Jordan Donica a rising star
NEW YORK — When Jordan Donica was about 9 or 10, his aunt took him to New York City with a mission: Get the notion of making it on Broadway out of his system. Thankfully, that mission failed spectacularly.
“It was raining and I was dancing through the streets of Times Square, loving every second of it. My aunt had to tell me to slow down,” he recalls, now happily a New Yorker. “The thing that I love the most is here, at its height — the core where everything explodes out from.”
With determination and talent, Donica still hasn’t slowed down, earning his first Tony Award nomination for playing the hunky, gallant knight Sir Lancelot in a gorgeous Lincoln Center Theater revival of the classic musical “Camelot.”
He made his Broadway debut in 2016 as Raoul in “The Phantom of the Opera,” coming full-circle. He had been in the audience as a kid during that New York visit, mesmerized by the skill of the Phantom. “I was like, ‘I need to learn how to use my voice the way that man is using his voice.’ And I set out to do that.”
In the lavish, sweeping “Camelot,” he plays a virtuous if egotistical knight who is in a love triangle with King Arthur and Guenevere. The story has been updated by Aaron Sorkin to focus on the dream of democracy, but the songs by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe remain.
Comedian Neal Brennan back with a “Brand New Neal”
At the conclusion of “Blocks,” Neal Brennan’s Netflix stand-up special released in November, the 49-year-old comedian found himself at a mental health crossroads.
After spending his hourlong set confronting various
impediments to his happiness, Brennan cycled through the cures he has tried for his depression — therapy, ketamine, transcranial magnetic stimulation, extreme psychedelics —and pleaded for internal acceptance.
“I just grind and attack myself relentlessly like it’s my job,” he told his audience. “I would love to stop.”
Six months later, as Brennan takes his latest standup show, “Brand New Neal,” on the road, where is he on that journey?
“When I say ‘Brand New Neal,’ it’s because I’m having fewer emotional disorders than I’ve had,” Brennan says.
“I would say I’m healthier than I’ve ever been emotionally.”
In a phone interview, Brennan discussed his show.
His answers have been edited for length and clarity.
“I’m kind of hopeful, in that if you can’t make it to absolutely pure 100 percent emotional health,
there’s a lot of upside to having imperfect emotional health. One of the bits toward the end of the show is that most great things in life come from psychopaths and drug addicts.
“Most of Freud’s books should be called “This May Be the Cocaine Talking.” Like, there’s something positive about mental illness. Then I go through a litany of musicians, a litany of comedians, and I’m a little more accepting of the idea that I may be optimized for one thing — as are many, many of my comedy sisters and brothers. — Washington Post
T.J. Newman returns with new novel
Time is a precious commodity and some readers need to be hooked from page one. T.J. Newman ‘s 2021 debut novel “Falling” (Avid Reader/simon & Schuster) begins with a sentence that blasts out of a cannon: “When the shoe dropped in her lap the foot was still in it.”
The novel — about a pilot whose family will be killed if he doesn’t crash the plane he’s flying — had an equally fast trajectory to the bestseller list. With Newman’s second book,
“Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421,” out Tuesday, she again starts with a bang: “Will Kent opened his eyes just to see the engine explode.”
In “Drowning,” a plane crashes into the ocean shortly after takeoff and its survivors, including a father and his young daughter, race against the clock to be rescued before the plane sinks. The events unfold from various points of view because, as Newman says, “every person is the lead character in their story, you put them in an enclosed environment on a plane, add a central conflict, and you’ve got a rich, fully fleshed-out (narrative).”
Newman says she’s “obsessed with the reader experience” and feels satisfaction if her books are devoured in big gulps.
“I don’t want to just have a reader read a book, I want them to experience a story. When people say, ‘I stayed up till four in the morning reading,’ ... nothing makes me happier.”