Prouvaire

Harmony, the Barry Manilow/Bruce Sussman musical that opened in November to good reviews that never translated to big audiences, will play its final performance at the Barrymore Theatre on Sunday, February 4.

Producers Ken Davenport, Sandi Moran and Garry Kief made the announcement this evening. At the time of its closing, Harmony will have played 24 previews and 96 regular performances. The musical began previews October 18 and opened November 13.

Directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, Harmony tells the true story of the Comedian Harmonists, a German vocal group that achieved international fame and success in the 1920s and ’30 but were all but wiped from history by the Nazis. At the peak of its career, the group sold millions of records, made dozens of films and played to sold-out venues around the world.

With a score by Manilow and book and lyrics by Sussman, Harmony stars Chip Zien, Sierra Boggess, Julie Benko, Allison Semmes, Andrew O’Shanick and, as the Harmonists, Sean Bell, Danny Kornfeld, Zal Owen, Eric Peters, Blake Roman, and Steven Telsey.

Last week, the show grossed $534,769, filling just 77% of seats at the Barrymore despite a modest average ticket price of $84.91. Attendance for the show peaked in mid-November when the show filled slightly more than 80% of seats.

The Kleban Foundation has announced the recipients of the 34th annual Kleban Prize for Musical Theatre. The 2024 Kleban Prize for the most promising musical theatre lyricist has been awarded to Rona Siddiqui. The 2024 Kleban Prize for the most promising musical theatre librettist has been awarded to Lisa Loomer.

Rona Siddiqui is a composer/lyricist based in NYC. A Grammy nominated artist, Rona Siddiqui is a recipient of the Jonathan Larson Grant and Billie Burke Ziegfeld award and was named one of Broadway Women's Fund's Women to Watch. Her musicals include Salaam Medina: Tales of a Halfghan, an autobiographical comedy about growing up bi-ethnic in America, One Good Day, Hip Hop Cinderella, and Treasure in NYC. She is the recipient of the ASCAP Harold Adamson Lyric Award, the ASCAP Foundation Mary Rodgers/Lorenz Hart Award and ASCAP Foundation/Max Dreyfus Scholarship. She has been in residency at Musical Theatre Factory and Ars Nova. Rona also served as Music Supervisor of A Strange Loop on Broadway. www.RonaSiddiqui.com

Lisa Loomer is a playwright whose work has been produced at major theaters across the country and is taught in both Women's Studies and Latine Studies classes. Her recent play Roe, about Roe v. Wade, debuted at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and went on to such theaters as Arena Stage, The Goodman, and Berkley Rep. Other plays include The Waiting Room (Williamstown, Vineyard), Living Out (Mark Taper, Second Stage), Distracted (Mark Taper, Roundabout), ¡Bocón! (Mark Taper Forum) and Café Vida (LATC). Ms. Loomer is an alumna of New Dramatists and the recipient of The American Theater Critics Award (twice), Pen award, Jane Chambers award (twice), Kennedy Center New Plays Award, Susan Smith Blackburn, and an Imagen Award for positive portrayals of Latine people in all media. Screen credits Girl, Interrupted. She is the bookwriter of the musical adaptation of Real Women Have Curves which is currently running at the American Repertory Theater in partnership with the producers Jack Noseworthy and NAMCO. Current projects include the musical of Like Water for Chocolate and a new play, Side Effects May Include...about Pharma.

Since its inception, Kleban Prize winners have been selected by judging panels comprised of the theatre’s most respected artists and administrators. The trio of celebrated judges making the final determination this year were Tony Award-winning playwright, composer, and lyricist Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop), Elissa Adams (Associate Artistic Director ,Theater Latte Da; Producer, NEXT Festivals), and award-winning actor and playwright Chistine Toy Johnson (The Music Man, Pacific Overtures, Falsettoland).

The Kleban Foundation was established in 1988 under the will of Edward L. Kleban, best known as the Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning lyricist of the musical A Chorus Line. Kleban’s will made provisions for annual prizes, which in recent years have totaled $100,000 each, payable over two years, to be given to the most promising lyricist and librettist in American musical theatre. For over 30 years, the Kleban Prize has recognized and honored some of the American musical theatre’s brightest developing talents.

"The Kleban Prize for Musical Theatre is one of the theatre's most distinctive honors,” says Tony Award winner Richard Maltby Jr., President of the Kleban Foundation. “After the last few challenging years, Ed Kleban's legacy may be more important than ever in supporting the creators of tomorrow's American musicals. Ed Kleban recognized that theatrical wordsmiths have the hardest time supporting themselves while honing their craft, and so the Kleban awards are specifically for librettists and lyricists. It is notable that the Kleban Prize is not given to a specific work, as other awards are, but instead, it is given for work yet to be written. With a uniquely generous endowment, the Kleban Prize identifies, celebrates and supports promising writing talent in the theatre, just when emerging writers -- and established writers -- need help the most. Kleban Prize winners are going to define the art form for years to come. The Kleban Foundation is proud to carry on Ed Kleban's enlightened legacy.”

