As of today, there may be precisely no plays at all running on Broadway; but by the year’s end, a dozen of them will open. As Variety succinctly puts it, “reports of the death of the Broadway play may have been exaggerated.” And just as significantly: “In both number and diversity, the lineup clearly overshadows the tuner slate: just three new musicals before the holidays.”
But the difference is that whereas musicals consider their future – at least in theory – as open-ended (and two of those three musicals are Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein and Disney’s The Little Mermaid, so that is precisely what they are hoping for), every play arrives there as a limited season. So although more plays are opening than musicals, it is still the musicals that will dominate in the long run. The same thing happens here in London: as Richard Pulford showed me and I previously blogged about here, taken across the entirety of 2006, and excluding the National, Donmar and Royal Court, if you wanted to see a musical last year you had 34 titles to choose from, whereas if you wanted to see a play you had 63. Yet despite this, the number of musicals playing against plays is skewed in favours of musicals nowadays. But at least plays are indeed being done.
Of the 12 ahead on Broadway, several of them, inevitably, are either in the not-for-profit sector (Roundabout, Lincoln Center Theatre and Manhattan Theatre Club, all of whom have a significant Broadway presence nowadays) or commercial transfers from London (the Royal Court’s Rock ‘n’ Roll and the National’s The Seafarer). Then there are the star revivals, including a Kevin Kline Cyrano de Bergerac and a new production of Pinter’s The Homecoming (with Britain’s own Ian McShane and Eve Best). But there are also a number of new plays, too, with commercial transfers from Chicago for Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, the arrival of Aaron Sorkin’s The Farnsworth Invention (workshopped earlier this year at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse), and a previously-unproduced Mark Twain play, Is He Dead?, from 1898. Add in Manhattan Theatre Club’s production of Theresa Rebeck’s Mauritius, and that’s four new plays this side of Christmas.
By contrast, as Matt Wolf pointed out in a column in The Observer yesterday, we may have lots of plays ahead in London, too, “but where, oh where, is the new play? Whereas last autumn at least had the commercial transfers of Rock ‘n’ Roll and Frost/Nixon to set pulses racing, this season is offering retreads, however fresh, of familiar territory: even All About My Mother, like Elling before it, comes to us already a cinema brand name.” (I wonder just how much of a brand name Elling – an obscure Norwegian 2001 Best Foreign film Oscar nominee – actually is, but we’ll let that pass).
As Matt continues, “Not for the first time, one is reminded of the large-scale, commercially viable new play as an endangered species, which is another way of saying that you can’t rely on Alan Bennett and Tom Stoppard to keep theatre afloat every year.” And he concludes, “Amid a glittering classical parade and the usual pile-up of musicals (one of which is in fact called Parade) exists a black hole into which new work seems to have plummeted: a theatre scene not so much All About My Mother as it is about a climate of new writing in terminal decline.”
I’m not sure we should be quite so gloomy just yet: though its true that even the Royal Court – with classics by Ionesco and Max Frisch ahead — and the National with Coward and Shakespeare on its agenda, plus the Almeida reviving first Clifford Odets, then Caryl Churchill – new plays are thin on the ground, there are other ways of working, too. The National are also bringing Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse to the stage, while Punchdrunk are colonising BAC next to adapt Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death for its latest indoor promenade performance.
Theatrical storytelling comes in lots of different shapes and forms, and perhaps we shouldn’t get too hung up about insisting that it comes only from playwrights for now. Playwrights work at their own pace; there’s no need to demand that they work to order. And the West End, National and Royal Court are not the only place to find them, in any case; let’s not forget that this week Shakespeare’s Globe has a new play, Eric Schlosser’s We the People, opening; while the Bush Theatre, as usual, has a full slate of new plays ahead, including David Watson’s Flight Path beginning next week, and a new Neil LaBute double-bill in January, amongst much else.
