The Music Man : OPENING NIGHT

[ruby]

Feb 13, 2022 8:27:23 GMT -5 jo said:

At the Palm-West Side for the post-show party?

http://instagr.am/p/CZ2SVm1vS21

Not The Palm. There was no big company after-party due to Covid. Small groups of family and friends gathered.

[ruby]

Feb 10, 2022 18:24:07 GMT -5 mamaleh said:

Feb 10, 2022 18:12:37 GMT -5 jo said:

Is that Shawn Levy with him?

It looks very much like Levy, so I’d say yes.
Nice that HJ’s good buddies are showing their support.

Ellen

Shawn is such a lovely person. Spoke with him at the theatre as we’d met him prior during Real Steel shoot. (Ryan waited patiently at his side 😛). Shawn’s oldest daughter is Hugh’s PA on TMM.

[jo]

Hmm... maybe there could be a future buddy road comedy involving Hugh & Ryan in the future with Shawn-- something many have been asking for?

I just remembered - in Real Steel - there is a scene when some kids were watching Atom in Charlie's truck, all agog! Those young girls were Shawn's daughters

www.imdb.com/title/tt0433035/

The eldest Levy daughter is Sophie. Could that be Sophie hovering on the side in the clip

Hugh did a longish cameo as King Arthur/ Wolverine in Night at the Museum 3 (the 3 film-series were directed by Shawn).

Jo

[ruby]

Feb 13, 2022 17:51:50 GMT -5 jo said:

The eldest Levy daughter is Sophie. Could that be Sophie hovering on the side in the clip

Jo

That’s his wife

[njr]

Only able to find Anne Hathaway’s Instagram account (which has over 22 million followers!) which does have the blue checkmark.

instagram.com/annehathaway?utm_medium=copy_link

Nancy

[jo]

www.broadway.com/buzz/201871/see-the-broadway-show-hit-the-red-carpet-with-hugh-jackman-more-on-opening-night-of-the-music-man/

More Opening Night interviews with the cast.

[jo]

[jo]

[jo]

[jo]

What a teasure trove from a longtime and very good friend of the Jackmans,(the) Donna Karan!

It seems this was a private party on Opening Night!

http://instagram.com/p/CZ4Yhiig8YB

Keep watching!




Jo

[jo]

http://instagram.com/p/CZ60Iv2up_G

[ruby]

Feb 15, 2022 10:26:22 GMT -5 jo said:

What a teasure trove from a longtime and very good friend of the Jackmans,(the) Donna Karan!

It seems this was a private party on Opening Night!

http://instagr.am/p/CZ4Yhiig8YB

Keep watching!




Jo

There was no cast after party other than small gatherings. This was the creatives get together. The original was even more low key but the location changed last minute to glam it up a bit.

[jo]

The location looks like the Mandarin at Columbus Circle.

Jo

[ruby]

Feb 15, 2022 19:46:06 GMT -5 jo said:

The location looks like the Mandarin at Columbus Circle.

Jo

Appel Room Jazz @lincoln Center. Mandarin is next door.

[jo]

[ruby]

Feb 15, 2022 20:24:21 GMT -5 jo said:

I’m in the background of her selfie. Ha! Not the cabdriver.

[jo]

Fashion maven Diane Von Furstenberg is interviewed.

To me, she gave the most interesting comment ( "My husband", referring to Barry Diller," has been very nervous about this ") presumably referring to his work as the show's lead producer. Barry was a very supportive lead producer and had likely worked very hard for the show to have reached this point. It must have been he who gave the reassurance to Hugh and the rest, when Rudin had to go, that he will be a very supportive lead producer, not just in terms of the financial aspect (the production initially capitalized at 17 million went up to twenty four million!) but also for his little touches of support (remember when he sent each cast member a big box of goodies...and then those memento special bottles of champagne on Opening Night to each cast member...and probably worked hard to get the toast of NYC present at Opening Night).

Btw, Diller used to be the President/CEO for FOX and Paramount Studios.

The couple are well-known philanthropists - most recent one was their USD 250 million donation to build NYC's latest
attraction called Little Island ( built on stilts looking support on the Hudson itself and connected to the west side of Manhattan).

[jo]

[chessie]

I just got around to watching the Donna Karan video and had to replay it several times because I could not believe the photo of Oscar and Ava. They look wonderful, but they're definitely NOT little kids anymore. Time does fly!

Carol

[jo]

Yes, they're young man and adolescent now. Hugh has said that he misses his "young kids" and their time together when he would read them bedtime stories.

TBFO was 18 years ago!

Time flies

Jo

[jo]

I didn't see this coverage from the NYTimes till now --
despite the negativity in their theatre critic's review, the return of The Music Man to Broadway is seen as a big boost to its shaky footsteps to get the bright lights shining again, as we used to see.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/11/theater/music-man-broadway.html

Keep swiping.

At first, when I heard the bands strike the music (I was initially hoping it would be 76 Trombones all the way) I did not immediately recognize the notes of THE WELLS FARGO WAGON song! Then it dawned on me that this was intentional - that this show would be symbolic of a gift coming to brighten up the streets of Broadway, through a revival of a much-loved show. Just as the WF Wagon was symbolic of the richness of that gift, the new creative vision from Zaks and his creative team and the artistic interpretation from Hugh Jackman et al, brought Broadway audiences a new gift, with much fanfare



Jo

[jo]

http://instagram.com/p/CaD608clfkG

[jo]

http://instagram.com/p/CZ-icWwhEK3

[jo]

Postscript -- the story of the 3 bands joining Opening Night ceremonies!

