Walking down West 45th Street from Broadway, what do you see? Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer is at the Booth; Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll is at the Bernard Jacobs (which I still prefer to call the Royale); Aaron Sorkin’s The Farnsworth Invention is at the Music Box; and Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County is at the Imperial. There’s also A Chorus Line (at the Schoenfeld, or Plymouth as I again prefer to remember it) and Avenue Q (at the Golden). Real new plays (two originated in London, two from American writers) are outnumbering the musicals four to two along this particular stretch of hallowed Broadway turf.
And walking up Shaftesbury Avenue, by contrast, what do we find? The revival of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret is now in its 2nd year at the Lyric; next door at the Apollo is the vanity (or maybe insanity) filler show An Audience with the Mafia; then there’s the Gielgud, currently hosting a five-week season of G&S operetta from the Carl Rosa Opera Company; and then the Queen’s has Les Miserables. Time was that each of these four houses would typically host some of the most prestigious plays in town.
Of course you need to take a broader picture than just those two streets in each city, and another snapshot taken in a few weeks time could yield an entirely different picture.
In London, the Avenue gets two new play productions with The Vortex opening at the Apollo next month, and Yasmina Reza’s latest God of Carnage coming to the Gielgud in March; while on Broadway, Rock ‘n’ Roll and The Seafarer both reach the end of their seasons on March 9 and March 30 respectively (and The Farnsworth Invention, with attendances last week hovering just above 60%, may not be around as long as those).
But it is still a striking fact that right now it isn’t just on 45th Street that new plays have come back; they are everywhere right now on Broadway, and seeing seven shows this week here, as I have scheduled, more than half of them are of plays rather than musicals. Though the spring season promises some more musicals on the horizon, there are also a slew of more plays due, too, from an all-black Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (at the Broadhurst next month) to revivals of Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, both in April.
But right now the play that it will take a lot to beat is August: Osage County, which I saw last night — and is everything, for once, it has been cracked up to be: an instant modern American classic in the fabled family drama tradition of Broadway, but given a dark and dysfunctional spin that would make its characters not seem out of place in Jerry Springer – the Opera that I saw the night befoe.
Having now chalked up August, tonight I will see David Mamet’s new play, November; at this rate, Broadway needs only revivals of Ring Lardner and George S Kaufman’s June Moon and Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July, and outings for a pair of John Godber plays, April in Paris and September in the Rain, to carry on the calendar theme. I’ve been looking for other candidates, and January could be represented by three choices: January Thaw, Mrs January and Mr X or Night of January 16. March of the Falsettos might work for March; May has May Blossom or May Day in Town; and October has First Monday in October. I am therefore only stumped with February and December…. Suggestions on a postcard, please (or use the reply form below!)
There is a play about the Bronte sisters called WILD DECEMBERS by Clemence Dane.
MARCH OF THE FALSETTOS is really cheating since it doesn't refer to the month.So I would suggest replacing it with THE IDES OF MARCH by Thornton Wilder.
Still working on February.
No specific, direct comment really except to say that it will lost on few members of the entertainment/psychotherapy field that Mr Shenton hurls himself at the Big Apple as a film about a big out-of-control beast from another world rampaging through NYC retains Number 1 status at the box office. As a model of discretion, I shall not be commenting.