Hamilton‘s sweep of the Tony awards has claimed its first victim.
The Steve Martin-Edie Brickell musical Bright Star will close June 26 at Broadway’s Cort Theatre. It will have played 30 previews and 109 regular performances. It had been widely reported that Martin, Brickell and Brickell’s husband, Paul Simon, had helped finance the show to keep it running through the Tony awards. But the folk-rock musical about young love lost and found couldn’t sustain an audience.
According to figures from the Broadway League, Bright Star was selling tickets at 80 percent capacity last week, compared to best-musical competitors Hamilton and Waitress (both at 101 percent), Shuffle Along (at 99 percent) and The School of Rock (at 94 percent).
Bright Star was nominated for five Tony awards — best musical, best book of a musical, best original score, best orchestrations and leading actress in a musical for the critically acclaimed Carmen Cusack, who played literary editor Alice Murphy from age 17 to 37. Hamilton won each of those categories.
The production did win 2016 Outer Critics Circle Awards for best musical and score and the Drama Desk Award for outstanding music. (Hamilton won those honors in 2015, during its off-Broadway run).
In any other season, the show might have attracted more of an audience. We’ll have to wait to see if it tours and makes its way to the Fox Theatre.
