Broadway To Vegas

Copyright: May 23, 2021
By: Laura Deni
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GOTHIC DRAMA NIGHT OF THE ORCHID TWISTS, TURNS AND HOLDS THE ATTENTION

Night of the Orchid is a contemporary Gothic audio drama from award winning Wireless Theatre and Marty Ross, a Scottish writer, best known for his audio dramas for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

A tale of desire and death, and of love and vengeance beyond the grave.

This full length play of 1 hour, 50 minutes contains sexually explicit scenes and vulgar language.

Madeleine Loughran has fled her wedding, seeking shelter with her beloved Great Aunt Mary at her house in the snowbound Scottish countryside. In the house’s ruined hot house, known as The Glasshouse, the blossoming of a single living flower is the first sign of a passion that will strip bare the secret history of a house and its inhabitants.

Paul Blinkhorn directs Rebecca Hamilton as Madeline, Lesley Stone as Aunt Mary, Kate Valerie as Agnes, Peter Hannah as Paul and Kevin Devine as Alan Archer.

Madeline gasps for air. She is exhausted. In her wedding dress she was the perfect princess. The wedding dress bodice stays were trapping her into a life she couldn't live. She had no choice but to flee from her own wedding to the violence prone Allan.

it wasn't the best of an evening- a wedding reception without the wedding - becomes a party - some of the guests are drunk.

Madeleine has fled to the home of her Great Aunt Mary, a place of her childhood.

Great Aunt Mary, whose movements are restricted, welcomes Madeline with open arms and orders Madeline's old room to be opened up.

Mary's housekeeper Agnes says Great Aunt Mary is like the house: "old, and cold and dying slowly"

Madeline, who eventually, it is disclosed, has been known to cut herself and attempt suicide, tells Aunt Mary that she has done everything wrong for a long time. She admits to being frightened and lonely and looks to Aunt Mary for peace.

Aunt Mary cautions Madeline that no one is ever out of harms way.

After dinner everyone is scurried off to bed but Madeline sneaks off on a tour of parts of the old place which are now closed off - including The Glass House.

There, in the middle of the bed was a single scrap of an old wilted flower which Madeline had never before seen. She reached to touch it and pricked her finger. Suddenly whirring winds erupted. Agnes recalled that years ago one of her kitchen helpers maintained that the glass house was haunted. "Of course she was Irish, so she'd believe anything,"

Madeline is warned: "Don't come in here again. this place is dead, long dead," and is warned "don't overstay your welcome."

Aunt Mary confesses that she has her secrets - things she's not proud of - better they be kept to herself. Suddenly, the figure of a man appears in the moonlight.

Madeline returned the to glass house determined to get in. She breaks the lock.

That scrap of flower seems stronger, longer with a fresh pedal. Suddenly a shadow fell across her and there he was ordering her to take his hand.

She asks if he is dead. He replies that he'd is a ghost who she has made real. With his hands roaming her body, he wants her to take off her sweater and kiss him. He laid her across the orchid streamed bed and removed his clothes; then ripped off her underwear.

Meanwhile, Aunt Mary screams and Agnes comes running. Mary maintains that she had seen him and smelled him - like the orchids. Aunt Mary maintains that the one place they couldn't banish him from is their heads. Aunt Mary admits she is in agony over what she had done, which involved needing Agnes' help.

The scenes alternate between Madeline and her bruise producing, passionate ghost lover and Aunt Mary's deeply buried secrets.

Horned rimed glasses wearing Agnes viciously confronts Madeline about releasing the dragon. Agnes despises Madeline, "whose pleasure is my torment."

As the mystery progresses the ghost chastises Madeline about her past behavior and tells her to stop dying and to start living. To stop being afraid. To make her own hell and heaven.

The ghost tell her to "be women enough to embrace the man in me."

Intended bridegroom Allan arrives and confronts Madeline, wanting to know why she left him at the alter embarrassing him in front of everyone he had ever respected. He accuses of her of thinking she is one of the Bronte sisters.

