PBS will be back on Broadway next month.
It will stuff four Fridays in May with “Great Performances” shows. That includes two full musicals — “Suffs” (shown here) and “Top Hat” — plus a documentary and a Nicole Scherzinger concert.
This has become a tradition, for the month leading into the Tony awards. Each year, “Great Performances” puts new specials alongside ones from London. In this case, “Top Hat” and the Scherzinger concert were filmed in England, the others in the U.S. The line-up, all at 9 p.m., is:
— May 8. “Suffs” is short for “suffragettes”; the musical portrays the push that finally brought American women the right to vote, in 1920.
In her Broadway debut, Shaina Taub pulled a trifecta in the Lin-Manuel Miranda style: She wrote the book and the music (winning Tonys for both) and starred as Alice Paul. The show also drew four more Tony nominations, including best musical and Nikki James as Ida B. Wells; it was filmed in late-2024, shortly before ending its eight-month run.
— May 15: “Top Hat” hasn’t been to Broadway, but it’s big in England.
Adapted from a 1935 Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movie, it opened in London in 2013. Reviews were mixed, but it won Olivier Awards (the British equivalent of Tonys) for best musical, costumes and choreography.
Last year, Kathleen Marshall — an American director who has won three Tonys — did a revival in Chichester, England. That’s the version that was filmed, with such Irving Berlin classics as “Cheek to Cheek,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.”
— May 29: Many Americans know Scherzinger mainly as the lead singer for the Pussycat Dolls and as a panelist in the early years of “The Masked Sionger.” But in England, she’s been big in musicals.
She sang “Memory” in “Cats” for three month and starred in “Sunset Boulevard.” The latter moved to Broadway; Scherzinger ended up winning both an Olivier and a Tony. This concert — filmed at the Royal Albert Hall in London — will include both her pop and theater songs.
— May 29: “Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy” includes interviews with many of the greats — Stephen Sondheim, Mel Brooks, Stephen Schwartz, John Kander, Sheldon Harnick, Harold Prince and more.
But it also goes back further, to focus on the classic composers and lyricists, including Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, the Gershwins and Rodgers and Hammerstein and Hart and more. Joel Grey narrates.