“For the theatre community, it was a time of tumult, turnover, ‘the field is in crisis’ essays, show cancellations due to illness, and budgetary shortfalls.” But also a response: “If our field is on fire, [we] want to be water.’”
This is an observation in a post offering highlights of 2023 from HowlRound, which is arguably still a theater blog, although it calls itself a theatre commons. In any case, many of the theater bloggers below seemed to see 2023 the same way — as a year of crisis but also one of hope. For some, it turned out to be a better year than the previous three, which doesn’t sound like it’s saying much – until you read, say, Adam Szymkowicz’s summary of his landmark accomplishment, or Samuel Leiter’s description of his 31st published theater book. The looks back and glimpses forward are full of serious issues – the rising Broadway ticket prices, the effect on Broadway of the new congestion pricing policy, changes in theatergoing demographics, the bizarre banning of plays (see both Szymkowicz and Howard Sherman.) But there are also present-moment theatrical enthusiasms – which seems a clear sign that theater, and even theater bloggers, will persist.
Adam Szymkowicz offers a detailed review of his year, which was a happy one – not just busy and productive (“I wrote a lot this year–4 one act plays, 3 full length plays, one short film and a book about playwriting”) but life-changing: He was able to quit his long-time job at Juilliard and write full-time.
And in something of a theme for theater in 2023 , he reports that his play “Marian, or The True Tale of Robin Hood,” a gender-bending take in which Robin Hood is really Maid Marian in disguise, was canceled in a school in Fort Wayne, Indiana but then “made national news when students decided to produce it themselves.” In what feels like an apt moral to this tale, the publicity might explain why the play was produced so widely in 2023: 32 productions!
The Bad Boy of Musical Theater, Scott Miller, assessed how his theater company New Line fared in 2023, yet again in verse, more optimistically than last year,
‘Twas a year full of New Line, and yep, we’re still here!
Tell me, who would’ve guessed we’d survive one more year!
But we’re quickly returning to more solid ground,
Thanks to New Line’s supporters, whose help’s been profound!
These dark times remind us how much we need Stories,
To help us make sense of our stumbles and glories;
So New Line’s still here, busting all categories!
Jan Simpson tells us she didn’t have such a happy year, which is why in Broadway & Me, her end-of-year post lists ten shows that were (as her title explains) “Not the Best Shows in 2023 But Those That Put A Smile on My Face When I Needed One” including “The Phantom of the Opera,” which she had avoided seeing for 35 years. “But when I heard that this landmark show was closing, I knew I had to finally see it. And I’m so glad I did….I already miss seeing the iconic white mask that sat on the Majestic Theater’s marquee and reigned over 44th Street for all those decades. “
In Broadway Journal, Philip Boroff dissects the latest report from the Broadway League on the demographics of Broadway, finding some “silver linings” in the reduced attendance: “25 to 49-year-olds who attended Broadway shows outnumbered those 50 and up for the first time since 2008-09.” Also: While the Asian, Hispanic and mixed-race audience was smaller, Black admissions jumped 14 percent. The increase coincided with a revival of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson with Samuel L. Jackson in an acclaimed ensemble, as well as a Tony Award-winning revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog. The season had the largest Black audience since 2011-12…”
In another post, Boroff looks ahead, reporting of the separate efforts to transfer to Broadway two shows with recent runs elsewhere – Stereophonic, which ran Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, and a musical version of The Great Gatsby which ran at Paper Mill Playhouse.
Ken Davenport looks with the eyes of a producer at My 10 favorite Broadway moments in 2023, which are not moments on stage, but more like facts and figures: In 2023, for example, six Broadway shows announced recoupment (three musicals and three plays), and 237 people made their Broadway debuts.
