Grace Aki (4:57)

Telling on the Sunday podcast, Grace Aki.

Matt Tamineni (5:00)

Grace, I want to let everybody know that I recently had a delightful conversation with star of both stage and screen Haven Burton, who is currently playing Ursula in the Paper Mill Playhouse's production of Disney's the Little Mermaid. She went deep into her love of Ursula and how much she wants to hopefully play this part in other villains in the future. But because it is something that I am not super familiar with, I also had to ask her about her more than decade long associ association with Pokemon. Are you a Pokemon person? Like you're of the generation I would think that like grew up on Pokemon, right?

Grace Aki (5:36)

Yeah.

Matt Tamineni (5:37)

Okay. Are you, are, are you familiar with Haven's like voice acting in Pokemon?

Grace Aki (5:44)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know she's been in Pokemon for a long time. And like I'm obsessed with her because when she was doing Shrek the Musical, I became obsessed with her because I also got to voice like Gingy and Fiona when she did the same because she was an understudy for Fiona. And so I'm just obsessed with her voice work in general. So it was really great to see her in how to Dance in Ohio. But I'm actually seeing Little Mermaid this weekend. So I'm very excited to see Haven. I'm obsessed with her. Like she, she does not know, but I am obsessed with her.

Matt Tamineni (6:11)

All right, Grace, before we dive into the news, something that happened last night on Tuesday night that we just didn't have an opportunity to talk about because of all of the Tony Awards stuff. But Broadway did its first communal light dimming as we've talked about their kind of redoing how they honor people who pass away from the Broadway community. Well, all 41 of the Broadway marquees dimmed on Tuesday night at 6:45pm and it honored a about a dozen ish people who passed away in the past quarter of a year. Those people included Marshall Brickman, Richard Chamberlain, William Finn, Athel Fugard, Gene Hackman, Linda Lavin, Helen Gallagher, Quincy Jones, Merle Louise, Tony Roberts, Ken Page, Joan Plowright, Charles Strauss, and Len Taylor Corbett. I hope that if you were in the theater community or in the theater district on Tuesday night that you were able to take a moment to remember all of those folks. All right, Grace, the big news on Tuesday came out of New York City center and this is something we, we love in encores. We love Encores seasons and it's important to remember that new artistic director over at Encores this season and it feels like to me that is a little bit different than the ones that we got under Lierre de Bessonnet. Jenny Gersten is the new artistic director and the season is really interesting. We're going to go in chronological order. It's going to start with their annual gala production that's going to run from October 29th, which is a perfect date for this show, through November 9th. And this is going to be the iconic cult classic musical Bat Boy, with a score by Lawrence o' Keefe and a book by Keith Farley and Brian Fleming that is going to be directed by the absolute perfect person to handle that one, Alex Timbers. Then we're going to dive into the encore season proper and we're going to start with the musical High Spirits, which feels like the quintessential old school Encores selection. This is a musical adaptation of Noel Coward's Blythe Spirit that was written by Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray. This production is going to from February 4th through February 15th and is going to be directed by Jessica Stone, which she's wonderful, we know that she is fantastic. But this show is not one that really has a huge life. This is not one that feels like, oh, this one's itching for a Broadway transfer. It premiered on Broadway in 1969, only ran for less than a year. And I know this feels a really smart, cool throwback to what Encores has done in the past. Then we're going to get the Michael, John lachiusa and George C. Wolf's production of the Wild Party that we had originally thought was going to be part of this past season. It had been pushed back and originally it was going to be directed by Sahim Ali. That is no longer the case. It is now going to be directed by Lily Ann Brown. It will run from March 18th through the 29th. But the big one from this announcement is the fact that they are going to cap the season from June 17th through the 28th, a little more than a year away from now with a production of La Cage aux Fall, directed by Robert o' Hara and starring Billy Porter as Albin. Maybe it's the Harvey Fierstein feel for vibes from the Tonys, but this just seems like great casting, a great opportunity. This will be an all black production of the show, so I think there's some really cool, interesting, fun casting opportunities there. But Billy Porter doing La Cage Grace just feels like, why hasn't it ever been done before, to be quite honest with you.

