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Today on Broadway: Wednesday, June 25, 2025
00:15:25
‘Oedipus’ announces Broadway dates, Trensch will be Bat Boy, Jimmy Award winning performances 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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Matt Tamineni
Welcome to TODAY on Broadway for Wednesday, June 25, 2025. I'm Broadway Radio's Matt Tamineni. I'm coming to you on my own today because I have to head out a little bit earlier than normal and Grace is obviously busy doing the things that she does during the day because I'm heading over to the Dr. Phillips center for the Performing Arts to see the national tour of Shucked tonight on Tuesday night, obviously as I'm recording. Super excited to finally see that show again. I saw it twice on Broadway, loved it, thought it should have won the Tony Award for best musical in 2023, with all due respect to Kimberly Akimbo, which is coming to the Dr. Phillips center this year with Anne Morrison leading the tour. But I am very excited to see if those jokes will continue to translate with a different cast because that group originally on Broadway was so fantastic. So looking forward to that. It is here through Sunday, June 29th, if you are in the Central Florida and Florida area and want to check it out. But before we get into the news, and this is kind of news, but we do want to send a congratulations out to everybody over at Broadway Cares Equity fights AIDS, everybody who participated in the 33rd annual Broadway Bears and everybody who either bought a ticket or contributed money to the stripathons. Because this year's incarnation of the annual burlesque and striptease show raised a record amount for Broadway Cares Equity fights AIDS. It brought in 2,000,400,447,967. So congratulations to everybody involved and clearly that is a wonderful total that we know that BC EFA will do incredible work with in the years and months to come. Alright, let's get into the news and we're gonna start on Broadway because yesterday we found out that one of the shows that we already knew was coming to Broadway has landed on on specific dates. And this is the Broadway transfer of the recent hit West End production of Oedipus starring Mark Strong and Leslie Manville. It will play 14 week engagement at Studio 54 on Broadway with performances beginning on October 30th and an opening night currently set to happen on November 13th. The two stars previously did the show in London together. Strong obviously has been on Broadway before, View from the Bridge, things like that. And Leslie Manville will actually be making her Broadway debut, although she did win Olivier for playing Jocasta in this version of the show. Previously, this version of the Sophocles classic was imagined, adapted and directed by Olivier winner Robert Eich and it reimagines the iconic classical Greek Sophocles epic tragedy into an election night thriller. With all types of modern, political and interpersonal context thrown into the show. This will be the first Show in the 2025, 2026 Broadway season for the Roundabout Theater Company. Going just a few blocks over to the east yesterday we found out who is going to be playing the title character in the New York City center gala production of the musical. And through some very fun, but not exactly, exactly super hidden hints, City center confirmed yesterday that the one and only Taylor Trench will be playing the title role of this cult classic. It will run from October 29 through November 9. No other casting information has been announced. As we've talked about before, Alex Timbers will direct and Conor Gallagher will choreograph. I love Taylor Trench. We all love Taylor Trench. He was one of the highlights of the season for me in Floyd Collins. But I'm gonna do what I always do when castings like this, and I know it doesn't really matter, especially for a gala production, but Batboy in the show is a teenager. He's maybe 18. Obviously he's part bat. So I guess who knows if some of the normal age constrictions that we think about in going to school and all of that stuff really apply. And I don't remember the scri well enough to know if they actually say how many years ago he was born. But traditionally he is a high school student. Taylor Trench is 36 years old and while he certainly looks young and continues to play young characters, yeah, it just like what are we doing? You had Andrew Barth Feldman right there very well could have done that part. I don't know. I think it'll be interesting to see who they cast as Shelley, who is the female lead, also of a similar age in the show. Is it going to be somebody who is actually in their early to mid-20s like that part is generally cast in, or is it going to be somebody in Taylor Trench's age range? Who knows? He's obviously going to have, I don't know, probably pointy ear prosthetics and who knows what else he's going to be made up. And so maybe it doesn't really matter. But I do always think it's interesting when we do stuff like this how off the characters casting are. I do think that that has an impact, but maybe not nearly as much, especially in a two week gala performance as it would in a regular production. Next up, let's talk about one of the biggest events in the theatrical calendar. Every single summer and that is the Jimmy Awards. They were hosted this year by Josh Groban and they honored excellence in high school musical theater across the country. A total of 108 high school students participated in a week long musical theater intensive and training program that culminated in the awards ceremonies with tons of performances at the Minskoff Theater on Monday night. There were several medleys where students got to perform parts of the songs that they performed at their high schools. There were some production numbers, and then there were individual performances for the eight finalists. Four for Best Actor and four for Best Actress. And they all got to do a song of their choice. Well, the winners of this year's Jimmy Awards are. The Best actress winner was Fabiola Caraballo Quijada from Tyler Legacy High School in Tyler, Texas. She won the Broadway Dallas High School Musical Theater Awards. She was nominated for playing Sandra Bloom in Big Fish. And the solo that she did was astonishing from Little Women. We'll talk about that a little bit more later. But what's interesting is this is her third time being a nominee for the Jimmy Awards. She'd been there in 2023 where she was nominated for Motormouth Maybell and Hairspray. And last year she was nominated for Nostradamus and Something Rotten and was actually a finalist last year. And then the Best actor winner was Chris Hayes. No, not MSNBC's Chris Hayes, who also went to college with Lin Manuel Miranda. But this is Chris Hayes from the Las Vegas Academy of the Arts. He won the Nevada High School Musical Theater Awards for playing Gaston in Beauty and the Beast. And the song that he performed as his solo performance as a finalist was the title song from she Loves Me. Both Fabiola and Chris won a $25,000 check from the Nederlander Producing Company of America. And then the other six finalists, three best actor, three best actors actress, received a $5,000 scholarship toward their future education from MJ the Musical. Then the Jimmy's also recognized several other additional honorees, all of which got a $2,500 scholarship, including for the Rising Star Award, the Best dancer honor. In the Spirit of the Jimmies. And five other participants were honored with outstanding performance in an ensemble recognition. If you want to see all of those young people who were recognized as well as where they come from, head over to the Show Notes. I will have that list there. All right, let's take a break from the news real quick to talk about our sponsor for this week, surfshark. 