Matt Tamaneni (0:01)

Welcome to Today on Broadway for Monday, April 7, 2025. I'm Broadway Radio's Matt Tamaneni. I am getting ready to check out of my hotel here in New York City to wrap up my trip. And if you've been following along over on Patreon, I've released two different travelog episodes so far covering I don't know how many, seven, eight, nine shows at this point. I will have one more coming up next week that not only has my weekend shows but also has things that had not yet opened by the time I saw them, so I had to hold for reviews. That includes Boop. The Last five Years, Good Night and Good Luck Purpose and Sondheim's Old Friends. So it'll probably come after Old Friends opens later this week. We will get to that in our schedule. But because this episode of Today on Broadway is coming out after the review embargo for the last five years, I will have my vague thoughts at the end of this episode and I'll dive into them much more obviously in the travelogue episode. So if you want to hear all about every show that I saw in New York over this eight, nine day period, head over to patreon.com broadwayradio broadway radio.com patreon and subscribe at the Mezzanine Tier or above. So as we are getting ready to record over in London, they are preparing for the Olivier Awards. Those will happen later this evening in the UK afternoon here in the States. So we will have all of that in tomorrow's episode. So pay attention there. But we do actually want to start with news coming to us from London and that is that the Cate Blanchett, Tom Burke and Emma Coren production of Seagull. The Seagull, they took the article out of the beginning of that title for some reason is planning a move to New York. And this comes to us from Baz Bama Boy of Deadline. The show actually wrapped up its run at the Barbican Theater on Saturday and is already looking to come to New York City in 2026. How and where? We'll get to that in a second. But this is a production that is from the director Thomas Ostermaier and he co wrote the script or co adapted this script with Duncan McMillan. And what's interesting about this production that they update the script regularly. Apparently from performance to performance they can add in lines based off of things that are happening in the world. Apparently just this past week on Thursday night, Jason Watkins, who plays Soren, has a line where he references the high tariffs that he has to pay for the produce that is coming from his his farm, obviously referencing the tariffs that were announced by the Trump administration the day before. That line was not there apparently the previous week. So they are updating this show in real time to make it as current as humanly possible. Of course, though, this is based on Chekhov, so this is a show that is not a modern show, but they are doing everything they can to make it feel modern. It is a current dress production. The adaptation obviously leans into issues with today's world, but what's interesting about this is it is at the Barbicon and the way that the show is set up is that it has a center section that goes out into the audience with semicircular seating around it. And previously when the show's star, Cate Blanchett was on the Late show with Stephen Colbert, she talked about wanting to come to somewhere like the Park Avenue Armory or Brooklyn Academy of Music for this production. The director's last two productions of Hamlet and Richard III both played at bam, so that would make sense. Of course, Baz does note that the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln center also has a very similar seating arrangement, so that could be a possibility. But because Cate Blanchett and Emma Corin and Tom Burke and everybody are fairly big stars, especially Cate Blanchett and Emma Corin, they can't do the show anytime until 2026. They did not say whether that would be winter, spring, summer, fall, whenever. But somewhere in 2026, the show is planning on coming to New York. Whether that is on Broadway, off Broadway, in Brooklyn, uptown, wherever, we don't know. But anytime someone like Cate Blanchett is bringing a show to New York, it is going to be a hot ticket. So keep your eyes and ears peeled for that one. All right, let's dive into this week's upcoming theater schedule. And it's actually not nearly as jam packed as some recent weeks were because this last wave of Broadway shows have been in previews, although we do have one starting previews this week and some of the openings will be kind of clumped together at the end of month. Although we do have two openings this week. So I'll focus on the Broadway stuff. Of course, I'll have links for everything in the show notes. But I do want to mention that tonight down at the New York Theater Workshop, Becoming Eve officially opens. That is the new play by Emil Weinstein, based on a memoir by Abby Shava Stein and directed by Tyne Raffaelli, that features Tommy Dorfman, Judy Kuhn Tedra Millan, Richard Schiff and Brandon Uranowitz heard a lot of great things about this one. And then on Tuesday we have our next Broadway opening. This one will come to us from the Manhattan Theater Club where Stephen Sondheim's old friends will officially open. Coincidentally, I am seeing that as of recording