The ghost of late, great producer David Belasco supposedly haunts this 1,016-seat house, built in 1907. We've never seen the specter—no doubt clad in priestly garb, as Belasco was wont to do—but we'll take theater folks' word for it. In 1935, the elegant playhouse was home to Clifford Odets's breakthrough drama Awake and Sing! It served as an NBC radio playhouse from 1949 to '53 but then returned to live fare. Over the decades, it has housed the scandalous sex-themed hit Oh! Calcutta!, a sterling revival of August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone in 2009, which President Obama attended with the First Lady, and the recent Broadway production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
In this idiosyncratic original musical, Darren Criss (Glee) and Helen J Shen (The Lonely Few) star as obsolescent robots who make an unexpected Seoul connection. A Korean-language version of the show, also written by composer Will Aronson and lyricist Hue Park, won several awards for its 2016 premiere in South Korea; an earlier version of this incarnation—directed by Michael Arden (Parade) and designed by his frequent collaborator Dane Laffrey—debuted in Atlanta in 2020.
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