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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. Today's the day. It is kickoff of Broadway Week, which is actually a full month, and it's a way that you can see Broadway on the cheap-ish. There's a lot of great shows to see, many of which were covered on All Of It, including Riverside and Crazy or Six, or maybe you can go old school and see Chicago or Wicked. We'll be highlighting some of the interviews with the cast and creators of these shows, including later on the cast members of the new hit, Kimberly Akimbo. They'll be with us on Thursday. With us for Broadway Week, for a little preview and maybe a look forward to 2023, is New York Theater writer Jackson McHenry. He's a senior writer at Vulture and he just wrote a piece titled Our Most Anticipated Show is On and Off Broadway in 2023. Hey, Jackson?

Jackson McHenry: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: Hey. We are talking about this Broadway Week. What is the origin story of Broadway Week?

Jackson McHenry: It comes out of a way that this time of the year, especially on Broadway is tends to be a tough for ticket sales. It's a time between the winter holidays when there's lots of families and tourists who are going out for something to see between Christmas and Thanksgiving and then the spring season where on the run-up to the summer is typically when a lot of shows open before the Tony Awards in June. Then before the storm or tourist travel where there's just not a lot of business and it's a way where there's not the same level of tourism to the town. It's to encourage New Yorkers to come out and see a lot of the theater that you might just not have a good excuse to go and you can go and get tickets or, as you said, relatively cheaper than they are typically.

Alison Stewart: The idea is you get two tickets for one. It's a bogo in away. Buy one get one free. I'm curious about if you could do this, which show-- Oh, I guess I couldn't ask you that because you were a journalist. I was going to say, which show would you just run out and get tickets for right away?

Jackson McHenry: Oh, I think there are plenty of them. It depends because I see a lot of them for work and in my case, it would be a situation where it's probably something that might have been running for a long time-

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Jackson McHenry: -where you're covering a lot of openings and it might be a good chance to go back and as you said, I think Jinkx Monsoon from RuPaul's Drag Race is in Chicago and that might be interesting to see or to go back. I remember when Broadway was reopening in the midst of the pandemic and I went to see The Lion King when it first came back. It was such an event and I had seen that only when I was a kid years ago and I was like, "Right, this still has this spectacle. Why not revisit it?"

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about some of the shows folks can maybe see during Broadway week. We are going to be speaking with Kimberly Akimbo stars, Bonnie Milligan and Ali Mauzey on Thursday. This is a show about a girl actually who ages four times as fast as natural. She is 16, but she looks like she's 64. She is played by Victoria Clark, who's extraordinary in the role. It was a big hit at a small theater. I think it was the Atlantic Theater last year or the year before. What do you think of the transfer to Broadway?

Jackson McHenry: I think it's been really wonderful, and you're right. It was off Broadway at the Atlantic Theater last winter, and it was one of those precious little gems that you saw and you felt so close, literally close to the actors with their wonderful detail performances. Victoria Clark, really, believably has the awkwardness of a teenage girl and she channels that even though obviously she looks and is much older. There's a sweet melancholy to it, but it somehow just fills out a Broadway stage magically really well.

I think actually Bonnie Milligan who plays Kimberly's aunt who comes into the show and she's on a crime streak and she's deeply amoral and she has these big belting broadway numbers and she just fills the house with her voice. It's a great moment for her. She's been on Broadway before and head over heels, which only had a short run. It's wonderful to see her get this moment. There's just the sense of these actors get the chance to really bring this story into a bigger, broader world.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jackson McHenry, Vulture Senior writer for theater. We are talking about Broadway Week. It's for a limited time and you can buy two tickets to most Broadway shows for the price of one, which is an exciting idea. Let's talk about the-- what do I want to talk about next? Funny Girl. Funny Girl has had a second life with Lea Michele in the role as Fanny Brice. When you think about this reinvigorating the show, how would you describe Funny Girl Part 2, the sequel?

Jackson McHenry: It's almost meta in a way because it's so much about the whole storm and drown of drama about the show. You can't help but think about Lea Michele's history as a performer, her starring in Glee, her celebrity, accusations about that. She's even talked about with The New York Times of being very hard to work with and that being a terror to her coworkers. Coming back for her marking this as her big comeback moment proving that after being in Spring Awakening and breaking out on Broadway, she still has it and she does. She can sing incredibly well.

Then it just becomes so much about celebrity. It's a show about Fanny Brice as a character who sings, I Am the Greatest Star, right at the beginning of the show and is insisting that she's always going to be famous and she just needs to be discovered. It's just one after another these big great numbers that don't rain on my parade. The things that you've heard Lea Michele sing on Glee and the pressure of that, the fact that the show was not selling very well with its original star Beanie Feldstein and she left early. There's been reporting about the behind-the-scenes drama there. It's so much about that, that she has to be great every single night, I think, for it to work. It's an interesting moment.

