"Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state."
-- George Eliot
The Best Plays and Musicals to See This Fall
4 SEPTEMBER 2016 VOGUE ADAM GREEN
... Aubergine
Playwrights Horizons is first out of the gate—previews began August 20—with this new play by Julia Cho (BFE), a meditation on food, cooking, and the ties that bind.
The Cherry Orchard
I’m always happy to leave the theater both exhilarated and depressed by Chekhov’s singular vision of life’s comedy and tragedy, but I’m particularly keen about this production for two reasons: The new translation by Stephen Karam, who won a 2016 Tony for his luminous family drama The Humans; and the return to Broadway of the sublime Diane Lane as the imperious, deluded Madame Ranevskaya, a part played by Meryl Streep in a 1977 production that also featured a 12-year-old Lane.
The Public Theater’s Fall Season
In recent years, pretty much everything the Public has put on has been worth seeing, and its fall slate is no exception. It kicks off with What Did You Expect?, the second in Richard Nelson’s trilogy The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family. And it goes on to include the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lynn Nottage’s (Ruined) new play, Sweat; a revival of David Hare’s Plenty, directed by David Leveaux and starring Rachel Weisz; and Tiny Beautiful Things, based on Cheryl Strayed’s beloved “Dear Sugar” columns, adapted by and starring Nia Vardalos and directed by Hamilton’s Thomas Kail.
The Front Page
Stop the press! Print journalism may be going the way of all ink, but Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s fast, furious, and funny 1928 love letter to the tabloid newspaper game remains a surefire crowd-pleaser, especially with an all-star cast that includes Nathan Lane, John Slattery, John Goodman, Jefferson Mays, Holland Taylor, and Robert Morse.
Verso
In high school, I hung around Tannen’s magic shop and earned money by performing tricks at kids’ birthday parties. Once a magic nerd, always a magic nerd, so it’s no surprise that I’m excited for this new show by card wizard Helder Guimarães, whose 2014 collaboration with Derek DelGaudio, Nothing to Hide, was nothing short of mind-blowing.
The Encounter
Also mind-blowing, I hear, is this solo show directed by and starring Simon McBurney, the genius behind the English theater company Complicite, which uses cutting-edge audio technology—and individual headsets for each audience member—to tell the story of National Geographic photojournalist Loren McIntyre’s time among a tribe in the Amazon.
Heisenberg
Mary-Louise Parker made her Broadway debut in 1990’s Prelude to a Kiss, in which the plot was set in motion when an older man kissed her character at a wedding. Here, in Simon Stephens’s two-hander, Parker’s character is the one who kisses an older man (Denis Arndt), sending his life spinning into the delirious chaos that is romantic love.
Oh, Hello on Broadway
Last winter, when Nick Kroll and John Mulaney brought their cranky, clueless, off-color 70-something Upper West Side alter egos, Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland, to an Off-Broadway theater, the limited run sold out in a matter of hours. Now, the comic duo is coming to Broadway in an inspired evening of surreal nonsense that is, I promise, the funniest thing you will see this season.
Falsettos
William Finn and James Lapine’s funny, spiky, and heartbreaking 1992 Tony-winning musical, about a neurotic married man who comes out as gay at the height of the AIDS crisis, returns to Broadway with a fantastic cast led by Andrew Rannells and Christian Borle.
Sell/Buy/Date
The great Sarah Jones, who won a 2006 Tony for her dazzlingly multicultural one-woman show Bridge and Tunnel, returns to Broadway as more than a dozen characters in Sell/Buy/Date, a hilarious and harrowing look at the sex industry.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Christopher Hampton’s deliciously nasty 1985 adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’s 18th-century novel about sex as blood sport in the ancien régime still has the power to wound (and entertain) in Josie Rourke’s new production from London’s Donmar Warehouse, starring the peerless Janet McTeer as the Marquise de Merteuil, an aristocratic “virtuoso of deceit,” who squares off against Liev Schreiber’s sex-addicted Vicomte de Valmont, and in the process destroys him and everyone else in their orbit.
Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812
After causing a stir at Ars Nova in 2012 and at various site-specific locations thereafter, Dave Malloy’s nifty rock-musical adaptation of a slice of Tolstoy’s War and Peace comes to Broadway. And while the more traditional setting may mean that it won’t feature tableside blinis and vodka shots this time around, it will have a new leading man and lady in pop superstar Josh Groban and rising ingenue Denée Benton.
Mouse
The fantastically off-kilter comic monologuist Daniel Kitson, whose Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church and It’s Always Right Now, Until It’s Later were hits at St. Ann’s Warehouse a few seasons ago, returns to theater, in its new Dumbo home, with his latest, which he describes as “an implausible story” about a mouse and a phone call.
Dear Evan Hansen
A hit at the Second Stage theater last season, this musical about a misfit teen with crippling social anxiety who tells a compassionate lie that spins out of control is coming to Broadway. Funny, tender, and beautifully observed, it features a gorgeous rock-pop score by the young It songwriting team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Dogfight) and a thrilling, star-making performance by Ben Platt (The Book of Mormon; the Pitch Perfect films) as the overwrought adolescent of the title. Read More
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