Around Broadway

Part of the mission of New York’s Signature Theatre Company, the Off-Broadway company founded in 1991, is to give season-long attention to the work of living American playwrights. With its expansion to a new Frank Gehry-designed complex this spring, it seems the Signature’s mission has expanded, too.

One of the great villains of the stage, Shakespeare’s Richard III, is in power once again.

John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, rocked the British theater – sorry, theatre – scene in the 1950s, bringing to the stage a vivid, unvarnished realism as well as Jimmy Porter, the play’s main character and the original “angry young man.”

South African Playwright Athol Fugard has a busy New York season ahead, with two theater companies producing four of his shows over the next several months.

January is the season for new and experimental theater in New York. But a work that was new last year at the Under the Radar festival has earned a return engagement at the Public Theater in the East Village through Feb. 5.

Porgy and Bess has returned to Broadway for the first time in many years. The show has probably spent more time in recent decades in the opera house, but this new production is a homecoming, because when Porgy and Bess first appeared in New York in 1935, it was in a Broadway theater.

The holiday decorations are mostly packed away and even the New Year’s eve parties are becoming dim memories (at least, those that are remembered at all). Yes, the winter blahs are upon us. 

The 2006 independent movie Once, about the relationship between an Irish musician and a Czech immigrant who meet on the streets of Dublin, has been turned into an Off-Broadway musical.

Two new plays that opened recently Off Broadway offer studies in divergent reactions to the stresses of contemporary life.

At Playwrights Horizons, Maple and Vine by Jordan Harrison offers a dark fantasy about a young urban couple seeking a novel way of escaping from their harried lives. And Alan Ayckbourn’s latest comedy, Neighbourhood Watch, at the 59 East 59 Theaters, tells the story of gentle middle-class Britons turned into vigilantes. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood shares his views.

Amid a good number of new plays on Broadway this fall season are two by female African-American writers. Stick Fly by Lydia R. Diamond recently opened at the Cort Theater; and Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop opened this past fall at the Bernard Jacobs Theater. Both plays are directed by Kenny Leon.