There’s a man trapped in a cave, a girl trapped in a factory, a bandit trapped in a coffin, a flapper trapped in two dimensions—and they will all be singing and dancing for us in musicals coming to Broadway this spring. Choreography will be provided by established masters (Tony winners Warren Carlyle, Jerry Mitchell, and Sergio Trujillo) and by visitors from surprising corners of the dance world: the “vertical dance” specialists at BANDALOOP, who take movement off the floor, and Ani Taj, whose Dance Cartel regularly breaks down the fourth wall. It’s easy to get excited about Smash and Buena Vista Social Club, covered elsewhere in this issue, but the second half of the 2024–25 theater season is actually crammed with other tantalizing possibilities—off-beat and on-beat dancing in myriad styles that I can’t wait to see.
On Broadway, the oddball stuff that isn’t necessarily billed as “choreography” can usually be relied on to enrich the choreographic lexicon. Idina Menzel became a star defying gravity in Wicked, and, in the recently opened Redwood, she’s doing it again, under the guidance—and climbing technology—of BANDALOOP’s artistic director, Melecio Estrella. Menzel, who is the musical’s co-conceiver (with its director, Tina Landau), plays a grieving mother who retreats to the California redwood forest to heal—cue the dream ballet, by Jennifer Weber (& Juliet). Estrella, whose usual milieu is a mountainside or a building facade, provides the show’s “vertical movement and choreography” at the Nederlander Theatre.
From left: Nkeki Obi-Melekwe and Idina Menzel in Redwood at La Jolla Playhouse. Photo by Rich Soublet, Courtesy Grapevine Public Relations.
Another choreographer who, like Estrella, is trying her hand on Broadway for the first time, is Ani Taj, the “movement director” for Dead Outlaw. An off-Broadway hit last year from composer David Yazbek, playwright Itamar Moses, and director David Cromer—who gave us the stunning 2018 10-time Tony winner, The Band’s Visit—it’s a darkly comic take on the true story of Elmer McCurdy, a small-time crook in the American West whose mummified corpse became a sideshow attraction about a century ago. Taj is a longtime collaborator of the always-inventive Sam Pinkleton—her only other Broadway credit is dancing his choreography in Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812—and she’s made a career of turning shows into dance parties and vice versa. So it’s a good bet she’ll be surprising us at the Longacre Theatre when previews begin April 12, ahead of the April 27 opening.
Jon Rua isn’t exactly a Broadway neophyte—he made his debut as a performer in In the Heights and as an assistant choreographer on a number in SpongeBob Squarepants. But it’s safe to say that he’s never faced the kind of challenge presented by Floyd Collins, for which he is designing “dance sequences.” The hero of this 1996 off-Broadway classic, the story of a spelunker who was trapped in a Kentucky cave in 1925, stays pinned underground while would-be rescuers and sensation-seekers toil above—it doesn’t exactly scream dance. Jeremy Jordan has the lead and some of Adam Guettel’s most beautiful music to sing at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, starting on March 27 and opening April 21. Tina Landau is the book writer and director of this one, in addition to Redwood, but she’s not the only one doing double duty this season: Rua is also an associate choreographer on BOOP! The Betty Boop Musical.
Courtesy Lincoln Center Theater.
Jasmine Amy Rogers (center) and ensemble in BOOP! The Betty Boop Musical. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman, Courtesy Boneau/Bryan-Brown.
Women at the center of Broadway musicals offer a wide array of archetypes: stage mothers, widowed matchmakers, funny girls, merry murderesses. But this year we’re getting a spit-curled, wasp-waisted flapper-era sexpot in BOOP!, and a zaftig Latina factory worker who’d prefer to be in college in Real Women Have Curves. Both have powerhouse director-choreographers. With BOOP! Jerry Mitchell gets to guide the cutie-pie from Max Fleischer’s 1930s cartoons into the real world, with appropriate razzle-dazzle and Jasmine Amy Rogers in the title role. Her Instagram account includes a photo of her as a 4-year-old in red-ribboned tap shoes, but the grown-up version will be at the Broadhurst Theatre starting March 11, with opening night scheduled for April 5. And it’s Sergio Trujillo pouring his showbiz heart and Colombian soul into the musical version of Josefina López’s 1993 play Real Women Have Curves, which centers on a young woman as she struggles to find a way out of the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles in the 1980s. The dancing, to the songs of Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez, starts at the James Earl Jones Theatre on April 1, ahead of an April 27 opening.
The American Repertory Theater cast of Real Women Have Curves. Photo by Nile Hawver and Maggie Hall, Courtesy Rubenstein Public Relations.
It’s always fascinating to watch how Broadway’s artists attempt to reprise a success or bend over backwards to avoid repeating themselves. Rick Kuperman and Jeff Kuperman made their spectacular Broadway debut last season with masses of teenagers jumping out of their skins in The Outsiders. This time the brothers are choreographing on only two bodies, those of Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren. They’re the entire cast of The Last Five Years, Jason Robert Brown’s much-admired chamber musical chronicling how a marriage takes shape and disintegrates. It happens at the Hudson Theatre starting on March 18 prior to the April 6 opening.
The Last Five Years’ Adrienne Warren and Nick Jonas. Photo by Norman Jean Roy, Courtesy Polk & Co.
Elmer McCurdy and Floyd Collins aren’t the only nonfiction heroes of the spring musicals. The Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Bobby Darin, who died in 1973, gets his Broadway bio thanks to Ted Chapin, who had the idea, and director Alex Timbers, who developed it. Just in Time, starting previews March 28 and opening April 23, stars Jonathan Groff and has choreography by Shannon Lewis, whose work with The Verdon Fosse Legacy and extensive resumé of Broadway shows as a performer should be a great match for tracing Darin’s evolution from teen rocker to jazz-inflected nightclub crooner.
Just In Time’s Jonathan Groff. Courtesy Polk & Co.
Gilbert and Sullivan didn’t know jazz—or blues or Caribbean rhythms—when they created their 1879 operetta The Pirates of Penzance. But the Roundabout Theatre is imagining that they did, with a revised version called Pirates! The Penzance Musical. The comic and romantic shenanigans have moved to New Orleans, and so has the music, freeing the choreographer, Warren Carlyle, from Victorian England and letting him indulge his jazzy American side. The show runs April 4 to June 22 at the Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre, and promises to be a fun ride.
Great as they are, Stephen Sondheim’s brainy, high-concept musicals tend not to be fun rides, and they’re notoriously resistant to splashy dance numbers. But put those brilliant songs into a revue instead of a story about a 19th-century painter or a murderous barber, and rules can be broken, the picture can change. Reviews from London suggest that Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends, starring Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga, gives choreographer Stephen Mear plenty of room to play—not really surprising, given that Matthew Bourne and Julia McKenzie are the guiding spirits. Mear and Bourne co-choreographed Mary Poppins, and Gavin Lee, whose brilliant dancing was a highlight of that show, is in this one, too. It starts at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre March 25 ahead of an April 8 opening.
The season’s other British hit, Operation Mincemeat, already previewing at the John Golden Theatre, doesn’t have the pedigree, but it won the 2024 Olivier for best musical. A project of the SpitLip musical comedy troupe, it’s described as “Singin’ in the Rain meets Strangers on a Train”—whatever that means. Based on actual events, it’s got World War II, wacky spies, a corpse, and British choreographer Jenny Arnold keeping it all together. It’s opening March 20—only the beginning of what looks to be yet another dance-packed season on Broadway.
The West End cast of Operation Mincemeat. Photo by Matt Crockett, Courtesy DKC/O&M Co.
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