Why This Broadway Season's Truths Are Stranger Than Fiction

Razzle and dazzle rarely go out of style, but a new crop of Broadway shows are betting that audiences are ready to face reality. On the heels of the industry’s historic Covid shutdown, moony rom-coms like The Music Man and Funny Girl spelled box office gold, while beltathons like Six and & Juliet remain aloft on a cloud powered by pop music.

But today the world is still in crisis, and politics is growing more divisive. It’s enough to make you want to go to the theater—not to escape but to make sense of it all. Vladimir
Putin is at the Barrymore in Patriots, the latest by Peter Morgan, creator of The Crown; Hillary Clinton is producing Suffs, a women’s suffrage musical; and the Nazis are once again encroaching on the louche riffraff of Cabaret. Meanwhile, Brian Cox is leading a West
End revival of Eugene O’Neill’s downward spiral A Long Day’s Journey into Night, and a Harvard professor is mired in controversy in The Power of Sail at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory.

“We live in a disposable news moment,”says Patriots director Rupert Goold. “Theater is particularly good at sitting everybody down in the same room and asking, ‘What were the moments that precipitated wherewe are now?’ ” Morgan’s drama traces the Russian president’s rise amid the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, a coming-of-age story about authoritarianism’s new dawn. (A Variety review called the London run “startlingly timely.”)

Theater also provides a shared context to process events outside our usual echo chambers.“Weirdly, we’re going to the theater to get our news because it will be more truthful,” says the Tony-winning playwright J.T.Rogers, whose new play Corruption, about the News of the World phone hacking scandal, ran off-Broadway this spring. Science has even shown that people’s heartbeats tend to synchronize when they sit together in a theater, Rogers notes. “We don’t get that anymore in our culture.”

The timeline for putting on a show means that theater responds to events on a lag, which gives audiences breathing room in the wake of catastrophe, according to historian Harvey Young, dean of the College of Fine Arts at Boston University. A similar pattern to what we’re seeing emerged after 9/11, another moment when theaters temporarily shut down.

In the aftermath came the premiere of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, about the specter of child abuse in the Catholic Church (back on Broadway this season with Liev Schreiber); Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, about a narrator of child murders; and August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean, about a family reckoning with the legacy of slavery.

“Theater has always been a place to grapple with big, heavy issues,” Young says. “There are moments when people want to escape, but then the industry course-corrects.” The variety evident on Broadway this season, from revivals of dystopian-hued classics like An Enemy of the People and Uncle Vanya to jukeboxes stacked with hits by Alicia Keys (Hell’s Kitchen) and Huey Lewis and the News (The Heart of Rock and Roll), is a testament to the complexity of audiences, Young says. “People actually want to spend time thinking about their lives and the world even as they’re being entertained.”

This story appears in the May 2024 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW

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