Who knew that Sean Hayes could really play the piano? We didn’t before watching him host last night’s 64th Tony Awards. For those of you who missed the live show, it was pretty entertaining as these things go — in fact, it was obvious that they were trying to keep things viewer-friendly for the Glee Generation. While we could spend an entire post snarking on the production issues that plagued the broadcast (seriously: bad miking, lighting issues and awkward camera zooms), we figure that anyone who wasn’t on stage crew in high school would rather hear about the highlights. Photos and clips after the jump.

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Plays often fall into the trap of telling rather than showing. And then there are playwrights like Martin McDonagh, who crafts viscerally-charged stories that effortlessly unfold and always leave us wanting more. The world premiere of his latest, A Behanding in Spokane , Friday night at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre proved no exception, flying by in a taut, intermission-free 90 minutes. Its charmingly bizarre conclusion hits a lighter note than Mcdonagh’s previous works; it’s also his first to be set in America and originate on Broadway.

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Could our favorite foul-mouthed fourth graders be coming to Broadway? Well, we’re not exactly sure yet. What we do know is that that Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Robert Lopez, the composer of Avenue Q, are working on a new musical that will run in August and September at New York Theatre Workshop — the same East Village space that premiered Rent back in 1996.

While we think a staged South Park musical, complete with the Satan worshiping Woodland Critters and a hatred for gingers, is a hilarious idea, we’d also like to see this darkly comedic dream team come up with something new. With a group of guys that have written songs concerning American jingoism, the amount of porn on the Internet, and Helen Keller, we trust that whatever they come up with will be both irreverent and LMAO funny.

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Pee-wee Herman: endearing man-child or nasal annoyance? The subversive, polarizing character made famous by actor Paul Reubens has returned nearly twenty years after the massively successful television show Pee-wee’s Playhouse for a month-long stage show at Club Nokia in Los Angeles, and we caught the premiere this past Tuesday night.

After the jump, our review, along with a slideshow of images.

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Catherine Zeta-Jones makes her Broadway debut in the current revival of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s A Little Night Music, and as fans of her Oscar-winning work as Velma Kelly in Rob Marshall’s Chicago might have assumed, the critics say that she’s good, (if too young and pretty for the part). Ditto five-time Tony winner Angela Lansbury, who reprises her role from the original production from the ’70s. The reaction to show itself is rather mixed, in part because of director Trevor Nunn’s creative take on the material; get the critical rundown after the jump.

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