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Why are these Broadway shows closing? Thoughts on Back to the Future, Water For Elephants and Suffs closing
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Mickey Jo
Well, it must be that time of year again, because I am once again making a YouTube video where I pose the question, why are so many Broadway shows closing? And the answer nine times out of ten is they aren't making enough money. If they were making plenty of money, then they wouldn't be closing. But this then prompts the next question. Why aren't more people buying tickets to go and see those particular Broadway shows? In this video, you and I are going to find out the answer. Oh, my God. Hey. Welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theater, theatre. I am a stagey content creator here on social media. I'm also an independent theatre critic. This is my theatre themed YouTube channel where you can watch reviews of shows that I've been invited to go and see. You can watch theatre going vlogs, and you can also watch videos just like this one right now, where I recap theatre news happening both in the West End and on Broadway. And I also talk about trends and sort of general stuff that we're seeing in the industry. And today we're going to be talking about a string of recent closing announcements, multiple shows announcing that they will close either just before or just after Christmas, which has not become uncommon in the last few years. It's never uncommon on either side of the Atlantic. The reason for the timing generally is because the opening of shows on Broadway or in the West End is largely focused around awards season, which is the Olivier Awards in London, which take place in April, and the Tony Awards in New York, which take place in June. The Tonys have more of an impact and tend to shape the opening calendar a little bit more than we see here in London. And that, I think, is just a product of theatre tickets being more expensive in New York. Ergo, people are more discerning with how they spend their money and they care more about whatever won the Tony. Ergo, shows care more about trying to win the Tony. In London, fewer theater goers are even aware of the Olivier Awards and they matter a little bit less. But over in New York, the most opportune time for a show to open will be in March or April. They open just before the Tonys, they keep up that momentum and they hope to be a Tony Award winner by the summer. But if they're not a Tony Award winner by the summer, another musical or a play in that season starts to get all of the attention and they begin to struggle. And as fewer tourists come into New York over the coming months, they get a Little bit of a boom again around Christmas, but then we get January, January being a particularly bleak month all around, and one that does not offer promising advance sales. And so for a show that has struggled to make enough money leading up to the end of the year, they often won't make it into the new one. This year specifically, we are set to lose Back to the the Musical, which opened last summer actually at the Winter Garden Theatre and has run a surprisingly long amount of time, I think longer than. Than a lot of Broadway pundits expected it to. I had a decent amount of faith in Back to the Future and kind of hoped it would run longer than that. It was an Olivier Award winner here in London, and the West End production continues to run, continues to drive on at the Adelphi. Broadway will also be losing the new musical Suffs, currently playing at the Music Box Theatre. This one did win Tonys. It won the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical and Best Score, Best Original Score. Both wins for Shayna Taub, who wrote the show. And they will also be losing Water for Elephants, currently playing at the Imperial Theater on Broadway. In today's video, I'm going to talk through each of those three shows and explain in each instance a little bit more about why they have struggled to sell as well as they ought to have. I think each show didn't quite live up to its full potential for different reasons in terms of box office sales. Some of that is, you know, stuff that we can attribute to certain shortcomings, but a lot of it is through no fault of their own. It is still a difficult climate for, for theatre. There's of course, the disclaimer that everything is very expensive in the world of theatre tickets, especially in New York, especially on Broadway, and a lot of people who would be interested in going to see those shows, possibly many people in the comments section of this video haven't felt able to go and see as many shows as they would like, or any shows at all. Because of the ticket price, because of the prohibitively expensive ticket price. But before we talk about each one individually, there is something else I would like for us to consider, because it feels as though Broadway less than a decade ago was really penetrating the zeitgeist, a lot more so than it is now, or more shows were able to become recognizable and break through. And it was kind of the impact of Hamilton that did that. Hamilton crossed over into mainstream culture so