One much praise The revival of “For Black Girls Who Was Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Comes,” Ntozake Shange’s classic choreography, will wrap up later this month after struggling to find an audience during the show. a tumultuous Broadway season.
The show’s producers said Tuesday that the final show will be on May 22, just a month after opening and three months earlier than planned.
The closures reflect the challenges of this unusual Broadway season – the first since the pandemic shutdown – as travel continues to decline, coronavirus cases are an ongoing complication and a large number of performances open at the same time, making it difficult for any of them. to get out.
“For Girls of Color” has garnered strong reviews – in the New York Times, critic Laura Collins-Hughes said, “thrilling and exciting”- but it struggled from the start; last week, it was the best week, it grossed 250,000 dollars. The show’s audience, at the Booth Theatre, was only 51 percent full, and the average ticket price was $79.
Nelle Nugent, one of the main producers of the play, said: “Our numbers are far below those rave reviews. “There’s a lot of picks this season, which is exciting, but there’s a lot of inventory and shows with big stars that are doing better. I think there’s also a confusion in the public’s mind about safety.”
“For Girls of Color,” a series of monologues about the experiences of Black women who begin to dance and sing, first to Broadway in 1976, and was wildly successful, running for 22 months. It has been adapted for film and television, and influenced many theater producers.
In 2019, next year Shange’s deathan Off Broadway revival was held at the Public Theatre, directed by Leah C. Gardiner and choreographed by Leah C. Gardiner Camille A. Brown. The success of that project led to the revival of Broadway, directed and choreographed by Brown.
This production, like many others, has been challenged by the coronavirus pandemic – three of the actors have been absent in recent days. And the pandemic has done some damage in other ways, too. “It affected us a lot, including the nearly two-year delay to going public, so our momentum dissipated,” Nugent said.
In a joint interview, Nugent and Ron Simons, also a lead producer, attributed the closure to a number of factors, including not just the large number of shows opening on Broadway this spring and lingering effects of the pandemic, but also delay in announcing Tony nominationsthe presence of scaffolding around their theater, and misunderstandings about their programming.
“There was a mitigating effect on us because of the title – when you read ‘suicide,’ people think it’s going to be a bleak and uninteresting play,” says Simons. “But it’s not just a play dealing with dark themes. The show ended on a high note of celebration. “
Nugent and Simons say they hope that, by announcing a closing date, audiences will flock to the show and say they’re open to an extension if there’s sudden interest. They said that without that, it would still be necessary to close the show, which was invested in at $4.85 million. “The final decision is based on economics,” says Simons.
“For Colored Girls” is the second Broadway show to announce an unplanned closure this spring due to weak sales. An adaptation of “Little Prince,“Starting preview on March 29 and premiering on April 11, announced last week that it would close on May 8.
