Broadway is the pinnacle of the commercial theater, a billion-dollar cultural enterprise and a jewel of New York City. So why is it run like a Christmas tree farm?
I don’t mean that it invites too much tinsel. I mean that it operates at a very low hum for 10 months of the year and then goes into a two-month frenzy of product dumping.
This year, 18 shows, more than half of the season’s entire output, will open on Broadway in March and April — 12 in just the last two weeks before the Tony Awards cutoff on April 25. Like the film industry in December, angling for Oscars before its end-of-year deadline, theater producers bet on the short memory of voters (and a burst of free publicity on the Tonys telecast) to hoist their shows into summer and beyond.
From a business standpoint, this is obviously unwise. Instead of maintaining a drumbeat of openings throughout the year — as Hollywood, with hundreds of releases, can do despite its December splurge — Broadway, with only 30 to 40 openings in a typical season, keeps choosing to deplete the airspace, exhaust the critics and confuse the audiences with its brief, sudden, springtime overdrive.
Of course, I shouldn’t care about the business standpoint; I’m one of those soon-to-be-exhausted critics. Please pity me having to see a lot of shows from good seats for free.
But regardless of the as-yet-unjudgeable merits of the work, I find myself enthusiastic about the glut. I might even argue for more.
Look closer at those 18 March and April openings. Eleven are musicals, from every far corner of the form. Do you like a pure jukebox show, repurposing the catalog of a 1980s pop rock act? Then welcome “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” featuring songs made famous by Huey Lewis and the News. Also in the jukebox neighborhood is “Hell’s Kitchen,” Alicia Keys’s quasi-autobiography in soul, hip-hop and R&B, transferring to Broadway after a successful run at the Public Theater this winter.
Three other musicals marry original scores by folk-pop musicians to classic emo stories. “The Notebook,” based on the Nicholas Sparks novel and the Rachel McAdams-Ryan Gosling weepie, has songs by Ingrid Michaelson. The folk duo Jamestown Revival, working with Justin Levine, provides the words and music for an adaptation of “The Outsiders,” based on the S.E. Hinton coming-of-age novel. And PigPen Theater Co., a seven-man indie-folk troupe, sets “Water for Elephants,” based on the Sara Gruen circus romance, to song.
Another three shows — “Lempicka,” “Suffs” and “The Great Gatsby” — emerge from a more traditional musical theater ethos, even if their subjects are also more daring than usual. “Lempicka,” featuring songs by Matt Gould and Carson Kreitzer, is about the scandalous painter Tamara de Lempicka; “Suffs,” by Shaina Taub, is about the fight for women’s suffrage. And I suppose “The Great Gatsby” is daring because who would dare take on a novel everyone was forced to read in high school?
For the record, the songwriters Nathan Tysen and Jason Howland are the darers. But so is Florence Welch, without her Machine; her version, with a book by Martyna Majok, is a likely arrival next season.
With so many new musicals filling the bigger Broadway houses, there are fewer revivals than in years past. But they too are an important part of a resilient cultural ecosystem, and it helps that the three opening in March and April, each from a different decade, offer a spectrum of musical styles. “Cabaret” (1966) features a classic Kander and Ebb score, inflected with the sound of its late-Weimar Berlin setting. “The Wiz” (1975), a Black revamp of “The Wizard of Oz,” is crammed with infectious funk and soul. And the Who’s “Tommy” (1993) represents the lineage of Broadway rock opera, with its belting instead of bel canto.
Is there something missing, then, among the musicals? Yes. I don’t see any examples of what I call nerdicals: small-scale, low-key, powerful works like “Fun Home,” “The Band’s Visit” and “Kimberly Akimbo.” Perhaps “Days of Wine and Roses,” which opened in January, has already taken that spot for this season.
Or perhaps that spot will be taken, in a way, by “Stereophonic,” David Adjmi’s play, seen Off Broadway at the end of 2023, about a rock group a lot like Fleetwood Mac making an album a lot like “Rumours.” It has all the things I look for in a nerdical and, with its songs by Will Butler, is halfway there already.
The other crunchtime plays are an ideal mix of old and new. Representing the old are two 19th-century classics (Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” starring Jeremy Strong, and Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” starring Steve Carell) as well as a more recent revival (John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt”). The new plays range from the domestic (“Mother Play,” by Paula Vogel) to the global (the British import “Patriots,” about Putin and his oligarchs), with a stop in between at the tragi-cosmic — Amy Herzog’s harrowing “Mary Jane.”
That leaves us lacking (as usual) a great comedy. Not to worry: The comedy will likely come from the sight of so many first-nighters, Broadway completists and Tony voters flitting red eyed from theater to theater.
And it could be worse — or, I sometimes think, better. In the 1937-38 Broadway season, not atypically for the period, 139 shows opened. Granted, you may not recognize most of them: “Roosty,” anyone? The four-performance revival of “Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines”? But their quick failures helped make room for the few works we still value, like “Our Town” and “Of Mice and Men.”
The past argues that a properly functioning commercial theater must offer more shows, even stinkers, not fewer. Ideally, they would be better spread out; October’s a lovely month, too. Yet in a way, the March-April compression helps us experience the thrill of plenty. It reminds us that a healthy crop requires variety and quick turnover — as any farmer (except one selling Christmas trees) might tell you.
