Around Broadway

Until now, the idea of cheerleading a Broadway show has been metaphorical, in the sense of drumming-up-support. Now, however, it means actual cheerleading.

A new musical called Bring It On, based on the 2000 movie of the same name, is giving New York audiences at the St. James Theatre a chance to see just how complex and intensely competitive cheerleading has become; it’s not just pleated skirts and pom-poms anymore.

“The Cockfight Play” is not the title of the play at the Duke on 42nd Street theater. But it’s the accepted euphemism, safe to print in family newspapers and safe to say on the radio.

The plot is an old, old theatrical construct – a love triangle. But this gang of three has an unconventional twist: A young man in love with a young man, falls in love with a young woman. Which partner he will ultimately choose becomes the crisis of the drama.

Gore Vidal’s 1960 play The Best Man is enjoying a successful revival on Broadway. It opened in April, received a couple of Tony Award nominations and attracted a starry cast including James Earl Jones, Angela Lansbury and John Laroquette. But it’s not the only political play currently on the boards in New York.

There are more than 20 roles in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. But a recent new production of the play at the Lincoln Center Festival featured only a single performer speaking all the lines, telling the entire story.

Irish playwright Tom Murphy is not the best known Irish playwright in America. Even authors whose work shows specific influence from Murphy, such as Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh, have higher profiles.

But the Lincoln Center Festival believes he deserves more attention. It's showcasing three Murphy plays in productions by the Druid Theatre Company of Galway, Ireland. Under the title DruidMurphy, the plays -- Conversations on a Homecoming, A Whistle in the Dark and Famine -- offer a chance to get better-acquainted with Murphy's works.

Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya is a classic of Western theater and New Yorkers are blessed with two productions of it this summer.

Shakespeare in the Park is -- and no pun intended -- a New York theater lover’s midsummer night’s dream. This is the 50th anniversary year of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare productions in Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, which opened in 1962 with a version of The Merchant of Venice that starred George C. Scott as Shylock.

On the playbill this summer are the Shakespeare play As You Like It, and a classic of the American musical theater, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods.

A very amiable and otherwise harmless man – he drinks a bit and his best friend is an invisible rabbit – is persecuted by relatives who want him institutionalized so he’ll stop embarrassing them.

Complications ensue, but in the end the man and his invisible friend are restored to freedom, and the other characters reflect on the possibility that the most eccentric among us may have the firmest grip on what’s important in life.

That plot sounds a bit quaint for sophisticated, cynical New York theatergoers in 2012, doesn’t it?

Playwright Gina Gionfriddo's dark comedy Becky Shaw was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. Her first new play since then, Rapture, Blister, Burn, opened Tuesday night Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, in a production starring Amy Brenneman, best known as the star of television's "Private Practice" and "Judging Amy."

Brenneman plays Catherine, the character at the center of this play, who explores women's choices in the post-feminist era.

New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood travels far from the lights of the Great White Way this week, and he’s found a couple of shows that just might make it to Broadway. One, in fact, is already planned for a New York production after the end of its current run.