The Outsiders may have had the inside track at the Tony Awards after all.
In awarding Best Musical to the $22 million adaptation of the S.E. Hinton novel and Francis Ford Coppola movie about an ill-fated gang of teenagers in 1967 Tulsa, Oklahoma, voters rewarded Danya Taymor’s meticulously staged production over the propulsive glitz of Alicia Keys’ Hell’s Kitchen, the presumptive favorite in the category going into the evening.Continue Reading
Tony Award leaders today affirmed their decision to bar Broadway co-producers from the stage of the David Koch Theater on June 16, while offering the investors and bundlers a consolation prize: live shots of them elsewhere in the theater on Broadway’s big night.
According to a Tony Awards memo circulating this afternoon, a “Voice of God” in the Koch Theater will announce a specific category during a commercial break and invite co-producers to gather in the lobby off the first tier. When a winning show is named, the triumphant cluster will congregate on a riser for their live moment on primetime television.Continue Reading
The Tony Awards are enmeshed in a high-stakes dispute over who gets stage time on Broadway’s big night.
Some co-producers — whose primary role is to invest or raise money for shows — have been informed by Tony Award staffers that they aren’t welcome onstage at the David H. Koch Theater on June 16. In recent years as production budgets swelled, swarms of co-producers have taken the stage when awards were handed out for the categories of best musical, play, musical revival and play revival.Continue Reading
EXCLUSIVE: Celebrity prevailed over experience at Actors’ Equity Association, where Brooke Shields was elected president of the labor union representing about 51,000 actors and stage managers.
Shields got 2794 votes, vs. 1940 votes for stage manager Erin Maureen Koster and 834 for Chicago-based actress Wydetta Carter, according to a tally shared with Broadway Journal.Continue Reading
Charlotte St. Martin, who’s led the Broadway League trade association since 2006, will step down on Feb. 16. The sudden departure occurs amid an industry changing of the guard as Broadway struggles to recover from the pandemic and respond to calls for greater diversity.Continue Reading
Producers are working on two high-profile additions to the busy 2023-24 Broadway season: Stereophonic, an ecstatically reviewed play with music about a fictional mid-1970s rock band creating an album; and The Great Gatsby via Paper Mill Playhouse, one of two Broadway-bound musicals based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Roaring ’20s novel.
John Johnson, Sue Wagner and Greg Nobile are in discussions to move Stereophonic to the John Golden Theatre, following a sold-out, two-and-a-half-month run at Playwrights Horizons off-Broadway, people familiar with the plans said. Continue Reading
After opening red hot in October 2019, Little Shop of Horrors at the Westside Theatre had a rough second half of 2022.
Box office sales fell short of the revival’s $180,000 to $200,000-a-week running costs in 27 of the final 31 weeks of the year. Operating losses for Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s plant-based off-Broadway musical comedy, set in a Skid Row flower shop, totaled $734,000 over the seven months ended Jan. 1, 2023.
Such shortfalls can lead to closing notices. Instead, the producers distributed $1.2 million of profit to themselves, their investors and co-producers. That was on top of $1.9 million of profit paid out over the previous 15 months.Continue Reading
The Broadway musical comedy Some Like it Hot will close on Dec. 30, just over a year after the $19.5 million show opened. Producers emailed a closing notice tonight.
The lavish adaptation of the 1959 Billy Wilder movie was nominated for 13 Tony Awards and won four, including for lead actor J. Harrison Ghee and Casey Nicholaw’s choreography. But Hot is burdened with formidable running costs — it needs to sell at least $900,000 of tickets a week to pay its bills (that’s the published gross, or “gross gross”), according to a 2021 recoupment chart reviewed by Broadway Journal. It met that threshold in just 14 of its 47 weeks at the Shubert Theatre. Continue Reading
New York State extended the New York City Musical and Theatrical Production Tax Credit, a subsidy of up to $3 million per Broadway show, as the industry struggles with rising costs and subpar sales.
On May 3, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced the two-year extension through 2025 and said commercial Off-Broadway shows will also be eligible, albeit for a smaller credit. The Broadway League trade association lobbied for preserving the program. It was designed to jumpstart the industry, which contributes billions to the economy, and encourage productions “to begin performances sooner and come back stronger” as the city recovered from Covid-19.Continue Reading
The $19.5 million crowd-pleaser Some Like it Hot was nominated for 13 Tony Awards today, the most of any Broadway show this season. In six of the past 10 Tony races, the musical that got the most nominations won the high-profile best musical award.
But a less encouraging trend could derail the Shubert Organization-produced show — which was also nominated for lead actors Christian Borle and J. Harrison Ghee, and for Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman’s toe-tapping score. Eight of the past 10 best musical winners were smallish and experimental — a la A Strange Loop (2022), Hadestown (2019), and, potentially, Kimberly Akimbo.Continue Reading
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