Bunny Christie: Last News

Naman Ramachandran “Sunset Boulevard” was the big winner at the U.K.’s 24th annual WhatsOnStage Awards, which are decided entirely by the theatregoers themselves. It won seven awards, including best performer in a musical for Nicole Scherzinger, professional debut performance for Grace Hodgett Young, direction for Jamie Lloyd, lighting design for Jack Knowles, sound design for Adam Fisher, video design for Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom and music direction/supervision for Alan Williams.

Tammy Faye, the Olivier-nominated Elton John–Jake Shears–James Graham musical about ’80s-era televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, will premiere on Broadway during the 2024-25 Season.

David Benedict Since Nicholas Hytner, former artistic director of the National Theatre, is one of the finest, most detailed Shakespeare directors in the land, you could be forgiven for forgetting that he really knows how to put on a show — and then some. Given that his career spans everything from “One Man, Two Guvnors” to the original “Miss Saigon,” expectations in London were high that, armed with arguably the greatest musical comedy ever written, he might be onto a winner. Revise your expectations: His immersive, explosively joyous “Guys and Dolls” is a solid-gold knockout. Hytner has always been strong on physical staging. Because he started out in opera, he has always known about crowd control and can shift the emotional temperature of a scene simply by how he commands groups of people on stage. After his runaway-hit, immersive productions of “Julius Caesar” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at his own Bridge Theatre, he now takes that skill up umpteen notches moving not just the actors in “Guys and Dolls” but a third of the audience.