The year began with Elton John getting an EGOT and ended with his giving Broadway a flop. It was that kind of year, offering theatergoers reasons to cheer and to jeer. Here are ten of the biggest stories about New York theater in 2024, some of them major recurring issues, some of them events, most of them serious, some absurd, some sad, some hopeful.
1. Theater’s New Normal
The state of New York theater in 2024 seems to depend on who you ask, and whether they consider the theater to be primarily an industry, a community, an art form, or a night out.
Example: Ticket prices went up, which was good news for producers and bad news for theatergoers.
But if prices, attendance and box office grosses were higher than last year, producers worried that attendance and grosses remained lower than they were before the pandemic, while costs have increased.
Much like last year, many of the theater stories of 2024 seemed to fit into one of two categories — a sign that theater is in crisis, or that it is thriving in the face of adversity….or both.
Some theaters shut down (see number 6 below), some reopened renewed (8), some in the face of struggle, found a new approach (7)
There were some surprising flops, like “Tammy Faye” (considering the proven talent involved, like Elton John), and some unexpected hits, like “Maybe Happy Ending.” That last title might sum up how many are feeling about the theater (if not the country) at the end of 2024.
2. On Death and Dimming
Many in the theater community were devastated by the death of beloved performer Gavin Creel at the age of 48 – and outraged that just eleven of the 41 theaters on Broadway would dim their marquee lights in his honor. After a petition, the Broadway League reversed the decision, expanding the dimming to all 41, and also announced they would no longer be involved in making light-dimming decisions.
This latest light-dimming controversy was an “Only in New York Theater” moment. It’s hard to understand the theater owners’ rationale for “partial dimming.” Are they trying to save money (does the dimming cost a lot?) Do they think it necessary to rank the deceased – that it somehow insults a legendary performer to provide the same wattage in tribute to a merely beloved one?
This odd practice suggests a couple of lessons about New York theater: It still values hierarchy, but it is also open to change. The tradition of dimming the lights of Broadway to honor theater artists began with the death of Gertrude Lawrence in the 1950s, and there were only a handful of times it occurred in the quarter century after that. Now the practice is more widespread and (Is it ridiculous to say?) more egalitarian.
3. Politics as Theater, Theater about Politics
The startling political developments of 2024 were nothing if not dramatic (The Election Season That Fell Out of a Coconut Tree: Twenty-five stunning moments of the 2024 Presidential campaign…”) They were also viewed repeatedly through an explicitly theatrical lens. “King Lear,” for example, was invoked innumerable times to describe Joseph Biden’s debate stumble and eventual withdrawal.
Shortly after that debate, Hillary Clinton, newly minted Broadway producer (of “Suffs”), decried this tendency in an essay: “From ‘Suffs’ to ‘Hamilton,’ I love theater about politics. But not the other way around. Too often we approach pivotal moments like this week’s debate between President Biden and Donald Trump like drama critics. We’re picking a president, not the best actor.”
(Vaclav Havel, the playwright turned Czech president, rebutted her 27 years earlier: “All politicians, including those who sneer at theater as superfluous, something that has no place in politics, unwittingly become actors, dramatists, directors, or entertainers. The significant role that sense of theater plays in politics is two-edged. Those possessing this quality can arouse society to great deeds and nurture democratic culture, civic courage, and a sense of responsibility. Such people can also mobilize the worst instincts and passions, make masses fanatic, leading them into hell.”)
Meanwhile, New York theater was awash in plays that focused on politics (either domestic or international) in inventive and thought-provoking ways: The Ally, The Ask, Between Two Knees, Counting and Cracking, Fatherland, How To Eat An Orange, N/A , KS6: Small Forward, Suffs, We Live in Cairo.
It’s hard not to acknowledge the one-night-only Broadway debut of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in “& Juliet” — actually, her performance marked the Broadway debut of any Supreme Court Justice in any Broadway show. (In 2016 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg did perform in an opera in D.C. — a non-singing role.) This might not seem as if it belongs in this list as political theater; however, some of the comments on the YouTube video of her performance could be interpreted as something other than theater criticism: One writes, “Please, quit your day job and go to Broadway.”
4. A New Generation of Artistic Directors
The spate of announcements of new artistic directors in many theaters in the city amounted to a generational change, given how many of them were replacing the long-time leaders (often founders) of these institutions. In chronological order of announcements:
Taja Cheek at Performance Space New York; Amy Cassello at BAM; Evan Cabnet at Second Stage; four co-directors Annalisa Dias, Lanxing Fu, Lauren Miller, and Jesse Cameron Alick at HERE Arts Center; Lear deBessonet at Lincoln Center Theater; Emily Shooltz at Signature; Christopher Ashley at Roundabout. Some won’t take over until next year; Ashley not until 2026.
5. Star Power on Stage: Savvy survival strategy vs. cynical money grab
Cole Escola and Nicole Scherzinger reached a new level of stardom because of their Broadway debuts this year, in “Oh, Mary” and “Sunset Blvd,” respectively. But many who made their stage debuts in 2024 (or were returning after a long absence) were already established screen or pop stars: Zoey Deutch, Robert Downey Jr., Michael Imperioli, Daniel Dae Kim, Adam Lambert, Juliana Margulies, Rachel McAdams, Jeremy Strong; even Kit Connor and Rachel Ziegler, although both in their early twenties, were already fan magnets. It is obvious that many of these stars were cast because of their stardom.
