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      ‘Gutenberg!’: A Guide to the Inventor Behind the Broadway Musical

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      “Gutenberg! The Musical!,” a comic meta-musical about two talentless dolts pitching a show about the father of the printing press, wraps up its limited Broadway run on Jan. 28.Written by Scott Brown and Anthony King and starring Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells (reprising their “Book of Mormon” buddy act), the show has drawn mixed reviews and strong box-office returns. But even before it opened, its mere existence on Broadway sent book and library nerds vibrating with anticipation and a bit of disbelief.There have also been grumblings from some traditionalists (of the rare book, not the Rodgers and Hammerstein, variety), along with some resignation. Well, why not a musical about Johannes Gutenberg? If Broadway can turn a semi-overlooked founding father like Alexander Hamilton into a household name and cultural hero, why should the guy whose invention helped jump-start mass literacy throw away his shot?Rannells with Josh Gad, left, in the musical, which reunited the pair onstage for the first time since they starred in “The Book of Mormon” over a decade ago. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHamilton had some big fat biographies on his side. But as Gad’s character in the show notes, Wikipedia (correctly) declares records of Gutenberg’s life “scant.”Here is a primer for those who, even after seeing the show, might be left wondering: “Guten-Who?”What do we actually know about Johannes Gutenberg?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘Stereophonic,’ a New Play About Making Music, to Open on Broadway

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      Written by David Adjmi and featuring songs by Will Butler, the drama follows five musicians making an album in the 1970s.“Stereophonic,” an acclaimed behind-the-music play about a disputatious band recording a studio album, will transfer to Broadway this spring following a buzzy and sold-out Off Broadway run.The play, written by David Adjmi, is set mostly inside a Sausalito, Calif., recording studio, and follows five musicians and two sound engineers through a year in the 1970s. The story — featuring romance, infighting, drug use and a solo-star-in-the-making — resembles that of Fleetwood Mac, but Adjmi says he had many inspirations for the play.The 14-week Broadway production is expected to begin previews April 3 and to open April 19 at the Golden Theater.The Off Broadway run, over 10 weeks last fall at the nonprofit Playwrights Horizons, garnered strong reviews. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green called it “relentlessly compelling.”The show also won significant praise for its original songs, which were written by Will Butler, a former member of Arcade Fire.Adam Greenfield, the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, described the play as being about “a group of brilliant artists who are at odds with each other, trying to figure out how to collaborate without killing one another, even when killing one another might be the easier way out.” Also, he said, “it’s set in a world that is incredibly sexy — the West Coast rock scene of the ’70s,” and “it has a killer title.”Adjmi has been working on the play for a decade; he said the idea first came to him while he was listening to a Led Zeppelin song on a plane and wondering what it would have been like to be in the studio when they were recording it.“I saw it in my mind’s eye, and I thought, this could be a great idea for a play,” he said. “I didn’t know anything about the recording process, but I would talk to experts and try stuff out.”The process, which included inviting engineers to comment on the script as it evolved, resulted in a high level of verisimilitude, down to the details of a much-praised set by David Zinn.The production is directed by Daniel Aukin; the entire Off Broadway cast, including Will Brill, Juliana Canfield, Tom Pecinka, Sarah Pidgeon and Chris Stack as the musicians, as well as Andrew R. Butler and Eli Gelb as the engineers, is expected to transfer to Broadway.The show will be capitalized for up to $4.8 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is being produced by Sue Wagner, John Johnson, Seaview, Sonia Friedman Productions, Linden Productions, and Ashley Melone & Nick Mills. More

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      ‘Harmony,’ Barry Manilow’s Passion Project, to Close on Broadway

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      The musical, which Manilow wrote with Bruce Sussman, is about a German singing ensemble that collided with the rising Nazi regime.“Harmony,” Barry Manilow’s long-in-the-works musical about an early-20th-century German sextet that ran afoul of the Nazi regime, will end an abbreviated Broadway run on Feb. 4.Manilow and his longtime collaborator Bruce Sussman have been working on the show for more than a quarter-century, inspired by a documentary film about the Comedian Harmonists, an ensemble that included some Jewish members, which was unacceptable to the Nazis.The musical, directed by Warren Carlyle, opened on Nov. 13; at the time of its closing it is expected to have played 24 previews and 96 regular performances. It was capitalized for up to $15 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; that money has not been recouped.Manilow wrote the music for the show; Sussman wrote the book and the lyrics. Over the years, the show had productions in San Diego, Atlanta and Los Angeles, and then in 2022 there was a successful Off Broadway production at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan’s Battery Park neighborhood.The Broadway production features Chip Zien portraying a surviving member of the group, reflecting back from 1988 to its history in the late 1920s and early ’30s. Ken Davenport, Sandi Moran and Garry Kief are the lead producers; they announced the closing Tuesday evening.The show opened to mixed reviews, and has been running at a time when overall Broadway attendance has not yet rebounded to prepandemic levels. Last week, “Harmony” grossed $534,769, which is not enough to sustain a musical of its size; its houses, at the Barrymore Theater, were just 77 percent occupied, according to data released by the Broadway League.Many shows are struggling, and industry leaders are worried about this spring, when there is a sizable crop of musicals and plays planning to open, while production costs are high and audience numbers remain lower than they once were. Another musical, “Shucked,” closed on Sunday after a 10-month run, and last year’s Tony-winning musical, “Kimberly Akimbo,” has announced that it will end its run in April. More

