Broadway Journal

WILL A NEW ‘SWEENEY TODD’ MAKE ITS INVESTORS A KILLING? (EXCLUSIVE)

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Hamilton producer Jeffrey Seller is raising as much as $14.5 million to revive Sweeney Todd on Broadway this spring, a test of whether a big-budget Stephen Sondheim revival can succeed in the post-Sondheim era.

Josh Groban (The Great Comet) will play the vengeful barber and Annaleigh Ashford (Sunday in the Park with George) will play the creative pie maker Mrs. Lovett, according to an operating agreement distributed to investors and reviewed by Broadway Journal. The musical, with a book by Hugh Wheeler, will be staged by Hamilton director Thomas Kail with a full orchestra playing the score, a person familiar with the revival said. (Two prior Broadway revivals, while critically acclaimed, were comparatively small-scale productions.)Continue Reading

BROADWAY CINDERELLA STORY: ‘A STRANGE LOOP’ FOLLOWS ITS PULITZER WITH BEST MUSICAL

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Maybe Usher can finally quit his day job.

A Strange Loop — Michael R. Jackson’s deconstructionist portrait of a musical theater artist as a young, Black, insecure gay man — was named best musical at the 75th Tony Awards tonight. A former Lion King usher, Jackson spent nearly two decades working on his sacred-cow-slaughtering show about a “Disney ushering, broke-ass middle-class politically homeless normie leftist Black American” aspiring composer-lyricist.Continue Reading

WITH SONDHEIM’S DEATH, ‘COMPANY’ HAS LINK TO ‘RENT’

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Stephen Sondheim’s death on Friday morning — an unexpected loss to the people in his life and to musical theater — attaches a new significance to the third Broadway revival of 1970’s Company. The musical, which marked the beginning of Sondheim’s decade-long collaboration with director Hal Prince, is now the last production that Broadway’s most revered composer-lyricist of the past 50 years directly worked on.Continue Reading

INSURANCE KEEPS ‘COMPANY,’ ‘COME FROM AWAY’ ALIVE AS JUJAMCYN FIGHTS CHUBB SNUB

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EXCLUSIVE: No one put more money into the highly anticipated Broadway revival of Company  than the insurance giant Chubb.

The Ladies Who Lunch LLC, which transferred the Stephen Sondheim and George Furth musical from the West End only to suspend it during previews because of Covid-19, received $8.85 million from Chubb, according to an email that lead producer Chris Harper sent to investors. Continue Reading

CRITIC JOHN SIMON DIES AT 94; ‘I DID NOT COMPROMISE’

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John Simon on Theater Talk

John Simon, the theater, movie and music critic who died last night at 94, took erudition to another level.

Never mind that English was his fifth language — after German, Hungarian, French and Serbo-Croatian, the language of his native Yugoslavia — every review sent you to the dictionary. He could be cruel, famously so when reviewing actresses’ looks, but also loyal. Betty Buckley wrote on Facebook this morning about her “abiding gratitude for his support of my work through all of these years and his friendship.”

When Bloomberg News hired Simon as its theater critic, in 2005, after 36 years at New York magazine,  arts editor Manuela Hoelterhoff assigned me the fun task of interviewing him in the book-lined Upper West Side apartment he shared with his wife, Patricia Hoag Simon. I found him to be  soft-spoken, thoughtful and unapologetic, except regarding his early assessments of Stephen Sondheim and Adam Guettel.  Excerpts follow.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

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