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Following two sold-out limited seasons at London’s Barbican, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s acclaimed stage version of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli classic My Neighbour Totoro will transfer to the West End early in 2025.

The show broke box office records during both its inaugural 15-week term in 2022 and repeated that success on its second iteration, which played for 17 weeks from last November until last month.

Griselda Yorke, My Neighbour Totoro’s executive producer for the RSC, revealed that more than 290,000 saw the production at the Barbican.

Griselda Yorke, executive producer of My Neighbour Totoro for the RSC

Yorke and her RSC colleagues have secured the Gillian Lynne Theatre beginning March 8, 2025 for an initial 34-week period through November 2, 2025.

In a sense, the move to the Gilly Lynne — how some affectionately refer to the theatre named for legendary Cats and Phantom of the Opera choreographer, the late Dame Gillian Lynne — moves My Neighbour Totoro,...

With a still relatively fresh Oscar nomination, Paul Mescal has added to his fast-growing haul of accolades by winning his first Olivier Award.

On the biggest night for the British stage, the Aftersun star won the best actor honor for his portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in Rebecca Frecknall’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, his West End debut. The production also won best actress in a supporting role for Anjana Vasan, and best revival. Killing Eve star Jodie Comer, meanwhile, won best actress for her West End debut, the solo drama Prima Facie, which was named best new play.

Elsewhere, Will Keen won the best supporting actor award for his performance in Patriots, and Tammy Faye garnered two acting awards: Katie Brayben for best actress in a musical and Zubin Varla for best actor in a supporting role in a musical.

But it was the Royal Shakespeare Company...

Jodie Comer and Paul Mescal were among the big winners at the 2023 Olivier Awards, which were revealed this evening at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Scroll down for the full list of winners.

Comer picked up the Best Actress gong for her West End debut in the well-received legal thriller Prima Facie, which had five nominations overall, including Best New Play and Best Director. The play was penned by Australian-British writer Suzie Miller. On the night, the play took two awards, Comer’s win and Best New Play.

Mescal landed the Best Actor award for his reincarnation of Stanley Kowalski in Rebecca Frecknall’s buzzy adaptation of the classic Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire. The play, which picked up a total of three awards this evening, opened at the Almeida Theatre in North London but has since transferred to the West End.

Accepting the award, Mescal paid tribute to Frecknall,...

Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company is bringing back its barnstorming stage adaptation of famed Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s hand-drawn 1988 classic My Neighbour Totoro for a second season at London’s Barbican in November.

The show will play 17 weeks at the arts venue located in the capital’s City district from November 21-March 23.

It follows an inaugural 15-week run that closed January 21 after playing to record-breaking audiences of more than 130,000, according to data we requested from the RSC.

Director Phelim McDermott told us “that for lots of children” the show was “their first experience of visiting the theater.”

But there was another demographic that fascinated him.

“There were a lot of video and games enthusiasts, a lot of them in their late teens, who really got into it,” said McDermott, who also is co-founder and co-artistic director of the Improbable theater company.

It’s thought that both the family and...

"Someone will die at the end of the day." A fictionalized Virginia Woolf (Joyce Didonato) announces this as she sullenly stares at a dead bird. She's referring to the plot development of her 1925 novel, "Mrs. Dalloway," and she hasn't decided who will die yet in her novel, which would be considered a modernist masterpiece long after her 1941 suicide. She's also echoing her own suicidal dread. She also doesn't know that she's portending another woman's ending.

Based on Michael Cunningham's novel and the 2002 Paramount Pictures film adaptation directed by Stephen Daldry, "The Hours" opera premiere on the Metropolitan Stage is an ambitious undertaking. Balancing out three women's narratives from different time periods, both text and movie contain multitudes: the exhaustion of ordinary living, mental illness, queer lives, and the connective tissue of literature. This may sound lofty for an opera but the medium has a favorable condition: a large stage...

The stage adaptation of Studio Ghibli animator Hayao Miyazaki’s classic 1988 film My Neighbour Totoro, officially opening Tuesday night at London’s Barbican Theater, has attracted immense interest from the international theater community. Stage producers and theater owners from New York, Paris, Australia, Korea, Canada and Australia have been tracking the progress of the production being presented by composer Joe Hisaishi and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

“There has been a lot of interest,” Griselda Yorke, the show’s executive producer for the RSC, told Deadline. “Lots of people are coming to see it, which is really gratifying. But there’s nothing more concrete than that it’s sparking a lot of interest at this stage of the game.”

Yorke said the fact that so many members from film and theater communities “are coming from all over the world to see it” is a tribute to the collaboration of the RSC,...

Jim Henson’s Creature Shop animatronics and visual effects studio, based in Los Angeles, has teamed with Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company to produce life-size puppets for the RSC’s stage adaptation of legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 hand-drawn classic My Neighbour Totoro.

