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Post-pandemic album cycles for A-list pop acts have often been accompanied by major, career-high concert announcements. Bad Bunny’s all-stadium World’s Hottest Tour preceded the release of Un Verano Sin Ti, Taylor Swift’s Midnights was followed by The Eras Tour, and Morgan Wallen’s One Thing at a Time is being supported by his first run in stadiums. For the Jonas Brothers, similar announcements would trickle out. But before going big, they went intimate.
In March, Joe, Kevin & Nick Jonas put on five shows at Broadway’s Marquis Theatre, recently the home to stage musicals Beetlejuice, Tootsie and Evita. Located on 46th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues in Manhattan, the Jonas Brothers took on Broadway with a series of (relatively) small shows that set the stage for the year ahead.
Titled Jonas Brothers on Broadway = 5 Albums 5 Nights, the band played its entire discography dating back to 2007, one album at a time: Jonas Brothers on the 14th, A Little Bit Longer on the 15th, Lines, Vines and Trying Times on the 16th, Happiness Begins on the 17th, and this year’s as-yet-unreleased The Album on the 18th.
Speaking to Billboard, Brad Wavra (SVP Global Touring, Live Nation) commented, “The Jonas Brothers’ Broadway shows were all about doing something unique and special for their fans. The intimate setting combined with the format of celebrating five albums over five nights was meant to bring fans along on the band’s personal journey from day one all the way into their new upcoming album.”
According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, the Jonas Brothers grossed $1.6 million and sold 7,291 tickets over these five consecutive shows.
Scaling for the week of shows was relatively consistent, ranging from 1,387 tickets on the final night to 1,500 on the 16th. Accordingly, grosses barely budged, from $298,000 to $322,000. Tickets were priced between $299 and $89, averaging out at $213.
Having toured arenas and amphitheaters for the last 15 years, the Marquis Theatre is the smallest venue the Jonas Brothers have played since 2008, dating back to a sold-out underplay at London’s Carling Academy Islington (591 tickets, now known as the O2 Academy). To further illustrate the Broadway run’s rare intimacy, it’s the first reported engagement at the venue in Boxscore history.
Since the Jonas Brothers’ 2019 reunion, the band’s New York presence has been spread between Madison Square Garden, Barclays Center, the Prudential Center (Newark, N.J.) and Northwell Health at Jones Beach Theater (Wantagh, N.Y.). Those five shows (there were two at MSG) averaged $2.2 million and close to 15,000 tickets.
But the Marquis Theatre shows don’t represent a step down from historical business. Since their Broadway concerts, the JoBros announced a two-night stay at Yankee Stadium, marking the biggest area play of the band’s career. “The momentum is only going to build from here with their stadium shows coming in August, and with what more lies ahead for 2023,” says Wavra.
Throughout their history in arenas and amphitheaters, the Jonas Brothers have dipped their toes in the stadium circuit. Most recently, they played one show at Boston’s Fenway Park (Oct. 1, 2021) and two at Hersheypark Stadium in Hershey, Penn. (Aug. 31, 2019 and Sept. 24, 2021). Those shows peaked at 31,000 in attendance and $2.6 million, leaving room to grow for Yankee Stadium’s 45,000 capacity.
Since the group’s earliest Boxscore reports in 2006, the Jonas Brothers have grossed $326.8 million and sold 4.5 million tickets across 359 shows. With three secret-location shows later this month in Los Angeles (April 25), Dallas-Fort Worth (April 26) and Baltimore (April 28), plus the Aug. 12-13 New York dates, those numbers will continue to grow in 2023.
Andrew Lloyd Webber stopped by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Monday night (April 17) to reflect on Cats, The Phantom of the Opera and more.
Host Jimmy Fallon led his conversation with the Broadway legend to the Jellicle 1981 musical by asking, “Can I ask you about Cats?” as members of the audience chuckled. “How does one come up with an idea like Cats? And are you a cat person?”
“Well, I am a cat person,” Lord Lloyd Webber responded. “Well, I was a total cat person until I saw the Cats movie.”
After that joke got an impromptu standing ovation from the studio audience, the composer continued. “What happened to the Cats movie was, during the course of it being, as it were, shot — which I hope the whole movie would’ve been — I bought this little puppy. And he was called Mojito, he’s a little Havanese dog, he comes from Cuba.”
Lloyd Webber went on to explain that he tried using the pup as a therapy dog on an airplane, but the unnamed airline said he needed a doctor’s note. “And so I just said, ‘I saw the Cats movie and bought a puppy,’” he deadpanned. “And they said, ‘No doctor’s letter required.’”
