The $22.5 million Broadway musical “The Queen of Versailles” — starring Kristin Chenoweth and scored by Stephen Schwartz (“Wicked”) — will play its final performance on Jan. 4 at the St. James Theatre. What was supposed to be a high-gloss Broadway blockbuster is shuttering less than three months after opening night.
The musical was adapted from the 2012 documentary film of the same name, which chronicles the attempts of a wealthy Florida couple to build the largest private home in America, only to see the 2008 financial crash upend their dream. Amid sparkling costumes and cartoonish opulence, the show never quite found a tone that held audiences’ attention. Critics and theatergoers alike grumbled that the musical wavered between satire, heartbreak, and empty spectacle.
The fate of “Versailles” belongs to a broader, troubling trend. Since Broadway’s post-pandemic reopening, dozens of new musicals have opened and only a handful have turned a profit. This season’s slate of new musicals was already unusually slim — and now, one of the biggest and brassiest hopes is gone. The show’s unusually quick closing suggests that producers believed profitability was unlikely and opted to cut their losses rather than continue bleeding money through the winter.
Playwright Tom Stoppard Dies at 88
Tom Stoppard, the English playwright whose mix of dazzling wordplay, intellectual bravado, and emotional undercurrents made him one of the most influential dramatists of the past half-century, died on Saturday at age 88. The lights of Broadway were dimmed in his honor on Tuesday night.
For theatergoers, Stoppard represented a kind of artistic guarantee: a night at the theater where ideas mattered — where philosophy, mathematics, history, and quantum theory could coexist with pratfalls, romance, and jokes sharp enough to bruise. His dialogue could feel like a verbal pinball machine, ricocheting between wit and wonder. Yet beneath the pyrotechnics, Stoppard was always searching for clarity and connection.
His 1966 breakthrough, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” turned two minor Hamlet characters into existential wanderers. He spent the following decades writing plays that audiences leaned into and studied afterward, including “Arcadia,” “The Real Thing,” “Travesties,” and the three-part epic “The Coast of Utopia.” His final major play, “Leopoldstadt,” was a sweeping family drama shaped by Stoppard’s own discovery of his Jewish relatives who perished in the Holocaust. The play received rave reviews in London and on Broadway, where it won the 2023 Tony Award for Best Play.
Nathan Lane to star in ‘Death of a Salesman’
Broadway will get a new look at Arthur Miller this spring when Nathan Lane steps into the role of Willy Loman in a revival of “Death of a Salesman” at the Winter Garden Theatre directed by Joe Mantello. Laurie Metcalf will star opposite him as Linda Loman, alongside Christopher Abbott as Biff Loman.
The production also advances Scott Rudin’s public return to Broadway, following his retreat in 2021 amid reports of workplace abuse and intimidation. Rudin re-entered the commercial arena this fall with Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road,” produced at the Booth Theatre with Metcalf and Micah Stock. That production marked the first Broadway show to bear Rudin’s name since his hiatus.
This revival follows closely on the acclaimed 2022 Broadway production led by Wendell Pierce and Sharon D Clarke, which reframed the Lomans as an all-Black family and offered a sharply resonant reinterpretation of Miller’s classic.
For Lane, “Salesman” continues a turn toward dramatic material following his Tony-winning work in “Angels in America” in 2018. Metcalf, meanwhile, remains one of Broadway’s most incisive portrayers of domestic turmoil.
