South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
New Broadway in Miami season lineup revealed
By Rod Stafford Hagwood
There’s a lot of newness surrounding the 2022-2023 Broadway season in Miami.
There will be two for-the-firsttime ever-in-Miami national tours touching down at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts: “Disney’s Aladdin” and “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations.”
And there will be two South Florida premieres: the Lincoln Center Production of “My Fair Lady” and the recent Great White Way buzzy show “Six” (which will run in Fort Lauderdale for two weeks before landing in Miami for one week).
And the popular — or perhaps more accurately “evergreen” — musical-comedy “Wicked” will also return to the Arsht Center.
How to get tickets
The five-show subscription package costs $202-$786. You can order beginning at 10 a.m. on Thursday, March 31.
Call 305-949-6722 or 800-9398587 or go to ArshtCenter.org.
Current subscribers may renew by phone or online. The renewal period ends April 26.
Breaking down the Broadway titles
Oct. 25-30 —“Six”
After more than a year’s delay because of COVID-19’s shutdown of NYC’s theater district, this musical finally bowed on Broadway on Oct. 3, 2021. Critics raved at what was, at the time, the only new show to debut. Staged as a pop concert, the story puts the six Tudor queens and wives of Henry VIII center stage and girl power in the spotlight. “Six” will play Fort Lauderdale Oct. 11-23.
Jan. 3-8, 2023 —“Disney’s Aladdin”
The 1992 animated movie was a live action film in 2019, directed by Guy Ritchie and starring
Will Smith. The stage musical happened in between, bowing on Broadway in 2014 with all the instantly recognizable songs — such as “Friend Like Me” and “A Whole New World” — from the original Disney treatment as well as some new tunes from the score’s dream team of Tim Rice, Alan Menken, Howard Ashman and Chad Beguelin. Lifted and Disneyfied from the Arabic folk tale “One Thousand and One Nights,” the story essentially remains the same.
Feb. 15-March 5, 2023 —“Wicked”
Remixed and rebooted from “The Wizard of Oz,” this you-gotta-see-it-at-least-once musical tells what went down in the Land of Oz years before Dorothy Gale plopped down in Munchkinland. The show, which made its Great White Way debut in 2003 and made stars of Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel, is centered on gal pals Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch of the West. This reiteration is darker by far than Judy Garland’s take, but “Wicked” is also a big Broadway musical comedy with all the requisite physical humor, production numbers and colorful costumes mixed with witty lyrics and soaring music by Stephen Schwartz. The hit songs include “Popular,” “For Good” and “Defy
ing Gravity.”
March 28-April 2, 2023 — “My Fair Lady”
This production of the Lerner and Lowe classic is a bit of a Pygmalion story itself (the musical is based on George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion”), mirroring the main plot of the show about a Cockney flower seller being transformed into a lady by a linguistics professor in Edwardian London. The show was a hit when it bowed on Broadway in 1956, making Julie Andrews a star. It was also a hit film in 1964 with Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison repeating his role from the stage version. This tour is based on a 2018 revival by the Lincoln Center Theater, which brought in a who’s who of a creative team to dust off the ol’ chestnut: director Bartlett Sher, choreographer Christopher Gattelli, scenic designer Michael Yeargan, costume designer Catherine Zuber and lighting designer Donald Holder.
May 9-14, 2023 —“Ain’t
Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations”
Who couldn’t use a little mo Motown in their lives these days? The legendary Detroit record label is just rife with stories and has even been Broadway-tized before. There was the stage musical “Motown the Musical.” And some might say that “Dreamgirls” was the first clone, siphoning off the story of Diana Ross and the Supremes the way it did. But that was then, this is now. This musical makes fabulous fodder for a show, retelling onstage/backstage dramas of one of the most successful male vocal groups of all time; Especially since that history includes some of pop and soul music’s biggest hits including “The Way You Do The Things You Do,” “My Girl,” “Get Ready,” “Ball of Confusion,” “Runaway Child, Running Wild,” “I Can’t Get Next to You,” “Cloud Nine,” “Just My Imagination” and “Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone.”