Alison Stewart: In your piece, you wrote about this interesting state of Broadway right now when you have shows like KPop and Ain't No Mo going down quickly but you have record sales for things like Funny Girl and & Juliet. When you think about how to explain these differences, what comes to mind?

Jackson McHenry: It's a lot of aspects of it's just become a much more stratified market on Broadway, especially post-pandemic, the sense that there are shows that can be hits, that can be juggernauts. Often, they're targeting younger audiences, family audience. They're relying on some level of familiarity. & Juliet has songs from Max Martin who has done all sorts of hits for Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, things you can sing along to, and shows that have been trying to push the envelope, whether they're more intellectually challenging, whether they're more diverse.

They have a lot of times. Unfortunately, it shows with non-white leads that have struggled, have had trouble getting people to the theater, getting people either used to the idea that this is something that you can go see on Broadway as opposed to established fair, or just getting people to say, "This is something more of a gamble. This is out of my comfort zone." There's been a whole slate of closings right in December. It's always tough times in January. Especially even in the last few weeks, a whole sets of shows have closed. There's a lot of open spaces, which means a lot of new things coming this spring, but it's certainly people trying to figure out how to sustainably produce more interesting work.

Alison Stewart: Let's highlight a few things coming down the pike. This isn't Broadway but it's really interesting. It's coming to Bam, it's a revival of a Lorraine Hansberry play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, which first premiered in 1964 with Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan. That seems like a great duo. For those who are unfamiliar, what is this about?

Jackson McHenry: It's interesting. It's basically often known as the play that Lorraine Hansberry wrote after the success of A Raisin in the Sun that was a massive in its time and in 1959 when it was first produced. This is a different story for her to be writing. It's about a young white couple in Greenwich Village. They're activists. He's very idealistic. She was living in Greenwich Village at the time.

It's about the '60s moment of idealism rubbing up against conformity and bourgeois values and that kind of thing and a whole network of people who are their friends, and the tension there. It's very rarely done. I've never seen it staged. It was done in Chicago in 2016, and this is the first major New York revival as what Bam is touting it as. It's exciting to have stars like Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan come in and do it. They both have stage cred.

Alison Stewart: Yes, absolutely.

Jackson McHenry: I'm excited to see it.

Alison Stewart: Sweeney Todd opens in March. Who's the creative team behind this Sondheim revival?

Jackson McHenry: It's directed by Tommy Kail, who's the director of Hamilton. It's his big stage follow-up to Hamilton. It's starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford. One of the big things they're touting is that it has a 26-piece orchestra. They're going to be using the full orchestrations a lot of times recently for the cutting costs and that sort of things. You don't get to see a show with the full suite of performers, but as you expect in the spring, we get these big musical revivals and musical things that are like 747s heading in as Tony season approaches and the summer approaches to the runway.

Alison Stewart: You got Camelot opening on April 13th and you also have Michael R. Jackson, of course one, the [unintelligible 00:10:00] for A Strange Loop, Tony for Best musical last year. He has an Off-Broadway project in April called White Girl In Danger. What do we know about this?

Jackson McHenry: We know a little, and we don't know too many details, but we know that it's set in a world of a soap opera. That it's about a Black character, a Black woman on the soap opera who is frustrated with the fact that all of her storylines are about her race and she wants to be in more interesting lurid love triangles and that kind of thing. At least that's how it's described. It's Michael R. Jackson who did the incredibly fascinating and which also recently just closed A Strange Loop that was a very personal self-referential story about a young Black guy writing a musical about himself.

He's interested, I think, in all narratives about what you expect from race and pop culture and what you expect from race and musicals. It's directed by Liliana Blaine Peruse who did a recent revival, The Skin of Our Teeth, has done all things Off-Broadway and has a wonderful maximalist sensibility. I'm excited to see her and him take on soap opera storylines.

Alison Stewart: Any other show you're really anticipating in 2023 you're excited about?

Jackson McHenry: Speaking of big productions being announced, they announced after we ran that post. It's a sign that there's space available that they're bringing a revival of Parade with Ben Plat and Mikayla Diamond that had a short run as part of the encores program last fall where they do week-long runs of famous musicals. That was something that's Jason Robert Brown, who went on to do last five years and Bridges of Madison County, gorgeous romantic melodies. It's a musical about the trial. It's a real story of Leo Frank who is a Jewish man who's accused of rape in the South. It's coming back and it's going to have a big splashy revival. It's a musical who's cast recording. I've listened to a lot the original one, so I'm excited to see it.

Alison Stewart: Jackson McHenry is Vulture senior writer. We have been talking about theater as Broadway Week kicks off today. Jackson, thank you so much for being with us and sharing your reporting.

Jackson McHenry: Thank you for having me.

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