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    Broadway Shows Closing Soon: ‘Dorian Gray,’ ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and More

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    Catch two Tony-winning performances, Sarah Snook in the Oscar Wilde classic and Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, before these productions and others wrap up.Floyd CollinsBased on true events, this musical drama by Tina Landau (“Redwood”) and Adam Guettel (“Days of Wine and Roses”) stars Jeremy Jordan in the title role of a cave owner and explorer in 1925 Kentucky who creates a national media sensation when he is trapped deep underground. Taylor Trensch plays Skeets Miller, the diminutive cub reporter who descends into the cave to conduct a series of interviews with Floyd and help get him out. Landau directs. (Through June 22 at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont Theater.) Read the review.The Last Five YearsJason Robert Brown’s two-character musical of doomed romance, which arrived Off Broadway in 2002 and later became a movie starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan, comes to Broadway for the first time. Adrienne Warren, a Tony winner for “Tina,” stars as Cathy opposite Nick Jonas as Jamie, New Yorkers whose marriage can’t bear the tension between his swift success as a novelist and her lack of it as an actress. Whitney White (“Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”) directs. (Through June 22 at the Hudson Theater.) Read the review.SmashThe TV series about the making of a Broadway musical has itself become a Broadway musical: a backstage comedy leading up to the opening of “Bombshell,” a musical about Marilyn Monroe. Directed by the five-time Tony winner Susan Stroman, it has a score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (“Hairspray”), whose dozens of songs for the series include “Let Me Be Your Star,” and choreography by Joshua Bergasse. The book is by Rick Elice and Bob Martin; Brooks Ashmanskas, Krysta Rodriguez and Kristine Nielsen are among the cast. (Through June 22 at the Imperial Theater.) Read the review.Glengarry Glen RossDavid Mamet’s luxuriantly crude, bare-knuckled real estate drama, which won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize, gets its third Broadway revival. Kieran Culkin, last on Broadway a decade ago in “This Is Our Youth,” stars as Richard Roma — the Al Pacino role in the movie adaptation — opposite Bob Odenkirk (as Shelley Levene, the Jack Lemmon role), Bill Burr, Michael McKean, Donald Webber Jr., Howard W. Overshown and John Pirruccello. Patrick Marber, a 2023 Tony winner for his production of “Leopoldstadt,” directs. How’s that for a lead? (Through June 28 at the Palace Theater.) Read the review.The Picture of Dorian GrayWe 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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tonys 2025 Takeaways: ‘Maybe Happy Ending’ Wins 6 Awards

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      Broadway rewarded adventurous newcomers including Sarah Snook (“The Picture of Dorian Gray”), Nicole Scherzinger (“Sunset Boulevard”) and Cole Escola (“Oh, Mary!”).“Maybe Happy Ending,” a stirring Broadway musical about two discarded robots who go on a road trip and forge a relationship, won the coveted Tony for best new musical on Sunday night, capping a remarkable journey for a show that faced long odds but won over both critics and fans.The triumph of a show with a puzzling title and tough-to-explain themes was a vote of confidence in originality by an industry often dominated by big-brand intellectual property and big-name Hollywood stars.The musical’s prize capped a night in which Broadway rewarded adventurous newcomers: Sarah Snook, the “Succession” star who played 26 roles in a technologically complicated adaptation of “The Picture of Dorian Gray”; Nicole Scherzinger, the former Pussycat Doll who, barefoot and bloodied, delivered a scorching performance in a revival of “Sunset Boulevard”; and Cole Escola, an alt-cabaret performer who imagined Mary Todd Lincoln as an alcoholic who longs to be a chanteuse and turned that zany idea into the hit play “Oh, Mary!”The awards were spread out among a diverse array of shows. “Maybe Happy Ending,” set in a futuristic Korea, won a night-leading six awards, and “Buena Vista Social Club,” a musical set in Cuba, finished with four competitive prizes.Natalie Venetia Belcon performed a song from “Buena Vista Social Club” before winning a Tony for best featured actress in a musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe awards show took place as Broadway seems finally to be rebounding after a damaging pandemic shutdown. The season that just ended was the highest grossing on record when the figures are not adjusted for inflation. But attendance remains slightly below prepandemic levels and very few musicals are achieving profitability. The season’s success was attributable in large part to three starry plays whose runs are now ending: “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “Othello” and “Glengarry Glen Ross.”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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nicole Scherzinger Wins the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical

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      In “Sunset Boulevard,” Scherzinger plays Norma Desmond, a former screen star who descends into madness.Nicole Scherzinger won the Tony Award for best actress in a musical for her performance in a revival of “Sunset Boulevard,” a high-tech, minimal-scenery staging from Jamie Lloyd about a washed-up silent film star, Norma Desmond, who haunts a grand, ghostly Los Angeles mansion. This is Scherzinger’s first nomination and win.This latest run of “Sunset Boulevard” — based on the 1950 film by Billy Wilder — is dramatically scaled back compared to previous revivals of the Andrew Lloyd Webber show. Instead, the show relies on technology to modernize it for a new audience. It is the type of show that demands vocal and choreographic athleticism, something that Scherzinger — the former lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls — takes on with confidence.It first opened in London in 2023, winning Scherzinger praise and an Olivier. It then moved to Broadway last fall, and Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, wrote that Scherzinger delivered an “exciting yet exceptionally weird and counterintuitive performance.”Speaking to The Times in 2023, Scherzinger described her turn as Norma as “grueling.”“But for many years I have been saying I am using a fraction of my potential, and now I feel I have really tapped into that,” she said.Before joining the show and after the Pussycat Dolls disbanded in 2010, Scherzinger pursued a solo career with modest success — dropping two solo albums and working as a judge on “The X Factor” and “The Masked Singer.”She later performed “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” (from Lloyd Webber’s “Evita”) as part of a TV special celebrating Lloyd Webber, who, along with the director Trevor Nunn, asked her to join the cast of the 2014 revival of “Cats” in the West End. More

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      Test Your Broadway Knowledge, Celebrity Edition

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      George Clooney is making his Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of his 2005 film “Good Night, and Good Luck.” In 1994, he had his big break on the popular medical ensemble drama “ER.” Which other “ER” actor also starred in a Broadway show this season? More

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      Tony Awards 2025: 13 Great Songs of the Season

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      Our critic listened to the cast recordings of all the nominated musicals and picked one of his favorite tracks from each.Great Broadway musicals must feature great songs, but not all the great songs are found in great musicals. That’s why I collect cast albums: There are obvious gems and hidden ones. To explore that range at the end of a generally fine and unusually eclectic Broadway season, I picked a song from every show that received a Tony Award nomination in any category. (The exception: “Pirates! The Penzance Musical,” which will record its New Orleans-inflected Gilbert and Sullivan score after the awards are doled out on CBS this Sunday.) Some of the songs are delicate, others brassy. Some jerk tears, others laughs. Some forward the show and others stop it cold. In any case, even if you never see them onstage, they all repay a deep listen.‘Up to the Stars’ from ‘Dead Outlaw’Thom Sesma crooning “Up to the Stars” as Thomas Noguchi, a.k.a. the “coroner to the stars,” in “Dead Outlaw,” the Broadway musical about a long-lived corpse.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThom Sesma as Thomas Noguchi (Audible and Yellow Sound Label)For most of its 100 minutes, “Dead Outlaw,” a death-dark comedy about a man who became a mummy, accompanies its posthumous picaresque with songs (by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna) in a genre you might call rockabilly grunge. But near the end, the palette radically changes, when a formerly secondary character emerges as the show’s perfect avatar. He is Thomas Noguchi, the real-life Los Angeles “coroner to the stars” from 1967 to 1982. In a hilarious yet philosophical number called “Up to the Stars,” filled with sparkling, macabre lyrics, he details his most famous cases and corpses in the finger-snapping Rat Pack style of Dean Martin. As Noguchi, Thom Sesma sells what may be the best number ever about buying the farm.‘With One Look’ from ‘Sunset Boulevard’Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of “Sunset Boulevard.” Songs like “With One Look” evoke the drama of Desmond’s contradictions.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond (The Other Songs)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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The 2025 Tony Nominees Discuss Their Biggest Tests and Triumphs

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      Since 2018 The New York Times has been interviewing and shooting portraits of performers nominated for Tony Awards, those actors whose work on Broadway over the prior season was so impressive that they are celebrated by their peers. This spring, we asked those nominees to tell us about tests and triumphs — how they persevered, persisted or muddled through challenges on the path to becoming a successful actor, and in the roles for which they are nominated.‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’Sarah Snook“I was pregnant when I was offered this role. Had I known what it was to do this show, and had I known what it was to have a kid, I probably would have said no! You’re kind of going in with blissful ignorance on both counts, and finding your way through that, and showing up and being conscious about being present in all the places that you’re asked to be, whether it’s family or it’s work.”‘Sunset Boulevard’Nicole Scherzinger“I’ve always struggled with low self-esteem and a lot of insecurities. This role has really helped me to become the woman who I was meant to be. Facing head-on those insecurities, that’s where you build your bravery and you build your armor.”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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Backstage With ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and 3 Other Broadway Shows