The RSC’s most ambitious project to date — even more so than the award-winning theater company’s original productions of musicals Les Miserables and Matilda the Musical — My Neighbour Totoro now has creatives working on it at bases in London, Stratford-Upon-Avon, Los Angeles and Tokyo.

Show will feature the score that composer Joe Hisaishi created for the film, plus additional music that wasn’t used in the movie.

Set in 1950s Japan, the story follows the adventures of Satsuki and Mei, young sisters who move from Tokyo city to the countryside. Once there they encounter spirits and awesome creatures. Two furry ones capture their imaginations: a...

Famed Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi has partnered with the U.K.’s Royal Shakespeare Company to create a stage version of Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 hand-drawn classic My Neighbour Totoro, a beloved film that follows the adventures of two young sisters who move from Tokyo city to the countryside.

Set in 1950s Japan, the film introduces us to Satsuki and Mei who move with their father to their new home, near a forest. Left to their own devices, they discover spirits and magical creatures; two furry ones are of particular interest — a giant fluffy creature known as the Totoro, and a mammoth cat bus that takes on passengers then soars off into the sky.

Hisaishi will executive produce the show with the RSC in partnership with Studio Ghibli, where Miyazaki creates his films, in collaboration with UK theater company Improbable and Nippon TV.

Miyazaki’s Spirited Away won...

A new production of Cosi Fan Tutte, featuring Broadway's Kelli O'Hara is now open at The Metropolitan Opera What did the critics have to say A winning cast comes together for Phelim McDermott's clever vision of Mozart's comedy about the sexes, set in a carnival-esque, funhouse environment inspired by 1950s Coney Island-complete with bearded ladies, fire eaters, and a Ferris wheel. Manipulating the action are the Don Alfonso of Christopher Maltman and the Despina of Tony Award-winner Kelli O'Hara, with Amanda Majeski, Serena Malfi, Ben Bliss, and Adam Plachetka as the pairs of young lovers who test each other's faithfulness. David Robertson conducts.

BroadwayWorld has a first look at Cosi Fan Tutte at The Met, starring Kelli O'Hara A winning cast comes together for Phelim McDermott's clever vision of Mozart's comedy about the sexes, set in a carnival-esque, funhouse environment inspired by 1950s Coney Island-complete with bearded ladies, fire eaters, and a Ferris wheel. Manipulating the action are the Don Alfonso of Christopher Maltman and the Despina of Tony Award-winner Kelli O'Hara, with Amanda Majeski, Serena Malfi, Ben Bliss, and Adam Plachetka as the pairs of young lovers who test each other's faithfulness. David Robertson conducts.

They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky, they're altogether ooky The Broadway musical sensation The Addams Family is on stage at the Ogunquit Playhouse October 1 through 26. Broadway's Rachel de Benedet and David Engel star in this musical comedy that brings the beloved and bizarre first family of comedy to life, complete with show-stopping musical numbers, the Broadway set and costumes by Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch and puppets by the inestimable Basil Twist.

It may not be true that Walt Disney wanted to be cryogenically frozen, but Philip Glass's new opera about the last months of his life explores the man behind the myth. Nicholas Wroe meets its director, Phelim McDermott

It was remarkably soon after Walt Disney's death in 1966 that the urban myth emerged of his body being cryogenically frozen in the hope that one day, pending advances in medical science, he might be brought back to life. "Of course it was absolute nonsense," says Phelim McDermott, director of Philip Glass's new opera about Disney, The Perfect American, which opens at the English National Opera . "But for some reason, this was a myth that people wanted to believe. One of our singers grew up in Florida and says, when he was a kid, everyone just knew that Disney was underneath the Epcot Centre. And after a while, these myths can...

London — The English National Opera's 2013-14 season will include a world premiere of Oedipus-inspired opera "Thebans" and the return of Monty Python's Terry Gilliam to direct a new production, the company announced Wednesday.

"Thebans," based on the tragedies of Sophocles, is a first opera from composer Julian Anderson, with libretto by Irish playwright Frank McGuinness. It opens in May 2014.

Gilliam, who directed "The Damnation of Faust" at the Eno in 2011, will lead a production of Hector Berlioz's "Benvenuto Cellini" in June 2014.

Both will be conducted by Eno Musical Director Edward Garner.

The season includes 10 new productions, including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Cosi Fan Tutte," directed by Katie Mitchell, a Calixto Bieito-directed production of Ludwig van Beethoven's "Fidelio" and Mozart's "The Magic Flute" directed by Simon McBurney – a co-production with the Netherlands Opera.

The company also plans revivals of recent successes including David Alden's production of...

