Closing the Curtains: How Fans Say Goodbye to Their Favorite Broadway Shows

New York’s Broadway landscape is seeing incredible changes as an abundance of shows are “closing their curtains”.

Photo via Phantom of the Opera on Twitter.

Just this past summer, 12 fan-favorite productions, including Dear Evan Hansen, which opened in 2016, and all-female farce POTUS: Or Behind Every Great Dumbass are Seven Women Trying To Keep Him Alive took their final bows on Broadway.

The sadness that comes from the loss of these shows is not small. Cast and crew members are losing their jobs, theater houses are going dark, and audiences are losing an irreplaceable connection to stories they love.

The relationship between the art and its audience is sacred. Read below as a few of these fans share the bonds they have found in the theater and how they prepare to say “happy trails” to the productions that have greatly impacted their lives.

Haley Keizur was visiting NYC for a journalism conference when she was unknowingly in the last ever audience for Mean Girls on Broadway.

“I was going to see it that Friday because we flew in on Wednesday, so it would have been cutting it a little close,” Keizur begins, “but I really wanted to caption my Instagram post ‘On Wednesdays we wear pink’, so I decided that we had to go that night. And thank god we did!”

Before seeing the show, she was familiar with the 2004, Mean Girls film (of the same name) as well as the cast, and even knew of friends who had attended performances and loved it. Keizur went in with an open mind, and it ended up being the “funniest thing” she’d ever seen.

Immediately after this trip, Keizur flew back to San Francisco to pack up her dorm, and for the entire 13 hour drive home from College, she listened to the Mean Girls cast recording on repeat.

“It was one of the last large-group, ‘normal’ things I did so I think that contributed to my brain function of like “how do I latch onto this last normal thing.” she explains, “I just became obsessed with it.”

Through social media she got to know fellow fans of the show and built relationships with cast members, forming connections through faith and voter outreach during the 2020 election making the work even more personal and important to her.

On January 7th, 2021, Keizur was on facetime with one of the friends she had met through the show when the Mean Girls Instagram account posted that the show would not be reopening with Broadway’s return after COVID-19 induced an industry-wide shutdown.

She reflects on the news coming just a day after the January 6th insurrection, being so caught up in the political conversations happening and the “shitshow” of Twitter.

“People were already so full of emotion, and then this happened.” Keizur says, “I remember being really shocked because I had just talked to Laura Leigh Turner, who was playing Karen Smith at the time, literally the Saturday before about her returning to the show and putting stuff in her dressing room and so when they announced it, I was like “well that’s crazy!’”

Photos via Haley Keizur

Despite this sad ending, Keizur is still able to stay connected to the students of Northshore High. Since resuming their route, she has been able to see the Mean Girls North American tour in four different cities, feeling lucky that the show still has a life somewhere.

And back in New York, when Broadway did finally begin reopening, Passover was the first show she attended in the August Wilson Theater. This is the same theater that housed Mean Girls, a very intentional, full circle move to honor the production that did not get a proper goodbye.

The reopening of Broadway brought with it the 2021 revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, a production originally slated to open in March of 2020 before being postponed. Among the first audience members during the show’s opening week was Lauren Carlson, an actress studying musical theater at NYU Steinhardt.

“There was a time… once upon a time, where I was like ‘I don't know if I’m a Sondheim fan’ and my voice teacher told me a couple lessons ago ‘I don’t know why you said that…’” Carlson recalls, “I think maybe it’s because I never took the time to think about the work.

She had seen the revival being hyped up on social media and became interested in seeing it, particularly intrigued by the female perspective of Bobbie’s main character.

Carlson and her friend bought tickets two months in advance for a performance the day after opening night. Despite being seated in the last row of the theater and forgetting her glasses, there was an undeniable draw to the story, having enjoyed this new interpretation of Bobbie and calling Katrina Lenk’s rendition of “Being Alive” a “masterclass of specificity as an actor”.

“For me the show wasn’t even like a fan perspective, I really enjoyed all of the art that every single person on that stage was producing every single night, and that is what drew me,” Carlson says, “I had a good friend who saw it with me a lot– she saw it 13 times and I saw it six– and she even says this show was different every single time she saw it and she was right, it was different every single time.”

It was this refreshing take on the show night after night that kept her returning to the theater, feeling particularly engaged as a student in this field knowing that she was witnessing something incredibly unique.

