"The 25 Worst Broadway Musicals of the Millennium"

by Adam Feldman and David Cote 

[Are you like me?  Do you indulge in a bit of Schadenfreude, just for fun now and then?

[Okay, I don’t really take pleasure in someone else’s bad luck.  But sometimes, when it’s anonymous—and brought on by a touch of arrogance or predictable stupidity, it can be a little fun to wallow.  If that’s you, then you’ll enjoy this article, a catalogue of flop Broadway musicals from between 2001 and 2021.  The list and the review excerpts are compiled by a couple of reviewers from Time Out New York. 

[The shows labeled the “worst Broadway musicals of the millennium” are all the product of some really bad thinking.  I managed to have stayed away from all of them because not one of them sounded like something I’d want to sit through.  For the most part, apparently, I wasn’t alone.  (The reviewers had to go, more’s the pity.)

[The article, which unfortunately lacks the past two years, appeared on Time Out New York’s website on 9 February 2022.  All excerpts from reviews are from TONY and many are online.  (Jason Zinoman, who reviewed the first two productions on the list; Adam Feldman; and David Cote, were or are staff reviewers for the weekly entertainment magazine.)]

Once you’ve seen these song-and-dance bombs, you can’t un-see them. Here are the worst Broadway musicals since 2000.

When it comes to Broadway musicals, we try to accentuate the positive. We cheer for breakthroughs such as Hamilton [Lin-Manuel Miranda; Richard Rodgers Theatre; 6 August 2015-Present; 2,989 performances (as of 21 April 2024); directed by Thomas Krail; choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler; 15 Tony nominations, 11 awards]. We get misty-eyed when the Tony Awards hand out prizes. We curate a list of the best Broadway shows to share our enthusiasms. But anyone who loves song-and-dance spectacles has a dark side: There’s a flop vulture in each of us, keeping track of the dumbest, tackiest and most misguided musicals we’ve ever seen. Hence this list, a chronological reckoning of the worst Broadway musicals since 2000—a mix of awkward sentimentality, crimes against literature, bottom-scraping jukebox shows and deeply misconceived film-to-musical adaptations. Together, they represent more than 50 hours of agony, boredom and embarrassment in the theater. Yet today, we present them and say: Enjoy!

[1] Thou Shalt Not

Director Susan Stroman was on fire after the runaway success of 2001’s The Producers, but she doused her momentum in shallow water later that year at the helm of Harry Connick Jr.’s musical tragedy, set in 1940s New Orleans.

[The Producers: Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan; St. James Theatre; 19 April 2001-22 April 2007; 2,502 performances; directed and choreographed by Stroman; 12 Tonys, including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, Best Original Score, and Best Direction of a Musical.]

Opening date: October 25, 2001 [closed: 6 January 2002]

Performances: 85

From Jason Zinoman’s review: ”Lincoln Center’s vulgar adaptation of Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin is a misguided laughingstock of the variety that only Broadway can produce. Thou Shalt Not is a story of murder, greed and sin—with a little tap dancing thrown in.”

[Record (from IBDB): Plymouth Theatre; book by David Thompson, music and lyrics by Harry Connick, Jr.; directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman; no awards, nominated for 2002 Tony for Best Original Musical Score.

[Thou Shalt Not must not be confused with Thérèse Raquin, a straight play based on the same 1868 novel by Émile Zola.  It played at Studio 54 from 29 October 2015 to 3 January 2016, running for 75 regular performances.  It was written by Helen Edmundson and directed by Evan Cabnet; Keira Knightley made her Broadway début in the title role.  The criticism was middling to poor, with a few cheers in the mix.  The production was nominated for a 2016 Tony for Best Scenic Design of a Play (for Beowulf Boritt), but didn’t win.]

[2] Dance of the Vampires 

Michael Crawford sucked hard as an aristocratic neck-biter pursued by a vampire hunter somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains. The bombastic, campy score was by Jim Steinman, including his hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

Opening date: December 9, 2002 [closed: 25 January 2003]

Performances: 56

From Jason Zinoman’s review: ”Subtle, this ain’t. The overamped Vampires doesn’t just preach that bigger is better. Louder, brighter and hammier work too. Why have one dancing vampire, when you can crowd the stage with half a dozen Draculas kickin’ up their heels?” 

[Record: Minskoff Theatre; book by David Ives, Jim Steinman, and Michael Kunze; music and lyrics by Steinman; based on the 1967 film The Fearless Vampire Killers by Roman Polanski; directed by John Rando; choreographed by John Carrafa; no awards or nominations.]

[3] Urban Cowboy

A Texas honky-tonk with a mechanical bull (stay on it and win a cash prize) was the main setting for this country & western rom-com about a woman who has to choose between an ex-con and a hardworkin’ good ole boy.

Opening date: March 27, 2003 [closed: 18 May 2003]

Performances: 60

From David Cote’s review: ”When not relying on pop-country classics and bump ‘n’ grind line-dancing extravaganzas, the flimsy book veers between dumb jokes and pathetic stabs at character development. Woe betide anyone hankering for a well-crafted musical. You’d be looking for art in all the wrong places.” 

[Record: Broadhurst Theatre; book by Aaron Latham and Phillip Oesterman; based on the 1980 film directed by James Bridges; stage adaptation directed by Lonny Price; choreographed by Melinda Price; two Tony nominations, no awards.]

[4] Dracula[, the Musical]

Hoping to reproduce the success of his awful but long-running Jekyll & Hyde, composer Frank Wildhorn returned to Broadway with a synth-heavy, ultrabombastic musical fright fest that had critics running for rhetorical garlic.

[Jekyll & Hyde: Leslie Bricusse and Frank Wildhorn; Plymouth Theatre; 28 April 1997-7 January 2001; 1,543 performances; directed by Robin Phillips; choreographed by Joey Pizzi; four Tony nominations, no awards.]

[Dracula, the Musical should not be confused with the successful revival of the 1927 non-musical play, Dracula by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, that ran at the Martin Beck Theatre from 20 October 1977 to 6 January 1980 (925 performances).  That production was directed by Dennis Rosa with Frank Langella in the title role and set and costume designs by macabre cartoonist Edward Gorey.  The show won 1978 Tonys for Best Costume Design and Most Innovative Production of a Revival.]

Opening date: August 19, 2004 [closed: 2 January 2005]

Performances: 157

From Adam Feldman’s review: ”Dracula plays like the longest and drippiest Meat Loaf video [e]ver, a dunderheaded pseudoromance that travesties Bram Stoker’s novel. (A Dracula who emerges from his coffin to sing ‘It’s hard to make each moment count when you’re alone / Maybe that’s all I need to know’ is unlikely to strike fear into anyone except those with taste in lyrics.)” 

