...And there will be many more shows opening this fall. For now, let’s just look at what’s onstage, and maybe a bit of what’s coming (if I can find it on YouTube, lol).
Broadway is back….
A year and a half after the coronavirus pandemic forced all 41 theaters to go dark, silencing a symbol of New York and throwing thousands out of work, some of the industry’s biggest and best known shows are resuming performances on Tuesday.
Simba will reclaim the Pride Lands in the “The Lion King.” Elphaba and Glinda will return to Oz in “Wicked.” A young, scrappy and hungry immigrant will foment revolution in “Hamilton.” The long-running revival of “Chicago” will give ’em the old razzle dazzle. Plus there’s one new production, the childhood reminiscence “Lackawanna Blues,” offering a reminder that Broadway still provides a home for plays, too.
www.nytimes.com/...
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...and NYC couldn’t be more delighted:
The Lion King - Circle of Life | Musical Awards Gala 2018:
Four trailblazing productions — the concert show “Springsteen on Broadway,” the new play “Pass Over,” and the musicals “Waitress” and “Hadestown” — started performances this summer, serving as laboratories for the industry’s safety protocols. None has yet missed a performance.
By the end of the year, if all goes as planned, 39 shows will have begun runs on Broadway.
www.nytimes.com/...
I’d really, really love to see Waitress. It sounds like my kind of musical.
Waitress
Backstage:
“Bad Idea”:
The longest shutdown in Broadway history is over.
Some of the biggest shows in musical theater, including “The Lion King,” “Wicked” and “Hamilton,” resumed performances on Tuesday night, 18 months after the coronavirus pandemic forced them to close.
They were not the first shows to restart, nor the only ones, but they are enormous theatrical powerhouses that have come to symbolize the industry’s strength and reach, and their return to the stage is a signal that theater is back.
“People are ready,” said Julie Taymor, the director of “The Lion King,” “and it’s time.”
www.nytimes.com/…
You know, I used to live on the edge of the Theater District, just off Theater Row. Broadway doesn’t just fund theater — all nearby restaurants benefit. Hotels in town benefit. A lot of NYC is funded by tourism. And while I miss the grit of the pre-Disneyfied Times Square, much of the rest of the Theater District is still fun. Be sure to check out Restaurant Row (W. 46th between 8th & 9th Aves.). Joe Allen’s is well-known as a theater hangout.
Hamilton
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At the Tonys:
Hamilton, the groundbreaking rap musical about Founding Father Alexander Hamilton that has been dominating headlnes and talk shows for most of the season, also dominated the 70th Annual Antoinette Perry Awards, winning 11 awards including Best Musical. Its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, won awards for Best Book and Best Score.
It won every category in which it was nominated, except Scenic Design of a Musical and Best Leading Actress in a Musical. Those losses kept it from tying (or surpassing) The Producers for most Tony wins ever.
Hamilton so completely dominated the awards that no other new musical that opened the entire season won a single award in any category. Where Hamilton was beaten, it was by revivals. Only eight of the 39 shows that opened on Broadway won Tonys June 12.
www.playbill.com/...
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It’s in the first NYT story linked (paywall), but I don’t want to push fair use, so to paraphrase, Broadway basically decided that vaccine mandates (under 12, negative tests), plus improved ventilation and masking, would make audiences feel safe enough to visit theaters.
It certainly seems to have worked for Stephen Colbert, whose audiences are both vaxxed and masked. (And after 18 months in the broom closet, he starts every show with a shit-eating grin.)
On March 12, 2020, Broadway went dark. Curtains down. Ghost lights on. Doors locked.
The actors scattered….
But what happened to the other stars of the show — those visual effects that bring the dazzle to the razzle?
www.nytimes.com/...
Chicago
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After 25 years, CHICAGO is still the one musical with everything that makes Broadway shimmy-shake: a universal tale of fame, fortune, and all that jazz, with one showstopping song after another and the most astonishing dancing you’ve ever seen. No wonder CHICAGO has been honored with 6 Tony Awards®, 2 Olivier Awards, a Grammy®, and thousands of standing ovations. As we celebrate our 25th anniversary — plus the return of Broadway and a new, all-star cast — you’ve got to come see why the name on everyone’s lips is still…CHICAGO.
chicagothemusical.com/...
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“The six merry murderesses of the Cook County Jail”:
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Jamie Harrison, the production’s chief illusionist, said some equipment — particularly anything that generates flames or fire — will have to be replaced because of potential degradation before the show, consolidated from two parts to one, returns Nov. 12.
www.nytimes.com/...
Well, London’s West End was desperate to reopen too:
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Ten points, and a Tony, to Gryffindor! Penned by Jack Thorne, The eighth installment of the blockbuster book and film franchise, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, was named Best Play at the 72nd Annual Tony Awards at Radio City Music Hall on June 10.
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Cursed Child picks up on the stories of Hogwarts alums Harry, Ron and Hermione 19 years after the events of the seven-book series…. With an original story by Potter creator J.K. Rowling, director John Tiffany and Thorne, the epic theatrical addition to the franchise earned 10 Tony nominations this year.
Tiffany was named Best Director of a play earlier in the evening, and the show also received Tonys for Best Sound Design, Best Lighting Design, Best Scenic Design and Best Costume Design.
www.broadway.com/…
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Hadestown
All your favorite Greeks are heading somewhere in “Hadestown,” the sumptuous, hypnotic and somewhat hyperactive musical that opened on Wednesday night after its own twisty 13-year road to Broadway.
