Thirteen shows will open on Broadway in the four weeks until the Broadway 2024-2025 officially ends; by then New York theater award season will be well underway: New York Theater Awards Calendar and Guide 2025
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
Sarah Snook portrays some 25 characters as well as the narrator in this dazzling and sometimes dizzying stage-and-video adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel, but at the curtain call, she is far from alone: Fourteen other people, all dressed in black, take their bows with her. These are the
5 Camera Operators
1 Dresser
1 Wig Supervisor
2 Prop Managers
3 Carpenters
and 2 LX/Sound Engineers
who make Snook’s performance possible. They, and especially video designer David Bergman,.also help turn writer and director Kip Williams’s adaptation of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” into a visually clever, technically sophisticated production for which “solo play” feels like an inadequate description.
The In-Between: Intimate and Candid Moments of Broadway Stars photographed by Jenny Anderson
The Week in New York Theater News
Studio Seaview (formerly Tony Kiser Theater) will open with John Krasinski starring in “Angry Alan,” a play by Penelope Skinner that began at Edinburgh Fringe about one man’s journey down the digital rabbit hole, May 23- August 3
Punchdrunk (Sleep No More) is returning to NYC with “Viola’s Room” an immersive 50-minute gothic mystery of “lost innocence and unleashed obsession” (based on “The Moon-Slave”) narrated (via headphones) by Helena Bonham Carter. At the Shed June 17 – October 19
Noël Coward’s Private Lives is coming to Broadway in the 2026-2027 season, Jeffrey Richards, producer. That’s all we know so far. t The 1931 comedy of manners about a divorced couple who still long for each other, has been on Broadway eight times, featuring some stars you might find familiar
Jeff T. Daniel has been named president of the Shubert Organization, the largest landlords of Broadway theaters. Daniel was previously Chief Strategy Officer at Shubert, a role he assumed in September 2023 after 14 years at Broadway Across America.
The season at Atlantic Theater resumes, after the resolution of the stagehand’s strike that interrupted its season in January:
I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan, by Mona Pirnot, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll, starring David Greenspan
Atlantic Stage 2
March 29 – April 30
Grief Camp, by Eliya Smith, directed by Les Waters
Linda Gross Theater
April 5 – May 11
A Freeky Introduction, written by & starring NSangou Njikam, directed by Dennis A. Allen II, featuring DJ Monday Blue
Atlantic Stage 2
May 16 – June 22, 2025
Lowcountry, by Abby Rosebrock, directed by Jo Bonney
Linda Gross Theater
June 4 – July 13, 2024
Scott Rudin, Producer Exiled for Bad Behavior, Plans Return to Broadway (NY Times)
This fall he plans the first Broadway production of “Little Bear Ridge Road,” a play by Samuel D. Hunter that was staged last year in Chicago by Steppenwolf Theater Company. The New York production, like the one in Chicago, will star Metcalf and will be directed by Mantello. Next spring Rudin plans to stage “Montauk,” a new play by David Hare, also starring Metcalf and directed by Mantello. The following season he says he hopes to revive “Death of a Salesman” in a production with Metcalf and Nathan Lane, again directed by Mantello.
The most popular reader comment: “As an assistant working on Broadway, I am genuinely disgusted by this. I am disgusted that The NY Times chose to report on this and give this man exactly what his PR team wants. I know people who suffered abuses in his office so abhorrent that they still are working through the damages it had on them…The Broadway community can’t keep tsk-tsking at Trump when the Trump of our own industry is being welcomed back in for a second term.”
The Brooklyn Academy of Music is fighting to regain its mojo (NY Times)
BAM is far from alone in showing signs of strain. Cultural organizations across the country are struggling financially with reduced income and raided endowments, as the pandemic, aging audiences, rising labor costs, declining philanthropy and competition from streaming services take their toll….
BAM now faces competition for donors, audiences and artists from a rash of performing arts venues that also feature intrepid, innovative presentations, like the Park Avenue Armory, the Shed, the Joyce and the Perelman Performing Arts Center.
Alex Edelman answering what he sees in “Just for Us” (My review of it on Broadway), after watching his solo play about his personal encounter with Nazis in Queens, performed by somebody else in Minnesota: “The love of my family and my identity, and weirdly, there’s something patriotic about it. Which is the idea…, not that these people can be reached, the white nationalists in the room, but the idea that you’d want to is very, I think, weirdly patriotic. Also, the neediness of someone who wants to connect with everyone…”: (Full interview.)
War on Culture
House Republicans Hold Hearing Accusing NPR and PBS of bias (NY Times)
Dark pronouncements by Republicans about a “communist agenda” espoused by public media were intercut with lighter references to “Sesame Street” and “Curious George.”
In Memoriam
Richard Chamberlain, who would have turned 91 today, came to fame as heartthrob “Dr Kildare” on TV then was crowned King of the Mini-Series. But he went on to Broadway, first in the infamous flop Breakfast at Tiffany’s but later in classic plays – Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana and Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit — and musicals – My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music