hard that it brought a lot of attention onto Broadway. It punched this hole through the echo chamber of the theater community and people on the outside of that were able to peer through and see other shows opening around the same time. And in the following years the likes of Waitress and Dear Evan Hansen and Come From Away likely all benefited from this. And even within the theatre fan community bubble in like the Internet sphere of all of that. I feel like almost all of the shows opening in those few years were known, even the smaller ones. Even your Natasha Pierre in the Great Comet of 1812, even your be more Chill People knew about those shows and there are so many now that even having run upwards of a year they announced closing. I'm still seeing comments on things like Back to the the Musical which you thought was this very well known thing. People saying I had no idea this was even a musical. And I would say of this most recent season, people on the Internet have become aware of the Great Gatsby, people have become aware of the Outsiders, and I don't know if that many more have really penetrated through to mainstream theatrical recognition. Certainly I don't think the Internet really grasps the nature of what Suffs is about. I think they have a preconce the same with Water for Elephants and honestly the same with Back to the Future, but we're going to talk about those now. If you enjoy today's video, make sure to subscribe to my theatre themed YouTube channel. You can turn on notifications somewhere down here below my face and then YouTube will tell you every time I share a new video, which is every other day or so. Also make sure to share your thoughts in the comments section down below. Theatre is inherently subjective. Everyone has different opinions about things and I would love to know what you think about each of these shows. Did you get to see them on Broadway? Did you decide not to see them on Broadway? And what was the reasoning for this? Did you pick another show instead? Please tell us why. For now though, let's talk about why each of these shows is closing on Broadway, starting with the first to announce, which was Water for Elephants. So this closing notice came on the 1st of October. I'm going to read from the press release here. They announced that it was going to play its final Broadway performance Sunday, December 8, 2024. This is suspiciously early in December. I thought There are complicated financial tax reasons why it's beneficial for many shows to close before the new year, but even considering that it is not a great sign for a show to close multiple weeks before Christmas in of that there wasn't any accompanying statement issued with this press release. I dare say remarks will be made at the show's Closing curtain call and possibly comments have been passed in other places on social media, but officially no word has been given. It was more of a ticket sales encouraging email where they said there's only 10 weeks left to see the show because it's now closing. It was a subtler press release in that way. So Water for Elephants is an adaptation of the film of the same name, and it follows a young man who inadvertently runs away with the circus. And he was training to be a veterinarian, but his family has been struck by tragedy, and he finds himself unexpectedly using those skills he had developed, caring for animals, taking care of the animals who are traveling with the circus, the circus who are trying to stay afloat, who are trying to get good business, who find themselves purchasing an elephant. But the elephant seems impossible to train and becomes his responsibility. At the same time, he develops this flirtatious relationship with the aggressive ringleader's wife. She is also a performer in the circus, as is everyone that they are traveling with. He gets to know all of the troupe, they come to accept him a little bit more, but we have this complex love triangle at the heart of it. Now, this show is visually really stunning, Very richly staged and directed. It features a lot of puppetry to bring all of these different animals to life, including the giant elephant who we see on stage. It's very emotive. It's quite powerful. The circus acrobatics and all of that stuff that they use in the show is really incredibly striking and impactful. I enjoyed this very much. I didn't think an awful lot of the score. The score just sort of took us from A to B. I thought it was decently unremarkable, but I thought the performances of the cast were very strong. The problem for a show like this is it's lovely and it's stirring and it's wonderful. I don't know in 2024 if it stood out that strongly and against everything else it was opening alongside and everything else on that same street. It is next door to the Music Box Theatre, where Suffs is. It's across the street from the Outsiders, which is one of the biggest hits of this season. It's just down the street from the Notebook. It's around the corner from Hell's Kitchen, the Alicia Keys jukebox musical. And though it had an awful lot going for it, a tremendous amount going for it, and ticket sales really picked up once it got a New York Times critics pick. A slightly unexpected