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Around a dozen years ago, hit country songwriter Shane McAnally had a revelation after seeing his first Broadway show, The Book of Mormon.
“At the end of that show, I just looked at my husband and said, ‘I’m going to do this’ — not even knowing the first thing about how you would do that,” he says. “I feel like I set a dream in motion.”
Similarly, even though revered fellow singer-songwriter and frequent McAnally collaborator Brandy Clark had been raised on musicals (after seeing Oklahoma at an early age) and had “this big, lofty dream at some point of writing a musical,” she tells Billboard, “I thought ‘I can’t do that. I didn’t go to college to do that.’ I thought you had to be super trained.”
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After more than a decade, and a winding road that included abandoning both the original concept and a second attempt — taking a few years off before resuming and then dealing with pandemic delay — McAnally and Clark’s dreams come true Tuesday (April 4) when Shucked opens on Broadway at the Nederlander Theater.
The show, directed by three-time Tony winner Jack O’Brien, features lyrics and music by McAnally and Clark and a book by Robert Horn, who won a Tony for best book of a musical for Tootsie, which he wrote during a break from what ultimately became Shucked.
The musical comedy is a laugh-out-loud “farm-to-fable” about the denizens of a small, rural Midwest community, one of whom heads to the big city — well, Tampa — to figure out why the village’s corn has quit growing. The musical combines the good-natured, fish-out-of-water vibe of The Book of Mormon and the occasional bawdiness of Avenue Q, with a redeemed con man tale reminiscent of The Music Man.
Part of the show’s charm is its effervescent embrace of obvious, often lowbrow, humor: The female lead is named Maizy, who lives with her grandfather and friends in, naturally, Cob County. It pokes fun at rural stereotypes, but always with great affection for its characters and a knowing wink, provided by Storyteller 1 and Storyteller 2, who serve as the in-on-the-joke narrators.
With Horn’s script often focused on laughs, much of the emotional lifting comes from Clark and McAnally’s songs — including poignant, tender ballad “Maybe Love,” resilient mid-tempo track “Somebody Will,” perky empowerment tune “Woman of the World” and audacious anthem (and bonafide showstopper) “Independently Owned.”
“Shucked” writers Shane McAnally (music & lyrics), Robert Horn (book), and Brandy Clark (music & lyrics).
Emilio Madrid
Responsible for such hits (together and separately) as Sam Hunt’s “Body Like a Back Road,” Miranda Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart,” Kacey Musgraves’ “Merry-Go-Round” and dozens of others, Clark and McAnally know their way around a country hook. But they didn’t know their way around the structure and timing of crafting a Broadway musical — so they were thrilled when they got a care package from Horn early in the process.
“He sent us CDs, saying, ‘These are opening numbers. There are 11:00 numbers,’” Clark recalls. Hairspray’s bouncy, inviting first tune, ‘Good Morning, Baltimore’ was on the opening numbers CD, while powerful ballads The Wizard of Oz’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and West Side Story’s “Tonight” were examples of 11 o’clock numbers (even if those songs didn’t end their respective projects), meant to demonstrate the pacing and mood of writing for different acts.
“The thing about Robert is he’s a generous collaborator,” Clark says. “He wanted real country songwriters and he was willing to do that work to help us do our homework.”
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
Around 10 years ago, Horn was approached by the Opry Entertainment Group to write the book for a musical based on Hee Haw, the hokey variety show that ran from 1969 to 1991 and mixed country music with groan-worthy skits, often set in a cornfield. He asked Clark and McAnally to work with him.
“We loved the idea of doing something associated with Hee Haw. We were the only people who felt that way,” McAnally says with a laugh, sitting with Clark in a second floor lounge in the Nederlander Theater the morning after a sold-out preview.
McAnally and Clark quickly discovered that, while Hee Haw did offer them their first exposure to artists like Buck Owens, Roy Clark and Tammy Wynette as young children watching with their grandparents, “there wasn’t a lot there and some of the humor did not age well,” McAnally says. The idea morphed into the broader-themed Moonshine: That Hee Haw Musical, which opened in Dallas in September 2015, and told the story of a small town girl who goes to the big city to be a TV weathergirl.
Feeling that Moonshine wasn’t where it needed to be, after the Dallas run, the trio put the musical on hold. “We stepped away from it and said, ‘Maybe it’s just not going to happen,’” Horn says. “But there was a seed of an idea that we loved.”
A year or two later, as Horn watched America riven by political and ideological conflict, he reached out to Clark and McAnally. ‘“We need to start over,’” he recalls saying. “Let’s write a show about how we find commonality in a country so divided. We can’t fix that, but maybe we can be a part of the healing.”
The show was completely overhauled, with O’Brien now onboard and the theme evolving to “a girl who is underestimated and finds out she has the ability to be a hero inside of her,” Horn says.
