The Palace will reopen tonight after six years for the primary of what at the moment are 19 reveals scheduled thus far for the Broadway 2024-2025 season, with a live performance by Ben Platt selling his new album, which can run for 18 days.  A lot has been made from the $80 million spent on the renovation of the 1913 theater: the new entrance and foyer on West 47^th, the elevated legroom and larger restroom capability, the brand new lighting fixtures impressed by the unique Beaux-Arts type.

There’s much less concentrate on the explanation why the Palace has been put out of fee since “SpongeBob SquarePants” in 2018, and why the landmarked theater, which weighs 14 million kilos,  was lifted up thirty ft within the air. The Palace now performs above a mall (though they don’t name it that.)

One can argue that Platt’s “taking part in the Palace” continues a longtime custom of solo reveals by star entertainers there, from Sarah Bernhardt in 1913 to Judy Garland in 1951, 1956 and 1965 to Bette Midler, Shirley Maclaine and Diana Ross within the Nineteen Seventies. 

There’s one other approach to take a look at this most up-to-date chapter in The Palace’s historical past: When the theater opened in 1913, it was a part of an 11-story workplace constructing. Eight a long time later, the theater remained however the constructing was changed by a 43-story resort. Now, the Palace a part of a $2.5 billion, 46-story tower referred to as TSX Broadway, which incorporates a 669-room resort and multi-story retail house.

Broadway as an entire, too, might be seen as each an business and as an American artwork kind. The various theater awards supposedly view it because the latter, though it’s arduous even there to divorce the reveals fully from present enterprise. 

At Broadway season’s finish, within the warmth of awards season, public assessments of the state of theater are typically upbeat  — 

“The 2023-2024 Broadway season was one other great yr, with attendance of 12.3 million and Broadway reveals grossing $1.54 billion greenback. Audiences are responding to the unbelievable number of performs, musicals, and specials that we’ve got on Broadway” – Jason Laks, Interim President of The Broadway League 

— at the same time as non-public assessments are, at greatest, hopeful: “Spring 2024 noticed a frenzy of latest reveals opening (21 since January) within the face of two formidable obstacles: prices which have almost doubled over a decade and an viewers nearly 20 % smaller than it was pre-pandemic…What the optimists and pessimists agree on is that the enterprise mannequin has to alter” – New York Journal

Broadway League statistics on complete attendance
 2023-2024: 12,287,708
2022-2023: 12,283,399
2018-2019: 14,768, 254

New Theater Books to Learn in Summer season 2024

The Week in Theater Awards

2024 Chita Rivera Award Winners: Hell’s Kitchen and Water for Elephants (tie), Illinoise

Watch Jessica Lange, Kelli O’Hara, Cole Escola et al settle for their Outer Critics Circle Awards, quote their spouses, and debate opinions

2024 Tony Award Winners — YOUR Picks? Ballot

The final query within the ballot is: If there was room for just one new class for a Tony Award, which ought to or not it’s? To this point, half the respondents picked Ensemble, adopted by 1 / 4 for Hair, Wig and Make-up.

The Week in New York Theater Opinions

The Fires

“The Fires” brings us concurrently into the lives and loves of three Black homosexual males occupying the identical railroad residence in South Brooklyn, however a long time aside —  Jay (Phillip James Brannon) in 1974, Sam (Sheldon Finest) in 1998,  Eli (Beau Badu) in 2021. They go about their each day lives oblivious to at least one one other’s presence (since they’re residing in numerous eras) even after they’re in the identical mattress!..That every one eleven characters (portrayed by a high-quality eight-member forged) transfer in and round  Raphael Mishler’s three-room set with such precision, grace, sexiness and readability is a testomony to the well-honed abilities of some of the sought-after choreographers in New York, Raja Feather Kelly. Kelly is directing “The Fires,” splendidly. He’s additionally making his Off-Broadway playwriting debut as its writer. Would that his writing matched the readability and precision of his path. Full Evaluation

Three Homes

Dave Malloy’s newest sing-through musical theater piece, which has a energetic rating and a gifted forged, however largely falls wanting its effort — seemingly impressed by Sondheim’s strategy in “Into The Woods” — to say one thing important about life in the course of the pandemic. At an open mic night time in a darkish bar, three storytellers take turns singing of their experiences throughout lockdown….Full evaluation

The Week in New York Theater Information

Two extra reveals have introduced for the Broadway 2024-2025 Broadway season — 19 thus far: “Job” which ran Off-Broadway (my evaluation) will open on the Hayes on July 30; “Romeo + Juliet,” introduced earlier for Broadway, now has a gap date (October 24), a venue (Broadway’s Circle within the Sq.), and a brand with a curse phrase in it. For particulars on each try my Broadway 2024-2025 Broadway season preview information.

Brooks Shields has been elected president of Actors Fairness, succeeding, Kate Shindle, who declined to run for reelection after 9 years. The presidency is a demanding unpaid place that oversees the administration and path of the union. (Broadway Journal) A film actress beginning as a younger youngster, she is now a veteran of 5 Broadway performs.

Theater Weblog Roundup: Broadway Restoration Stalls, Off-Broadway Unionizes, Awards Proliferate

High 12 Posts within the 12 Years of New York Theater

How Daniel Radcliffe Outran Harry Potter: He was the world’s most well-known youngster star. Then he had to determine what got here subsequent. (Atlantic Journal)

“Radcliffe has been doing theater for half his life now, and onstage was the place he made his first daring break from expectations. When he was 17, between the discharge of the fourth and fifth Harry Potter films, it was introduced that he can be showing in London’s West Finish because the lead in a revival of the Nineteen Seventies play Equus, taking part in a disturbed teenager with a predilection for mutilating horses by blinding them—a task that, amongst its many different checks, required him to be totally bare onstage for a number of minutes. He wasn’t attempting to shock; he was simply attempting to stretch the boundaries of who he would possibly grow to be….. Since then, different theater roles have adopted, together with in Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, together with 10 months because the lead in a Broadway revival of the musical Find out how to Reach Enterprise With out Actually Attempting. And now Merrily, Sondheim’s told-backwards story of three buddies.

“For Radcliffe, the position appears a pure match…. His dad and mom, who met doing musical theater, used to play Sondheim productions whereas they had been driving. It took Radcliffe years to grasp that not all childhoods had been like his on this respect. “I believed everybody listened to point out tunes within the automotive,” he just lately stated. “I believed that was road-trip music.”

In Memoriam

Richard M Sherman, 95, composer along with his brother Robert of three Broadway musicals (Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Over Right here) and  some two dozen movies, many for Disney.