Cara Joy David - Page 2

Many folks have read in the last couple of weeks that Broadway is suffering from a suburban theatergoer drought. That is true. Two things are important to note related to that. First, this impacts more than simply pure overall attendance numbers. Second, this isn’t totally unique to New York.

Last year, I spent a lot of time at stage doors. I wanted to write about what it was like. I wrote about my experience at the stage doors of straight plays and the installment about musicals was supposed to follow quickly thereafter but kept getting bumped. I could not let it sit too far into 2024 however, so here it is.

Almost everyone in North America has heard of Cirque du Soleil. The Canadian entertainment company that produces an odd hybrid of circus, acrobatics, and dance performance has several touring shows and resident productions in Las Vegas. But there is only one Cirque du Soliel dinner theater experience and it is in Mexico.

Late last season a musical came to Broadway from an unusual tryout city with a marketing campaign tied to a fruit. Shucked will leave Broadway in a month, though seemingly not because of either of the oddities I just mentioned.

We all know regional theater is in trouble. One of my favorite companies, the Lookingglass Theatre Company, is in the middle of a semi-pause while it assesses how to produce live theater in this new world. But this coming Friday, its Lookingglass Alice will air on PBS.

Gutenberg! The Musical! has been one of the few 2023-2024 season bright spots at the box office. And I admit, it has outpaced my expectations. But, it’s almost 20 years old, and so the Tony Awards Administration Committee has deemed it should compete in the Best Revival category.

As his Here Lies Love played its last week of performances on Broadway, producer Hal Luftig scored a significant victory in court. The Bankruptcy Court of the Southern District of New York recommended confirming the reorganization plan for Hal Luftig Company, Inc.

New York energy company Con Edison, a longtime local supporter of the arts, is the latest corporation to back away from funding them. Dwindling local corporate giving has been a problem across the country, as I’ve previously written. But this Con Ed move is surprising given that the company reinforced its dedication to the arts in recent years.

This week we learned the last Broadway performance of Here Lies Love would take place on November 26. To some, it seemed rather shocking that a show that took so long to get here would run for so short a time.

It is a rare week when two topics related to set design interest me. But that is what happened last week. The first topic involves social media and AI. The weekend before last, people kept sending me a TikTok clip or related posts about The Wiz allegedly using AI to generate its “backdrops.” The second topic involves a terminology change.

Bill Kenwright, who passed away last week, was an old-school dedicated leader. He committed totally to his projects. He knew more about them than anyone. And he often knew more about other people’s projects than even the people involved with those projects.

Last week, London’s National Theatre announced that starting in February 2024, select Tuesday and Thursday performances for new productions will begin at 6:30pm. Is it a good idea? Should the West End or Broadway adopt 6:30pm curtains? It’s hard to know, but it could pay off.

This week, I’m going to answer a couple of questions I received in the past few weeks. I wrote in my column a couple of weeks ago about the change in ticket buying habits. Post-pandemic Broadway research has shown people buying tickets later. The question posed to me was: 'Why?'

Last week the venue for the 77th Tony Awards was announced—The David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. For the second year in a row, we will have a new venue for theater’s biggest award show. And those I spoke to in the industry were split on the choice.

Grumbling in the industry was this season would have fewer musicals. Shows were taking longer to receive their full capitalization. Many musicals were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars per week. Attendance was down. Buying habits had changed. In other words, it didn’t feel like a particularly hospitable time to launch a Broadway show.

Last week, Forbes ran a piece about the Nederlander Organization, Broadway's second biggest landlord, leaving Ticketmaster. The piece was fairly light on details, so confusion spread, and I read a bunch of incorrect takes. This piece (filed well before sundown Sunday) is my attempt to provide some clarification.

In May, I promised a series of stage door behavior stories. And then there were a lot of more timely stories to report on and, unfortunately, the next installment in the series got pushed. But now I can finally do the second installment, on plays.

This past week, an auction was launched to sell off what was left of Bay Area Children’s Theatre. It is part of the bankruptcy proceeding—most of the theaters that folded managed to do it before the court needed to get involved, but not BACT.

In recent years, the number of theater-related lawsuits has shot up. I’m going to give you updates on a couple of cases.

We have long talked about how the UK has more of a theatergoing culture; how government support is greater there. This idea was only further solidified when the West End rebounded quicker than Broadway. But anyone actually looking closely knows UK theater is undergoing its own collapse.