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      Covid, Crutches, Surgery: For Christopher Abbott the Show Somehow Went On

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      “I thought this could be my swan song, in terms of the angry-young-man thing,” said the actor of his rocky run of “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea.”Christopher Abbott was about halfway through a performance of “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” when he felt something go wrong. The 37-year-old actor had been sitting onstage — his character, a brutish trucker, proposing marriage to a tormented woman played by Aubrey Plaza — and as he went to get up, he couldn’t straighten his leg.That early December injury — he had a bucket handle meniscus tear — was followed in short order by a case of Covid and arthroscopic surgery. And then he returned to the stage, performing for several weeks on crutches, through the end of the show’s 11-week run on Saturday night.The play, a two-hander, is a 1984 drama by John Patrick Shanley about two hardened people who meet in a Bronx bar and wind up spending a night together. The run, staged Off Broadway at the 295-seat Lucille Lortel Theater, was unusually bumpy.Abbott and his co-star, Aubrey Plaza, during a curtain call on the final day of performances.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Charlotte St. Martin to Step Down as President of Broadway League

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      No reason was given for her unexpected retirement after 18 years in the pivotal role.In a surprise announcement on Tuesday, Charlotte St. Martin, who has served as president of the Broadway League since 2006, said she would be stepping down from her current role next month.As the leader of the league, a trade association representing producers and theater owners as well as presenters from around the nation, Martin has held one of the most pivotal positions in the theater industry. The league plays an important role in promoting Broadway, handles labor negotiations with the many unions representing theater workers on Broadway and on tour, and collects and distributes data about Broadway’s economic health and the demographics of its audience.The League also presents, alongside the American Theater Wing, the Tony Awards, which is the annual ceremony honoring the best shows and performances on Broadway.St. Martin’s retirement, effective Feb. 16, comes as Broadway — which is made up of 41 theaters concentrated in and around Times Square — is still struggling to rebound from the lengthy pandemic shutdown. The economics of Broadway have become increasingly challenging as production costs have risen while audience levels remain lower than they were before the pandemic.The league said in a statement that St. Martin would continue to advise the organization through this year’s Tony Awards, which are scheduled to take place on June 16. Jason Laks, the league’s executive vice president and general counsel, will run the organization on a day-to-day basis until St. Martin’s replacement is chosen; the league is overseen by a board that is chaired by Kristin Caskey, an executive vice president of the Ambassador Theater Group. More

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      ‘The Emigrants’ Review: A Troubled Show Finally Debuts

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      Krystian Lupa’s latest work had its premiere in Paris after an earlier attempt collapsed. The delay would have been a good time to rethink the four-and-a-half-hour show.The spotlight is rarely on them. Yet as the technical crew moved furniture between scenes of Krystian Lupa’s new play “The Emigrants,” which finally had its world premiere in Paris on Saturday, they were watched as carefully as headline performers.Without these inconspicuous figures, the show can’t go on — and for much of the past year, a dispute with technicians has kept “The Emigrants” from the stage. Initially scheduled to debut last June at the Comédie de Genève, a prestigious Swiss playhouse, that production was canceled less than a week before opening night.At the time, the Comédie de Genève cited differences in “work philosophy” and “values” between its team and Lupa, 80, a longtime luminary of European theater. An article in the Swiss newspaper Le Temps said that the theater’s crew had been “mentally and physically exhausted” by Lupa’s attitude in rehearsal. In a reply published in the French newspaper Libération, Lupa apologized for two violent outbursts during rehearsals, but maintained that technicians “should at least attempt to adapt” to a director’s creative process.Members of the Comédie de Genève technical crew responded with a long letter, describing “multiple instances of disrespect, scoldings, taunting, scenes of drunkenness and humiliations, as well as chaotic organization.”The play’s director, Kristian Lupa, at the Odéon earlier this month. An earlier attempt to stage “The Emigrants” in Geneva collapsed after members of the technical crew walked out.Woytek Konarzewski/SIPA, via Associated PressThe domino effect was swift, and the prestigious Avignon Festival, which was supposed to present the work this past summer, pulled out, too. The Odéon — Théâtre de l’Europe, a Paris theater where Lupa has been a frequent guest over the years, ultimately stepped in to make up for the lost rehearsal time this winter, allowing for a belated premiere using its own technical crew. (No performances of “The Emigrants” are currently planned beyond the Paris dates.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      A ‘Great Gatsby’ Musical Is Coming to Broadway in March