time in just a few hours. So very excited to see this incredible group of stars led by Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga, along with Kate Jennings Grant, Bonnie Lankford, Beth Leavel, Jasmine Forsberg, Gavin Lee, Jason Pennycook, Joanna Writing, Jeremy Secombe, Kyle Selig, Daniel Yearwood and more. This is a limited run and is currently scheduled to play just through June 15th. I do think there is room for more extensions there based off of the interview that I did with Jasmine a couple weeks ago. So I've heard great things about this. I went to dinner with friend Deb Schrager, friend of the show, on Saturday night and they had just come from seeing it and said that it is much more fully staged than a lot of reviews are so looking forward to checking that one out. And of course you will hear my thoughts on it when it eventually opens over on the Travelogue episode. Then on Thursday we have another Broadway opening and this of course is Smash coming to us at the Imperial Theater. What a wild time to be living in a world in which Smash the musical is on Broadway. And I will note over at the souvenir store, I don't remember the name of it. I apologize. Over on 44th they actually have a Bombshell window card. I wanted to get it, but it's just hard for me to take that home and not get it destroyed. But it is promotional materials for this show, but it is a poster of Bombshell, so if you're interested in that, head over to that merchandise store and you can pick that up. But this of course is based off of the television show of the same name and features a score by Scott Whitman and Marc Shaiman, a book by Rick Ellis and Bob Martin, and it is directed by Susan Stroman and choreographed by Joshua Bergace. The cast is littered with fantastic stars, just in alphabetical order, with some of them Jacqueline B. Arnold, Brooks Ashmanskas, John Bauman, Caroline Bowman, Bella Coppola, Casey Garvin, Robin Herder, Christy Nielsen, Krista Rodriguez, and more. I've heard it's just a wild time in the theater. It might not all make sense. It might be messy and it might be a little sloppy, but it's fun and I think that's really all that we can hope for. Also happening on Thursday night down in Brooklyn at the theater for a new audience. We have the Off Broadway premiere of Wole Soynika's the Swamp Dwellers, so you can get more information about that. It is just running through April 20th. And then at Playwrights Horizons we have the first preview on Thursday night for Ryan J. Haddad's new show, Hold Me in the Water. He both wrote it and performs it. It's directed by Danny Sharon and is running through May 4th. Then on Friday we have the first preview for the Off Broadway production of Ceremonies in Dark Order, Old Men, which is being led by Norm Lewis. This is a rarely produced show by Lon Elder III and is directed by Clinton Turner Davis. It is playing at the Theater at Saint Clements through May 18th. Then on Saturday we finally get the last show of this Broadway season to take the boards. And that of course, is Dead Outlaw that will be beginning performances at the Longacre Theater on Saturday and is going to open just on April 27th. So a very short preview period for this show. But of course, this entire cast and company did this show off Broadway last season, so they are coming back into a show that they know very well. It features a book by it, Tomara Moses, and a score by David Yazbeck and Eric Della Penna. It is directed by David Cromer, who is very busy this season because he just opened Goodnight and Good Luck on Broadway last week. So he is bouncing back and forth between two new shows. I don't think David is going to be nominated for Good Night and Good Luck, although I thought that his staging of that show was incredibly subtle and perfect for what that show needed. But I do expect that he's going to be much lauded for this when it comes to Tony season, as he was off Broadway. But the cast features Jeb Brown, Eddie Cooper, Andrew Durand, Dashiell Eves, Julian Nettle, Ken Marks, Trent Saunders and Tom Sesma. This one is going to be really the only competition in my mind for or maybe happy ending. It's going to come down to those two shows in terms of who is going to win the Tony for best Musical. Both of them are kind of the smaller, more artistic, more innovative shows that we have seen win the Tony in recent years, I mean, in the last decade or so. So this is exciting. I did not see it off Broadway. I have avoided the audible recording of it because I wanted to see it live. So I cannot wait to see this one in May and kind of looking forward to this race to see how these two smaller kind of weird shows stack up against each other. Then on Sunday, we have an opening Off Broadway from the Irish Repertory Theater of Irishtown. And then we also have a closing Off Broadway of American at 59 East 59th. All right, real quick, have some showing. Casting news. On Thursday, we found out that Lucas Hedges and Zoe Winters have joined the production of Sissy at Baryshnikov Arts. They are stepping in for the previously announced Christopher Abbott and Alia Shawkat, who had to depart the production for scheduling conflicts, but they are still joining the incredible Marisa Tomei. In this run, there