Around Broadway

As a famous filmmaking duo, the Coen Brothers have given us Fargo, No Country for Old Men, a remake of True Grit, A Serious Man and many other big screen successes. One of Coens, Ethan, has also been writing for the stage.

Lincoln Center Theater has yielded two Broadway productions this fall, its Tony-winning hit War Horse and the acclaimed Other Desert Cities at the Booth Theater. But Charles Isherwood, theater critic for The New York Times, has found a strong new LCT production Off Broadway: J.T. Rogers’s Blood and Gifts, a play commissioned by Lincoln Center Theater running now at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater.

The fall season on Broadway features two prominent concert performances. Hugh Jackman, better known as Wolverine to fans of the X-Men series, is installed at the Broadhurst Theater, performing songs from classic musicals. He's also paying tribute to Peter Allen, the Australian singer-songwriter he played in The Boy From Oz. Meanwhile, a few blocks uptown at the Ethel Barrymore, Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin, the original stars of Broadway’s Evita, are sharing the stage.

Two very well-known musicals from the 1970s drawn from the life of Jesus return to Broadway this season: Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell and Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar.

Nina Arianda is an actress whose star power brightened considerably a couple of years ago because of her Off-Broadway performance in the David Ives play Venus in Fur. Now the play is being revived and Arianda is re-creating her celebrated performance on Broadway, opposite the British actor Hugh Dancy, in the Manhattan Theater Club production that opened recently at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.

Up until last week the famed Berliner Ensemble — the theater company founded by Bertolt Brecht and his wife, the actress Helene Weigel, in 1949 — had never appeared in the United States. That changed when the company brought Brecht’s most famous show, The Threepenny Opera, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Written with Kurt Weill, the production directed by Robert Wilson had a brief, sold-out run last week.

Adam Rapp is a creative artist who keeps busy. He’s a musician and a filmmaker, a novelist and he’s written episodes of HBO’s In Treatment. He also is a playwright of prolific output – something like 20 plays in the last 10 years.

The New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood joins host Jeff Spurgeon to talk about Rapp's latest staged work called Dreams of Flying, Dreams of Falling, which is playing at the Classic Stage Company in a production from the Atlantic Theater Company.

Much ink has been spilled about the financial swindler Bernie Madoff since his multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme was exposed at the beginning of the global economic collapse. Madoff is, of course, imprisoned for what we expect will be the rest of his life. But now one of the most notorious American figures of the 21st century has been brought to life on the stage.

The 1971 musical Follies, with a score by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Goldman, has opened the fall season on Broadway with a splash of acid-tinged nostalgia. The revival production began in Washington, D.C., this summer.

The New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood reports on the show’s look after the move from the Kennedy Center to the Marquis Theater.

This fall season is full of new plays opening between now and December. Charles Isherwood, theater critic of The New York Times, joins Jeff Spurgeon to give a preview of several of the new productions, including The Mountaintop with Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett, Private Lives with Kim Cattrall and Relatively Speaking, a series of one-acts by Woody Allen, Ethan Coen and Elaine May.