Casting stars on stage is a common practice (“Chicago” has been doing it for decades), but this year was unusual for the sheer number, for how many are from Hollywood, how many are appearing for the first time — and how many are in straight plays, rather than musicals, reviving a genre once feared to be disappearing from Broadway.
One can see this as a net positive. But there are potential downsides. Good performers might not get the opportunity their talent deserves because they lack name recognition. Good shows might not get produced because they can’t attract a star. Shows that deserve long runs won’t get them (because Hollywood stars don’t stay long.) And producers could engage in the cynical practice of celebrity-packing to mount mediocre shows at high prices. Two celebrity-laden shows this year — “Shit. Meet. Fan.” and “All In: Comedy about Love” – sparked many angry and disappointed rants in theater chat rooms.
6. Shutting Down
This year, Second Stage Theater gave up its long-time Off Broadway home, the Tony Kiser Theater, and the Soho Rep is gave up its longtime home in TriBeCa, Walkerspace, the latest casualties of rising costs. The Connelly Theater has also stopped producing plays, for a different reason: The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York starting rejecting proposed productions based on their content.
Following up on last year’s closing of the long-running shows “Phantom of the Opera” and “Stomp,” two more announced they would be gone by the beginning of 2025 – Blue Man Group, and (after a year-long reprieve) Sleep No More.
7. Sharing
SoHo Rep is not going out of business. It is moving in with Playwrights Horizons, part of an increasing trend of cooperation and partnership among Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway theaters. Last year, the Public theater was forced for financial reasons to stop sponsoring the Under the Radar festival. The festival continued in 2024 as a shared responsibility of a consortium of Off-Broadway theaters, and plan to do so again in January. Theaters are also pairing up for co-productions. Dominique Morisseau’s latest play “Bad Kreyol: was a co-production of Manhattan Theatre Club and Signature. En Garde Arts co-produced with Vineyard Theater, Transport Group with Lucille Lortel, Rattlestick with Theater for a New Audience and (separately) New Georges.
8. Reopening Up
The Palace Theater reopened on Broadway after a six-year, 80-million dollar renovation, albeit debuting with two shows that were not well-received (one of them the aforementioned “Tammy Faye.”)
The Bushwick Starr reopened in a clean, open, well-lit new venue in the same neighborhood that gives this Off-Off Broadway theater its name. The new space has some elegant touches (a mural, a red velour couch) but they are modest enough so that they don’t feel like a betrayal of the theater’s shambolic roots. Everything about The Bushwick Starr, and everybody in it, felt welcoming.
9. Wicked and the screen/stage dissolve
“Wicked” reportedly had the biggest ever opening weekend for a movie adaptation of a Broadway musical. A month after opening, it already has a worldwide box office gross of more than half a billion dollars – not as high as the Mamma Mia adaptation yet, but already higher than the Les Miserables. Which is to say – since I’m talking about worldwide box office grosses – it’s a movie. It is faithful to the stage musical in several ways (the songs are the same), although significantly different in one major way (it’s twice as long; this is just Part 1, Part 2 is scheduled a year from now.) But it is a movie. So why is this one of the biggest theater stories of 2024? Broadway producer Ken Davenport wrote a post entitled Can Wicked be Broadway’s Golden Ticket Back to Before? “The wisest elders in the industry, who have seen dark times before (although nothing like this) all say the same thing: We need a hit,” he explained. And “Wicked,” he argued, can be that hit, taking the place of past stage hits (Hamilton, Jersey Boys), which he implies boosted all of Broadway.
Such an argument is further evidence that the line between stage and screen is increasingly permeable. This seemed clear to me from the surge during the pandemic in interest and activity involving digital theater. Works of digital theater weren’t as visible this year, But the decades-long interplay between stage and screen continues to evolve, in various ways. Much of the current revival of “Sunset Blvd,” a musical adaptation of a movie, takes place on screens placed on the stage of the St. James.
10. Warriors, and the undefining of theater
Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis this year produced “Warriors,” a concept album adapted from the 1965 novel by Sol Yurick and the 1979 film directed by Walter Hill. The huge starry cast includes many theater stalwarts as well as recording artists with little to no stage experience. They initially expressed no plans to turn it into a stage musical (as Miranda did with Hamilton, which was originally conceived as a concept album) but recently told the Times “…because we’re such a visual culture, everyone said to me and Eisa ‘OK, when can we see it?’ So I think at the top of the year, Eisa and I will just start having conversations about how to adapt that to the stage.”
This is a theater story even if they wind up abandoning the idea of a stage adaptation, not just because the creators are consummate theater artists, but because their storytelling symbolizes for me the way that theater as an art form is escaping beyond the boundaries created for it – beyond buildings with proscenium stages — becoming harder, indeed, to fit within a concrete definition.
Such a fluid notion allows in a queer “Cats,” a dance piece without dialogue, a religious ritual, and a show like “Life and Trust.” “Life and Trust” has no linear script — it’s different for everybody who attends — and it takes place in the six underground floors of an actual 59-story skyscraper that was built as a bank building in 1931 a block away from Wall Street. In the months since it opened, it has developed a dedicated following of repeat visitors, many of who, I would guess, are not otherwise regular theatergoers. But we simply call the show “immersive and site-specific” and so have no trouble accepting it as theater in 2024.
These stories are culled largely from my #Stageworthy posts, a weekly summary of theater news.