Over more than three decades, the annual Kleban Prize for Musical Theatre has awarded over $6,000,000 to 83 artists who collectively have garnered seven Tony Awards (with nearly 30 Tony nominations), 59 Emmy Awards, three Grammy Awards, 10 Drama Desk Awards, nine Outer Critic Circle Awards, five Obie Awards, two Olivier Awards, and two Pulitzer Prizes. The list of previous Kleban Prize winners includes Lisa Kron (Fun Home), Robert L. Freedman and Steven Lutvak (A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder), David Lindsay-Abaire (Kimberly Akimbo, Shrek), Jason Robert Brown (Parade, The Last Five Years), John Bucchino (A Catered Affair, It’s Only Life), Gretchen Cryer (I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road, The Last Sweet Days of Isaac), Michael Korie (Grey Gardens, Happiness), Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez (Avenue Q), Michael John LaChiusa (Giant, See What I Wanna See, The Wild Party), Glenn Slater (The Little Mermaid) and John Weidman (Pacific Overtures, Road Show, Assassins).

Broadway singers, the vocal virtuosos of the theater world, bring the magic of musicals to life through their exceptional voices and dramatic flair. These performers are the heart and soul of Broadway productions, enchanting audiences with their ability to convey emotion, tell stories, and showcase unparalleled vocal talents.

The list consists of:

1. Ethel Merman
2. Julie Andrews
3. Barbara Cook
4. Patti LuPone
5. Bernadette Peters
6. Audra McDonald
7. Angela Lansbury
8. Kristin Chenoweth
9. Lin-Manuel Miranda
10. Mandy Patinkin
11. Lea Salonga
12. Idina Menzel
13. Brian Stokes Mitchell
14. Hugh Jackman
15. Leontyne Price

Hard to argue with the likes of Julie Andrews, Barbara Cook and Audra McDonald, but some of the choices on this list are... interesting. Lin-Manuel Miranda is a top-tier talent, a real polymath, but his singing is at best acceptable. Same with Hugh Jackman. Strange choices for a website called "The Singers Room". And has Leontyne Price done any musicals other than Porgy and Bess (which a lot of people, including the Gershwins, classify as an opera)?

You’d be forgiven if you thought butter was a carb, just like it’s totally understandable if you didn’t know the new “Mean Girls” is a musical.

Paramount, which released the movie over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, chose not to explicitly market it as a song-and-dance spectacle, according to the studio’s president of global marketing and distribution Marc Weinstock.

“To start off saying musical, musical, musical, you have the potential to turn off audiences,” he says. “I want everyone to be equally excited.”

The PG-13 film triumphed in its box office debut with $33 million over the four-day weekend. But despite the cultural prominence of Tina Fey’s 2004 comedy, which propelled Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried to stardom, Weinstock’s job – selling the masses on (and clearing up any confusion about) “Mean Girls” – was trickier than trying to make fetch happen.

The story is the same, following Cady Heron as she moves to Illinois from Africa and navigates the lawless jungle of high school. But this rendition – adapted from the Broadway show – has singing and dancing. It isn’t a remake or sequel, and there are new actors (“Sex Lives of College Girls” star Reneé Rapp and “Spider-Man: No Way Home” actor Angourie Rice led the cast) embodying the Plastics.

“This is a movie within the ‘Mean Girls’ world,” Weinstock says. “We didn’t want to distill it down to one thing, because it’s not one thing.”

Where do you start with marketing such a familiar property?

There are two audiences: the audience that grew up with “Mean Girls,” and the audience that didn’t. On “Mean Girls” Day, which is Oct. 3, we released the entire movie on TikTok in 23 separate clips. Non-fans started watching and were like, “Wait, this is a great movie.” They immediately got familiar with the world.

Some fans of the original felt strongly about the tagline, “This is not your mother’s ‘Mean Girls.'” What were you trying to convey?

People kind of misconstrued it and took offense. All we meant to say was that it’s a new twist. People took it literally. “What do you mean? I’m not a mom!” We moved away from that and toward “A new twist from Tina Fey.” It’s her vision, and it’s fantastic.

Did you intentionally avoid advertising the movie as a musical?

We didn’t want to run out and say it’s a musical because people tend to treat musicals differently. This movie is a broad comedy with music. Yes, it could be considered a musical but it appeals to a larger audience. You can see in [trailers for] “Wonka” and “The Color Purple,” they don’t say musical either. We have a musical note on the title, so there are hints to it without being overbearing.

