On Tuesday evening, the more than 1,300 spectators cheered full of relief, but also with pride in what they got through and looking forward to the next three hours.
In the semi-darkness of the sold-out hall, they celebrate the artist on stage, who has been a superstar in the scene for almost a decade. Lin-Manuel Miranda is the mastermind, composer and former leading actor of “Hamilton”, the world’s most successful musical restart of the past decades. “Welcome back to the theater!” He calls out to them. “Personally, I never want to take it for granted again.”
The mood in the hall remains electrified: especially during the first half hour of the musical about the US founding fathers, every new actress is celebrated, with almost a dozen songs there are standing ovations and the artists have to go on stage because of applause and pause loud laughter longer than usual. After the first major concerts in Central Park, smaller performances on Broadway, the Met Gala on Monday and the US Open, it is another sign of New York’s return to normal after the difficult months of the pandemic.
Four hit musicals premiered this Tuesday after the pandemic. Fans also saw an industry celebrity on stage in the Disney adaptation of “The Lion King” in Julie Taymor – she was the original director and costume designer of “The Lion King”. The witch show “Wicked” started its performances in the Gershwin Theater, with more than 1900 seats the largest Broadway theater. All three belong to the influential production company Nederlander and, before closing on March 12, 2020, were among the top-selling performances in the world-famous theater district of the metropolis. Together they came to a gross profit of more than five million dollars in many weeks. The production of “Chicago”, which had been running since 1996, also returned on Tuesday.
Hardly any other city in the world is so dependent on its theater scene as New York. “Our comeback to tourism is being driven by Broadway,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in advance. Broadway has 41 houses for musicals and plays, in the last full season 2018/2019 they sold almost 15 million tickets according to the industry association “Broadway League” and achieved around 1.8 billion dollars in sales – around one and a half times what the local film funding agency as the total box office result of all German cinemas. The “League” reckons that around 100,000 jobs in the city will benefit directly or indirectly from Broadway. And so de Blasio asks in view of the fact that around two thirds of the tickets are sold to tourists: “Come and enjoy a show – or two, or three.”
Changes in the industry in recent months were not only caused by the pandemic: after the “Black Lives Matter” protests against police violence against blacks last year, there was also criticism of the lack of diversity on and behind the stages. The newly formed Black Theater Coalition calculated, for example, that for the 3002 musicals and 8,326 plays that have been staged since Broadway began in 1866, there were only ten black musicals and eleven black drama directors.
This season, however, there is a rethinking, especially in the theater sector. Seven completely new productions will start in 2021, and they were all written by black people, including four women. Theater critic Adam Feldman also commented in the city magazine “Time Out” that these plays should not have an easy run: They all start in autumn, at a time when tourism in the city has by no means returned to pre-pandemic level . With the brilliant start on Tuesday, the industry has at least made a visible effort to radiate optimism.
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