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      The latest adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel will feature Jeremy Jordan (“Newsies”) as Jay Gatsby and Eva Noblezada (“Hadestown”) as Daisy Buchanan.“The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel of garish glamour and dashed dreams, is coming to Broadway as a musical this spring.The show — the latest in a long string of adaptations of this widely read story — had a pre-Broadway run last fall at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., where it opened to mixed reviews. (As it happens, the book also arrived to mixed reviews, and is now widely considered a great classic of American literature.)The lavish production will join a spring Broadway season packed with new musicals at a moment when many industry leaders are concerned that there do not seem to be enough patrons to keep most of the shows afloat.This new “Gatsby” musical is backed by Chunsoo Shin, a Korean producer hungering for a Broadway hit after a spate of unsuccessful ventures here. He most recently was part of the producing team for “Once Upon a One More Time,” the short-lived show featuring Britney Spears songs; previous endeavors included a stage adaptation of “Doctor Zhivago” and a Tupac Shakur musical, “Holler if Ya Hear Me.”The “Great Gatsby” musical features songs by Nathan Tysen and Jason Howland, who collaborated on the 2022 musical “Paradise Square,” and a book by the playwright Kait Kerrigan (“The Mad Ones”). (Tysen and Kerrigan are married to each other.) The director is Marc Bruni, whose previous Broadway outing, “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” which opened in 2014, was a significant hit.The musical will star two Broadway fan favorites. Jeremy Jordan, a Tony nominee for “Newsies,” will play the nouveau riche title character, Jay Gatsby, while Eva Noblezada, a two-time Tony nominee, for “Miss Saigon” and “Hadestown,” will play Daisy Buchanan, the young woman with old money whom Gatsby has long desired.“The Great Gatsby” is scheduled to begin previews March 29 and to open April 25 at the Broadway Theater, one of Broadway’s largest houses.The novel has been explored in other media many times, including in a glitzy 2013 Hollywood film directed by Baz Luhrmann that starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. On Broadway, there was a “Great Gatsby” play staged in 1926, the year after the novel’s publication; Off Broadway there was a highly acclaimed seven-hour version, called “Gatz,” developed by Elevator Repair Service and staged at the Public Theater in 2010.The novel entered the public domain in 2021, opening the door to any number of adaptations. Most significantly, at least for theater audiences, is another musical adaptation in development. It’s called “Gatsby” and is scheduled to start performances in May at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.That production, which also has Broadway aspirations, has a book by the Pulitzer-winning playwright Martyna Majok (“Cost of Living”), songs by the rock star Florence Welch (of Florence and the Machine) and Thomas Bartlett (also known as Doveman), and direction by Rachel Chavkin (a Tony winner for “Hadestown”). More

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      When Nate Berkus Decorates Your Home, It’s Best Not to Change a Thing

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      Just ask the actors Patrick Page and Paige Davis, whose Upper West Side apartment has remained virtually untouched for two decades.Patrick Page and Paige Davis met in the mid 1990s, during New York rehearsals for the first national tour of the musical “Beauty and the Beast.” But with Mr. Page working on his scenes in one studio (he played Lumière), and Ms. Davis, an ensemble member, singing and dancing in another, they didn’t really get acquainted until performances began in Minneapolis.“We started hanging out as friends, and we’ve been hanging out ever since,” said Mr. Page, 61. The couple’s 2001 alfresco nuptials were chronicled on the TLC series “A Wedding Story.”For several years, the vivacious Ms. Davis, now 54, was the host of TLC’s “Trading Spaces,” a home improvement show (wherein neighbors, backed by a design team, would redo a room in each other’s homes on a $1,000 budget), and later returned to her theater roots, starring in “Chicago” on Broadway. Recently, she completed an indie short film that’s due out this year.Husband-and-wife actors Patrick Page and Paige Davis live in a two-bedroom co-op on the Upper West Side that Nate Berkus decorated 20 years ago, for an episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More