Shortly after the producers booked the show for a late 2020 run at the National Theater in Washington, D.C., the pandemic hit and the run was canceled.
“If the show’s successful, I credit it to the pandemic,” Horn says. “We sat down and dug into the show and said, ‘It’s not there yet.’ Had we opened that show, it was still a good show — but it wasn’t the show. We literally rewrote the whole show again.”
Though country songs are renowned for their storytelling, Clark says writing for characters for a musical hits different. “When Alex Newell (Lulu) gets a standing ovation [for ‘Independently Owned’], it feels out of body,” she says. “I remember seeing Miranda Lambert after ‘Mama’s Broken Heart’ had been a hit, and when that part of the show came, being super-excited. This doesn’t feel like that. I forget that these are our songs. They are [the characters’ songs] — and when they feel like their songs, then I know it’s right.”
McAnally adds writing for Shucked is closer to his and Clark’s truest selves. “What’s funny is this actually feels like what we always did. We switched for [Nashville],” he says. “We have to edit [those songs] because we have a much more irreverent sense of humor. We love rhymes that are completely shocking, that people would go, ‘I’d never say that.’ Here we don’t have to do that — because we’re saying what these characters would say and not trying to figure out if Dierks Bentley would say it.”
A few remnants from Moonshine remain — including the rowdy “We Love Jesus (But We Drink a Little),” which opens the second act and serves as the theme of the small-town girl going to the big city and actor Kevin Cahoon, who is the only holdover from the Moonshine cast, where he played an idiot savant named Junior Junior.
In Shucked, Cahoon’s character is now Peanut, the town philosopher — who come across as a bit of a rube, but then spouts profound universal truths. Based on Horn’s husband’s uncle, who was a peanut farmer, Cahoon’s character also runs the radio station, marries and buries people, and is the town clerk.
Kevin Cahoon
Emilio Madrid
As Cahoon researched his part, he discovered the “great tradition of country storytellers, whether it’s Minnie Pearl or Jerry Clower,” he says. “You may have thought [they] were hayseeds, but they are saying things that are connected to you in a simple, pure, honest way. I thought about those great country comedians when I’m playing him.”
BOSNER’S ‘BEAUTIFUL’ EFFECT
The show may have remained dormant after Dallas, if not for Mike Bosner, one of the lead producers on the Tony-winning Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, signing on as lead producer. He heard about Moonshine after the Dallas run and met McAnally through McAnally’s husband, who knew Bosner’s wife, Brittany Schreiber, a booker for Today.
“Shane and I started talking about doing a different show, because I was obsessed about bringing a show to Broadway with country music,” Bosner says. “The fact that [there] hasn’t been one in recent years is a crime.”
Those involved say Bosner’s palpable enthusiasm, connections (he brought in O’Brien) and backing made all the difference. “We’re very happy that he got on board and feels so passionate,” McAnally says. “That relationship was really what put this into high gear.”
Around 2019, as Bosner began lining up other investors — the SEC filing’s range for the show is a minimum of $13 million and a maximum of $16 million — he approached Sandbox Entertainment head Jason Owen, whom he knew through his wife, to become a producer. (Even though artist manager Owen and McAnally are partners in Monument Records, it was Bosner who brought him in.)
Owen then brought in the other lead investor, AEG, which had last invested on Broadway in 2005’s The Color Purple, and whose team, led by Jay Marciano and Gary Gersh, has provided not just money but business acumen. “For the last six or seven months, we’ve had weekly calls with AEG,” Owen says. “They’ve been involved in looking at how we’re marketing in and outside of New York [and] cross-analyzing data on the ticket buyers that are seeing certain shows in and around New York.” AEG has also used its buildings and other venues to provide billboards and other out-of-home marketing.
(Owen further tapped into the music community, recruiting Sony Music Entertainment and clients Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild and Jimi Westbrook as co-producers.)
Broadway previews began March 8, and given how Shucked is an unproven commodity with no known hit songs and no big names in the cast, the show aggressively discounted preview tickets — with some going for as low as $29, and none higher than $149. According to Broadway News, the gambit worked, with attendance running at (or close to) 100% for the first three weeks of previews. “What we really needed to do was get butts in seats,” Owen says. “We were able to capture an audience that lives on social media and was able to start spreading the word about how great the show is.”
The play is deliberately being marketed as a musical comedy and not a country musical. As the U.S. emerges from COVID and remains mired in political division, the producers are counting on a show with no agenda, other than to make people laugh and accept one another, to have broad appeal.
The promotional ad campaign initially relied on stressing the punny humor, while keeping an air of mystery. One ad had the tagline, “’I saw it 300 times before it even opened’-George Santos.” Another read, “’The musical that has Broadway all a-Twitter’-Elon Husk.”
