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
EXCLUSIVE: Four decades after Gerard Alessandrini introduced his Broadway satirical revue at an Upper West Side cabaret, the ever-changing spoof will finally plant its funny flag in a Broadway theater.
Forbidden Broadway, Merrily We Stole a Song is scheduled to run at the Hayes Theater July 29 to Nov. 4, according to a pitch deck prepared for prospective investors. The title is a play on Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along, which evolved from 1981 flop to this season’s boffo revival, which is on the cusp of recouping its $13 million capitalization.Continue Reading
Water for Elephants, the circus-themed new musical, will be under pressure to make a big splash when it arrives on Broadway.
Scheduled to open March 21, 2024, at the Imperial Theatre, it will need to sell at least $960,000 of tickets each week to cover operating expenses, according to an internal budget prepared over the summer and reviewed by Broadway Journal. (The sales here refer to “gross gross,” the weekly figure that the trade association the Broadway League makes public, which includes credit card commissions and other fees the production doesn’t keep.)
Joining the million dollar club at the Broadway box office used to be a matter of prestige. Today, it’s often a requirement for a show’s survival.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
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
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
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
In comes Company — again. Marianne Elliott’s revival of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s revered 1970 musical will resume previews on Dec. 20 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre ahead of a Jan. 9, 2022 opening night, its producers announced today. Continue Reading
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
The musicals Ain’t Too Proud, Moulin Rouge, Frozen, Jagged Little Pill and The Tina Turner Musical posted their worst sales since opening as tourists increasingly stay home in response to the coronavirus threat.Continue Reading
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