Story of the Week: Curls, Clooney, and Korean Robots—Notes on the 2024-25 Broadway Season

It’s been a year since The Outsiders and Stereophonic were crowned Best Musical and Best Play at the 2024 Tony Awards, and two new productions are waiting in the wings to take their places this Sunday night.

Over the last season, 43 shows opened on Broadway—and with $1.89 billion in grosses (a record) and 14.7 million attendees (second only to 2018-19), it’s safe to say Broadway is not just back (to borrow that oft-repeated, post-pandemic phrase), it’s booming.

However, numbers only tell part of the story. In a commerce-driven industry, they may be the most important measure of success—but art still matters. And the 2024-25 season gave us remarkable artistic highs, baffling lows, and clear lessons for the future.

Ahead of the Tonys, Story of the Week is looking back at the 2024-25 season and asking: What worked? What didn’t? And what can we learn moving forward?

Small Shows, Big Impact (and Big Shows, Small Impact)

Despite Broadway’s reputation for spectacle, this season once again proved that emotional depth and inventive storytelling can outshine helicopters and chandeliers.

Among the season’s splashy musicals, Death Becomes Her and Boop! provided high-energy fun. Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard devoured the scenery as bickering frenemies, and Jasmine Amy Rogers played a cartoon character with thoroughly human sincerity. But despite the technical polish, both shows felt more like big-budget diversions than works that will stand the test of time (and the less said about Smash, the better).

By contrast, Maybe Happy Ending, a gentle sci-fi musical about two obsolete robots who fall in love on a trip across Korea, emerged as the surprise success story. The odds were stacked against it last fall when it opened amid scenic delays and soft box office; it looked poised to close quickly. Once we all saw it, it won us over with its heart, clever staging, and bittersweet themes, showing that even the most unlikely stories can thrive with the right creative approach.

On the dramatic side, star vehicles like George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck broke box office records, but the plays that lingered in our minds were the ones that were intimate and urgent: Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor Is the Villain, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Pulitzer-winning Purpose, and Sanaz Toossi’s English. These weren’t just good plays; they’re going to become canonical texts of 21st-century American theater.

Biographical Bust

You wouldn’t know it from the Tony nominations, but Tammy Faye was, in fact, a show this season. The latest Elton John musical—co-written by Jake Shears and James Graham—arrived with strong buzz from the UK but wildly misjudged American audiences’ appetite for a musical about the Christian right, especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s second election. Tonally chaotic and frequently baffling (it opens with a colonoscopy), Tammy Faye shuttered after just 29 performances, struggling to fill the vast Palace Theatre even with the balcony often closed.

A Wonderful World, a hagiography about Louis Armstrong, lasted a little longer but fared no better creatively. Burdened by a flimsy book and a trio of directors who weren’t on the same page, the show never found a voice as distinctive as Armstrong’s. The first red flag was raised at the press meet-and-greet, when the conceiver’s sister scattered his ashes on the red carpet—one of the more surreal things I’ve ever experienced in the line of duty.

Conversely, the Bobby Darin-inspired Just in Time is thriving at Circle in the Square, thanks in large part to a thrilling performance from Jonathan Groff—who is, technically, playing Jonathan Groff playing Bobby Darin.

Meanwhile, Operation Mincemeat and Dead Outlaw prove that musicals about the mutilation of real corpses can be unexpectedly moving, not merely macabre. If I had a nickel for every singing coroner on Broadway this season, I’d have 10 cents—not a fortune, but weird that it’s happened twice. (I don’t count Floyd Collins as being about a corpse because he’s technically alive until the end).

A few autobiographical plays made the boards, too. David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face—an incisive, self-interrogating work revisiting his protests of Jonathan Pryce’s casting in Miss Saigon—was sharp, gutsy, and revolutionary. Left on Tenth, Delia Ephron’s memoir-turned-play starring Julianna Margulies, Peter Gallagher, and a scene-stealing dog, was … not.

Of course, the best biographical play of the season isn’t quite biographical at all. It’s Cole Escola’s riotous Oh, Mary!, a satire that imagines Mary Todd Lincoln as an ill-fated cabaret star with a gay husband. A downtown darling in 2024, it has unexpectedly become the Broadway hit of the season, and one that can live just as well without its writer-star taking center stage. One day soon, eager high schoolers in ballgowns leftover from last spring’s Cinderella will be squealing the line “Louise likes to rub ice cream on her pussy!” with wild abandon. Won’t those TikTok supercuts be something?

The Price of Celebrity Casting

Broadway welcomed a plethora of A-listers to the stage this year, ranging from Robert Downey Jr. to Denzel Washington.

Some knew how to play the game. Downey, coming off an Oscar win for Oppenheimer, proudly ran the opening-night press gauntlet for the AI drama McNeal at Lincoln Center Theater. Darren Criss, a producer on Maybe Happy Ending as well as its leading man, has voluntarily attended multiple awards gatherings to celebrate the production.

Succession siblings Sarah Snook and Kieran Culkin can regularly be seen signing autographs at their respective stage doors. While George Clooney did not show up to accept his Outer Critics Circle Award for Best New American Play, sending emissary David Cromer instead, he did run the bases in Central Park as he played for his show’s Broadway Softball League team.

In short, it was both the starriest season Broadway has seen in a long time, and the most expensive. The presence of Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal doing Othello helped elevate the Broadway grosses to that record-setting total, but that’s only because the producers are charging astronomical sums for tickets.

The cost of doing business has gone up everywhere, from the grocery store to the Broadway stage. And if you have stars that can command $900 a ticket, I completely understand a producer’s desire to charge that much, especially when the production’s only victory is going to be financial. Othello got mediocre reviews and no major awards attention. They didn’t make it to Radio City, but they’re laughing all the way to the bank: They announced their recoupment just moments after the Tonys left them in the dust.

But the question is: Should tickets cost that much?

Looking Ahead

As we enter the new season, here are a couple of things I wish theater makers would remember.

We want to be challenged, not spoon-fed. The best theater this season, from The Hills of California to Floyd Collins, trusted its audience to go on the journey and didn’t apologize for being difficult.

Not every show needs to be Tonys bait. I would have had much more fun at Pirates! The Penzance Musical in February instead of April. Don’t wait until the last minute to open.

As Maybe Happy Ending has proved, finding an audience takes time. I hope that Real Women Have Curves makes it. It deserves to.

Meanwhile, far from the bright lights of Broadway, Hugh Jackman and mega-producer Sonia Friedman have created a potential new model for theater production. They’ve formed Together, a theater company dedicated to equal pay for actors, intimate storytelling, and audience accessibility.

Until June 18, you can catch Jackman taking selfies and hugging elderly ladies outside the Minetta Lane Theatre (without barricades, no less), and onstage there delivering his best performance since The Boy From Oz in an excellent Hannah Moscovitch play called Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes. At every show, 25 percent of all tickets can be purchased for $35.

No green-eyed monster about gross potential can be found there, and Broadway should take note. Accessibility is key, especially if there’s going to be a training ground for future professionals. Let that be the biggest takeaway of all.