In just over an hour, Quinn’s “Unconstitutional” takes the audience on an irreverent journey through the entire United States Constitution and its Bill of Rights. Sure, the Constitution might not sound like a particularly hilarious topic, but it’s much more than a history lesson with Quinn. 

So why focus this special on the Constitution?

“It’s the one thing that we’re all experts about, which is amazing because none of us have read it,” Quinn explains at the start of the show.

Thankfully for everyone involved, the show is just as much about modern America as it is about the country’s founding. Yes, Quinn throws in jokes about Cyrus Griffin and the Articles of Confederation, but there’s still plenty of commentary on the Kardashians and Maury Povich to keep the show accessible.

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The play opened last Saturday and according to the Guardian "was expected to be one of the highlights of the celebrations" for the bicentenary of the composer's birth.

From the Guardian:

The opening scene depicts singers inside glass containers dropping to the floor as they are enveloped in a white fog – a clear allusion to the gas chambers that killed millions in Nazi death camps.

Another scene that caused some in the audience to gasp and cover their faces was one in which an entire family had their heads shaved before being shot dead.

In a statement, Rheinoper's managers acknowledged that they had always accepted that the production would be controversial, "but it's with great regret that we now react to the fact that some scenes, in particular the very realistically portrayed shooting scene, caused such strong psychological and physical reactions in some visitors that some of them had to be taken into medical care".

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"Kinky Boots" is based on the 2005 British movie about a real-life shoe factory that struggles until it finds new life in fetish footwear. Lauper's songs and a story by Harvey Fierstein have made it a crowd-pleaser.

"I walked my dog early this morning so I'd be back in time to listen to the announcement. It's so great. It's so great. I'm done crying a little bit. But I'm still thrilled and a little stunned," Lauper said.

The haul did not match the record number of nominations for a musical, which is 15, set by "The Producers" in 2001 and "Billy Elliot" in 2009. "The Book of Mormon" nabbed 14 Tony nods in 2011.

"Lucky Guy," Nora Ephron's portrait of Mike McAlary, a gutsy New York City newspaper columnist who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing that a Haitian immigrant had been sodomized by police officers in 1997, got six nominations, including one for Hanks as McAlary.

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From the L.A. Times:

"All The Way" will open the new season at American Repertory Theater in Massachusetts, with performances scheduled to begin Sept. 13. The company said that the play dramatizes Johnson's first year in the Oval Office as he deals with the conflict in Vietnam and civil-rights unrest at home.

Schenkkan wrote the play as a commission for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where it was produced in 2012 with a different cast and directed by Bill Rauch, who is artistic director of the Oregon company. Rauch is returning as director of the new production.

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IN THE INTRODUCTION to his novel "Bend Sinister" (1947), Vladimir Nabokov writes the following:

I am not “sincere,” I am not “provocative,” I am not “satirical.” I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of “thaw” in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent.

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As the Grammy Award winner began work on the exuberant "Kinky Boots," it took her back to her childhood, where she was likely to be found listening endlessly to cast albums on a record player.

There was "There's No Business Like Show Business" and "My Fair Lady." And "South Pacific," of course. She remembers her grandmother coming downstairs and ripping "The King and I" off the player after one too many spins.

"My mother said I was a little odd as a kid," says Lauper, 59. "I was alone a lot but I didn't feel alone. When I sang with those records, I'd be Julie Andrews and there was Rex Harrison sitting on my mother's bed. I was Mitzi Gaynor. I was Ezio Pinza. I think she had Mary Martin, too — I was all of them. I was pretty good until they sang duets."

Sitting backstage at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, waiting to catch another preview of her 15-song debut as a Broadway lyricist and composer, Lauper is both nervous and humble. The little girl who listened compulsively to show tunes has now delivered her own.

"It's the closest thing to being 5," she says.

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Still, despite its reach, most of these spinoffs are not lucrative. In a bonus feature of Besser's "Improv 4 Humans" podcast released Tuesday night, co-founder Ian Roberts outlined the organization's finances, which had been "in the red" for many years. Roberts said that even now, "the theater as a business barely makes anything."

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The Broadway League reported Wednesday that the nine-year-old "Wicked" took in a whopping $2,947,172 over nine performances last week, which is the highest single-week gross of any show in Broadway history.

It squeaked by the old record - $5,382 more to be exact - set by "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark," which earned $2,941,790 over nine performances last year during the holidays. Back then, the webslinger had swiped the title from "Wicked." (For the record, the "Spider-Man" musical earned $2,716,990 last week over nine shows.)

Both musicals' huge hauls reflect the use of premium seating, in which producers charge higher prices for certain days and certain seats. "Wicked" managed to command as much as $300 for a top premium seat - second only to the "Book of Mormon," which has a top premium of $477. The average paid admission was $181 to "Wicked."

But making its feat more impressive is the fact that it is performed at the Gershwin Theatre, has about 100 seats less than the 1,930-seat Foxwoods Theatre, home of the superhero musical.

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WHEN LES MISÉRABLES ARRIVED on Broadway in 1987, New Yorkers came to the theater ready to cry. Pretty much everyone knew someone young who was dying or dead, usually after terrible suffering. The death toll was growing exponentially, with no relief in sight. Outside the theater district, a certain heartlessness pierced the air. AIDS gave every bigot an ostensible reason to despise gay men. Reaganomics was well underway, and cities were dealing with unprecedented numbers of the homeless as mental health facilities lost their funding and threw patients onto the streets. On Wall Street traders were indulging their new love of junk bonds, which fueled an October stock market crash. The scales of wealth and misery were not yet at the tipping point, but we were at the point where we could imagine a tipping point, like the one depicted in Les Misérables.

