I’m not sure I could even name half the winners of last year’s Tony Awards, yet somehow this annual prize giving achieves mythical importance on Broadway. Sure, it can turn middling shows into reasonable successes – the eminently forgettable A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder became a surprise hit after being anointed the year’s best musical – but otherwise the deadly focus on the Tony Awards can cast an unhealthy pall around Broadway, not least in the annual lemming-like rush to the cliff that routinely takes hold around this time of year.
In the next two months, between now and the last date when productions can open to be considered eligible for this year’s awards on April 23, no less than 18 new productions are opening – only one more than the number that opened in the previous 10 months combined (excluding the short Christmas Broadway runs of The Illusionists and The Temptations and the Four Tops).
Since only four of those 18 new shows are opening in March, that leaves the remaining 14 to open over a 23-day period in April. (And that’s without the wild card of Hamilton, a new musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda that opened at the Public Theatre on Tuesday and has been generating more excitement than any musical since The Book of Mormon, and may be fast-tracked to Broadway now to sneak in ahead of that Tony Awards cut-off).
I’m planning two trips to Broadway in the next couple of months to catch up on some of it. But I’m also trying to go a little beyond Broadway (I’ll see Hamilton, of course) and that’s causing me a big diary headache.
It’s a nice problem to have, I suppose – there are other times in the Broadway calendar when you’re hard pressed to find things to see, like mid-summer or mid-January, during the post-Tony or post-Christmas clear-outs. (This winter has been crueller than most for New York’s box offices.)
So what am I seeing this trip and the next? I’ve got my two favourite Broadway singers lined up: Barbara Cook – now 87 – in concert at Lincoln Centre’s Appel Room later this month as part of its American Songbook season; and Audra McDonald at New Jersey’s Performing Arts Centre in April, ahead of her next Carnegie Hall concert.
Both of those are reason enough for each trip. But this coming trip I’m also looking forward to catching up with Robert Falls’s much-acclaimed Chicago production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, which is now playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, starring Nathan Lane and Brian Dennehy. (I’ve shamefully never been to BAM before, so that’s another reason to look forward to this.)
And On the Twentieth Century, the musical revival I’ve been most looking forward to all year is in previews (ahead of opening on March 12), and getting great buzz in the chatrooms. I’ve long loved this brilliant Cy Coleman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green operetta, and it’s been long overdue a significant Broadway revival.
There’s also a new play written by and starring Larry David in his Broadway debut, Fish in the Dark (opening on March 5). I hardly ever watch any television, but I’m obsessed with Curb Your Enthusiasm, so I’m full of expectation for this.
Also on Broadway, Helen Mirren reprises her turn as the Queen in The Audience, which I’ll see again to see how it registers with an American audience, and also to see the new rewrites that Peter Morgan has introduced, ahead of Kristin Scott Thomas taking the role in the play’s West End return in April. I am also going to try to check out the Broadway revival of Cabaret again, to see Sienna Miller who has recently taken over as Sally Bowles.
Off-Broadway there’s a revival of Andrew Lippa’s two-hander musical John and Jen (opening on February 26 at the Clurman on West 42nd Street), starring the wonderful Kate Baldwin who was so magnificent in Lippa’s last original Broadway musical, Big Fish. And our very own Cush Jumbo will be reprising her Bush Theatre show Josephine and I at the Public Theatre’s Joe’s Pub, after recently completing a Broadway run starring opposite Hugh Jackman in The River. I want to see that again, as of course I will want to see Benjamin Scheuer’s magnificent one-man musical The Lion that I saw at the St James Studio last year and is now playing at New York’s Culture Project home in the West Village. (It was my single favourite musical of all of last year, either on Broadway or in London).
It’s a lot, but things get really crazy in April
But when I return to New York in mid-April, things are really crazy, with those 14 new Broadway shows, nine of them musicals. Some I’ve seen in earlier incarnations. Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s Fun Home is a transfer from the Public where I saw it in 2013, and It Shoulda Been You is a new musical directed by David Hyde Pierce that I saw the New Jersey try-out of in 2011 at New Brunswick’s George Street Playhouse, and which features several of the same cast now including Tyne Daly and Harriet Harris, newly joined by Sierra Boggess.
There’s also the Broadway bow of Lucy Simon’s musical version of Dr Zhivago that I previously saw in its original premiere in Sydney, Australia, in 2011 (where Des McAnuff also directed). And Harvey Weinstein is bringing an entirely revamped stage version of Finding Neverland to Broadway, after trying it out with a different writing and creative team entirely in Leicester back in 2012.
Kander and Ebb’s The Visit, which I saw in one of its several previous try-out incarnations at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, near Washington DC in 2008, is finally reaching Broadway, too, with Chita Rivera who starred in that version and a previous staging at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2001, reprising her role under new direction now from John Doyle.
There are also a couple of new stage productions of classic film properties Gigi (transferring to Broadway by way of a Washington DC try-out) and An American in Paris (transferring by way of, where else, Paris), while The King and I gets the Lincoln Center Rodgers and Hammerstein treatment that previously yielded the fantastic production of South Pacific (the one that came to the Barbican).
But the most eagerly anticipated brand new show of the season, apart from Off-Broadway’s Hamilton, has to be Something Rotten!, yet another meta-musical about the business of putting on theatre, from The Book of Mormon director Casey Nicholaw.
All that and a generous handful of plays, too, led by the transfer of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Wolf Hall double bill and the West End revival of David Hare’s Skylight, plus Hand to God from Off-Broadway, Lisa D’Armour’s new play Airline Highway (transferring from Chicago’s Steppenwolf), Joe DiPietro’s Living on Love (starring opera diva Renee Fleming in her stage acting debut) and the first Broadway revival of Wendy Wassterstein’s The Heidi Chronicles, which won the Tony Award for best play for its original 1989 production.
There’s a crazy amount of choice out there – and an even crazier outlay of money involved. According to a recent feature in the New York Times, the cost for just the seven shows that qualify as comedies on that list will be $35m. As the features notes, “Given that only 25 percent of Broadway shows ever turn a profit, producers are betting big that audiences are in a mood to laugh.”
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