How did you make it clear from the first trailer that new actors are playing Regina George and Cady Heron?

Our first teaser was Reneé Rapp to the camera singing “My name is Regina George.” It did so much for us because immediately it said, “This is your new Regina. Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams are not in this movie.” We did have Tim [Meadows] and Tina in the spots to show familiarity.

Did you take any lessons from another very pink movie, “Barbie”?

It was the campaign of the year. They did a great job in ubiquity, and that’s the one thing we tried to do: be anywhere and everywhere. I get excited when people come up to me and say, “It’s on my [social media] feed every two seconds.”

What kind of fun did you have with quotable lines from the 2004 film?

We didn’t want to copy the lines exactly because we didn’t want people to think they were getting a version of the old movie. We used odes to it, like a bus ad that says “Look both ways, Regina!” It’s a funny line for those who know, and those who don’t know want to investigate it. We were conscientious that we weren’t like, “Here are all the lines from the first movie! It’s back again!” We wanted to show there was something fresh.

I saw that people online were upset the premiere was held on a Monday and not a Wednesday.

I know. That was due to talent availability. It’s a boring answer.

Douglas Lyons, the writer of “Chicken and Biscuits,” is adapting “Big River” as a film. The show, which features music influenced by country and gospel, is based on Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” It opened on Broadway in 1985 and won seven Tony awards, including best musical, and seven Drama Desk awards.

“It is my deepest honor to adapt this beloved Broadway classic for the big screen,” Lyons said. “With its legendary score and moving tale, ‘Big River’ invites us all to remember there’s more beauty in humanity than hate.”

“Big River” is being developed in partnership with Mary Miller and William Hauptman, as well as by the musical’s original producer Rocco Landesman, Emily Baer and Jason Seagraves under his Prod Co. banner. “Chicken and Biscuits” opened on Broadway in 2021 at the Circle in the Square Theatre.

“Big River” follows Huck and Jim as they race down the mighty Mississippi to secure Jim’s freedom. Lyons will reimagine the story so that it centers on the perspectives of both Jim and Huck, instead of just focusing on Huck’s story. The musical features songs such as “Free at Last,” “Muddy Water” and “World’s Apart.” The show’s hit song “River in the Rain” reached No. 36 on the U.S. country music charts and has been re-recorded by Alison Krauss.

Landesman conceived of the idea of adapting Twain’s novel for the stage and persuaded Roger Miller, an 11-time Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, to write the music and William Hauptman to write the book. The show was a box office hit, running for 1,005 performances, and was revived on Broadway in 2003 by Deaf West Theatre, going on to win another Tony in 2004. Landesman believes Lyons has found a fresh way to tell the story.

“Douglas has taken the greatest American novel of all time and made it relevant to our time,” Landesman said in a statement.

https://archive.md/rJt6Z

“The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel of garish glamour and dashed dreams, is coming to Broadway as a musical this spring.

The show — the latest in a long string of adaptations of this widely read story — had a pre-Broadway run last fall at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., where it opened to mixed reviews. (As it happens, the book also arrived to mixed reviews, and is now widely considered a great classic of American literature.)

The lavish production will join a spring Broadway season packed with new musicals at a moment when many industry leaders are concerned that there do not seem to be enough patrons to keep most of the shows afloat.

This new “Gatsby” musical is backed by Chunsoo Shin, a Korean producer hungering for a Broadway hit after a spate of unsuccessful ventures here. He most recently was part of the producing team for “Once Upon a One More Time,” the short-lived show featuring Britney Spears songs; previous endeavors included a stage adaptation of “Doctor Zhivago” and a Tupac Shakur musical, “Holler if Ya Hear Me.”

The “Great Gatsby” musical features songs by Nathan Tysen and Jason Howland, who collaborated on the 2022 musical “Paradise Square,” and a book by the playwright Kait Kerrigan (“The Mad Ones”). (Tysen and Kerrigan are married to each other.) The director is Marc Bruni, whose previous Broadway outing, “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” which opened in 2014, was a significant hit.

The musical will star two Broadway fan favorites. Jeremy Jordan, a Tony nominee for “Newsies,” will play the nouveau riche title character, Jay Gatsby, while Eva Noblezada, a two-time Tony nominee, for “Miss Saigon” and “Hadestown,” will play Daisy Buchanan, the young woman with old money whom Gatsby has long desired.

“The Great Gatsby” is scheduled to begin previews March 29 and to open April 25 at the Broadway Theater, one of Broadway’s largest houses.

The novel has been explored in other media many times, including in a glitzy 2013 Hollywood film directed by Baz Luhrmann that starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. On Broadway, there was a “Great Gatsby” play staged in 1926, the year after the novel’s publication; Off Broadway there was a highly acclaimed seven-hour version, called “Gatz,” developed by Elevator Repair Service and staged at the Public Theater in 2010.