Looking ahead, Davenport expresses mixed feelings about New York City’s new congestion pricing plan. Starting in the spring, the driver of any car will need to pay $15 to enter Manhattan south of Sixtieth Street before 9 p.m, with the money going to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to fund mass transitc. As a New York City resident, he sees much merit in it. But as a Broadway producer, “I’m scared.” It’s bad for Broadway, “mostly because it’s aimed squarely at the audience that has been the hardest to get to come back to Broadway”—people who live in the suburbs
George Hunka generated several posts while preparing for a trip to Vienna, including one about “The Last Days of Mankind,” a mammoth satirical play about the city written by Karl Kraus around the end of World War I. The play is so long that Kraus estimated that a performance of the full play would run to “ten evenings in terrestrial time.” There was an attempt to perform it a decade ago, but Hunka focuses on a series of dioramas by an artist named Deborah Sengl based on the play, “with stuffed rats standing in for human actors.”
Howard Sherman rather frighteningly catalogues dramatic works swept up in Florida book bans, which include four plays by Aristophanes, the collected plays by Lillian Hellman, “M. Butterfly” by David Henry Hwang and “Sweat” by Lynn Nottage.
Perhaps even more disturbing is the story Sherman recounts, in three previous posts; how officials of the Sherman Independent School District in Sherman, Texas were disturbed by the “mature adult themes, profane language, and sexual content” of a show planned by the students of Texas Sherman High School, and needed to review “all aspects of the production.” The show in question: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! This is a complicated story, with a suggestion that their objection was initially to the cast of a trans student in one of the minor roles.
The blog’s two authors offered “our favorite productions” of 2023, and then Jeff Kyler gave his three theatrical resolutions for 2024:
See as many new musicals as possible.
Bring my average paid ticket price down. Way down
Find theater in a variety of venues and genres
Lauren Halvorsen’s review of 2023 is only for paid subscribers, but it’s worth excerpting her preface:
In the annals of regional theatre history, 2023 will always be the year of The Crisis™. I don’t need to meticulously recount every emergency fundraising campaign, theatre closure, layoff cycle, and season reduction… It’s easy to feel discouraged about The State of The Field, but whenever I feel hopeless (which is often, as I’m a catastrophizing depressive), I think about the first line of my favorite Alice Walker poem: “I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.” It’s hard not to agonize over an uncertain future — but even if we can’t yet imagine how we get there, we can honor the transformation ahead.
Chris Peterson’s post on his On Stage Blog proclaims “Broadway Ticket Prices Won’t Ever Get Cheaper” and he explains why: costs, limited seating capacity, high demand, unionized talent. He concludes: “I said it a couple of years ago and I’ll say it again now – the only way Broadway thrives and survives the next 50 years is through streaming options. Until the powers-that-be accept that reality, don’t expect ticket prices to decrease.”
Samuel Leiter turns his theater blog into a theater book blog, at least termporarily, describing his two latest books — his 30th, published at the beginning of last year Meiji Kabuki: Japanese Theatre through Foreign Eyes, his 31st, just published Brooklyn Takes the Stage: Nineteenth-Century Theater in the City of Churches.
In a separate post, he reviews Hermione Lee’s biography of Tom Stoppard, who he says makes a convincing case for Stoppard being the English-speaking world’s foremost living playwright (and indeed “it’s hard to come up with anyone comparable, regardless of what language they write in”) destined to get the Nobel Prize in Literature
For a different point of view, Rev Stan’s Theater Blog comments on having seen Tom Stoppard’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll” at Hampstead Theatre, in its annual list of top 10 favourite plays (and 4 least favourite): This was my last attempt to find an engaging Tom Stoppard play that isn’t Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. And it didn’t work. I didn’t care about any of the characters or get most of the cultural/historical references, which left me feeling stupid and annoyed.
In his once-a year blog posting at Theatre Afficionado at Large, Kevin Daly lists My Year in Show Music, from Six on January 1st to Kimberly Akimbo on December 31st.
Brian Eugenio Herrera offers what he promises to be the first of a monthly foray into a specific work of theater; this first is his take on Annie Baker’s Infinite Life, with some general observations as well about the playwright. “What I most savor about Annie Baker’s plays is the trust that they invest in the capacity of her actors (and her audiences) to listen, to observe, and to be uncertain… or what Vogue’s Liz Appel describes as the “experience of attunement.”