New York Times critics pick, actually, but one I think that was richly deserved. It was never really clear what Water for Elephants was going for and what it was offering audiences uniquely. I think visual spectacle was the best thing it could aspire to. But just one street over you get Moulin Rouge, which is also doing something circus adjacent but is better known and is giving you a sort of a more lavish visual spectacle. Also not for nothing, and this is really not a world that I know about, but I guess if people really want to go see circus stuff, then the Big Apple circus is a thing that happens for at least part of the year. And I don't think I could really call this the most spellb visually stunning thing I had ever seen on Broadway either. I enjoyed it an awful lot more than I thought that I would and I would happily go back. In fact, I've made plans to go back on my upcoming New York trip. By the time you see this, I will already be in New York. Stay tuned for many videos coming soon. Perhaps I will do a full review of Water for Elephants if I get time. I'm seeing many, many shows, but it also wasn't the most impressive animal puppetry I had ever seen or that had been seen on that same street because Life of PI had been at the Schoenfeld only the previous season and currently at the Schoenfeld is the Notebook, another one that I would talk about more in today's video, but I made another video a little while back explaining why the Notebook was closing. They are giving romance and based on a book and based on a film in a more obvious, more known way than Water for Elephants. So all of this makes it hard for a show like Water for Elephants to really know what they are selling. And they never really lit the box office on fire. They never completely got going. They never really established themselves with the theatre community outside of New York. It felt like they are going to be launching a national tour that is going to be launching in Baltimore, Maryland at the Hippodrome Theatre at the Franz Merrick Performing Arts Centre in the fall of 2025 with additional cities to be announced over the next several months. Casting being another factor that helps to sell a lot of tickets these days. It opened with a very strong cast. It has a very strong cast. Grant Gustin was the initial leading man who is known for the CW Flash show. He's also known to some Glee fans I guess, but he was the only one that really had mainstream outside of Broadway star power and recognition. And when he departed the show and was replaced by Kyle Selig who from the original cast of Mean Girls and from the Jimmy Awards is well liked within the theatre fan community. They didn't really have anyone speaking to tourists, speaking to mainstream audiences with any kind of recognition. I will say it's nice to see a show whose life I think was prolonged a little bit by positive reviews because so often we see that as the nail in a lot of shows coffins. And it's nice to see people being encouraged by positive critical response to go and book tickets to something. So often it's the other way around. That kind of a marketing strategy though, relies on prestige and that relies on Tony Award wins. And the show couldn't compete with the likes of the Outsiders in terms of its direction, in terms of everything the show was offering. It couldn't compete with Suffs in terms of its material. There's really great things in Water for Elephants, but most of its greatest creative feats. They don't have specific awards categories for those, not at the Tony Awards anyway. And if we're being completely honest, I don't know if they performed the best number for them on the Tony Awards, but it's hard to choose what out of that show would have showcased them the best because you want to show off the circus and the acrobatics and that's ultimately what they chose to do. But there's also a tremendous heart of the show and the story that I don't think was communicated as well. It's hard. It's hard choosing what to do on the tonys. So about 10 days after that announcement, their next door neighbor at the Music Box Theatre, Suffs, announced they would also be closing. They're sticking around a little longer because they're going to be closing on January 5, 2025. I'm reading from the Deadline article that shared that news. It says Suffs, the double Tony Award winning Broadway musical by Shayna Taub, best score and best book. That counts Hilary Rodham Clinton among its producers. We'll talk more about that because that's a factor. Oh boy. Will close January 5, 2025. The well reviewed musical about the suffragist movement didn't get a New York Times critics pick. Began previews at the Music box theatre on March 26 with an official opening on March 18. When it closes, it will have played 24 previews and 301 regular performances, which is nothing to frown at. But it's certainly not the same success as something like Hamilton, which the show I don't know if it compared itself to, but other people were making the Hamilton comparison. They both had a Pre Broadway life at the Public Theatre. They are both telling historic, politically rooted stories about marginalized groups rising up. And each