Carlson was on a contract in Leavenworth, Washington for the summer of 2022 when she received a text from her friend that read “I’m sorry for your loss”. Being hit with immediate confusion, she went to Instagram and saw it had been announced that Company would be closing July 31st.

“It was very sad,” Carlson recalls, “I was asking all my friends “Do I go back to New York and see it? Do I go back to New York and see it?” and I don’t think I had the money at the time and didn’t think I should leave in the middle of this contract. So I ended up not coming back and had to mourn it from afar.”

Carlson now has an accidental “shrine” to the Company in her apartment, equipped with “Side By Side” streamers, a bottle of Maker’s Mark, and a show playbill signed by the entire cast.

This specific playbill she took with her to Washington before having any knowledge of the show closing. Carlson kept it with her in her dressing room, along with her Mother Abbess things, one of the roles she was understudying in The Sound of Music, a role she ended up going on for opening night.

“I kept it as kind of a good luck charm as a piece of the city,” Carlson says, “and it reminded me of home. Company was such a big part of this last semester… and it marks a part of my life of discovery and resilience which is why I love the show.”

These grounding reminders of how a show has inspired fans and touched the lives of its most devoted audiences come in many forms.

Photos via Elysha Blair

Elysha Blair has been making cross country trips to the Music Box Theater to see the 2017 Tony Award Winning best musical Dear Evan Hansen as often as she could for the past five years, and did so for the last time this September.

When in the city, Blair got a small star tattooed on her left arm at a studio in Soho.

“A $50 flash to commemorate the weekend and the last five years of starting with stars in my eyes and Zoe Murphy’s star-cuffed jeans,” she says.

This isn’t Blair’s first Dear Evan Hansen inspired tattoo, the first coming four years earlier in the form of a hand drawn sun from original cast member Laura Dreyfuss, the two acting as bookends to her journey with the show.

She reflects on her time with DEH by saying “It’s always going to be in the background of my life and something I can turn to when I want to… but it isn’t something that I need to hold onto in the same way that I used to.”

When the timing hits just right, a story seen on a Broadway stage can sit in the audience’s hearts for a very long time, growing with them as they navigate life with a newfound support system of knowing we are not alone.

The Cher Show acted as this guiding light to Ashley Broder.

“The way that it happened with it being my first year in New York City, it being a show that I went to because I loved Cher and I loved Stephanie [J. Block] separately, and I didn't expect it to impact me the way that it did,” she says, “but it became a show that just made me feel good and like a badass.”

Broder felt reassured and inspired to take on the world each week after being in the audience of this jukebox musical. This made the unexpected closing announcement hard to grapple with as the confidence boost that she was finding through The Cher Show was something Broder had learned to then find within herself.

It is important to note the impact these shows make on the lives of those in the audience as they offer a sacred place and favorite nights had in those theater seats.

Photo via @Spoonfulsofbroadway on Instagram

The closing announcement for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera was an especially surprising one as, after running for nearly 35 years, most theater goers barely remember a Broadway without it. This reigns true for Selena, @spoonfulsofbroadway on Instagram.

She was first introduced to Phantom by her fifth grade music teacher and immediately fell in love with the classical sound and magical escapism of the show. At 10 years-old, Selena watched the famed chandelier go up for the first time and “nothing was the same”.

Selena has been making frequent trips to the Majestic Theater ever since, sharing the story with the most important people in her life, including friends, her girlfriend, and her late grandfather. It is the memories she shared with these people in her favorite theater that will make saying goodbye so difficult.

Photos via @Spoonfulsofbroadway on Instagram

In gearing up for these final months on Broadway (Phantom closes February 18), she has been indulging in her time left with the show by attending more often and picking up show memorabilia at BCEFA’s annual Broadway Flea Market.

Selena has been attending the flea since she was in High School, typically focusing on playbill collecting, but this year she made sure to pick up some special Phantom pieces including show artwork by legendary Broadway artist, Squigs Robertson.

These bits of Phantom will be cherished even after the show closes and the Global Edition of the cast recording will keep Selena in tune with the music of the night for forever, or at least for 10 hours and 18 minutes.

More shows are set to close as we head into 2023, such as A Strange Loop, Beetlejuice, and Into The Woods, just to name a few. Refer to Playbill.com’s list of rush and digital lottery policies to find the most affordable way to attend any of these soon-to-be-closing productions.

Broadway offers great escapes and comforting relatability to the audiences that fill their theaters, and we should be taking advantage of the art around us and be a part of them before it is too late. Grab your tickets and enjoy the show!