The novel entered the public domain in 2021, opening the door to any number of adaptations. Most significantly, at least for theater audiences, is another musical adaptation in development. It’s called “Gatsby” and is scheduled to start performances in May at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. That production, which also has Broadway aspirations, has a book by the Pulitzer-winning playwright Martyna Majok (“Cost of Living”), songs by the rock star Florence Welch (of Florence and the Machine) and Thomas Bartlett (also known as Doveman), and direction by Rachel Chavkin (a Tony winner for “Hadestown”).

In the original 2004 Mean Girls, gossip plays out through word of mouth or surprise three-way phone calls. But in the film adaptation of the Mean Girls musical, vicious teen backstabbing gets a social media makeover.

The film, which was also written by Tina Fey, moves the classic 2000s flick to the present day, trading Y2K aesthetics for Gen Z vibes. With that shift comes the need to bring modern-day tech and social media into the movie — because how can you accurately depict the 2020s high school experience without it?

For directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., the challenge became incorporating social media into this new take on Mean Girls in a way that would ring true with audiences today (especially younger viewers).

"You can't overdo it," Perez Jr. told Mashable in a video interview.

"It's a balance, right?" Jayne added. "If you go too hard with it in scenes where it doesn't count, it feels superfluous."

They found inspiration in the framing device of the musical on which the film is based, which sees Janis (Auli'i Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey) recounting Cady's (Angourie Rice) encounter with the Plastics as a "cautionary tale." With that in mind, Perez Jr. said, the vision for Mean Girls became: "Let's do this film as if Janis and Damian directed it."

We see this right from Mean Girls' opening moments. Janis and Damian film themselves vertically on a phone while singing in a garage. Seconds later, the screen widens into a CinemaScope aspect ratio as we journey to Cady's home in Africa. Throughout the film, we'll see these aspect ratio changes time and time again, as the format jumps between widescreen and vertical phone screens. Sometimes these changes even happen mid-musical number.

How can social media shape a Mean Girls musical number?

Take Karen's (Avantika) Halloween costume banger "Sexy." In the original stage musical, the song opens with a gag that involves Karen appearing onstage, realizing she's messed up her song, and leaving. Seconds later, in one of the musical's biggest applause breaks, she returns to the stage and starts all over again.

"We're huge fans of the musical. We love how she walked out on stage, then left, and that was the joke there," explained Jayne. "But that just wouldn't translate [to film]. So, what would she do?" Mean Girls solves that problem by having Karen singing into her phone camera while preparing for the Halloween party, only to restart her recording when she screws up.

"We pitched that ['Sexy'] should start as a Karen 'Get Ready With Me' video," Jayne said.

From there, Karen's "Sexy" dance is picked up by other performers in their own videos, mimicking how TikTok dances spread. These dances come courtesy of the film's choreographer Kyle Hanagami, whose viral dance combos are an internet staple. "He is so beloved by the internet, and he speaks internet," Jayne said, "so he just knew how to do all of these fun transitions that all the kids do."

Capturing the overwhelming nature of social media

Beyond being a tool to add new flair to musical numbers, social media becomes a key storytelling device in Mean Girls. Think of it as an evolution of the talking heads in the original, where North Shore students tell the camera things like, "I saw Cady Heron wearing army pants and flip flops, so I brought army pants and flip flops." The new Mean Girls sees these kinds of observations texted between friends or brought up in TikTok videos.

The role of social media becomes especially prominent in key montages, like reactions to Regina George (Reneé Rapp) falling over at the Christmas talent show or to her getting hit by a bus. Since these incidents were filmed by other students, the magnifying glass on people like Regina and Cady grows a hundredfold. Their every move is replayed and dissected for the whole world to see. (You can spot several cameos in these sequences, including rap superstar Megan Thee Stallion and influencers like the Merrell Twins and Alan Chikin Chow.) The scope and potential reach of these posts makes Cady's experience more overwhelming than the gossip of the original, or even in the musical, which projected an onslaught of posts onto the back of the stage.

"When we dive into these barrages of social media posts, we wanted it to feel like these characters are scrolling through their phone. It's in your face. We wanted it to feel violent, in a way," Jayne said of the montages.

"Yeah, if you're getting bullied, that's what it feels like," Perez Jr. added.

"When people are talking well of you, it feels euphoric. And when people are disparaging you and making jokes about you, it feels devastating," Jayne said. "We wanted that to feel as real as we could make it."