Grace Aki (10:04)

I think it's great. But there's always going to be a project like that, right. Where you're just like, how has this never been done? You know, down at Encores. I think this is great. Also there was, there was a pretty recent, I say recent, it was probably 20 years ago revival of it. So I think that this is a perfect time. And I love that Billy Porter's a part of it.

Matt Tamineni (10:20)

Yeah. And like Robin DeJesus played the maid butler and it was like Douglas Hodge was in it. Kelsey Grammer came in at some point. I forget who else was in that, but. Yeah, that's right. That wasn't too, too long ago. All right, so let's talk about numbers here, Grace, and not the grosses. That's going to be coming later. But we're going to start with talking about the ratings for the Tony Awards. There's been a couple announcements of ratings and how this happens is Nielsen will always put out the fast ratings, which is measuring just like the major markets. And then a day later they will do the. The full ratings. So on Tuesday we got the full ratings. And it turns out that year over year, the Tony awards increased by 44% in viewership. Last year they had 3.53 million viewers on average. Which is like spread over like how what's the average of the total number of people that were watching at any given time? This year it was bumped up to 5.1 million. This also marks a huge increase in terms of the key demographics. 25 to 54 is up nearly 100% at 99%. 18 to 49, which is like that key advertising demo was up 116%. It was the number one non sports program of the evening. So this is very, very good news. Obviously I would not be surprised if the Hamilton performance had a little bit to do with that grace. But the other thing that I think is important to note here is that with the continued degradation of traditional TV viewership, linear viewership, cable, satellite, over the air, broadcast stuff, a lot of these numbers are shifting over to streaming. And Paramount saw its highest ever live stream Tony awards up 208% over the previous year. So to see increases on both streaming and linear is pretty unus for something like this. But to know that there was a pretty strong audience across the board is very exciting and can only be a good thing for not only Broadway, but Tony's and theater and those shows specifically Grace. But that's not the only ratings information that we got, Grace, because on Friday, of course, CNN aired the live stream of the Broadway production of Good Night and Good Luck, but that was done literally live. But this one's a little different because of how many different ways that people could watch it. CNN made their stream of this available across all of its platforms, meaning that if you have access to CNN normally on cable satellite streaming, you could watch it 2.011 million people did it that way. They watched it in a normal way. However, CNN also took off its blackout from people watching it on the CNN website on the CNN app, which means that normally you have to authenticate your cable subscription to be able to watch it in those ways. That was no longer the case on Friday night because they felt very strongly that this was a story and this was a message that needed to be broadcast as widely as humanly possible. So whether or not you subscribe to CNN in one form or another, you could have watched it by downloading the CNN app on your smart TV or watching it on the website. It was also broadcast on CNN US and CNN International, which are channels that are available to states. In total, that brought its complete reach up to 7.34 million people. It was also streamed on Max, if you have the Max, soon to be once again HBO Max streaming service, which is bonkers because the show closed on Sunday, obviously. And during its shortish run on Broadway, only 155,000 people saw it on Broadway. So the opportunity, Grace, to have a Broadway show with a star of the caliber of George Clooney, but also with like kind of the. All of that brilliant direction and technical design and all of that stuff. But the fact that so many more people had the opportunity to see it via CNN than ever could have seen it on Broadway, like, that's pretty fantastic.

Grace Aki (14:25)

Yeah, like, I know that these. Listen, it's not cheap. I. The amount of money that it took to even make that happen is, is, you know, but they were, you know, they made a lot of money on the production, so they're able to do that. I. This is super exciting. And again, like, I think that a lot of times when people introduce the concept of, you know, airing a live capture or, you know, any kind of, you know, capture of a Broadway show, people freak out because they think, oh, well, then nobody will go. There are hundreds of thousands of millions of theater goers across the country that cannot make it into Manhattan for whatever reason. It doesn't always have to do with like not wanting to buy a ticket or not being able to, et cetera. It's a lot of other factors. So this was just an amazing opportunity. I also think that it works because that story in and of itself is by nature about television and about accessibility to the news. So there's really no better partnership in my mind than this one.

