Arts

If you have the means — ticket prices for some theatre shows top $700 — the spring Broadway season offers a multitude of celebrities.

Take your pick. Will it be George Clooney, making his Broadway debut, playing the broadcaster Edward R Murrow confronting Joseph McCarthy in the stage adaptation — which Clooney has co-written — of his 2005 movie, Good Night and Good Luck?

Or Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal going head-to-head in Othello, in the first production of Shakespeare’s play on Broadway since 1982?

If you have the money — the most expensive tickets for some of the shows are going for more than $700 — the spring season offers a plenitude of celebrities on Broadway, as Hollywood’s biggest stars vie for the Tony awards.

Succession fans can double up, seeing Sarah Snook in her acclaimed one-woman show, The Picture of Dorian Gray — transferred from London’s West End, where Snook won an Olivier award —as well as her Oscar-nominated co-star Kieran Culkin in a revival of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross.”

Another Olivier award-winning London transfer, Stranger Things: The First Shadow (a prequel to the hit TV show, set 25 years before it began) will be directed by Stephen Daldry. Also landing from London are Operation Mincemeat, the Olivier-winning musical, and the tribute revue Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends, starring Bernadette Peters.

Elsewhere, Jonas Brothers fans can see Nick Jonas in The Last Five Years, while Jonathan Groff will play Bobby Darin in Just in Time. Also appearing will be Frasier’s David Hyde Pierce in Pirates! The Penzance Musical.

Brian Moreland, who is producing Othello, said: “Rehearsals ofcially began this week. We just had the table-read. It was thrilling. Under Kenny Leon’s direction, everyone is rowing in the same direction. There’s nothing better than a group of people who want to be in service to the story.”

Moreland revealed that Leon had told Washington, Gyllenhaal and the rest of the cast that if they found passages their characters said in the original text that they loved, but were not in the abridged version, they could make the case for reinstating them — as long as they were open to losing other passages in the edited version.

“Moreland said that celebrities helped to drive ticket sales for Broadway shows, but that audiences were savvy enough to sniW out stunt casting or celebrity casting that was a bad fit. Broadway producers, he said, calculated carefully before casting big names to try to ensure all the elements —name, role, popularity, surprise, and audience appeal — were as much in alignment as possible.

“Bringing Denzel and Jake together to do a play that hasn’t been done on Broadway in 40 years feels exciting,” he said. “Both Denzel and Jake also really believe in the art of the stage, they believe in the communication of an actor in front of a live audience telling your truth. That’s the draw for most celebrities doing Broadway. The draw for the public is seeing actors whose bodies of work they know from the screen doing something very different, or very live, right there in front of you.””

“Broadway continues to claw its way back from the audience and profit-shedding effects of the pandemic.”

“The industry publication Playbill reported this week that 19 of 29 shows currently running on Broadway earned $1 million (£810,000) or more at box office. The so-called $1 Million Club has Wicked — bolstered by the popularity of the movie starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo — as the most profitable show on the Great White Way.”

“The publication reported the average ticket price was $126.52, down from $155.37 in the week of New Year and $182.32 from the week including Christmas.

Celebrity names aren’t what pushes ticket prices over $1,000, Moreland said, but the presence of “third-party people who buy tickets and resell them for huge sums of money”.”

The Times of London