Around Broadway

Lincoln Center Theater has made a new performance space for LCT3, its program of works by new playwrights, directors, and designers. The Claire Tow Theater sits atop the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, and kicking off the first full season at the new house is a play that confronts some very contemporary themes.

Sandy is the name of the hurricane that’s wreaked havoc in New York City this week, but if you’re looking for stormy weather in the theater, the names you want are George and Martha. They’re the main characters in Edward Albee’s 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The first new play of the fall Broadway season has arrived, settling in at the Cort Theatre. Grace, a drama about faith, love and fate, marks the Broadway debut of playwright Craig Wright, as well as actor Michael Shannon, known for roles in films such as "Revolutionary Road," and currently appearing on the third season of HBO’s "Boardwalk Empire."

Nineteenth century Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen is a theatrical legend, but most of his plays are not that frequently produced today, with Hedda Gabler and Ghosts probably getting the most stage time in our era.

The title of Lisa D’Amour’s play is Detroit, but the action doesn’t take place there – or at least not necessarily. However, an American city struggling with an economic downturn, drifting mostly helplessly in the current of shifting fortunes, makes an apt metaphor for individual Americans struggling with uncontrollable economic forces, too.

Forbidden Broadway is back. After a 30-year first run and a three-year, self-imposed hiatus, impresario Gerard Alessandrini and his send-up of theatrical convention – and theatrical innovation – are once again on the boards in New York.

The American playwright Horton Foote made his biggest marks with works such as The Trip to Bountiful and Tender Mercies, the screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Young Man from Atlanta. Now, three years after his death in 2009 at age 92, New York theater audiences have a chance to re-assess one particular area of Horton Foote’s work.

For more than half a century, theater lovers have been heading a couple of hours west of Toronto to enjoy summertime performances of Shakespeare plays.

For its second presentation this summer at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, the Public Theater has turned from Shakespeare to Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's musical Into the Woods, directed by Timothy Sheader with co-direction by Liam Steel.

“Good lords, make all the speedy haste you may,” says Prince Edward in Shakespeare’s Richard III. That’s just what the The Public Theater has done with the play itself, employing an adaptation directed by Amanda Dehnert to lighten the lengthy load of the text and make it easier to take on the road.

Until now, the idea of cheerleading a Broadway show has been metaphorical, in the sense of drumming-up-support. Now, however, it means actual cheerleading. A new musical called Bring It On, based on the 2000 movie of the same name, is giving New York audiences at the St. James Theatre a chance to see just how complex and intensely competitive cheerleading has become; it’s not just pleated skirts and pom-poms anymore.

“The Cockfight Play” is not the title of the play at the Duke on 42nd Street theater. But it’s the accepted euphemism, safe to print in family newspapers and safe to say on the radio. The plot is an old, old theatrical construct – a love triangle. But this gang of three has an unconventional twist: A young man in love with a young man, falls in love with a young woman. Which partner he will ultimately choose becomes the crisis of the drama.

Gore Vidal’s 1960 play The Best Man is enjoying a successful revival on Broadway. It opened in April, received a couple of Tony Award nominations and attracted a starry cast including James Earl Jones, Angela Lansbury and John Laroquette. But it’s not the only political play currently on the boards in New York.

There are more than 20 roles in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. But a recent new production of the play at the Lincoln Center Festival featured only a single performer speaking all the lines, telling the entire story.

Irish playwright Tom Murphy is not the best known Irish playwright in America. Even authors whose work shows specific influence from Murphy, such as Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh, have higher profiles. But the Lincoln Center Festival believes he deserves more attention. It's showcasing three Murphy plays in productions by the Druid Theatre Company of Galway, Ireland. Under the title DruidMurphy, the plays -- Conversations on a Homecoming, A Whistle in the Dark and Famine -- offer a chance to get better-acquainted with Murphy's works.

Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya is a classic of Western theater and New Yorkers are blessed with two productions of it this summer.

Shakespeare in the Park is -- and no pun intended -- a New York theater lover’s midsummer night’s dream. This is the 50th anniversary year of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare productions in Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, which opened in 1962 with a version of The Merchant of Venice that starred George C. Scott as Shylock. On the playbill this summer are the Shakespeare play As You Like It, and a classic of the American musical theater, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods.

