Wolverine and James Bond on stage together, with no one else, for an hour and a half—speaking in Chicago accents. This is the formula for A Steady Rain, starring Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig as gruff cops working the crime beat in Chicago’s slums. Jackman’s character, Denny, pays off prostitutes to keep them out of pimps’ hands (and takes his interactions with the street’s women beyond the professional). Craig plays his good-hearted Irish partner, Joey, who longs for Denny’s cozy nuclear family and comforts. If there’s one impressive thing about the show, it’s the memorization; Keith Huff’s play unfolds quickly, like a detective novel-meets-soap opera, and both Craig and Jackman yammer away in dialects without stopping for over 90 minutes. (There is no intermission.) The pair are so focused on volleying their lines that any interruptions can be disastrous—observe this video of Jackman responding with little humor to an audience member’s rogue cellphone ringer. Though the play has been sold out every night (marquee names have their perks) and Craig will be lauded for a solid Broadway debut (Jackman’s been all over the stage already, winning Tonys, hosting them, etc.), the real success story of A Steady Rain is Huff’s. The playwright wrote the noir-ish script in two weeks in 2005 while he was working a day job at a medical Web site in Chicago—he has since sold the rights to Hollywood for more than $1 million and is in talks for film and television projects.
Greg Williams
Another Chicago playwriting superstar, Tracy Letts, brings his second play to Broadway this season. (He previously won a Tony and a Pulitzer for the Southern Gothic family drama, August: Osage County. Superior Donuts is a far less ambitious play than August—which featured a huge cast and a three-story set—but it is just as charming. Spinal Tap’s Michael McKean plays Aurthur P., the owner of a crumbling Polish donut shop on Chicago’s north side that has been in his family for several generations. He is depressed and haunted by his past (he was a draft dodger and a neglectful father), but gets a jolt of inspiration when Franco Wicks, a young local played by the fantastic Jon Michael Hill, comes to work at Superior Donuts, bringing with him whimsical ideas like an open-mic night and a more nutritious donut recipe. Superior Donuts does have dark moments, though its best lines are comic; and while it does not have the heft of Letts’ Pulitzer winner, it is still one of the brighter spots of this Broadway season.
Michael Brosilow
Though not technically on Broadway this season, we have to note Nora and Delia Ephron’s Love, Loss, and What I Wore (based on the book by Ilene Beckerman) for bringing star power to Off-Broadway’s Westside Theater. The sisters Ephron have described the show as “The Vagina Monologues without the vaginas”—notable women talk about what they were wearing during watershed life moments. Confirmed to tell sartorial musings are The Daily Show’s Samantha Bee, Rosie O’Donnell, Rita Wilson, Kristin Chenoweth, and Tyne Daly. It’s the acting version of ladies who lunch.
Michel Spingler / AP Photo; Damian Dovarganes / AP Photo
Star Wars princess Carrie Fisher stormed through Hollywood the hard way; alcoholism, addictions, breakups, breakdowns, depression, mental illness—all the trappings of an L.A. casualty. But at least she has a sense of humor about it. The actress wrote about her addictions in her memoir Wishful Drinking last year, and now brings her open wounds to Broadway, where she will spill candidly about her strange upbringing. Anyone with Debbie Reynolds as a mother and Elizabeth Taylor as a stepmother is bound to have stories, but Carrie Fisher really has them, and she tells them with a wry, self-aware tone that is more alluring than offputting. As New York magazine’s Amy Larocca, who scored a great interview with Fisher, writes, “her musings operate on a higher plane than Courtney Love's tweets or Kanye West's blog posts." Amen to that.
Walter McBride / Retna Ltd.
Winning the award for most-promising-young-playwright to hit a big theater this season is
Broke-ology, by 30-year-old Nathan Louis Jackson. Jackson has had an incredible trajectory—he was an unknown from Kansas State University, but was
accepted into the ranks of Juilliard, then the Williamstown Festival, and then Lincoln Center in only a few years. His recession-friendly debut follows an African-American family in Kansas City struggling with financial worry—the father has multiple sclerosis; one brother is burdened by a baby and a restaurant job; and the other wants to escape. Jackson’s work has already drawn comparison to Arthur Miller and other family dramatists of the 1950s, though with a decidedly modern—and multi-racial—take.
When a big film star comes to Broadway, it is often considered “stunt casting”—trying to fill the seats rather than doing the play justice. But Jude Law’s turn as Hamlet might trump the trend. If the London reviews from the show’s run at the Donmar Warehouse are any indication, Law is a hit as the Dane. The Guardian’s Michael Billington wrote, “Law's Hamlet has the right inwardness and self-awareness. People who come to patronize him as a movie star essaying the great Dane will be in for a shock,” while The Independent’s Kate Bassett notes, “A feverish energy seems to surge from [Law’s] fingertips as he delivers his soliloquies direct to the audience. These are startlingly intimate lectures, given on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” It will be impossible to get a ticket to see Law recite the Bard’s words, but if you are one of the chosen few, all signs point to being in for a treat.
Johan Persson
David Mamet seems to have a show—or two—on Broadway every season—last year it was American Buffalo and Speed-the-Plow (complete with Jeremy Piven’s mercury poisoning debacle), and this year, he has both a revival, Oleanna, and a new play, Race. The former opens first, with Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles starring, and Doug Hughes ( Mauritius, Inherit the Wind, Doubt) directing. Though Pullman is a Broadway vet, the 28-year-old Stiles makes her debut in the play about the sexual politics between a university professor and one of his students. Stiles has starred in Oleanna before—in London in 2004 with Aaron Eckhart, and earlier this year with Pullman in L.A. The New York transfer will be her biggest stage effort yet.