[Record: Belasco Theatre; book by Don Black and Christopher Hampton; music by Frank Wildhorn; lyrics by Black and Hampton; based on 1897 Bram Stoker story; directed by Des McAnuff; choreographed by Mindy Cooper; no awards or nominations.]

[5] Brooklyn

A cast of five wore garbage, and sang it, in this loud and bizarre musical, presented as a play-within-a-play by homeless musicians under a bridge. Somehow it all ended with a sing-off between a French convent girl and an evil Black diva at Madison Square Garden.

Opening date: October 21, 2004 [closed: 26 June 2005]

Performances: 284

From David Cote’s review: ”The latest example of urban blight is Brooklyn, by far the biggest eyesore, earsore and brainsore on the Great White Way. An infantile urban fable periodically pierced by American Idol-style bellowing, Brooklyn wallows in trash of every kind. What it deserves from any self-respecting inhabitant of the five boroughs is a loud Bronx cheer.” 

[Record: Plymouth/Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre; book, music, and lyrics by Mark Schoenfeld and Barri McPherson; directed by Jeff Calhoun; no choreographer listed; no awards or nominations.]

[6] Good Vibrations

More than 30 Beach Boys songs were crammed into this story about a geeky high-school graduate and her three friends on a cross-country sojourn to California for surfing and romance.

Opening date: February 2, 2005 [closed: 24 April 2005]

Performances: 94

From David Cote’s review: ”It’s the kind of embarrassing fiasco that only a committee of gutless and tasteless Broadway producers could foist on the public. The deformed hate child [of] Mamma Mia! and Movin’ Out, it aspires to the ditsy hit-parade nostalgia of the former and the aerobic dance appeal of the latter.” 

[Record: Eugene O’Neill Theatre; book by Richard Dresser; music and lyrics by Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys; directed and choreographed by John Carrafa; no awards or nominations.]

[7] Lennon

Another jukebox-musical misfire, this one with songs by visionary ex-Beatle John Lennon. A diverse nine-member ensemble trudged its way through Lennon’s hits in an abstract, high-concept staging.

Opening date: August 14, 2005 [closed: 24 September 2005]

Performances: 49

From David Cote’s review: ”A ’70s-nostalgia wallow and peacenik hagiography implicitly pegged to the war in Iraq [2003-11]. Advance hype on this show was misleadingly dire. It’s not the car crash that flop vultures have hoped for, but that’s only because its engine never starts.” 

[Record: Broadhurst Theatre; book by Don Scardino; music and lyrics by John Lennon; directed by Scardino; choreographed by Joseph Malone; no awards or nominations.]

[8] In My Life

Joseph Brooks was best known for the treacly pop ballad “You Light Up My Life” [ballad originally recorded by Kasey Cisyk for the soundtrack album to the 1977 film of the same title] when he wrote, directed and produced this gobsmacker about a young man with Tourette syndrome and a brain tumor. In the show’s takeaway number, a campy angel sang “There’s a little rumor / Someone’s got a tumor,” then danced with a skeleton.

Opening Date: October 20, 2005 [closed: 11 December 2005]

Performances: 61

From David Cote’s review: ”Delusions of grandeur clearly attended the clueless construction of this musical, in which people fall in love with undetectable chemistry, suffer without arousing pity and die with no other consequence than relief. Those who decry shows made by committee should be careful what they wish for: In My Life is the sound of one man flopping.” 

[Record: Music Box Theatre; book. music, and lyrics by Joseph Brooks; directed by Brooks; no choreographer listed; no awards or nomination.]

[9] Hot Feet

An African-American twist on Hans Christian Andersen’s short story “The Red Shoes” and Michael Powell’s 1948 movie, scored to pop hits by Earth, Wind & Fire. Maurice Hines choreographed and directed this flat-footed fable about a young dancer mixed up with a satanic impresario.

Opening date: April 30, 2006 [closed: 23 July 2006]

Performances: 97

From David Cote’s review: ”This overamped, overacted eyesore barely sustains interest beyond the morbid kind: What new terpsichorean travesty will they foist on us next? In seeking to force the Faustian moral into a modern-day African-American context, Hines displays either flagrant ignorance, cynicism—or both.” 

[Record: Hilton Theatre; book by Heru Ptah; music and lyrics by Maurice White; directed and choreographed by Maurice Hines; no awards or nominations.]

[10] Lestat

After the Dance of the Vampires and Dracula[, the Musical] fiascos, Broadway hardly needed another bloodsucker musical, but it got a third anyhow in this Anne Rice adaptation, with a score by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. This one put the nail in the coffin—for now, at least.

Opening date: April 25, 2006 [closed: 28 May 2006]

Performances: 39

From Adam Feldman’s review: ”Like any bogeyman in a B-grade fright flick, the vampire musical won’t stay dead. Just when it seemed safe to go to Broadway again, Lestat has swooped into the Palace. Is Elton John’s undead musical much better than its predecessors? The short answer is: no. The long answer is: no, no, no. Episodic and maudlin, the show is bound together by crimson kitsch.”

[Record: Palace Theatre; book by Linda Woolverton; music by Elton John; lyrics by Bernie Taupin; based on The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice; directed by Robert Jess Roth; no choreographer listed; two Tony nominations, no awards.]

[11] The Pirate Queen

The buccaneering hero of this leaky historical musical by Les Misérables creators Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg was a female raider who gives England’s Elizabeth I trouble on the high seas.

Opening date: April 5, 2007 [closed: 17 June 2007]

Performances: 85

From David Cote’s review: ”Even from the most crassly pandering point of view, The Pirate Queen is a total failure: not even good schlock. If only the creative team had the courage of its lack of conviction. It puts the aar back in aartless gaarbage.” 

[Record: Hilton Theatre; book by Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schönberg, and Richard Maltby, Jr.; music by Schönberg; lyrics by Boublil, Maltby, and Morgan Llywelyn; based on the 1986 historical novel Grania: She King of the Irish Seas; directed by Frank Galati; choreographed by Carol Leavy Joyce; no Tony awards or nominations.]

[12] Baby It’s You!

Although this jukebox musical was built around the songs of the Shirelles (with the glaring exception of their biggest hit, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”), the African-American singers took a back seat to the story of their producer, a Jewish New Jersey housewife played by Beth Leavel.

