Here are ten of the biggest stories involving theater this year
1. The Federal War on Culture and the Arts
Near the beginning of 2025, President Donald Trump took over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, replacing its staff leadership and board with loyalists, installing himself as chairman, and vowing to get rid of “woke” programming. Artists and productions such as Hamilton canceled its scheduled performances, and ticket sales plummeted. By the end of the year, Trump’s hand-picked board voted to change the name of the institution to the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts
What’s been done to the Kennedy Center is just the most visible example of the coarsening of culture and the direct threats to free expression. Unlike Kennedy, Trump is no friend to the arts. The Trump administration’s first proposed budget eliminated funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which provides funding for both PBS and NPR T
The NEA rescinded grants to a wide range of arts organizations, such as $60,00 to the Classical Theatre of Harlem, and required that applicants for NEA grants agree that they “not promote gender ideology.” – a requirement that a federal judge recently ruled unconstitutional.
Trump also terminated or targeted a range of other cultural institutions, some of them officially independent but heavily funded by the federal government, because of what he said were “race-centered ideology,” demanding instead an emphasis on “American exceptionalism”
Trump also shut down the Commission on Fine Arts, a federal advisory body responsible for reviewing major construction in Washington, while he demolished the East Wing of the White House to construct a $400 million (as of now), 90,000 square foot ballroom, and announced plans to build a triumphal arch near the Lincoln Memorial.
2. The Affordability Crisis in Theater
Theater has been in crisis every year since I began these year-end summaries, but this year it makes sense to frame it specifically as a crisis of affordability: That was the constant refrain of incoming New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani during his campaign; it was the reason why he was elected.
To theatergoers, that means high ticket prices, sometimes obscenely high this year, especially for shows that starred Hollywood celebrities (see # 3 below.) The highest single ticket price in 2025 was reportedly move than $1,500 for premium seats to Hamilton when Leslie Odom Jr. returned,while shows like Othello (with Denzel Washington) saw top individual seat prices nea $1000. More outrage was expressed about the $300 top ticket price for “All Out,” at which four celebrities sit and read short stories aloud. But prices have been jacked up on stages beyond Broadway as well. The top official ticket price for the Andrew Scott one-man show Vanya at the Lucille Lortel Theatre was $434.
The result, according to a recent report by the Center for an Urban Future, is that “live performance has shifted from a regular part of city life to an occasional luxury.”
There is also an affordability crisis for theater artists, the cost of rent and basic living expenses driving them out of the city. Since the pandemic, there has been a more than four percent decrease in the city’s resident artist population, including an eight percent drop in actors and an 18.8 percent decline in dancers,
And, theater producers complain about an affordability crisis as well (although it might be more accurately called a problem of profitability); CNN recently reported that they face “rising costs from theater rent, fees, labor and even lumber, which has roughly doubled in price since December 2016. Meanwhile, ticket prices haven’t risen quickly enough to offset these costs.” That last sentence is clearly from the producers’ point of view, not likely to be shared by the theatergoing public – just as the regular boasts of theater producers of record-breaking box office play out differently when we’re talking about legitimate theater rather than movies. In movies, that means more people attended. On Broadway, it means the ticket prices were higher.
(For the record, according to the Broadway League, the latest available statistics show the average ticket price on Broadway is $145, down from the previous year of $154. \O
3. Hollywood Stars on Broadway
A-list movie stars George Clooney and Keanu Reeves made their Broadway debuts this year; Tom Hanks starred in his playwriting debut Off-Broadway. There were so many stars that they sometimes came in threes — Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr in a revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross”, Bobby Cannavale, James Corden, and Neil Patrick Harris in a revival of “Art”; Aaron Tveit,Lea Michele, and Nicholas Christopher in a revival of “Chess.” But the performers who were received most enthusiastically by critics and theatergoers alike this year were homegrown stage performers – Jonathan Groff in “Just in Time,” Joshua Henry in “Ragtime” – and actors whose performances may well turn them into stars – Jasmine Amy Rogers in “Boop,” Sam Tutty in “Two Strangers,” June Squibb in “Marjorie Prime.”
