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- in Theater
Broadway Opened 12 Shows in 9 Days. Here’s What That Looked Like.
Even at a challenging time for a pandemic-weakened industry, they found razzle-dazzle.Broadway Opened 12 Shows in 9 Days. Here’s What That Looked Like.Broadway is in the midst of a rolling celebration — of artistic expression, of audience enthusiasm, of song and dance and storytelling itself.The overlapping runs constitute a risky bet by producers and investors, who have staked tens of millions of dollars on their ability to sell seats. Even in the best of times, most Broadway shows fail, and these are not the best of times: Production costs have soared, and season-to-date attendance is 18 percent below prepandemic levels.But the shakeout comes later. First: fanfare and flowers, ovations and optimism.WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17‘The Wiz’Easing on down the road … to BroadwayDeborah Cox, left, who plays Glinda the good witch, and Nichelle Lewis, who plays Dorothy, at the opening night of “The Wiz.” Many of the 1,600 in attendance wore green for the Emerald City.A revival of a 1975 musical that reimagines “The Wizard of Oz” for an all-Black cast.Of course “The Wiz” was going to have a yellow carpet. The show’s recurring song is “Ease on Down the Road,” and that road is the yellow brick one — the path to Oz, but also, to self-discovery.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
- in Theater
What to Expect From the 2024 Tony Awards Nominations
The contenders from a crowded season will be announced by Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Renée Elise Goldsberry.At a time when Broadway is overflowing with plays and musicals but could use more ticket buyers, this season’s Tony Award nominations will be announced on Tuesday, offering a boost to some shows and dashing the hopes of others.Here’s what you might want to know about the Tony nominations, which this year will recognize plays and musicals that opened on Broadway between April 28, 2023, and April 25, 2024:When and how are the nominations announced?A few categories are to be made public shortly after 8:30 a.m. Eastern on the Tuesday broadcast of “CBS Mornings.” (CBS airs the Tonys, so it has first dibs on the news.) The full list of nominees will be announced on the Tony Awards YouTube channel starting at 9 a.m. Two previous Tony winners, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Renée Elise Goldsberry, will read the list of nominees.The New York Times’s live coverage of the announcements will continue all day, with the list of nominees as well as news and analysis.How were the nominees chosen?The Tony Awards have a nominating committee made up of people knowledgeable about theater (many are theater artists or administrators), but who do not have a financial stake in any of the season’s shows. This season 36 Tony-eligible plays and musicals opened; nominators were required to see all of them.The nominating committee started with 60 members, but then — as always happens — some had to recuse themselves because they couldn’t get to all the shows or because a conflict of interest arose. About 45 nominators are expected to vote.What are the leading contenders?The race for best musical — generally the prize with the biggest economic impact — is wide open, with 15 eligible contenders, none of which have immediately broken out as a unanimous critical darling or a box-office smash. Five to seven shows will be nominated for the best musical award.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
- in Theater
It’s April on Broadway. This Man Wants to Sell You on a Show.
Rick Miramontez, a veteran theater press agent, is gearing up for the craziest stretch of the Broadway season.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at what the spring has in store for Rick Miramontez, a leading Broadway press agent.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesRick Miramontez is both a night owl and an early bird.He has to be. As the president of DKC/O&M, the theatrical public relations agency he founded in 2006, he is always on call. His agency represents eight shows currently running on Broadway, including “Hadestown” and “MJ.”And the nine-day stretch from April 17 to 25 — when 12 plays and musicals will open by the cutoff date to be eligible for Tony Award nominations — is the equivalent of the theatrical Super Bowl.“It’s absolutely seven days a week right now,” Miramontez said in a recent phone conversation from his office, which sits in a penthouse on West 39th Street above the Drama Book Shop.April is always a busy time for Broadway openings. Like the crush of Oscar hopefuls that open in late December, productions want to open as close as possible to the Tonys deadline to be fresh in the minds of nominators and voters. Tony nominations will be announced on April 30, and the televised awards show takes place on June 16.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
- in Theater
Christopher Durang, Playwright Who Mixed High Art and Low Humor, Dies at 75
In a career spanning more than 40 years, he established himself as a hyperliterate jester and an anarchic clown.Christopher Durang, a Tony Award-winning playwright and a master satirist, died on Tuesday night at his home in Pipersville, Pa., in Bucks County. He was 75.His agent, Patrick Herold, said the cause was complications of aphasia. In 2016, Mr. Durang was found to have a rare form of dementia, logopenic primary progressive aphasia. The diagnosis was made public in 2022.An acid, impish writer, Mr. Durang never met a classic (“The Brothers Karamazov,” “The Glass Menagerie,” “Snow White”) that he couldn’t skewer. In a career spanning more than 40 years, he established himself as a hyperliterate jester and an anarchic clown. Regarding subject and theme, he pogoed from sex to metaphysics to serial killers to psychology, and he had a way of collapsing high art and jokes that aimed much lower.“He’s so scaldingly funny,” the actress Sigourney Weaver, a friend and collaborator since she met Mr. Durang at the Yale School of Drama, said in an interview. “You laugh with horror at what’s going on and your sheer inability to do anything about it.”But even in his most uproarious work — like his early play, the sex and psychoanalysis farce “Beyond Therapy,” or his late hit “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” a delirious homage to Chekhov — there was often a strong undertow of melancholy.Mark Alhadeff and Cynthia Darlow in a 2014 production of Mr. Durang’s “Beyond Therapy” at the Actors Company Theater in New York.Marielle SolanWe 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
