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musical theater

From its 1975 debut on Broadway as “the super soul musical,” winning seven Tony Awards and spotlighting stars like Stephanie Mills, Hinton Battle, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Andre De Shields; to its Oscar-nominated screen adaptation starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson among others; to its sing-along songs like “Ease on Down the Road,” “Home” and “Believe,” The Wiz has become a modern-day musical theater classic — and in its retelling of The Wizard of Oz through the lens of Black culture and music, a landmark in Broadway history.
Yet the show has only had one official Broadway revival, in 1984, which ran for a grand total of 20 performances — until now. A major new production of The Wiz is playing at the Marquis Theatre, and four of the stars of its cast and creative team — actors Wayne Brady and Deborah Cox; choreographer JaQuel Knight; and writer Amber Ruffin, who created additional material working with the show’s original book — stopped by Billboard News recently to talk about why the show is still a groundbreaker and a hugely entertaining crowd-pleaser.

For all four, The Wiz was a formative show, influencing their career paths in entertainment and showing what was possible for Black artists. “It was one of the drivers that made me go, ‘Oh, I think I can do this,’” says Brady.

“The film was just life-changing — it allowed me to see life as a choreographer and understand the essence and energy of movement,” adds Knight, known for his work with major pop artists including Beyoncé, Megan Thee Stallion, Zara Larsson, J Balvin and more.

For Ruffin, The Wiz was “a real introduction to Black weirdness not connected to Black pain…The Wiz is the thing that gives you permission to be your artsiest, weirdest self and just do what’s in your weird little heart.”

Brady, who’s starred in previous Broadway productions including Kinky Boots and Chicago, plays the showman titular character, while R&B veteran Cox displays vocal pyrotechnics as Glinda. Both discuss The Wiz‘s enduring significance as a universally welcoming show — and proof that Broadway can continue to diversify and evolve.

“This show is a testament to what you can do when you display Black people and Black culture not as a monolith,” says Cox. “We are all of it, and we are the origin of it, and I think this show is the beginning of what you’ll be seeing a lot more of on Broadway.” Adds Brady: “It’s a true display of Black excellence in every form. It’s so rich.”

To hear what else Brady, Cox, Knight and Ruffin had to say, watch the video above.

As more and more artists from the pop world add writing a Broadway musical to their career-goal lists, Sara Bareilles stands out as one of the brightest success stories from that group.

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Waitress — the musical adaptation of Adrienne Shelly’s beloved independent film, featuring music and lyrics by Bareilles — was an unequivocal Broadway hit, running for nearly four years after an opening in April 2016.

That year, Bareilles’ score earned her two Tony nominations (out of a total four for the show), and she went on to perform the lead role of Jenna for three different stints. The production played London’s West End as well as internationally, garnered a Grammy nomination for its original Broadway cast recording, and yielded both a standalone Bareilles album (What’s Inside: Songs From Waitress, released on Epic Records between the show’s off-Broadway and Broadway runs) and a film of the stage show (which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2023).

Sara Bareilles performs during the curtain call for Broadway’s “Waitress” at The Brooks Atkinson Theatre on March 31, 2017 in New York City. 

Noam Galai/Getty Images

Now, Bareilles — who’s been warmly embraced by the wider theater community, and racked up another Tony nomination last year for her portrayal of The Baker’s Wife in Into the Woods — is making her return to Broadway.

She’s writing the music and lyrics for The Interestings, an adaptation of the New York Times bestselling novel by Meg Wolitzer with a book by Pulitzer- and Tony-nominated playwright Sarah Ruhl.

The plot of Wolitzer’s novel revolves around character Jules Jacobson and her friends from an exclusive childhood arts camp (the titular Interestings, as they call themselves) who grow up to find varying degrees of success and satisfaction or disillusionment with where a creative life has led them.

When it came out in 2013, the Times called it “warm, all-American, and acutely perceptive about the motivations of its characters,” likening it to modern Great American Novels and praising Wolitzer’s “inclusive vision and generous sweep.” With its complex, layered female protagonist and diverse cast of characters, as well as the knotty themes it explores — ranging from what qualifies as success to whether being extraordinary is the only path to it — the book seems rich material for musical adaptation, and it’s easy to see why it appealed to Bareilles, whose Waitress balanced the buoyant with the bittersweet.

The Interestings is being produced by Matt Ross, and is currently in development; additional creative team and production details will be announced in the coming months.

If you’ve seen a musical — or, well, anything involving music onstage or onscreen — in the past decade or so, chances are high that Tom Kitt had something to do with it.
The composer, lyricist, musical director, music supervisor, arranger and orchestrator has inhabited one or more of those roles for projects as diverse as Grease: Live!, the Pitch Perfect films (yes, you have him to thank for the “riff-off”), the musical adaptations of Bring It On, SpongeBob SquarePants, Jagged Little Pill and American Idiot. In 2009, he won a Tony Award for his score for the musical Next to Normal, which in 2010 also won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and though he’s comfortable writing in any number of idioms, he’s become especially well known since then for his keen understanding of how to organically integrate pop and rock sounds into a theater setting.  

