Starry Lips Together, Teeth Apart Reading a Hit for Broadway.com and BC/EFA COVID-19 Fund
More than 50,000 theater fans around the world celebrated the genius of late playwright Terrence McNally by tuning in for the starry Broadway.com livestream reading of his 1991 play Lips Together, Teeth Apart. The special online event raised over $75,000 for the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS' COVID-19 Emergency Assistance Fund.
Lips Together, Teeth Apart starred Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Sam Truman, Celia Keenan-Bolger as Sally Truman, Zachary Quinto as John Haddock and Ari Graynor as Chloe Haddock, with Brad Heberlee reading stage directions. It was directed by Trip Cullman, with livestream direction by Paul Wontorek of Broadway.com. Ryan Casey provided graphics to the production, with Tug Rice creating special illustations. The event was produced by Broadway.com, with Justin Mikita and Eric Kuhn.
Special guests on the livestream included original Lips Together, Teeth Apart stars Christine Baranski and Nathan Lane, as well as McNally’s husband, Tony Award winning producer Tom Kirdahy.
"I felt completely transported," Stuart Emmrich wrote of the event in Vogue. "If this live-streamed, magical performance of Lips Together, Teeth Apart, is a glimpse of what the future of theater looks like—at least for now—then count me in."
McNally had a remarkably far-ranging career, including a new work on Broadway in each of the last six decades. In 2018, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a 2019 recipient of a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. He also received the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award. He won four Tony Awards, for his plays Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class and his musical books for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime. He wrote a number of TV scripts, including Andre's Mother, for which he won an Emmy Award. He received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, four Drama Desk Awards, two Lucille Lortel Awards, two Obie Awards and three Hull-Warriner Awards from the Dramatists Guild. In 1996, he was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. He wrote the libretto for the operas Great Scott and Dead Man Walking, both with music by Jake Heggie. Other plays and musicals include Mothers and Sons; The Lisbon Traviata; Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune; A Perfect Ganesh; The Visit; The Full Monty; Corpus Christi; Bad Habits; Next; The Ritz; Anastasia; It's Only a Play; Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone?; and The Stendhal Syndrome.
Enjoy the clip from the reading below, highlighting the show’s hilarious Act Three game of charades.