New Broadway season: The play's the thing

'The Little Mermaid' takes the plunge along with many other exciting new shows

BY MICHAEL KUCHWARA | The Associated Press

September 30, 2007

A monster and a mermaid would seem to have the new musical market cornered on Broadway this fall, but it is plays rather than musicals that - surprisingly - are dominating the first half of the season.

"The lineup of production for the fall season should quiet anyone who would categorize Broadway as having become a theme park of mass-appeal, tourist-driven shows," says Howard Sherman, executive director of the American Theatre Wing.

There are new plays by Aaron Sorkin, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, Tracy Letts, Conor McPherson and Theresa Rebeck. Not to mention revivals by Harold Pinter, Terrence McNally, William Inge, Edmond Rostand, George Bernard Shaw and even William Shakespeare.

"Look for a heavier slate of musicals come the spring, but this fall the play's the thing, contrary to all of the conventional wisdom about the viability of plays on Broadway," Sherman says.

Still, it's hard to ignore those mammoth musicals, "Young Frankenstein" and "The Little Mermaid," adaptations of two well-known movie titles that are making their way to the stage.

The first is Mel Brooks' follow-up to "The Producers," one of the biggest Broadway successes of the past decade. Some of Brooks' collaborators on that megahit have joined his latest venture, including director-choreographer Susan Stroman, book co-writer Thomas Meehan and actor Roger Bart, who has traded the flamboyant Carmen Ghia of "The Producers" for the role of earnest, sensitive Dr. Frederick Frankenstein in the new musical.

Bart's co-stars include such theater and television veterans as Megan Mullally playing Elizabeth (the Madeline Kahn role in the film), Sutton Foster as Inga, Fred Applegate as Kemp, Christopher Fitzgerald as Igor and Shuler Hensley as the top-hat-and-tails monster.

Newcomer Sierra Boggess portrays the title character in "The Little Mermaid," Disney's latest venture in transforming its animated films into theater. The Alan Menken-Howard Ashman movie score has been augmented with 11 new numbers by Menken and Glen Slater.

Boggess is Ariel, the sea maiden who longs to live on land. Sean Palmer plays her prince charming and the scene-stealing Sherie Rene Scott appears as Ursula, the sea witch. Francesca Zambello, best known for her opera productions, directs the musical.

That leaves one other musical before the end of the year - one being a limited return engagement of "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" Last season, the show was a box-office bonanza, pulling down large grosses with 12 performances each week during the prime holiday period. This year, some weeks will have 15 performances.

The first new play of the season (opening Thursday) is "Mauritius," Theresa Rebeck's look at two half sisters battling over their departed mother's rare stamp collection. Alison

Pill and Katie Finneran portray the squabbling siblings, with F.Murray Abraham, Dylan Baker and Bobby Cannavale as a trio of questionable characters, each vying to sell the philatelic treasure.

Tom Stoppard took home a best-play Tony Award last season for "The Coast of Utopia," his three-part epic about 19th century Russian intellectuals. His latest effort, "Rock 'n' Roll," is a bit more current.

The play, which stars Rufus Sewell, Sinéad Cusack and Brian Cox, takes place from 1968 to 1990. It juxtaposes events in Czechoslovakia during the Soviet occupation with the lives and loves of three generations of an academic family in Cambridge, England.

Before "The West Wing" and "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," Aaron Sorkin wrote "A Few Good Men," which was a Broadway hit in 1989 and a 1992 movie starring Tom Cruise. Now Sorkin is returning to the Music Box Theatre, the same house where "A Few Good Men" played, with "The Farnsworth Invention," a drama about the birth of television.

The play deals with the battle between a young inventor, Philo T. Farnsworth, and David Sarnoff, head of the Radio Corporation of America. Hank Azaria will play Sarnoff and Jimmi Simpson his youthful competitor. Des McAnuff directs.

From the Emerald Isle

"The Seafarer" by Irish playwright Conor McPherson was a big hit last year for England's National Theatre. Now several members of its London cast, including Conleth Hill and Jim Norton, will be in the Broadway company. Also in the cast are David Morse, Ciarán Hinds and Ritchie Coster.

Tracy Letts is an actor, director and playwright. But it's as a playwright that he will make his Broadway debut. The drama is called "August: Osage County," and the production is coming pretty much intact from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company. The play, which got strong notices in Chicago, concerns a venomous mother and her three daughters.

Mark Twain wrote a lot of plays, most of them not very good, according to Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a Stanford University English professor and Twain scholar. It was Fishkin who rediscovered one