Twenty-seven years ago this June, Julie Taymor and Garry Hynes became the first women to win Tony Awards for best direction — Taymor for a musical, The Lion King, and Hynes for a play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane. As we close out Women’s History Month, more female directors are earning kudos for a diverse crop of new Broadway productions.
They include Danya Taymor, Julie’s niece, who won a Tony herself last year for directing an adaptation of The Outsiders that was also named best musical. The younger Taymor, who made her Broadway bow as assistant director of a 2015 revival of Thérèse Raquin and later helmed the premiere of Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s Pass Over, is guiding another play this season: Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor Is the Villain, featuring Stranger Things and The Whale star Sadie Sink; it’s in previews and is scheduled to open April 14 at the Booth Theatre.
In Proctor, Sink plays one of a group of high school students reading Arthur Miller’s 1953 classic The Crucible, in which Proctor, who has an affair with a teenage girl, is drawn as a flawed but noble hero. The high school students read it in 2018, as #MeToo makes national headlines and sexual violence impacts their own small town. The cast includes several up-and-coming young actresses, including Amalia Yoo — familiar to fans of another Netflix series, Grand Army — in her first Broadway performance.
Accepting her Tony in 2024, the younger Taymor acknowledged the importance of female representation in theater, calling it the “honor of a lifetime to be among this group of directors — especially the group of women directors, a record number this year.” The six female nominees in that group, outnumbering four men who also received nods in the play and musical categories, ranged from prolific veteran Leigh Silverman to rising star Whitney White.
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White, who garnered a Tony nomination for Broadway’s Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, written by rising female playwright Jocelyn Bioh, returns this year with the Jason Robert Brown musical The Last Five Years. In previews and due to open April 6 at the Hudson Theatre, the production marks the Broadway arrival of the 2001 show, with Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren playing a couple whose relationship is traced both chronologically and in the reverse order.
Before helming Jaja’s, White worked steadily and earned praise in regional and Off-Broadway theater. Since last fall, she has won acclaim for two other New York productions: of Amy Berryman’s Walden and Bess Wohl’s Liberation; the latter was inspired by the second-wave feminism Wohl learned about through her mother and is running through April 7 at Roundabout Theatre Company’s Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre.
Discussing her work on these plays and Years in a recent interview with the online magazine TDF Stages, White noted that while she hadn’t set out to work in such rapid succession on three shows featuring complicated women faced with hard choices, she was grateful for the opportunity. “‘For women, our personal struggles are huge battles,’” White noted. “‘There’re so many television shows, films and plays that make our struggles look small, and I’m sick of that.’”
One female director who has already amassed rave reviews on Broadway this season is Phylicia Rashad, the beloved stage and screen actress, who in recent years has juggled playing roles — including a part in Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew, for which she earned her second Tony Award — with guiding other actors onstage, in productions of plays by such giants as August Wilson and Lorraine Hansberry. Last season she was also a producer of Kenny Leon’s revival of Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch.
Brendan Jacobs-Jenkins’s Purpose, a hilarious and harrowing account of dysfunction and hypocrisy in a prominent family, marks Rashad’s Broadway directorial debut and is already being heralded as a top candidate for Best Play this awards season. In a New York Times profile of Rashad, Jacobs-Jenkins, a previous Tony and two-time Obie Award winner, noted, “There is a lot of time wasted on the average new play because the director has to get the trust of the acting company. But when you have someone like Ms. Phylicia show up, who herself is a master actor, you can get into it really quick.”
Another multifaceted artist who’s making a big return to Broadway this year is Tina Landau, who not only co-conceived the new musical Redwood with Idina Menzel, starring as a grieving mother who finds refuge in nature, but also wrote the book, cowrote the lyrics (with Kate Diaz), and is directing the production. As that show continues its run at the Nederlander Theatre, Landau — whose previous directorial credits range from a 2001 revival of Bells Are Ringing to last season’s Mother Play — is readying a new staging of her 1994 musical Floyd Collins, for which she wrote the book.
For the new production of Collins — which marks its Broadway premiere, and is currently in previews for an April 21 opening at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater — Landau directs a cast led by Jeremy Jordan in the title role, that of a real-life cave explorer who got trapped underground in Kentucky a century ago. And since Landau wrote additional lyrics for Adam Guettel’s score, she becomes the first woman to direct and cowrite two shows bowing on Broadway in one season.
This season also brings a pair of new projects helmed by five-time Tony winner Susan Stroman, one of the most celebrated directors (and choreographers) of the past 35 years. Her many credits range from groundbreaking musicals such as Contact, The Producers, and The Scottsboro Boys, to hit revivals and 2002’s satirical play POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, the Broadway debut of female playwright Selina Fillinger.
After helming the musical New York, New York in 2023, Stroman took on another play this past fall: Delia Ephron’s autobiographical comedy Left on Tenth, with a cast led by Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher. This spring, she’s unveiling SMASH, the long-anticipated musical based on the popular TV series, which traced the making of a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe. Currently in previews at the Imperial Theatre, where it’s set to open April 10, the new show features a book by Rick Elice and Bob Martin, music by Marc Shaiman, and lyrics by Scott Wittman and Shaiman.
While Stroman isn’t choreographing this time, she will be working closely with Joshua Bergasse, who crafted dance routines for the television show and has several Broadway credits himself. A recent Vanity Fair article about Smash stressed that Stroman will be “in charge,” and that she took the job because she loved the series. Describing the musical, Stroman told the magazine, “It’s not unlike The Producers in the sense of full-on comic eccentric characters. But they have some depth.”
More women will be helming Broadway productions in the months ahead, as the new season launches: Sarna Lapine, who directed the 2017 revival of Sunday in the Park With George featuring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford, will guide Emmy-winning Hacks star Jean Smart in the title role of Jamie Wax’s Call Me Izzy, scheduled to begin previews May 24 and open June 12 at Studio 54. And esteemed English director Phyllida Lloyd will return to Mamma Mia!, her first Broadway outing, poised to begin performances August 2 and open August 14 at the Winter Garden Theatre.
It would seem the days when women’s names didn’t figure significantly in lists of best director nominees, for the Tonys and other honors, are behind us.
Photo of Danya Taymor by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions and photo of Tina Landau by Rebecca J Michelson for Broadway Direct.