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I love watching British tv, whether they are baking shows or cozy little crime dramas, but a lot of times those things aren't available in the United States. And Surfshark is my way of having a global pass to watch whatever I want whenever I want. And what's great about Surfshark is, is that one account does all of that online protection as well as all of the removing of geo restrictions for the stuff you want to stream. And it works on all of your devices, laptop, phone, tablet, even your smart tv. There's no juggling subscriptions having to log in and out from one thing to another. Just one click and you're done. And an added bonus, Surfshark alert tells you if your data shows up in a breach. It's like an early warning system for your identity. Surfshark is the absolute best way to have the safest and most robust streaming experience online. So it's time to take control of your online security. Try Surfshark risk free today and enjoy their 30 day money back guarantee. Go to surfshark.com tob for four extra months of Surfshark. That's codetobsurfshark.com the URL and code can be found in our show Notes Foreign let's talk about last week's Broadway grosses and things looked very, very good for Broadway. As we talked about, the previous week had been a bit of a down week, but thanks to some things closing and announcing closing, I think we saw a nice little jump back. The number of shows on Broadway stayed consistent from week to week at 38, but the grosses increased by 10% which was about 3, $3.7 million to come in at 42,994,336 bucks. Attendance increased by 5% to 327,954 people, and the average ticket price increased 5% as well, to $131 a dime. Without the juggernauts that were Othello and Goodnight and Good Luck, some semblance of order has been restored to the top of the grosses charts, where Wicked led the way at $2,484,800. It was followed by Glengarry Glen Ross at 2.2 million, Hamilton at 2.17, the Lion King at 2.14, and Sunset Boulevard at 1.83. The rest of the shows, in descending order that were north of seven figures, included the Picture of Dorian Gray in just seven performances, Aladdin, Death Becomes her mj, the Outsiders, Omari, Buena Vista Social Club, Gypsy, Just In Time, Cursed Child, Stranger Things Maybe Happy Ending, the Great Gatsby, Hell's Kitchen, Moulin Rouge and and Juliet. We saw 22 different Broadway shows with six figure increases week over week as summer vacations really started to kick into gear and tourist season started to pick up. The one that led them all, though, was Smash. That went out on a very high note. It brought in an extra $401,000 last week to finish its Broadway run at 977,800. $805. That was its best week on Broadway since the end of April. So almost two full months. And obviously, if it had probably continued to do numbers like that through the duration of the spring, last week probably wouldn't have been its final one on Broadway. What's great about that is, is that while not every show on Broadway saw six figure increases, all of them but four actually did see numbers in the black. And two of them that saw week to week declines were ones that were very well represented at the Tonys. So they actually had a really nice spike last week following the Tonys. And those were oh Mary and Happy Ending. The other ones were Glengarry Glen Ross, which as I said, was the number two grossing show last week. And the other one was Stephen Sondheim's Old Friends, which is wrapping up its run, but also in a very small subscription house. So that complicates the arithmetic as well. Well, in total, 26 of Broadway's 38 shows played to 90% capacity or better. Omari and Wicked were at exactly 100%. Glengarry Glen Ross was at 100.57%. Then picture Dorian Gray and Hamilton were between 101 and 102%. The Outsiders and John Proctor is the villain, were between 100 to 103% and then just in time continued to lead the way at 103.6 capacity. While Grace is not here today, I know that she would want me to talk about this next thing that is happening Off Broadway. Coming up this week, Starting on Thursday, June 26, Audible will present the Pansy Craze, a six part series written and created by Hunter Byrd and Mason Alexander Park. Mason will host the show. While this will be a six part series, the first three are the only ones with dates. The second three will be announced later, but the first three will happen on Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the Minetta Lane Theater. Each episode of the Pansy Craze will feature a different special guest and focus on a unique moment in queer history. Thursday is called the Queerest Night on Broadway and will feature Jackie Cox from RuPaul's Drag Race. Then on Friday it will be ou pretty things colon the Rise and Fall of Glamrock which will feature Evan Rachel Wood. And then Saturday will be the Queen of the Pansies and the King of Harlem. That one will feature Laverne Cox. If you want more information on this very unique and very cool series of events, head over to the show. Notes in our final little bit of news, the New New York Theater Company's very first production ever is Sophie Treadwell's Machinal. We've talked about it before. The show began performances on June 7th and it has now extended its engagement Off Broadway. It is now going to play at New York City center through July 13th. This is one of my favorite plays of all time, like Top five or of all time. I wish that I'd be able to get into New York to see it, but please everyone go see it for me. All right and wrapping up the show, as I previously mentioned, we have the videos of both Fabiola and Chris's solo performance performances from the Jimmy Awards. If you want to check out those songs again, Fabiola did Astonishing from Little Women and Chris did She Loves Me from she Loves Me. 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 if you want more broadwayradio, head over to patreon.com broadwayradio broadwayradio.com patreon all right everybody, have a wonderful Wednesday and we'll be back to talk to you tomorrow.