General News
Meropi Kyriacou Honored as TNH Educator of the Year
NEW YORK – Meropi Kyriacou, the new Principal of The Cathedral School in Manhattan, was honored as The National Herald’s Educator of the Year.
NEW YORK — Billy Crystal is not ready to say goodbye to “Mr. Saturday Night.”
The comic icon has turned his comedy film into a Broadway-bound musical and hopes to open it next year with him reprising his film role as Buddy Young Jr., a bitter, old insult comic chasing a last laugh.
“There’s something about this guy and that world that I love,” Crystal tells The Associated Press. “I think that we’ve brought this story and this character to a better place than I could have imagined even.”
Crystal has written the stage adaptation with his film’s co-writers — Lowell Ganz and Marc “Babaloo” Mandel — and married it to music by Jason Robert Brown and lyrics by Amanda Green. John Rando will direct.
“What the music has done to elevate the story and to propel the story and bring out dynamics in the characters is quite amazing to me,” Crystal says. “It’s something I couldn’t be more excited about, honestly.”
He will star opposite Tony Award-winner Randy Graff, Chasten Harmon and David Paymer, who will recreate his Oscar-nominated performance as Buddy’s brother, Stan Yankelman.
Crystal has just ended a developmental run of the show at the Barrington Stage Company in Massachusetts. Performances begin on Broadway on March 1, 2022, at the Nederlander Theatre.
This is Crystal’s first return to Broadway following his “700 Sundays,” which he premiered in 2004 and revisited in 2013. For the new show, American Express members get access to tickets starting Nov. 10; to the general public on Nov. 22.
Crystal made a name for himself first in comedy, from stand-up to TV’s “Soap” to the films “When Harry Met Sally” and “City Slickers.” Then in 1992, he got serious with “Mr. Saturday Night,” which he directed, co-wrote and starred in. He based the Buddy character in part on real comedians, including Alan King, Pat Cooper and Buddy Hackett.
In an interview, Crystal he recalls starting the shooting of the movie in Central Park 30 years ago at age 43 and needing six hours in the makeup chair, starting at 2 a.m.
“Now, all these years later, we don’t need the makeup,” he says. “I’m playing my own age. It’s much more freeing. It’s much more honest in a way.”
Instead of the film’s use of flashbacks, Crystal will portray a man he calls “Willy Loman with laughs” in every stage of his life. “The pain and the joy and the emotion that he goes through in the film, I get to do it live in front of people and they feel it and I feel them.”
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Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits
NEW YORK – Meropi Kyriacou, the new Principal of The Cathedral School in Manhattan, was honored as The National Herald’s Educator of the Year.
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza (AP) — An international team of doctors visiting a hospital in central Gaza was prepared for the worst.
ATHENS - The tragedy of the Tempi train collision is a much greater issue than an opportunity for parties to table a motion of censure against the government, but the opposition parties used it anyway "to turn society's pain into a tool to strike at the government and me personally," Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Thursday night in parliament.
ATHENS - PASOK-KINAL leader Nikos Androulakis, speaking at the Hellenic Parliament on Thursday, emphasized that there is "an established belief among the Greek people" that the government "operates as a well-oiled machine of corruption, cover-up, and propaganda.
ATHENS — Greece’s center-right government survived a motion of no-confidence late Thursday that was brought by opposition parties over its handling of the country’s deadliest rail disaster a year ago.
ASTORIA – Greek Minister of the Interior Niki Kerameus offered an informative presentation on postal voting in the upcoming European Union elections for Greek citizens in a well-attended event held at the St.