Spectacular, spectacular!
That’s the excitement level the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust is clearly trying to invoke with its announcement of the touring productions it’s bringing to the Benedum Center as part of its 2023-24 PNC Broadway in Pittsburgh season. The trust announced the nine-show lineup Monday morning after a week of dropping not-so-thinly veiled hints via social media.
The Cultural Trust is always aiming to book “the finest Tony Award-winning shows from the Broadway stage to the Benedum Center as soon as possible,” Marc Fleming, the trust’s chief marketing officer and vice president of Broadway programming, said in a news release.
This year’s crop of shows is headlined by two highly decorated musicals from the past few years: “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” which won best musical and nine other awards at the 2021 Tony Awards, and the revival of “Company,” which took home best revival of a music and four other Tonys last year.
Here’s what musical theater fans in Pittsburgh have to look forward to in the 2023-24 Broadway in Pittsburgh season:
• Sept. 27-Oct. 8: “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” based on the Oscar-winning 2001 Baz Luhrmann movie of the same name.
• Oct. 31-Nov. 5: “The Wiz,” an adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz” famous for R&B and soul-inspired tunes like “Ease on Down the Road” and “A Brand New Day.”
• Nov. 28-Dec. 3: “Mrs. Doubtfire,” the musical version of the 1993 Robin Williams dramedy of the same name.
• Jan. 9-14: “Girl From the North Country,” which uses 19 Bob Dylan songs to tell its story of lives intersecting at a guesthouse in 1934-era Duluth, Minn.
• Jan. 30-Feb. 4: “My Fair Lady,” which follows linguistic Professor Henry Higgins as he makes it his mission to turn the delightfully unrefined Eliza Doolittle into his idea of a proper lady.
• April 16-21, 2024: “Company,” the revival of Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical comedy about love, marriage and maintaining one’s sanity in a crazy world.
• May 7-12, 2024: “The Kite Runner,” a play based on Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 novel of the same name.
There are also two “season specials” that will be heading to Pittsburgh in 2024:
• Feb. 27-March 3: “The Book of Mormon,” an outlandish comedy about two Mormon missionaries who bite off more than they can chew during their mission trip to Uganda.
• March 26-31: “Mamma Mia!,” the ABBA-heavy classic about a woman trying to figure out who her real father is before her wedding.
Subscription packages to the main seven-show series can be secured via trustarts.org. Group discounts on orders of 10 tickets or more are also available now for all nine shows, and tickets to individual performances will go on sale throughout the year.
The 2022-23 Broadway in Pittsburgh season kicked off last year and has so far brought “Frozen,” “Hadestown,” “Les Miserables,” “Hairspray,” “Jagged Little Pill” and “Beetlejuice” to the the Steel City. The tour of “SIX The Musical” begins its Benedum Center run Tuesday evening, and the season will be capped off with “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical” in April and “Dear Evan Hansen” in May.
“The PNC Foundation is excited to once again be part of bringing this wonderful series to Pittsburgh,” Louis R. Cestello, PNC’s Pittsburgh regional president, said in a news release. “The variety and quality of shows this season will continue the tradition of our community coming together through a shared appreciation of the arts.”
Joshua covers pop culture, media and more at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Contact him at jaxelrod@unionprogress.com.