of them tells that story by subverting traditional casting. For Hamilton, it's casting non white performers in the roles of white historical figures to tell a story about America then reflected with the diversity of America. Now for Suffs, it's telling a story with male and female characters using an entirely female and non binary cast. Before I forget, they are launching a national tour at Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre in September 2025, with additional cities to be announced in the coming months. And this show, again, had been doing decent business. It never really became this huge sellout hit and sales had been beginning to decline. We already know the next tenant at the Music Box Theatre. It's going to be the Picture of Dorian Gray, the Australian production starring Sarah Snook, which has already played at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London. I have reviewed that here on my channel, if you're curious to know what that is like. Much like the current Sunset Boulevard, it uses cameras and screens on stage extensively. There are more of them, in fact, in the Picture of Dorian Gray way more than in Sunset Boulevard. I didn't mention it before, but we also know what's replacing water for elephants at the Imperial. That's going to be smash. I made a video covering that news as well. And if you're really not sick of me, I also made a video talking about how much I love Suffs. I will make no secret of this. I thought Suffs was the best new musical of this most recent Broadway season. I thought it was certainly the best written and the Tony Awards reflected that as well. But the story really spoke to me. I've seen it twice and it moved me profoundly both times. I love this show. It's probably one of my favorite things on Broadway right now. But, you know, I was under no illusions about the fact that it wasn't either really taking off commercially, nor connecting to young audiences in particular. This is something I'm going to talk about more in a moment, but I went to go and stand in the rush line for the show and I was the first person in line. By that point, there were already dozens of people in line for the Outsiders across the street. Now, what I find interesting about this is that the Outsiders, it's very popular with a lot of people. The Outsiders. I've said again about the Outsiders. I've also reviewed that here on my channel. It did not really speak to me. I feel like I have to go and see the Outsiders again, or at least listen to the cast recording more, because I seem to be an outlier here and I had no prior relationship to the book. And I know that for a lot of Americans this is a well read and beloved story that many people read and studied in high school, but I really just found myself being surprisingly unmoved by it. Very contrary to my experience with Suffs. And I found it a little bit disappointing even that the Outsiders is now so popular with young women when it kind of offers the least representation of female characters of any Broadway show. Like there is more extensive and deep and meaningful female representation in the Book of Mormon than in the Outsiders, which is saying something like that is not a good position to be in. And I got a little bit of heat on TikTok and fairly enough for provocatively asking why more young women were excited to go and see the Outside as a musical discernibly about emotionally stoic young men and sort of emotionally inarticulate young men, rather than the show across the street about emboldened young women advocating for their rights. And I think on the surface, I guess those young people knew a lot more about the Outsiders, knew what it was about. The. The Outsiders in the cast of the Outsiders are doing a lot more to connect with them via social media, whereas Suffs seems like an uninteresting documentary from the outside. I don't believe that it is, but I get how it seems that way. And this ushers in a conversation about marketing because this is where most people have been laying the blame in terms of Suffs not running longer on Broadway. People have said it wasn't marketed properly. And I don't want to blame anyone individual team, because I think even if Suffs wasn't marketed well, it's hard, it's really hard to market a show like Suffs and a story like Suffs because what it's going to boil down to is, yes, it's history and yes, it's politics and yes, it's like the story of the nation, but it's also women and it's also feminism. And if there's one thing that audiences don't respond well to across all media, sadly, depressingly, it's feminism. We've seen this in superhero films, we've seen this in sci fi films, we've seen this in many different genres where not only female led, but specifically feminist female led with multiple female characters interacting. And with a majority female cast, they don't tend to perform nearly as well. The Hillary Clinton thing is also a factor. She is not the only well known producer of this show, Malala Yousafzi, also a producer on Suffs. But Hillary, despite having won the popular vote in the presidential election of 2016, remains unpopular with a handful of people, with handful of people from