Despite its rural themes and Clark and McAnally’s pedigrees, the music falls more solidly in the pop range, and the producers didn’t want to risk alienating any attendees by labeling the show “country.” “In a big metropolitan city like New York, saying, ‘Oh, we’re doing a country show’ — the theater elite is [going to be] like, ‘I don’t know if that’s for me,’” Bosner says. “But if you’re selling musical comedy and saying this is a laugh-out-loud hilarious, then a country score or whatever [genre] it is, would be the gift with purchase. From the get-go, I’ve been saying, ‘We need to sell this as the best time out,’ and our goal is to not create any potential pothole that says, ‘That doesn’t sound like a show for me’.”
Owen agrees. “The marketpace on Broadway is currently 90% existing jukebox musicals, whether that’s [MJ the Musical] or Moulin Rouge. You know to some extent what you’re getting,” he says. “If we would have pigeonholed ourselves into a country [box] when it’s really not — it just didn’t feel right to look at it like that.”
Clark and McAnally join a short list of Nashville-based, country music songwriters to open original musicals on Broadway. The most successful of those musicals has been Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with music and lyrics by Roger Miller (“King of the Road”). The Tony winner for best musical originally opened in 1985 and ran for 1,005 performances. Keeping with the Mark Twain works, Don Schlitz (“The Gambler”) wrote the music and lyrics for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which ran for 21 performances in 2001.
More recently, Nashville based Wayne Kirkpatrick (“Change the World”) was nominated for a Tony for best original score for co-writing the words and music for Something Rotten!, which opened in 2015 and played for 708 performances.
Sony Masterworks Broadway will release Shucked’s original cast recording digitally on May 5 and on CD June 9, but there are already thoughts of finding big pop names to possibly reinvent the songs, à la 2016’s The Hamilton Mixtape, featuring Kelly Clarkson and Alicia Keys, or 2017’s The Greatest Showman: Reimagined, which included P!nk, Zac Brown Band and Kesha. “Imagine ‘Independently Owned’ sung by Lizzo,” Clark says. “That’s where our head goes.”
There are also dreams of taking Shucked into corners that Broadway musicals have never ventured before. “AEG has Coachella and Stagecoach. Is there a world where we can do the music of the show at Stagecoach in some way?” Bosner asks. “That’ll be amazing, right? But let’s get the show open on Broadway first.”
Hulu wasn’t explicitly looking to develop a musical comedy when songwriters Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, writer Steven Levenson, and director Thomas Kail presented them with Up Here. The platform hadn’t ever done a musical TV show — which, despite well-received past series like Glee, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Schmigadoon remains a relative rarity in the current streaming world.
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But, as head of scripted content at Hulu Originals Jordan Helman remembers it, it was hard to resist this “who’s-who of the heavy hitters of Broadway in the past decade.” Kail is the Tony-winning director of Hamilton (and now Sweeney Todd); Levenson the Tony-winning playwright behind Dear Evan Hansen; and Lopez and Anderson-Lopez the Academy Award-, Emmy- and Grammy-winning married duo behind the music of Frozen, Frozen 2 and Coco (Bobby, who co-created The Book of Mormon and Avenue Q, is also a double EGOT winner).
Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez
Sarah Shatz/Hulu
Up Here is based on a musical of the same name by Anderson-Lopez and Lopez, produced in 2015 at the La Jolla Playhouse. The story of Miguel and Lindsay (portrayed by Carlos Valdes and Mae Whitman) finding themselves, and romance, in New York City in the 1990s — while battling the naysaying voices of their subconsciouses, personified onscreen — was, Helman says, an “irresistible” opportunity for Hulu to enter the musical landscape. Its audiences have responded positively to female-driven soaps and thrillers in the past, but “we had never really approached [a show] through a rom-com lens,” Helman continues. “This felt like a tailored opportunity to broaden the aperture of what we do, but still feeling deeply relevant to the viewers we have on platform.”
For Lopez and Anderson-Lopez, developing Up Here for TV was also an enticing opportunity to expand upon and rethink their original show — which dwelt on the male protagonist’s subconscious. It was freeing as well, allowing them to explore multiple genres in their songwriting. And with each episode functioning like a mini-musical — complete with elaborate singing and dance numbers — they were able to see a much larger than usual quantity of their compositions make it to the final product (those songs can also be heard on the show’s soundtrack, recently released on Hollywood Records).
“We’re from Broadway,” says Bobby. “And we wanted to bring what was great about Broadway musicals and see if we could do our version of it in a streaming series.” Below, he and Anderson-Lopez speak to Billboard about precisely how they did it.
After the production of Up Here at La Jolla, what did you hope its future would be?
