We Gotta Get Harry Styles on Broadway

Harry Styles’s 30-night-long run at Madison Square Garden was an unmitigated success: The shows sold out, his fans loved his “Harryween” costumes, and in between performances, he even got to galavant around lower Manhattan in athletic shorts and loafers. Now all he has to look forward to is a more normal, less headline-making international tour through August 2027. While I’m sure those concerts will all be a blast, the truth is that we all know Styles’s favorite thing to do is plop down in New York for an extended period and dress like Minnie Mouse or Dorothy or a French clown.

Well, do I have good news for this guy: Sparkly costumes and long New York runs are quite conspicuously easy to combine. Harry, it’s time to star in a Broadway musical. 

Styles has, thus far, only acted in strangely “nonmusical” projects for a singer. He was mostly unmemorable in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk; after that, he starred in the critically disregarded My Policeman and the noted PR catastrophe Don’t Worry Darling. It’s all been pretty po-faced for a pop star. He’s just never found a project that actually capitalizes on his strengths as a performer. As a singer on tour, Styles is a ball of charisma and a bit of a ham. Maybe he’s gone for blander fare because of a (misguided) thought process that being an actor means seriousness and seriousness means no singing. It’s time to shirk that and use what he’s got in a genre that plays to his strengths.

A role in a musical would be a good distraction for him, too, following the tepid critical reception of his most recent album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. The lead single, “Aperture,” may have hit No. 1, but it didn’t have the staying power of his previous hits. Critics lambasted his willfully impersonal lyrics. Vulture’s Fran Hoepfner referred to his lyricism as “vagueposting,” and Pitchfork wrote that “These songs … sound like Harry Styles songs, but the man himself rarely feels present.” Styles is not a pop star who wants to reveal himself in his lyrics, like Taylor Swift does, or who wants to experiment too fiercely with genre, like Beyoncé does. On the recent record, it feels like this lack of new ground is leading to diminishing returns. Being in a musical would allow him to elide pesky questions like “Is this song about anyone we know?” or “Is it about your life?” or “Is it about anything?” Yes, on Broadway, that song could be about his wife who is actually a fictional character being played by noted theater actress Sherie Renee Scott. If he stars in a musical, Styles can just get the good bits of performing and not have to reveal anything about his personal life.

And it’s not like Broadway is too good for pop stars. In recent years, stunt casting has expanded from being categorized by the Broadway community as a “desperate trick” to being “financially necessary.” While plays like the Julia Louis-Dreyfus–starring Other Desert Cities rake in over $2 million each week, Tony-winning musicals like Maybe Happy Ending are struggling to pull in half that. Styles, and fellow A-listers like George Clooney or Tom Hanks, are inevitable interlopers. So go ahead. Revive a classic like Kiss Me Kate or a rock musical like Hair or a potentially meta, age-inappropriate show like Bye Bye Birdie and toss Styles in the lead role. Maybe he can score the T in his EGOT (stranger things have happened to people like him) and the show will rake in bookoo bucks. It’ll be good for everybody.