different political affiliations and also with very woken, very politically engaged young people for a handful of reasons. And certainly there were a lot of people who stayed away from Suffs because of Hillary Clinton's involvement. Now, one of the bigger criticisms I've seen made of Sufs is that they didn't capitalise on the announcement that Kamala Harris was going to become the Democratic presidential nominee and run for office. Suffs being a show all about the political rights of women in the us the idea of the first female president getting elected while the show was running on Broadway, that's huge, coincidental, serendipitous timing for them. And true enough, they didn't really capitalize on it. The cast has been involved in Broadway rallies for Kamala, but the show's marketing hasn't really tethered themselves to her campaign. And I guess that would have been a dangerous choice to make because they either fly or fall based on how the election goes. And, you know, we can only hope that it goes well. But I also wonder, going back to the Hillary Clinton of it all, if that is a factor, if that show being a show that she's a producer on, tethering themselves that closely to Kamala would look like an unofficial political endorsement. And I think, you know, there are so many things that marketing teams want to be able to do. And it goes back to all of these long meetings and conversations and all of these ideas that get shut down. And I dare say there was probably a lot of exciting stuff they wanted to do that was very difficult in a challenging political landscape, in a divided political landscape. But again, I think it's just really hard to get broad audiences interested in women's stories. This was never going to interest families and Date Nights in the same way as a lot of other shows on that same street. The other thing about Stuffs is people had preconceptions about it that were never really thoroughly dismantled. There were even protests inside of the theater about the way it prioritized white feminism, because people didn't understand the extent to which the black historical characters, such as Ida B. Wells, were uplifted and given a platform to talk about the shortcomings of the early feminist movement, the early suffrage movement within the show. Those protesters didn't know when they entered the theater that that was such a factor of it. And a lot of people thought Suffs was about white feminism, so didn't go and see it for that reason. Finally, the most recent closing announcement, this one having only come in four days ago, and the reason why I was waiting to make this video Back to the Future at the Winter Garden Only this evening has been announced that the next tenant at the Winter Garden is going to be the play starring George Clooney. Good night and good luck. Obviously a very big tonal shift from Back to the the Musical, but let's talk about why Back to the Future is closing, because this one is a little bit more interesting. The show continues to run at the Adelphi Theatre in the West End, where it's been running for just over three years now. I think it just recently had its third anniversary. They've had a bunch of cast changes. It won the Olivier Award for Best New Musical. Admittedly, in a quiet year, it was kind of our version of Moulin Rouge winning the Tony Award for Best New Musical because we were emerging from COVID and a lot of the other things that would have been around weren't around. But at the same time, it did very well when it opened in London and it continues to do very well. And I think much of the difference between its West End success and not quite having the same on Broadway is these based on film, very commercially driven shows. Driven being an unintentional pun there for a musical featuring a car do seem to do better in London. We saw that with Pretty Woman, we saw that with Mrs. Doubtfire. I feel like I keep invoking those options recently, but it's a thing we really see here. Legally Blonde did much better in the uk, continues to do much better in the UK than it did on Broadway. And Back to the Future has this obvious appeal to me because it's a very popular film franchise that has never been capitalized on in the same way the likes of Star wars or Lord of the Rings have. Fans of Back to the Future haven't really had that much of an outlet to go and be fans of Back to the Future like you get a Comic Con occasion. I think there's some theme park in the world where there's a ride, maybe. But if you're a Star wars fan, you've had a lot of new films to go and see, you've had a lot of TV series, there hasn't been new spin off Back to the Future content. So suddenly something pops up and people are going to want to go and see it. Now, interestingly enough, Back to the the musical. The largest creative criticism here is always the score. And even more so than the score for Water for Elephants, this really does just get us from A to B, but more often we just sit down en route from A to B and have this utterly pointless song. The songs in Back to the Future not only don't really add much, they waste our time in the process. It is. It is a largely unnecessary score. It has the worst act to opening in