Opening date: April 27, 2011 [closed: 4 September 2011]

Performances: 148

From David Cote’s review: ”Baby It’s You! touches on a few worthy topics—payola, interracial romance, Brill Building song-factory practices—and manages to drain each of tension and subtlety. The big-voiced, warmly rueful Leavel moves heaven and earth to make us root for plucky Florence. Whole seconds pass in which you forget how dumb and shoddy the show is.” 

[Record: Broadhurst Theatre; book by Floyd Mutrux and Colin Elliott; directed by Mutrux; choreographed by Birgitte Mutrux; one Tony nomination, no awards.]

[13] The People in the Picture

Donna Murphy played a Jewish bubbe regaling her granddaughter with tales of her friends in the Warsaw Ghetto. Who doesn’t love a tear-jerking musical about the Holocaust? As it turns out, a lot of people don’t.

Opening date: April 11, 2011 [closed: 19 June 2011]

Performances: 60

From Adam Feldman’s review: ”The People in the Picture renders its story the way fat is rendered in an old Jewish home: over low heat, with traditional tools, in the service of making schmaltz. Iris Rainer Dart’s sincere, well-meaning musical caters to a taste for sentiment spread thick. But crying at this show is like crying at sliced onions.” 

[Record: Studio 54; book by Iris Rainer Dart; music by Mike Stoller and Artie Butler; lyrics by Dart; directed by Leonard Foglia; no choreographer listed; one Tony nomination, no award.]

[14] Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (original version)

Julie Taymor could not get the Bono-and-the-Edge-scored comic-book musical off the ground. Six months of previews, onstage injuries, desperate spin and a $75 million-dollar un-recouped budget made it the flop to end all flops.

Opening date: June 14, 2011 [closed: 4 January 2014]

Performances: 1066

From David Cote’s review of version 1.0: ”Spider-Man is a crummy, pandering kids’ musical pretending to be a new form of entertainment—a ‘circus rock drama,’ as Taymor claims with Barnum-level swagger. The production is a deeply confused, ugly, ultimately boring example of artistic hubris enabled by financial excess.” 

[Record: Foxwoods Theatre; book by Julie Taymor, Glen Berger, and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa; music and lyrics by Bono and The Edge (of U2); based on the Marvel Comics character Spider-Man, elements of the 2002 film Spider-Man, the 2004 film Spider-Man 2, and the Greek myth of Arachne; original director: Taymor (“creative consultant”/subsequent director: Philip Wiliam McKinley – see below); choreography by Daniel Ezralow; two Tony nominations, no awards.

[An explanation of why Cote writes about an “original version” and “version 1.0”: For those who weren’t around in 2010 and 2011, or weren’t paying attention to the Broadway Buzz at that time, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was arguably the most troubled production in Broadway history, possibly in all of theater history. 

[According to Wikipedia:

Several actors were injured performing stunts and the opening night was repeatedly delayed, causing some critics to review the “unfinished” production in protest [most on 7 February 2011]. Following negative reviews, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark suspended performances for a month to retool the show. Aguirre-Sacasa, a longtime Spider-Man comics writer, was brought in to revise the story and book. The director, Julie Taymor, . . . was replaced by the creative consultant Philip William McKinley. By the time Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark officially opened on June 14, 2011, it had set the record for the longest preview period in Broadway history [28 November 2010-14 June 2011], with 182 [preview] performances.

[(I have a post on ROT on my take on the press controversy regarding the reviews of Spider-Man: “Reviewing the Situation: Spider-Man & the Press,” 20 March 2011.)

[During the retooling of the production, when Aquirre-Sacasa came in to revise the script, Taymor left the show but retained her program credits.  McKinley was brought in to replace Taymor as de facto director, but was given the title “creative consultant” in press releases and the opening-night Playbill.

[After Spider-Man finally started previews on 28 November 2010, Cote wrote two reviews.  The second one came out on the TONY website (Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark | Theater in New York (timeout.com)) on 15 June 2011, the day after the official press opening (as traditional reviews are usually published).

[Cote’s first notice was published on 11 February 2011, in the middle of the extended preview period.  This is the review he’s excerpted above (and it’s included online with the second one), slugged “original version” and “version 1.0” to distinguish this review from his final, more positive (marginally) notice of the re-jiggered production that finally opened on 14 June.

[Note that Spider-Man ran for 1066 regular performances but was still “a massive financial loss.”  The production had cost $75 million, the most expensive Broadway show ever.]

[15] Wonderland

Ever eager to put his stamp on public-domain material, Dracula tunesmith Frank Wildhorn dragged Lewis Carroll’s beloved Alice down a dingy rabbit hole in this joylessly energetic blunder.

Opening date: April 17, 2011 [closed: May 2011]

Performances: 33

From Adam Feldman’s review: ”’Tis Wildhorn, and the hapless cast / Does direly gambol on the stage. / All flimsy is the plot half-assed, / Not right for any age. / Beware of Wonderland, I warn! / The jokes that cloy, the scenes that flop! / Beware the humdrum words and scorn / The spurious, bland rock-pop!” 

[Record: Marquis Theatre; book by Gregory Boyd and Jack Murphy; music by Frank Wildhorn; lyrics by Murphy; contemporary version of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” books; directed by Boyd; choreographed by Margueritte Derricks, no awards or nominations.]

[16] On a Clear Day You Can See Forever

The 1965 version of this musical was a famous mess about extrasensory perception, past lives and a kooky gal with a magical green thumb. The 2011 revisal, rewritten extensively enough to be considered a new show with an old score, made it even murkier.

Opening date: December 11, 2011 [closed: 29 January 2012]

Performances: 57

From David Cote’s review: “It was broke, but they sure ain’t fixed it. The famously flawed 1965 Burton Lane–Alan Jay Lerner romantic comedy has been reincarnated into a clunky bore that switches time periods and gender, inserts a gay subplot and turns its putative hero into a creepy, manipulative stalker.”

[Record: St. James Theatre; reconceived by Michael Mayer; new book (2011) by Peter Parnell; music (1965) by Alan Jay Lerner; lyrics (1965) by Burton Lane; based on original book (1965) by Lerner; directed by Mayer; choreographed by JoAnn M. Hunter; one Tony nomination, no award.]

[17] Scandalous

Morning talk-show host Kathie Lee Gifford penned the book, lyrics and some music for this manic, grating paean to the life and work of controversial Hollywood spiritual leader Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944).

Opening date: November 15, 2012 [closed: 9 December 2012]

Performances: 29

From David Cote’s review: ”It’s a CliffsNotes take on the 20th-century evangelist, a trinity of camp, kitsch and middlebrow morality that, through uncritical worship, makes its hero the least interesting person onstage—despite throat-shredding vocal pyrotechnics. I have seen worse shows, but few as wild-eyed and zealously wrongheaded.” 