Ghost-lighting, multiple murders, a history in which transgressing from a social/moral code resulted in punishment. And, what is buried in that grave?

The ghost, whose name is Paul - possessing deep, dark eyes - says: "We all have darkness in our hearts. It's whether circumstances let it bloom."

This attention holding, well written, twisting mystery unfolds.

One caveat: Some of the actors have strong Scottish accents requiring the American listener to make aurei adjustments. You might want to listen to the first two minutes then go back and start over after you've adapted to the burr.

Engineered by Carlos Ziccarelli and Rohan Onraet and recorded at the Unity Studios, London.
Editing and Sound by: Malcolm Thorp and Aaron May
Original Music: Isabel Herschmann
Broadcasting Assistant: Ruth James
Assistant Producer: Paul Blinkhorn
Produced by: Jack Bowman and Robert Valentine
Image: Peter Merholz.

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This is not your typical, totally boring textbook.

In the pages of How To Earn A Living As A Freelance Writer (the first to be lied to and the last to be paid) you'll find sex, celebrities, violence, threats, unethical editors, scummy managers and lawyers, treacherous press agents, sex discrimination; as well as a how-to for earning money by writing down words.

ART AND ABOUT

TATE BRITAIN has unveiled Rupture No.1: blowtorching the bitten peach, a major new work by Heather Phillipson. Presented for the annual Tate Britain Commission, which invites contemporary artists to respond to the grand space of the central Duveen Galleries, the venue calls Phillipson’s work "one of the most transformative commissions to date."

Heather Phillipson has reimagined the spaces, in her own words, as a sequence of ‘charged ecosystems, maladaptive seasons and unearthed lifeforms’. She proposes that the galleries are alive and exist in a parallel time-zone. Engulfed by sound, colour and motion, the three interconnected spaces are populated with mutant life-forms, built from technological remains. In Rupture No. 1 : blowtorching the bitten peach, the work and its title evoke a plurality of sensations and associations that resist coherence. Everything is remixed and redeployed. The artist describes this as an attempt to ‘cultivate strangeness, and its potential to generate ecstatic experience’.

Phillipson’s practice often involves collisions of wildly different imagery, materials and media that conjure absurd and complex systems. Entering the Duveens, visitors are confronted with bisected aircraft fuel tanks, piled aggregates and vast, hand-painted clouds. In the centre, multiple animal eyes glitch across screens emerging from mountains of salt. Further along, visitors encounter various makeshift creatures – a papier-mâché ram, modified diesel bowsers, and insects hammered together from roof vents, car dipsticks and reused steel. In the final space, sand overflows from a collapsed silo, filled with gas canisters that clang like a wind-chime. Rotating anchors and emergency foil blankets are doused in projected light. Each of the three spaces is demarcated by a precise dosage of colour, marking the transition between zones. Augmented animal sounds reverberate throughout.

Phillipson’s Tate Britain Commission coincides with The End, her 2020 commission for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, on view until August 2022, and Music For Rats, a project at the Shanghai Biennale 2021. Audacious and disconcerting, her expansive, multimedia projects include video, sculpture, installation, music, poetry and digital media. Described by the artist as ‘quantum thought-experiments’, her works often carry a sense of latent threat – a feeling that received ideas, images, and the systems that underpin them may be on the verge of collapse. The artist has said: ‘I am always aspiring to the condition of becoming alien.’

Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain, said: ‘I’m delighted that Tate Britain will reopen with this hugely ambitious new project by Heather Phillipson. Through her unique layering of images, textures and sounds, she is offering visitors an unforgettable experience. The parallel planet she has created encourages us to consider our own and how we can work individually and collectively to look at it afresh.’