That sense of overwhelming emotion in the face of relentless social media scrutiny came in part from Jayne and Perez Jr.'s scouting of real high schools. There, they saw the impact of technology on teen life firsthand. They cited things like phones always being out and plugged in to charge in classrooms as guidance for the ubiquity of tech in Mean Girls. But what surprised them most about current teen culture was the difference between interactions in real life and online.

"[The students] kind of seemed nicer. I heard a lot of people be really nice to each other," said Perez Jr. "So I would ask, 'What's going on here?' And the kids were like, 'Oh no, no one's mean to your face anymore. They're vicious to you online.'"

"I do not have the mental fortitude to go back to high school and experience it that way, with social media. I would just crumble!" Jayne laughed. "But it was really interesting speaking to [students] and trying to understand their experience now, and bring it to the movie [in a way that would] resonate with today's audience."

Clinical psychologist Emilio Amigo, who runs a counseling center for autistic people in Columbus, Ohio, had a big idea: "Many of my clients never went to their homecoming or prom because they weren't welcomed," he said. "I'm like, 'How many of you guys would love to go to a big formal?'"

Putting on a prom involved teaching his clients new skills, like dancing or asking someone out. Their journey was the subject of a 2015 documentary called "How to Dance in Ohio."

That story is now a Broadway musical.

The new Broadway musical "How to Dance in Ohio" tells the real-life story of a group of autistic young people who are getting ready for their first formal dance. In a trailblazing first, the autistic characters are all played by autistic actors. "How to Dance in Ohio"

"All of us who work on the show get messages from autistic individuals saying, 'I've seen myself represented onstage.' That's what we do it for," said Sammi Cannold, the show's director. She was not, however, its first one. That was the legendary Hal Prince, director of shows like "Phantom of the Opera," "Evita," "Cabaret," and many Sondheim musicals. He sadly passed away in 2019.

"Hal's granddaughter is autistic; my brother is autistic," said Cannold. "For him the show was very personal; for me the show is very personal."

But "How to Dance in Ohio" isn't just about autistic people. All of the autistic characters are played by autistic actors.

Cannold said feedback she got from people saying, "I don't think you're gonna find the actors that you're looking for," implied that there aren't enough Broadway-caliber actors with autism. But, she said, "We could've cast the show three times over."

Ashley Wool, Imani Russell and Liam Pearce are among the show's autistic actors. "I think you've picked the perfect three people, because all three of us are so different," said Pearce.

Pearce was diagnosed as being on the spectrum when he was age five; Wool was a junior in college. And Russell said it was May 2021 when they were diagnosed: "And I was really excited, 'cause I finally had a word for something that I think I knew about myself, internally, for a long time, but I didn't have the language for."

Autism comes in a huge variety of forms; it's described as a spectrum for a reason.

Amigo said, "The great enemy of someone who's autistic is social anxiety and anxiety. And that comes from, 'I don't know what to expect, I don't know what I'm supposed to do, I don't know what to say.'"

Wool said, "People like me are more sensitive to a lot of different things, like lights or sounds."

"I think another thing, when it comes to being autistic, is the concept of masking," said Russell, "which is sort of having to hide the movements that we do, or the sounds that we make, or having to speak at times that you don't want to speak to make other people feel comfortable."

The actors were encouraged to blend their own expressions of autism with their characters'. Pearce said, "Sammi Cannold, our director, was very open and supporting of being, like, 'If you, onstage, feel the need to let out your energy or, like, show your excitement in your own, individual, physical ways that you do outside of this rehearsal space, feel free.'"

The rehearsal process offered unusual accommodations for the cast and crew, like someone saying they have a sensitivity to scented soap: "And then our company management team will say, 'Okay, we're gonna replace all the scented soap in the building with unscented soap,'" said Cannold. "And so, it's hundreds of little things like that."

For autistic showgoers with sensory sensitivities, the show offers cool-down areas, sunglasses, and headphones.

And for non-autistic audience members, there's a message.

Do I only exist on this planet
to make somebody else feel inspired?
–"Nothing at All," from "How to Dance In Ohio"

Pogue said, "While the characters explicitly sing, 'We don't want to be objects of pity, we don't want to be inspiring,' at the same time, there's probably not an audience member who doesn't say, 'It's about people with challenges succeeding,' which is inspiring."

Russell said, "I like to pose the question, is your feeling of inspiration just infantilization? They're so inspiring because they're autistic, but they did that? Autistic, but they did that? It's not that our disabilities are the hurdles. It's other people's expectations for us that are the hurdles."

Wool added, "The point that we're making is, it's not an 'In spite of…' It's a 'Yes, and…'"

"How to Dance in Ohio" has earned itself an army of fans. Wool recalled at the very first preview, "The seven of us came on stage to do the prologue -- standing ovation, for like a minute-and-a-half. I was like, 'Wait a minute. We haven't done anything yet! We haven't earned this!'"