[Record: Neil Simon Theatre; book and lyrics by Kathie Lee Gifford; music by David Pomeranz and David Friedman; directed by David Armstrong; choreographed by Lorin Latarro; one Tony nomination, no award.]

[18] Soul Doctor

Shlomo Carlebach was a charismatic Hasid who used folky, catchy tunes to spread a hippie-friendly message of spirituality in the 1960s and beyond. This short-lived tuner didn’t win him any converts.

Opening date: August 15, 2013 [closed: 13 October 2013]

Performances: 66

From Adam Feldman’s review: ”Gevalt! The best that can be said about this strange Broadway musical, based on the life and music of ‘singing rabbi’ Shlomo Carlebach, is that it isn’t as bad as it sounds. But the show digs shallowly into its central character, and often rings false. Reverent to a fault, Soul Doctor bleaches a story that cries out for tie-dye.”

[Record: Circle in the Square Theatre; book by Daniel S. Wise; music by Shlomo Carlebach; lyrics by David Schechter; directed by Wise; choreographed by Benoit-Swan Pouffer; no awards or nominations.]

[19] Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak’s novel of life before and after the 1917 Russian Revolution was the fodder for this lumbering dud. An idealistic physician survives World War I, sadistic Soviets and multiple hardships, all while pursuing the woman he loves.

Opening date: April 21, 2015 [closed: 10 May 2015]

Performances: 23

From David Cote’s review: ”No amount of Lucy Simon’s syrupy, portentous music—swamping Michael Korie and Amy Powers’s workmanlike lyrics—can make us care for the synthetic, drably colored pageant. Des McAnuff’s staging looks expensive but ugly, with cheesy video close‑ups of actors, giant Soviet propaganda posters, eruptions of fire and the occasional explosion or gunshot to wake us up. To Siberia with it.” 

[Record: Broadway Theatre; book by Michael Weller; music by Lucy Simon; lyrics by Michael Korie and Amy Powers; based on the 1957 novel by Boris Pasternak; directed by des McAnuff; choreographed by Kelly Devine; no nominations or awards.]

[20] Amazing Grace

First-time composer-lyricist and book writer Christopher Smith took inspiration from the life and religious conversion of John Newton, a British slave trader who later in life wrote lyrics for the hymn “Amazing Grace.”

Opening date: July 16, 2015 [closed: 25 October 2015]

Performances: 116

From David Cote’s review: ”A clunky period piece broken up by bombastic, generic anthems. Personally, I expect poetic license in the theater, but it should serve a strong artistic or political vision. Amazing Grace has neither. It comes out strongly against slavery; well done. But it mainly proves that folks are willing to burn piles of money trying to resurrect the 1980s-style megamusical.”

[Record: Nederlander Theatre; book by Christopher Smith and Arthur Giron; music and lyrics by Smith; directed by Gabriel Barre; choreographed by Christopher Gattelli; no nominations or awards.]

[21] Home for the Holidays

This tacky pop-up Broadway concert, the yuletide equivalent of a Halloween costume store, featured a comically motley cast: three winners of televised vocal contests, a former star of The Bachelorette, a married a cappella duo and veteran character actor Danny Aiello.

Opening date: November 21, 2017 [closed: 30 December 2017]

Performances: 47

From Adam Feldman’s review: ”Home for the Holidays is unlikely to remind you much of home, unless you were raised in a department-store elevator.”

[Record: August Wilson Theatre; no book; songs are traditional; “creative director”: Jonathan Tessero, no awards or nomonations.]

[22] Gettin’ the Band Back Together

A 40-year-old stockbroker in New Jersey must reassemble his high-school rock combo to save his mother from eviction in this schlocky and formulaic comedy by Ken Davenport and Mark Allen.

Opening date: August 13, 2018 [closed: 16 September 2018]

Performances: 40

From Adam Feldman’s review: ”Gettin’ the Band Back Together aspires to a knowing attitude toward its own silliness, but it’s not sharp enough to pull off the gambit; you can’t tell if it’s winking or just has something weird in its eye. Whatever quotation marks this musical might want to put around ‘stupid’ have melted away, leaving only desperate salesmanship.”

[Record: Belasco Theatre; book by Ken Davenport and The Grundleshotz (a collective of performers and writers); music and lyrics by Mark Allen; directed by John Rando; choreographed by Chris Bailey; no awards or nominations.]

[23] Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

An impoverished child gets the chance to take candy from a stranger in this shapeless musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s story.

Opening date: October 5, 2018 [closed: 14 January 2018]

Performances: 305

From David Cote’s review: ”This dull, clunky adaptation of the book and movie with none of the wit of the former nor the dreamy wonder of the latter. Adults are bound to conclude that Charlie is like what happens with an Everlasting Gobstopper: lots of sucking.”

[Record: Lunt-Fontanne Theatre; book by David Craig; music by Marc Shaiman; lyrics by Shaiman and Scott Wittman; based on the 1964 novel by Roald Dahl with songs by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley from the 1971 film Willy Wonka &  the Chocolate Factory; directed by Jack O’Brien; choreographed by Joshua Bergasse; no Tony nominations or awards.]

[24] King Kong

Broadway went apeshit in a musical a[d]aptation of the ape-meets-girl classic that featured an extremely impressive 20-foot, 2,000-pound animatronic puppet. But this very special effect was caged in a vehicle that was mostly pretty awful.

Opening date: November 8, 2018 [closed: 18 August 2019]

Performances: 322

From Adam Feldman’s review: ”The truly frustrating thing about King Kong is the waste of it all. Why did this story, whose central figure necessarily cannot sing, need to be a musical at all, much less one that suggests a late-run Simpsons parody?”

[Record: Broadway Theatre; book by Jack Thorne; music by Marius de Vries with songs by Eddie Perfect; based on the classic 1933 film; directed and choreographed by Drew McOnie; Special Tony Award for Puppet Design, plus four more nominations.]

[25] Diana[, T]he Musical

Book writer Joe DiPietro and composer David Bryan offered a campy, dishy pop-rock clip job of tabloid moments from the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, who died in a car accident in 1997.

Opening date: November 17, 2021 [closed: 19 December 2021]

Performances: 34

From Adam Feldman’s review: “The gobsmacking unseriousness that characterizes Diana’s approach to the late princess is also what makes it bearable to watch in a way that a more earnest version would probably never have been. For collectors of flop shows, Diana is a keeper: It goes for broke, and achieves it.”   