are only a handful of performances. It's going to be from April 24th through the 26th. And it is written, directed and choreographed by Celia Rolson Hall. And it is a kind of a dance focused reimagining of the Sisyphus myth from Greek mythology in which Sisyphus, or in this case Sissy, is a pregnant woman whose rock is sometimes the moon and sometimes a disco ball. Then we found out coming up on Monday, a week from today, there will be a reading of a new play called Gods of Mercy by Joshua Owens. It'll happen on the Lower east side at Teatreletea and it is directed by Sami Zyle and the cast features great star of television Timothy Busfield along with Constance Shulman, Ethan Dubin and Rebecca Robles. The play follows Margaret, a biologist studying the dwindling population of birds on a remote Pacific island. She and her husband Greg have been alone on the island for months when retirees Bo and Darce crash their boat into a nearby reef. Their arrival shows cracks in Margaret and Greg's relationship, which are then torn wide open in the aftermath of a catastrophic storm surge. All right, as promised, I want to talk a little bit and just I say little bit because I am. I want to give my full thoughts into the show on the travelogue episode. But we did officially get the opening of the Last five years at the Hudson Theater on Sunday night. And I will say I left the Hudson theater angry. I left the show angry. And my anger was because while I think we can have a legitimate debate as to whether or not this show should be on Broadway or if it should be off Broadway where maybe they could have little shopped it and just kind of like had cool stars come in and do this show rotating every few months, but the fact that we have this show on Broadway and it is an underwhelming, I don't want to use the term disaster, but that's the first thing that comes to mind means that we're not going to get a first rate production in New York City of this show. For, for a while it's been, gosh, was the Betsy Wolf, Adam kanter production in 2014, 2016, something like that. It's been a while and we're not going to get another one. It'll probably be even longer than that. The show remains great. Like, the songs are still fantastic. And while I've got some little quibbles here and there with Adrian Warren's performance, she is so much better than everything else in this show that any issues I have are forgotten and don't matter whatsoever. And you might be thinking, oh, he's talking about Nick Jonas. And you know, Nick Jonas is Nick Jonas. You know what you're going to get with him. He sings it like he sings all of his pop songs. He's not a great vocalist. You knew that going in. Honestly, from this, he's not even a competent actor. But like, I, I don't know, I, I didn't expect him to be. I. He's fine. He doesn't sound bad in any of the songs. You know, I think some of those previews people were acting like he, he couldn't carry a tune. He's fine. He's not good. He's not awful, but he's not good. But he's fine, really. The issue with this production is the direction, which shocks me because as we've talked about a lot, like I've kind of adored a lot that Whitney White has done on and off Broadway. Ja Jazz African Hairbreading was one of my favorite shows of the 2023, 2024 season. And this just looks like she didn't do anything. It's, it's, it's a very, it seems like a very lazy production and there is no internal logic to what is going on in these scenes. This is a show that can be very complicated with, with timelines overlapping and going back and forth and bouncing here and there and nothing makes sense. It is just kind of a shockingly inept production, which honestly just kind of blew me away, to be honest with you. I expected Adrian to be great, the direction to be great, and Nick to be the weak link. And while Nick is by no means a strong link, he is not the weakest. And it is the direction, unfortunately. And I'll get into that a little bit more in my Patreon episode. But because this episode is coming out after the review embargo is up, I figured, figured I should at least throw that out there because I have had a lot of people ask me about this production because of the Jonas of it all, because people know that I love Adrian and I love this show. But I have started to hear rumors that despite the fact that it's not selling super well, like I would have thought for a Jonas Brothers show, it is looking to extend and replace these stars after their contracts are up. So who knows what's going to happen? I love, love the idea of kind of running through new stars. Like I said, if they would have little shopped this and kind of had people come in every few months, I think that would have been great. But this staging is a mess and it's really disappointing. So some of the people that I've heard rumored will probably get me to buy a ticket and come back, but it will be for them rather than for this production of a show that I love. All right, everybody, that's all that we have for today. Thanks for listening to today on Broadway. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can follow me on Instagram @bww. Matt, thank you for listening. Have a great Monday. Have a great week, and I'll be back to talk to you tomorrow.