B'way Update: Smash to the Stage, Roundabout and CSC Seasons

The TV series Smash
serves as the inspiration for a new musical
set for 2024-25

It hardly seems possible, but there are already plans being hatched for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 Broadway and Off-Broadway seasons. Two theater companies, Roundabout Theater Company and CSC, have announced their schedules for 2023-24 and the long-awaited stage version of the TV series Smash has been announced for the 2024-25. 

The producers of Smash who include Steven Spielberg intend to open the show two seasons hence. The book by Ric Elice (Jersey Boys) and Bob Martin (The Drowsy Chaperone) will differ somewhat from the 2012-13 NBC series upon which it is based. The basic premise of a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a musical based on the turbulent life of Marilyn Monroe will remain intact. Some characters will return, others will not. The producers report the story will be funnier than the series which employed a series of melodramatic plot twists as we follow Bombshell, the Monroe tuner, from inception to out-of-town try-out to opening night to the Tony Awards. Five-time Tony winner Susan Stroman (The Producers, Contact) will direct. Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (Hairspray, Some Like It Hot) will provide the score which will include songs written for the series as well as new ones. Joshua Bergasse returns as choreographer.

Danny DeVito will return to Broadway in
I Need That.
Credit: Barry Gordin

Roundabout Theater Company's 2023-24 season will include a Broadway premiere and a revival, as well as Off-Broadway productions. The Broadway season opens in Emmy winner and Tony nominee Danny DeVito starring with his daughter Lucy in I Need That by Theresa Rebeck (creator and writer for Smash) at the American Airlines Theater in October. DeVito will play Sam, a man afflicted with a hoarding disorder who must clean up his super-cluttered house or face eviction. His real-life daughter will play his child in the play which had a reading at the Dorset Theater Festival in Vermont. This will be Rebeck's fifth Broadway play after Mauritius, Seminar, Dead Accounts and Bernhardt/Hamlet.

Roundabout's spring broadway production will be a revival of Samm-Art Williams' Home. Originally presented by the Negro Ensemble Company and transferred to Broadway in 1979 where it received a Tony nomination for Best Play, Home follows Cephus Miles whose life changes when his sweetheart Patti Mae goes to college and marries another man. Tony winner Kenny Leon (A Raisin in the Sun) directs. 

Off-Broadway, Roundabout will collaborate with New York Theater Workshop on The Refuge Plays by Nathan Alan Davis. Described as an intergenerational saga spanning 70 years in a black family's history will begin performances in September at the Laura Pels Theater. In October, York Walker's Convenant about a struggling blues guitarist returning to his home town a star, plays the Black Box Theater in Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center. Rachel Bond's Jonah, focusing on a young girl at a boarding school fulfilling her fantasies, will play the Laura Pels in Spring 2024.

Barbra Streisand and
Elliott Gould in
I Can Get It for You
Wholesale.

Classic Stage Company has also announced its season with three revivals of rarely seen works. First up is I Can Get It for You Wholesale, a 1962 musical about the garment industry known today mostly as the show which provided Barbra Streisand with her Broadway debut. The male lead was played by Elliott Gould who later married Streisand. Tony winner Santino Fontana (Tootsie) and Judy Kuhn (Fun Home) star. The book by Jerome Weidman will be revised by his son John (Pacific Overtures). The score is by Harold Rome and Trip Cullman directs (Fall 2023). Shakespeare's curio Perciles will be presented during the winter of 2024 in a staging from Fiasco Theater which was previously enchanted NY audiences with their inventive productions of Cymbeline, Into the Woods and Merrily We Roll Along. The season concludes in the spring with a revival of Alice Childress's Wine in the Wilderness. LaChanze who starred in the recent Broadway revival of Childress' Trouble in Mind, will make her directorial debut with this play about an artist and his model, who proves to be more than he bargained for.

2022-23 and 2023-24 Broadway/Off-Broadway Schedule
March 30--Life of Pi (Schoenfeld)
April 4--Shucked (Nederlander)
April 5--Lortel Award nominations announced
April 11--Regretfully So the Birds Are (Playwrights Horizons)
April 12--Fat Ham (AA)
April 13--Camelot (Lincoln Center/Vivian Beaumont)
April 19--Peter Pan Goes Wrong (Barrymore)
April 20--The Thanksgiving Play (Second Stage/Hayes)

April 23--Prime Facie (Golden)
April 24--Good Night, Oscar (Belasco)
April 25--Summer, 1976 (MTC/Samuel J. Friedman) 
April 25--Outer Critics Circle nominations announced

April 25--Drama League Award nominations announced (NY Public Library)
April 26--New York, New York (St. James)
April 29--Fuenta Ovejuna (TFANA/Polonsky Shakespeare Center)
May 2--Tony Award Nominations Announced
May 4--Primary Trust (Roundabout/Laura Pels) (previews begin; opening TBA)
May 5--Days of Wine and Roses (Atlantic Theatre Company) (previews begin; opening TBA)
May 7--Lortel Awards (NYU Skirball Center)
May 16--King James (MTC/City Center Stage I)
May 16--Outer Critics Winners announced
May 19--Drama League Awards (Ziegfeld Ballroom)
May 25--Outer Critics Circle Awards (Bruno Walter Auditorium/Lincoln Center Library)
May 30--Grey House (Lyceum)
May--Wet Brain (Playwrights Horizons)
June 11--Tony Awards (United Palace)
June 22--Once Upon a One More Time (Marquis)
June 28--Hamlet (Delacorte/Shakespeare in the Park) 
July 9--Orpheus Descending (TFANA/Polonsky Shakespeare Center)
July 20--Here Lies Love (Broadway)
July 24--The Cottage (Hayes)
Aug. 3--Back to the Future (Marquis)
Sept. 19--Merrily We Roll Along (begins previews; opening TBA) (Hudson)
September--Here We Are (The Shed Griffin Theater)

September--The Refuge Plays (Roundabout/NYTW/Laura Pels)

October--I Need That (Roundabout/AA)

Summer 2023

Purlie Victorious

Fall 2023

I Can Get It for You Wholesale (CSC)

Poor Yella Rednecks (MTC/City Center Stage II)

Winter 2024

Pericles (CSC)

Spring 2024

Home (Roundabout/AA)

Jonah (Roundabout/Laura Pels)

Wine in the Wilderness (CSC)

2024-25

Smash

2024 and Beyond

Game of Thrones, The Great Gatsby, Frida, the Musical, High Noon, The Mousetrap

Future--Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death; Black Orpheus; BOOP! The Betty Boop Musical, Come Fall in Love--The DDLJ Musical; The Devil Wears Prada; Ella: An American Miracle; Everybody's Talking About Jamie; The Griswolds' Broadway Vacation; Harmony; I Need That; Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat; The Karate Kid; La La Land; Lempicka; Our Town; Pal Joey; The Nanny; The Normal Heart/The Destiny of Me; The Secret Garden; Sing Street; Soul Train; What a Wonderful World; The Who's Tommy; The Wiz; Working Girl