This continuing trend of Hollywood stars on stage might be viewed as a net positive, since many were in straight plays, rather than musicals, reviving a genre once feared to be disappearing from Broadway.. 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 – see number 1, the affordability crisis — producers could engage in the cynical practice of celebrity-packing to mount mediocre shows at high prices.
4. Hollywood Buys (Into) Off-Broadway
The movie studio A24 bought the Cherry Lane Theater in 2023 for ten million dollars, and this year, presented its first Off-Broadway theatrical production for a paying audience, “Weer.”
The 166-seat theater was founded by Edna St. Vincent Millay in 1923 and premiered plays by Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee and Sam Shepard among many others (a partial list provided by the plaque put up on the building in 2003.) A24 put up signs announcing the Cherry Lane as “the birthplace of Off-Broadway” – which is an encouraging sign that it will continue the tradition, rather than turning it into a screening room.
Hugh Jackman started his own Off-Broadway theater company, called Together., along with high-powered producer Sonia Friedman, the point of which – judging from their first two plays at Minetta Lane Theater this year – is to offer given that their aim, according to the announcement in March, is for audiences to experience theater in an intimate space for an affordable price.
5. Theater on Screen
“Merrily We Roll Along” and “Hamnet,” which opened on the same weekend in December, represent the two basic ways that theater wound up on screen this year – the first a recording of a live Broadway production, the other a movie about Shakespeare.
Other recordings of live theatrical productions include “Waitress The Musical,” a capture of the 2016 Tony-nominated Broadway show, which is currently streaming on HBO Max, and “Frozen: The Hit Broadway Musical,” which (despite its title) captured a production on the West End, and is streaming on Disney+. “Hamilton: An American Musical,” a recording of the Broadway production with its original cast, which was initially streamed during the pandemic on Disney+, was re-released in cinemas in September, in celebration of the show’s tenth anniversary on Broadway
Other films of shows that originated on Broadway were adaptations that made changes big and small, including of course Wicked, which opened last November and is now streaming on HBO Max, and Wicked: For Good, which opened in cinemas this November; as well as “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” released in October and now available to rent or purchase online, and “The Piano Lesson,” currently on Netflix.
“Hedda,” released in October and currently streaming on Amazon Prime, is so different from “Hedda Gabler,” the Ibsen play that inspired it – this Hedda is a Black woman in 1950s England – that it’s officially called a “reimagining” rather than an adaptation.
And then there are the movies, like “Hamnet,” which have theater as their subject. These include “Griffin in Summer,” still in some cinemas and also streaming on Hulu and available for rent and purchase elsewhere online, which is a hilarious and knowing film about a super serious 14-year-old thespian who falls for his leading man. In “The Last Showgirl,” available on Hulu, Pamela Anderson portrays the star of a Las Vegas revue that’s closing after thirty years. In “Song Sung Blue,” opening in cinemas on Christmas Day, Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson portray two down-on-their-luck musicians who form a Neil Diamond tribute band (based on a true story.) In “Blue Moon,” which is still in some cinemas but also available for rent or purchase online, Ethan Hawke (brilliantly) portrays the lyricist Lorenz Hart on the night when his writing partner of 24 years, composer Richard Rodgers, has the biggest hit of his life, “Oklahoma!” – with a new lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II.
6. The Reinvention of Andrew Lloyd Webber
Two years after “The Phantom of the Opera” closed on Broadway after a thirty-five year, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical has been reborn as “Masquerade,” a work of immersive theater that is sensuous and you-are-there in a way that the earlier version was not. The approach that director Diane Paulus et al take in this intricate, intimate, interactive new production could well appeal to audiences who have never seen Phantom, or even those who saw it and didn’t care for it.
But of course, it’s reasonable to assume that the main audience for the show will be theatergoers who already know the musical well, given its many fans. That popularity is the very reason why “Masquerade” could conceivably serve as a model for an exciting, sustainable new wave of immersive theater in New York.
Whether or not immersive theater will experience a resurgence, Lloyd Webber’s old musicals are rather spectacularly entering a newly inventive stage. There was a hint of this last year with all those live videos in “Sunset Blvd.” There is more currently in London with an immersive version of “Starlight Express,” and a production of “Evita,” where Rachel Zegler on a balcony of the London Palladium,sings “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” while the paying customers have to watch her performance on live video.