The New Yorker



The BoardsMarch 7, 2022 Issue
Band Camp on Broadway
Blake Lively and Seth Meyers came out to salute the première of “The Music Man”; so did forty-five New York teen-agers armed with clarinets and sousaphones.

By Sarah Larson

February 28, 2022
Squiz Hazelton, flute teacher of the young Meredith Willson, of Mason City, Iowa, had come to town with a musical show, and his methods employed a travelling performer’s inventive pragmatism. “Squiz found out I could fake, so he suggested my doubling on the banjo,” Willson wrote in his 1948 memoir, “And There I Stood with My Piccolo.” Willson played in his high-school orchestra, and later in John Philip Sousa’s marching band; he went on to write “The Music Man,” about a musical faker so deft that he conjures an imaginary marching band for kids, and mesmerizes an entire town. Last month, “The Music Man” returned to Broadway, with Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, after two decades and two pandemic delays. Opening night featured Harold Hill levels of chutzpah: a red carpet full of dignitaries and movie stars; signs reading “opens tonight!” and “whadayatalk!”; and, under the marquee, a forty-five-piece teen-age marching band, in plumed-busby regalia, playing “Seventy-six Trombones.” The musicians had been recruited from Brooklyn and Staten Island high schools; jacket inspection revealed distinctions between Fort Hamilton, Susan E. Wagner, and Tottenville. They wore masks, as did the wind instruments, but the sound oompahed up and down Times Square.

Portrait of Hugh Jackman in the Broadway musical The Music Man.
Hugh JackmanIllustration by João Fazenda


David Banks, the chancellor of New York City schools, addressed the crowd. What would it take, post-isolation, to get the city’s kids back to where they need to be? he asked, with a dash of “Ya Got Trouble” panache. “Well, I’ll tell you what it’s going to take!” he said. “It’s going to take music! It’s going to take theatre! It’s going to take the arts! ” People cheered, and the band kicked into “The Wells Fargo Wagon.” Cops and publicists cleared a path for the musicians, who marched onto Broadway, assembled into the shape of a square, and played on.

Some theatregoers—Governor Kathy Hochul, Senator Chuck Schumer, Speaker Nancy Pelosi—didn’t linger outside; others paused to reflect on the occasion and on youth. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, in a bookshelf-print scarf, had recently met Foster, who plays Marian the Librarian. “I said, ‘You’re showing a librarian with spunk,’ ” Hayden said. “She brought up the censorship thing in the show”—locals offended by Chaucer, Rabelais, Balzac. “When you deal with what kids should have, and what kids should do, those are perennial themes.” Mayor Eric Adams, beaming in a tailored blue-gray suit, posed for a photograph with a grim-looking Mike Bloomberg, then continued down the red carpet, reminding everybody that he was “the night-life Mayor.” “I’m going to see ‘Tina’ in a few days; I’m going to see Michael Jackson,” he said. Did he play an instrument growing up? “No. Only the bongos!” Seth Meyers and his wife, Alexi Ashe, have three little kids, too young for a band. “They’re just on drums now,” Meyers said. “Sort of a loose, annoying drum.” The actors Mariska Hargitay and Peter Hermann, who are married, said, in unison, that onstage Jackman and Foster (“dear family friends”) “can do anything. Anything! ” (On the series “Younger,” Hermann’s character declared his love to Foster’s character after watching her sing “The Lonely Goatherd.”)




The marching band decamped to the Palm—the gig came with dinner—and ate steak under caricatures of Broadway luminaries. Uniform jackets hung on chairs; stretchy overalls were revealed. A teacher happily observed that the students, who had been encouraged to mingle—“sousaphone from Fort Hamilton, meet sousaphone from Tottenville”—were doing so. After two years of isolation and disruption, playing for a Broadway opening was “surreal,” a sixteen-year-old clarinet player named Jada said. She has a nose ring and is a Jackman fan. “I kept thinking, I can’t believe this is happening.” The event also gave clarinet players a chance to let it rip: “You can’t have a song that mentions all these clarinets and not be able to hear the clarinet.” Victoria (eighteen, euphonium and trombone) and her fellow-trombonists had long been “begging” to play “Seventy-six Trombones.” Stamatios (seventeen, saxophone) saw Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively watching them play. “You want to say hi to everyone, but you’ve got a job to do,” he said. Genesis (eighteen, trombone) made eye contact with Lively: “I stopped playing for a second, I was so thrown off.” Mekhi, a snare-drum player since the age of fourteen, helped guide the band through multiple red-carpet surprises. “We teach them to be flexible,” Thomas Oberle, the Fort Hamilton band director, said: “ ‘Mekhi, count ’em off!’ ”

The three bands had practiced separately, and met for the first time that day for a rehearsal, followed by a group bus ride. “In our band, we have a tradition, pass it back—before every big competition or event, we do a fist bump, and you pass it down the line,” Victoria said. “Today, it went all throughout the different schools, and it was so nice—like, aww! ”

David LaMorte, the Tottenville band director, said, “Band kids are, like, the highest-level kids. They know about teamwork. They know about camaraderie, being respectful to one another. Deadlines. Music teaches you about life.” Like what Harold Hill inspired? Oberle looked politely dubious. “The Think System worked out well for him,” he said. Then he went to rally the musicians for an after-show encore. ♦



Published in the print edition of the March 7, 2022, issue, with the headline “Harch! Harch! Harch!.”

[mamaleh]

Good old Susan E Wagner High School. I did my student teaching there under the mentorship of a funny, erudite English teacher who I think was the first person named Hugh I’d ever met. Much as I admired and liked him, I think I prefer the second Hugh of my acquaintance. 😊

Ellen