{"id":720377,"date":"2026-06-07T04:54:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T04:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/720377\/"},"modified":"2026-06-07T04:54:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T04:54:16","slug":"knicks-meet-tonys-basketball-on-broadway-new-york-theater","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/720377\/","title":{"rendered":"Knicks, Meet Tonys: Basketball on Broadway \u2013 New York Theater"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York basketball and theater fans are both experiencing suspense and excitement at exactly the same time, which makes this feel the right time to revisit some shared history. Below, a look back at theater about basketball.<\/p>\n

\"\"Kiefer Southerland, Jim Gaffigan, Chris Noth, Jason Patric and Brian Cox.<\/p>\n

That Championship Season
Broadway\u2019s Booth Theater, 1972-1974. Revived 2011<\/p>\n

Jason Miller\u2019s play takes place during the 20th reunion of a championship high school basketball team, for whom the game was their moment of glory in lives that have turned bitter with disillusionment and betrayal. The play won both the Tony Award for best play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
When the play was revived on Broadway in 2011 (as I pointed out in my review<\/a>) the playwright\u2019s ashes were in an urn on the set, placed there by his son Jason Patric, who was in the new five-member cast. In something of a mirroring of the play, Miller had died of a heart attack in a bar in Scranton in 2001, the last three decades of his life no match for his early success.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Lysistrata Jones
Judson Memorial Church, then Broadway\u2019s Walter Kerr Theater, 2011<\/p>\n

Librettist Douglas Carter Beane and songwriter Lewis Flinn\u00a0 took Aristophanes\u2019 bawdy anti-war satire and turned it into a teen musical comedy: A group of cheerleaders refuse to have sex with a team of college basketball players until they start winning games.\u00a0 The musical was originally staged on an actual basketball court. But then it moved to Broadway, and lasted thirty performances. (My Broadway review<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Magic\/Bird
Broadway\u2019s Longacre Theater, 2012<\/p>\n

This play about the rivalry and then friendship between basketball stars Magic Earvin Johnson and Larry Bird, was put together by the same team (producers, playwright, director) that brought \u201cLombardi\u201dto Broadway. That play about the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi lasted about seven months at Circle in the Square, longer than any previous play about football. \u201cMagic\/Bird\u201d ran just 38 performances. The show partnered with the National Basketball Association, and enlisted the play\u2019s real-life subjects to do promotion and publicity. But that might have been part of the problem, as I explained my review<\/a>, \u201cMagic\/Bird\u201d seems to have been inspired by little more than a marketing strategy. My review concludes:
How does \u201cMagic\/Bird\u201d solve the problem of presenting the actual sport of basketball on the stage? Not very effectively: The actors dribble a little, shoot a basket here and there; there is some video footage, as well as a couple of fancy effects involving lighting and slow motion. But all in all, there was more of a sense of the actual game of basketball \u2013 the kinetic excitement of it \u2014 in the choreography of the musical \u201cLysistrata Jones.\u201d
\u201cMagic\/Bird\u201d is the last basketball play to have had a run on Broadway. The others since then have been Off or Off-Off Broadway<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

King Liz
Second Stage Theatre Uptown, 2015<\/p>\n

Karen Pittman portrayed the\u00a0head of the \u201cNBA division of the top sports agency in the country,\u201d\u00a0who tries to woo a 19-year-old (Jeremie Harris), who is an extraordinary player \u2013 with a criminal record. My review<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Great Leap
Atlantic, 2018<\/p>\n

Lauren Yee\u2019s play, inspired by events from her father\u2019s life, follow an aggressive 17-year-old from San Francisco\u2019s Chinatown who talks his way onto an American college basketball team traveling to Beijing for a \u201cfriendship game\u201d in the tense summer of 1989 (the summer of the Tiananmen Square\u00a0massacre)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
King James
MTC, 2023<\/p>\n

Rajvi Joseph\u2019s play is as much a meditation on the nature of fandom as it is about the game itself, tracking two intense Cleveland fans over a twelve-year period \u2014 a time span that coincides with major events in the career of LeBron James. My review.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Half-God of Rainfall
ART, 2023<\/p>\n

Inua Ellams\u2019s epic poem tells the story of a Nigerian-born demigod son of Zeus who becomes an NBA All Star,<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Flex
Lincoln Center Theater\u2019s Mitzi Newhouse, 2023<\/p>\n

Candice Jones\u2019 play about a high school basketball team of Black female players in Plainnole, Arkansas aiming to win the state championship of 1998, involved basketball playing by the ensemble that felt somewhere between authentic court moves (both the playwright and director Lileana Blain-Cruz reportedly played high school basketball) and lively choreography. My review<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

KS6: Small Forward
La MaMa,2024
Katsiaryna Snytsina, a globe-trotting professional basketball player and Olympian, portrayed herself in her remarkable true story: She joined other athletes in a letter protesting the dictatorship in her native Belarus of Alexander Lukashenko, which forced her into exile in London, where she thrived on a new team, the London Lions, became an outspoken activist, and came out publicly as a lesbian. (The title is composed of her initials, the number on her uniform, and her basketball position.) Produced by Belarus Free Theater, the show was an inventive mix of basketball moves and avant-garde theatricality. My review.<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York basketball and theater fans are both experiencing suspense and excitement at exactly the same time, which…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":720378,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,85],"class_list":["post-720377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basketball","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-basketball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=720377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/720378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=720377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=720377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=720377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}