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Welcome to Today on Broadway for Thursday, January 15, 2026. I'm Broadway Radio's Matt Tamneti. I am coming to you because of the last two days we have gotten two announcements that have somewhat reshaped a little bit of the spring season on Broadway. The first one came to us on Wednesday when we got an announcement about what show would be taking over the James Earl Jones Theater following the run of Liberation. I have been dropping a little bit of teases about this because we did know this was coming. It will be the Broadway premiere of Lindsey Ferrantino's play the Fear of Thirteen and as the show did in London last year, it will star two time Oscar winning actor Adrien Brody. He of the never ending acceptance speeches is who I was referencing a number of times in the teases for this. The show will begin performances at the James Earl Jones Theater on March 19 and is currently scheduled to have an opening night on April 15. They are saying it will play into July, but we don't exactly have a closing date as of yet. Now the one major bit of news about this that we didn't know coming over from London is the fact that starring opposite Adrien Brody will be film and television actress Tessa Thompson, who is incredible. She played the title character in the film adaptation of Hedda Gabler that came out last year called Hedda. She can currently be seen on Netflix's his and hers, which I've heard is really great. I saw Grace posting about how incredible that series is. Both Brody and Thompson will be making their Broadway debuts in the show and they will be directed by David Cromer, who is never not in demand but always excited to have him looking at a new piece of work. The show is based on a documentary by David Sington about a man falsely accused of murder who is on death row. The production is partnering with the Innocence Project to aim to support this vital work and provide audiences with meaningful ways to take action beyond the theater. The official plot description of the show says the fear of 13 tells the extraordinary true story of Nick Yaris, who spends more than two decades on death row for a murder he insists he did not commit. Through a series of prison visits with a volunteer named Jackie, Nick traces a life shaped by impulse and consequence. As Nick and Jackie's conversations deepen, the line between witness and participant blurs, forcing both to confront what justice demands, what belief requires, and the perilous distance between true freedom and the illusion of self determination. By turns devastating, darkly funny, and life affirming, the fear of 13 is a powerful exploration of truth and trust, conscience and connection. So with that announcement, I was able to officially fill in the last open spot on my spreadsheet for the spring Broadway season. Meaning that we, of course, now know every show that's going to be on Broadway this season. Every single house will be spoken for. Of course, that was true for about 24 hours until, somewhat surprisingly, on Thursday morning we got word that Hell's Kitchen is going to wrap up its run on Broadway. Almost two years after officially beginning performances, they will now close at the shubert Theater on Feb. 22. By the time the show closes, it will have played almost 800 performances. And coming back to rejoin the company is original cast member Brandon Victor Dixon, who will return to the role of Davis on January 27th and will play the final 3ish 4 weeks of the run. The show has been doing fairly well in terms of grosses, not great, but it never got more than 1.8 million and is regularly in that $1 million mark. But it has been going downwards recently. Last week, with the grosses that I talked about yesterday, it did only $828,000, which is reportedly under its weekly operating cost as of now, unless something changes between today and the end of the run, the closing cast and addiction to and Victor Dixon will include Amanda Reed as Ali, Kelsey Kimmel as Jersey, Yolanda Adams as Ms. Liza Jane, and Lamont Walker the second as Nuck. Now, of course, when you get an announcement like this this late, and I've been telling you for a while now, like it doesn't seem like we're going to have any other shows closing that hadn't previously been announced. Everything that was planning to close in January we heard of a while back so that you could really focus on selling tickets. So it's unusual for things to announce closing in January, especially things that have been running for as long as Hell's Kitchen has. But with a closing date on February 22, you look at that, and what that means to me is that the Shubertz are likely kicking them out of the Shubert Theater. And the closing date of February 22nd gives them as long as possible to ramp up, try to get people back in for the last time to make a little bit of money off of the closing announcement, but still give them time to load out and and then a new show to load in. So I've tried to do some digging as to what could possibly be the shows that might take over the Shubert. As of now, nobody seems to really know, although I will talk about what I've heard more than anything else. But I've heard things like Wanted, we already know they want to come to Broadway. We have the Dolly musical that we haven't heard much about in a while. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil we haven't heard much about in a while. Griswold's Broadway Vacation. I've seen a lot of Ken Davenport videos recently popping up on social media, so I don't know if he's really trying to grease the wheels for that. Then there's some other shows that have been a little bit more under the radar. We have the Heart and Three Summers of Lincoln that were out I think both at La Jolla recently that I know want to come to Broadway. And then the one that I've heard most often discussed is Galileo, which I believe Raul Esparza did out in California for a tryout in the last year or so as well. That's the one that I'm hearing popping up quite a bit. The other thing that makes me a little bit more nervous is the fact that we have kind of seen this story before with the Schuberts kind of forcing out shows to bring in potentially a Scott Rudin produced show. We saw it with John Proctor is the villain in favor of Little Bear Ridge Road. And could Scott Rudin be trying to flex his muscle and and take over the Shuberto house that he has had shows in many, many times before? I don't know. I haven't heard anything about that. That is just speculation. The thing I've heard most, as I said, is Galileo. But you know, there doesn't really seem to be a front runner for best musical right now. I think the front runner is Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York. But it's not like a runaway by any means. And so The Schubert at 1460 seats isn't like the biggest musical house, but it's probably a little too big for a play unless you're coming in with a huge star to fill that house. Especially when there's not a significant amount of lead time to begin performances in late March, early April. So I would imagine that a musical is going to go in there very well could be wrong. But with so much volatility in the musical categories for this season, anything that comes in really has a fairly decent shot of getting some nominations and if it's good, potentially even snagging some awards. So if I had to guess, I think it will not only be a musical, it'll be a new musical. And we will get an announcement relatively soon. I mean, it is January 15th as we're talking. I don't think they'll announce it this week, but I could see something coming as early as Monday, an announcement to try to get people to start buying tickets. You want to have as much lead time as humanly possible to spread the word and to build up in advance. A fairly unusual thing thing here to announce a closing five weeks out, you know, halfway through January. But that generally means that there is something coming in and we will just have to wait and see what happens. All right. There has been a ton of other news, especially on the casting front and as you probably saw, a very famous popular duo reuniting on stage. And if it wasn't going to be a year and a half from now, I would have done a special standalone episode that earlier this week. But since that is not going to happen until summer of 2027, I will save that for this week on Broadway, along with casting at Hadestown and original Hadestown stars reuniting in another show together. So I'll have all of that information and more on this Sunday's last week on Broadway. So make sure that you're subscribing to us on Patreon to get that before everyone else or you can get it in the regular feed on Monday. Anyway, that is all that I have for you today. Thanks for listening. We will talk to you soon and I'll see you at the theater. Sam.