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Plays dominate Broadway's fall season
Despite musicals like 'Frankenstein' and 'Mermaid,' plays are autumn's hit
 Paul Kolnik / AP Tony Danza plays Max Bialystock in the Las Vegas version of Mel Brooks' hit Broadway show "The Producers". |
NEW YORK - A monster and a mermaid would seem to have the new musical market cornered on Broadway this fall, but it is plays rather than musicals that — surprisingly — are dominating the first half of the season.
"The lineup of production for the fall season should quiet anyone who would categorize Broadway as having become a theme park of mass-appeal, tourist-driven shows," says Howard Sherman, executive director of the American Theatre Wing.
There are new plays by Aaron Sorkin, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, Tracy Letts, Conor McPherson and Theresa Rebeck. Not to mention revivals by Harold Pinter, Terrence McNally, William Inge, Edmond Rostand, George Bernard Shaw and even William Shakespeare.
"Look for a heavier slate of musicals come the spring, but this fall, the play's the thing, contrary to all of the conventional wisdom about the viability of plays on Broadway," Sherman says.
Still, it's hard to ignore those two mammoth musicals, "Young Frankenstein" and "The Little Mermaid," adaptations of two well-known movie titles that are making their way to the stage.
The first is Mel Brooks' follow-up to "The Producers," one of the biggest Broadway successes of the last decade. Some of Brooks' collaborators on that megahit have joined his latest venture including director-choreographer Susan Stroman, co-book writer Thomas Meehan and actor Roger Bart, who has traded the flamboyant Carmen Ghia of "The Producers" for the role of earnest, sensitive Dr. Frederick Frankenstein in the new musical. The show opens Nov. 8 at the Hilton Theatre.
Bart's co-stars include such theater and television veterans as Megan Mullally playing Elizabeth (the Madeline Kahn role in the film), Sutton Foster as Inga, Fred Applegate as Kemp, Christopher Fitzgerald as Igor and Shuler Hensley as the top-hat-and-tails monster.
Newcomer Sierra Boggess portrays the title character in "The Little Mermaid," Disney's latest venture in transforming its animated movies into theater. The film's score by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman has been augmented with 11 new numbers by Menken and Glen Slater.
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That leaves two other musicals before the end of the year — one being a limited return engagement of "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" Last season, the show was a box-office bonanza, pulling down large grosses with 12 performances each week during the prime holiday period. This year, some weeks will have 15 performances.
The show about a green meanie (played by Patrick Page) who decides to abscond with Christmas opens Nov. 9 at the St. James Theatre for a run through Jan. 6.
Shakespeare with a Texas twang is the inspiration for "Lone Star Love," a musical loosely based on the Bard's "The Merry Wives of Windsor." Seen several years ago off-Broadway, this new version arrives Dec. 3 at the Belasco Theatre. The cast includes Randy Quaid as Col. John Falstaff as well as the Red Clay Ramblers, the esteemed musical group that plunks out the score.
The first new play of the season is "Mauritius," Theresa Rebeck's look at two half-sisters battling over their departed mother's rare stamp collection. Alison Pill and Katie Finneran portray the squabbling siblings with F. Murray Abraham, Dylan Baker and Bobby Cannavale as a trio of questionable characters, each vying to sell the philatelic treasure. The curtain rises Oct. 4 at the Biltmore Theatre for this Manhattan Theatre Club production, directed by Doug Hughes.
Tom Stoppard took home a best-play Tony Award last season for "The Coast of Utopia," his three-part epic about 19th-century European intellectuals. His latest effort, "Rock 'n' Roll," is a bit more current.
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Before "The West Wing" and "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," Aaron Sorkin wrote "A Few Good Men," which was a Broadway hit in 1989 and later a 1992 movie starring Tom Cruise. Now Sorkin is returning to the Music Box Theatre, the same house where "A Few Good Men" played, with "The Farnsworth Invention," a drama about the birth of television. It opens Nov. 14.
The play deals with the battle between a young inventor, Philo T. Farnsworth, and David Sarnoff, head of the Radio Corporation of America. Hank Azaria will play Sarnoff and Jimmi Simpson his youthful competitor. Des McAnuff directs.
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"The Seafarer," which McPherson will also direct, concerns two brothers, played by Norton and Morse, and a couple of their buddies (Coster and Hill), whose boozy card game is interrupted by the arrival of a mysterious, vaguely satanic stranger (Hinds).
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