Kristen Anderson-Lopez: La Jolla was a huge growth experience. We’d never done book, music and lyrics all together before … while raising two children out of town … and getting infested with bird mites. [Laughs.] That’s a thing that happened! We realized that where we are in our lives, we wanted to work with book writers [going forward]. You can’t address what you need to in production, on all three fronts, overnight, every day. So, we’d started to talk to talk to book writers and had actually identified Steven Levenson as someone with their finger on the pulse of what we wanted to do.
Then life took over: Frozen Broadway, Frozen 2, Coco. There was an Excel spreadsheet somewhere that said we could do nothing else for four years. [Laughs.] So it got put away. But there was always this intention of revisiting it with Steven at some date in the future. And then that date came in 2020 when Tommy Kail called us and said, “Hey, I’d like to do something with you guys on TV” — and we’d fallen in love with Fosse/Verdon [the FX series that Kail directed]. If there’s a president and vice president of the Fosse/Verdon fan club, it’s us.
Bobby Lopez: The production in La Jolla was very different from what we ended up with on Hulu — in that it only really entered the guy’s head, and one of the takeaways was, “Gee, I wish we’d written it so you could see what she’s thinking, too.” We couldn’t imagine rewriting it for the stage in a way that would preserve any of what we had. So, we were a little frustrated.
But when the idea of television came into it — doing a half-hour comedy, where every week we had the structure to write a mini-musical in essence, and end up with 8 mini musicals adding up to a larger grand musical [over a season] — we got very excited. It just seemed like, “This is a new take on the idea, we’ll be able to tell a different story, we’ll be able to change the characters in exciting ways.”
‘Up Here’
Patrick Harbron/Hulu
Did you preserve anything from the original stage show?
Kristen: I’d say the thing that’s preserved is the concept and question of: Can you ever truly know someone? And what does it feel like when a relationship that you assume is, “This is my person” — they become a stranger? And how you realize you’re up against the bubble of your own consciousness.
Bobby: Some of the songs about that theme carried over. For instance, the idea of “I Can Never Know You” — that was a song in the original, and we transformed it into a different song called “Please Like Me” for the show.
Kristen: “Please Like Me” was originally kind of a “I’m Just a Girl Who Cain’t Say No” charm song — an introduction to the female lead — and now it’s about the huge problem she’s battling. I think it probably always was. And we were always curious to see if you could have a song that’s so clearly, “This person needs to grow from this.” But it’s also why you identify with her, because she’s so honest about it.
Even in the expanded streaming world, musical television shows still feel pretty few and far between. Why do you think that is?
Kristen: I can tell you, after doing it for the last three years — it’s very, very difficult to do. TV is always hard to do. It’s always about getting it ready as much as you can, then you have to get lightning in a bottle on the film day, then you have to piece it together. If you add the elements of learning music and choreography, producing music, to something already time-constrained… you’ve added weights to what’s already hard.
Bobby: I think we sold this show on the first pitch, to [co-chairman of Disney Entertaiment] Dana Walden. And they were very excited — we all were — and then we realized the process of developing a TV show. A lot of the writing is done during production, whereas musical theater is very iterative as a process: You write a draft of the whole thing, you have to see it in front of an audience to know whether it’s working. And it’s the same in animation, honestly – we screen the first version of the film, and then kind of throw it all out, and at the end of many iterations we have something we know works and we produce that.
TV is much more accelerated. It took a lot of time before we were greenlit, rethinking the concept of who these characters were. It was a high degree of difficulty to not only have these singing characters, but also the concept of being inside their minds.
What are the specific challenges inherent in making an episodic musical, as opposed to one in film or onstage that’s over in about two hours?
Kristen: Every musical has an architectural scaffold to it: You have your opening, your “I want” song, your charm song, your act break, your finale, your 11:00 number. [For a show] you really want to know what the whole is before you start making the parts.
We really had to think architecturally [with this show] as we were breaking the story – toggling between what it is to break a normal streaming comedy and to break a musical. There’s a little bit of a Russian doll aspect: In order to have the whole series, we needed to have a giant overview and know where the key songs were going to be before you could ever film. And then you need to record all those songs. Everything has to be pretty solid before a single actor has ever stood on a soundstage, because the songs get pre-recorded.
Bobby: Which is the opposite of how we usually work. In theater, the cast album is the last thing. In animation, you kind of record as you go. It’s never the very first thing — like, “Hi Mae, I’m Bobby, this is Kristen! Now, if you step inside the booth, let’s record the first song.”
Kristen: I will say, I have never been part of a TV writers’ room, and I absolutely loved it. It was kind of like eight hours of group therapy every day. It’s just really creative people pretending, basically.
You get to play with musical genre so much from episode to episode. Did that feel like a freeing new direction?
Kristen: It was liberating. We could jump all over – you could have a Fiona Apple[-type] song next to a Katrina and the Waves song next to a weird eight-bit mini opera.
Bobby: The original show was vast — it was meant to be like a British mega-musical, it had a big orchestra, it wanted to sound gigantic. This version, we really went small with it, trying to think of it all as one rock band playing the music. Getting to work with the same players every day, it felt like we were making an album, rather than hiring players to be in the orchestra pit. It felt unified by its small, intimate sound.
Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez
Sarah Shatz/Hulu
What was the casting process like? Both Mae and Carlos are great singers, but they’re not huge, over-the-top Broadway voices.
Kristen: At its heart we wanted this to feel like an extraordinary story about ordinary people – so we didn’t want them to be larger than life. We wanted to find those people we’ve seen – or not seen – who really seem like you could see them on the street. They could [ordinarily] be the sidekick on a show, but this is a chance for the sidekicks to be the lead.
Mae brings with her such a beautiful humility; she does feel like, to me, your little sister. She’s so relatable and just lets you see all her emotions. And Carlos … we put poor Carlos through the wringer. He came in five times, because what he had to do was extraordinary. He had to be able to have these intimate scenes, but also dance up a storm and sing and really show us what’s underneath the toxic masculinity, and bare his soul. And he always rose to the occasion.
Bobby: We were 100% behind them vocally. They both have experience singing, and for what they needed to do in this, they really were rock stars. Not to mention the chemistry they have that just sparked.
Kristen: Mae likes to say she’s not a singer — but I spent years raising my kids on her Tinker Bell! She’s an amazing singer.
Bobby: One of my first gigs, I wrote a song on spec for The Jungle Book 2, and if it had gotten selected, Mae would have been the singer. I think she was 10.
Kristen: And Carlos was in Darren Criss’ band at University of Michigan. He went to this hardcore, triple-threat high school that was like the FAME high school of Atlanta — and then he got into Michigan for musical theater, which is like, where you go to become a Broadway star.
You also have big Broadway stars on the show, like Norm Lewis and Brian Stokes Mitchell — but it seems like you’re having fun casting them against type.
Bobby: There’s always a bunch of people we’re dying to work with and haven’t yet, and this was a great opportunity to. Scott Porter, we’d seen in Altar Boyz a long time ago and knew he was an amazing singer and dancer, so to get him onboard was incredible. Brian Stokes Mitchell and Norm Lewis are baritone titans of Broadway.
Kristen: To talk about Stokes for a second: To bring him in to do a hip-hop Dr. Seuss character, to show this side of him that’s so funny – we knew we needed a really charismatic, attractive silver fox. But then he just had this bead on this character that was so funny, and the ability to really commit that teeters on the absurd. And across the board, that’s what we got with all these Broadway performers. Nobody’s afraid of going toward the stylized, so everyone just committed hard to these big emotions in such wonderful, quirky ways.
Musicals, both on stage and in animated form, go through years of workshopping and development, and so much gets left on the cutting room floor. Up Here on the other hand seems to have a much higher quantity of songs – was that liberating?
Kristen: Yeah! Frozen, we wrote 26 songs and 7 got into the movie. Whereas here we wrote 25 songs and 21 are in the show. Although I will say, if you count La Jolla as part of that development process, the math falls apart there.
Bobby: Then it’s like 75 songs. [Laughs.] But yeah — we did toss a few numbers, but we didn’t have the luxury of doing a lot of cutting and rewriting. We killed ourselves making 21 brand new songs in a row, and having to mix and master and produce tracks that you love, it’s a great deal of work. Now, when we listen to the soundtrack, it does play like a cast recording – it feels like a Broadway show, and that’s what we wanted.
Nicholas Lloyd Webber, the Grammy-nominated composer, record producer and eldest son of Andrew Lloyd Webber, died Saturday (March 25) in England after a protracted battle with gastric cancer and pneumonia. He was 43.
“His whole family is gathered together and we are all totally bereft,” the 75-year-old Webber said in a statement emailed by a representative. “Thank you for all your thoughts during this difficult time.”
Nicholas died at a hospital in the south-central English town of Basingstoke, his father said. Webber, the famed composer, missed the Broadway opening Thursday of his Bad Cinderella to be at his son’s side with other loved ones.
Nicholas is best known for his work on the BBC One’s Love, Lies and Records, which was based on the book The Little Prince. He also worked on his father’s 2021 Cinderella, earning a Grammy nod for best musical theater album.
Nicholas is Webber’s son with his first wife, Sarah Hugill, also the mother of his older sister, Imogen. The senior Webber has four other children.
Andrew Lloyd Webber has given an update on his son Nick’s cancer battle. Just days after sharing that his eldest son was “critically ill” following an 18-month fight against gastric cancer, on Thursday (March 23) Webber posted a video on his Instagram revealing that Nick has checked into hospice care following a bout of pneumonia.