Directed by Tom Hooper, the 2019 musical adaptation featured a who’s who of stars like James Corden, Judi Dench, Idris Elba, Jason Derulo, Jennifer Hudson, Ian McKellan and Taylor Swift as humanoid alley cats. It was panned by critics and audiences alike, though “Beautiful Ghosts,” the original song written for the film by Lloyd Webber and Swift, did garner a Grammy nomination for best song written for visual media.
During the interview, the Broadway impresario also spoke about the closing of Phantom the night before, saying, “It was sad last night because I just felt it could run on, but there you go.”
However, the iconic chandelier may not have fallen for the last time. ALW received a mysterious note that was delivered to the Tonight Show studio from the Phantom himself, which read, “I am extremely displeased that my legend is no longer being told in New York, a city for which I have developed great affection. I am therefore currently obtaining a new address in which my legend will be examined in extreme detail. I advise you and New Yorkers to be vigilant.”
Watch Lloyd Webber’s complete interview with Fallon below.
Sara Bareilles, Vanessa Williams and Ledisi are among the artists who will be featured on Great Performances: Celebrating 50 Years of Broadway’s Best, which premieres Friday, May 12, at 9 p.m. ET on PBS and the PBS app.
The program, which marks Great Performances’ golden anniversary, is a revue of milestone Broadway shows from 1973 to 2023. The special will feature a mix of original stars and up-and-coming talent. Hosted by two-time Tony winner Sutton Foster, the program was taped on March 23 at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater in New York.
Bareilles sings “She Used to Be Mine” from Waitress (for which she received a 2016 Tony nomination for original music score). Williams, who earned a 2002 Tony nod her performance in Into the Woods, performs a song from Kiss of the Spider Woman, which brought Broadway legend Chita Rivera her second Tony.
Other highlights of the special include Rivera performing her signature song “All That Jazz” from Chicago; André De Shields performing “So You Wanted to See the Wizard” from The Wiz; a tribute to A Chorus Line featuring Tony-winning original cast member Donna McKechnie joined by Robyn Hurder; and a tap number from Jelly’s Last Jam performed by Corbin Bleu.
Other performers on the show include Brian Stokes Mitchell, Jessie Mueller, Raúl Esparza, Shoshana Bean, Norm Lewis, Rob McClure, Patina Miller, Mamie Parris, Solea Pfeiffer, Britton Smith and Jessica Vosk.
The show features songs by such composers as Stephen Schwartz, John Kander & Fred Ebb, Fats Waller, Stephen Sondheim, Duke Ellington and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Great Performances: Celebrating 50 Years of Broadway’s Best is directed and choreographed by Tony winner Warren Carlyle with Patrick Vaccariallo as music director. The program was directed for television by David Horn, produced by Mitch Owgang and co-produced and written by Dave Boone.
One week later, on Friday, May 19, at 9 p.m. ET, Great Performances will air the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park production of Richard III starring Danai Gurira (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, The Walking Dead) with Tony winner Ali Stroker (Oklahoma!) as Lady Anne. Tony nominee Robert O’Hara (Broadway’s Slave Play) directs this Shakespearean tragedy.
One week after that, on Friday, May 26, at 9 p.m. ET, there will be an encore presentation of Cole Porter’s classic 1934 musical Anything Goes, starring Foster (who won her second Tony for the 2011 Broadway production) as well as Tony winner Robert Lindsay. The show, restaged in London’s West End, was directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall. Featuring such classic songs as “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “You’re the Top” and the title song, the show first aired on PBS last year.
This is the season for Broadway programming. The 76th annual Tony Awards, hosted by Ariana DeBose, are set for Sunday, June 11. The show will be held at the United Palace in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood.
Throughout its 50-year history on PBS, Great Performances has amassed 67 Emmy Awards and six Peabody Awards. The series is produced by The WNET Group. For Great Performances, Bill O’Donnell is series producer and David Horn is executive producer.
As the creative forces behind Broadway shows like Hairspray! and Catch Me If You Can, as well as the cult hit TV show Smash, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman have written some of the most beloved musicals of the past couple decades (Shaiman composes; the two write lyrics together).
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This spring is particularly eventful for the pair. Their new musical Some Like It Hot — a timely adaptation of the classic 1959 film which happens to also offer a poignant, thoughtful take on drag culture and gender identity — is a hit with both critics and audiences. And at long last, as Shaiman and Wittman recently revealed, a much-awaited stage adaptation of Smash is slated to hit Broadway next year.
