Lauper, Janney, Shelley, Bean, Breaker and Houdyshell Join Star-Studded Defying Inequality Benefit

By Andrew Gans
February 13, 2009

Additional actors from stage and screen have been announced for Defying Inequality: The Broadway Concert — A Celebrity Benefit for Equal Rights, which will be held Feb. 23 at the Gershwin Theatre, the current home of Wicked.

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Hairspray to Close Jan. 4, 2009; Fierstein Returns Nov. 11

By Kenneth Jones
October 22, 2008

Hairspray, the Tony Award-winning musical hit that spawned tours and a Hollywood movie version, will close Jan. 4, 2009, the producers announced on Oct. 22. Original Tony-winning star Harvey Fierstein will join the company Nov. 11 and play to the close.

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At Home, Backstage

Setting the Stage, Offstage

Setting the Stage, Offstage
By PENELOPE GREEN

URSULA the sea witch idolizes Leona Helmsley, Jerry Falwell and Gloria Swanson, which is why their pictures are part of a collage hanging in Sherie Rene Scott’s dressing room at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater. Like many stage actors, Ms. Scott, who plays Ursula in the Disney play “The Little Mermaid,” uses her dressing room to get herself in the mood of her character. Unlike most Broadway actors, however, Ms. Scott has scored a dressing room the size of a Manhattan one-bedroom, and it comes with features: French doors opening onto the street and a pink bathtub (put there for Elizabeth Taylor in 1983, when she was in “Private Lives”).

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