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Today on Broadway: Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2025
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‘Romy & Michele’ announces closing, Ne-Yo to join ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ Sean Hayes in ‘Off-Broadway one-man show Since 2016, “Today on Broadway” has been the first and only daily podcast recapping the top theatre headlines every Monday through Friday.
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Welcome to Today on Broadway for Tuesday, November 18, 2025. I'm Broadway Radio's Matt Taneni. I am coming to you on my own for what I think is going to be the last day. Obviously last week Grace got married and then was celebrating with F4 a few days before she went back to work later in the week. And because I was in New York, my schedule was all wonky, so we didn't match up our schedule and I just told her, you go enjoy being a newlywed. And then Monday night she was actually at the New York premiere of Wicked for Good, so she wasn't able to record. But the plan as of now, knock on wood, is for Grace to be back tomorrow and we can get you back to your regularly scheduled programming. Now I'm going to run you through all of the news on my own today, but I still have the travelogue episode to bring you from all of the Off Broadway stuff that I saw and have not talked about from my trip last week. So head over to patreon.com broadwayradio broadwayradio.com patreon to hear that. Now, unfortunately, one off Broadway show that I am not going to have an opportunity to see is Romy and Michelle the Musical, because last night it announced that it will close its run on Broadway just a little over a month after opening. It will have played 15 previews and 40 regular performances when it closes up shop at Stage 42 on November 30, which is the Sunday after Thanksgiving. That means that you have two weeks to run over and see the show that stars Laura Bell Bundy and Kara Lindsay, along with some other familiar names like demaro, Darius R. Copes, Lauren Zacharian, Michael Thomas, Grant Jordan, Kai Burnett and more. Moving over to Broadway Yesterday was announced that Grammy Award winner Neo will make his Broadway debut, taking over the role of Davis in Hell's Kitchen from Tank. Tank had done the show previously, came back to do a little limited run. Obviously now it looks like he was just coming in to fill the gap between Chris Jackson Neo will begin performances on December 4th. Tank will exit the role on November 30th. Now, while Neo does not have any Broadway experience, he did play the Tin man in the Wiz Live on NBC a number of years ago. He also won the Masked Singer as the Cow. When I sent this press release over to our friend Oliver Henry Roth, who is a fellow devoted Masked Singer fan. His husband David is the production counsel for the Masked Singer as well. He was very excited. Figured he'd have to go back and see the show now because he's also a fan of Neo, but he is going to step in to the show to play Ali's estranged father Davis. The press release doesn't say how long he's going to be in the show, but I would imagine he will be there for at least a little bit of time. So if you want to check out Neo in the role, you can head over to the Shubert Theater. Sticking on Broadway we got some other pretty exciting news yesterday because the recent Broadway transfer of the play Liberation has announced that it will extend. The show had originally been scheduled to play through January 11th at the James Earl Jones Theater that has now extended a couple of weeks and is now scheduled to close on February 1st. The grosses have not been great for Liberation. I had hoped that we would see some sort of spike following the opening on October 28, which it got rave reviews, so hopefully those will start to trickle in. There is nothing else currently scheduled to be going into the James Earl Jones Theater. So if things do pick up, Liberation could I guess continue to extend deeper into Tony season, which would only help its opportunity to compete for Tony Awards. I think it is already a shoo in to get a Best Play nomination. Whether or not it wins, who knows. There's a ton of other things that have yet to open and we'll have the opportunity to take advantage of the spring opening that Liberation will not unless it extends things like Giant and and Dog Day Afternoon, the Ballisters as well. I'm not exactly sure how Becky Shaw, Marjorie prime or Every Brilliant Thing are going to be categorized if those will be new plays or slit into the classics designation, that'll make it a revival. But certainly the longer Liberation can go into the spring, the better it will impact its Tony chances going from Broadway to Off Broadway Yesterday it was announced that stage and screen star and two time Emmy Award winner Sean Hayes will return to the New York stage later this season. He will star in a new one man thriller from the great one man play playwright David Kael called the Unknown. It is about a writer on the edge that explores the fine line between fascination and obsession. It is going to be direct by Lee Silverman and it will begin performances on January 31st for a 10 week run that is scheduled to wrap up on April 12th. Of course could always extend as well. This will happen at Studio Seaview. When Seaview Productions announced that it was taking over the formerly tony Kaiser Theater, we knew that they would just be bringing heavy hitting shows with big stars. They've