A very amiable and otherwise harmless man – he drinks a bit and his best friend is an invisible rabbit – is persecuted by relatives who want him institutionalized so he’ll stop embarrassing them. Complications ensue, but in the end the man and his invisible friend are restored to freedom, and the other characters reflect on the possibility that the most eccentric among us may have the firmest grip on what’s important in life. That plot sounds a bit quaint for sophisticated, cynical New York theatergoers in 2012, doesn’t it?

Playwright Gina Gionfriddo's dark comedy Becky Shaw was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. Her first new play since then, Rapture, Blister, Burn, opened Tuesday night Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, in a production starring Amy Brenneman, best known as the star of television's "Private Practice" and "Judging Amy." Brenneman plays Catherine, the character at the center of this play, who explores women's choices in the post-feminist era.

New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood travels far from the lights of the Great White Way this week, and he’s found a couple of shows that just might make it to Broadway. One, in fact, is already planned for a New York production after the end of its current run.

The Signature Theater Company’s busy season in its new Frank Gehry-designed home continues with a trio of late-spring openings. The first is the new monologue Title and Deed by Will Eno, the author of Thom Pain (based on nothing), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. The Irish actor Conor Lovett performs the show, which is a co-production with the Gare St. Lazare Players of Ireland.

A play in the commedia dell’arte tradition of Italy from the 1700s, featuring stock characters in uncomfortable situations, is now on Broadway. But the production is not full of powdered wigs and arcane syntax. The original play, Carlo Goldini’s Il servitore di due padroni (The Servant of Two Masters), has been adapted by Richard Bean and turned into One Man, Two Guvnors, set in the British resort town of Brighton in the 1960s.

Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh, is one of the more challenging works in the American dramatic canon. Its down-on-their-luck characters, mostly men, are steeped in life’s difficulties – steeped figuratively and literally, as alcohol is refuge and scourge of many of those found in the saloon where the play takes place in the New York City of 1912. The work challenges playgoers not only with its dark themes onstage, but with its real-time length: The Iceman Cometh has four acts, and often clocks in at around five hours running time.

Tuesday was a big day on Broadway with the announcement of nominations for the 66th annual Tony Awards. The musical Once was nominated considerably more often than that – 11 times, in fact. Two other musicals, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess and Nice Work If You Can Get It, received 10 nominations each. Bernadette Peters and Hugh Jackman were named recipients of special awards, along with Actors’ Equity Association, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year.

Anticipating the announcement next week of the nominees for this year’s Tony Awards, New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood noticed something interesting: It’s possible that all the nominees in the category of Best Musical will be shows based on films.

She first told you not to cry, Argentina, back in 1978. Now — and how can it be 34 years later already? — Evita Perón, along with Juan and Che, are back for the very first Broadway revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's musical, Evita.

Last spring Lincoln Center Theater presented 4000 Miles by Amy Herzog under the auspices of its Lincoln Center Theater 3 – a program with the motto of “new artists and new audiences” – at the small Duke on 42nd Street Theater.

It started out as a concept album in 1970 and came to life on Broadway for the first time in 1971. Now, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical Jesus Christ Superstar returns to Broadway in a revival at the Neil Simon Theater.

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is back on Broadway. Esteemed movie and theater director Mike Nichols directs the revival, which features retro sets and music, and young actors playing old – including 44-year-old Philip Seymour Hoffman playing the role of defeated salesman Willy Loman, a man in his 60s.

The musical Carrie has become legendary among a certain subset of musical theater-obsessed New Yorkers. The 1988 Broadway show based on the 1974 Stephen King horror novel, earned its own special place in New York theater history as the “Prom Queen of Bad Musicals,” closing after just 16 previews and five performances.

Part of the mission of New York’s Signature Theatre Company, the Off-Broadway company founded in 1991, is to give season-long attention to the work of living American playwrights. With its expansion to a new Frank Gehry-designed complex this spring, it seems the Signature’s mission has expanded, too.

One of the great villains of the stage, Shakespeare’s Richard III, is in power once again.

John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, rocked the British theater – sorry, theatre – scene in the 1950s, bringing to the stage a vivid, unvarnished realism as well as Jimmy Porter, the play’s main character and the original “angry young man.”

South African Playwright Athol Fugard has a busy New York season ahead, with two theater companies producing four of his shows over the next several months.

January is the season for new and experimental theater in New York. But a work that was new last year at the Under the Radar festival has earned a return engagement at the Public Theater in the East Village through Feb. 5.