- in Theater
What to Know About This Crazily Crowded Broadway Spring Season
Why are 18 shows opening in March and April, and which one is for you? Our theater reporter has answers.Is Broadway facing a bonanza or a blood bath?The next two months are jam-packed with new productions — 18 are scheduled to open in March and April — while the industry is still struggling to adapt to the new, and more challenging, realities of a postpandemic theater era.For potential ticket buyers, there will be a dizzying array of options. In early April, about 38 shows should be running on Broadway (the exact number depends on unexpected closings or openings between now and then).“From a consumer point of view, we’re excited about the amount of choice there is on Broadway,” said Deeksha Gaur, the executive director of TDF, the nonprofit that runs the discount TKTS booths. Anticipating that bewildered tourists will need help figuring out what shows to see, TDF is already dispatching red-jacketed staffers to preview performances and updating a sprawling cheat sheet as the employees brace for questions on what the new shows are about and who is in them.But the density of late-season openings — 11 plays and musicals over a nine-day stretch in late April — has producers and investors worried about how those shows will find enough ticket buyers to survive.“On the one hand, how incredible that our industry perseveres, and that there is so much new work on Broadway,” said Rachel Sussman, one of the lead producers of “Suffs,” a musical about women’s suffrage that is opening in mid-April.“On the other hand,” Sussman added, “we’re still recovering from the pandemic, and audiences are not back in full force, so there is industrywide anxiety about whether we have the audience to sustain all of these shows. It’s one of those things that only time will tell.”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
- in Theater
Hinton Battle, Three-Time Tony Winner in Musicals, Dies at 67
He won awards for his roles in “Sophisticated Ladies,” “The Tap Dance Kid” and “Miss Saigon” — the most ever in the category of best featured actor in a musical.Hinton Battle, a dazzling dancer who won the first of his three Tony Awards in 1981 for his performance in the Duke Ellington musical revue “Sophisticated Ladies” after learning how to tap dance in the weeks leading up to opening night, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 67.His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by Leah Bass-Baylis, a family spokeswoman, who danced with him on Broadway. She did not provide a cause.“Some people are born with the spirit of the dance,” said Debbie Allen, the dancer, choreographer and actress, who had known Mr. Battle since he was 16. “Hinton Battle was that kind of person.” She added: “He was just technically superior to anyone who came close to him. He had rhythm and style. You were looking at a supernova.”Mr. Battle auditioned for “Sophisticated Ladies” several years after he originated the role of the Scarecrow in “The Wiz,” the all-Black adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz,” when he was 18. Trained as a ballet dancer, he didn’t know how to tap and felt the pressure of being in a show with virtuoso tappers like Gregory Hines and Gregg Burge.Mr. Battle playing the Scarecrow with Stephanie Mills as Dorothy in the Broadway musical “The Wiz” around 1975. Hulton archive/Getty ImagesAt his audition, Mr. Battle said that he fudged a soft-shoe routine.“I panicked,” he told The New York Times in 1984. “It used to be you didn’t need to know how to tap. Tap was out for so long, and there wasn’t much of it to see.”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
- in Television
Elton John Secures EGOT With Emmy Win
Elton John secured an EGOT on Monday night, joining the select group who have won all four major entertainment awards — an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony — when he won an Emmy for outstanding variety special for his livestreamed farewell concert at Dodger Stadium.John has won five Grammys, a Tony Award for best original score for “Aida,” and two Oscars for songs in “The Lion King” (“Can You Feel the Love Tonight”) and “Rocketman” (“I’m Gonna Love Me Again”).With his Emmy for “Elton John Live: Farewell From Dodger Stadium,” which streamed on Disney+, John became the 19th person to gain the title. The rather elite club includes Audrey Hepburn, Rita Moreno, Mel Brooks, Whoopi Goldberg, John Legend, Jennifer Hudson and Viola Davis.John, 76, was not present at the Emmys ceremony because of a knee operation, said Ben Winston, an executive producer of the show who accepted the award on John’s behalf.John said in a statement that he was “incredibly humbled” by the honor.“The journey to this moment has been filled with passion, dedication and the unwavering support of my fans all around the world,” he said in the statement. “Tonight is a testament to the power of the arts and the joy that it brings to all our lives. Thank you to everyone who has supported me throughout my career, I am incredibly grateful.”The live concert, which took place at the Los Angeles stadium in 2022, carried echoes of the pop star’s pair of shows at the same venue in 1975, when, in his late 20s, John played hits such as “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and “Bennie and the Jets” to a sold-out venue. More
