17 new plays set to revitalize Broadway
David Leonard as Miss Trunchbull in "Matilda." Credit: Handout
Not to be a downer at the start of a new year. But doesn't it seem a bit ominous that by the time the splendid revival of "Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" closes its limited run Feb. 24, there will be exactly two productions -- "Annie" and "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" -- left from the fall season?
To be fair, a couple of holiday shows, "A Christmas Story" and "Elf," shouldn't count in our tally. And one strictly limited engagement, let's call it "Al Pacino's Glengarry Glen Ross," never intended to run beyond Jan. 20.
But that still leaves just two holdovers from the 16 plays that opened since September. This is bad -- except for the part about leaving space for 17 more for the winter/spring. Among those are more promising new musicals than just passed our way -- including the incoming British blockbuster, "Matilda," and "Kinky Boots," based on the 2005 film, with score by Cyndi Lauper and book by Harvey Fierstein. (Bet rehearsals are fun.)
The season continues the pretty wonderful tilt in the direction of new American plays. Among them are two -- "The Assembled Parties" and an adaptation of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" -- by Richard Greenberg, who has been absent from the New York stage for far too long.
What? You say you want stars? How about Tom Hanks in Nora Ephron's "Lucky Guy"? Scarlett Johansson in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"? Alec Baldwin and Shia LaBeouf in a revival of Lyle Kessler's raucous "Orphans"? Nathan Lane in Douglas Carter Beane's "The Nance," named after the stereotypical comic homosexual '30s burlesque? Bobby Cannavale in "The Big Knife"? And if Cannavale doesn't seem like a big star to you, you haven't been paying attention.
Briefly, in chronological order, we can look forward to this kind of spring:
