A spate of new musicals will cheer the spirits in 2024

Musicals are finding their rhythm again. After an off-beat couple of years, attendance on Broadway and in the West End is approaching or exceeding pre-pandemic levels. Theatres are once again bolstering the economies of New York and London. The musical genre, long derided as uncool, has been given a boost by “Barbie”, 2023’s biggest film, which was partly inspired by the technicolour musicals of the mid-20th century.

A host of productions will hit the stage in 2024. Several will be adaptations of existing films or stories. “Starter for Ten”, David Nicholls’s novel about television quizzes, was turned into a hit film in 2006; its musical iteration will be performed at the Bristol Old Vic in Britain. In America, fans of “The Notebook” and “Water for Elephants” can watch all-singing, all-dancing versions on Broadway. “El Otro Oz”, a bilingual production billed as a “Mexican folk-infused musical inspired by ‘The Wizard of Oz’”, will open off-Broadway.

In Boston, meanwhile, “Gatsby” will have its premiere. A stellar creative team has adapted F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic tale of wealth, deceit and longing: Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine, a British indie band, and Thomas Bartlett, an Oscar-nominated songwriter, wrote the tunes; Martyna Majok, who won a Pulitzer prize in 2018, penned the script; Rachel Chavkin, a Tony award winner, will direct.

Real-life figures have also inspired forthcoming shows. “Ali” will have its premiere in its subject’s home town of Louisville, Kentucky, in the autumn. It chronicles the boxer’s supremacy inside the ring and his civil-rights activism outside it. The recent wave of media involving Marilyn Monroe—which has included “Blonde”, a film; a musical version of “Some Like It Hot”; and James Ellroy’s novel “The Enchanters”—will continue with “Smash”, a Broadway musical. Somewhat confusingly, it is based on a television series of 2012-13 which was itself about the creation of a Broadway musical of Monroe’s life.

For a more surreal yarn, book tickets to “42 Balloons”, playing in Salford, England, in the spring. It reimagines the true story of Larry Walters who, unable to become a pilot owing to bad vision, realised his dream of flying in 1982 by attaching helium balloons to his patio chair. He ascended to 16,000 feet and, after 45 minutes of drifting over California, safely came back down to Earth. “It was something I had to do,” he said.

That desire to escape will resonate with many in 2024, as people the world over face sluggish economic growth and political instability. In hard times the reverie offered by a musical, on stage or screen, is appealing. Consider that in 1929, the year the Depression began, all of the ten highest-grossing films in America were musicals. As someone famously once asked: “What good is sitting/Alone in your room?/Come hear the music play.”■

Rachel Lloyd, Deputy culture editor, The Economist