Broadway to The Bushnell

Performing arts center announces 7 shows for 2024-25 series

The Bushnell Performing Arts Center in Hartford announced its 2024-25 Broadway series of musicals on Monday.

The slate of shows for the upcoming season includes the Neil Diamond bio-musical “A Beautiful Noise” Oct. 1-6; the return of Disney’s “The Lion King” Nov. 13-Dec. 1; “MJ the Musical” Dec. 10-15; a radically rethought revival of “Peter Pan” Feb. 4-9; “The Wiz” March 11-16; “Some Like It Hot” April 29-May 4, 2025; and “Back to the Future the Musical” June 4-8, 2025.

The schedule breaks down to two jukebox musicals, two refreshed and reinterpreted 20th-century musical classics and three musical versions of famous movies (one of them from Disney).

The Bushnell continues its tradition of hosting the

first national tours of recent Broadway hits. Two of the shows, “MJ” and “Back to the Future,” are still running on Broadway as their first national tours commence. The Broadway production of “Some Like It Hot” closed in December after running for around a year. “The Wiz,” a revival of the 1974 Black

version of “The Wizard of Oz,” is touring before it gets to Broadway, playing The Bushnell less than three weeks before it begins preview performances at New York’s Marquis Theatre.

Besides the seven shows in the subscription season, The Bushnell announced return bookings of two musicals that have already played the venue in recent years: “Les Miserables” from Oct. 29 to Nov. 3, and the concert-style British history lesson “Six” Dec. 31 through Jan. 5. Various tours of “Les Mis” have been coming to The Bushnell since 1989, most recently in 2017. When “Six” happens, it will be only two years since the first tour of the show about the six wives of Henry VIII played The Bushnell in January 2023.

Tickets are not yet available. Bushnell Broadway series subscribers are contacted first about renewing their subscriptions. Then, new subscriptions are offered to those not currently subscribing. Finally, months from now, single tickets will go on sale for the shows.

Of the seven subscription shows, five are the first national tours of new musicals that have never appeared

at The Bushnell. The other two, “Peter Pan” and “The Wiz,” first came to The Bushnell decades ago but in very different forms. This new production of “Peter Pan” has been rewritten by playwright Larissa Fasthorse (Broadway’s “The Thanksgiving Play”), with a particular interest in reworking the original script’s objectionable depictions of Native Americans.

“Some Like It Hot” is based on the 1959 film comedy directed by Billy Wilder and starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe. It’s not the first time the movie has been turned into a musical. A previous attempt, “Sugar,” by Jule Styne, Bob Merrill and Peter Stone ran on Broadway in 1972 and (retitled as “Some Like It Hot”) played the Shubert Theatre in New Haven in 2002. This new one has a score by the “Hairspray” and TV “Smash” team of Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman and a book by Matthew López and Amber Ruffin. López has had several of his plays (including the world premieres of “Somewhere” and “Reverberation”) produced by Hartford Stage, which also commissioned (but did not end up producing) his Tony-winning epic “The Inheritance.”

Ruffin, best known as a writer/performer on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” and for her now-defunct “Amber Ruffin Show” on Peacock, also had a hand in the tour of “The Wiz,” adding new material to the show’s book.

It took years, but The Bushnell has finally caught up with the backlog of Broadway series shows whose visits to Hartford were delayed by the COVID19 pandemic. The last straggler was “The Cher Show,” which was originally scheduled for November 2020 and finally arrived earlier this month.

The 2024-25 season begins in the fall. There are still three more Broadway shows coming in the current 2023-24 season: the “Wizard of Oz” prequel “Wicked” April 24 through May 12, “Beetlejuice” May 28 through June 2 and “Funny Girl” June 18-23.

For more information on The Bushnell’s upcoming 2024-25 season, go to the venue’s website at bushnell. org.

MATTHEW MURPHY Roman Banks as “MJ” in the national tour of “MJ the Musical,” based on the music of Michael Jackson. The tour will come to The Bushnell in December.

JEREMY DANIEL Kyle Ramar Freeman, from left, Nichelle Lewis, Phillip Johnson Richardson and Avery Wilson in the revival of “The Wiz” at The Bushnell in March.