The jukebox musical about the powerhouse Motown group will end its run on Jan. 16. It is now the fourth show to announce a closing in the last eight days.
“Ain’t Too Proud,” a jukebox musical about the Temptations that opened on Broadway in early 2019, will close on Jan. 16, the show’s producers said on Tuesday.
The musical is the fourth Broadway show to announce a closing in the last eight days, as the spike in coronavirus cases from the Omicron variant has exacerbated the financial woes of an already pandemic-damaged theater industry.
Last week, the musicals “Jagged Little Pill” and “Waitress,” as well as the play “Thoughts of a Colored Man” announced that they had closed without so much as a farewell performance — all were already on hiatus because of coronavirus cases among cast or crew.
The Broadway production of “Ain’t Too Proud,” about the powerhouse Motown group, has not run since Dec. 15, citing coronavirus cases. It is planning to resume on Tuesday, Dec. 28, and hoping to run for three more weeks before closing for good.
The musical also has a touring production that had to postpone shows at the Kennedy Center in Washington because of coronavirus cases; it is scheduled to have its delayed start on Tuesday night, as well.
“Ain’t Too Proud” had a yearlong prepandemic run, opening in March 2019 to a positive review in The New York Times, where the critic Ben Brantley wrote, “While honoring all the expected biomusical clichés, which include rolling out its subjects’ greatest hits in brisk and sometimes too fragmented succession, this production refreshingly emphasizes the improbable triumph of rough, combustible parts assembled into glistening smoothness.”
After the lengthy Broadway shutdown, “Ain’t Too Proud” resumed performances on Oct. 16; because the Broadway League is no longer releasing box office grosses for individual productions, it is not clear how the show has been doing over the last two months. The production received a $10 million Shuttered Venue Operators Grant as pandemic emergency assistance from the U.S. Small Business Administration.
The musical won a Tony Award for its choreography by Sergio Trujillo; it features a book by Dominique Morisseau and direction by Des McAnuff, and the lead producers are Ira Pittelman and Tom Hulce. The show was capitalized for $16.75 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; it successfully recouped that investment, according to a spokesman.
Source: Music - nytimes.com
