Stagefright	by Javier

TV and movie star Lorenzo Lamas (pictured above) is making his New York cabaret debut this week with Lorenzo Sings About Love, a show featuring standards and contemporary songs, now being performed at Feinstein’s at the Regency through November 11. The son of Fernando Lamas and Arlene Dahl, Lorenzo got his first big break when he landed the role of Tom Chisum in the film version of the musical Grease.

Speaking of Grease, a second Broadway revival is scheduled to open in June 2007, directed by Kathleen Marshall. This time the two lead actors playing Sandy and Danny will be auditioned and cast in the reality TV show You’re the One That We Want, which will be start airing on NBC in January. The show hopes to repeat the success of BBC’s How to Solve a Problem Like Maria? in which newcomer Connie Fisher was chosen to play Maria Von Trapp in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s upcoming London revival of The Sound of Music.

The Broadway revival of the musical Chicago will celebrate its 10th anniversary on November 14 with a special gala performance featuring many of the stars who have appeared in the current New York and London revivals. A CD/DVD special edition has been released featuring such rarities as Lynda Carter singing “When You’re Good to Mama” (she played Mama in London) and Melanie Griffith singing “Me and My Baby” (she played Roxie on Broadway). The revival is now the eighth-longest-running show on Broadway, it opened on November 14, 1996.

The touring production of Rent returns to Shea’s December 5-10. Still going strong on Broadway, Rent is now the seventh-longest-running show. It opened on April 29, 1996.

The recording of the new stage musical Irving Berlin’s White Christmas has also just been released featuring Buffalo’s Jeffry Denman as Private Phil Davis. The stage version of the movie classic was first performed in 2004 in San Francisco and has since been performed in several cities around the holidays. This year the show will be performed in St. Paul with Denman reprising his part opposite Stephen Bogardus.

Mary Craig, accompanied by The Ladies First Big Band Quartet, will star in the one-woman show Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues, a musical journey featuring the songs of legendary blues pioneers such as Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith. Presented by O’Connell & Company, the show will run February 22- March 18.

Me II, the new musical with score and lyrics by Grant Golden and book by DonnaMarie Vaughan, has been cancelled, two weeks before its scheduled November 9 opening at the New Phoenix. Artistic differences between the composer and director David Granville reportedly derailed the project.

Michele Ragusa won the Barrymore Award for her performance in the musical Adrift in Macao, produced by the Philadelphia Theatre Company. Ragusa will be recreating her part when the show opens in New York in January at Primary Stages. She was last seen in Buffalo at Studio Arena in Bad Dates, for which she won a Katharine Cornell Award.

Buffalo native Brian Charles Johnson will be making his Broadway debut in the upcoming musical Spring Awakening, one of the three shows that are transferring from off-Broadway this season (the other two being A Little Dog Laughed and Grey Gardens). Spring Awakening had a successful run at the Atlantic Theater Company. Performances begin November 16 at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre.

As part of its 15th anniversary celebration, Buffalo United Artists will present a one-night-only A…My Name is Alice original cast reunion on January 28, 2007. The show, which was the very first BUA production, opened on January 2, 1992 at the old Franklin Street Theatre starring (in alphabetical order): Mary Craig, Gail Golden, Jeanmarie Lally, Sheila McCarthy and Loraine O’Donnell, with musical direction by Theresa Quinn, directed by Kelli Bocock-Natale. All seven ladies will be present to celebrate the occasion.

Playwright Richard Greenberg (pictured below), whose Pulitzer-nominated play Three Days of Rain is currently on stage at Studio Arena, had a very prominent presence in the 2005-06 American theater season. He had two plays running on Broadway (the new play A Naked Girl on the Appian Way and Three Days of Rain) and three plays having world premieres elsewhere: The Well Appointed Room (January 06) at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, Bal Masque (April 06) at DC’s Theater J and The House in Town (May 06) at Lincoln Center. Greenberg also adapted Strindberg’s Dance of Death for the 2001 Broadway production that starred Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren and featured Eric Martin Brown, who is now starring as Pip/Theo in Three Days at Studio Arena. By the way, Greenberg is now working on the screen adaptation of the play.