The Long Road to Broadway: 'Gutenberg! The Musical!'

It is a commonplace among musical theater creators that the usual gestation period of a musical from conception to Broadway is about seven to eight years. Some, though, take much longer and pass through many way stations before arriving at a Broadway theater. Along the journey, artifacts of earlier productions sometimes make it into theater archives even before a Broadway production occurs. This is especially true of several musicals in the 2023-2024 Broadway season. This blog post is part of a series that examines several of those musicals.

The New York Musical Theater Festival (NYMF) was one of the most successful launchpads for new musicals in the first decade of the 21st century. The festival provided a platform for Altar Boyz, Next to Normal, [title of show], In Transit, Chaplin and dozens of other musicals, many of which received professional cast recordings, Broadway productions, and contracts with major licensing houses. In 2023 another of the shows that appeared at the Festival, Gutenberg! The Musical!, opened on Broadway after nearly 20 years of development.

Gutenberg! was part of the second year of NYMF in 2005, the product of a series of collaborations between the festival and the Chicago-based improv group Upright Citizens Brigade (which workshopped the musical in 2004). The musical then had full productions in London and at NYMF, both in 2006. It ran off-Broadway from late 2006 through May 2007, first at 59E59 and then at the Actors’ Playhouse. But although Gutenberg! was performed around the globe over the next 15 years, the show did not open on Broadway until 2023. 

By that time, the Broadway productions of works like [title of show] (another NYMF favorite) and A Strange Loop had accustomed Broadway audiences to the potentially insiderish idea of a musical about musical theater writing. In 2019, the writers of Gutenberg! (Scott Brown and Anthony King) helped create a Broadway fan favorite with their book for Beetlejuice: The Musical and proved their quirky humor would appeal to mainstream ticket buyers. Gutenberg’s Broadway production also provided an opportunity to reunite the original leads of The Book of Mormon, Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells, in characters that shared the appealing earnestness of the Mormons they played over a decade prior.

By the late 2010s, NYMF had fallen on hard times, and it collapsed altogether in 2019. However, it is unlikely that Gutenberg! will be the last NYMF show that lands on Broadway. The musical Nerds://A Musical Software Satire, for instance, played at the Festival in 2005 and has had numerous productions and several ultimately aborted announcements of a Broadway opening. It seems quite possible that, like Gutenberg!, Nerds will make its way to a Broadway theater in the end.