[Record: Longacre Theatre; book by Joe DiPietro; music by David Bryan; lyrics by Bryan and DiPietro; directed by Christopher Ashley; choreographed by Kelly Devine; one Tony nomination, no awards.

[The Broadway production of Diana, The Musical was recorded in the summer of 2020. This video, directed by Ashley, was released on Netflix on 1 October 2021. The recording received nine nominations at the 42nd Golden Raspberry Awards, winning for Worst Picture, Worst Director, and Worst Screenplay, among other categories.]

"The Courage to Produce: A Conversation on High School Censorship"

by Allison Considine, Jessica Lit, Jordan Stovall, and Nadine Smith 

[On 30 July 2023, I posted “Censorship on School Stages,” my take on a trend that had been developing across the United States for over a year at that time.  The Rick On Theater post was inspired by newspaper reports such as the Washington Post’s “The culture war’s latest casualty: The high school musical” by Hannah Natanson (2 May 2023) and “On School Stages, Politics Plays a Leading Role” by Michael Paulson in the New York Times (4 July 2023). 

[“Censorship on School Stages” (Rick On Theater: Censorship on School Stages) was my first post focusing specifically on school censorship of theater, but I’d blogged on censorship, suppression, and other forms of repression of the freedom of expression in numerous other articles, including “Degrading the Arts” (13 August 2009), ”The First Amendment & The Arts” (8 May 2010), “Disappearing Theater” (19 July 2010), “‘The Arts Are Under Attack (Again!)’” by Paul Molloy (22 May 2011), “Culture War” (6 February 2014), and “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux” (13 February 2015), among others.

[Over the years since I started ROT, which just passed its 15th anniversary last 16 March, I’ve established an ad hoc series on the accommodation of theater and the arts in our society.  Sometimes I addressed this topic directly, and sometimes I addressed a closely related subject, such as arts funding or arts education.

[At this juncture, let me quote myself (in slightly reformatted form) from “The First Amendment & The Arts,” just to make one thing clear before you read this article on my blog:

I ought to confess here that I’m pretty much a First Amendment absolutist.  One of my favorite theater lines is from Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards’s musical 1776.  Stephen Hopkins, the iconoclastic and cantankerous delegate from Rhode Island, declares, when asked to vote for or against an open debate on independence, declares: “Well, I’ll tell y’—in all my years I never heard, seen, nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn’t be talked about.  Hell yes, I’m for debatin’ anything . . . !”

That fairly well sums up my feelings: we should be allowed to talk about anything in this society, even stuff most other people don’t want to hear.  The only proper response to speech we don’t like is more speech.  You don’t cut people off when you don’t like what they’re saying, you debate them.

[“‘The Courage to Produce,’” which is a conversation between Nadine Smith and Jessica Lit, ran in the Winter 2024 issue of American Theatre (40.2), and was also posted at AMERICAN THEATRE | The Courage to Produce: A Conversation on High School Censorship on 1 April 2024.  (American Theatre, now a quarterly magazine, is published by the Theatre Communications Group, an organization for non-profit theater companies in the U.S.)

[Nadine Smith, a former journalist, is the Executive Director of Equality Florida, the state’s largest organization dedicated to ending discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.  In 2022, she was named to the Time 100, Time magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world

[An award-winning journalist turned organizer, Smith was one of four national co-chairs of the 1993 March on Washington.  She was part of the historic meeting with then-President Bill Clinton (42nd President of the United States: 1993-2001) on 16 April 1993, the first Oval Office meeting between a sitting president and LGBTQ community leaders.  She served on the founding board of the International Gay and Lesbian Youth Organization.

[Smith, who lives in St. Petersburg (which she calls “St. Pete”) with her wife Andrea and son Logan, is a Florida Chamber Foundation Trustee and served on President Barack Obama’s (44th President of the United States: 2009-17) National Finance Committee.  She’s been named one of her state’s “Most Powerful and Influential Women” by the Florida Diversity Council and has received the League of Women Voters’ Woman of Distinction Award.  In 2018, she was named one of the 100 Most Influential Floridians by Influence Magazine, a magazine of Florida politics.  She currently serves as chair of the Florida Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

[Equality Florida is a political advocacy group that promotes civil rights and protections for LGBTQ residents of Florida.  Equality Florida was formed in 1997 by Smith and Stratton Pollitzer, an expert in LGBTQ non-profit development, just before Governor Jeb Bush took office (1999-2007) and Florida's state government became considerably more conservative.  

[A former actor, Jessica Lit is the Director of Business Affairs of the Dramatists Guild.  She’s an intellectual property and entertainment attorney with a focus on empowering artists of diverse backgrounds and disciplines to take control of their careers by educating them about their legal rights.  She recently decided to channel that interest into launching a solo practice, The Lit Esquire PLLC, aimed at doing just that. 

[Lit has a strong background in the arts, having earned her B.A. in theater performance from New York City’s Fordham University in 2011 before she went on to start a theater company with fellow classmates that focused on producing works exclusively written by women.  

[After stepping away from performing, Jessica earned her real estate license in New York and worked for three years as a full-time agent under several high-profile brokerages in New York City, where she specialized in working with performing artists to help find their first apartments in the city.

[While she no longer performs as a career, Lit has stayed involved in the arts in any way she can, including serving as a co-producer on a weekly magic show on New York City’s Upper West Side from 2014 to 2015 and appearing in an episode of The Perfect Murder (2017-18) on Investigation Discovery, a cable channel dedicated to true crime documentaries.

[Lit earned her Juris Doctor (J.D. – Doctor of Law) degree in 2019  from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University in New York City with a concentration in intellectual property.  While at Cardozo, she facilitated student-led discussions sponsored by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, was an active member of the Moot Court Honor Society, and served as Problem Editor for the 2019 BMI Entertainment and Communications Law Moot Court Competition.  Jessica was admitted to the New York State Bar in 2020 and recently relocated to her hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina.]

A dialogue on how students, teachers, and parents can push back against a wave of conservative legislation and intimidation that threatens to chill theatrical expression.

The kooky, macabre musical The Addams Family was named the most-produced tuner on U.S. high school stages for the 2022-23 school year. But there will be at least one less mysterious and spooky production for next year’s tally since a Pennsylvania school board voted to cancel a 2024 production, citing the show’s “dark themes.” [This instance was an example in “Censorship on School Stages.”]