"It's so cool, at our stage door and stuff, like, young kids have come up to me like, 'I'm autistic, too!'" said Pearce.

But some of the biggest fans are the real people from the documentary. Sammi Cannold introduced them on opening night, including the real-life Drew – Pearce's character. "It was a really crazy, awesome, surreal experience to be able to, like, look at him and be like, 'Hey, thank you for existing, because my entire life and what I do here every night, is because of you.'"

Dr. Amigo liked it, too. He said he's seen it "a few times. if I'm counting right, it's about 13."

Do the show and the documentary help his clients in any way? "Every day," he said. "Because it's a story about them. It builds our self-esteem. It builds our sense of significance."

When cast members were asked how they hope their show will be perceived in the future, Russell said, "Oh, 'How to Dance in Ohio,' that was one of the beginnings."

"A turning point," said Wool.

Amigo said, "I hope that in ten years, it's no longer a big deal that there are seven autistic actors in a cast. Like, 'Okay. So what? That's great. Let's go. Let's start working on a play!'"

The musical-comedy “Shucked” had its closing performance on Broadway Sunday night, but the show went out with an even louder set of whoops than expected, as the curtain call included the news that a feature film adaptation is in the works.

Show reps confirm to Variety that a movie version of “Shucked” is being set up with Mandalay Pictures. The producers for Mandalay will be Jason Michael Berman (AIR) and Jordan Moldo, along with Alan Fox.

“We’re all a little sad to say goodbye to this. But there’s some good news,” one of the Broadway production’s producers, Mike Bosner, said amid the cast’s final farewells. “We don’t have to say goodbye just yet. Because I’m happy to announce that we will be making a feature film of ‘Shucked,'” he said, as the crowd’s cheering began to drown him out.

Robert Horn, who wrote the show’s book, is writing the screenplay adaptation. Horn is one of the executive producers, as well, along with Jack O’Brien, who directed the Broadway production, and Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, who composed the music.

Horn, O’Brien, Clark and McAnally were all Tony-nominated for their work, and Clark and McAnally won the Drama Desk Award for outstanding music.

No casting has been revealed.

“Shucked” was already set to enjoy an after-life in the wake of the Broadway closing, as a North American tour was announced in the fall, with the first dates set for Nashville. Further U.S. dates have not yet been announced, but productions in London and Australia are planned as well.

The Broadway cast album is currently up for the Grammy for best musical theater album.

At Sunday’s closing performance, Alex Newell, who won a Tony for featured male performer in a musical, playing Lulu, received what attendees said was a three-minute standing ovation for the showcase number “Independently Owned”… an uptick on the minute-plus ovation that performance regularly earned throughout the run.

Theatreland is taking a gamble on a wave of quirky little shows to challenge the big but tired box office beasts

A fresh kind of musical theatre show, set apart by having started life on the fringe or in a small-scale provincial production, is challenging the established order in London’s West End this season.

A wave of new, quirky productions will be taking their places alongside Phantom of the Opera-style classics and all those big, popular musicals that rework a familiar film title or milk a superstar legacy.

Latest to graduate to the major league is Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), an acclaimed British musical which has just been rewarded this weekend with a run at the Criterion theatre on Piccadilly from April. “It has not sunk in yet,” said its writer Kit Buchan. “Hearing that it will be on in the West End is a bit like the answer to a prayer. But it feels so unlikely: I am not sure I will really believe it until I see the curtain go up.”

Buchan wrote the show with his friend Jim Barne after they decided to branch out from writing songs for the band they have played in together since school. Audiences and critics responded enthusiastically. The show, developed over seven years and now finishing a sold-out run at the Kiln in north London, has earned rave reviews. The Evening Standard critic said the two-hander musical “matches its wide-eyed hero and sardonic heroine with just the right mix of sugar and sour”.

There are high hopes, too, for another unconventional show, Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder!. It impressed critics at the Edinburgh fringe, and is now poised for a West End run.

“New British musicals are having a moment, and that is really exciting,” said its producer, Francesca Moody, who brought Phoebe Waller Bridge’s Fleabag to the stage. “This is the riskier end of a risky market, but there are a group of producers who are prepared to take it up a gear by backing writers with shows that are not based on existing book or film titles. And the West End is making room for them in the ecosystem.”

An affectionate whodunnit parody, Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder!, began as a lockdown project for writers Jon Brittain and Matthew Floyd Jones. Moody is aware that keeping the charm of this small production when it’s in a big London theatre will be crucial. “You have to hold on to the things that have made it successful, like the reusing of the set and the multi-casting. Those elements, the pace and the velocity of movement, make it satisfying.”

