Broadway’s unofficial post-election strategy: hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
Citing Donald Trump’s campaign statements, commercials and recent appointments, many theater artists — including actors, writers and producers — fear that as president he’ll curtail civil liberties, accelerate climate change and undermine the nation’s moral authority and standing in the world.
Broadway performers and writers, who lampooned Donald Trump and his wife during the presidential campaign and raised millions for Hillary Clinton, expressed despair and defiance as the developer and reality TV performer pulled off what Politico called the biggest upset in United States history. Continue Reading
UPDATE WITH ADL statement: Patti LuPone and Jesse Tyler Ferguson have taken themselves out of the running for a Presidential Medal of Freedom in a Donald Trump administration.
EXCLUSIVE: While expanding Broadway’s boundaries, Scott Rudin is reining in his investors.
The daring and powerful producer is requiring backers to sign away their right to criticize him and the plays and musicals that they’re capitalizing. The unusual provision appears in recent prospectuses obtained by Broadway Journal. It prohibits investors from making “negative remarks orally or in writing in any medium,” including social media, about him, his show or his business practices.
EXCLUSIVE: The first investor non-disparagement clause we found was for the Scott Rudin-produced revival of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. (Click on the text for easier reading.)
The Associated Press raved, the Hollywood Reporter was mixed and Ben Brantley at the Times panned while questioning whether Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses holds up in a new Broadway revival, particularly with a scene that blends rape and seduction.
EXCLUSIVE: The producers of Hamilton are selling a new block of $998 tickets for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays that handily sets a Broadway price record.
The $998 seats are up 18 percent over the $849 tickets Hamilton introduced in early June — the previous record holder. When including Ticketmaster’s $18 service fee, the new ticket, at $1,016, is the first on Broadway to run four figures.
As ticket prices for Broadway musicals consistently rise, independent record labels like Sh-K-Boom, which preserves musical theater scores, must grapple with the proliferation of free music: specifically, web services such as YouTube and Spotify that cannibalize CD sales and iTunes downloads.
“There have to be the purchases,” Sh-K-Boom President Kurt Deutsch said Aug. 3 at the Upper East Side Barnes & Noble, before a concert promoting his new Broadway cast recording of She Loves Me. His company has put out about 100 cast recordings since 2002, beginning with Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years.
Summer is the off-season for Manhattan fundraising. But with headlines consumed by hate crime, police conduct and race relations, the New York Civil Liberties Union says its July 18 Broadway-themed benefit is timely in the extreme.
“This is a very charged and heightened time in politics and civil liberties,” said Susan Blackwell, a performer and writer who will host the event, Broadway Stands Up for Freedom, at NYU’s Skirball Center. “It’s easy to get bogged down and overwhelmed.”
Jeremy Gerard, a prolific and widely read arts reporter and critic, was laid off by Deadline.com two years and two months after the news outlet hired him to oversee its expansion of New York media and theater coverage .
Gerard, who was executive editor and chief theater columnist, said in an email that he was told that Deadline.com, otherwise known as Deadline Hollywood, is focusing resources on film and television coverage. Mike Fleming Jr., co-editor in chief, didn’t return an email. Gerard said: “I have loved working at Deadline and will miss my great colleagues there.”
