Around Broadway

The Signature Theater Company’s busy season in its new Frank Gehry-designed home continues with a trio of late-spring openings. The first is the new monologue Title and Deed by Will Eno, the author of Thom Pain (based on nothing), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. The Irish actor Conor Lovett performs the show, which is a co-production with the Gare St. Lazare Players of Ireland.

A play in the commedia dell’arte tradition of Italy from the 1700s, featuring stock characters in uncomfortable situations, is now on Broadway. But the production is not full of powdered wigs and arcane syntax. The original play, Carlo Goldini’s Il servitore di due padroni (The Servant of Two Masters), has been adapted by Richard Bean and turned into One Man, Two Guvnors, set in the British resort town of Brighton in the 1960s.

Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh, is one of the more challenging works in the American dramatic canon. Its down-on-their-luck characters, mostly men, are steeped in life’s difficulties – steeped figuratively and literally, as alcohol is refuge and scourge of many of those found in the saloon where the play takes place in the New York City of 1912. The work challenges playgoers not only with its dark themes onstage, but with its real-time length: The Iceman Cometh has four acts, and often clocks in at around five hours running time.

Tuesday was a big day on Broadway with the announcement of nominations for the 66th annual Tony Awards. The musical Once was nominated considerably more often than that – 11 times, in fact. Two other musicals, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess and Nice Work If You Can Get It, received 10 nominations each. Bernadette Peters and Hugh Jackman were named recipients of special awards, along with Actors’ Equity Association, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year.

Anticipating the announcement next week of the nominees for this year’s Tony Awards, New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood noticed something interesting: It’s possible that all the nominees in the category of Best Musical will be shows based on films.

She first told you not to cry, Argentina, back in 1978. Now — and how can it be 34 years later already? — Evita Perón, along with Juan and Che, are back for the very first Broadway revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's musical, Evita.

Last spring Lincoln Center Theater presented 4000 Miles by Amy Herzog under the auspices of its Lincoln Center Theater 3 – a program with the motto of “new artists and new audiences” – at the small Duke on 42nd Street Theater.

It started out as a concept album in 1970 and came to life on Broadway for the first time in 1971. Now, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical Jesus Christ Superstar returns to Broadway in a revival at the Neil Simon Theater.

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is back on Broadway. Esteemed movie and theater director Mike Nichols directs the revival, which features retro sets and music, and young actors playing old – including 44-year-old Philip Seymour Hoffman playing the role of defeated salesman Willy Loman, a man in his 60s.

The musical Carrie has become legendary among a certain subset of musical theater-obsessed New Yorkers. The 1988 Broadway show based on the 1974 Stephen King horror novel, earned its own special place in New York theater history as the “Prom Queen of Bad Musicals,” closing after just 16 previews and five performances.