Below, the duo speak to Billboard about the Smash news, the prescient timing of Some Like It Hot (including its surprise, reimagined twist) and how they’ve maintained career longevity amid the choppy waters the Great White Way.
It’s safe to say the news that Smash is coming to Broadway shook the internet. Can you talk about the path to the big announcement?
Scott Wittman: Well, it’s been in the works for awhile. About a year and a half ago, we did a reading with a script from Rick Elice and Bob Martin, who have written many shows, including The Drowsy Chaperone and Jersey Boys.
Marc Shaiman: They’re great writers who came to the producers of Smash and said they’d love to take a crack at writing a script. For a few years before that, everyone was trying to create a musical of Bombshell, the actual Marilyn Monroe musical we were writing [within] the show, and the original plan was at the end of the season to have a musical we’d produce on Broadway. So it actually was always the idea to bring a show to Broadway.
But what’s different here is that it no longer became feasible to do a version of Bombshell, because the songs we wrote were always trying to speak to what the characters on Smash, the TV show, were going through. We’d find moments from Marilyn Monroe’s life that mirrored what was happening on Smash, so all of these songs had double meanings, and the lyrics were always skewed. Also, if any one woman tried to sing all of the songs we wrote for Marilyn in Bombshell — which were always these big, 11 o’clock showstoppers — they’d die by the end of the performance. Finally our producers said, “Let’s listen to what Rick and Bob would want to pitch us.”
Wittman: We had a great reading about a year ago. Steven Spielberg came and said, “This is fantastic, let’s do it.” So that’s how it happened.
So this is a show about putting on a musical. A musical version of the TV show.
Wittman: It’s like Noises Off. You’re doing a musical but everything goes totally wrong.
Shaiman: What it says on the title page is A Comedy About a Musical. We don’t know if they’ll actually call it a play or a musical. So it’s like the TV show Smash — only, we hope, funnier.
Wittman: It’s very funny. There were very funny people in the reading; who knows if they’ll be in the show.
I guess the next logical step then is to make a movie version of the stage musical inspired by the TV show?
Shaiman: [Laughs.] It’s all so confusing. Then you throw in Some Like It Hot, and it’s really bizarre. It’s a multiverse.
It must be creatively energizing for you guys to look at something from so many different angles.
Wittman: It’s great fun. Even during the read through, we all laughed a lot and even Steven Spielberg went nuts. He actually also came to Some Like It Hot a couple weeks ago.
Shaiman: [Laughs.] He’s our biggest fan.
Does he give creative notes?
Wittman: Yes, very much! What makes him so great is that he’s like an audience member. He watches things like an audience, with a keen eye.
Can we expect Smash cast members from the TV show in the stage version?
Wittman: Some of them helped out at the reading, but it’s still a ways off. It wouldn’t actually go until maybe around this time next year.
Shaiman: The fact that it’s not exactly the TV show means it’s not exactly the characters from the TV show. So it doesn’t necessarily make sense for people on the TV show to play them. But one never knows.
Will there be songs from the show or will there be original songs?
Wittman: It’ll be songs from Bombshell, along with some more we’ll write.
The announcement had fortuitous timing, coming when you have Some Like It Hot — the musical version of the classic movie — on Broadway. When were the seeds planted for that particular project?
Wittman: It’s a funny, meta world. We had done Smash and within that is the musical about Marilyn Monroe. And we even wrote a Some Like It Hot number for Marilyn in that musical. But the producers of the TV show, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, had gotten the rights to the movie and they were thinking of doing the version of it. We were in London doing Mary Poppins Returns when they called. So we’ve been working on it for six years, off and on.
J. Harrison Ghee and Christian Borle in SOME LIKE IT HOT.
Marc J. Franklin
That’s pretty par for the course, right?
Shaiman: Unfortunately these days, yes. If you look back at the golden age of Broadway — and I’m not saying we’re Rodgers and Hammerstein — but they did a show every year! Nowadays it takes an endless amount of workshops and readings, and months in between them all, so it’s not like a steamroller or a train that’s constantly moving.
Wittman: And then of course with Covid, we were a train stuck in a tunnel for a while.
It’s a musical that couldn’t have come at a better time, especially with the current bans on drag and discourse around it. It seems like a show that could open people’s eyes to drag in general.
Shaiman: That is the hope. I mean, Hairspray! was a similar situation. People just might leave a little bit more open-minded about some things they may have not been three hours earlier.
Wittman: It’s always good when a show can incite discussion.
