A final flurry in New York….

Plays and musicals I remember first time around are now coming back in revival: on Friday, for instance, I saw the new production of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, a play that had just premiered shortly before my first-ever trip to New York back in the summer of 1983, and is now back 26 years later in a splendid new production by director David Cromer that aches with feeling, heart and hurt. I’d also seen its British premiere at the National Theatre back in 1986 in a different Michael Rudman production (that subsequently transferred to the Aldwych).

But seeing it back on its home territory, with authentically American actors inhabiting it fully, it feels like the most substantial play on Broadway. And it’s high time for a serious reappraisal of its legendary playwright, now 82, too: as a profile in the current issue of New York magazine by David Edelstein puts it, “Bashing Neil Simon has been almost de rigueur for highbrow critics since the playwright had his first hits in the early sixties. But now that he’s 82 and in iffy health, and a major revival of two of his most celebrated works—the first and third parts of the Brighton Beach trilogy, Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound—is about to open, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic for the popular theater he once dominated. For better and worse, Simon’s plays—in their complacency, insularity, and, yes, hilarity—connected with their audience on a level that theater almost never does anymore.”

Actually, another returning piece of popular theatre establishes an extraordinary connection with its audience, too: Ragtime, that I saw the original production of back in 1998, is back on Broadway in a new production that has arrived there via Washington DC’s Kennedy Center. Attending a preview on Sunday evening, with an audience that felt as if it was welcoming the show home like a one-off concert staging, I felt like I was part of the reception committee.

The show famously lost the Tony Award for Best New Musical to Disney’s The Lion King first time around (though it won the awards for Best Original Musical Score and Best Book): The Lion King is still going strong all these years later (though in a different theatre nowadays to the one it opened in), but if there’s any justice in the world, this revival must be a shoe-in for the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical this time around.

There was déjà vu to two more plays I also saw over the weekend. In the case of Patrick Marber’s version of After Miss Julie, that Roundabout Theatre Company have newly brought to the American Airlines Theatre (where it opened officially last Thursday), I had seen it previously, of course, in the Donmar’s premiere in 2003. And if some of the studio intensity of that production was inevitably lost (and so was Kelly Reilly’s stunning turn as Miss Julie), the two Miller’s here - Sienna and Jonny Lee (no relation) - gave it star wattage that burnt brightly and surprisingly dangerously, too. (Sienna, American but raised in London, also had a perfect English accent; unfortunately duff notes were sounded in this department by the third party in the triumvirate, Marin Ireland as maid Christine, whose accent wandered from Billy Elliot land to the country that she shares her surname with).

It’s also another example in the Donmar Warehouse’s growing influence on the American stage, where its productions of Hamlet (starring Jude Law) and Jason Robert Brown’s Parade are respectively now running at Broadway’s Broadhurst Theatre (to December 6) and at LA’s Ahmanson (to November 15). In a feature in Sunday’s New York Times, Charles Isherwood referred to the Donmar as becoming, aside from the National, “the most influential and productive theater in London”, and “a busy theatrical generator of first-class productions in London and New York”. To that list of course should be added the Phyllida Lloyd production of Mary Stuart that also transferred to Broadway earlier this year, with Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter reprising their amazing performances as the queens of Scotland and England respectively.

There was also a genuine revelation to seeing a sparkling revival of the classic 1927 Broadway comedy The Royal Family — originally premiered, coincidentally, at the Selwyn Theatre that is now the aforementioned American Airlines, but now being revived under the auspices of Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J Friedman Theatre a few blocks away; and, to further the theatrical set of coincidences, Harriet Walter was also at the matinee I saw on Sunday afternoon!

A few years ago Peter Hall directed a misfiring version of the Edna Ferber and George S Kaufman comedy The Royal Family at the Haymarket; but seeing it with American actors this time around was to see a reinvigorated classic that is lovingly for and about the theatre; “there’s no people like show people”, goes the Irving Berlin lyric in Annie Get Your Gun, and this play, which long predates it, could have been written expressly to prove it. But there are also no actors like American actors to give it the brio and shine it requires.

The big autumn buzz, of course, was all about two major male movie stars appearing in a play together: Wolverine and James Bond, or Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig. Regular London theatregoers have seen them both over the years - the former in Oklahoma! at the National, the latter in Angels in America at the National and Caryl Churchill’s A Number at the Royal Court - but together they are lighting up a dark little play A Steady Rain in a seriously compelling way. But much the most entertaining part of the evening was when the actors came off script for the curtain calls to lead an auction for the annual Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids fundraising campaign, and offered up their underwear from that evening’s performance.

Not, I hasten to add, for their underpants, alas, but their undershirts. Though they didn’t promise to take them off in front of whoever bought them, bidding still reached $5000 - at which point the two people competing to buy the pair agreed to split the win and give $5000 for one shirt each! That’s some price to pay for a sweaty piece of movie star DNA; but then Hugh Jackman has proved a past master at this kind of fundraising. When he was last on Broadway in 2004 in The Boy From Oz, the two annual fundraisers saw the company raise over $1m in two six week fundraising periods; as reported here at the time, “an unprecedented $632,998” was raised between October 28 and December 7 2003, then a further $440,524 from March 9 to April 15, 2004.

Jackman does it with charm, of course, but also knows that people want a piece of him and will pay to get it. That, after all, is what they’re doing every night as it is, shelling out up to $376.50 for premium seats on Friday and Saturday evenings. No wonder the show is grossing record sums every week.

And on Saturday evening, Jackman added to the fun by pointing out what an exciting performance we’d just seen: “we managed to get through an entire performance without a cellphone ringing”, he quipped. Just a few weeks ago, of course, he famously stopped a performance and suggested to the person whose phone was ringing, “Do you want to get that? You want to get it? Grab it. I don’t care.”