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The year 2025 begins with some short-term questions about theater – the fate of “Warriors,” the effect of “Wicked”?– and more long-term ones – what new leadership will mean to Off-Broadway; how celebrity-packing will affect Broadway — provoked by issues, trends and events from 2024.
I’ve done such a post every New Year’s Day since 2020, when I first explored possible future trends underneath the illustration above, which is entitled “Eye Enclosing The Theatre At Besancon France,” an engraving made in 1847 by Claude Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806.) I used an eye because I couldn’t pass up the pun: “Seeing 2020.” But since then, I’ve learned the hard way that, in trying to envision the future of theater, we can never see 2020. We can, however, look at the recent past and wonder how things will play out.
1. Will Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis bring their concept album “Warriors” to the stage?
2. Will we see more theaters shutting down?
3. Will the popularity of the “Wicked” movie affect Broadway in any way?
“The wisest elders in the industry, who have seen dark times before (although nothing like this) all say the same thing: We need a hit,” Broadway producer Ken Davenport wrote in a recent blog post. And “Wicked,” he argued, can be that hit, taking the place of past stage hits (Hamilton, Jersey Boys), which he implies boosted all of Broadway. (The report of Broadway grosses for the week ending December 29, 2024 offers some support for this prediction: “Wicked” at the Gershwin Theater grossed more than $5 million, the highest weekly gross of any Broadway production in history, and several of the 32 other Broadway shows running that week also broke box office records.) Will it have any other effect?
4. Will a reliance on star power enhance or detract from the theatrical landscape?
The Spring season on Broadway promises to bring back such homegrown stars as Jonathan Groff, Idina Menzel, Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga; some movie stars with proven track records in theater like Denzel Washington, but also newcomers like George Clooney, Succession’s Sarah Snook and Breaking Bad’s Bob Odenkirk. Stars help sell a show. But will theatergoers come to expect, and then in effect demand, that a stage show feature a movie or pop star? Will this result in higher ticket prices, shorter runs and less originality? Could the long-time practice of stunt-casting be supplemented by what one could call celebrity-packing? Many theatergoers recently have expressed a sense of betrayal by two celebrity-laden shows, “Shit. Meet. Fan.” and “All In: Comedy about Love.”.
5. Will theater people continue to argue about dimming the lights of Broadway after each prominent death, or will wiser heads come up with a fix?
6. Will theater, and theatergoers, tune out politics?
There are a handful of shows slated for the Broadway Spring Season that one could view as political, most explicitly “Good Night and Good Luck,” George Clooney’s adaptation of his film about TV journalist Edward R. Murrow’s against a crude demagogue of the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy. But polls, articles and TV news ratings indicate that Americans are exhausted by politics – no doubt in large measure because of last year’s startling, sometimes battering, turn of events.. I’m wondering whether 2025 will see a fall-off in theater artists’ activism and in a dwindling of political shows (There were many in 2024, eg: The Ally, The Ask, Between Two Knees, Counting and Cracking, Fatherland, How To Eat An Orange, N/A , KS6: Small Forward, Suffs, We Live in Cairo. But, as some critics have pointed out, the most popular shows were largely apolitical, like “Maybe Happy Ending,” and outright ahistorical like “Oh, Mary,” both of which are going strong, while all but one of those I just mentioned were limited runs, and “Suffs” is closing January 5.)
7. What will the new generation of artistic directors mean to New York theater?
In 2023 many long-time artistic directors of New York theaters died or announced their retirement; in 2024, many theaters announced their replacements. (eg Taja Cheek at Performance Space New York; Amy Cassello at BAM; Evan Cabnet at Second Stage; four co-directors Annalisa Dias, Lanxing Fu, Lauren Miller, and Jesse Cameron Alick at HERE Arts Center; Lear deBessonet at Lincoln Center Theater; Emily Shooltz at Signature; Christopher Ashley at Roundabout.) It might take a few seasons before theatergoers will feel any effect of this change in leadership, but a lingering question is whether the new leaders will be able to leave their mark in any distinctive way. Will they be confronted with an uncertain environment, financially and politically, that traps them in survival mode? Or will the challenges spur them, like their predecessors, to innovate in rewarding ways?
8. Will the spirit of collaboration among Off-Broadway theaters continue?
One such innovation last year was a series of co-productions among established Off and Off-Off Broadway theaters. Dominique Morisseau’s latest play “Bad Kreyol: was a co-production of Manhattan Theatre Club and Signature. Other such pair-ups: En Garde Arts with Vineyard Theater, Transport Group with Lucille Lortel, Rattlestick with Theater for a New Audience and (separately) New Georges. Will this continue? If so, what will be the effect?
9. How receptive will New York theater be to innovations in technology?
At the beginning of 2023, I wondered whether, despite the lessening of the impact of COVID-19, digital theater would continue to flourish, as it had the previous three years. There were some advances by the end of 2023, such as the mainstreaming of “simulcasts” of several Broadway and Off-Broadway plays (the performance taking place simultaneously live on stage, and live on computer screens in people’s homes.) At the beginning of 2024, having seen two AI-created stage shows the previous year, I wondered whether there would be a step-up in Artificial Intelligence on stage. But over the past year, experimentation in both AI and digital theater seemed to have been (to use an old-tech metaphor) put on the back burner. There was one exception: In “McNeal, a play starring Robert Downey Jr. as a fictitious novelist, playwright Ayad Akhtar used AI both as a subject and as an apparent aid to his playwriting.
Doug Reside, the curator of the Billy Rose Theater Collection at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, provided a larger context for the interplay between theater and technology in his book “Fixing the Musical.” The book is a clear-eyed if implicit dismantling of the myopic view of theater as an unchanging ancient art form that has defiantly survived despite competition from new-fangled lesser forms of entertainment. The book demonstrates instead how much theater has thrived (rather than just survived) because of (not despite) the way it has collaborated (not competed) with the evolving arts and tools of modern life.
Will experimentation in AI and digital theater be more visible, and more welcomed, in 2025? And are there newer technologies in the pipeline that will debut in the coming year?
10. Who will drive the theater conversation?
This is a question I ask every year. The answer looked fairly grim last year, when Peter Marks retired as the theater critic of the Washington Post, one of the few such positions (full-time, full pay, with health benefits) remaining in the country, and there was uncertainty whether the Post would hire anybody to replace him. On his last day, he wrote: “I feel like a character in an existential play by Tom Stoppard: relinquishing an endangered job in a struggling business that covers a gasping industry…”
But they did replace him, with Nuveen Kumar. And, if I don’t feel especially encouraged to continue as a theater critic, there is a new critical generation and new platforms– Substacks and podcasts (and Substack podcasts – one of which Peter Marks now runs) and TikTok channels. And there are still old-school theater blogs that regularly run theater reviews (including this one.).
This is not a Hallelujah moment; more like a brief reprieve. The change in the meaning of opening night is a sign of the continuing, deliberate devaluing of professional theater criticism: (Broadway Opening Night. What It Means. How It’s Changed. 7 Facts to Clear UpThe Confusion and Crystallize the Outrage.)
I’ve quoted before a Broadway producer saying: “I expect the next generation of content creators to not care so much about critics.” And then followed that with a famous quote by Pauline Kael: “In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.” Will that Broadway producer and future “content creators” really be satisfied when the only source is advertising?
Will we get some answers to these questions as 2025 comes into focus? We’ll see.
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