Shaiman: But as Mary Poppins said, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. We just want to entertain, that’s our main focus. That’s what we love to do, that’s what we love to go and see and experience ourselves. We write shows we’d want to go see. Like you said, in this case it so happened that the story was full of things that were so prescient.
Wittman: That’s what made it more intriguing to do. There already had been [the original Some Like It Hot-inspired musical] Sugar, so there was no reason to do another movie-to-stage version of that. So it really had to be something new.
Spoiler: there’s a huge twist when the character Jerry, who is hiding out from the mob by dressing in drag, realizes that they feel much more alive dressed as a woman. It becomes a life-changing and eye-opening experience for the character, which is a stark departure from the original story. How did you realize that was going to be a turn that character was going to make?
Wittman: Right from the very beginning we thought that, along with our Sugar being played by a Black actress [Adrianna Hicks]. Those are two things that made us say yes.
Shaiman: Scott and I had lived our whole lives around trans people from when the words weren’t always used. But literally since the time we moved to New York, we have lived, worked, loved and have been friends with trans people.
Wittman: Going back to when I did a lot of shows with the whole Andy Warhol crowd at Max’s Kansas City in the ’80s, with all of these performers like Jayne County.
I know the song “Let’s Be Bad” uniquely made the jump from Smash to Some Like It Hot. What’s the story behind that?
Shaiman: We had a different song that we had done a reading or two with when the girls, Osgood and Daphne decide to break curfew and go to Mexico. The original song that we had was called “The Good Neighbor Policy,” and it was a kind of sly, sexy South of the Border kind of song. But after the reading, [director and choreographer] Casey Nicholaw said, “Can it be something hotter and sexier? Maybe something a little less laid back?” So Scott and I went home and were thinking of the line “Let’s be..” And then we said, “Didn’t we already write this song, ‘Let’s Be Bad”? We kept trying to figure out other ways to say what we had already said in a song. Maybe 20 percent at most of the lyrics are from Smash; for the most part it’s newly written lyrics for a song that now takes on a joyous and fun experience. It certainly works. We actually asked everyone working on these shows, from Smash and now the Broadway show, if we could use it. We didn’t know if they were going to say, “No, you can’t use that song, we’re gonna have it on our own show.” But luckily, everyone said, “Yeah, my God. That would be perfect.” We signed off by saying if the worst thing that happens is that there are two musicals at once with this song in it, then that’s a fantastic conversation piece.
Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman
Michaelah Reynolds
Speaking of songwriting, I remember hearing Stephen Sondheim said that he’d never write lyrics without drinking a glass of something. Do you have any creative aids when you’re writing?
Shaiman: Yeah, I saw that. Well, I used to smoke dope before I wrote any music or arrangement, but then I started scoring movies. The first movie I scored was Misery, so I’d smoke a joint at then in the morning just to compose because I had never done anything without taking a puff. But by the end of the second day, I realized I couldn’t do it; they were 12 hour days and I’d have to do all of this math with the frames and it was so involved. So one day I said, “Let me see, can I do it [without]?” And that one day turned into the rest of my life.
You’ve been churning out shows for decades now. What have you learned about navigating the ups and downs of a notoriously difficult business over the years?
Wittman: Over the tears, you mean. [Laughs.]
Shaiman: I’m terrible at it. I’ve grown more thin-skinned as opposed to thicker-skinned over the years.
Wittman: We’re like Eeyore and Tigger. So it works in some ways.
Shaiman: I’m Eeyore.
Wittman: It’s not like a movie or a TV show where you do it and then you move onto the next one. It’s such a big chunk of your life. It’s a lot of time investment and sometimes heartbreak and sometimes great joy.
Shaiman: When you work on these things for years, it’s not that people are blowing smoke up your ass the whole time. You work hard to make it be the best that you can. So you’re surrounded by people who are encouraging you and are like, “Yes, that’s it, that’s great.” And then you’re in a room with the cast and you’re all enjoying it and you feel like you’ve done a good job, and putting all this money into it and months of rehearsals. So by the time opening night comes, you have this feeling that it’s worth it and it’s worthy. And then you can suddenly, in one night, in the most off-handed or nasty or rude ways, be shot down sometimes. There’s no way that that’s easy, or easy to ignore.
Wittman: But the opening night of Some Like It Hot was spectacular. We had a very private party with just close friends, most of them being famous. I said, “We don’t want to know about the reviews or anything like that,” but all of the sudden I hear this chant of “Rave! Rave! Rave!” from Bridget Everett. So that was a nice feeling.
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.
