Male characters of various stripes – clockwise from top left, valiant, vain, and vile – dominated the Broadway shows that opened over the past week: “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “The Last Five Years,” and “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Well, the three shows that opened and allowed critics to post their reviews. A fourth, “Boop,” has helped change what “opening night” means. (See “What is Broadway Opening Night?” below.)
April 2025 New York Theater Openings
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
Glengarry Glen Ross
It feels inadequate – and perhaps even misleading – simply to assess the pluses and minuses of this particular production about these cut-throat, conning real estate salesmen, who are portrayed this time around by a starry cast… A normal review struck me as almost irrelevant when I saw audience members take obvious delight at the foul-mouthed, hateful, racist invective of Mamet’s characters, laughing at the ugliest lines.
Where is our Edward R. Murrow?
That is the implicit question that animates George Clooney’s play, opened tonight on Broadway in an elegant, meticulous and timely production directed by David Cromer, which dramatizes how Murrow, the veteran CBS journalist, stood up to a demagogue, Senator Joseph McCarthy. …Good Night, and Good Luck” is a stage adaptation of the black-and-white movie of the same name that Clooney co-wrote and directed in 2005, with Clooney this time starring as Murrow….If there’s not much change in content, “Good Night, and Good Luck” is transformed by its context. On the night I attended, the audience treated the play like the gathering of the like-minded at a public square, responding to this real-life drama from the 1950s as if a comment on life in America under Donald Trump.
Two decades after it was first produced, I was finally won over to Jason Robert Brown’s two-character musical inspired by the unraveling of his first marriage….What has made “The Last Five Years” hold together as more than a pleasant-enough collection of show songs was a credible sense of connection between the two characters….Adrienne Warren and Nick Jonas, who are appealing and talented singers, just don’t seem like a match for these roles, or for each other.
The Week in New York Theater News
Lucille Lortel Award Nominations for Off-Broadway 2025
Drag: The Musical, Our Class, and Three Houses received the most nominations for the 40th annual Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Achievement Off-Broadway. Winners will be presented at the annual ceremony on Sunday, May 4, 2025, at NYU.
The Lortel nominations mark the launch of the 2025 theater award season
What is Broadway Opening Night? What’s changes, why it matters
Here are ten facts, updated, about opening night on Broadway….
5. This season, suddenly, opening night no longer necessarily even means when the reviews come out. Some productions are delaying their embargoes so that they occur after opening night. “Boop,” for example, has an official opening night of Saturday, April 5, 2025 but the show’s publicists told the professional critics that their reviews couldn’t run until after 9 p.m. Monday, April 7. “Just in Time” is doing the same thing. The “opening night” is April 26th (which is the day before the deadline to be considered for Tony Awards), but the critics are forbidden to post their reviews until April 28.
Ali Louis Bourzgui (the lead of The Who’s Tommy) and Myra Molloy (the touring cast of Miss Saigon) will become Orpheus and Eurydice in Hadestown starting May 6, 2025.
War on Culture
In Trump’s Second Term, Retribution Comes in Many Forms (NY Times)
“Mr. Trump has employed tactics including lawsuits, executive orders, regulations, dismissals from government jobs, withdrawal of security details and public intimidation to take on a wide range of individuals and institutions he views as having unfairly pursued him or sought to block his agenda… In the process, he has blurred the personal and the political, making it difficult in some instances, like his targeting of academic and cultural institutions [like the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian], to distinguish between his grievances and policy goals.”
List: Who Trump Has Targeted for Retribution:
Public and cultural institutions
Presidio Trust
Mr. Trump ordered the government to “eliminate to the maximum extent” the functions of the Presidio Trust, which oversees a San Francisco park and was one of Representative Nancy Pelosi’s proudest accomplishments.
The Smithsonian Institution
Mr. Trump issued an executive order claiming that the Smithsonian Institution had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” The order stipulated, among other things, that future appropriations to the Smithsonian “prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values.”
The Kennedy Center
The center has been in flux since Mr. Trump purged its previously bipartisan board of Biden appointees and had himself elected chairman.
What to Know About Trump’s Order Taking Aim at the Smithsonian
The president’s order called for curbing the independence of the sprawling network of museums and urging it to promote “American greatness.” (NY Times)
A new executive order ostensibly addressing the price-gouging of tickets for live events was signed by President Trump in the presence of Kid Rock (“What Trump’s Executive Order on Ticket Price-Gouging Could Mean for Concertgoers” Time.) It is “grandstanding,” writes music industry analyst Bob Lefsetz in his newsletter (“Too Much of Nothing: Trump’s Ticketing Order), just reiterating what’s already federal law, and not enforced. “In a government where Musk is cutting willy-nilly, where is the extra manpower to focus on…TICKET SCALPING?”
In Memoriam
Val Kilmer, 65, a movie star, astonishing as Jim Morrison in “The Doors.” He survived throat cancer and thereafter spoke with an AI device. At age 23, he turned down a role in the film “The Outsiders” for the Broadway play, “Slab Boys,” with Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn, which ran for two months in 1983
