All the World’s a Stage
Julianne Moore on her role in David Hare’s international-studies play The Vertical Hour—and how she almost skipped her return to Broadway.
• The Vertical Hour, By David Hare; Music Box Theatre; opens November 30.
Twyla’s in the Basement, Mixing Up the Medicine
Tharp heavily remade Movin’ Out before its Broadway opening and will surely do the same here.
• The Times They Are A-Changin’, Conceived and directed by Twyla Tharp; music and lyrics by Bob Dylan; Brooks Atkinson Theatre; opens October 26.
The Ten-Percent Solution
This fall’s Broadway transfer of Douglas Carter Beane’s The Little Dog Laughed suggests a new subgenre: the Agent Morality Play.
• The Little Dog Laughed, By Douglas Carter Beane; Cort Theatre; opens November 13.
• Howard Katz, By Patrick Marber; Laura Pels Theatre; opens February 2007.
A Berlitz Guide to BAM
BAM, that European colony in Brooklyn, set a new standard last year with 4.48 Psychose, a minimally subtitled French edition of an already cryptic English play.
Channeling the Grey Ghosts
Christine Ebersole chats about—and with—Little Edie Beale.
• Grey Gardens, By Doug Wright, Scott Frankel, and Michael Korie; Walter Kerr Theatre; opens November 2.
Company’s Coming
John Doyle made waves when he gave Patti LuPone a tuba for Sweeney Todd. Will it work for “The Ladies Who Lunch”?
• Company, By Stephen Sondheim and George Furth; Barrymore Theatre; opens November 29.
But Is the Cast Album on Vinyl?
Making a Broadway musical from Nick Hornby’s lovely novel High Fidelity, about a lovelorn indie-record-store snob, sounds dubious.
• High Fidelity, Imperial Theater; opens December 7.
Marathon Man
Brace yourself, Stoppard fans: The master brings a nine-hour drama to Lincoln Center.
• The Coast of Utopia, By Tom Stoppard; Lincoln Center Theater; Part one opens November 5.
The Best of the Rest
The return of Nathan Lane, Eve Ensler, A Chorus Line, and more.
The Best of the Rest
The return of Nathan Lane, Eve Ensler, A Chorus Line, and more.
{BROADWAY}
Jay Johnson: The Two and Only!
In a one-man, many-dummy show, the veteran ventriloquist (and alumnus of the sitcom Soap) takes out his props in midtown, transferring from the Atlantic.
• September 28.
A Chorus Line
The Marvin Hamlisch–scored backstage musical “dedicated to anyone who has ever danced in a chorus,” which won nine Tonys and a Pulitzer in 1976 and ran for almost fifteen years, is revived with minimal changes in script and staging.
• October 5.
Heartbreak House
Top-shelf actors in a revival of George Bernard Shaw’s comedy of errors—its fifth Broadway appearance since opening in 1920—include Philip Bosco, Swoosie Kurtz, Byron Jennings, and Lily Rabe.
• October 11.
Losing Louie
The much-employed Jerry Zaks directs Simon Mendes da Costa’s new play, whose two-generations-in-one-house conceit resembles that of Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain.
• October 12.
Butley
Broadway finds a new vehicle for Nathan Lane, playing a beleaguered professor juggling a wife and mistress in this revival of Simon Gray’s seventies comedy, for which Alan Bates won both a Tony and a Drama Desk Award.
• October 25.
Les Misérables
Roll out the fog machines! Jean Valjean is back, as another former Broadway mainstay returns—three years after closing—for a six-month run with Gary Beach and Daphne Rubin-Vega in starring roles.
• November 9.
Mary Poppins
Disney’s latest adaptation, directed by Richard Eyre with Matthew Bourne co-choreographing, transfers from London, where critics raved that it was better, darker, and more sophisticated than the movie.
• November 16.
Spring Awakening
The Duncan Sheik–scored rock adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Expressionist play, about high-schoolers fatally doomed by their repressed sexuality, makes a surprise leap to Broadway—and snags big-time director Michael Mayer—after a run at the Atlantic.
• November 17.
{OFF BROADWAY}
SubUrbia
Eric Bogosian’s talky tale of slacker twentysomethings hanging out in a parking lot is revived and updated from the 1994 Gen-X version.
• September 28.
The Treatment
Dylan McDermott and Portia bring a starry gloss to the new play by Eve Ensler, the famously self-promotional activist behind The Vagina Monologues. Her new show concerns a soldier and an Army psychologist confronting issues of Abu Ghraib–style torture.
• September 12.
The Pain and the Itch
Bruce Norris’s dark satire of bourgeois familial hypocrisy and dysfunction, set during an unforgettable Thanksgiving, drew admiring reviews in its run at Chicago’s Steppenwolf—and some controversy for its use of child actors in situations implying abuse.
• September 21.
Wrecks
Ed Harris is Neil LaBute’s latest Everynastyman, playing a recently widowed car salesman who, of course, isn’t as innocent in his grief as he seems. This time, the twist is hinted at in the play’s title and the fact that the protagonists are named Ed and JoJo.
• September 26.
Birth and After Birth
A new show by the accomplished playwright Tina Howe, last seen translating and adapting Ionesco for the Atlantic, tackles adults’ absurd competitiveness over their kids at the scene of a birthday party for a manic child gone horribly awry.
• October 3.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Cynthia Nixon stars in the New Group’s adaptation of the Muriel Spark novel, about a charming Scottish schoolteacher and her students on the eve of World War II.
• October 9.
Emergence-See!
Performer-playwright Daniel Beaty, whose show has toured throughout the country, plays 40 different African-Americans reacting to a slave ship that mysteriously rises out of the Hudson.
• October 10.
My Name is Rachel Corrie
The story of an American crushed to death in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer, drawn entirely from her own writings, finally finds a local theater after the New York Theater Workshop controversially postponed it last season.
• October 15.
The Clean House
Jill Clayburgh stars in Sarah Ruhl’s Pulitzer-nominated dramedy about a doctor whose maid hates cleaning but loves writing jokes.
• October 30.
Evil Dead: The Musical
Believe it or not, this adaptation of Sam Raimi’s cult horror flick, featuring such numbers as “All the Men in My Life Keep Getting Killed by Candarian Demons,” is co-directed by three-time Tony winner Hinton Battle.
• November 1.
Regrets Only
A new farce from old hand Paul Rudnick covers a momentous night in the life of a rich attorney, his socialite wife, and their fabulous fashion-designer friend.
• November 14.