The Palace will reopen tonight after six years for the first of what are now 19 shows scheduled so far for the Broadway 2024-2025 season, with a concert by Ben Platt promoting his new album, which will run for 18 days. Much has been made of the $80 million spent on the renovation of the 1913 theater: the new entrance and lobby on West 47th, the increased legroom and greater restroom capacity, the new light fixtures inspired by the original Beaux-Arts style.
There’s less focus on the reason why the Palace has been put out of commission since “SpongeBob SquarePants” in 2018, and why the landmarked theater, which weighs 14 million pounds, was lifted up thirty feet in the air. The Palace now plays above a mall (although they don’t call it that.)
One can argue that Platt’s “playing the Palace” continues an established tradition of solo shows by star entertainers there, from Sarah Bernhardt in 1913 to Judy Garland in 1951, 1956 and 1965 to Bette Midler, Shirley Maclaine and Diana Ross in the 1970s.
There’s another way to look at this most recent chapter in The Palace’s history: When the theater opened in 1913, it was part of an 11-story office building. Eight decades later, the theater remained but the building was replaced by a 43-story hotel. Now, the Palace part of a $2.5 billion, 46-story tower called TSX Broadway, which includes a 669-room hotel and multi-story retail space.
Broadway as a whole, too, can be viewed as both an industry and as an American art form. The many theater awards supposedly view it as the latter, although it’s hard even there to divorce the shows completely from show business.
At Broadway season’s end, in the heat of awards season, public assessments of the state of theater tend to be upbeat —
“The 2023-2024 Broadway season was another wonderful year, with attendance of 12.3 million and Broadway shows grossing $1.54 billion dollar. Audiences are responding to the incredible variety of plays, musicals, and specials that we have on Broadway” – Jason Laks, Interim President of The Broadway League
— even as private assessments are, at best, hopeful: “Spring 2024 saw a frenzy of new shows opening (21 since January) in the face of two formidable obstacles: costs that have nearly doubled over a decade and an audience almost 20 percent smaller than it was pre-pandemic…What the optimists and pessimists agree on is that the business model has to change” – New York Magazine
Broadway League statistics on total attendance
2023-2024: 12,287,708
2022-2023: 12,283,399
2018-2019: 14,768, 254
New Theater Books to Read in Summer 2024
The Week in Theater Awards
2024 Chita Rivera Award Winners: Hell’s Kitchen and Water for Elephants (tie), Illinoise
Watch Jessica Lange, Kelli O’Hara, Cole Escola et al accept their Outer Critics Circle Awards, quote their spouses, and debate reviews
2024 Tony Award Winners — YOUR Picks? Poll
The last question in the poll is: If there was room for only one new category for a Tony Award, which should it be? So far, half the respondents picked Ensemble, followed by a quarter for Hair, Wig and Makeup.
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
The Fires
“The Fires” brings us simultaneously into the lives and loves of three Black gay men occupying the same railroad apartment in South Brooklyn, but decades apart — Jay (Phillip James Brannon) in 1974, Sam (Sheldon Best) in 1998, Eli (Beau Badu) in 2021. They go about their daily lives oblivious to one another’s presence (since they’re living in different eras) even when they’re in the same bed!..That all eleven characters (portrayed by a fine eight-member cast) move in and around Raphael Mishler’s three-room set with such precision, grace, sexiness and clarity is a testament to the well-honed skills of one of the most sought-after choreographers in New York, Raja Feather Kelly. Kelly is directing “The Fires,” splendidly. He is also making his Off-Broadway playwriting debut as its author. Would that his writing matched the clarity and precision of his direction. Full Review
Three Houses
Dave Malloy’s latest sing-through musical theater piece, which has a lively score and a gifted cast, but largely falls short of its effort — seemingly inspired by Sondheim’s approach in “Into The Woods” — to say something significant about life during the pandemic. At an open mic night in a dark bar, three storytellers take turns singing of their experiences during lockdown….Full review
The Week in New York Theater News
Two more shows have announced for the Broadway 2024-2025 Broadway season — 19 so far: “Job” which ran Off-Broadway (my review) will open at the Hayes on July 30; “Romeo + Juliet,” announced earlier for Broadway, now has an opening date (October 24), a venue (Broadway’s Circle in the Square), and a logo with a curse word in it. For details on both check out my Broadway 2024-2025 Broadway season preview guide.
Brooks Shields has been elected president of Actors Equity, succeeding, Kate Shindle, who declined to run for reelection after nine years. The presidency is a demanding unpaid position that oversees the management and direction of the union. (Broadway Journal) A movie actress starting as a young child, she is now a veteran of five Broadway plays.
Theater Blog Roundup: Broadway Recovery Stalls, Off-Broadway Unionizes, Awards Proliferate
Top 12 Posts in the 12 Years of New York Theater
How Daniel Radcliffe Outran Harry Potter: He was the world’s most famous child star. Then he had to figure out what came next. (Atlantic Magazine)
“Radcliffe has been doing theater for half his life now, and onstage was where he made his first bold break from expectations. When he was 17, between the release of the fourth and fifth Harry Potter movies, it was announced that he would be appearing in London’s West End as the lead in a revival of the 1970s play Equus, playing a disturbed teenager with a predilection for mutilating horses by blinding them—a role that, among its many other tests, required him to be fully naked onstage for several minutes. He wasn’t trying to shock; he was just trying to stretch the boundaries of who he might become….. Since then, other theater roles have followed, including in Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, along with 10 months as the lead in a Broadway revival of the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. And now Merrily, Sondheim’s told-backwards tale of three friends.
“For Radcliffe, the role seems a natural fit…. His parents, who met doing musical theater, used to play Sondheim productions while they were driving. It took Radcliffe years to understand that not all childhoods were like his in this respect. “I thought everyone listened to show tunes in the car,” he recently said. “I thought that was road-trip music.”
In Memoriam
Richard M Sherman, 95, composer with his brother Robert of three Broadway musicals (Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Over Here) and some two dozen films, many for Disney.
