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Exclusive: As she looks to expand from theater into film and television, writer, director, and actress Sara Porkalob has signed with Impression Entertainment for management.

Porkalob is best known as the creator of The Dragon Cycle, a trilogy of matrilineal musicals about her Filipino American gangster family. The first in the cycle, Dragon Lady, directed by Andrew K. Russell, premiered at Intiman Theatre and was the recipient of three 2018 Gregory Awards, including Outstanding Sound/Music Design, Outstanding Actress in a Musical, and Outstanding Musical Production. The show recently sold out its run at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, and continues to tour.

The second work in Porkalob’s cycle, Dragon Mama, premiered at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Ma and was the recipient of Elliot Norton Awards for Best Original Script and Best Solo-Performance in 2019.

Currently, third entry Dragon Baby is in development under a commission from Geffen Playhouse.

Near the start of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Broadway revival of the musical 1776, a cast made entirely of actors who identify as female, transgender and nonbinary, with multiple representations of race and ethnicity, step into the gold-buckled shoes, literally, of the men who would come to be called the founding fathers. We can only imagine how things might turn out differently, both for the musical and in some alternate real-life universe.

In some ways, not much changes. Members of the Continental Congress still bicker, fight and ever so slowly hash out the details of what will become the Declaration of Independence. Slavery will remain enshrined in both the document and the new nation, and the musical’s rousing Sherman Edwards score is as vibrant and pleasing as ever.

What’s different, of course, are the voices singing those songs and hashing those historical details, and in that, at least,...

A new Broadway season has started, and there are currently seven productions of musicals set to open this fall. Could we be seeing any of them contend at next year’s Tony Awards? Below is an overview of the plot of each musical as well as the awards history of its author, cast, creative team, and the opening and (where applicable) closing dates.

“Almost Famous” (previews begin October 3; opens November 3)

In this stage musical adaptation of Cameron Crowe’s 2000 Academy Award-winning film, William Miller is an idealistic 15-year-old aspiring music journalist. When Rolling Stone magazine hires him to go on the road with an up-and-coming band, he is thrust into the rock-and-roll circus, where his love of music, his longing for friendship, and his integrity as a writer collide.

This musical has a book written by Crowe, who also co-wrote the score with Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tom Kitt.

The Broadway-bound revival of the musical 1776, which begins a pre-New York engagement at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Ma, next month, has announced a cast comprised fully of performers who identify as female, non-binary and trans.

The cast announced Friday was specifically for the A.R.T. production and might not necessarily carry over to the staging at Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre on Broadway in September (or a U.S. tour set to launch in February 2023), but the news provides a clear indication of the production’s reimagined, groundbreaking approach.

First staged on Broadway in 1969, the musical about the signing of the Declaration of Independence — and the so-called Founding Fathers — features music and lyrics by Sherman Edwards and a book by Peter Stone, based on a concept by Edwards. A film version was released in 1972.

The new staging will be co-directed by Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus (with...