‘Frozen,’ ‘Funny Girl’ among season’s hits
Musicals based on five movies and the lives of two pop culture divas make up the just-announced 202324 Broadway series at the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in Hartford.
With the exception of the return of the ever-popular “Wicked,” every show in the season is making its Connecticut premiere. The MVP of the season is Harvey Fierstein, who wrote/adapted the books for both “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “Funny Girl.” The playwright and actor is a longtime Connecticut resident whose previous musicals include “Newsies,” “Kinky Boots” and “Hairspray.”
Two of the musicals, “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “Beetlejuice” are wacky comedies. “Frozen” and “Moulin Rouge” are effects-laden fantasy romances. “The Cher Show” and “Funny Girl” are musical biographies of iconic singers/actors of the 20th century. There’s also the long-awaited return of “Wicked,” which will mark its 20th year on Broadway in June and has been touring the country since 2005.
The Bushnell is still making good on shows that were announced years ago and then postponed due to COVID. “The Cher Show” was originally scheduled to play in the theater in November 2020.
Unlike this year’s booking of “To Kill a Mockingbird” or last year’s “What the Constitution Means to Me,” the 2023-24 Bushnell Broadway season is all musicals.
The season begins Oct. 3-8 with “Mrs. Doubtfire.” The musical, based on the 1993 Robin Williams movie about a man who passes as a female Scottish nanny, ran on Broadway from March 2020 through May 2022. It has a book by Fierstein, a score by Alan Menken (“Beauty and the Beast,” “Little Shop of Horrors”) and lyrics by David Zippel (“City of Angels,” “Bad Cinderella”).
“Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” based on the 2001 Baz Luhrmann film about an enchanted romance during the Belle Epoque in Paris at the turn of the 20th century, plays The Bushnell from Nov. 21 through Dec. 3. The musical, which has been running in New York since 2019 (including a COVID hiatus), is directed by
Alex Timbers, who began his directing career as an undergraduate at Yale University. The score is made up of famous pop songs from “Lady Marmalade” to “Material Girl” to “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
“Frozen” gets a two-week booking on
Feb. 8-18, 2024. The 2013 animated Disney wasted no time becoming a Broadway musical, debuting in 2018, only to have its run cut short by the COVID pandemic. “Frozen” did not reopen on Broadway after closing in 2020 but has become a major touring attraction. It has a book by Jennifer Lee (a co-writer of the film), music and lyrics by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez and spectacular wintry special effects.
“The Cher Show” runs March 5-10, 2024. It takes three performers (shorthanded as “Star,” “Lady” and “Babe”) to cover the life and times of the superstar Cher in this style-shifting show written by Rick Elice (a 1970s grad of Yale and one of the creative forces behind “Jersey Boys”). The score includes hits from every phase of Cher’s long career, from “I’ve Got You Babe” through “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” to “If I Could
Turn Back Time.”
“Wicked” returns for a whopping three-week engagement from April 24 through May 12, 2024. The show has played The Bushnell numerous times but not since 2014. (A 2016 tour played the Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford instead.) “Wicked” is based on Gregory Maguire’s book of the same name, one of several radical rethinkings he did of the Oz characters created by L. Frank Baum over a century ago. The musical also references the 1935 movie “The Wizard of Oz.” The score is by longtime Connecticut resident Stephen Schwartz, whose “Pippin,” “Rags” and “Postcards” have all been revisited on Connecticut stages in recent years.
“Beetlejuice” is at The Bushnell from May 28 to June 2, 2024. The manic
comic musical based on the 1988 Tim Burton movie began its Broadway run in the spring of 2019, closed during the COVID pandemic and was able to reopen at a different theater in 2022, where it ran until January of this year. Its national tour began in December. “Beetlejuice” was adapted for the stage by a variety of comic talents: Australian songwriter/comedian Eddie Perfect, Scott Brown and Anthony King (“Gutenberg: The Musical”).
The season ends June 18-23, 2024 with the current Broadway revival of “Funny Girl.” Casting will be everything. The musical, with a rewritten book by Harvey Fierstein, did not fare very well with its original Broadway star, Beanie Feldstein, a
Wesleyan University graduate, but picked up when she was followed by Lea Michele. “Funny Girl” is the show that cemented the stardom of Barbra Streisand in 1964. It’s the story of real-life comedy sensation Fanny Brice, a major Broadway and radio star of the 1920s and ’30s. The songs by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill include the timeless hits “People” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade.”
The only way to get a ticket for the shows right now is by buying a season subscription. Existing subscribers get the first chance to renew their seats, then new subscriptions go on sale and then single tickets to each show are made available to the general public. Details are available at The Bushnell’s website at bushnell.org.