The Stars and Stories Hitting Broadway Stages This Year

The closing months of the 2016–17 season brought a glut of extraordinary music and dance to Broadway’s stages, and the superabundance has left 2017–18 looking a bit anemic. Partly it’s real estate—there are only so many Broadway theaters; in June, nearly three dozen were occupied. The only musical scheduled to open this summer was Prince […]

#tbt: This Month in Broadway History

The 2017–18 Broadway season is just getting underway! But before we look ahead to new productions, let’s recall what came before. Here are a few of the sparkliest shows that opened on the Great White Way in previous Augusts. 42nd Street (1980) The cast of the 2001 revival of 42nd Street performing at the Tony […]

'Prince of Broadway': A Crash Course in Hal Prince's Hit Musicals

Apart from having won the Tony Award for best choreography, the dances in Damn Yankees, West Side Story and the 1994 revival of Show Boat have little in common. Not the choreographers—Bob Fosse, Jerome Robbins and Susan Stroman—or the composers—Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, Leonard Bernstein, and Jerome Kern. Not the dancers, either—the standouts were […]

"Dance Is the Best Way I Know How to Express Myself"

I have always been extremely dramatic. I think “extremely” might even be an understatement. As a child, I was constantly in costume. Never clothes. Always a costume. When I was 8 we moved into a new house, and took a home video to send to my dad’s family. My siblings were performing a song for […]

Choreography's Constantly Shifting Role on Broadway

I first got hooked on Broadway musicals as a preteen at Gypsy, with its tapping moppets, gyrating burlesque queens and Tulsa, the dancing heartthrob. I’ve been going ever since, but Dance Magazine has been at it even longer. The 1926-27 Broadway season was just ending when DM began publication, and of its 200-plus shows, dozens […]

Tomorrow's Broadway Stars Celebrated at the Jimmy Awards

Anyone worried about the future of live musical theater in a world full of tablets and earbuds and endlessly streaming video would have been relieved to be at the Minskoff Theatre on Monday night, as dozens of young singer-dancer-actors from all over the country paraded their formidable talents. No, it wasn’t a performance of The […]

Kevin Spacey Added a New Celebrity Impression to His Arsenal: Fred Astaire

The 2017 Tony Awards were last night, and despite it being a highly competitive Broadway season, things went more or less as predicted. Andy Blankenbuehler took home yet another Tony for Best Choreography after the cast of Bandstand showed everyone exactly why he deserved it (and, of course, the award was announced during a commercial […]