Fictionalised account of animator's life, one of nine new productions to be staged by the company, will present a 'nightmarish' vision of Walt Disney

A new work by Philip Glass about Walt Disney will have its UK premiere at English National Opera (Eno) in June 2013. Glass's opera – his 24th – is based on Peter Stephan Jungk's 2004 novel The Perfect American, a fictionalised account of the final years of Walt Disney's life, described by Glass as "unimaginable, alarming and truly frightening". The novel, narrated by Wilhelm Dantine, a fictional Austrian cartoonist who worked for the animator in the 50s, mixes fact and fantasy, including meetings with Andy Warhol and Abraham Lincoln, to discover Disney's delusions of immortality and glimpse into his murky private life. He is controversially depicted as a racist, a misogynist and an antisemite.

La Times reviewer Richard Schickel called the book a "partially successful fiction ... [that asks us to] reflect on fame and...

Manager Peter Gelb is leading the way in attracting a new, younger audience to New York's Metropolitan Opera, but at what cost?

In Peter Gelb's office at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, there's a screen that's flush with the wall so it resembles a window. It captures whatever is happening on the Met's stage – so its general manager's eye can be trained on rehearsals and performances all day long. When I visit, the set of Philip Glass's Satyagraha is being taken down, to be replaced, a little later, by that of Don Giovanni (both productions have British directors, to whom we will return).

It is appropriate that Gelb's eye on his operatic kingdom is via a screen, for cinema has become the company's boom area. Gelb claims it will reap $10m–$12m (£6.4m–£7.7m) net profit from this, its sixth season of live HD transmissions into cinemas. Donizetti...

Mike Myers thrilled fans in London on Sunday by making a surprise appearance at the comedy club where he started his career.

The Austin Powers star's gig at the Comedy Store was announced just hours before he took to the stage with the venue's Comedy Store Players improvisation troupe, which he helped found in 1985 with his pal Neil Mullarkey.

Pictures of the gig subsequently emerged on Twitter.com and a message posted on the venue's page reads, "Oh yes Mike Myers joined the Players for the show (at) Comedy Store UK tonight. Was a great night," while fellow Player Phelim McDermott added, "Fantastic fun playing with Mike Myers tonight at the Store!"...

"Ragtime" and "The Scottsboro Boys" came up big as the nominees for the 55th annual Drama Desk Awards were announced today. The short-lived Broadway revival of the Terrence McNally musical and the new Off-Broadway tuner each received nine nominations, more than any other production.The nominees were announced by actors Brian Stokes Mitchell and Cady Huffman at the Friars Club in New York. It was also announced that Drama Desk members have voted this year to present special ensemble awards to the casts of "Circle Mirror Transformation" and "The Temperamentals." The awards will be presented May 23 in a ceremony hosted by Patti LuPone at the Laguardia Concert Hall at Lincoln Center.The complete list of nominees is below.Outstanding play:Alan Ayckbourn, "My Wonderful Day"Annie Baker, "Circle Mirror Transformation"Lucinda Coxon, "Happy Now?"John Logan, "Red"Geoffrey Nauffts, "Next Fall"Bruce Norris, "Clybourne Park"Outstanding musical:"American Idiot""Everyday...

Charles Addams’ immortal family of kooks will be singing and dancing in the Windy City come late 2009. The performances for the yet-to-be-cast musical will begin November 13, 2009 at Chicago’s Oriental Theatre according to The Chicago Tribune. The formal opening date is expected to be a few weeks later in early December.

When The Addams Family production was first announced May 21, 2007 by Elephant Eye Theatrical they anticipated it being ready for the 2009-2010 Broadway season but that date may now slip a year.

The production is being written by songwriter Andrew Lippa and Jersey Boys writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice. Improbable Theater founders Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch will direct and design.

“Chicago has instructive and enthusiastic audiences,” lead producer Stuart Oken told the paper. “Given our roots in the Chicago theater community, this was the only place we ever imagined doing our first production.”

Workshop productions to help shape...

Watch out! After mastering comics, television, commercials, games, and movies, the creepy and kooky clan are set to take over the stage!

Created by cartoonist Charles Addams, the macabre family members got their start in The New Yorker magazine in 1938 and continued until Addams' death in 1988. On television, Gomez, Morticia and the rest were the subject of a well-loved live-action series (1964 - 1966) and most of the cast reunited in 1977 for a reunion movie. There have also been two animated series, games, two feature films, a direct-to-dvd sequel and even an M&Ms commercial.

Plans are now underway to bring The Addams Family to the stage in the form of a Broadway musical. The production will be authored by the team of Drama Desk Award-winner Andrew Lippa (The Wild Party) and Tony Award-winners Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice (Jersey Boys). Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, who created the dark Shockheaded Peter,...