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      Broadway stars make it look easy — hitting a high C, crying on demand, landing a complex turn with taps, doing all that as many as eight times a week. But behind the curtain, before a show, the groundwork is laid: the vocal cord steaming, the fight calls to ensure violent scenes can be staged safely, the visits and hugs and affirmations that put actors in the right frames of mind. We watched the preparations for four Tony-nominated shows — “Buena Vista Social Club,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “John Proctor Is the Villain” and “Oh, Mary!” — as their performers got ready to go onstage.‘Buena Vista Social Club’Photographed by More

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      In ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ Tom Francis Writes His Own Story

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      Tom Francis asked to meet on a rugged corner of the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. It was a bright April day, and in some ways Francis, 25, in a vintage sweater and slacks, looked like any other member of the creative class with a matcha habit. Still, I had picked him out a block away.Onstage, in Jamie Lloyd’s coruscating Broadway production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” his brooding features projected onto a 23-foot-tall screen, Francis looms large. But even here on Roebling Street, the actor, who stands 6-foot-2, with shoulders that would not demean a musk ox, was not exactly small. Francis is nominated for a Tony Award, and to see him pictured alongside his fellow nominees in the leading actor in a musical category is to believe that he could take any of them in a bar fight, maybe more than one at once.His “Sunset Boulevard” co-star Nicole Scherzinger described him succinctly. “He is a man,” she said in a phone interview. But, she was quick to emphasize, Francis is also a sweetheart, “a 25-year-old teddy bear.”In “Sunset Boulevard,” Francis stars as Joe Gillis, a dead-behind-the-eyes screenwriter who becomes entangled, in an asphyxiating way, with an aging queen of the silents. Here is the New York Times critic Jesse Green’s take: “Francis, as Joe, does shutdown-cynical-corpse very well.” Yet in person, Francis, who wields those shoulders lightly, is boyish, candid, eager, almost unable to believe his good fortune.Tom Francis last month in Manhattan. “I just knew in an instant that was Joe Gillis,” Jamie Lloyd, the director of “Sunset Boulevard,” said. “He wasn’t in any way glossy.”Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesAnd yes, that good fortune requires him to remain onstage for nearly every moment of a two-and-a-half-hour mega musical, except when he is leading the cast — in wind, in rain, amid tourists — through a portion of the Theater District as he sings the title number outdoors. He ends the show in his underwear, sunken-eyed and covered in blood.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      After ‘Sunset Boulevard’ Malfunction, Nicole Scherzinger Sings With Bullhorn

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      The “Sunset Boulevard” star briefly entertained the crowd when “a technical malfunction on the sound side” forced the cancellation of a matinee performance.In one of those moments that is likely to become Broadway lore, the actress Nicole Scherzinger grabbed a bullhorn to sing “With One Look” from “Sunset Boulevard” when the sound system failed on Wednesday afternoon at the St. James Theater.The packed matinee crowd had settled into the seats and was awaiting the start of the performance, which had been delayed for unspecified technical reasons. When it became clear backstage that the issues could not be resolved, Scherzinger, the show’s much-praised star, was not going to send the fans home empty-handed.So Scherzinger, a former Pussycat Doll, grabbed a bullhorn, and took the stage to sing one of the show’s best-known songs.“When it became apparent they couldn’t do the show, it was her idea to go out and speak to the audience, so she and Tom Francis came out,” said Rick Miramontez, a spokesman for the show, referring also to one of Scherzinger’s co-stars. “She asked stage management for a bullhorn, and she gave them a performance of one of the show’s biggest numbers.”The show was then canceled, and audience members were given a letter offering them a refund.“It was very disappointing, because we booked this a long time ago,” said Emily Feurring, a nutritionist who was in the audience, “but it was also kind of exciting because it was a New York moment, and no one else will ever get that.”“It was very sweet in a way,” she added. “And we live here, so we’ll get to go again.”Miramontez called the problem “a technical malfunction on the sound side,” and said the show’s producers were hopeful, but not certain, that the Wednesday evening performance would proceed as scheduled.The moment is reminiscent of others in which Broadway stars have vamped for audiences when technical issues have forced delays or cancellations to shows, many of which are dependent on electricity not only for voice amplification but also for automated set pieces, projections and building safety.On Tuesday, Darren Criss, Helen J Shen and Dez Duron, three of the lead performers in the musical “Maybe Happy Ending” entertained the crowd with songs when a medical emergency in the audience forced a lengthy pause in that show.And earlier this year, at the first preview of the new musical “Redwood,” a mid-show delay was caused by an issue with the set’s LED screens. Idina Menzel, the star, spent the time fielding questions from the audience, which was filled with fans looking for stories about her experiences performing in “Wicked” and “Rent” and as a voice actor in the “Frozen” films.But these incidents go way back — in Atlanta in the late 1990s, an early performance of the Disney musical that became “Aida” had to be stopped because of a technical problem, and the cast did the rest of the show concert-style. More