'Death of a Salesman' and more spring shows on Broadway
Actors Kevin Anderson, left, Brian Dennehy, center, and Ted Koch perform in the Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman." Dennehy, Anderson and the play were nominated for 1999 Tony Awards. Credit: AP
Broadway's fall season will be remembered for its extraordinary number of good new plays and its weak new musicals. This spring, we again have a remarkable assortment of new plays, but more new musicals than we expected. Why? Producers hustled after noticing the season was so lame that "Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark" could actually win the Tony for best musical.
We'll have 18 openings in the six crazy weeks between the March 15 revival of "Death of a Salesman" and the April 26 cutoff for Tony eligibility. The annual crush includes many solid offerings, though few as cutting-edge as in recent seasons.
Questions may be answered. Is Philip Seymour Hoffman too young to play the profoundly weary Willy Loman in "Salesman"? Is Blair Underwood too old to be the ravenous young Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire"? Are two revivals by the young Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice ("Jesus Christ Superstar," "Evita") too many? What about two new shows with music by Alan Menken ("Newsies," "Leap of Faith")? And, while we're asking impertinent questions, how many musical adaptations of movies are way too many?
Here is the rest of Broadway, 2011-12, in chronological order.
And, though this opens too late for Tony eligibility, next season officially begins previews May 18 with Jim Parsons ("The Big Bang Theory") in "Harvey," the comedy classic about a man who befriends a 6-foot-tall mythological rabbit. Another opening, another show, another giant bunny.
