Broadway Returns! But Where Will it Go Now?

Once upon a time, whenever I had seats for a Broadway show, my pretheater ritual involved one of two activities. I would either meet a friend at Sardi’s for a quick martini and a ramekin of orange cheese or else find myself sprinting out of the Times Square subway station at 7:59 to make an 8:00 curtain. But on a sunny, not-quite-warm Saturday in early April, I found myself in a fluorescent-lit exam room at an urgent-care clinic in Hell’s Kitchen, on the receiving end of a rapid-antigen COVID test. A negative result would let me join a lucky few at the St. James Theatre for an iteration of NY PopsUP, the citywide initiative to start bringing back theater, music, and dance to its culture-starved citizens. It would be the first live performance on a Broadway stage since New York theater, and the city itself, went dark last year on March 12.

An hour later, I was standing outside the St. James, where I was greeted in quick succession by the stylish, lushly maned theatrical impresario Jordan Roth and the dean of theatrical press agents, Rick Miramontez. “This is like my spring training,” Miramontez told me. “And believe me, I need it.” As I entered the lobby, I immediately noticed the lack of pre-show chatter, though the hush was punctuated by an occasional “I see you under that mask!” After a largely isolated 13 months, during which the it-couldn’t-happen-here tropes of dystopian science fiction became our shared reality, the scene felt at once familiar and alien, as if either a single day or 1,000 years had passed. Sitting among 150 other audience members in a theater that normally accommodates 1,700 only added to the unsettling, dreamlike atmosphere.

But when Savion Glover, in black jeans and a black T-shirt, wearing white tap shoes and a white knit cap, strode onto the bare stage, the audience was jolted awake. A storehouse of tap-dance history and a restlessly inventive pioneer, Glover spent the next 20 minutes or so weaving past and present into a spontaneous invocation of musical theater’s essence. With his signature mix of syncopated frenzy and laid-back ease, he punctuated his steps with a cappella snippets of show tunes from our collective consciousness while keeping us anchored in the reality of today. “I want to live in America,” he sang at one point. “Knee on your neck in America.” It was a thrilling reassertion of ritual and of theater’s immediacy, a reminder of how powerful it can be when people gather together in the dark to watch other people perform in the same room.

After that, spring and summer, sped along by Pfizer and Moderna, came fast. Less than three months later, the St. James—and Broadway—reopened when Bruce Springsteen returned for an encore run of his revelatory bildungsroman in music. Then Shakespeare returned to Central Park, where it remains the hottest ticket in town, with Jocelyn Bioh’s adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Delacorte. And now, as New York City’s summer of rebirth winds down and a new theater season is poised to kick off, it feels like the right moment to look back at what we’ve lost and ahead at what’s to come—including two productions in particular that signal the first glimmers of change on Broadway: Thoughts of a Colored Man, Keenan Scott II’s clear-eyed and lyrical look at contemporary Black manhood, which offers a snapshot of 24 hours in the lives of seven Black men in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, and Camille A. Brown’s new production of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, Ntozake Shange’s 1976 paean in poetry and dance to the vulnerability and resilience of Black women. Brown’s production, which will fuse theatrical elements, offers her unique interpretation of Shange’s vision of a unified “choreopoem” and will make her the first Black woman to both direct and choreograph a play on Broadway.

On the afternoon of Thursday, March 12, 2020, the day that Broadway theaters announced that they were shutting down for at least a month, I was debating whether I should go ahead with plans to meet a group that included the playwright Martyna Majok for an early dinner in the West Village. We would afterward go to see her new play Sanctuary City, which had at that point played eight previews off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. As a huge fan of Majok’s work, I felt like maybe I should still go. I literally had one dithering foot out the door when I got word that both the dinner and the performance had been canceled.

When Sanctuary City was shut down after just a few previews, Majok says, she “didn’t know when, or if, the play would ever be performed again. And I was scared that it would just disappear, as if it had never happened.” (Happily, New York audiences will finally get to see it when the production returns to the Lortel in September.) Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s musical Six, which assembles the unlucky queens married to Henry VIII as performers in a high-octane pop concert—it came to New York from London trailing clouds of critical glory and a reported $12 million in advance ticket sales—was also shut down on March 12, an hour and a half before curtain time, as were the 15 other shows yet to open in the weeks ahead. “The whole journey of the show snowballed in a really surreal way over three years,” says Moss, “and I’d been waiting for it to disappear at any moment.” For most, the shock of these sudden closures was immense. In addition to the casualties that would be suffered by the theater world—elder statesman Terrence McNally and the charismatic star Nick Cordero, among many others—the pandemic took a devastating economic toll on the theater and everyone who earned a living in it.