Matt Tamineni (15:21)

All right, let's take a break from the news real quick to talk about one of our sponsors for this week, Cash App. Now that things have kind of slowed down, we are getting into the summer season where vacations are going to be happening, traveling will be happening. I'm going on a cruise with my sister and nephew this weekend. Grace, I don't know what you have, but hopefully some sleep and some relaxation is involved. But as you start to go out and visit friends and family around the country, there is inevitably going to be opportunities where you owe somebody money or they owe you money. You split gas or you split a meal, or you owe somebody for a hotel room. If you need to figure out how to do that without having to carry around hundreds of dollars in cash of varying denominational bills. Sign up for Cash App. It is incredibly easy. All you have to do is download it, enter either your phone or email address, some other basic information, and that's it. You don't need to connect your bank account in any way. It is completely safe. And when you do have to send or receive money, there's no waiting. It shows up. It's right there in your account right away. You don't have to wait for days. It is the safest, easiest, most secure way to send or receive money. And I could not recommend it more.

Grace Aki (16:30)

Yeah, one of the things that we always run into as people that love to yap and gather and share drinks and food together is always this awkward thing of like, okay, who's covering this? How did we split it? What do we have to do? I personally, personally hate having that conversation. And so when you're able to use Cash App, you're able to actually make it really streamlined. It makes it possible for everybody to put in their contributions. You can send out personalized invoices, et cetera, et cetera, and you don't have to deal with all those other things. So that's why you want to use Cash App.

Matt Tamineni (16:55)

So for a limited time only, new Cash App users can use our exclusive code to earn some additional cash. For real. There is no catch. Just download Cash App and sign up. Use our exclusive referral code Broadway in your profile. Send $5 to a friend within 14 days and you'll get $10 dropped right into your account. Terms apply. That's money. That's Cash app. All right, we're going to continue the trend of talking about numbers, but I'm going to blow through last week's Broadway grosses fairly quickly. In total, again, 40 shows on Broadway, the grosses were up to $45,788,192, although attendance was down a smidge to 329,886 people and the average ticket price was at 100. Good Night and Good Luck went out on a record setting note. In its final week on Broadway, it did more money than any show which it was only competing against itself has ever done on Broadway. That was not a musical. It brought in $4,331,226. Similarly, Othello closed out on a very nice number at 3,807,875 bucks. There were three other shows north of $2 million. They were wicked, Glengarry Glen Ross and the Lion King. Hamilton was just a couple tickets away from doing that as well. The rest of the shows north of seven figures in descending order are the Picture of Dorian Gray in just seven shows, Death Becomes Her, Aladdin, Sunset Boulevard Just In Time, Buena Vista, Social Club, the Outsiders, oh Mary, maybe Happy Ending, mj, the Great Gatsby and rounding it out was Gypsy. Some of the shows that we are kind of keeping an eye on real women Curves actually saw a nice little $22,000 bump while Dead Outlaw saw an increase of over 38,000. Boop increased by about $62,000 and Smash was just under a $31,000 increase as well. In total, half of the shows on Broadway played to 90% capacity or more. The shows right at 100% were oh Mary, Othello and Wicked. Between 101 and 102% were Goodnight and Good Luck, the Outsiders and the Picture of Dorian Gray Between 102 and 103% were maybe happy Ending. Proctor is the villain and at 103.32% was just in Time. Now Grace, on yesterday's episode you talked about the fact that like all of your stat focused colleagues in the Broadway marketing and ticket selling communities were watching in real time what the impact of the Tony Awards did to ticket sales. Now this is similar, not the exact same, but probably has a very similar correlation to it. But in a report from Broadway World got they got some information from Spotify that showed that a couple of shows really saw phenomenal increases in terms of their cast album streaming following the announcement of their major awards. Maybe Happy Ending in the hour after it won Best musical saw ITS streams increase 270% in the United States. Similarly, Sunset Boulevard, after it won best revival, the West End recording of that show saw 175% increase on Spotify. In fact. In fact, the original Broadway cast of Sunset Boulevard saw a 485% increase in the US of streams on Spotify after that. Obviously because it's older, it probably had a much lower starting point for these numbers. But still pretty cool that these shows were getting some love on Spotify. Is there a correlation between music streams or video streams or YouTube streams or anything like that? Great. That shows directly up in the ticket sales data as well.

