Female characters and performers dominated the shows that opened this past week on Broadway, which the previous week had been dominated by shows featuring male characters and performers. Marilyn Monroe and Betty Boop are throwbacks to a previous era. In their singing of Sondheim, Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga bring the past into the present.
Seven more shows are opening in the final two weeks of the Broadway season.
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
If “Boop!” were a store rather than a Broadway musical, it would be a factory outlet, and the pile-on of merchandise on display would all be refurbished from parts of old shows – the top-hat-and-tails tap-dancing musical numbers, the two love stories, the various subplots such as time travel, a mayoral campaign, an orphan teenager, a cute cartoon puppet puppy dog. Some of it is wonderful (The black-and-white cartoon world versus color real world is a triumph of design.) One or two scenes made me cringe (a white-bread performer in hip-hop drag popping and locking atop a replica of the red steps of Father Duffy Square comes to mind.) Little of it feels original, and none of it feels necessary. But just like actual Betty Boop merchandise — the many toys, t-shirts, scrunchies and socks covered with her image – “Boop!” doesn’t have to feel necessary; it’s fun. And the main reason for that is Jasmine Amy Rogers.
In this sixth Sondheim show on Broadway since his death in 2021, a cast of 19 including Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga perform 40 songs selected from 14 shows for which Stephen Sondheim wrote the music and/or the lyrics. These are talented performers putting over some tuneful and clever numbers, in what is the latest of many Sondheim revues – which have their obvious pleasures, as well as some potential pitfalls. “Old Friends” tries to minimize the downside of the revue format, and succeeds (mostly.)…
‘“Smash” offered viewers the rare thrill of original musical numbers written by a Tony-winning songwriting team expressly for network television, and simultaneously gave Tweeters a target to try to be witty in real time at the show’s expense. These two pleasures helped gain a loyal following for the TV series, although apparently not enough of one for NBC; it ran for just two seasons a dozen years ago.
“Smash” the musical has opened tonight on Broadway, with the same premise as the TV series — a behind-the-scenes look at the making of “Bombshell,” a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe — and almost two dozen of the same familiar, tuneful musical numbers from the series: Same songwriting team of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, and, critically, much the same staging by Emmy-winning choreographer Joshua Bergasse — ably aided by the design team.
The live stage show offers no opportunity for real-time Tweeting anymore – is it still even called Tweeting? – but now it’s the new musical’s book writers, Rick Elice and Bob Martin, who are trying to be witty. The story in-between the musical numbers has been changed from primetime soap opera into broad stage comedy.
“Urinetown” co-creator Greg Kotis takes us to another future dystopian society in this small, cheeky musical that’s part of the New York City Fringe Festival. With a banjo-driven bluegrass score backed by a three-piece band, Pa, Ma, Boy and Girl sing of their struggle to survive off-the-grid on a mountain top, one of the few habitable places on Earth after a series of ecological melt-downs.
Book: What This Place Makes Me: Contemporary Plays on Immigration
a new anthology selected by Isaiah Stavchansky, who writes in an Editor’s Note: “The playwrights have diverse origins – Lebanon, Korea, Nigeria, India, Mexico, Poland – but what unifies their work is the way they shed light on immigrants’ challenges and dreams.”
Having seen five of these plays, which were all produced within the past decade in New York, I knew them to be well-crafted dramas, too nuanced and intimate to be dismissively labeled as issue plays. They are also worthwhile reads… there’s value in treating theater as literature.
The Week in New York Theater News and Features
Leslie Odom Jr. will resume portraying Aaron Burr in “Hamilton” on Broadway, from September 9 to November 23. His return comes shortly after the musical about Alexander Hamilton celebrates its tenth anniversary on Broadway on August 6, 2025. “I’m so grateful for the chance to step back into the room—especially during this anniversary moment—and to revisit this brilliant piece that forever changed my life and the lives of so many.” Odom, who won a Tony Award for originating the role of Hamilton’s rival, and killer, was most recently on Broadway last year in the Tony-nominated title role of “Purlie Victorious.”
Odom will also be providing the entertainment for the annual Public Theater gala, celebrating iconomi moments in Public Theater history, on the lawn outside The Delacorte Theater in Central Park on June 10
Plays by Lauren Yee and Heather Christian will be featured in Signature Theater Company’s thirty-fifth season, the first under new artistic director Emily Shooltz.