Heather Phillipson’s other recent projects include VOLTA, an online audio collage for Art on the Underground (2020), Almost Gone, a full-length audio broadcast for BBC Radio 3 (2020), and new multi-media installations for the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin and Sharjah Biennial 14 (2019). In 2018 she produced a major solo show at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and a new online commission for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.. Other forthcoming and recent shows include the British Art Show 9 (touring, 2021-22), Frieze Projects, New York (2016), the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016), 32nd Bienal de Sao Paulo (2016), Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2015) and the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015). She received the Film London Jarman Award in 2016 and was awarded the European Film Festival selection at the 47th International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2018. She is also an award-winning poet and has published five volumes of poetry.

WRITING THE FUTURE: BASQUIAT AND THE HIP HOP GENERATION EXHIBITION at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston has been extended to July 25. See it for the first time or return for another look and experience how contemporary art icon Jean-Michel Basquiat influenced the global popularity of hip-hop culture.

Also on display “Weng Family Collection of Chinese Painting: Travel and Home” celebrates the largest gift of Chinese paintings and calligraphy to the MFA in the museum’s history, thanks to art collector Wan-go H. C. Weng (1928–2020). The exhibition includes works by some of the greatest masters from the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties.

BECOMING JANE: THE EVOLUTION OF DR. JANE GOODALL allows you to explore the life and legacy of Dr. Jane Goodall.

Adventure into the field with world-famous scientist Dr. Jane Goodall to explore her trailblazing life and legacy from groundbreaking work with chimpanzees to becoming an acclaimed conservation activist. Step into Jane’s field tent to make your own scientific observations as you experience the sights and sounds of the chimpanzees’ natural habitat.

Becoming Jane: The Evolution of Dr. Jane Goodall is now open at the Field Museum in Chicago.

GROUNDBREAKING of the Universal Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx, NY, the birthplace of hip hop, took place this past Thursday. Called "arguably the most influential cultural movement in the world with this first-of-its kind museum." The museum is set to open in 2024.

The Museum will celebrates and preserves the history of local and global Hip Hop to inspire, empower, and promote understanding.

CONVERSATIONS: DARKNESS AND LIGHT Join lighting designer Jane Cox, senior lecturer and director of the program in theater at the Lewis Center for the Arts, and playwright Branden K. Jacobs-Jenkins, visiting lecturer at the Lewis Center for the Arts and the Princeton Atelier, MacArthur Fellow, and Obie Award Winner, as they bring reflections from their seminar “Darkness and Light: Writing, Lighting, Blackness, and Whiteness” to a consideration of works from the Princeton Museum’s collections.

Thursday, May 27, 2021 at 5:30 PM EDT.

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SWEET CHARITY

23RD ANNUAL BROADWAY BARKS ‘ACROSS AMERICA’ (VIRTUAL) takes place today, Sunday, May 23,2021 at 7:00 p.m. EDT. The streamed event, hosted by co-founder Bernadette Peters will feature adoptable animals from shelters and presented by celebrities Across America.


The event, hosted by Bernadette Peters will feature adoptable animals presented by celebrities from across the country. Offering up the four legged cuties in need of a permanent home will be: Alec Baldwin, Christine Baranski, Victoria Clark, Glenn Close, Ariana DeBose, Harvey Fierstein, Josh Groban and Allison Janney join the previously announcedSebastian Arcelus, Annaleigh Ashford, Bill Berloni, Stephanie J. Block, Carol Burnett, Lily Collins, Harry Connick Jr., Sheryl Crow, Jason Danieley, Ted Danson, Daveed Diggs, Gloria Estefan, Calista Flockhart, Whoopi Goldberg, Kathryn Grody, Emmylou Harris, Megan Hilty, James Monroe Iglehart, Hugh Jackman, Christopher Jackson, Nathan Lane, Bob Mackie, Audra McDonald, Charlie McDowell, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Bebe Neuwirth, Mandy Patinkin, David Hyde Pierce, Randy Rainbow, Kelly Ripa, Chita Rivera, Lea Salonga, Phillipa Soo, Mary Steenburgen and Will Swenson.