“I wanted to thank you first for the huge outpouring of messages of support for my son, Nick. He’s now been moved into a hospice and he’s battling away,” Webber said in the clip. “I think he’s over the worst of this first bout of pneumonia he’s got as a result of his cancer, which is just ghastly. But we’re all here, and the family here has gathered around, and it was the right place for us all to be I think.”
The elder Lloyd Webber was scheduled to attend the opening night of Bad Cinderella, which he composed, on Thursday (March 23) at New York City’s Imperial Theatre. The new musical is a reimagining of Cinderella, which ran in London from 2021 to 2022. “I will not be able to cheer on its wonderful cast, crew and orchestra on Opening Night,” the Oscar-winning composer said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter on March 18; he also noted that he has “not been able to attend the recent previews” of Bad Cinderella because of his son’s illness.
Nicholas Lloyd Webber, 43, is a Grammy-nominated composer and record producer known for his work on the 2021 film The Last Bus and 2013 short film Mr. Invisible, as well as co-producing and mixing the album for his father’s Cinderella, which earned him a 2022 Grammy nomination for best musical theater album.
In his mew video post, Lloyd Webber also sent along his best wishes to his “other family” around the world in the theater community, particularly the cast of Bad Cinderella. He apologized again for missing the opening night, but said he place now is in England with his family, while thanking the cast and wishing them good luck.
Watch Webber’s post below.
Lea Michele shared a vulnerable update with fans on Wednesday (March 22) after her son Leo was checked into the hospital for an undisclosed health matter.
“I’m so sorry but unfortunately I will be out of @FunnyGirlBwy today. We are at the hospital with our son dealing with a scary health issue that I need to be here for,” the actor wrote on her Instagram Stories, revealing she’d be calling out of her starring role in Broadway’s Funny Girl for the evening. “I’m so sorry. Please send us some love and strength.” She also shared a photo of her hand wrapped over the 2-year-old’s from his hospital bed.
Michele didn’t share what exactly sent her son with husband Zandy Reich to the hospital, but Funny Girl announced earlier this month that it will close this coming fall. After its final performance on Sept. 3, the show will hit the road for its very first North American tour.
Ahead of the news of its pending final curtain, the Michele-led revival of the 1964 musical starring Barbra Streisand — which originally featured Beanie Feldstein in the role of Fanny Brice — had been breaking box office records. In the week leading up to Christmas, the show raked in more than $2 million across eight shows, setting a new high water mark for the August Wilson Theatre.
In February, Michele opened up once again about the claims that have gone viral in recent years about her bullying others on the set of Glee, and how the backlash affected her perspective going into Funny Girl. “What I told myself stepping into Funny Girl was, ‘If I can’t take my role as a leader offstage as important as my role as a leader onstage, then I shouldn’t do this show,’” she told playwright Jeremy O. Harris for Interview Magazine.
Watch Michele’s Instagram Story before it disappears here.
Let me be your star! More than a decade after it premiered on NBC, Smash is finally getting the Broadway treatment.
A musical adaptation of the short-lived cult favorite series, which starred Katharine McPhee and Megan Hilty as rival actresses competing for the lead role of Marilyn Monroe in a new musical biopic called Bombshell, is currently in the works and aiming to take its first bow during Broadway’s 2024-2025 season.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the stage version of Smash will be helmed by Broadway legend Susan Stroman with Hairspray composers Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman in charge of the score, which will contain new music in addition to original favorites from the series like “Let Me Be Your Star” and “Don’t Forget Me.”
Running for just two seasons back in the early 2010s, Smash also starred Debra Messing (and her many scarves), Anjelica Huston and Broadway royalty such as Christian Borle, Brian d’Arcy James, Jeremy Jordan, Krysta Rodriguez, Leslie Odom Jr., Andy Mientus and Will Chase with Stephen Spielberg serving as an executive producer.
“Smash is near and dear to my heart, and it was always my hope that a musical inspired by the show would eventually come to the stage,” Spielberg said in a statement about bringing the series to Broadway. “We now have an incredible creative team, and I’m looking forward to completing the Smash journey which began with my producing partners over 10 years ago.”
This is hardly the first time a Smash-related production has tip-toed toward the Great White Way. In 2015, the cast reunited to stage a special, one-night-only concert of Bombshell at the Minskoff Theatre, and later hosted a live-stream concert in May 2020 during the pandemic.
Come on along and listen to the Jonas Brothers on Broadway! Throughout last week, the superstars took over the Marquis Theatre in midtown Manhattan for an exhilarating five-night residency on the very same stage where Nick Jonas made his Broadway debut as Little Jake two years into the 1999 revival of Annie Get Your Gun.
