“It’s great to see everybody unmasked sitting next to each other in one room,” Bruce Springsteen said on opening night Saturday of the first Broadway show in 15 months … speaking on the same night (almost the same moment) that Tina Landau welcomed the unmasked audience to a night of making “music and a little joy together” at the outdoor theater on Little Island “after 15 months of being separate and being scared and being unable to work and be unsure of when we could again”…which was on the same day when Ann Dowd was portraying all the characters in an adaptation of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” Off Broadway at the Park Avenue Armory, and audiences were making their way through Lynn Nottage et al’s “The Watering Hole” inside the Signature Theater Center.
You get the idea. “Springsteen on Broadway” is the first of 39 shows so far officially scheduled for the Broadway 2021-2022 season, which makes it a “milestone” and a thrill. But the next Broadway opening won’t be for months.
There is no need to wait, nor feel left out. There is already an abundance of theater — online but also in-person, outdoors but also indoors, including Off Broadway.
Off Broadway 2021-2022 Season Preview Guide
Long-running favorites are reopening, there is exciting new work by a slew of much-heralded American playwrights: Lynn Nottage has three separate shows! Jocelyn Bioh, two! Annie Baker, Samuel D. Hunter, David Lindsay-Abaire, Martyna Majok, Dominique Morisseau — and many more — all have new work set to debut….Off Broadway.
Broadway 2021-2022 Season Preview Guide
The Week in Theater Reviews
Week in Theater News
“Harry Potter and The Cursed Child” is returning to the Lyric Theater on November 16 – but reimagined as a single performance, rather than the two-part show (with separate admissions) that existed before the pandemic.
Norm Lewis and Michael Urie will star in a new Broadway comedy , “Chicken & Biscuits,” with a planned run from september 23 to January 2, opening October 10th at Circle in the Square, written by performer turned playwright Douglas Lyons, and directed by Zhailon Levingston, at 27 the youngest Black men ever to director a Broadway show. The Jenkins family is coming together to celebrate the life of their father—hopefully without killing each other! But any hopes for a peaceful reunion unravel when a family secret shows up at the funeral. The play is the first to transfer to Broadway from Queens Theatre, and the eighth play by a Black writer scheduled to open on Broadway this season. The others: “Pass Over,” by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu; “Lackawanna Blues,” by Ruben Santiago-Hudson; “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” by Keenan Scott II; “Trouble in Mind,” by Alice Childress; “Clyde’s,” by Lynn Nottage; and “Skeleton Crew,” by Dominique Morisseau.
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The Theatre World Awards will be holding a virtual benefit July 9, in which Audra McDonald will receive the Dorothy Loudon Special Award for Excellence in the Theater, and Patti LuPone and André De Shields will be given the eighth annual John Willis Awards for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre.
TKTS, which has been closed since Broadway shut down, is hoping to re-open its Times Square location in September.
“Harry Connick Jr. has joined Taraji P. Henson in “Annie Live,” the latest TV musical on NBC, scheduled for December 2.