the history of theatre. I gave the show a great review when it opened and it was because of what it achieves on stage. It brings a sci fi film to the stage and the stuff they do with the car and the stuff they do with projections and all of this technology that spills out into the auditorium, it's so cool. And it's really pushing the medium of theatre in bringing science fiction to the stage in front of us. I think that's mind blowing and it's very creative and it's very innovative and it's very exciting as a musical, not so much. The reason for that, though, in my opinion, is if you were to just say Back to the Future live on stage and it wasn't a musical, people would more readily say, well, I have the film at home. Why would I go all the way to London? Why would I travel down to the nation's capital and buy a ticket that's expensive to go and see Back to the Future live on stage? I can just watch that at home. But a musical is a different enough thing that people will go and see it. They don't have Back to the Future, the musical. It's like, oh, they've made a musical about that. I will like that and my wife will like that and my kids will like that. And it's a musical like Mrs. Doubtfire that dads can agree to go and see because that interests them a little bit more. And if you can get the whole family not to dads who like musical theatre, I'm sure there are plenty of you and power to you. Musical theatre dads. Sound off in the comments, but if you can get the whole family to buy tickets, you're selling more tickets, obviously. And so I had hoped that when the DeLorean drove over to the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway, it would have the same experience and that it would bring in a lot of tourists from around the country to go and see the Back to the Future musical. And I think that would have been its lifeblood if it could connect more to those people. But like I said, there are still a Lot of people who don't know that Back to the Future the musical even exists. I don't think they got to perform on the Tony Awards because they weren't nominated at the Tony Awards, or at least the show wasn't nominated for Best New Musical. It had opened in the summer before the Tonys, and Hamilton being the one sort of major exception to this. Often when we see a show opening in the summer, they know that they're not expecting any sort of big awards recognition because that's a very inopportune time for a show to open if it wants to get nominated for and win Tonys. It does mean the show has already been on Broadway for over a year, so it's had a decent number of performances already. By the time it will be closing in January, in fact, it will be after 18 months and over 500 performances, and it'll be closing on the same day as suffs January 5, 2025. It will have been seen by over 900,000 people. And with all that success, you may be wondering, why on earth is it closing on Broadway? Well, it's also incredibly expensive to run. It's a large cast and it has a great many technical elements, and so it would needed to have done consistently fantastic business in order to stay open. George Clooney's show at the Winter Garden, meanwhile, is going to be significantly cheaper to run, other than presumably his salary. And it's going to make a lot more money because people are going to buy tickets just to go see George Clooney on stage. Roger Bart was in Back to the Future and some people would have bought tickets to go see Roger Bart. I'd love to go see Roger Bart. I got to see Roger Bart, in fact, but I don't know that he's not George Clooney. And the theatre owners, the Shubert Organization, have formed for ousting one show in favor of another. Beetlejuice famously was ejected from the Winter Garden Theatre so that Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster could star together in the Music man, which they knew was going to do better business than Beetlejuice. I don't think that's what happened here with Back to the Future. I think it slowed down. It sort of. It decelerated and parked of its own accord. But all of these things, including replacement shows, are factors in the Broadway ecosystem. So Back to the Future, I think, is a show that had an extraordinary amount of appeal, but it was always very reliant on those tourists because I think for seasoned New York theatre goers and the New York Theatre community. A lot of people kind of turned their noses up at Back to the Future because it was yet another show based on a film and one that felt very commercial. Patti LuPone has spoken out against the circus that Broadway is turning into. I think a lot of people feel similarly there is worth in going to see Back to the Future, if only for the visual spectacle of it all and what it does on stage. If you're going to see it as a musical lover who loves the art form of musical theatre, I don't think you're going to be particularly fulfilled. But if you just love exciting, innovative theatre, there is plenty to enjoy there, I promise you. And it has a very talented young cast. I've heard great things about Casey Likes, who stars as Marty McFly. There are many more talented performers in that supporting cast and in that