By transferring to the West End, these small shows will follow a path recently laid by new musicals including Jack Godfrey’s Babies, which is tipped to return to the West End after a tryout last year, and Operation Mincemeat, a word-of-mouth hit which has won huge audience loyalty. Leading the charge was Six, the musical about the wives of Henry VIII. Written by two students for the Edinburgh festival, it has gone on to reach big audiences internationally. Next up in the West End will be Starter for Ten, adapted by Emma Hall & Charlie Parham from the David Nicholls book and 2006 film, with songs by pop-punk composer Tom Rasmussen.

“There is an interest in musicals from younger audiences now,” said Barne. The show he has created with Buchan, a funny riff on the romcom, has already won two industry prizes. In the lead roles are Dujonna Gift and award-winner Sam Tutty – who both starred in Dear Evan Hansen – as young wedding guests who meet at JFK airport. The show, originally called The Season, ran in several provincial theatres before catching the eye of the Kiln’s artistic director, Indhu Rubasingham, who will be taking over from Rufus Norris at the National Theatre.

According to the old joke, the fastest route to the bright lights of the West End is “practice, practice, practice”. In recent years, though, it has seemed quicker to simply string together a juke-box musical, or adapt a hit film. Musicals based on the songs of Tina Turner, Whitney Houston or Frankie Valli, together with all-singing, all-dancing versions of films such as Mrs Doubtfire, Back to the Future and Pretty Woman, have recently dominated.

But these small, new musicals are reassuring proof that practice and new creative talent can still count: “We made a joke that if we ever had a show on in the West End, we would both get a tattoo,” said Buchan, a performance poet, who has also written for the Observer. That tattoo now looks like a certainty, and will be of a small bat, not the wedding cake of the show’s title.

Neither is planning to leave their day job yet however: they claim that rumours of the money to be made with a West End musical are exaggerated. Buchan, like the hero of his show, works in a cinema, and Barne for a music publisher in Wiltshire.

Despite many younger people having a prejudice against musicals, they were drawn to the form because they wanted to write songs that “were more answerable to the story, and the characters and, of course, the audience”, says Buchan. “People do look down on musicals because they so clearly want to be loved. But we felt liberated from the pressure to be edifying. You can just be entertaining.”

Mean Girls, the movie-musical adaption that opens in theaters this weekend, feels like both an inevitable release and a bizarre confluence of trends that began long before its young cast was even born. We know that Hollywood will take any opportunity to expand an existing piece of intellectual property in a bid to make more cash; they kind of tried this already with Mean Girls’ ill-advised straight-to-ABC Family sequel in 2011. The decision to revisit the property as a straight remake but with songs is something that has only happened a handful of times. But given how recently the same thing happened with The Color Purple, we could be entering a new era of the movie to musical to movie musical pipeline. This phase is based, above all else, on the recognition of an old piece of film, but with some songs thrown in to justify its existence.

The story of how we ended up with movie-to-musical-to-movie musical adaptions of both The Color Purple and Mean Girls playing simultaneously in theaters across the country starts in 2001 with The Producers. Based on the 1968 Mel Brooks film, The Producers became the biggest hit of the 2001 Broadway season, won a record-breaking 12 Tony Awards, and made a ton of money. And even though it was a film first, when a Broadway musical is that successful, a film adaptation is all but guaranteed.

Even before The Producers, most Broadway musicals were based on something. Historically, it was common to adapt operas (Rent, Miss Saigon) biographies (Evita, Hamilton), and Shakespearean texts (Kiss Me Kate, West Side Story). There were plenty of musicals in Broadway’s Golden Age based on films, too; Nine and Sweet Charity are both based on Fellini films, and Sondheim’s A Little Night Music was based on an Ingmar Bergman film. (All three of these were later adapted back into movie musicals, too.)

Broadway figured out how to cash in on the Intellectual Property boom long before Hollywood did. In the 1990s, Disney adapted Beauty And The Beast and The Lion King into stage shows. Those were already movie musicals, so the transition was pretty natural, and The Producers was a Broadway-centric plot with a couple of existing songs, so that transition made sense too. The latter’s success, however, spawned an avalanche of successful, mainstream American films being turned into stage musicals, including Hairspray, Young Frankenstein, Legally Blonde, The Color Purple, Bring It On, and Mean Girls. Hairspray was also adapted back into a movie musical (and it remains one of the best in the genre, regardless of source material).

To anyone who has paid attention to Hollywood in the past two decades, this latest push should sound familiar. There was a spate of remakes of Baby Boom-era classics in the early 2000s (Stepford Wives, Yours, Mine, and Ours, Freaky Friday …). There were also a bunch of film series based on popular novels, kicking off with the Lord Of The Rings and Harry Potter series. Today, it’s endless sequels or endless live-action remakes of animated Disney movies. Though quality can vary with the latter, it’s fairly clear that these are exercises in brand extension, a way to bring audiences into theaters by tantalizing them with a familiar favorite. Usually, these remakes provide at least something new: updates to lyrics, new songs, updates to potentially outdated gender roles.

