Make room for Broadway

Sep. 15—Broadway doesn't just take over Popejoy Hall's stage for several weeks every winter. It also takes over the theater's loading dock.

The Popejoy's Broadway in New Mexico series will start in October with a three-week run of Disney's The Lion King, which last graced Albuquerque stages in 2016. Fabianna Borghese, the director of Popejoy Hall at the University of New Mexico, says The Lion King you'll see in New Mexico will be much like the experience on Broadway.

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Popejoy Hall, University of New Mexico

203 Cornell Drive NE, Albuquerque

505-277-4569, 877-664-8661; popejoypresents.com

"It's not too big for our stage. It is too big for our back of house," she says. "We actually have to do different things like expand our loading dock and enclose it so it becomes added space for storage. A lot of the time, we have to rent some storage spaces across campus when we have a big show."

The Lion King's massive inventory of gigantic animal puppets is what puts the strain on the Popejoy behind the curtain, but it's also the anchor in a season of shows that might not be so familiar.

The Popejoy will also show Hadestown (December 6-10), Pretty Woman: The Musical (January 25-28, 2024), My Fair Lady (March 21-24, 2024), and Beetlejuice (May 8-12, 2024) during its Broadway season.

Hadestown, Pretty Woman, and Beetlejuice will make their first appearances on the Popejoy stage, says Borghese.

The Popejoy begins planning its season a year in advance and works with an organization called Broadway Across America that helps organize the touring companies. When the Popejoy has its Broadway shows, Borghese says, they act as a frame to work around the rest of the venue's scheduling.

The Lion King, which has six Tony Awards, has been on Broadway since 1997 and is the third-longest running show in history. It has run through 10,000 shows at the Minskoff Theatre in New York City, and thanks to the touring production, more than 100 million people around the world have seen it.

Its beloved songs — written by Elton John and Tim Rice — also helped launch the musical from a 1994 animated feature and later resulted in a 2019 live-action remake. The Lion King has 24 showings at the Popejoy.

While the Hadestown production features a slightly more jazzy vibe than The Lion King, it may still be familiar to Santa Fe Opera fans. The show offers yet another version of the love story between Orpheus and Eurydice, which was told to acclaim this summer at the Santa Fe Opera's Orfeo (see "Orfeo 101," July 28, Pasatiempo).

Anaïs Mitchell wrote the book, the music, and the lyrics to Hadestown, and when it debuted on Broadway during the 2019 season, it earned eight Tonys, including for Best Musical and Best Original Score. Earlier this year, Hadestown became the longest-running show at the Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway.

Pretty Woman: The Musical doesn't have a long pedigree, but it does have a celebrated songwriting team. Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance, the pair behind innumerable hits including "Summer of '69," wrote the songs for Pretty Woman, which opened on Broadway in 2018 and ran for 420 performances.

My Fair Lady is a classic that has been through some twists and turns, with a spot of new polish. The 1956 Broadway version was based on a 1938 film, which had been based on George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion. That 1956 version, though, with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, won six Tonys, including Best Musical. A film version in 1964 won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It came back to Broadway in 1976, 1981, and 1993 before its most recent revival in 2018.

Beetlejuice, with music and lyrics by Australian composer and performer Eddie Perfect, debuted on Broadway in 2019 and ran for 679 performances before closing earlier this year. It began its life as a touring production last year — and before that was a 1988 movie directed by Tim Burton.