The resurgence of plays on Broadway last autumn — in which no less than a dozen opened between October and December — may have had its mettle seriously tested by the Broadway strike that followed, but actually the plays are here to stay - even if almost all of those plays actually weren’t. Of those 12 plays that opened then (8 of which were hit by the strike; the rest, with two playing under auspices of Roundabout Theatre Company and two more respectively under the auspices of Lincoln Centre Theatre and Manhattan Theatre Club, continued to play since they operated under different contracts with the stagehands’ union), only three are still on the boards, August: Osage County (now at the Imperial, but moving to the Music Box later this month), The Homecoming at the Cort (which ends its run on April 13, to be replaced immediately by the London import, via an earlier run at Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre, of The 39 Steps) and David Mamet’s November (currently on sale to July 13).
But the amazing thing, at least for now, is that despite the fact that few must have returned their investment, Broadway is still rich in plays, and six more new ones are due to open before the mad May rush for Tony eligibility to take the place of many of the earlier plays.
That includes another two Brit imports, with Rupert Goold’s Macbeth crossing the river from BAM to the Lyceum (where I’m seeing it on Thursday, replacing the previous tenant Is He Dead?) and Matthew Warchus’s production of Boeing-Boeing (with Mark Rylance recreating his West End performance at the Longacre). There’s also Morgan Freeman in a Mike Nichols’ directed revival of Odets’ The Country Girl (which starts previews at the Jacobs tomorrow, where it has replaced Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll) and Laurence Fishburne in a new biographical one-man play Thurgood (replacing The Seafarer, which just closed last Sunday, at the Booth). And two more British-directed revivals will open at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Biltmore Theatre and the Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre respectively, with Rufus Norris directing Les Liaisons Dangereuses and James Macdonald staging Top Girls.
If all of this activity on the plays front will duly create some interesting Tony battles (and you can count on the earlier now shuttered plays to be mostly overlooked), battle has already officially commenced on the even more sought after, and fought over, musicals awards. In his column in today’s New York Post, Michael Riedel has declared that the award for Best Musical Revival is going to be a two-horse race between Gypsy that opened last Thursday, and South Pacific that opens tomorrow at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont; by a quirk of scheduling coincidence, I am seeing both today, so I’ve got a long day of old musicals ahead, but a hopefully rewarding one.
According to Riedel, Gypsy was a “pretty shaky bet”, until the critics started tossing their hats in the air last Friday (or, as Riedel puts it, “in Big Ben Brantley’s case, eating them”, referring to Brantley’s self-confessed volte-face, with his review referring to his original more muted review of the production when it was first done last summer and stating now, “that quiet crunching sound you hear is me eating my hat”).
The revival of South Pacific, which first night critics have already seen but not yet reported on, is getting good word-of-mouth; but it is being done at the subsidised, not-for-profit Lincoln Center Theatre, and whereas our Oliviers are routinely dominated by the National and other subsidised houses like the Donmar and Almeida, there are bigger tensions - and more money - at play here to factor into the Tony race. According to Riedel, “The coming showdown between Gypsy and South Pacific is going to rip open a long-simmering dispute between commercial producers and nonprofit theater companies. The commercial producers, who take big risks with their investors’ money, bitterly resent competing for Tonys against subsidized theaters. Some producers privately say they’d like to ban the nonprofits from the Tony Awards.” And Riedel suggests that the commercial producers - who between them and their touring partners represent a substantial number of the Tony voters, too - will rally around Gypsy as a result.
Interestingly, too, Riedel knocks another subsidised company production, Sunday in the Park with George, out of the running, for allegedly skimping on the orchestra; as for the fourth possible contender, Grease, Riedel wittily dismisses it “is the worst show in the history of theater and represents an unparalleled assault on Western civilization and its values. Its producer, would-be TV personality David Ian, is an orange-colored Visigoth.”
But Grease also represents a backlash against the reality TV casting idea that may have caught on in London (to Kevin Spacey’s evident displeasure) but has failed to take root here. Partly that’s because this is a bigger country, and Broadway is sadly a negligible part of the rest of the country’s frame-of-reference; but who needs a programme to cast a specific show when there’s already an iconic American one doing it for you, with American Idol creating numerous stars who then go on to Broadway fame, like Fantasia in The Color Purple last year, or Clay Aitken, currently starring in Monty Python’s Spamalot here. The same thing, of course, is also happening in London - as Andrew Lloyd Webber recently noted when he was defending reality TV casting, “We just observe with interest that Sir Trevor [Nunn] has just cast Darius from Pop Idol as Rhett Butler in his new production of Gone with the Wind. I find that very intriguing. A little baptism has happened here, I think. Of course, he claims he had never heard of Darius prior to the audition.”
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