Like old boss Barack Obama, former State Secretary Hillary Clinton has tried to give her career a second act in the entertainment industry. Unlike Obama, she’s playing to tumbleweeds.
Clinton has produced the musical Suffs, and it’s drawing shockingly low attendance, according to newly released numbers from Broadway’s box office.
Suffs has reportedly filled only 81 percent of seats across eight performances in the week of May 5. It ranked 27th out of 35 that week. The play is sitting squarely in the bottom quartile, despite its deep-pocketed producers.
It gets worse. BroadwayLeague.com said Suffs filled only 78 percent of its 7,784 seats the following week.
Suffs debuted two years ago in The Public, an off-Broadway theater with a capacity of up to 299. It’s now playing at Broadway’s Music Box, a 1,025-seat theater.
Who helps to find a theater for a Broadway play? The producers!
In this case, the producers include Hillary Clinton… and Meena Harris, niece of the current vice president.
In the past, some pundits have demonstrated a fandom for musical theater. Homeland Security’s Nina Jankowitz, known for her short-lived stint as a “disinformation” czar, once called herself “the Mary Poppins of disinformation,” and she released a video of herself singing about disinformation to the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”
The musical is a Hamilton knockoff, critics say. It’s set in the 1920s and tells the story of women’s suffrage. Playbill.com advertises the play’s “entirely female and non-binary cast – among them Tony winner Nikki M. James, Jenn Colella, Emily Skinner, and Grace McLean as President Woodrow Wilson.”
Clinton relates to “all” characters in the play, she told the Associated Press.
If a public figure is eyeing a Tony award, then he or she can jump onto a Broadway play as a producer, sometimes at the last minute.
Obama’s studio, Higher Ground Productions, produced the documentary film American Factory in 2019. Hollywood quickly nominated Obama an Academy Award.
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