Matt Timine (0:01)

Welcome to Today on Broadway for Wednesday, January 8, 2024 on Broadway radio is Matt Timine. I'm flying solo today because Grace is off being Grace and doing fancy things and there's not a whole lot of news today, so I'm going to plow through it really quickly for you. We are starting with something that actually overlooked for yesterday's show. And this is the incredible casting for the upcoming Lincoln Center Theater Off Broadway production of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts. The show began performances on February 13th at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater and it will have an opening night on March 10th. We already knew that the adaptation was being penned by Irish playwright and screenwriter Mark O. Roe and is directed by Jack O'Brien. But the cast is incredible, especially if you do not have any problems with Nepo babies. Leading the company will be Lily Rabe and Levon Hawk. They will be joined by Ella Beatty, Hamish Linkletter and Billy Crudup. Now, I'm very sad that Grace is not here to talk about Billy Crudup because she absolutely loves, loves him and will do anything to have an opportunity to chat about him. But when we're talking about Nepo babies here, you've got Lily Rabe, who is the daughter of Tony winner David Rabe and the daughter of Tony nominee Jill Clayburg. Then you have Lavonne Hawke, who is the son of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. You have Ella Beatty, who is the daughter of Warren Beatty and Annette Benning. And then you have Hamish Linklater, who is the longtime partner of Lily Rape, but also the son of the head of the acting school at Columbia University. Really, the only non Nepo baby in this entire cast is Billy Crudup and he's the biggest star of them all. I personally don't have any. The, the whole Nepo baby conversation is irrelevant to me. I don't really care one way or the other. Obviously, when people are getting opportunities that they don't deserve or not talented enough for over people that do deserve it, that's a problem. But going into the same line of work that your parent or grandparent or relative or whatever is in is not a problem to me. Like, that is literally what most of this country was built on for a long time, kind of following in the footsteps of your parents. So that doesn't bother me at all. But nonetheless, this show centers on the long awaited return of Helena's son, Oswald, that is Lily Rabe and Levon Hawke. After spending years abroad, Oswald is now back and carrying with him a shocking secret. Alright, moving on to one of the best times to be in New York City. If you want to see as many shows as possible for as little money as possible, starting later this month, they will have the latest New York City Broadway Week. It is now a three week long program where you can get two tickets for the price of one to Broadway productions. It will run from January 21st through February 9th. The shows participating are and Juliet A Wonderful World, Aladdin Cabaret Chicago Cult of Love Death Becomes Her English Eureka Day, Gypsy, Hadestown, Hamilton, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Hell's kitchen left on 10th maybe happy ending MJ Moulin Rouge, Omari Redwood Romeo and Juliet 6 Sunset Boulevard the Book of Mormon, the Great Gatsby, the Lion King and Wicked. You can get more information in the show notes or go to nyctourism.com Speaking of ticket sales, yesterday we got the latest week of Broadway grosses data and they were certainly down from the Christmas week, but they were still very very good. In fact, Broadway had its best New year's week since 2017. Obviously there was pandemic related stuff in there, but it is nice to see that it is climbing back from where it was previously last year. For that final week of the calendar year Broadway was at $33,479,025.55. This year Broadway is up more than $11 million over that pre previous week there were 33 shows running to come in at $45,157,253. Attendance was at 290,640 people and the average ticket price was at $155.37. Again, those were all steep declines from Christmas week, but that's to be expected. The top grosser again continues to be Wicked, but that show came in at $3,294,179. That was still a far cry from the over4.5 million dollars the previous week. It was followed by the Lion King which was at almost exactly $2.8 million. That was down from the 4.2 million the previous week. Then we had Hamilton at just under 2.4 million, Aladdin at just under 2 million and the Outsiders at 1.9. Those shows were followed in sequential order by the Great Gatsby, Back to the Future, Cursed Child, MJ, Gypsy Sunset Boulevard all in Cabaret Moulin Rouge Suffs in its final week on Broadway, oh Mary and jul just seven performances romeo and juliet death becomes her elf just seven performances hell's kitchen the book of mormon just seven performances six hadestown and chicago. There were only eight shows on broadway last week that did not gross $1 million. One of those was english, which only had three preview performances. Another one was Cult of Love, which only had seven performances. Stereophonic, maybe. Happy Ending in Our Town were also over $900,000. So those all were very, very close and were boosted by the holidays for sure. So very nice to see all of those very filled Broadway houses. Speaking