Since 1938, the Educational Theatre Association (EdTA) has polled theatre educators to identify the most-produced musicals and plays, but its latest survey also measured the impact of a troubling resurgence of censorship. A whopping 67 percent of educators told EdTA they are weighing potential controversies when they make show selections—and with good reason. 

In recent years, a so-called “parents’ rights” movement has staked a claim in controlling the K-12 curriculum, leading to a surge of banned books and restrictions on performances. Florida’s House Bill 1069, which restricts media with sexual content, has even put Shakespeare’s oeuvre under scrutiny. Many lessons now only excerpt the Bard’s plays rather than teach them in full. As part of a counter-movement, the New York Public Library recently launched the Books for All initiative, making censored playscripts and musical libretti available online to teenagers nationwide.

[Considine is slightly misleading here. NYPL is not supplying censored books in the sense that the texts to which the library is providing access are edited or abridged. NYPL is providing online access to the original texts of books, plays, and libretti that have been banned elsewhere.]

The polarized political climate has only added to the backstage drama at high school theatre auditoriums, the latest arena for the culture wars. Parents and school board members are challenging show choices, requesting script changes, and outright canceling student productions with social or political themes, especially LGBTQ+ content. Last year, a Florida school gained traction on social media after canceling a production of Indecent, which centers on a queer Jewish romance. [This case of censorship is also in my post.] And last fall an Illinois school board canceled a production of The Prom, a musical about a group of Broadway actors who travel to a conservative town to help a lesbian student banned from bringing her girlfriend to the prom—though in response to uproar over the decision, the show will in fact go on this spring.

In Indiana, students took matters into their own hands, independently staging the gender-bending play Marian, or the True Tale of Robin Hood after a school canceled the production for its LGBTQ+ themes. An Ohio school requested 23 revisions before staging The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, removing explicit language and the mention of gay characters. A Texas school board canceled a school field trip in response to a social media post accusing a production of James and the Giant Peach that featured actors playing both male and female roles as being a form of “drag.”

This disheartening trend of censoring playscripts and productions coincides with an uptick in conservative legislation aiming to limit queer representation in the classroom. The ACLU is currently tracking a staggering 233 schools and education bills that directly target LGBTQ+ rights and expression.

This threat of censorship not only robs theatre kids of time in the limelight; it also deprives young students in the audience of the opportunity to witness different human experiences. It targets educators and their beliefs and impacts how—and what—they teach. These attacks also affect dramatists and composers, whose works are being amended and pulled from libraries and stages.

Censorship was a major theme of the 2023 EdTA conference in St. Pete Beach, Fla., where middle and high school theatre educators gathered last September. The programming included “The Courage to Produce,” two sessions curated by Jordan Stovall, the director of Outreach and Institutional Partnerships at the Dramatists Guild of America (DG), about navigating controversies and best practices for educators. The sessions were inspired by the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund’s “Dramatic Changes: A Toolkit for Producing Stage Works on College Campuses in Turbulent Times.” The following excerpt from a conversation between Jessica Lit, the DG’s director of business affairs, and Nadine Smith, co-founder and executive director of Equality Florida, has been edited for length and clarity.

                                                       Illustration for American Theatre by Colin Tom

JESSICA LIT: Welcome to “The Courage to Produce.” If you’re not familiar with the DG, we are a national trade association for playwrights, librettists, lyricists, and composers, and our mission is to aid dramatists in protecting the artistic and economic integrity of our work. Our sister organization, the DLDF, was created in 2011 to advocate and educate and provide resources in defense of the First Amendment. Since its inception, it’s been an active voice in supporting institutions which have been the targets of attacks on free speech, including the recent cancellation of Indecent at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Jacksonville, Fla. The DLDF also recently partnered with the EdTA to establish standards for protecting free expression when theatrical works are taught in educational institutions.

Today I am joined by the co-founder and executive director of Equality Florida, Nadine Smith. Equality Florida is Florida’s statewide civil rights organization dedicated to securing full equality for Florida’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community. Would you like to talk a little bit about Equality Florida and introduce yourself?

NADINE SMITH: Good morning. I live in St. Pete, and we founded Equality Florida when we realized that we were doing lots of local work, but this place called Tallahassee [the capital of the state of Florida], out in the middle of nowhere, was where big decisions were being made that impacted our lives. Actually, we’ve been around for 27 years—formally in January of ’97, but we existed before then.

For decades, we held at bay all of the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Florida. But 20 years of increasingly extreme Republican control of every level of government has sort of metastasized with [Donald] Trump [45th President of the United States: 2017-21] and [Ron] DeSantis [Governor of Florida since 2019]. And so we saw in these last two years what began first and foremost as an attack on the transgender community, trans kids in particular, and we also saw a whitewashing of history—no more racist dog whistles; it is a foghorn. We’ve seen bodily autonomy attacked in every way, from abortion bans to banning access to medical care for the trans community, and a stripping away of rights.

One of the ways that’s shown up most visibly has been the banning of books and theatre. I think it’s important for people to understand that this isn’t some movement that has grown organically from concerns raised by parents. The Florida legislature wrote the law in such a way that any resident of the county, they don’t even have to be a parent, can get any book pulled off the shelf in Florida. It’s a de facto ban even when it’s not a technical ban—i.e., schools fear they are vulnerable to lawsuits if they don’t remove books preemptively.

We were talking earlier about, how often do you think of eras in American history, where we see these book bans, a clamping down on art? And what else usually arrives with that? We have to raise the alarm at how perilous this moment is, at how normalized things that should be not just abnormal but hideous to us have become. You know, when they banned The Life of Rosa Parks, we were like, “This is outrageous.” And now it’s like, yeah, there were just another 10,000 titles pulled off shelves.

[The Life of Rosa Parks by Kathleen Connors (Gareth Stevens Classroom, 2013) was pulled from second grade classrooms in the Duval County public school district in Florida in 2022.]

I’m a Shakespearean actor, paid for it as well. In schools in Florida, they will not do Shakespeare because of how many gender-reversed roles there are in Shakespeare plays. So they will do excerpts.

JESSICA: Thank you, Nadine. I’m going to introduce myself. I’m the director of business affairs for the DG, and I do a lot of advocacy work. I also help in creating resources for educators, and for our members, to help advocate for their rights in the industry.

We’re all here because we love theatre and its ability to bring people together to tell stories that may not have been told, to be a vehicle for change. We understand that censorship and cancellations aren’t new. They’ve been around for as long as stage plays have been around. But as Nadine has just talked about, there are new trends, and it’s not just angry voices. It’s legislation coming down from our local, our state, our federal governments that we need to start thinking about as we enter this new era.