Grace Aki (20:45)

But it's, you know, it's kind of like arbitrary in terms of like, you know, those listens and those like ticket sales. Like they can all kind of attribute to this similar thing, but it's not always like a one to one of this show is trending more. I mean, think about like how often death becomes hers. Music is trending on social media right now because like several particular like snippets of songs were trending. But that doesn't always correlate to like, oh, because that sound is trending. There's an uptick, there might be an uptick in, you know, website clicks and then those website clicks turn into ticket sale clicks. Right. But I think that all of it, it all kind of has to feed into each other. And so I think that they do they all attribute in some way. But I don't think it's always like a one to one. You always want to look for, you know, those like social media visits. It's how many times did someone click on the link to go look at the website to go buy tickets? Did were you able to send like messaging out after they listened to those songs? Like it's all, it all kind of feeds into the same funnel. But I think it is interesting that they had so much listener ship in terms of Sunset Boulevard especially and maybe happy ending as well.

Matt Tamineni (21:50)

All right, before we wrap up the show, let's take a second to talk about one of our favorite sponsors, Factor Grace. I know that as people start to head out on vacations, head to the beach, they want to make sure that they are eating the healthiest, most nutrient packed meals that they possibly can. Not only because they want to get in as good a shape as they can for a swimsuit season, but also because they need the energy to go out and do all of the playing and the traveling and the adventuring that they want to do during the summer. And that is what makes factor so special. Not only do you know that you're going to get absolutely delicious food, it is chef curated after all. But you can also make sure that you are getting the types of food that meet your specific dietary needs. Whether that is you want to meet, whether that is you want to meet certain macros you want to stay away from certain things. You can go from calorie, smart, protein plus, keto and more. I always kind of focus on the protein plus and the keto. Those are my favorite go to's. But you can also get breakfast on the go, lunches, guilt free snacks and desserts. They really do have everything you could possibly need to round out your to round out your weekly menu. Grace.

Grace Aki (22:55)

Yeah, that's one thing that I have definitely missed in the last couple of weeks is the fact that I have not had a single time to listen, like sit down properly and have like normal set meal times. They're kind of just like on the go and all those things. And that's what we love about factor meals is that you only pop them in the microwave for about two minutes. I know Matt likes to put them in the oven for longer. I don't have time for that. But I love to have these balanced meals kind of picked out for me throughout the week, but also on the weekends when I'm able to do the protein shakes and all the breakfast meals as well.

Matt Tamineni (23:19)

So get started@Factor Meals.com Broadway 50 off and use code Broadway50OFF to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box. That's code Broadway50OFF@Factor Meals.com Broadway50OFF for 50% off plus free shipping. All right, let's close out the show in terms of news with some show and casting information. And this one comes to us from the Al Hirschfeld Theater where we already knew that Taye Diggs and Wayne Brady would be starting their runs as the Duke and Ziddler, respectively on July 22nd. Well, we have another announcement about who will be starring as the star crossed lovers at the center of that show when those two begin their runs. And it will be people who have played their roles before. Ashley Lauren will return to the role of Satine, which she did many times throughout the run of Broadway, starting as the alternate for Satine when it originally opened. And then she'll be joined as Christian by Christian Douglas, who played the role for a year and a half on the national tour. They will come in and replace Solea Pfeiffer and Jordan Fisher. Jordan Fisher just seems to be kind of bouncing back and forth between Broadway shows. So who knows what he has next? Next, Solea Pfeiffer has a couple options for things that she has been involved with in the past that have declared their Broadway intentions. I would imagine this one has more to do with being wanted than wanting to play chess. So we will see what happens there. And then finally in our news section, Grace, a show that I have talked with the creators about here on Broadway Radio in the past month or so. But the Death of Rasputin, which is that immersive show over on Governor's island, it has extended again. It had previously been extended to June 15th. It is now set to play through June 28th. If people continue to go out, it very well might end up being extended once again. All right, Grace. And my recommendation, of course, is all of the videos that CBS and the Tony Awards have officially made available available from the broadcast. I have an article from Broadway News that you kind of go through and just watch them all over again. Everything from the opening number numbers, all the performance numbers, the in memoriam, the closing number. If you want to rewatch all of those, we have them in the show notes and you can check them 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 broadwayradio and get all of our Patreon exclusives@patreon.com broadwayradio Grace, where can people find you?

Grace Aki (25:42)

You can find me at. It's graceaki.

Matt Tamineni (25:43)

All right, everybody, have a wonderful Wednesday. We'll be back to talk to you tomorrow.