Broadway Journal

INCLUSIVENESS AS BIG BOX OFFICE & OTHER TONY TAKEAWAYS

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Hunter Arnold, Mara Isaacs, Dale Franzen

Hadestown’s strong sales and its Tony Award for Best Musical may advance the cause of female theater artists more effectively than any speech advocating for industry inclusiveness.

The inventive folk opera, which won eight awards at Radio City Music Hall Sunday night, is an all-but-guaranteed hit — and just the latest musical written in part or entirely by a woman to demonstrate staying power.

Of the dozen new musicals running on Broadway longer than a year, six have a female composer, lyricist or book writer. (They are Wicked,  Waitress,  Mean Girls,  Frozen,  Come From Away  and Beautiful, the Carole King jukebox show.)Continue Reading

TOOTSIE’S INSIDER ADVANTAGE AT THE TONY AWARDS

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Santino Fontana & Andy Grotelueschen

EXCLUSIVE: In competitive Tony Awards contests, can producers who vote for their own shows have an outsized impact? Apparently.

I obtained a list of voters in the 2017-18 season — which I’m told is largely current — and cross-referenced it with names above the title of this year’s Best Musical nominees.

I counted 17 Tootsie  producers and co-producers who were eligible to vote, 16 on Ain’t Too Proud,  12 on Hadestown  and nine on The Prom.  With just 831 voters, those margins aren’t negligible. Continue Reading

WOMEN COMPOSERS SHINE LIGHT ON B’WAY BOYS CLUB

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Georgia Stitt

For female musical theater composers, this season has been a mixed bag. Of eight original Broadway scores, just one, Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown, was written by a woman. Yet with its standing-room-only audiences and 14 Tony Award nominations, the folk opera appears to be a hit, a sign that non-traditional work — by a man or woman — can defy conventional wisdom of what belongs on Broadway.

Amazingly, Hadestown is only the 38th Broadway musical composed by a woman since 1930, according to a new interactive timeline by Maestra Music Inc.Continue Reading

RICHARD BEAN SNOOKERS AUDIENCE WITH DELIGHTFUL ‘NAP’: REVIEW

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Ahmed Aly Elsayed, Ethan Hova and Ben Schnetzer/Joan Marcus

It may seem necessary, before an American audience, to provide a primer on snooker, that English variant of billiards. But the unseen, bone-dry play-by-play snooker announcers in Richard Bean’s charming new comedy about the sport, The Nap, which opened Thursday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, are reluctant to expend the effort.

One begrudgingly explains a few elements of the game, in an Alan Rickman-adjacent whine, “if you’re watching on the Internet in Antarctica,” or “for those on a canoe in Tahiti.” In other words, let’s assume we know the basics, and get on with the fun bits.Continue Reading

LAVISH ‘DOLLY!’ EARNS MODEST RETURNS

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Photo: Julieta Cervantes

EXCLUSIVE: Investors in Scott Rudin’s celebrated revival of Hello, Dolly! have earned a profit of 5 percent, according to two people familiar with the production.

In a flop-filled business, recouping is considered the benchmark for success, and investors months ago earned back their money. The musical was the talk of the 2016-17 season, won four Tony Awards, and last week was the third-bestselling musical, behind Hamilton and The Lion King. For angels seeking prestige, glamour and the satisfaction of helping to create a revival worthy of the iconic, 1964 original, Dolly delivered and made them money.

Others, however, expected more from a production that’s grossed $126 million.Continue Reading

‘PRETTY WOMAN’ BOTCHED BY ALL-MALE CREATIVE TEAM: REVIEW

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Photo: Andrew Eccles

Pretty Woman: The Musical, the over-amplified wannabe tourist trap that opened Thursday at the Nederlander Theatre, illustrates the limits of vision-free Broadway producing.

The music is monotonous and draining, the book simplistic and clichéd (much more so than the film), and the acting wooden.  The best elements are its Vegas-flashy sets (by David Rockwell) and its choreography (by director Jerry Mitchell).

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‘DELIGHTFULLY DAFFY’ TO ‘COCKAMAMIE MISH MASH’: GO-GO’S MUSICAL SPLITS CRITICS (WITH A PAN FROM OUR MAN)

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Head Over Heels/Joan Marcus

REVIEW : The question at the heart of Head Over Heels  is whether Elizabethan comedy and the music of the Go-Go’s go together. Sadly, the answer is no.

(See below for other opinions about the first musical of the season, which was capitalized for at least $11.6 million, according to investment papers.)

The jukebox musical that opened Thursday at the Hudson Theatre is (bizarrely) ostensibly based on Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th century Greek-mythological prose poem, The Arcadia. Thus the not-quite-iambic pentameter of the shepherd Musidorus (Andrew Durand), when he finds the skeletons of actors in the woods accompanied by a note: “These sad remains are of our theatre troupe, / Starved for lack of Serious Message.” This could charitably be called meta-commentary.

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CELEBRATING RISK & THE INDEPENDENT PRODUCER: A TRIUMPHANT ‘BAND’S VISIT’

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There’s cause for celebration in Bet Hatikva and Petah Tikva.

Groban & Bareilles at the Tonys

The Band’s Visit, a drama about acceptance, missed connections and the romance and ennui of everyday life, won 10 Tony Awards, including best musical. The triumph raises the profile of the quiet show about an Egyptian police band marooned in a sleepy Israeli town, who’d intended to go to a cosmopolitan city with a similar-sounding name.

Some takeaways from the CBS telecast:Continue Reading

SNUBBING ‘MEAN GIRLS’ & ‘SPONGEBOB,’ CRITICS’ CIRCLE SKIPS MUSICAL AWARD

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Maxwell Anderson, left, receives the first Critics’ Circle Award from Brooks Atkinson

The New York Drama Critics’ Circle voted not to give a prize for best musical this season, implicitly endorsing The Band’s Visit‘s Tony Award ambitions and rejecting Broadway’s other new musicals.

“It does bode well for The Band’s Visit,” Critics’ Circle President Adam Feldman said in an interview.

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‘BAND’S VISIT’ SHOULD WIN & MAY NOT & OTHER TONY TAKES

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Erika Henningsen in Mean Girls

BEST MUSICAL SUSPENSE: There were just seven new musicals on Broadway this season, the fewest in at least a decade. Only one received “Critic’s Pick” from the New York Times and generally great reviews: The Band’s Visit, about an Egyptian ensemble stranded in a sleepy Israeli town. It has a now-Tony-Award-nominated score by David Yazbeck that’s packed with prospective cabaret standards. As expected, it did well, collecting 11 nominations this morning. But a source of its integrity, the understated drama — its “zero razzle-dazzle,” as New York Magazine‘s Sara Holdren put it — could be a liability with road presenters, who represent a chunk of the roughly 840 Tony voters.Continue Reading

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