Today there is proposed, pending, and passed legislation in many states. Nadine, you talked a little bit about the book banning that’s happening in Florida, but is there other legislation that theatre educators should be aware of as they move through this new time?

NADINE: Yeah, bans on drag queens or drag performances. The insinuation is that any time somebody is performing in drag, it is inappropriate for children to be present. So if you bring your child to a play like Twelfth Night, have you brought them to a drag show? Have you exposed them to a dangerous ideology that will play “tug of war” with their gender identity?

In Florida there was a program at a theatre in Orlando, similar to a drag Christmas. They ended up putting on tickets for the first time that no one under 18 was allowed. The governor insisted that law enforcement be present. They left the theatre and said nothing untoward occurred, nothing inappropriate. The governor went after their beverage license anyway, claiming that the language on the ticket was printed too small to be of value, and that even though there was nothing sexually inappropriate, the fact that there were people performing opposite of their gender was sufficient to pull their license. They only just settled with three businesses; one of them was Hamburger Mary’s [a restaurant that presents a “family-friendly drag show”]. People are touting it as a win, but the chilling effect is very real.

The chilling effect is intentionally vague so that it casts a big shadow. The impulse is to go, “I don’t want any problems. I will do the least dangerous thing. I will do the thing that is so far from the line that I can’t get caught up even in their overzealous prosecution.” And slowly, the impact of that, not the actual letter of the law, begins to create the worst kind of censorship, which is self-censorship, where we don’t even permit ourselves to think things or pursue things because of a fear of what that vagueness might ensnare.

In the same way they say sunlight is the best disinfectant, ensure that anything which is vague is made concrete. Say to them: “Would you put in writing why this play is impermissible by law?” Six months from now, that could be the most important document in a lawsuit. Make them be explicit about why. And if you’re in a place where these restrictions aren’t being put and you’re not constrained by them, I would say, make sure that you’re building this into all of your performances.

It’s a time for courage. You might be that person in your school district, in your institution, along the chain who’s going to disrupt people sinking to the path of these resistances.

JESSICA: I think what you highlighted specifically is that schools are where kids are being introduced to ideas and cultures for the first time, and we shouldn’t shy away from introducing them to these cultures and different opinions and different viewpoints and different lifestyles because we’re afraid that they can’t handle it. If anyone can handle it, it’s young minds who haven’t been exposed to the discrimination, the hate, and all those things yet. This is actually a great segue to our next question for you.

[Jessica Lit addresses the lessons students can learn from being exposed to a variety of plays, a subject I introduce in “Censorship on School Stages,” but I also write about the unwelcome lessons the efforts to suppress and censor what students can see or read in secondary school can teach.]

Can you speak about the importance of addressing topics of queer identity, relationships, self-actualization in the classroom? We know that high school and middle school theatre is an entry point for many kids who identify with the LGBTQ+ community. 

NADINE: You know, I am 58. I know, I look good. [Laughter.] I remember being young, being fearful, and being homophobic to try to put people off the trail, especially playing basketball and softball. I had to throw out a lot of diversionary tactics, though not very effectively. So I understand how internalized homophobia shows up as bigotry in the world. And all of that is by way of saying that, I felt an extraordinary amount of isolation. And there are a lot of young people who do not survive that level of isolation. The suicide rate among LGBTQ+ young people is often talked about, but there’s also the homeless rate, the dropout rate, the self-medicating rate, when you have no place you can turn and the only places that you spend the majority of your time, which are school and home, are hostile environments—the world gets very small very fast.

Representation and visibility are literally life-saving. I want to ring the alarm bell so loudly. The dangerous normalization of these hideous laws has created a world in which young people are watching their favorite teachers who created safety for them leave the profession. They’re seeing empty spaces on bookshelves. All of the books are being taken out of classrooms because they haven’t gone through the approval process. Even donating books that reflect different experiences is no longer permitted.

For people who live in other states, start organizing. In Illinois, they passed a ban on book bans. It’s important that there be a countervailing message, and in places where you’re not having to fend off these attacks, go on the offensive and make a big deal. Vilify what’s happening in Florida and other states. We have to take it that seriously and not just wait until the wolf is at the door.

JESSICA: Thank you. I’m actually going to take a question out to those in the room. How many of you have faced challenges when you’re teaching or presenting works? Or had students come to you asking questions about the current legislative landscape that we’re living in? 

A show of hands indicates there are educators present that have experienced this. One educator in a Catholic school speaks on the particular challenges they faced with administration when attempting to cast a transgender child in a production, and navigating bringing works by different artists into the classroom. 

NADINE: The only purpose of this is to create moral panic. It’s a playbook, and it plays out again and again. Because we haven’t gone through the conciliation process required of our history, we have all of these unexamined and unresolved ways of dealing with difference in America that show up episodically as this massive backlash.

There’s a professor at Boston University named Stephen Prothero and he’s written several books. One of them is about this phenomenon. He says the backlash is a lagging indicator of how much progress we’ve made. The only reason they’re going after us is because young LGBTQ+ people are visible, do feel like they have a place in the world, are showing up as their full selves in school, are finding a support network among their teachers. And so, basically, he says, by the time the backlash arrives, the cultural tipping point has already come.

I think of it as a slingshot, where they are grabbing that slingshot and they’re walking us backwards. But what they don’t realize is they’re creating this dynamic tension that will leave their grip. We won’t just go back to where we were when they attacked. We’re going to propel forward into a world that looks much more like one that includes all of us.

Another educator speaks about the experience of dealing with community-wide controversy and issues with their administration over a production of To Kill a Mockingbird.

NADINE: I think we have to come out of the closet and tell these stories, share much more of how these things are happening. Every time we make them shut things down or we make them explain, we also are kind of showing this universe of people how to fight back.

One university in Florida was told they had to take down the university’s equity and inclusion policy. And what they did was they said, “Here’s our former diversity, equity, and inclusion policy. We have been ordered by the state to remove it. So we want you to know that this is no longer our diversity, equity, and inclusion policy.” Of course, then everybody read their diversity, equity, and inclusion policy. 

I’m saying we’ve got to be creative. I love that you keep taking it back to the students and saying, How do we tell this lesson that teaches them how to navigate? Coming up with these ideas and strategies that don’t put students in the position of, “Hey, I’m going to defend you, I’m going to risk it all to defend you,” which is one instinct, but rather, “You’re not powerless in the face of this. They can’t stop your voice. They can’t stop your TikTok. They can’t stop your message online. Here’s the phone call to PEN America, you may go to the Dramatist Legal Defense Fund, or here are the articles that have been written that can contextualize this. Here’s the background on these organizations that are systematically going after art.” By showing them these things, I think they’re going to emerge into society as people who don’t quietly capitulate. They want you to be fearful.