In the Fall, Signature will present a production of “Oratorio for Living Things” which in my review of a 2022 production I called “such a gorgeous, awe-inspiring concert of original music by Heather Christian that it feels like a religious experience. Indeed, the music — inflected with Baroque, gospel, blues, pop, and jazz — could work as a church service.” In the Spring, Christian’s “Animal Wisdom,” described as a musical séance
In the Winter, “Mother Russia” by Lauren Yee, who gained acclaim for Cambodian Rock Band, will tell the story set in St. Petersburg, 1992, when the Soviet Union has collapsed, McDonald’s has risen, and Evgeny, a young man at a loss, stumbles into a job working surveillance — and promptly falls in love with his target, a former pop star.
Frank Rich on the Real Broadway (New York Magazine)
The truth about post-pandemic Broadway is that even as ticket prices have bounced back to exorbitant and unsustainable heights, commercial theater production is more of a fool’s errand than ever because the equally unsustainable costs of putting on a show can rarely be recouped no matter how high the ticket price. Meanwhile, the surrounding neighborhood is mired in homelessness, shuttered businesses, and marauding Elmos.
“Paradise lost? Maybe not. When was there an idyllic Times Square, exactly? The historic fantasy of the Great White Way as a glamorous montage of gleaming marquees, sparky backstage romances, and elegant audiences reveling in black tie was a Hollywood concoction, arguably false from the start…”
Tariffs and Other Taxes in Broadway Shows
The president of the United States puts a fifty percent tariff on all imported cheese, which leads to war…with Switzerland. That’s the premise of “Strike Up the Band,” the first of a trio of Broadway musicals in the early 1930s with songs by George and Ira Gershwin that were intended as lighthearted political satires. Given what’s happening in 2025, were the Gershwins prescient? Consider that “Let ‘Em Eat Cake,” the last of these Gershwin musicals, was about a president who loses his bid for re-election and, inspired by fascism, tries to overthrow the U.S. government. (The first of the Gershwins’ political musicals, “Of Thee I Sing,” was the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.)
Taxes (which is what tariffs are, a tax on imports) have played a part over the years in plots, songs and scenes on Broadway stages. Examples — some jocular, some historical – feel timely, and not just because of the approaching Tax Day deadline.
Theater blog roundup: High on Broadway. Tributes to Finn and Fugard.
Broadway is luring the star-struck to pay big bucks in this final stretch of the season, leading Janice Simpson of Broadway & Me to ask “whether all the hoopla and moola are worth it.” She answers for four of the priciest shows, prefacing her reviews with the stars involved and the top ticket prices for each….
The War on Culture
At least 1,200 grants canceled at National Endowment for the Humanities. (Washington Post)
The cost-cutting effort was denounced by state humanities councils and cultural organizations such as the American Historical Association, which released a statement Friday condemning “the evisceration” of the NEH: “This frontal attack on the nation’s public culture is unpatriotic, anti-American and unjustified,” the statement said, adding that Trump’s approach “prioritizes narrow political ideology over historical research, historical accuracy, and the actual historical experiences of Americans.”
The Trump Show Comes to the Kennedy Center: Can the fifty-four-year-old arts hub weather the next four years? (The New Yorker Magazine)
“So many artists have quietly pulled out of the 2025-26 season that the center has had to keep delaying its schedule announcements. The Kennedy Center usually unrolls its musical-theatre offerings in April, but, “at this point, I have no idea when we’ll be able to announce a theatre season,” one staff member told me….
“Trump’s interventionist tack speaks to his desire to extend his reach deep into the cultural life of the country. Although the President’s mockery by the creative and cultural élite has long rankled him, it’s the melding of his hurt feelings with his instinct for stagecraft and its uses that has crystallized the Kennedy Center as one of his prime targets…”
In Memoriam
William Finn, 73, Tony-winning composer, lyricist and librettist for “Falsettos,” among the first musicals about the AIDS epidemic. He also created “A New Brain,” inspired by his own stroke, and “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,“ about adolescents competing in a spelling bee, ran for three years on Broadway and produced thousands of times since.
An appraisal by Jesse Green: “It is only after acknowledging and withstanding awfulness — shame, grief, mortality — that Finn permits a glimpse of happiness. In the title song of the revue “Infinite Joy” he describes that emotion with the words “Goodness is rewarded / Hope is guaranteed / Laughter builds strong bones.” Near the end of “A New Brain,” he summarizes what we’ve just seen as “Stories of coping / Of hope against hoping,” before having his stand-in, a composer who has been through the wringer, sing, “I have so much spring within me.”
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Mario Vargas Llosa, 89, Nobel Prize winning Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist, one-time political candidate…and playwright, whose writing “probed the depravity of authoritarian rule.”.He’s probably best-known here for his novels turned into films, such as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which playwright Caridad Svich adapted for the stage.