Each night, Nick, Joe Jonas and Kevin Jonas shone the bright lights of Broadway onto one of their past albums — starting with 2007’s Jonas Brothers and moving chronologically through 2008’s A Little Bit Longer, 2009’s Lines, Vines and Trying Times and 2019’s Happiness Begins.
“It really is kind of an emotional experience because you’re walking through different chapters of your life and your journey, both as a band and also as family, and kind of where we were at those pivotal moments when we released those albums,” Nick dished to Billboard at SXSW ahead of the residency’s first night.
But those first four shows, filled with songs some of which the siblings hadn’t played in over a decade, were all leading up to Saturday night (March 18), when the JoBros debuted their forthcoming sixth album, The Album, live for the very first time for a select audience of friends, family and superfans lucky enough to snag a ticket. (Yes, Danielle Jonas, Sophie Turner and Priyanka Chopra were all present and accounted for to cheer their husbands on for the evening, as were Mama and Papa Jonas.)
Billboard was also on the scene to hear The Album ahead of its May 12 release via Republic Records. Read on for all the best and most exciting moments from the special, one-night-only occasion.
“Wings” is the One, the Sun, the Light of Day
It’s been less than a month since the Jonas Brothers kicked off their latest era with lead single “Wings.” But that was, of course, more than enough time for fans to memorize every word to the soft rock-laced bop. And though they performed it as part the set during each of the four preceding nights, “Wings” certainly hit differently in context with other songs from The Album. With Nick and Joe trading vocals and a theater full of Jonatics gleefully singing along, the earworm went all the way to the rafters.
It’s Always Love at the “Waffle House“
“Waffle House,” which the siblings have already started teasing on social media, just might be their most personal song yet. “One of the things that we used to do back in the day before we were old enough to go and decompress post-show at a bar, was we would just go to a Waffle House,” Nick explained while introducing the song, “and sit there and spend hours talking about those experiences on stage, life on the road, and it really became a foundation for our relationship as brothers outside of the music that we did together.”
As evidenced by the JoBros sneak peek on TikTok, the surefire highlight — which would be perfect as The Album‘s next single — jitters with a funky groove and harmonies fit for a gospel choir as Joe and Nick preach, “No, don’t get stressed, it’s gon’ get figured out/ Oh, deep conversations at the Waffle House/ Headstrong father and a determined mother/ Oh, that’s why some nights we try to kill each other/ But you know it’s always love.”
The Rest of The Album Is Going to Slap
Nick wasn’t kidding when he declared that the band’s sixth album would be pulling influences and musical inspiration from ’70s acts like the Bee Gees, America, Boston and Stevie Wonder. Track for track, the sneak peek of The Album was an instantly nostalgic thrill ride filled with plenty of harmonies, guitar and the most mature, intimate songwriting from the brothers to date — from the disco-lite pulse of “Sail Away” to the melodic, sensual “Vacation Eyes,” which Kevin adoringly dedicated to Danielle in the orchestra.
Tender ballad “Little Bird” — which the trio wrote from their newly shared perspective on fatherhood (“we’re all dads, but we’re girl dads,” Joe stated to an explosion of cheers from the crowd) — is primed to be a father-daughter dance of choice at Jonatic weddings for years to come, and the horn-infused “Celebrate!” earned the exclamation point in its title by getting the party started as the very first song of the night.
Jonas Brothers on Broadway
Cynthia Parkhurst
“Montana Sky”(the first song the brothers wrote for The Album) was perhaps the most immediate album cut outside of “Waffle House” thanks to its dueling America-style guitars, shoutouts from New York City to George and a lovestruck refrain of “You’re the one, you’re the one walkin’ in my head.” And even without its guest feature from Bellion, album closer brought the theater to a state of euphoria as it morphed from a thoughtful plea into a bombastic, arena-ready finale.
Took a Ship to the Year 3000
After a proper, Broadway-style intermission, Act 2 of the show played out like the greatest of greatest hits collections, including the requisite forays into Nick’s solo career and Joe’s work with DNCE. Especially for the occasion, the former resurrected the gospel version of his 2014 single “Jealous” to divine effect and the latter happily shared the spotlight with DNCE guitarist JinJoo Lee on fan favorites like “Toothpaste” and “Cake by the Ocean.”
But nothing could top classic JoBros hits like “S.O.S.,” “That’s Just the Way We Roll,” “Lovebug” and “Burnin’ Up,” complete with Nick’s iconic delivery of “red dress” which elicited Beatlemania-level screams of adoration from the audience. And yet, no other song from the band’s ’00s-era catalog got quite the same reaction as “Year 3000.” Every fan scream-sang every single word of the 2006 single, filling the Marquis Theater with an electric energy that could’ve super-charged a Flux Capacitor.
