“Maybe Happy Ending” had a very unhappy beginning. The show’s triumph at Sunday night’s Tony Awards, where it won six honors, including best new musical, capped a remarkable turnaround for a small production with a baffling title and a hard-to-sell premise that was seen by industry insiders as dead on …
Eight times a week at the Majestic Theater in Manhattan, the entire, harrowing arc of a classic tragedy is delivered in 4½ minutes that are as exhilarating as they are upsetting. All the textbook components of tragedy according to Aristotle are vigorously at work here: self-delusion and self-knowledge, pity and …
The Broadway producer Jeffrey Seller is, by any measure, enormously successful. He’s produced (always in collaboration with others) about 10 shows that have, collectively, grossed $4.74 billion, approximately one-third of which was profit for producers, investors and others. You’ve probably heard of several of those shows. His first big hit …
Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at a wall of posters in a Manhattan restaurant that spotlights failed Broadway shows. We’ll also get details on a state senator who wants to take away Tesla’s right to operate five dealerships in New York. There’s a place where Broadway flops live …
When Jonathan Groff says “I’m a wet man,” he means it. The admission comes near the start of “Just in Time,” the Bobby Darin bio-musical that opened on Saturday at Circle in the Square. It’s a warning to the 22 audience members seated at cabaret tables in the middle of …
Joy Huerta wasn’t so sure about musical theater. When the director and choreographer Sergio Trujillo approached Huerta in 2019 about adapting Josefina López’s play “Real Women Have Curves” into a musical, she had her doubts. Huerta, best known as half of the brother-and-sister pop duo Jesse & Joy, was unfamiliar …
The cold open: In television, it’s a scene that begins an episode before the title sequence, often without leading characters but almost always with foreshadowing hooks to confound or set a mood. Theater doesn’t really have much of a cold open tradition. The expectation is that you introduce the main …
Great musical comedies are great mysteries, and not just because they’re so rare. They’re also mysteries in the way they operate. To succeed, they must keep far ahead of the audience, like thrillers with twists you can’t see coming. They are whodunits with songs instead of murders. “Smash,” which opened …
After a critically acclaimed premiere in London’s West End in 2023 — where it is still running — “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a play that serves as a prequel to the popular Netflix series, is set to open on April 22 at the Marquis Theater on Broadway. Of course, …
William Finn, a witty, cerebral and psychologically perceptive musical theater writer who won two Tony Awards for “Falsettos” and had an enduringly popular hit with “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” died on Monday in Bennington, Vt. He was 73. His longtime partner, Arthur Salvadore, said the cause of …