With ineffable talents and six Tony awards, Audra McDonald is box-office gold. But not this time. Not even she could save Ohio State Murders, a play that gave its author, Adrienne Kennedy, her Broadway debut at the age of 91.
“More of her work deserves to be produced commercially, and hopefully this will be the beginning of more and more awareness about who Adrienne Kennedy is, how incredible and poetic and profound and raw and revolutionary her work is,” McDonald said in a video posted on Instagram. “And that there needs to be more work out there centering Black women by Black women in the way that Adrienne has been doing for 70 years.”
Ohio State Murders took a drubbing over the holiday season, bringing in just $311,893 over nine performances in a grand but half-empty James Earl Jones Theatre. The final curtain will come down on Sunday, well before its originally planned closing date of 12 February.
The show is just one among a dozen closing during a brutal January in New York: A Christmas Carol, Almost Famous, Beetlejuice, Death of a Salesman, Into the Woods, The Music Man, The Old Man & the Pool, The Piano Lesson, 1776, A Strange Loop and Topdog/Underdog.
In some cases, the closures were planned; in others, producers apparently did not raise enough money to get through what is always a harsh winter for ticket sales. Last month saw the demise of KPOP, Broadway’s first Korean-centered musical, and Ain’t No Mo’, which was extended by a week after a rearguard action by Jordan E Cooper, the youngest Black American playwright to have a show on Broadway.
Race is perhaps a factor but not the only one as the industry continues to absorb the shockwaves of the coronavirus pandemic. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, the longest-running show in Broadway history, will close in April after 35 years.
Sam Gold, a director of numerous Broadway productions, says: “We have to acknowledge that it’s a hard time for live theatre. We’re still dealing with fallout from the pandemic. We have challenging supply chain issues. We have the $1tn a month poured into streaming so people can stay home and watch things at home. That got sped up because of the pandemic.
“People just got used to staying home and getting people back out and remembering how amazing live theatre is is taking time. Also people are still suffering and dealing with the trauma of the last few years. People want to think everything’s back to normal but it’s going to take longer for all people to feel normal after two and a half years of tragedy.”
January is the cruelest month for Broadway as ticket sales dip in synch with thermometers. But this year’s cull is a reminder that theatre has not fully rebounded from Covid-19, which wiped out live performances for 18 months – the longest closure in its history – and continues to expose a yawning chasm between haves and have-nots.
Over the traditionally lucrative Christmas week, the Disney musical The Lion King broke records with a haul of $4,315,264 over nine shows, followed by The Music Man – starring Sutton Foster and Hugh Jackman – with $3,971,531, Wicked with $3,152,679, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child with $2,671,191 and the Lea Michele-led revival of Funny Girl with $2,405,901.
At the other end of the spectrum, Suzan-Lori Parks’s acclaimed play Topdog/Underdog brought in just $345,567 over eight performances while a revival of Between Riverside and Crazy, a Pulitzer prize-winning dark comedy starring the rapper Common, notched a meagre $260,085. Broadway’s survival-of-the-fittest cycle seems more unforgiving than ever.
Peter Marks, theatre critic of the Washington Post, wrote this week: “The fact is that challenging themes don’t find much traction on Broadway anymore, and it’s the Broadway establishment’s own fault. In its zeal to cultivate a tourist audience, which now makes up the majority of ticket buyers, Broadway essentially turned its back on audiences for serious work: Almost every meritorious play, and even some fine, nuanced musicals, struggle bravely and then don’t last.
“Last June’s irreverently original, Tony-winning musical A Strange Loop is already in January’s departure lounge, and critical fall hits such as Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog fade quickly at the box office, after initial excited buzz.”
Cultivating a tourist audience paid off at the box office during a 10-year period of record growth for New York City, culminating in 66.6 million visitors in 2019. But the pandemic saw those numbers drop by 67% to 22.3 million in 2020. The city is still clawing its way back, making big money productions more risky than ever.
Gabriel Stelian-Shanks, artistic director of the Drama League, a creative home for stage directors, says: “What is compounding the issue right now is the question of tourism. Audiences are back but they are not back to pre-pandemic levels yet and so we’re seeing a very odd amalgam of shows being incredibly successful and shows really struggling.
“We’re seeing audiences flock to things that feel comfortable, that feel joyous, that feel expressive. But for a more sophisticated audience palate, you look at something like Ohio State Murders, which I think is just a phenomenal production, one of the best things I’ve seen in a long time, but it’s very challenging, complicated, difficult work even if we weren’t recovering from a pandemic, even if we weren’t wrestling with issues of equity and access and diversity on Broadway.”
He adds: “I really admire how incredible the producers are being at putting up such a variety of things in this moment. The sad news about the state of commercial theatre in America is when you put up that great a variety, some of it’s going to succeed and some of it’s going to fail. That’s where we are.”
There are parallels with the tribulations of Hollywood. Blockbusters films linked to franchises such as Top Gun: Maverick, starring Tom Cruise, and Avatar: The Way of Water, directed by James Cameron, have brought audiences back to cinemas. But a slew of brilliant but less trumpeted films have struggled to gain traction against increasing competition from streaming.
Stelian-Shanks continues: “People are moving toward known quantities and known products and on Broadway. If you swap Top Gun for The Music Man and Avatar for Six, you’re experiencing the exact same trend.”
But he drew a hopeful comparison between the surprise hit film Everything Everywhere All at Once and the musical & Juliet, a transfer from London without star names that grossed $1,639,788 on Broadway in the final week of 2022. “Now, granted it’s a jukebox musical but it’s got a diverse cast. It’s got a gender non-conforming lead character and a love story for that person. It is hitting a deeply engaged moment and doing just fine at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre.”
The winter of discontent will give way to a strong slate of shows in the spring, Stelian-Shanks adds. “For every show that just closed, they announced another one to take its place. There’s going to be an enormous amount of new offerings right at about the moment people are ready for them. There’s pockets of positivity popping up that counter this narrative that it was an especially savage fall.”
Among the new offerings is a revival in March of Sondheim’s musical Sweeney Todd starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford. It is directed by Thomas Kail and produced by Jeffrey Seller, who collaborated on Hamilton. Its production stage manager, Cody Renard Richard, strikes an optimistic note.
“I do think Broadway’s recovering,” he says. “I know a lot of my friends and myself have been employed for the last year and how ever many months. On the inside it feels like there’s definitely more of a community that we used to feel within the Broadway sphere. In that regard, we’re recovering in a way that feels good.”
Richard, who was production stage manager of Into the Woods, which ended its run last weekend, adds: “There are a lot of shows closing but that’s also not necessarily a change in how the landscape of Broadway normally works. There’s usually a bunch of shows that close in the new year and in the spring there’s a bunch of shows that open. It’s the cycle of what we see but it just feels different now because, coming out of the pandemic, we’re all hoping to see things last a little bit longer.”
