Normally the weeks leading to the Tonys are primarily a time for anticipation and celebration; five major theater awards were announced this past week alone — “Purpose” and “Maybe Happy Ending” getting a lot of love — with more to come. But it’s now also a time of urgency and worry. This is not just from the threat of the Trump administration’s proposed elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides funding for both PBS and NPR, but alarm over actions now taken. My email was filled with appeals from some of the most prominent non-profit theaters in New York after the abrupt cancellation of their crucial NEA grants:
NEA Abruptly Pulls Arts Grants on a Massive Scale (American Theatre)
The agency itself has been turned upside down:
Every arts director at the NEA exits federal culture agency (Washington Post)
The advocacy group Americans for the Arts has created a Protect the NEA campaign page, with advice for theaters on how to handle the abrupt grant cancellations, including how to file an appeal.
In the midst of such attack, one piece of surreal news:
Trump’s Kennedy Center Would Get $257 Million in House Republican Plan (New York Times) “A House committee approved a budget proposal last week that called for allocating $257 million to the Kennedy Center for capital repairs and other expenses, roughly six times the amount it usually receives from the government.”
It’s worth pointing out here that the entire budget for the National Endowment for the Arts in 2024 was $207 million.
IT would be an exaggeration to say that New York State has come to the rescue, but the 2026 budget that Governor Kathy Hochul signed into law last week does extend and expand the tax credit for Broadway productions, which was set to expire this year. Entitled the The New York City Musical and Theatrical Production Tax Credit, it will increase to $400 million and continue to be offered until 2027. (Playbill)
The Week in New York Theater Awards
Purpose Awarded 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Oh, Mary, The Ally Finalists
Sara Holdren and Vinson Cunningham both finalists in Pulitzer Prize in Criticism
Theater World Awards 2025
Off Broadway Alliance Award Nominations 2025
2025 Outer Critics Circle Awards: Maybe Happy Ending, John Proctor etc.
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes Review. Hugh Jackman launches his company
A sexual affair between Hugh Jackman as a married middle aged professor and Ella Beatty as his 19-year-old student? On its surface, “Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes” tells a familiar story with an overblown title and an underwritten female character….And yet, I’m glad to have seen it.
The Popess
A day after the election of the first American pope, the first female pope led us in a hymn in Latin – shortly before a hooded Inquisitor ordered her burned to death. What’s most arresting about “The Popess: Instructions For Freedom” is that it’s based on historical fact
Near the beginning of “Floyd Collins,” a sonically spellbinding musical inspired by a bleak and bizarre true story, Jeremy Jordan as the title character yodels into the darkness – and hears a sonorous echo. That’s how he knows he’s discovered a very deep cave, one that he hopes to turn into a tourist attraction that will make his fortune. It instead turns him into a tourist attraction, when he becomes trapped in a tight crawlway in the cave. This prompts a rescue effort, which is reported in the newspapers and in national radio broadcasts; the publicity draws tourists to the rescue site in the tens of thousands…..That echo is the first of many striking theatrical effects…An echo is also a good way to describe the musical as a whole.
The Week in New York Theater News
“Ragtime” is returning to Broadway, September 26 to January 4, with an opening set for October 16 at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, a year after its brief run as part of the Encores concert, with the same principal cast (Joshua Henry) and same director Lear deBessonet, her first show as LCT’s artistic director. My review of Ragtime at Encores
The terrifically off-the-wall comic writer and performer Julio Torres (Fantasmas, Problemista, Los Espookys) will make his Off-Broadway debut in Color Theories, a new theatrical spectacle. running September 3–21, 2025 (opening Sept 10) at Performance Space New York
Theater Videos
(Talk shows are a great platform for Broadway stars, judging from a few videos this season)
