Around Broadway

The scene is now set for Broadway’s big night, the 67th annual Tony Awards. The nominations were announced Tuesday and among the musicals up for the most awards are Kinky Boots, Matilda, Pippin, and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella.

Wait a minute. A girl who can make objects move just with her mind. Hasn’t this been on Broadway already — and failed? Yes, but that was Carrie, an altogether different girl. This girl is Matilda and her new Broadway musical is based on a children’s book by Roald Dahl.

Broadway musicals have always sought to entertain with custom-made songs designed to move the story along, songs that are full of catchy melody and clever lyrics that hook you into wanting to hear them again and again.

Lately, however, musicals have come with the musical appeal built in, through the use of popular hit songs the audience already knows. Those songs are then refitted into a plot, sometimes comfortably, sometimes not. But the formula has had huge successes: Mama Mia using songs of '80s pop group ABBA and Jersey Boys, which tells the story of Franki Valli and the Four Seasons using their music.

Tom Hanks, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, is making his Broadway debut in Lucky Guy, a new play by the late Nora Ephron.

Directed by George C. Woolfe and now playing at the Broadhurst Theatre, Lucky Guy is a true New York story about Mike McAlary, a New York storyteller himself — a tabloid reporter for, variously, The Daily News and the New York Post. McAlary’s career waxed and waned, but waxed again just before his death in 1998 at age 41.

Hands on a Hardbody is the decidedly catchy title of a musical with a particular catch in its plot: A group of people are in a contest to win a new truck. The competition is simple enough. The contestants stand around truck with one hand on it and the last person to let go of the truck is the winner.

Ann Richards was silver-haired, sharp-tongued, brassy, bold and mostly beloved. She came to national prominence with a speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention and served a term as governor of Texas starting in 1991, making a very distinctive mark both politically and personally.

The Flick is the newest play by Annie Baker, whose frequent collaborator, Sam Gold, directs the production now running at Playwrights Horizons.

A young, idealistic, American married couple move to Paris to live together and do good work. But youth and idealism aren’t enough to build a life on in a strange city, unless the foundations of the relationship are solid. Amy Herzog’s new play Belleville, described as a “psychological thriller,” is in its first Manhattan production at New York Theatre Workshop.

Sometimes we look back on the low moments in our lives and realize, hey, we did learn something from that awful episode; it wasn’t as bad as we remember, after all. Can the perspective afforded us by the passage of time yield the same realization at the theater?

What's a theater critic doing at the opera house? Well, opera is theater, after all. But it's the particular Broadway connection of director Michael Mayer that caught New York Times critic Charles Isherwood's eye on the marquee at the Metropolitan Opera.