The thing with this most recent adaptation of Mean Girls that stands out, though, is that it only seems to have a passing interest in being a musical. The stage production, which opened on Broadway in 2018, is hardly a masterpiece, but it is decent, and it has some fun Broadway pastiche across its score. But Mean Girls 2024 cuts almost all of the group numbers, instead focusing on solos or duets, which have also been rearranged to sound like pop songs. Truthfully, it’s more like a live-action Disney remake, updated to suit modern sensibilities, where the characters occasionally burst into song at random.

It really doesn’t matter how good or bad Mean Girls (2024) is, though, because the original film has been one of the internet’s favorite movies for almost 20 years. Hairspray and Little Shop Of Horrors, another standout in the genre, were not based on wildly popular films, and live theater is inherently a niche, exclusive audience. Those film adaptations needed to stand on their own because audiences generally weren’t going to see a musical adaptation of a John Waters film (they were going to see Zac Efron, more likely). But an audience will go see something that says Mean Girls (or The Color Purple, or Matilda) because it’s a beloved film and they’re predisposed to like it.

It stands to reason that there will be more movies based on musicals based on movies. Both Spamalot and Sunset Boulevard are reportedly in development, and maybe one or both of them will be pretty good. Maybe Legally Blonde, a musical adaptation that turned out far better than anyone expected, will make a decent movie musical. But if we’ve learned anything over the past couple of years in Hollywood, it’s that it doesn’t have to be to make a lot of money; it just has to be called Legally Blonde.

On the same topic, Dan Murrell (probably my favourite critic) dissects why Hollywood is ashamed of promoting the fact the movie musicals it makes are musicals.

Mean Girls is easily winning the box office popularity contest with an estimated four-day opening of $31.5 million over the long Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, although severe winter weather saw more than 50 theaters close Friday in such hubs as Chicago and Toronto. Many of the shuttered cinemas hope to reopen Saturday.

The Paramount film arrives on the big screen 20 years after the Lindsay Lohan-led cult classic Mean Girls, which was directed by Mark Waters and written by Tina Fey, strutted into cinemas. Fey returned to pen the script for the new film, which stars Angourie Rice, Reneé Rapp, Auli’i Cravalho, Bebe Wood and Chris Briney. Fey and Tim Meadows also reprise their roles from the 2004 movie.

Females turned out in force to see the new film, making up 74 percent of Friday ticket buyers. Younger females in particular were keen to see the musical right away. Nearly 70 percent of all ticket buyers were between ages 18 and 34, including 40 percent between 18 and 24. The movie topped Friday’s chart with $11.5 million and is coming in ahead of expectations.

The original Mean Girls sports a Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score of 84 percent; the score for the new film is currently a fresh 70 percent from the first 108 reviews. While the 2004 film earned an A CinemaScore, the updated version earned a B+.

Directed by Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., Mean Girls cost a relatively modest $36 million to produce before marketing and is the latest musical to brave the big screen after Wonka and The Color Purple.

Screenrant points out that the musical's estimated 3-day box office of about $29M and 4-day estimate of $31.5M is considerably better than the 2004 original, which had an a 3-day opening gross (not adjusted for inflation) of $24.4 million and a 4-day total of $25.6 million, though it didn't open over a holiday.

Even though the Mean Girls musical has beaten the original's opening, it still has a long way to go if it wants to outgross the 2004 movie entirely. In addition to being a much-quoted classic, 2004's Mean Girls was a box office hit, becoming the 26th highest-grossing domestic movie of the year, above blockbusters including Alien vs. Predator, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, and A Series of Unfortunate Events. Ultimately, with a domestic gross of $86 million and an international haul of $44 million, the movie grossed $130.1 million worldwide.

The new movie's success may end up depending on word of mouth. While the Mean Girls (2024) reviews are strong, earning a 70% score on Rotten Tomatoes, they can't quite compete with the Certified Fresh 84% of the original. Word of mouth could also be impacted by the fact that the movie wasn't advertised as a musical, which could potentially lead to audience consternation. However, the same advertising scheme didn't hurt the box office results of the 2023 holiday musical release Wonka, which became one of the top hits of the year.

Wonka opened somewhat higher than Mean Girls, with a 3-day opening gross of $39 million. However, if the new movie keeps up its pace relative to that 2023 release, which has so far earned a domestic total of $167.8 million, it could very well cross the $100 million mark in North America. Even if it earns a small international gross, the musical could very well pull ahead of the original movie with that kind of total.