Broadway News & Features

First-time Tony nominees in ‘Some Like It Hot’ celebrate the milestone

The new musical Some Like It Hot has garnered 13 Tony Award nominations — the most this season — for its swinging score, hilarious book, and brilliant cast. The nods include Best New Musical and four first-time nominations for co-writer Amber Ruffin and cast members J. Harrison Ghee, NaTasha Yvette Williams, and Kevin Del Aguila. Inspired by the 1959 Marilyn Monroe-led film of the same name, the musical features a book by Matthew López and Ruffin, and a score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman....

'Prayer for the French Republic' to premiere on Broadway

Joshua Harmon's Prayer for the French Republic will premiere on Broadway this winter with Manhattan Theatre Club, two years after the company produced its Off-Broadway premiere. Performances begin at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on December 19 ahead of an opening night on January 9, 2024. In Prayer for the French Republic, a Jewish couple in Paris awaits news of their missing relatives in 1944. Seventy years later, their descendants, also in Paris, wonder about their own safety in this epic...

Tyne Daly, Liev Schreiber to star in first 'Doubt' Broadway revival

This is good news, no doubt about it! Roundabout Theatre Company will present the first Broadway revival of Doubt: A Parable in February 2024, starring Tony and Emmy Award winner Tyne Daly and Tony and SAG Award winner Liev Schreiber. Daly is a Tony Award winner for Gypsy and a nominee for Mothers and Sons and Rabbit Hole. She makes her Roundabout debut with Doubt. Schreiber has performed in Betrayal and Moonlight with Roundabout, and he received a Tony for Glengarry Glen Ross. In John Patrick...

Julie Benko joins 'Harmony' Broadway cast

Julie Benko will join the cast of Harmony on Broadway, the new Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman musical coming to the Barrymore Theatre this fall. Performances begin October 18 ahead of a November 13 opening. Benko is known for her breakout role as the alternate Fanny Brice in the current Broadway revival of Funny Girl, playing the role once a week in place of Lea Michele. Her performance earned her the 2023 Theatre World Dorothy Loudon Award for Excellence in the Theatre. Benko will play Ruth in...

2023 Drama Desk Award winners announced

The Drama Desk has announced the winners of the 67th annual Drama Desk Awards, recognizing excellence in Broadway, off-Broadway, and off-offBroadway productions during the 2022-23 season. The Drama Desk Awards ceremony, co-hosted by Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody, will take place on June 6 at Sardi’s Restaurant in New York City. This year, all performance categories are gender-free and award two winners. A group of journalists, editors, and publishers covering theatre vote on the nominations...

How the authors of '& Juliet' and 'Fat Ham' shook up Shakespeare classics

Don’t just brush up on your Shakespeare – shake it up! Two writers earned Tony Award nominations this season for tapping into the Bard’s classic plays in innovative ways. Though their works are worlds apart, there’s a common thread: Both consider the impact of choosing life over death. Emmy-winning Schitt's Creek writer David West Read, who’s now up for Best Book of a Musical for & Juliet, began with Romeo & Juliet and a “what if.” He imagined a story in which the lovestruck heroine doesn’t kill...

'New York, New York' first-time Tony nominees on celebrating the city they love

They're finally a part of it — the ranks of Tony Award nominees, that is. The world-premiere musical New York, New York burst onto Broadway in March with Kander and Ebb and Lin-Manuel Miranda songs, explosive energy, and a whole lot of NYC love, much of which comes from new talent, new talent. Or at least newly recognized. Nominees Colton Ryan (Best Actor in a Musical), Sharon Washington (Best Book of a Musical) and Donna Zakowska (Best Costume Design of a Musical) have all been in the...

The cast of 'Kimberly Akimbo' on how the story got better with age

The new musical Kimberly Akimbo has been decades in the making — well, sort of. David Lindsay-Abaire’s same-named play Kimberly Akimbo premiered with Manhattan Theatre Club in 2003, and his musicalized version premiered with Atlantic Theater Company in 2021 before quickly transferring to Broadway the following year. Now a contender for the Tony Award for Best New Musical, Kimberly Akimbo follows Kimberly Levaco, a 16-year-old teen in New Jersey with a rare disease that causes her to age four...

'Leopoldstadt' designers on how the play resonates across time and space

A Broadway designer's challenge is to immerse audiences in another place and time, conjuring it well enough that they feel a part of it even if they've never been. For the team behind Leopoldstadt, a 2023 Best Play nominee by Tom Stoppard, that's a loaded task. On the one hand, Leopoldstadt is a lively drama about an extended Jewish family in 20th-century Austria, and its success comes from the fact that "we're invited into the Merz-Jacobowitzes' commonplace gatherings, debates, trysts,...

How Max Martin shaped '& Juliet' on its road to Broadway

Think you haven't heard of Max Martin? Think again. You're more familiar with the Swedish music executive than you know if you've heard Britney Spears's "...Baby One More Time," Bon Jovi's "It's My Life," The Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way," or dozens of other chart-toppers the five-time Grammy Award winner wrote and/or produced over the past three decades. He is, to be fair, a famously private person. And unless they also perform their tunes, songwriters don't often get public attention...