Barks announces Petra Janney the 2021 receipt of the Mary Tyler Moore Award. The award, named after the Broadway Barks’ co-founder, acknowledges an individual or group who has changed the lives of homeless animals in a way that encourages others to do the same. Petra is being recognized for her work with Amelia Air, an organization she co-founded. They are dedicated to saving animals by flying them out of high-kill shelters to rescues who have the resources to find them loving families.

Broadway Barks 23 Across America will spotlight and shine a light on animals from the following shelters and rescue groups:

Heart Of The Valley Animal Shelter, Long Island Golden Retriever Rescue, Yankee Golden Retriever Rescuewho are joining the previously announced, 1 Love 4 Animals, Abandoned Angels Cocker Spaniels Rescue, Adopt-A-Boxer, Adopt-A-Dog, Animal Care Centers Of NYC, Animal Haven, Anjellicle Cats, ARF (Animal Rescue Fund Of The Hamptons), ASPCA, Best Friends Animal Society Of Los Angeles, Best Friends NYC, Bide-A-Wee, Bobbi And The Strays, Bonapartes Retreat Dog Rescue, City Critters, Dawgs N Texas, Francis’ Friends, Humane Society Of New York, Husky House, Little Shelter Animal Rescue And Adoption Center, Long Island Bulldog, Love Leo Rescue, Manhattan Valley Cat Rescue, Metropolitan Maltese Rescue, Mid-Atlantic Great Danes, Pet-I-Care, Pet-Res-Q, Save Kitty, Sean Casey Animal Rescue, SPCA Of Westchester, and Urban Cat League.

Donations made to BroadwayBarks.com or via the stream will be evenly dispersed among the participating shelters and rescue organizations.

Broadway Barks, co-founded by Mary Tyler Moore and Bernadette Peters in 1998 as an adoption event has grown to a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Over the course of its 22 years, from its adoption events in New York City and virtually, more than 85% of the animals featured in the annual event have been adopted and hundreds of thousands of dollars have been allocated to shelters and rescue groups.

Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS is the largest single financial supporter of the social service programs at The Actors Fund, including the HIV/AIDS Initiative, the Phyllis Newman Women’s Health Initiative and The Friedman Health Center for the Performing Arts. Broadway Cares also provides annual grants to more than 450 HIV/AIDS and family service organizations in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.

THE FILM AND TV CHARITY of Great Britain has announced that:
1. Effective immediately, The Film and TV Charity will ringfence 30% of its future grants budgets for Black, Asian and minority ethnic people to ensure fair access to our funding.

2. The Charity will also introduce a new £1 million program to support the under-funded community leaders and groups working effectively to tackle racism and discrimination in the industry.

These changes signify our permanent commitment to better engage with and support work to eradicate structural racism and discrimination in our sector.

COMEDY GIVES BACK conducted a Clubhouse Chat focusing on Comedy and Mental Health last Thursday on May 20th. A discussion on how mental illness has impacted the comedy community and what we are doing to support those who need help took place. "In the wake of COVID-19, millions of people have uncovered new mental health conditions and millions more have had their existing challenges exacerbated, " explained the nonprofit.

92ND STREET Y’S VIRTUAL GALA to honor exceptional individuals and celebrate the many ways in which donor support has transformed 92Y during the pandemic. All proceeds benefit 92Y in New York City. .

Taking place Monday, May 24, 7-8 PM ET the Honorees are: 92Y’s Board Chairman LAURENCE BELFER for extraordinary leadership and service
Jazz Great and Educator CHRISTIAN McBRIDE for keeping the arts relevant and alive during a dark time
Award-winning playwright and actress ANNA DEAVERE SMITH for leading civic discourse and inspiring social action
Philanthropist MARSHALL WEINBERG for helping extend our reach to our global community

Reflecting the dazzling array of words, music and movements that unite us, performances and readings during the virtual gala include:
BALLET HISPÁNICO perform Linea Recta by Annabella Lopez Ochoa
CHRISTIAN MCBRIDE AND FRIENDS perform "Tomorrow (A Better You, Better Me)" by Quincy Jones
IAN MCEWAN reads "The Rolling English Road" by G.K. Chesterton
ANGELA HEWITT performs the last movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 15 in D Major, Op. 28 ("Pastorale")
YIYUN LI reads her translation of “River Letter” by Shen Congwen
SASHA COOKE performs "Goin' Home" by Anton Dvorák, arr. William Arms Fisher
A reading by RITA DOVE
A dance performance by YIN YUE
and
Special Cameo Appearances by Ryan Raynolds, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Dianne Reeves.

