Around Broadway

Lincoln Center Theater has made a new performance space for LCT3, its program of works by new playwrights, directors, and designers. The Claire Tow Theater sits atop the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, and kicking off the first full season at the new house is a play that confronts some very contemporary themes.

Sandy is the name of the hurricane that’s wreaked havoc in New York City this week, but if you’re looking for stormy weather in the theater, the names you want are George and Martha. They’re the main characters in Edward Albee’s 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The first new play of the fall Broadway season has arrived, settling in at the Cort Theatre. Grace, a drama about faith, love and fate, marks the Broadway debut of playwright Craig Wright, as well as actor Michael Shannon, known for roles in films such as "Revolutionary Road," and currently appearing on the third season of HBO’s "Boardwalk Empire."

Nineteenth century Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen is a theatrical legend, but most of his plays are not that frequently produced today, with Hedda Gabler and Ghosts probably getting the most stage time in our era. 

The title of Lisa D’Amour’s play is Detroit, but the action doesn’t take place there – or at least not necessarily. However, an American city struggling with an economic downturn, drifting mostly helplessly in the current of shifting fortunes, makes an apt metaphor for individual Americans struggling with uncontrollable economic forces, too.

Forbidden Broadway is back. After a 30-year first run and a three-year, self-imposed hiatus, impresario Gerard Alessandrini and his send-up of theatrical convention – and theatrical innovation – are once again on the boards in New York.

The American playwright Horton Foote made his biggest marks with works such as The Trip to Bountiful and Tender Mercies, the screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Young Man from Atlanta. Now, three years after his death in 2009 at age 92, New York theater audiences have a chance to re-assess one particular area of Horton Foote’s work.

For more than half a century, theater lovers have been heading a couple of hours west of Toronto to enjoy summertime performances of Shakespeare plays.

For its second presentation this summer at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, the Public Theater has turned from Shakespeare to Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's musical Into the Woods, directed by Timothy Sheader with co-direction by Liam Steel.

“Good lords, make all the speedy haste you may,” says Prince Edward in Shakespeare’s Richard III.

That’s just what the The Public Theater has done with the play itself, employing an adaptation directed by Amanda Dehnert to lighten the lengthy load of the text and make it easier to take on the road.