Around Broadway

In 2003, Mark Haddon wrote a well-received novel about a 15-year-old boy solving a mystery that's become a literary staple. But “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” is atypical of the boy-detective form because the boy in Haddon’s novel is atypical. He has autism and experiences the world in a markedly different way from most of us, possessing, among other qualities, a keen visual sense and an aversion to being touched, in addition to the usual challenges of adolescence.

Haddon’s novel is now a stage show of the same name adapted by Simon Stephens and imported from London’s National Theater. It's running on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theater and directed by Marianne Elliott. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood offers his thoughts on how effectively the story has been translated to the stage and on Alex Sharpe, the young actor straight out of Juilliard who is making his Broadway debut in this production.

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II were riding high in 1947 on the successes of Oklahoma! and Carousel. For their next show they tried something with a Greek chorus and a stage with no sets and few props. The subject matter was unusual, too, a man whose story ends with him in a state of existential confusion. The show, Allegro, was not a hit. But now, director John Doyle has revived Allegro in a production for Classic Stage Company.

Edward Albee’s 1966 play A Delicate Balance won him the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes. It has become one of his most highly regarded and frequently produced works, and returns for its third run on Broadway with one of the season’s starriest casts. 

A musical that spent just a few months on Broadway in 1997 has been re-tooled and returned to the Great White Way. Side Show is based on the lives of Daisy and Violet Hilton, conjoined twins born in Britain in 1908, who became famous on the vaudeville and sideshow circuit there and in the United States in the 1930s.

On Broadway right now at the Neil Simon Theatre is The Last Ship, which might as well be called The Sting Musical, since the pop superstar has contributed not only music and lyrics, but most of the pre-launch publicity. The story is based on the world Sting knew growing up in an English seaside town where life revolved around the local shipyard.

A short Off-Broadway run in 2012 was New York’s introduction to Disgraced. Novelist and screenwriter Ayad Akhtar’s drama is about the stresses placed on an American Muslim man struggling to resolve conflicting world views within himself and among his family and friends. The play now returns to New York, this time on Broadway and with bigger credentials, too, as a 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner.

The hottest-selling show on Broadway this fall is, surprisingly, not a musical. Instead, it’s the revival of Terrence McNally’s 1982 comedy It’s Only a Play, set in a theater producer’s lavish New York apartment where a group of onstage and offstage principals anticipate the reviews after opening night.

The reason for It's Only a Play's current ticket craze is the virtually all-star cast: Matthew Broderick is the playwright; Nathan Lane is his best friend; Rupert Grint is the genius director; Megan Mullally is the novice producer; Stockard Channing is the addled leading lady; and F. Murray Abraham is the dreaded newspaper critic.

To say that Tail! Spin! is true to life might be a bit of an understatement. Mario Correa’s play uses words taken from the public record to tell the sex-scandal stories of four politicians: Anthony Weiner, Mark Sanford, Larry Craig and Mark Foley. The four men are played by different actors, but all the women — “wives, tails, beards and Barbara Walters,” as the show’s website puts it — are played by former "Saturday Night Live" cast member Rachel Dratch.

Steve Martin has quite a resume: comic, actor, writer, art collector, banjo player and now, musical book writer and musical theater co-creator. Martin and his collaborator, singer-songwriter Edie Brickell, have written the new show Bright Star, in which we see the lives of two people from the perspective of a couple of different decades in their lives.

In the late 1980s, A.R. Gurney created an unusual play consisting only of a long correspondence between two people. But that play, Love Letters, has endured and has been seen in innumerable regional and amateur theater productions. Perhaps that’s because it’s easy to produce: no chorus lines, no costumes, no need for a balcony or a staircase on the stage set. The text is the lifelong correspondence between a man and woman of the East Coast upper crust and it is read by the actors on a bare stage rather than performed.

But perhaps, slight as the work is by some measures, its words are enough to compensate for what it otherwise does not have.