of which houses were filled last week, in total, out of Broadway's 33 shows running, 25 of them played to capacities of 90% or better at 100% were all in the Great Gatsby, Omar, Stereophonic and Wicked. Then we had and Juliet just a little bit over that. Hadestown, Hamilton and suffs was over 101%. Back to the Future was at exactly 102% in its final week on Broad. The Outsiders was a smidge over 102%. And Romeo and Juliet led the pack at 103.16% capacity. All right, we got some news out of Washington, D.C. yesterday when they announced the complete cast for the Arena Stage premiere of Sarah Silverman's musical the Bedwetter. It is directed by Anne Kaufman, and we already knew that the great Shoshana Bean would be playing Beth and Sarah Silverman's mother in the show. Aria Kane will be playing Sarah in the show. She had previously been on the North American tour of Frozen, which is interesting because the person who originally played that role off Broadway had been in the Broadway production of Frozen. Joining the production from the Atlantic Theater Company's Off Broadway run are Ashleigh Blanchett, Rick Crome and Darren Goldstein. They're all be reprising their roles of Miss New Hampshire, Dr. Grimm and Dr. Riley and Donald, respectively. Joining them will be Broadway favorites Liz Larson and Alicia Umphress, replacing Bebe Neuwirth and Ellen Marie Marsh from the Off Broadway run. The show will begin performances on February 4th and is scheduled to play through March 16th. There was a very interesting article from the Broadway Journal on Tuesday that looked into a very, very difficult audit that Off Broadway's Signature Theater has recently completed. Their accountants are actually concerned about the viability of Signature Theater continuing as a going concern, meaning that they're afraid that it could shut down, it could go bankrupt. All of those different things they lay out the issues that Signature is presented with right now. But one of the big problems is the fact that they stopped paying interest on a real estate loan back in March 2020 with the pandemic and have not yet begun to do that. Yet as of now they they have just under $20 million of deferred defaulted debt. In that case. One of the ways that Signature is trying to combat these issues is they have pulled back from producing eight shows about a decade ago to just three this year. They are also looking to bring in as many Off Broadway theater companies to rent out spaces in the Signature Theater center as they can. We already know that the new group has done a lot of their shows there for a while now, and in the article Signature says that it has signed a deal with an unnamed Off Broadway company to have a long term production partnership for that company to do its shows there. While Signature did not specify who that was, Philip Boroff who runs the Broadway Journal did report that that is second Stage as we know that they will leave the Tony Kaiser Theater after this season while still hanging on to the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway. So this is a an ongoing issue. Grace and I talk about this quite a bit, but the not for profit theater community both in New York and around the country have been devastatingly hit by the pandemic where not only have people stopped coming to the theater as often, but they have also stopped giving to theaters as much as they have before. And that has also not been offset by any additional funding by federal, state, local, municipality governments trying to make sure that those arts organizations which as we know drive incredible amounts of revenues from taxes wherever they are, they really haven't done a whole lot to try to keep them afloat. So hopefully the Signature in all theaters in similar situations are able to figure something out in the short term while they work on the larger institutional issues that are happening throughout the art space. All right, we have a couple feel good recommendations here and the first is from Caroline Bowman who is going to make probably her only appearance as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard this Sunday at 3pm she is the standby for Norma Desmond, but as we know she's getting ready to leave the show at some point to go do Smash. Her only scheduled date as of now is the matinee on Sunday, January 12 at 3pm she posted a little rehearsal video of her singing as if we never said good bye. I know Grace will be there. I wish I could be there. I love Caroline and excited to see her in Smash and would love to see her as Norma. But nonetheless, here's a little Instagram video that you can check out in the show notes and the other feel good recommendation is a bunch of performance videos from this year's Red Bucket Follies. We have the complete opening number. We have performances from Back to the Future and the Lion King. There's also all of the breakdown as to to which shows were the best fundraisers and all of those things. So if you want to check out all of the details about the red bucket follies 2024, head over to the show notes. All right, that's all that we have for today. Thanks for listening to Today on Broadway. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Rodrigue, you can follow me on Instagram @bww. Matt. All right, have a wonderful Wednesday and we'll be back to talk to you tomorrow.