Broadway Journal

‘MOULIN ROUGE!’ & ‘STRANGE LOOP’ TEST TONY TRADITION OF GOOSING GROSSES

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Eight months after winning the Tony Award for best musical, Hamilton’s weekly grosses were up 45 percent. Dear Evan Hansen‘s were higher by a comparable margin after its win.

Grosses for Moulin Rouge! at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre were down 25 percent last week compared with early fall, when the adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 movie reopened as Broadway’s newly minted best musical. At $1.2 million, its box office is off by nearly half since the end of 2019, when Moulin Rouge! was the top grossing new production of 2019-20, with an average ticket price second only to Hamilton.Continue Reading

‘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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