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Catherine Zeta-Jones, nominated for a Tony Award for her performance as Desiree in the current Broadway production of A Little Night Music, will sing the Stephen Sondheim classic "Send in the Clowns" from that Tony-nominated revival on the 64th Annual Tony Awards telecast.
Playbill.com has also learned many of the other performances scheduled for the June 13 ceremony, which will be broadcast live from Radio City Music Hall beginning at 8 PM ET on CBS.
In addition to Night Music, the revivals of La Cage aux Folles and Ragtime will also be featured. The cast of La Cage, which includes 2010 Tony nominees Kelsey Grammer and Douglas Hodge, will perform the toe-tapping Jerry Herman tune, "The Best of Times." Christiane Noll, nominated for her performance in the short-lived revival of Ragtime, will perform a portion of the Lynn Ahrens-Stephen Flaherty ballad "Back to Before."
Million Dollar Quartet, the Tony-nominated Best Musical that puts Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins in the same 1956 recording studio, will feature its entire cast - Eddie Clendening, Lance Guest, Tony nominee Levi Kreis, Rob Lyons, Hunter Foster and Elizabeth Stanley - performing a medley of "Down by the Riverside," "Party" and "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On."
The cast of Fela!, which tells the story of late Nigerian musician and political figure Fela Anikulapo Kuti, will offer a montage of songs and scenes written especially for the Tony telecast by Fela! librettist, director and choreographer Bill T. Jones; librettist Jim Lewis; and Aaron Johnson, who penned additional music for the musical.
Memphis Tony nominees Montego Glover and Chad Kimball will lead the cast of the acclaimed musical about a white radio DJ who falls in love with a black singer in the 1950s in a medley of Joe DiPietro and David Bryan's "Radio" and "Steal Your Rock 'n' Roll."
The high-energy cast of American Idiot, the Tony-nominated musical inspired by the 2004 Green Day punk album of the same name, will belt out their show's title tune, and the rock group Green Day will also lend their talents to the evening.
The show's opening pop-song medley will include 2010 Tony nominee Sherie Rene Scott performing a portion of "Up the Ladder," the cast of Million Dollar Quartet performing "Blue Suede Shoes" and more. "Glee" stars Lea Michele and Matthew Morrison will also perform, as will cast members from Come Fly Away and Promises, Promises.
Sean Hayes, a 2010 Tony nominee for his performance in Promises, Promises, will host the 64th Annual Antoinette Perry "Tony" Awards, presented by The Broadway League and The American Theatre Wing.
Presenters are scheduled to include Paula Abdul, Antonio Banderas, Justin Bartha, Patrick Breen, Laura Bell Bundy, Laura Benanti, Cate Blanchett, Michael Cerveris, Kristen Chenoweth, Barbara Cook, Viola Davis, Michael Douglas, Kelsey Grammer, Brian d’Arcy James, Rosemary Harris, Patrick Heusinger, Katie Holmes, Scarlett Johansson, Angela Lansbury, Anthony LaPaglia, Laura Linney, Lucy Liu, Jane Maxwell, Idina Menzel, Helen Mirren, Alfred Molina, Matthew Morrison, Chris Noth, Bernadette Peters, David Hyde Pierce, Daniel Radcliffe, Eddie Redmayne, Mark Sanchez, Tony Shaloub, Liev Schreiber, Will & Jada Pinkett Smith, Stanley Tucci, Denzel Washington and Racquel Welch.
The evening will be executive produced by Ricky Kirshner and Glenn Weiss of White Cherry Entertainment.
Visit www.tonyawards.com for more information.
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The lineup of performances for the 64th annual Tony Awards has begun to take shape, with "Promises, Promises" and "Come Fly Away" joining the top tuner nominees for showcases on the kudocast.
Those televised performance segs are always a topic of interest among legiters, since a showcase on the Tony telecast is considered one of the biggest national marketing boons a production can get.
As has been the tradition, each of the four new musical contenders -- "American Idiot," "Fela!," "Memphis" and "Million Dollar Quartet" will perform. So will three of the four tuner revival nominees, "A Little Night Music," "La Cage aux Folles" and the now-closed "Ragtime." ("Finian's Rainbow," another revival no longer playing, didn't sign on for a Tony spot.)
In the play sequences -- always a tricky endeavor, since nonmusicals rarely play well on screen -- a slew of thesps are on tap for a "special presentation" of the nominated new plays and play revivals in which they appear. Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, for instance, will talk up "Fences," while Justin Bartha, Anthony LaPaglia and Tony Shalhoub discuss "Lend Me a Tenor," Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson talk about "A View from the Bridge" and Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne appear for "Red."
The exact nature of the presentation has not been confirmed, although it's looking like the sequences will resemble the 2008 ceremony, in which host Whoopi Goldberg talked about each play while the production's set was recreated behind her. This year, it's said the actors (rather than the host) will talk about their respective plays; they will not perform.
Green Day, the band behind the album on which "American Idiot" is based, also has been confirmed to appear in the ceremony, joining a roster of talent that also includes Antonio Banderas, Cate Blanchett and Helen Mirren, among others.
The 2010 Tonys are set for June 13 at Radio City Music Hall.
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