It was the right musical at the right time.

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You know the drill: A storefront real-estate office in Chicago gets jacked of it prime leads, setting in motion a buzzard’s den of penny-ante salesmen who argue, whine and eventually knife each other in the back to survive, just like they do in the cubicle farms that grow the worst in human relations.

This harsh allegory of modern-day capitalism is not for the frail. New York Magazine critic John Simon famously freaked out on the play, calling it “reprehensible, immoral” because Mamet “enjoys his characters too much, that he revels in their brazen, agile crookedness.”

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 They offer the best noise canceling available, and sound decent to boot. I make this pick based on the reviews and opinions of the top headphone reviewers, plus having reviewed the QC15s and its competitors myself.

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The Neo-Futurists (creators of the acclaimed, long-running show “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind”) create theater under the principles of brevity, honesty and speed. Would that our political process would take the same approach.

Written by Andy Bayiates, Sean Benjamin, Gevenvra Gallo Bayiates, Chloe Johnson and Karen Weinberg, “44 Plays” encourages us to take the long view this election year. The project has grown into a nationwide election season festival, with 45 productions in progress across the country, from New York to Little Rock Central High School, where President Eisenhower dispatched the National Guard in 1957 to escort the Little Rock Nine to class. (Find a production here.)

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Then again, reduction and compression can also be done in a thoughtful way; certainly, designers constantly rely on reduction to inform our work. Logos and app icons require extreme simplification of an idea. From a perfectly composed tweet to a book cover, there's an undeniable art to brevity. Even when a particular designer's work seems to favor complexity, it's often an aesthetic judgment; the designer is choosing to reveal a select part of the spectrum from simplicity to complexity. Some of the greatest "maximalists" of our time show great restraint of concept.

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The play is a sort of companion piece to Lorraine Hansberry’s seminal 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun.” But instead of the hope, pride, honesty and love that give "Raisin" such enduring power, "Clybourne" is a biting satire of modern race relations, seen in 1959 (Act I) and 2009 (Act II), shortly after the nation’s first black president came to power.

In the first act of "Clybourne Park," which is understood as Chicago’s Lincoln Park, Karl Lindner (the only white character in "Raisin") is attempting to convince the white homeowners selling their house to the black family of "Raisin" to renege on the sale and preserve the neighborhood as a lily-white enclave. In the second act, a white couple are reintegrating and gentrifying a black neighborhood by buying the now-decrepit house, which they plan to tear down and replace with a McMansion.

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To hash this out, I invited Ben Marcus -- a novelist and an associate professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts, where he teaches fiction writing -- to see "Seminar" with me and talk afterward about the ways writing workshops are depicted in the performing arts. His first novel was acquired by the writer, editor and teacher Gordon Lish, considered to be the inspiration for the character played by Rickman, and Marcus also attended one of Lish's legendary seminars, conducted in private homes, like the class in the play. (Marcus' fourth book, the novel "The Flame Alphabet," will be published in January.)

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The attendant explained that there would be no talking during my stay at the McKittrick Hotel and that I was to wear a carnival-style mask at all times, but also that I was free to explore the space as I saw fit. As the elevator lurched to our destination and the doors opened, he offered these parting words: “this experience is best had alone.”

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The British company Punchdrunk's production is ostensibly the story of "Macbeth," though mixed with Alfred Hitchcock's film "Rebecca" and told in the form of an interactive maze that owes more to video games -- New York magazine compared the experience with "puzzle-horror first-person video games like BioShock" -- than Shakespeare.

Audiences form groups and are given "Eyes Wide Shut"-style masks as they enter the lounge area, which serves as the show's waiting room. They are told they aren't allowed to speak until they return to the lounge and also not to bother the actors -- but nothing else is off-limits. Then you are let loose in the hotel, where every room is decorated like a spread from "Nightmare Homes Monthly," and run into the "characters" (easy to spot because they aren't wearing masks). They perform their wordless scenes as they race from room to room. Sometimes they dance. Sometimes they fight (also a form of dancing, with some super-intense choreography). In one room, you might find a weeping woman looking at a photograph while packing a suitcase. In the basement, there's a dinner party where guests are either having a blood orgy or doing a sweeping waltz, depending when you arrive.

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Many productions mark their setting with topical references, but usually the revivals happen long enough after the original that it seems quaint, not clueless. I mean, how could any actor go onstage now and sing about how tough it is to live on the Lower East Side as a poor artist? Or not feel a modicum of shame whining about the ethical dilemmas of "living in America at the end of a millenium"?

I want to tell the characters, "Wait until right after the millenium, and then come talk to me about the problems in New York." I want to scream, "Stop singing about the different ways to measure a year!"

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1. Host Neil Patrick Harris tries to fit as many "Spider-Man" jokes as possible into 30 seconds:

2. Nikki M. James, winner of the award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical (one of nine total awards taken home by "The Book of Mormon"), gives an acceptance speech that is rambling, emotional, spontaneous -- and delightful:

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The Alamo Drafthouse, which Entertainment Weekly once called the No. 1 theater "doing it right"  (as well as a "movie geek heaven"), operates on the no-cellphone practice. Recently, it received an angry message from a former customer regarding this policy.

That this woman did not choose to text her concerns to the theater, thus saving her the humiliation of having her analog recording forwarded around the Internet, is what I like to call "technironic."

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