Broadway's Crunchtime is also the best life

Broadway is the pinnacle of commercial theater, a billion-dollar cultural enterprise and a jewel of New York City. So why is it run like a Christmas tree farm?

I don't mean it invites too much tinsel. I mean it runs at a very low hum level for ten months out of the year and then goes into a frenzy of product dumping for two months.

This year, 18 shows, more than half of the season's total production, will hit Broadway in March and April — 12 in the final two weeks before the Tony Awards cutoff date on April 25. Like the movie industry in December, chasing Oscars Before the year-end deadline, theater producers are betting on voters' short memories (and a burst of free publicity on the Tonys telecast) to keep their shows running through the summer and beyond to throw.

This is obviously unwise from a business point of view. Rather than maintaining a year-round slate of openings—as Hollywood, with hundreds of releases, can do despite its December extravaganzas—Broadway, with only 30 to 40 openings in an average season, continues to opt to take off. exhaust the critics and confuse the audience with its brief, sudden springtime overdrive.

Of course, I wouldn't care about the business point of view; I'm one of those critics who will soon be exhausted. Please feel sorry that I have to watch a lot of shows for free from good places.

But regardless of the work's yet-to-be-assessed merits, I'm excited by its abundance. I could even argue for more.

Take a closer look at those March 18 and April openings. Eleven are musicals, from all corners of the form. Do you like a pure jukebox show, where you revamp the catalog of an 80s pop rock act? Then please welcome 'The Heart of Rock and Roll', featuring songs made famous by Huey Lewis and The News. Also in the jukebox district is “Hell's Kitchen,” Alicia Keys' quasi-autobiography in soul, hip-hop and R&B, which moves to Broadway this winter after a successful run at the Public Theater.

Three other musicals combine original scores by folk-pop musicians with classic emo stories. “The Notebook,” based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks and the Rachel McAdams-Ryan Gosling novel, features songs by Ingrid Michaelson. Folk duo Jamestown Revival, working with Justin Levine, provides the lyrics and music for an adaptation of “The Outsiders,” based on SE Hinton's coming-of-age novel. And PigPen Theater Co.a seven-piece indie-folk group, sets 'Water for Elephants', based on the circus novel by Sara Gruen, to song.

Another three shows – 'Lempicka', 'Suffs' and 'The Great Gatsby' – draw on a more traditional musical theater ethos, even if their subject matter is also more daring than usual. “Lempicka,” with songs by Matt Gould and Carson Kreitzer, is about the scandalous painter Tamara de Lempicka; 'Suffs' by Shaina Taub is about the fight for women's suffrage. And I guess “The Great Gatsby” is daring, because who would dare write a novel that everyone had to read in high school?

For the record: songwriters Nathan Tysen and Jason Howland are the daredevils. But so does Florence Welch, without her Machine; her version, with a book by Martyna Majok, will likely be released next season.

With so many new musicals filling the larger Broadway houses, there are fewer revivals than in years past. But they too are an important part of a resilient cultural ecosystem, and it helps that the three openings in March and April, each from a different decade, offer a spectrum of musical styles. “Cabaret” (1966) features a classic Kander and Ebb score inflected with the sounds of the late Weimar Berlin setting. 'The Wiz' (1975), a black innovation of 'The Wizard of Oz', is packed with infectious funk and soul. And Who's “Tommy” (1993) represents the lineage of the Broadway rock opera, with its belting instead of bel canto.

Is there something missing between the musicals? Yes. I don't see any examples of what I call nerdicals: small-scale, quiet, powerful works like 'Fun Home', 'The Band's Visit' and 'Kimberly Akimbo'. Perhaps “Days of Wine and Roses,” which opened in January, has already taken that spot for this season.

Or maybe that spot will be taken, in some sense, by “Stereophonic,” David Adjmi's play, which opens on Broadway in late 2023, about a rock group that sounds a lot like Fleetwood Mac and makes an album that sounds a lot like “Rumours.” . It has everything I look for in a nerdical and is already halfway there with Will Butler's songs.

The other crunchtime plays are an ideal mix of old and new. The old is represented by two 19th-century classics (Ibsen's 'An Enemy of the People', starring Jeremy Strong, and Chekhov's 'Uncle Vanya', starring Steve Carell) and a more recent revival (John Patrick Shanley's ' Doubt'). The new pieces range from the domestic (Paula Vogel's 'Mother Play') to the global (the British import 'Patriots', about Putin and his oligarchs), with a stopover at the tragicosmic – Amy Herzog's poignant 'Mary Jane.'

As a result, we (as usual) lack great comedy. Don't worry: The comedy will likely come from the sight of so many first-nighters, Broadway completists and Tony voters flitting from theater to theater with red eyes.

And it could be worse – or, I sometimes think, better. In the 1937-1938 Broadway season, not atypical for that period, 139 shows were opened. Admittedly, you might not recognize most of them: “Roosty,” anyone? The revival of four performances of “Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines”? But their rapid failures helped make room for the few works we still appreciate, like “Our Town” and “Of Mice and Men.”

The past holds that a well-functioning commercial theater should offer more shows, even stinkers, not fewer. Ideally, they would be better distributed; October is also a wonderful month. But in a way, the March-April compression helps us experience the sensation of abundance. It reminds us that a healthy crop requires variety and rapid turnover, as any farmer (except the one selling Christmas trees) could tell you.