The event will include a special appreciation for 92Y’s longtime staff members Ellen Birnbaum, Director of Early Childhood Education, and Sally Tannen, Director of 92Y Parenting Center for elevating 92Y as a beacon of early childhood education.

“Now in our 147th year, marking our second virtual gala, we’ll gather online to celebrate all those who have sustained 92Y’s innovation and reinvention through the pandemic—our patrons, artists, performers, thinkers, educators and other extraordinary people who are helping ensure our future, including a return to in-person programming and a continuation of the digital outreach that has seen our community expand to a global one,” said Seth Pinsky, CEO of the 92nd Street Y, “This is our opportunity to celebrate and express our gratitude.”

SPREADING THE WORD

MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND Friday, May 28 – Monday, May 31, admission to the National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City is free for veterans and active-duty military personnel, while general admission for the public is half-price all weekend.

The Flags of Forgotten Soldiers display returns Monday May 24 - Monday, May 31. This display of 140 U.S. flags will be in front of the Museum and Memorial. It calls attention to the fact that 140 veterans are lost to suicide every week. Saturday, May 29 and Sunday, May 30, vintage military vehicles from World War II, the Korean War and Operation Desert Storm will be on display on the Southeast Lawn, in partnership with The Military Vehicle Preservation Association.

On Sunday, May 30, the first-ever Great Balloon Glow will take place on the Museum's 47 acres. Families are invited to picnic, listen to music and enjoy food from local food trucks beginning at 6 p.m. At 8:30, tethered hot air balloons will periodically light their propane to keep the balloons inflated and light up the night sky. This event is free to the public.

On Memorial Day, Monday, May 31, there will be a free public ceremony at 10 a.m. with a keynote address from Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Eric Jacobson. Currently a command surgeon and assistant chief of staff, Lt. Col. Dr. Jacobson was formerly a battalion surgeon with multiple overseas deployments and was former director of medical operations at the Javits New York Medical Station, the temporary response to New York City’s COVID-19 Pandemic. The ceremony will be followed by a Bell Tolling Ceremony at noon and the Museum and Memorial’s biannual Walk of Honor brick dedication at 2 p.m.

War Remains, the immersive VR experience presented by “Hardcore History” legendary podcaster Dan Carlin, opens to the public on May 27. War Remains transports viewers to the Western Front of the First World War. It debuted at Tribeca Film Festival in 2019. Tickets for opening weekend and most weekends in June are sold out.

TINY UNIVERSE Milk Crate Theatre and Shopfront Arts Co-op first co-production, and first major work for 2021 is currently on stage in Alexandria, NSW, Australia.

What's happening in our private moments that no one else might be able to see or understand? What are the rituals we perform, or methods of self-soothing that help us make sense of our place in the world? Who are we "out there"? Who are we outside or own tiny universe?

Co-directed by Milk Crate Theatre's Artistic Director, Margot Politis and Shopfront's Creative Director, Natalie Rose.

MENOPAUSE THE MUSICAL will re-open at Harrah's in Las Vegas on July 22, 2021, continuing its 16th year as the longest-running musical on the Las Vegas Strip.

MOLIERE IN THE PARK co-presenting with the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), and in partnership with the Prospect Park Alliance and LeFrak Center at Lakeside, in New York, will present free staged readings of two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Wilbur’s translation of Molière’s Tartuffe, directed by Molière in the Park’s Founding Artistic Director Lucie Tiberghien, May 26 – 30.