Porgy and Bess has returned to Broadway for the first time in many years. The show has probably spent more time in recent decades in the opera house, but this new production is a homecoming, because when Porgy and Bess first appeared in New York in 1935, it was in a Broadway theater.

The holiday decorations are mostly packed away and even the New Year’s eve parties are becoming dim memories (at least, those that are remembered at all). Yes, the winter blahs are upon us.

The 2006 independent movie Once, about the relationship between an Irish musician and a Czech immigrant who meet on the streets of Dublin, has been turned into an Off-Broadway musical.

Two new plays that opened recently Off Broadway offer studies in divergent reactions to the stresses of contemporary life. At Playwrights Horizons, Maple and Vine by Jordan Harrison offers a dark fantasy about a young urban couple seeking a novel way of escaping from their harried lives. And Alan Ayckbourn’s latest comedy, Neighbourhood Watch, at the 59 East 59 Theaters, tells the story of gentle middle-class Britons turned into vigilantes. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood shares his views.

Amid a good number of new plays on Broadway this fall season are two by female African-American writers. Stick Fly by Lydia R. Diamond recently opened at the Cort Theater; and Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop opened this past fall at the Bernard Jacobs Theater. Both plays are directed by Kenny Leon.

As a famous filmmaking duo, the Coen Brothers have given us Fargo, No Country for Old Men, a remake of True Grit, A Serious Man and many other big screen successes. One of Coens, Ethan, has also been writing for the stage.

Lincoln Center Theater has yielded two Broadway productions this fall, its Tony-winning hit War Horse and the acclaimed Other Desert Cities at the Booth Theater. But Charles Isherwood, theater critic for The New York Times, has found a strong new LCT production Off Broadway: J.T. Rogers’s Blood and Gifts, a play commissioned by Lincoln Center Theater running now at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater.

The fall season on Broadway features two prominent concert performances. Hugh Jackman, better known as Wolverine to fans of the X-Men series, is installed at the Broadhurst Theater, performing songs from classic musicals. He's also paying tribute to Peter Allen, the Australian singer-songwriter he played in The Boy From Oz. Meanwhile, a few blocks uptown at the Ethel Barrymore, Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin, the original stars of Broadway’s Evita, are sharing the stage.

Two very well-known musicals from the 1970s drawn from the life of Jesus return to Broadway this season: Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell and Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar.

Nina Arianda is an actress whose star power brightened considerably a couple of years ago because of her Off-Broadway performance in the David Ives play Venus in Fur. Now the play is being revived and Arianda is re-creating her celebrated performance on Broadway, opposite the British actor Hugh Dancy, in the Manhattan Theater Club production that opened recently at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.

Up until last week the famed Berliner Ensemble — the theater company founded by Bertolt Brecht and his wife, the actress Helene Weigel, in 1949 — had never appeared in the United States. That changed when the company brought Brecht’s most famous show, The Threepenny Opera, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Written with Kurt Weill, the production directed by Robert Wilson had a brief, sold-out run last week.

Adam Rapp is a creative artist who keeps busy. He’s a musician and a filmmaker, a novelist and he’s written episodes of HBO’s In Treatment. He also is a playwright of prolific output – something like 20 plays in the last 10 years. The New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood joins host Jeff Spurgeon to talk about Rapp's latest staged work called Dreams of Flying, Dreams of Falling, which is playing at the Classic Stage Company in a production from the Atlantic Theater Company.

Much ink has been spilled about the financial swindler Bernie Madoff since his multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme was exposed at the beginning of the global economic collapse. Madoff is, of course, imprisoned for what we expect will be the rest of his life. But now one of the most notorious American figures of the 21st century has been brought to life on the stage.

The 1971 musical Follies, with a score by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Goldman, has opened the fall season on Broadway with a splash of acid-tinged nostalgia. The revival production began in Washington, D.C., this summer. The New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood reports on the show’s look after the move from the Kennedy Center to the Marquis Theater.

This fall season is full of new plays opening between now and December. Charles Isherwood, theater critic of The New York Times, joins Jeff Spurgeon to give a preview of several of the new productions, including The Mountaintop with Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett, Private Lives with Kim Cattrall and Relatively Speaking, a series of one-acts by Woody Allen, Ethan Coen and Elaine May.