Around Broadway

Carole King is one of the great pop songwriters of the 1960s and '70s. Now, her songs — from early novelties such as “Who Put the Bomp” to intimate, soulful compositions such as “So Far Away” and “A Natural Woman” — are on Broadway in the biographical show Beautiful: the Carole King Musical. The show, at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, stars Jessie Mueller as King, and features a book by Doug McGrath. The director is Marc Bruni.

January is traditionally a lean month for the commercial theater, with tourists leaving and Broadway offering discounts. If you need help climbing out of the winter theater doldrums, New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood suggests you consider some newly minted — as well as more experimental — works being presented in two festivals in New York.

A playwright’s art imitates a financier’s life in a work about the reverberations of corruption and public scandal in The Commons of Pensacola by actress Amanda Peet, who embarked on a new career as a playwright this past fall.

The turn of the year marks the halfway point in the New York theater season. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood runs down a partial list of some 20 new shows opening between now and the Tony Awards in June. There are some new plays, some new musicals, a revival or two and headliners ranging from Alan Cumming to Denzel Washington, Toni Collette and Marisa Tomei.

The distinctive performance artist Marina Abramović is telling her life story — and attending her own funeral — at the Park Avenue Armory. Be assured, Abramović is very much alive, but she, with the help of the singular director Robert Wilson, is looking backward from the future in The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, a theatrical event made distinct by the sensibilities of these two artists.

When it comes to the songs of Burt Bacharach, you know more than you think you do. Bacharach, best known for his collaborations with lyricist Hal David, has written in a style that is very much a hybrid of pop, jazz and his own unique touch. His songs have surprising chord progressions and even more surprising rhythmic changes and yet they’re real pop tunes — catchy and sing-along-able.

For the movies, Bacharach and David wrote the theme from “Alfie” and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” For Broadway, they wrote the score of Promises, Promises, which includes “I Say a Little Prayer for You” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” two songs that were big hits for singer Dionne Warwick. In all, Bacharach has placed 73 songs in Billboard magazine’s Top 40 music chart. We told you that you know more Bacharach than you think.

Two fabled knights are jousting on Broadway these days, and no, it’s not a revival of Camelot. The knights are Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart and they’re appearing together at the Cort Theater in two plays, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, both directed by Sean Mathias. 

Actor Jefferson Mays is only one man, but he’s happy not to limit himself to a single role when he goes on stage. In 2004, Mays won a Tony Award and several other awards for his two-character turn in Doug Wright’s play, I Am My Own Wife. But now he's quadrupled that load in the new musical A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder at the Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway.

An iconic moment in American history is the subject of a new Broadway revue at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. After Midnight purports to take its audience to a Jazz Age Harlem nightclub.

It was a time and place in which America’s new music, jazz, was burgeoning. Conceived by Jack Viertel, and directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, this new show pays homage to the Cotton Club and other Harlem hotpots that had their heyday in the 1920s and 1930s. The show features more than 25 songs from the era, with an emphasis on both compositions and arrangements by Duke Ellington.

Crime novelist John Grisham is one of the most successful novelists of our time. Now, his novel "A Time to Kill," has come to the Broadway stage at the John Golden Theater. It’s Grisham’s first novel, and the first of his books that he has allowed to be adapted for theatrical presentation.