already had John Krasinski in a one man show, Prince F is playing there currently and then Jesse Eisenberg is doing a show on Dark Nights there and now Sean Hayes. So big time stars bringing shows over to Studio Seaview and I'm sure this is one that Grace is going to be really excited about. She loves David Kail shows. So looking forward to hearing more about this one. It certainly sounds like a role that ventures outside of what we normally see from Sean Hayes, which is, which is pretty exciting. We have seen him do a lot of different things, but generally a little bit more in the comedic range. But to see a thriller like this is fascinating. All right. Continuing with some news announcements from Monday yesterday the 25th annual Putnam County Spelling Bee took the opportunity of its opening night to announce an extension. It is now going to be playing Off Broadway at New world stages through April 12th. That is a pretty sizable extension. The show officially opened on Monday night. We'll talk about the reviews on tomorrow, tomorrow's episode. I'm glad because I did not have the opportunity to see it this past week when I was in town. I'm not exactly sure when I'm going to be back in town again, but I will definitely be back before April 12th and I think that if things continue to go well, it could extend from there as well. So really looking forward to having the opportunity to check out one of my favorite musical comedies of all time. So congratulations to them moving from Off Broadway to just the streets of New York. Yesterday, USA Today had an exclusive report that said that Tony Award winner and Wicked star Cynthia Erivo would be kicking things off for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on Thanksgiving morning that will air on NBC. Obviously the parent company of NBC is NBCUniversal, which also owns the Universal Studios, which is where Wicked comes from. So lots of overlap there. Eriva will deliver an opening number. We don't know what that necessarily means, but I would imagine it has something to do with Wicked. But who knows, Maybe not, as we've talked about before. There will be a number of Broadway shows that'll be performing as part of the parade. We will have Ragtime, Just In Time and Buena Vista Social Club as well as the Radio City Rockettes, Hunter X from K Pop, Demon Hunters, a ton of folks that have stage credits and all sorts of things. So this is a must watch for all theater entertainment lovers on Thanksgiving morning, November 27th. Once we get to Thanksgiving, it is not that far from a new year. And early in 2026 Tony Award winner Kelli O' Hara will be giving a one night only concert at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. Of course, she has done a number of shows at Lincoln Center, Light in the Piazza, South Pacific, the King and I. This will take place on January 12th. It is being called An Evening with Kelli O'. Hara. It'll be like I said, just one night only. Tickets will go go on sale tomorrow, November 19th for Lincoln Center Theater members and then on Friday the 21st for the general public. I would imagine she will be singing from a lot of the shows that she has done with Lincoln center over the years and probably some others as well. Maybe Days of Wine and Roses, things from some of her albums, Bridges of Madison county, who knows. But if you are Kelly o' Hara fan like our own James Marino I know is, check out those tickets when they go on sale later this week. All right, I have three videos to wrap up as recommendations. The first comes from the Tamron hall show. She had Aaron Morton, who is currently playing Martha Dunstock in the Off Broadway production of Heather's on the show. They chatted a little bit about how Aaron was kind of discovered she was a musical theater student and went viral on TikTok and now she's making her Off Broadway debut and then she sings the song that she sings in the show Kindergarten Boyfriend. So we have that if you wanted to see that video. Aaron is incredible and certainly one of the highlights of Heather's. Then on CBS Sunday Morning talking about all things of his career, but most importantly the Queen of Versailles, Stephen Schwartz talked about his career. We now have the extended interview from CBS Sunday morning. I'll link that in the show notes and I will say I didn't see Queen of Versailles, but I did see the Baker's Wife and it is absolutely delightful. So I will talk more about that in my travelogue episode. But the reviews for Queen of Versailles were not great. But I really, really, really enjoyed the Baker's Wife and I hope everyone has a chance to see that one and then finally the last video that I have comes to us from the national tour of Beauty and the Beast. When the show was at the Tennessee Performing Arts center last Friday, they had a special guest join them for the curtain call. And that was the original Belle in Beauty and the Beast on Broadway as well as the voice of Megara in Hercules, the one and only Tony nominee Susan Egan. She came out surprised. The audience did a duet with Kyra Belle Johnson, who is playing Belle in this national tour. We have video of the rehearsal and the post show performance performance if you want to check that out. 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, oddwayradio. If you want more Broadway radio, head over to patreon.com broadwayradio thanks for listening. Have a wonderful Tuesday and we'll be back to talk to you tomorrow.
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