Photo: Scott Suchman
The Tonys Pass ‘Glory Days’ By
…In the wink of a young girl’s eye, to reuse a joke. It took only one day for Broadway’s Glory Days to close, and it took just another day for the Tony Awards Administration Committee to rule that the ill-fated musical is ineligible for Tonys in all categories. That answers our question, we guess. It’s a sad end for the musical, which transferred from Washington’s Signature Theater Company with high hopes that its stripped-down, loose aesthetic might help it fit in in a Broadway season featuring a number of similarly offbeat musicals. Instead, the producers lost their shirts, Signature and especially director Eric Schaeffer suffered a significant black eye, and the two 23-year-olds in question — librettist James Gardiner (now 24) and songwriter Nick Blaemire — must feel pretty crappy, despite the fact that most reviews tried to be as gentle with the pair as possible.
In the end, moving this show to Broadway was a terrible idea. We’re not trying to pile on but instead to offer some helpful advice when we say that when we saw the tagline on the show’s poster — “What if two 23-year-olds wrote a musical about four 19-year-olds?†— our simple reply was, “Then it would be a great Off–Off Broadway show.â€
Tony Rulings: Glory Days Not Eligible for Nomination But Gypsy’s Laurents Is [Playbill]
Earlier: Can ‘Glory Days’ Still Find Glory at the Tonys?