Broadway’s Gypsy revival, starring Audra McDonald, will close

NEW YORK – A boundary-breaking Broadway revival of Gypsy starring American actress Audra McDonald will end its run on Aug 17, much earlier than its producers had hoped.

The run was originally open-ended, meaning that no closing date had been set, and tickets were on sale through Oct 5. But on July 16, the production announced the new closing date. At the time of its final performance, it will have played 28 preview and 269 regular performances at the Majestic Theatre in New York.

The show is the sixth musical to announce a closing date since the Tony Awards in June – following Boop!, Cabaret, Dead Outlaw, Real Women Have Curves and Smash – reflecting Broadway’s difficult financial dynamics.

Gypsy was nominated for five Tony Awards, including for Best Musical Revival and McDonald’s performance, but won none.

The revival, directed by George C. Wolfe, was highly anticipated because McDonald, with six Tony Awards, is Broadway’s most-honoured contemporary performer. The 55-year-old is the first black actress to play on Broadway the lead role of Rose, the stage mother whose daughter becomes a stripper.

The musical, with a book by American playwright Arthur Laurents, music by English-American songwriter Jule Styne and lyrics by American composer Stephen Sondheim, was inspired by the memoirs of striptease artiste Gypsy Rose Lee. It first opened in 1959 and is generally considered one of Broadway’s best golden age musicals.

When the revival opened in December 2024, it received overwhelmingly positive reviews. In The New York Times, chief theatre critic Jesse Green named the show a critic’s pick and wrote of McDonald, “doing a psychological striptease, showing more of the character’s rage than her predecessors, she is stupendously affecting”.

At the box office, the show seemed to be selling well for much of its run, grossing well over US$1 million (S$1.3 million) most weeks in its early months and peaking at US$1.9 million during a week in mid-January.

But the show is costly to run, thanks to a large orchestra and sizeable cast that includes children, who can be costly to employ because they require supervisors who need to be hired by the production.

Gypsy also lost a substantial amount of potential revenue over the usually lucrative Christmas holidays, when illnesses forced the cancellation of seven performances. Its weekly grosses have been heading in a troubling direction. Last week, the show sold only 61 per cent of its seats and grossed US$816,086.

And musicals have been fetching much lower ticket prices than starry plays.

For example, during the week that ended June 1, when all three shows were running, the average ticket price at an Othello revival, starring American actors Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, was US$425.

The average ticket price for Good Night, And Good Luck, starring Hollywood star George Clooney, was US$339, while for Gypsy, it was US$114. NYTIMES