5 Fun Facts About Planning Blumenthal’s 2025-26 Broadway Season

Blumenthal Arts recently announced its new 2025 - 2026 Broadway season, featuring more touring Broadway hits than anywhere else in the Carolinas. The season includes 17 total shows, many coming straight from their dazzling Broadway runs.

There are big winners from the 2024 Tony Awards, like “The Outsiders” (Winner of four Tony Awards, including Best Musical) and “Stereophonic” (Winner of five Tony Awards, including Best Play); hits like “Hell’s Kitchen” featuring the music of 17-time Grammy-winning creator Alicia Keys and the new Tony Award-winning musical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece “The Great Gatsby,” set in the Roaring Twenties; plus returning favorites like “The Sound of Music,” “Monty Python’s Spamalot,” “& Juliet” and so much more.

Did you ever wonder how it all comes together?

There’s tons of behind-the-scenes action that goes into curating such a diverse collection of extraordinary productions for local audiences each year. We checked in with Blumenthal’s President and CEO Tom Gabbard to find out some of the secrets behind bringing Broadway’s best to Charlotte.

Blumenthal gets involved as an investor way before shows find success on Broadway.

Charlotte is a Top 10 market for touring Broadway shows and that didn’t happen by accident. Blumenthal always has its eye on the big winners for Best Musical, Best Revival and Best Play at the annual Tony Awards, Gabbard says, but the journey with many shows starts much earlier.

Blumenthal plays a major role in developing new projects and advising productions with an eye toward the possibility of these emerging works touring one day.

Take last season’s “Back to the Future,” for example.

“Blumenthal was one of the first four partners on that show, 10 years before it arrived in Charlotte,” Gabbard says. “... We're involved with many of these shows, not knowing whether or not they will land on Broadway, whether or not they will be successful and ultimately whether or not they will tour. We get involved and frequently supply strategic advice and a little bit of money way before any of that’s known. So it is pretty speculative.”

“It takes a village” to bring shows to cities around the country.

Blumenthal is a key member of the Independent Presenters Network, a group of 40 leading presenters, theaters and performing arts centers across North America, Asia and the U.K. IPN is managed in Charlotte and Gabbard is a past president.

The group jointly invests in many productions and if those shows end up going on the road, it puts these member organizations in a strong position to bring them to their cities. Gabbard says there has to be agreement, lots of conversation and coordination among presenting partners in order to bring a show on the road.

“It's not like going on Amazon and ordering up shows,” he says. “... It takes a village to get these shows out. They can't just go play one city, and so part of what we're doing is not only thinking in terms of what Charlotte needs but seeing is there a critical mass of cities who are interested in this? Can we agree on time periods that will work for us?”

That last part is especially critical now, Gabbard said, since trucking regulations recently changed and shows can only travel a limited number of miles between cities. Typically, a show loads-out on Sundays (breaking down the set, packing up costumes, etc.) and arrives in its new city for load-in on Mondays.

“We used to have relief drivers and things like that that would allow them to push ahead more overnight and things like that that's gotten to be much more restrictive,” he says.  

Ongoing conversations with peers around the country are key to figuring everything out, including how much each presenter is willing to pay for a production. It’s the marketplace that ultimately determines which shows go out, Gabbard says, and whether they go as a first-class title or a non-equity show. Blumenthal rarely brings non-equity shows to Charlotte but it’s a collective decision that determines how a show will tour.

Sometimes Blumenthal goes solo and takes a big risk to bring an important show to Charlotte.

That’s what happened this season with the recent dramatic musical, “Parade.” Only two cities across the Southeast, Charlotte and Atlanta, booked the show. (The closest other performances will be in Houston, Texas and at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. later this year.)

“I think honestly because of the serious subject matter, a lot of our peers just weren't ready to do that,” Gabbard says. “That's the kind of thing that we will lean in on and want to provide to our community.”

A number of shows each season only come to Charlotte in the region. “We're frankly pretty proud of that,” Gabbard says, noting that sometimes these shows will lose money but as a mission-based organization, Blumenthal’s team thinks it's important to bring works “in service to the community.”

“We're able to take on some of the serious, more artful things because we make sure that we offset that with things that are just fun and are going to be a safe bet,” Gabbard says.

Blumenthal’s season reflects Broadway trends and tone.

Sometimes people look at a season lineup and wonder if there’s a thematic intent behind it all. Gabbard says that’s rarely the case, but sometimes it unintentionally happens on Broadway and that directly affects Blumenthal’s schedule too.

If a lot of dramatic works open one year, “then a year or two later our season may look a little more dramatic,” Gabbard says. “If Broadway becomes all light and fluffy and bubbly, then our season is going to be more bubbly. We’re reflective of what Broadway has done.”

Sometimes unexpected things happen.

Last year, Blumenthal had to make a last minute schedule change, replacing a show about a week before announcing the new season. “It was quite the scramble redoing all our materials in time for the big day,” says Blumenthal’s Chief Marketing Officer Danny Knaub.

But things do sometimes change and even shows that Blumenthal has watched carefully throughout their development process can be full of surprises. In New York during previews, productions can still make changes — like adding new lines or choreography — up until their official opening date, when performances are locked in and critics review them.

Throughout that creative process, shows evolve, Gabbard says. And sometimes productions that were initially troubled turn out to be “dazzling” on opening night.

Want to find out more about what happens behind-the-scenes? Pull back the curtain with Kristen Miranda, Blumenthal’s Chief Community Impact & Partnership Officer and former host of “QC Life” in the TV special, “Blumenthal Arts Presents: From Broadway to Charlotte,” that recently aired on WBTV. You can find it here!

For more information about our 2025-26 Broadway Season, visit: BlumenthalArts.org/Broadway

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