And “CATS: The Jellicle Ball,” which ran last year during the first season of the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center, is opening on Broadway in April a reimagining of Lloyd Webber’s adaption of t.s eliot’s poem as a vogueing competition rooted in the tradition of Harlem drag balls among LGBT people of color.
7. The Year of Stephen Schwartz
This year, Stephen Schwartz repeats the feat he last accomplished as 28-year-old wunderkind half a century ago — three musicals running in New York at the same time. There is a difference. All three of his hits in the 1970s were hits on Broadway. One of the three this time, The Queen of Versailles, closed quickly; another, “The Baker’s Wife” was Off-Broadway. On the other hand, “The Baker’s Wife” was acclaimed, a reclamation of a show that was thought to be unfixable. Schwartz’s third show, “Wicked,” is one of the longest-running shows on Broadway ever – and it’s just generated not one, but two, movies that are both box office blockbusters.
8. The Generational Transition Continues
Nicki Hunter became the new artistic director of Manhattan Theatre Club, succeeding Lynne Meadow, who has served as MTC’s artistic director for over five decades; Meadow is not leaving. She is taking on a new role as artistic advisor.
Lear deBessonet also took over Lincoln Center Theater from André Bishop, who led it since 1992 and Evan Cabnet took over Second Stage from Carole Rothman, from Second Stage Theater, who co-founded it in 1979, Christopher Ashley will take over Roundabout in 2026, three years after the death of Todd Haimes, who ran the theater for 40 years. (Scott Ellis has been serving as interim director.)
These four non-profit theater companies – MTC, Lincoln Center, Second Stage, and Roundabout – all own at least one Broadway theater.
9. The Future of Storytelling is Now
Several recent books offer a glimpse into what’s going on under the radar (such as at the Under the Radar festival, but occasionally on Broadway, one example this year being the incorporation of screens in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” starring Sarah Snook as 26 characters, another being the streaming of “Punch” into theatergoers’ homes simultaneous to the live production on a Broadway stage.) The new methods of storytelling include, but are not limited to, the incorporation of new technology into the theatrical arts.
In “The Future of Storytelling: How Immersive Experiences Are Transforming Our World” Charles Melcher describes some 50 examples of what he calls “living stories” which he describes as “participatory, multisensory, interactive and highly personal.” Theater is inextricable to many of them. Both Melcher and E.M Hunter in “Acting the Part: Audience Participation in Performance,” use Punchdrunk’s “Sleep No More,” which concluded its run in New York in January after 14 years, as a prime example.
Doug Reside, the curator of the Billy Rose Theater Collection at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, provided a larger context for the interplay between theater and technology in his book “Fixing the Musical.” The book is a clear-eyed if implicit dismantling of the myopic view of theater as an unchanging ancient art form that has defiantly survived despite competition from new-fangled lesser forms of entertainment. The book demonstrates instead how much theater has thrived (rather than just survived) because of (not despite) the way it has collaborated (not competed) with the evolving arts and tools of modern life.
10. A Brighter Way of Dimming
Last year, many in the theater community expressed outrage when just eleven of the 41 theaters on Broadway planned to dim their marquee lights in honor of Gavin Creel, a beloved performer who died at the age of 48.
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. The practice recently became more widespread and (Is it ridiculous to say?) more egalitarian.
So it was hard to understand the theater owners’ rationale for “partial dimming.” Were 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?
After much back and forth, a Broadway in Memoriam Committee was formed and came up with a solution:: Four times a year on the 2nd Tuesday of, March, June, September and December all 41 theaters will be dimmed to recognize multiple honorees – chosen on submission of names by community members who fill out this form.
The first ceremony took on June 10, 2025 at 6 p.m. when the 41 marquees of Broadway dimmed for Marshall Brickman, Richard Chamberlain, William Finn, Athol Fugard, Helen Gallagher, Gene Hackman, Quincy Jones, Linda Lavin, Merle Louise, Ken Page, Joan Plowright, Tony Roberts, Charles Strouse, and Lynne Taylor-Corbett.
The marquees dimmed for playwright Tom Stoppard on December 2, and again on December 9, the latter time with 14 other members of the Broadway community.
These stories are culled largely from my #Stageworthy posts, a weekly summary of theater news.