Bye Bye Birdie came back into the cultural conversation this fall even before the Broadway production hit—Matthew Weiner opened an episode of his wildly popular Mad Men with a video of Ann-Margret singing the title song. Now, for the first time in nearly 50 years, Birdie is back on the New York stage. The musical is about rock-star heartthrob Conrad Birdie (modeled on both Elvis and Conway Twitty), who is drafted into the Army in 1958 and attempts a publicity stunt. This version stars John Stamos as dealmaking music agent Albert Peterson, and Gina Gershon as his secretary and sidekick, Rose Alvarez. Rounding out the cast are Broadway regulars Bill Irwin and Jayne Houdyshell, and newcomer Nolan Gerard Funk (how’s that for a name?) as the hip-swiveling crooner.
Joan Marcus
Another musical vaguely referencing Elvis, Memphis, debuts in New York after a sold-out run at California’s La Jolla Playhouse. The new musical, with music from David Bryan (a founding member of Bon Jovi), follows, according to Broadway Buzz, “Huey Calhoon, a young, white radio disc jockey growing up in Memphis, Tennessee in the 1950s. Fueled by the music he hears in the black bars on Beale Street.” You see where this is going? Most of the cast members are unknowns, but star Chad Kimball has a good chance of breaking out with his white-boy bluesy voice (see a video of Kimball singing here). If anything, Memphis should provide a good alternative for those tourists who can’t score tickets to Jersey Boys.
Sienna Miller and Jude Law broke up in 2006, but they are reunited in New York this year—or at least they will both be starring on Broadway blocks from each other. Miller stars with Jonny Lee Miller (no relation) in Patrick Marber’s 2003 play about a rich twentysomething and her servants (her valet and cook, to be exact), lolling about a huge country house outside of London. The reimagining of August Strindberg’s 19th-century work, Miss Julie, the play is full of incisive British wit. But will American audiences get it? And does that even matter when Sienna Miller is on the marquee?
Andrew H. Walker / Getty Images
The two plays taken together make up “ The Neil Simon Plays,” two parts of Simon’s famed semi-autobiographical Brooklyn trilogy ( Biloxi Blues is left out this time) opening one after the other on Broadway. Both share the same cast and director (David Cromer, most recently responsible for the very successful Off-Broadway staging of Our Town in NYC), and tell the coming of age of Eugene Morris Jerome, who grows up in a charmingly dysfunctional Brooklyn household. Though Roseanne’s Laurie Metcalf and Broadway vet Jessica Hecht will appear in both shows, the lead role of Eugene (who must age between the two) is split. Playing the younger version is teen Noah Robbins, and as the Broadway Bound Eugene, actor Josh Grisetti makes his Broadway debut (and has posted an adorably nerdy vlog about rehearsals on his Web site).
Joan Marcus
The Neil Simon Plays happen at the Nederlander Theater, but over at the Neil Simon Theater (confused yet?) there’s a revival of Ragtime, a transfer from a sold-out run at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. Based on an E.L. Doctorow novel, Ragtime is turn-of-the-century candy, revolving around three classic American characters (a frustrated rich wife, a striving Jewish immigrant, a struggling Harlem musician). The cast is a motley mix of Broadway regulars and newcomers (sadly, there is no Audra MacDonald, who won a Tony for Ragtime when she was only 28 in 1998), but the music is catchy enough to transcend a cast list with no bold-faced names.
Joan Marcus
Thirty-five-year-old playwright Sarah Ruhl is one of the leading young women of letters in the theater community (her play, The Clean House, which debuted when she was only 30, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist), and her most recent work, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, premiered Off-Broadway in New York with Mary Louise Parker as the star. Now, she finally makes her Broadway debut with In the Next Room (the vibrator play), which is about basically what it sounds like—the invention of the vibrator. The play is set in late 1800s New York, when a woman is treated for psychological illness with a newfangled machine that induces “paroxysm” (aka, le petit mort); Ruhl’s premise seems funny, but as The New York times notes, “Her real subject is the fundamental absence of sympathy and understanding between women and the men whose rules they had to live by for so long, and the suspicion and fear surrounding female sexuality and even female fertility.”
Joseph Marzullo, Wenn / Newscom
Those familiar with the music of Nigerian Afropop all-star Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (or simply, Fela) know how explosive it is—and how ripe the music is for a singing and dancing Broadway extravaganza. Fela! is just that, and with direction and choreography by the legendary Bill T. Jones and arrangements by Brooklyn-collective Antibalas, the show is set to be a joyous celebration of African (and African-American) culture. Actor/activist/performance artist Sahr Ngaujah of Sierra Leone stars as Fela—a great profile of Ngaujah and his study of all things Kuti can be found here.
Walter McBride / Retna Ltd.
David Mamet’s newest play has been kept top secret (with the exception of a script leak by the New York Post’s Michael Riedel), and even then few details are known. What we do know is that the show deals heavily with issues relating to its title, and that James Spader, David Alan Grier, and Kerry Washington will star. We also know that there will be a lot of swearing, swagger, and crackly verbal fireworks.
AP Photo
Just in time for holiday tourists, Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music gets a Broadway revival. One of Sondheim’s more obscure titles, ALNM is set in a weekend country house in Sweden at the turn of the century—the show’s most famous song is “Send in the Clowns,” sung by the fading actress, Desiree. Embodying Desiree in the revival will be Catherine Zeta-Jones ( Chicago taught us all that she can sing), and acting alongside her will be Angela Lansbury, who is still trucking at 83 years old. Lansbury just won a Tony this year for Blithe Spirit, and shows no signs of slowing down. The 2009 season comes to an end with one of Broadway’s grand dames—just like it should.
Gary Lewis / Retna Ltd.
