Around Broadway

Helen Mirren won an Oscar for portraying Queen Elizabeth II in the 2006 movie “The Queen.” Now she picks up the famous handbag again in the play The Audience, written by Peter Morgan, who also wrote “The Queen,” and directed by Stephen Daldry.

The play, originally seen in London's West End, depicts the Queen in her weekly meetings with various prime ministers, including Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Harold Wilson and David Cameron.

The Audience is on Broadway at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre through June 28.

If you’ve been in a dive bar in New York, or anywhere else, just those simple words are enough to conjure the bleak decor, the smell of stale drink and something more. Eugene O’Neill’s 1939 play, The Iceman Cometh, takes place in a dive bar filled with broken people, and their broken dreams, who are the unseen props that fill the stage. The play makes only rare appearances on stage, this is in-part because of its extensive length. The four acts stretch across more than four hours. But the Brooklyn Academy of Music is currently hosting a production from Chicago’s Goodman Theatre.

The play stars Nathan Lane and Brian Dennehy. Dennehy is an old hand at playing O’Neill characters, but Lane, one of New York’s great comic actors, might be a surprising casting choice. New York Times theater critc Charles Isherwood has visited this bleak O’Neill world and he shares his view of the production and also suggests why spending time in O’Neill’s world is worthwhile.

The Iceman Cometh is at BAM's Harvey Theater through March 15.

A new production from The Civilians, a journalistic theater company, is called Pretty Filthy and is an exploration of the pornography industry centered in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley. The Civilians use words of ordinary people — in this case, people who work in porn — so the story is told with less concern for poetry than for verity.

And, oh yes, it’s a musical, too. The show, directed by Steve Cosson, features songs by the Civilians’ in-house composer Michael Friedman, and a book by Bess Wohl.

New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood lets us know if Pretty Filthy is worth seeing in, shall we say, the flesh.

Decades before Anton Chekhov’s plays about the struggles of existence among ostensibly successful and wealthy Russians, Ivan Turgenev wrote A Month in the Country, a play that contains many elements of Chekhov’s more famous works. There’s a bored, young wife on a country estate and men who orbit her in varying degrees of attraction and repulsion.

The play has been given a rare revival this season by the Classic Stage Company. The production features two stars currently appearing in popular television shows: Taylor Schilling from “Orange Is the New Black” and Peter Dinklage from “Game of Thrones.”

New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood shares his thoughts on this classic 19th century play as produced with actors of 21st century fame.

"Boy meets girl” is a fine start for so many stories, including Let the Right One In, a play adapted by Jack Thorne and based on the Swedish novel and film of the same name by John Ajvide Lindqvist. But when the boy is an adolescent misfit and the girl is a vampire, the consequences of their encounter are likely to be farther-reaching than those in a human-to-human hookup.

No less than three other Broadway musicals have been vampire-based, although all three of them proved to be somewhat less than immortal. This one is directed by John Tiffany, known for the musical Once.

How does this "boy meets girl" relationship begin, how does this vampire make her way in the world of mortals? And — more important for us theatergoers — is this vampire tale going to leave us bewitched or simply benumbed? New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood clues us in.

The National Theatre of Scotland production of Let the Right One In runs through Feb. 15 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.

What can happen when two people meet? The possibilities are endless, but every relationship winds up following a single path, better known as “what actually happened.” But what about all of those alternative possibilities, the relationship roads not taken, the places the relationship might have gone?

We see some of those alternative realities in Nick Payne’s 2012 play, Constellations, now in its Broadway debut at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Relativity, quantum mechanics and string theory are involved in this story — both in the play’s underpinnings and in the words spoken onstage by actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson. So there are stars of several kinds in Constellations; New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood tells us if they shine brightly enough for Broadway.

Courtney Love, a famous rock widow and an actor and rock star in her own right, is making a low-key return to performing in the new musical theater piece Kansas City Choir Boy at HERE Arts Center, as part of the Prototype Festival of new opera and musical theater works.

The music and lyrics performed in the show are written by Todd Almond, who plays the other leading role in a story that looks back on a relationship, which is permanently ended. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood gives his review.

Hear a song from the musical:

Every Brilliant Thing is a one-man show that features a large supporting cast. The show's other big self-contradictory element is its exploration of the impenetrable sadness of depression through things that uplift us, specifically, a list of things that make life worth living. This mildly immersive show is written by Duncan Macmillan, directed by George Perrin and features a sole performer, Jonny Donahoe. But Donahoe conscripts numerous members of the audience to play minor or sometimes major roles in the play.

Every Brilliant Thing was a hit at the Edinburgh Festival and now North American audiences are getting their first chance to see it in an Off-Broadway production at the Barrow Street Theater. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood looks for the brilliance in Every Brilliant Thing and shares what he finds.

The New York Times recently sent theater critic Charles Isherwood on a trip to London, where he saw Shakespeare, quasi-Shakespeare and Kristin Scott Thomas onstage. While there, Isherwood took note of the theatrical import-export balance between Broadway and the West End.

• Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins at the Menier Chocolate Factory.

• Shakespeare's Henry IV at the Donmar Warehouse.

• Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III at the Wyndham's Theatre.

• David Hare's Behind the Beautiful Forevers at the National Theatre.

• Sophocles's Electra at the Old Vic Theatre.

Theatrical magic acts have a long, long tradition in the world of entertainment. With a name that pays homage to earlier forms of stage trickery, The Illusionists: Witness the Impossible is a slickly packaged production of seven professional prestidigitators, all of whom appear – and perhaps occasionally disappear – on the stage of the Marriott Marquis Theater.

Without giving away any secrets of this family oriented presentation, New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood lets us know if you should or should not make an appearance at the box office for The Illusionists.