Right now, Kitt is, as usual, juggling multiple high-profile projects. Most notably, he wrote the score and, with Cameron Crowe, co-wrote the lyrics for the new musical adaptation of Crowe’s beloved film Almost Famous, which just opened on Broadway. He’s brought his vocal arranging expertise to the buzzy new dance musical Only Gold (playing off-Broadway at MCC Theater through Nov. 27) featuring the music of singer-songwriter Kate Nash. And in between, he managed to write a showstopper for a true icon — Elmo — in the new off-Broadway Sesame Street the Musical.  

Kitt describes juggling his myriad projects with trademark calm. “Theater is the ultimate collaborative art form,” he says. “You’re always serving many other visions — it’s just a question of what you’re bringing to the project. As long as you’re in an exciting creative world, these [different] things can feed one another, and I don’t feel overwhelmed in any way.” Having worked on shows that have run the gamut of Broadway success, he has a healthy sense of the business’ realities, and has learned how to keep his creative priorities straight. “What’s most important is I’m expressing myself in ways that feel profound and exciting to me,” Kitt says. “I came into this art form so inspired by all the people currently writing, the legends who wrote for the theater. I wanted to be part of that history and hopefully have people say that Tom Kitt musicals have been a part of their life in important ways.” 

Casey Likes and Solea Pfeiffer in Almost Famous.

Matt Murphy

Almost Famous  

Though Kitt studied economics in college he dreamed of becoming a singer-songwriter and was heavily influenced by classic 1970s albums like Born to Run, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Piano Man —touchstones that came in handy for the moment in which Almost Famous takes place. “I get to now live in that sensibility as a composer and arranger,” Kitt says. The Almost Famous score is mostly Kitt’s original music but does incorporate iconic songs from the movie like Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” and Kitt’s job, in part, was “to make it feel like one voice, one score.”  

While it may be Crowe’s first time as a Broadway lyricist, Kitt describes him as a natural. “Cameron already is a poet, a lyricist, just in terms of what he’s put into the world,” Kitt says, adding that the lines from Crowe’s movies are themselves “earworms.” As a writing team, “we found our groove right away,” Kitt continues. Crowe would send Kitt the starting thoughts for a song in various forms, and Kitt would start composing from there, with the two “batting it back and forth ‘til we both felt like we were saying what we wanted to say.”  

Starting with Next to Normal, and in the years since, Kitt says, he’s learned that while pop music often adheres to a defined form, in theater a pop song needs to serve the plot above all, providing the audience with new information. “It’s about really keeping yourself honest and not just saying, ‘I’m gonna write a pop song and It’s gonna adhere to this form,’ so we feel like we’re building something and don’t stay in the same place, or get there too early.” 

Only Gold 

Choreographer and director Andy Blankenbuehler is a longtime friend of Kitt’s; the two collaborated on Bring it On: The Musical (a now cult-favorite that opened on Broadway in 2012). This past summer, Blankenbuehler asked Kitt’s recommendation on a vocal arranger for Only Gold, and he volunteered his own services. “Kate Nash is a brilliant writer,” Kitt says. “Her songs are filled with visceral energy and beauty, and you can see how they’re going to be theatrical.”  His duties for the show mostly happened before he got into rehearsal with Almost Famous. Blankenbuehler broke down the show by song, filling Kitt in on who would be available to sing each and what kind of tonality he wanted from the vocal arrangements. “I had great guidance going in, and then you hear it in the room and discover new things,” Kitt says.  

Jacob Guzman, Ahmad Simmons, Ryan VanDenBoom, Voltaire Wade-Greene, Hannah Cruz, and Reed Luplau in MCC Theater’s 2022 Production of ONLY GOLD

Daniel J. Vasquez

Sesame Street the Musical 

In recent years, Kitt has composed for Sesame Street: he wrote a song for Cookie Monster called “If Me Had a Magic Wand,” and a spoof of a famous song from Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sunday in the Park With George called “Look I Made a Splat.” The call for Sesame Street the Musical came through his agent, and it was fairly simple. “They said, ‘We want to craft a big 11 o’clock-style number for Elmo,” Kitt recalls, “and I knew it was a song about imagination.” He thought about the sensibility of classic Sesame Street songs like “Sing,” and asked himself, “What’s something expressive in that world for me to write?” The end product channels the sweetly melodic, anthemic feel of the classics Kitt wanted to channel, but he didn’t hear Elmo sing it until opening night of the show, “and it was everything I hoped it would be. I mean, who doesn’t want to write a song for Elmo? I jumped at the chance.”