Spring Season Preview 2016

·27 min·2 clips

Michael Riedel and Susan Haskins debate if any musical can compete with Hamilton's $70 million advance this spring.

A preview becomes a sparring match. Haskins and Riedel start with the usual Broadway calendar question, but the panel treats the season like an argument before the listings can settle. Musto's shirt causes the first trouble. Then the conversation veers through The Music Man, the Village Voice, Logo, cocktails, and Broadway gossip. This group loves a detour, and the detours are half the show. Patrick Pacheco keeps trying to describe new productions with earnest context. The room keeps testing whether any premise can survive being said out loud. Bluegrass turns into a flash point. A show about a young man returning from World War II barely gets explained before the score, the publicist joke, and Patrick's patience run into each other. Then Tuck Everlasting gets hauled in. Its forever-living family, magic water, Disney connection, and Casey Nicholaw staging become less a plot description than a Broadway plausibility trial. The jokes have teeth because everyone at the table knows the machinery. Nobody sounds detached. Even the mockery depends on knowing how shows, spoilers, choreography, and source material usually get sold. Hamilton sits over everything. The panel wonders whether its dominance has made room for unlikely Broadway transfers, including Disaster, a spoof that once seemed unlikely to get past 14th Street. Are weaker shows crowding in because one enormous hit changed the market, or is the season just odd? The answer stays loose. Patrick defends, the others heckle, and every title becomes evidence in an ongoing argument about Broadway taste. The goodbye keeps swinging: shoes, expertise, Trump's name, Musto's return, and Riedel's book going conspicuously unmentioned. It is affectionate, but it still has bite. The episode works because the panel treats a preview as a live-room argument over what Broadway thinks it can get away with.

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