NADINE: Even though young people are experiencing these really ugly, fascistic impulses that are curtailing their rights, how you guide them in those moments may produce more of what we need in this world.

Another educator speaks on their experiences with censorship, community backlash, and having books and plays removed from their school’s library system after attempting to add them to the curriculum. 

NADINE: We started a group called Parenting with Pride precisely because [of issues like these]. One of the things I encourage is to be proactive and work with the PTA, work with the parents’ groups, work with the parents of the students in whatever you’re creating. And say, “Listen, I don’t know if you’re even watching these timelines, but this atmosphere has developed where one parent will complain on opening night, try and shut down all of the hard work of your kid, and we really need to be in this together.” Which is a thing you probably never would have had to do or think about, but in this atmosphere, we have to go on the offense and we have to engage parents so that it’s not a mom consciously defending the virtues of children from sinister forces.

JESSICA: I want to speak a little bit about the First Amendment. It is different in high schools and middle schools than it is on college campuses, because your students are minors. But the Supreme Court has said that students and teachers do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate. That is from Tinker v. Des Moines [I describe this case briefly in my 2023 post]. It’s a well-established freedom in our country.

I want to encourage all of you to use your voices to speak up, because while there is limited academic freedom, school boards and school administrations have a wider discretion in determining what kinds of materials can be taught. Discretion does not mean that they can censor something because they’re hostile to the ideas that are presented. There has to be a legitimate educational purpose for why they are removing or moving something.

I’ll take the example of evolution. They may say, you know what, maybe fifth graders aren’t prepared to understand this concept so we’re going to move it to the eighth grade curriculum. That’s okay, but to say we’re not going to teach evolution because we don’t believe in evolution, we don’t understand evolution—that’s unacceptable.

Also, speaking about personal freedom as it relates to you as teachers: Nadine talked about organizing in your community, using your voice outside of schools. They can only really go after you if what you are doing outside of school is substantially and materially disrupting what’s happening in schools. So if you are going on your social media, you are organizing in your communities and creating protests outside of the school grounds or encouraging your students to do the same, you have that right under the First Amendment. I really want to make sure that you’re aware of that. Even though you are in a different situation with schools, it doesn’t mean that you’re now completely eradicated of your First Amendment rights. It’s something to really think about as you move forward.

And creating allies, not just with your parents and the kids, but within your community. One of the things that DLDF has done is rally people to attend school board meetings. Not just parents, but members of the community or people who care. Recently there was a cancellation of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee in Ohio. We put out a statement, and many people attended a virtual school board meeting. The show went back on. It wasn’t parents that were even local to Ohio. It was people who care about theatre, people who care about seeing different points of views.

When these things happen, don’t think that you are isolated. Don’t think you’re alone. Think about the educators who are sitting here today. Think about the work that Equality Florida is doing. Come talk to us at the DG. We will do everything we can to help. We put out many statements, but we also have tried to help students find different venues to put a show on. There are resources available for you. Take advantage of them.

It’s a scary time, but the louder we can be, the better.  

To find out more about the Dramatists Guild, including the rights theatre writers have against censorship and cancellation of their work, visit www.dramatistsguild.com.

To find out more about the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund [DLDF], find out how to support this work, or to reach out regarding additional resources including “Dramatic Changes: A Toolkit for Producing Stage Works on College Campuses in Turbulent Times,” visit www.thedldf.org.

To learn more about Equality Florida, find out how to support this work, or to reach out regarding additional resources, visit http://equalityflorida.org/.

[Jordan Stovall/Wanda Whatever (they/them) is a playwright, arts administrator, queer events producer, and drag artist based in London.  They presently serve as the Director of Outreach & Institutional Partnerships for the Dramatists Guild, where they have worked since January 2016.

[Stovall’s plays have been shortlisted and selected as Finalists for the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Festival and Relentless Award, among others.  They have studied playwriting and have received artistic mentoring from the likes of Tina Howe, Tanika Gupta, Ola Animashawun, Deborah Zoe Laufer, Michele Lowe, Stefanie Zadravec, Gary Garrison, and more.  

[Stun premièred at The Cockpit Theatre in London after several developmental public showcases in the U.S. and U.K.; corpus premièred at the Midtown International Theatre Festival in New York following its showing at the Manhattan Reading Competition; Aviary premièred at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama after a showing as part of LGBTQ+ Tiny Shows at Omnibus Theatre.  They are a Resident of the Hamilton Project IX at the Barn Arts Collective.

[As a drag artist, Stovall is the founder and executive producer of the Time Out London Award-Nominated Boulangerie: A Queer Variety Show, and FUSSY, a bi-monthly ongoing party and series of queer community gatherings/arts-focused events at Dalston Superstore (formerly in residence at The Yard Theater, Hackney Wick).  

[They can be seen on upcoming miniseries Pistol on FX directed by Danny Boyle and Meet the Richardsons (BBC Studios).  They have performed in Bushwig NYC and Bushwig Berlin festivals, Sink the Pink, were a finalist in Season 1 and winner of the Christmas edition of drag competition The Gold Rush at The Glory.  They regularly perform in multiple venues across London (Dalston Superstore, Royal Vauxhall Tavern, The White Swan, etc.), as well as New York venues such as The Rosemont, Hardware, Club Cumming, Metropolitan, The Duplex, The West End, and more.

[They are Program Manager for the New Visions Fellowship, founding Co-Administrator for End of Play, National Playwriting Month, and founding Executive Administrator of the Dramatists Guild Institute.

[Stovall has an MFA in Writing in the Stage and Broadcast Media from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London (2019) and a BA in Theatre/Performing Arts from Florida’s University of Tampa (2011).

[Allison Considine, who wrote the introduction to this dialogue transcript, is the senior editor of American Theatre.  She studied literature and cultural studies and theater arts at New York City’s Pace University.  She is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor whose writing has appeared in American Theatre magazine, Backstage, Broadway Style Guide, and TDF Stages.  She contributed to the book American Theatre Wing, An Oral History: 100 Years, 100 Voices, 100 Million Miracles (American Theatre Wing, 2018), a 100-year history on the celebrated organization behind the Tony Awards.

[After college, Considine took a sidestep from acting and turned her attention to arts journalism, which allows her to explore the creative process behind the stage magic.  She enjoys connecting with emerging theater professionals educators about theater training—and, of course, seeing it all come together on stage.]