ensemble. And if somehow they had found a way for Back to the Future to really reach more people across the U.S. maybe it would have sustained it for longer. But they were always going to be reliant on the times of year when the tourists were coming in. That's why they opened in the summer and that's why they're closing in early January. This is not going to be the end of Back to the future's life, however, being a very commercial show, they've already announced it's going to be moving to Germany in the 2025-2026 season following the final Broadway performance. In fact, there are four new productions opening in the next year, including Japan, joining two existing productions in London's West End and the already ongoing North American tour. The show has also signed an eight year deal with the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line, where a condensed version of it will be entertaining cruise ship audiences. And it's perfect for cruise ships like I think a they're going to have no trouble trimming it down. But also it's a phenomenal spectacle. I'm very intrigued to see how they do this on a cruise ship. Betelgeuse was also on a cruise ship not too long ago and so I think that's going to do great. Certainly Back to the Future will have a decent enough life. It continues to run in the West End and I don't think it did too shamefully on Broadway. I think the producers could be proud of what they managed to pull off at the Winter Garden. So those are my thoughts, at least on those three most recently announced closings. Like I said, the Notebook is another one that is closing in December. I made another video about that not too long ago Here on my channel, you can go and check that one out. But I basically talked about, you know, it didn't have central star casting and it didn't really get the critical response that it wanted nor the results at the Tony Awards Awards that it wanted. It's the same story for many of these shows. The things that they would have needed didn't really come their way. But it also feels like they're vying for a smaller audience. Right. Like how many simultaneous theaters can Broadway sustain right now? It does feel like the last couple seasons specifically have been very challenged ones. And we keep seeing this thing where many of the shows that open in one Broadway season have closed by the next. There are very few shows that make it through to the following Tony Awards. And beyond the following Tony Awards. I think last season it was maybe only really and Juliet that has managed to do that from a few seasons back. Moulin Rouge and Six and MJ are still going, but year on year it seems like we are seeing less shows having ongoing life and turning into comfortable long runners. Oh, and also Beautiful Noise, the Neil diamond musical. Let us not discount A Beautiful Noise, the Neil diamond musical, which has now closed but made it through the Tonys. Last January we lost Shucked and Some Like It Hot. A few months later, we lost Kimberly Akimbo, that season's Tony Award winner for best musicals. I do think the Outsiders is going to stick around for a little bit longer. It seems like Hell's Kitchen might as well, but anecdotally things do seem like they're getting that little bit bleaker on Broadway. We've seen multiple Broadway seasons that have been dominated by huge revivals. That's happening again right now with Sunset Boulevard being the most talked about thing, with Gypsy about to Open with Audra McDonald. In the world of new musicals, do we see anything opening this season that is going to have the staying power to last through next season? I mean, what do we have coming in? We have Buena Vista Social Club. We have Smash. We have Boop. We have Just In Time, the Bobby Darren musical that Jonathan Groff is going to be doing there. It seems like there is some commercial viability there. Operation Mincemeat coming in as well. It doesn't necessarily feel like any of them are going to be obvious long runners, but time will tell and I will be sure to cover them and let you know right here on YouTube if you want to stay abreast of all of the ongoing Broadway news as well as everything that's happening right here in the West End, make sure you are subscribed to my theater themed YouTube channel. Turn on those notifications down below. If you enjoyed this video, give it a like and make sure to comment with your thoughts about these recently announced Broadway closures. Like I said, by the time you're seeing this video, I will already be in New York and seeing Broadway shows. I'm so excited I can't even tell you. And I'll be sharing many, many vlogs from what is going to be my biggest Broadway trip ever. Just in terms of how long we're going to be there. There are going to be reviews. Hopefully there might be challenges and more sort of theatrical guides. Let me know the content that you would like to see. Make sure you're subscribed. Go follow me on all the other social media platforms that you can think of so you don't miss any of it. And I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For 10 more seconds, I'm Mickey Jo Theater. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a Stagey day. Subscribe.