Word: broadway
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Rent didn't exactly start a revolution. Broadway continues to do robust business; total attendance climbed 2.7% last year, to a record high of 12.3 million. But the vast majority of hit musicals since Rent, from The Producers to Jersey Boys, still earn their money the old-fashioned way: by catering to comfortably middlebrow, middle-aged audiences...
...teenagers in repressed 1890s Germany. It's the sort of show that a few years ago would have been satisfied with a critically acclaimed run at a hip downtown theater--where, in fact, Spring Awakening began life in 2006. But the show, buoyed by good reviews, transferred to Broadway the following spring and awakened to find itself, against all odds, a multiple Tony winner and a box-office...
...Broadway is about to welcome two more unconventional shows from off-Broadway that are hoping to reel in the sort of people who have traditionally turned their noses up, and their iPods off, at show-tunes-style musicals. One of them, Passing Strange, is an idiosyncratic mix of rock concert and theatrical bildungsroman, presided over by a Los Angeles-based alt-rocker named Stew. The other, In the Heights, is a Latin- and hip-hop-flavored love letter to the Hispanic neighborhood of Washington Heights in upper Manhattan. The two shows have little in common except that neither could...
They don't look a lot like Rent either. That show, for all its breakthroughs, had an audience dominated largely by white kids from the suburbs. Meanwhile, Broadway audiences have been growing steadily more diverse in recent years; according to Theater League figures, about 26% of all Broadway theatergoers last season were non-Caucasian, a record high. One big reason was The Color Purple, the hit musical based on Alice Walker's novel of the same name, backed by the seemingly unstoppable Oprah Winfrey...
...Color Purple is really an old-fashioned musical dressed up in new colors. Most of the shows that are expanding the musical's horizons are more personal and experimental--the work of artists who are approaching Broadway with a refreshing lack of preconceptions. And audiences, despite all the Internet-age doomsayers, may be ready for them, judging from the excitement generated by shows like Spring Awakening. "Theater is becoming groovy and cool again," says Kevin McCollum, a co-producer (along with Jeffrey Seller and Jill Furman) of In the Heights as well as Rent. "As technology is isolating us more...