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But watching “Hadestown” unfold so gorgeously at the Walter Kerr Theater, I found myself thinking of other Greek characters: those lucky few saved from heartbreak by radical metamorphoses.
That’s because “Hadestown” — written by Anaïs Mitchell, developed and directed by Rachel Chavkin — has itself been radically transformed. What’s onstage at the Kerr is almost unrecognizably different from the version I saw at New York Theater Workshop in 2016. There, it was garbled and precious, too cool for its own good, let alone Broadway.
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The Broadway production opened to critical acclaim and received numerous awards and nominations. At the 73rd Tony Awards, Hadestown received a total of 14 nominations (the most for the evening) and won eight of them, including Best Musical and Best Original Score.
en.wikipedia.org/...
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Okay, Soho Rep isn’t exactly Broadway, but NYC needs Off- and Off-Off-Broadway shows, too. Those little black box theaters can grow careers. (I’ve been to some shows that were so far Off-Off they might as well have been in Schenectady.)
It has been nearly two years since Soho Rep has staged a show in its 65-seat theater at 46 Walker Street. And Sarah Benson, the theater’s artistic director since 2007, is in disbelief.
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But when performances return to the Lower Manhattan space for the company’s 46th season in September, it will be alongside the second year of a new initiative: Soho Rep Project Number One, a job creation program developed in response to the pandemic that brings artists into the organization as salaried staff members with benefits.
The inaugural 2020-21 class included eight artists, who each received a weekly salary of $1,250, a year of health insurance coverage and a $10,000 budget to create a new work in any format, to be presented to an audience at the theater during the upcoming season. The next phase of the project thus far includes two artists for the 2021-22 season: The director and writer Abigail Jean-Baptiste and the scenic designer Kimie Nishikawa.
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Soho Rep, an audacious home for new plays, has kick-started the careers of writers including Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (“Gloria,” “An Octoroon”), Lucas Hnath (“A Doll’s House Part 2,” “Dana H.”) and Young Jean Lee (“Straight White Men,” “We’re Gonna Die”), while also providing a home for innovative designers and directors, many of whom participated in the theater’s storied writer/director lab.
www.nytimes.com/…
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Tina — The Tina Turner Musical
This is fantastic, from the London production:
Tina The Musical opened in London’s West End in 2018 and picked up an Olivier Award. It opened on Broadway in early November, 2019, in plenty of time to qualify for the Tony Awards. And it was nominated in 12 categories, by my count.
Yes. That would have been the Tony Awards in June 2020. You know: the canceled Tonys? On Sunday, September 26th, we might finally find out whether Tina The Musical won and in which categories, as New York’s season begins at last.
Meanwhile, enjoy this performance:
Tina, De Tina Turner Musical - Nutbush City Limits & Proud Mary | Musical Awards Gala 2020
Moulin Rouge
On Good Morning, America, just before the city shut down:
This one’s for the hedonists.
All you party people should know that the Al Hirschfeld Theater has been refurbished as an opulent pleasure palace, wherein decadence comes without hangovers. That’s where the euphoric “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” opened on Thursday night in a shower of fireworks, confetti and glittering fragments of what feels like every pop hit ever written.
Inspired by the 2001 Baz Luhrmann film and directed with wicked savvy by Alex Timbers, this “Moulin Rouge” is a cloud-surfing, natural high of a production. It has side effects, for sure, including the vertigo that comes from having your remembrance of songs past tickled silly and the temporary blockage of any allergies to jukebox musicals.
Ben Brantley, www.nytimes.com/...
And here’s another one caught up by last year’s Tony Awards cancellation, according to Wiki. It did win a bunch of Drama Desk awards, including Choreography, Scenic Design, and Costume Design.
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Of course, every great musical needs some great choreography:
A dance is never just about the steps. But what if Gwen Verdon hadn’t happened to Bob Fosse?
Nicole Fosse, their daughter, has a suspicion that her mother had a good deal to do with Fosse’s steps.
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“He’d be trying to find something in his body, and she would get next to him and start imitating him,” Nicole said. “He’d look at her and then all of a sudden there was this symbiotic thing that happened between them: And then there was the step.”
This October, as part of the Fall for Dance Festival at New York City Center, Nicole is giving her mother credit where she believes credit is due. In a festival commission, the Verdon Fosse Legacy — which Nicole formed in 2013 to promote, preserve and protect the work of her parents — presents “Sweet Gwen Suite,” a trio of short dances originally performed on “The Bob Hope Special” in 1968 and “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1969.
www.nytimes.com/...
From “Sweet Charity”:
Stephen Sondheim
In the meantime, Sondheim fans will have plenty of opportunities to revisit his work. Steven Spielberg is directing a new film adaptation of “West Side Story,” with a screenplay by Tony Kushner, that is scheduled to open Dec. 10. Sondheim wrote the lyrics for that 1957 musical.
Also, a revival of “Company,” in which the genders of the protagonist and several other characters have been swapped, is scheduled to resume previews Nov. 15 and to open Dec. 9 on Broadway. The revival, directed by Marianne Elliott and starring Katrina Lenk and Patti LuPone, got through nine preview performances before theaters were shut down in March 2020. Sondheim wrote the show’s music and lyrics.
Off Broadway, the Classic Stage Company is planning, on Nov. 2, to start performances of a starry revival of “Assassins,” directed by John Doyle, which was also delayed by the pandemic. Sondheim wrote that show’s music and lyrics.
www.nytimes.com/...
BROADWAY IS BACK!