LIFE IN STAGES the National Theatre in London's brand-new series with some of the biggest names in theatre revealing the funny, personal and poignant stories from their careers thus far.

Catch up on episodes featuring Olivia Colman, Bill Nighy, Meera Syal, Josh O’Connor and more - and tune in for upcoming conversations with Kae Tempest, Sophie Okonedo and Dominic Cooke.

Watch for free on You Tube.

BUFFETS REOPEN IN LAS VEGAS but not without some changes. At the famed Bacchanal Buffet at Caesars, which underwent a $2.5M makeover, reservations will be required.

The buffet features nine open, interactive kitchens, with many dishes already individually prepared, shared, or plated in real-time by staff from behind the counters, offering diners a clear view of the process. There are open-fire roasting grills to prepare prime rib and other meats, while new steaming and refrigerated display systems keep dishes such as crab legs cool.

Also new, 30 dishes such as dim sum-style food carts that will roam the dining room with foie gras PB&J, spicy seafood boil bags, Japanese wagyu hot dogs, and traditional dim sum. Prepared dishes include turmeric grilled baby octopus with XO chili jam, cheeseburger bao, chipotle bourbon barbecue oysters, and duck carnitas quesadillas.

The buffet also now offers more vegetarian and vegan options such as quinoa-stuffed baby sweet potatoes with fried kale, tomato tartar, and coconut-carrot gazpacho.

The Mediterranean kitchen has a new mezze bar and serves Roman-style pizza, while the Asian kitchen offers more Southeast Asian flavors featuring Laotian, Filipino, Indonesian, Thai, and Vietnamese specialties.

For dessert, the buffet added Earl Grey mousse, salted caramel popcorn and death by chocolate cupcakes, yuzu tart, ube chiffon cake (which is a cake that gets it's purple color from the ube -purple yam - extract and can contain yam powder), and more than 10 all-natural gelato flavors.

Price. Thursday - Monday: $64.99 per person. Due to limited capacity, guests are asked to keep their dining experience to 90 minutes.

The MGM's Grand buffet reopens on May 26 for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Hot and cold stations offer dishes such as made-to-order omelets, buttermilk pancakes, breakfast sides, and pastries for breakfast, as well as pasta dishes, seafood, barbecue ribs, lasagna, salads, soups, and a dessert bar with cookies, doughnuts, brownies, pies, cheesecakes, and more for lunch. Initially, the MGM buffet plans to be open Thursday through Monday from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Prices start at $25.99 every Monday, Thursday, and Friday, and $29.99 every Saturday and Sunday. Kids age 5 and younger eat free.




DELILAH DELGADO

Delilah Delgado. Photo: National Shakespeare Competition.

18, of LaJolla, California who beat out high school students from 40 other regions in April to win the 2021 English-Speaking Union National Shakespeare Competition. She will now spend three weeks in an English conservatory studying theatrical history and will perform with other international students at Shakespeare’s Globe, a re-creation of the Bard’s original theater, which closed in 1642. San Diego’s Old Globe also was built to replicate the original.

Delgado, a San Diego native and a senior at The Bishop's School in La Jolla grew up attending the Bard’s plays at The Old Globe in San Diego’s Balboa Park. The first Shakespeare play she saw at The Old Globe was ,i>A Midsummer night's Dream which remain her favorite.

Last year, she graduated from the Old Globe's Pam Farr Summer Shakespeare Studio - presented virtually due to the pandemic.

"We're so proud of Delilah, her hard work, and the role the Globe was able to play in her theatrical development," stated the venue.

For the international contest students compete by performing Shakespeare’s sonnets and monologues from his plays for teams of judges, first at the school level, then at the regional and national levels.

Delgado's winning combination was a speech by the love-smitten shepherdess Phoebe in As You Like It and a reading of Sonnet 62, a poem that celebrates the constancy of love.

Delgado will graduate from Bishop’s in June. In the fall, she’ll start classes at Williams College, a private liberal arts college in Williamstown, Mass., where she plans to study theater, art history, English and gender studies.