Jonas Brothers on Broadway
Cynthia Parkhurst
Kevin’s Lullaby of Broadway
Hysterically, much was made throughout the evening of Kevin finally making his Broadway debut years after his brothers. It even started with Broadway actors Sis, Alex Boniello and Andrew Barth Feldman reading from “The Book” as Nick, Joe and Kevin, respectively, at the start of the show. (“Yeah guys, we know you all did theater! We get it!”) But the running gag turned serious and sentimental when Joe — who took his first Broadway bow in Baz Luhrmann’s 2002’s production of La Bohème — paused the show midway through the second act to properly celebrate Kevin’s debut on the Great White Way. And naturally, he did so by singing the hook from Hilary Duff’s “What Dreams Are Made Of,” giving fans the Disney Channel crossover they didn’t know they needed for the night.
Andrew Lloyd Webber has announced that he will be absent from the opening night of his new Broadway musical Bad Cinderella because his eldest son is “critically ill” with gastric cancer.
The Phantom of the Opera composer shared a statement with The Hollywood Reporter on Saturday (March 18), revealing that his 43-year-old son, Grammy-nominated composer and record producer Nicholas Lloyd Webber, has been fighting cancer for the last 18 months and is currently hospitalized.
“We are all praying that Nick will turn the corner,” Andrew Lloyd Webber said in the statement. “He is bravely fighting with his indomitable humour, but at the moment my place is with him and the family.”
Andrew Lloyd Webber was scheduled to attend the opening night of Bad Cinderella, which he composed, on Thursday (March 23) at New York City’s Imperial Theatre. The new musical is a reimagining of Cinderella, which ran in London from 2021 to 2022.
“I will not be able to cheer on its wonderful cast, crew and orchestra on Opening Night,” the Oscar-winning composer said.
Andrew Lloyd Webber also noted that he has “not been able to attend the recent previews” of Bad Cinderella because of his son’s illness.
Nicholas Lloyd Webber is known scoring the 2017 BBC One drama Love, Lies and Records, along with the 2021 movie The Last Bus. He was also the co-producer of the original cast album for his father’s Cinderella in 2021, which earned him a Grammy nomination for best musical theater album.
The Jonas Brothers hit the Broadway stage on Thursday (March 16) for the third night of their ongoing Broadway residency, and trotted out their Miley Cyrus collab “Before the Storm” especially for the occasion.
The performance marked the first time the siblings had performed the album cut from 2009’s Lines, Vines and Trying Times since at least 2013, though they decided to only run through the first part of the song, sans Cyrus’ opening verse. “I don’t want to lose her/ Don’t wanna let her go,” Nick Jonas belted out before urging the audience, “Sing it out, c’mon!” and letting the packed crowd sing along for the chorus.
“The ONLY part of Before The Storm Nick could tolerate to sing lol,” a fan on Twitter captioned the video she posted of the number. Of course, the youngest Jonas has quite the history with the Endless Summer Vacation singer, considering they dated in their Disney Channel days as teens and Cyrus allegedly based her 2008 hit “7 Things” on their relationship.
For the third night of their takeover at the Marquis Theatre, the JoBros performed the entirety of their fourth studio studio set in full, including a snippet of Common collab “Don’t Charge Me for the Crime” and the live debut of album closer “Keep It Real.”
On Friday night (March 17), they’re set to highlight 2019’s Happiness Begins before the live premiere of their soon-to-be released new LP, The Album, on Saturday (March 18).
Watch the Jonas Brothers sing “Before the Storm” sans Miley Cyrus below.
Good news, Arianators: The first part of Jon M. Chu’s Wicked adaptation will be premiering in theaters a month earlier than expected, the directorannounced on Tuesday (March 14).
Chu excitedly shared the news via Instagram, writing that he and his team were “deep into shooting WICKED here in London” before officially announcing the new release date. “Bring the family, bring your friends…it’s going to be a ride!!! appreciate all your support through this long production process. Shooting two movies at once is no small feat.”
The film version of the hit Broadway musical — which will star Ariana Grande as Glinda and Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba — was initially meant to hit theaters on Christmas Day of next year (Dec. 25, 2024). But in the spirit of giving thanks, Wicked Part 1 is now set to be released next Thanksgiving (Nov. 27, 2024), meaning that fans can catch the film one month sooner.
Sources told The Hollywood Reporter that the original release date was pushed up reportedly in order to help the film “build an audience over the year-end holidays,” while also remaining “beneficial from a consumer products standpoint.”
Michelle Yeoh, Jonathan Bailey, Jeff Goldblum, Keala Settle, Bowen Yang, Ethan Slater and others are also set to star in the film. Yeoh, who took home the Academy Award for best actress on Sunday (March 12), said earlier this year that she was “really looking forward” to getting to film alongside Grande and Erivo. “Those two are so adorable, so gorgeous, so talented,” she said.
See Chu’s announcement about ‘s new release date below.