Black Plays Are Knocking on Broadway’s Door. Will It Open?

Sensing that the climate is shifting, he is again hopeful. “If they could shake loose a Broadway house,” he said, “we would take it.”

Ron Simons, the lead producer of “For Colored Girls,” has partnered with a veteran Broadway producer, Nelle Nugent, hoping that her experience will help the show win a theater. The show, which first opened on Broadway in 1976, was revived at the Public Theater last year. Camille A. Brown, the choreographer, will also direct on Broadway, succeeding Leah C. Gardiner, who directed the production downtown.

There are producers hoping for Broadway runs of several other shows with Black writers working their way through nonprofit theaters, including the plays “Pass Over,” a charged riff on “Waiting for Godot” by Antoinette Nwandu and “Toni Stone,” about a female Negro leagues baseball player, by Lydia Diamond, as well as the musical “Gun & Powder,” by Angelica Chéri and Ross Baum, about a pair of Black twin sisters who passed as white in the 19th century and became bank-robbing outlaws.

Even earlier in the developmental process is “Dreaming Zenzile,” about Miriam Makeba, written and performed by Somi Kakoma with Mara Isaacs of “Hadestown” attached as a producer; the show is being developed in association with the National Black Theater, and a first production is expected at the Repertory Theater of St. Louis.

A few projects have powerhouse producers behind them. Disney Theatrical Productions, the biggest company producing on Broadway, is working on a musical adaptation of “Hidden Figures,” which it has been exploring since 2018 with the film critic Elvis Mitchell as creative consultant. And Scott Rudin, the prolific independent producer, wants to revive August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” and is also considering a commercial production of “The Black Clown,” a musical adapted by Davóne Tines and Michael Schachter from a Langston Hughes poem.