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OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY

THE TONIGHT SHOW STARRING JIMMY FALLON has been renewed for five years - a longer contract than most late night renewals.

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This is not your typical, totally boring textbook.

In the pages of How To Earn A Living As A Freelance Writer (the first to be lied to and the last to be paid) you'll find sex, celebrities, violence, threats, unethical editors, scummy managers and lawyers, treacherous press agents, sex discrimination; as well as a how-to for earning money by writing down words.

FINAL OVATION

CHARLES GRODIN accomplished Broadway, television and movie actor, comedian, author, and television talk show host died May 18, 2021 from bone marrow cancer at his home in Wilton, Connecticut. He was 86.

Grodin won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special in 1978 for the Paul Simon Special alongside Chevy Chase, Lorne Michaels, Paul Simon, and Lily Tomlin. He was also nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for The Heartbreak Kid in 1972. He won Best Actor at the 1988 Valladolid International Film Festival for Midnight Run, and the American Comedy Award for Funniest Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture for his performance in Dave in 1993.

During the late 1960s, he also co-wrote and directed Hooray! It's a Glorious Day ... and All That, a Broadway play, and directed Lovers and Other Strangers and Thieves, also on Broadway.

From 1995 to 1998, Grodin hosted his own issues-oriented talk show, The Charles Grodin Show, on CNBC and, starting in 2000, became a political commentator for 60 Minutes II. In 2004, Grodin wrote The Right Kind of People, an Off-Broadway play about co-op boards in certain buildings in Manhattan. Grodin's commentaries continue to be heard on New York City radio station WCBS and other affiliates of the CBS Radio Network, as well as on the CBS Radio Network's Weekend Roundup.

Grodin was the only person I know of who had the backbone to stand up to Merv Griffin, the powerhouse creative of shows Jeopardy andWheel of Fortune who hosted his own talk show, The Merv Griffin Show. That show was taped before a live audience and broadcast about 10 days later.

Griffin's passion was breaking up people's romantic relationships. He was dogged determined and got gleeful enjoyment out of causing heartache for others. There was no level that Griffin wouldn't stoop to in order to interfere in the lives of others. Grodin knew that and arrived at the taping prepared to take charge of his life.

When Griffin brought up Grodin's personal life, Grodin minced no words. He said he knew Merv liked to break up couples and told Griffin to stay out of his life and not pursue his break-up strategy. Grodin said he wouldn't tolerate it. Griffin was stunned, but backed off from attempting to interfere in Grodin's personal life. The segment wasn't edited out and aired.

Grodin is survived by two children, daughter Marion (a comedian), from his marriage to Julie Ferguson, and son, Nicholas, from his marriage to Elissa Durwood. For a period in the 2000s, Grodin gave up show business to be a stay-at-home dad to his children.

PAUL MOONEY groundbreaking comedian, actor and writer died on Wednesday, May 19, 2021, at his home in Oakland, Calif., after suffering a heart attack. He was 79.

In November 2014, Paul's brother announced that Mooney had prostate cancer. Mooney continued to tour, and perform his stand-up comedy.

Mooney served as the head writer on The Richard Pryor Show and co-wrote some of Pryor’s material on several of his comedy albums and his Saturday Night Live sketches. Mooney also wrote for Sanford and Son; Good Times; In Living Color; Pryor’s Place; The Larry Sanders Show; Chappelle’s Show and BET’s reality TV parody show Real Husbands of Hollywood.

In addition to his stand-up comedy, Mooney appeared in numerous movies.

In 2007, he published a memoir titled Black Is the New White, in which he discussed his relationship with Pryor and some of his most iconic and controversial comedy sets.

Next Column: May 30, 2021
Copyright: May 23, 2021 All Rights Reserved. Reviews, Interviews, Commentary, Photographs or Graphics from any Broadway To Vegas (TM) columns may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, utilized as leads, or used in any manner without permission, compensation and/or credit.
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Laura Deni

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