There are so many things to look forward to in fall in New York City: sweater weather, pumpkin spice (if that’s your thing) and the new theater season. Some highlights this year include revivals like “Gypsy” and “Our Town,” as well as new productions like “The Hills of California” and “Yellow Face.”
Several famous Hollywood actors will return to the stage, including Robert Downey Jr., Julianna Margulies and Adam Driver. Beloved Broadway stars like Audra McDonald and Patti LuPone are back, too.
To learn more about the upcoming season, WNYC’S Alison Stewart talked to Helen Shaw, the theater critic for the New Yorker. Below is an edited version of that conversation.
Alison Stewart: I read there are 16 Broadway openings between now and the end of the year. Is this a lot?
Helen Shaw: Yes! It’s exciting because so many of them are plays as well as musicals. That is not always the norm for Broadway. It feels like a new optimism about what can succeed there.
What stands out to you about the offerings?
Shaw: There is a real reliance on great writing. There are people who’ve had major off-Broadway careers who have gone off to Hollywood and come back – Leslye Headland is coming to Broadway with a show called “Cult of Love.”
We also have great playwrights – Pulitzer winners and Obie winners – like David Henry Hwang, who, as you mentioned, has “Yellow Face” coming to Broadway, which is a much-awaited production.
It was very beautiful at the Public in 2007, and now it is coming to Broadway with an astounding cast. It’s definitely the fall of the playwright.
Early this year, the New York Times published an article about how – even four years after the pandemic – ticket sales are down, attendance was down compared to the pre-pandemic, and some small theaters were struggling. What are you hearing?
Shaw: It is rough, particularly from the standpoint of nonprofit theaters. If you look at the Tony Awards, every single Tony Award for Best Play over the last 20 years has gone to a show that started at a nonprofit theater.
Without our non-profits, we don’t have an American theater. The fact that they are struggling is really troubling. We know they’re struggling because some of them are moving in together.
Second Stage will be moving in at the Signature Theatre. Soho Rep is moving from downtown up to have a roommate situation at Playwrights Horizons.
On one hand, I’m really excited about the heat and light that that condensation of all of our activity is going to create, it also does signal us that there’s trouble in paradise.
Let’s talk about some new productions. “Left on Tenth” begins on Sept. 26 at James Earl Jones Theatre. It’s a romantic comedy based on Delia Ephron’s memoir. It’s directed by Susan Stroman and stars Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher. I think of Peter Gallagher as a song-and-dance guy.
Shaw: Yes.
How is he going to do in a straight-up play?
Shaw: I think if we can trust anyone to create romantic energy on stage, it’s going to be one of the Ephron sisters, and so I am guardedly optimistic. I also happened to have just seen a romantic comedy on stage last night called “Table 17” at MCC that blew me away.
It is so funny.
Shaw: Blew me away. I was sitting there in the middle of it, and I wrote in my dutiful little notebook, “more romantic comedy.”
Let’s talk about “The Hills of California.” It’s about to begin previews at the Broadhurst Theatre. It’s about sisters who return to their childhood home on the English coast where their mother is dying. You saw this in London. What were your thoughts?
Shaw: For people who are expecting Jez Butterworth’s last play, which was the Irish tragedy “The Ferryman” – this is quite different. For me, one of its great pleasures was the craft that Butterworth has as a playwright.
Again, I really think this is the fall of the playwright, but also he’s writing for Laura Donnelly again, who was the star of “The Ferryman.”
She might be the most magnetic person I’ve seen on stage this year. She is a lodestone. It’s a family’s behaving badly, which is also a real staple of the stage. I’m excited to see what it’s like with these American audiences.
Adam Driver is going to be at the Lortel, which is small, in a Kenneth Lonergan play. Robert Downey Jr. is headlining a play called “McNeal.” First of all, what do you make of big names?
Shaw: I can be a little crotchety when someone parachutes in and they haven’t done any theater. They went away and then they never came back. That is not the case for Adam Driver.
He’s really good on stage.
Shaw: Deeply, deeply dedicated. I saw him in an Ostrovsky play at Classic Stage. This is a person who really loves text, and in “Burn This,” he was absurd. He’s also really willing to go massive.
I think the chance to see all of that intensity up close at the Lortel is pretty major and is pretty exciting. It’s part of a trend of really huge people coming to Off-Broadway. Cole Escola, of course, started “Oh, Mary!” in that same theater.
Does it make me a little sad that the Lortel used to be a place of less commercial projects? Yes, but on the other hand, the commercial projects that are going there just happen to be superb.
All right, let’s talk about some of the revivals. “Our Town,” the ultimate comfort theater food. It’s returning to Broadway directed by Kenny Leon. Why does “Our Town” survive?
Shaw: This is me being a bit of a nerd, I guess. I teach a modern US drama class and I teach “Our Town” every year.
I think we get this sense of it as being an easy play because we did it in high school or we saw it in high school, and we think it must be easy. It must just be like, I don’t know, “Camelot,” but it’s not. It’s actually very, very profound.
It asks us to look at the most simple fact of life, which is that it ends. It’s a beautiful piece, and it’s done so without pretension.
I think that Kenny Leon’s production of “Home” is actually what made me so excited about this coming production of “Our Town,” because “Home,” if you saw it, was done with almost no set, it was extremely stripped down and it was really beautiful.
Is there anybody in the cast that you find particularly interesting? You’ve got Katie Holmes, Jim Parsons.
Shaw: I would say those people are in it, and that is OK with me. I’m more excited about Billy Eugene Jones, who was the breakout for me in “Fat Ham” and is in it. What a comic talent. Who else? Ephraim Sykes, who was David Ruffin in “Ain’t Too Proud,” is going to be George. If anyone can play romantic, yearning, heartbreak, it’s going to be him.
You mentioned “Yellow Face,” which starts previews at the Todd Haimes Theater on Sept. 13. It was written by David Henry Hwang of “M. Butterfly,” and is based on his own criticism of casting of Jonathan Pryce in the original production of “Miss Saigon.” It’s going to star Daniel Dae Kim. What is exciting about this?
Shaw: One part of it is that it’s a good play and I have seen it off-Broadway and loved it. It all comes down to the fact that he has a comic touch, a really light comic touch. Daniel Dae Kim, who joined “The King and I” after Ken Watanabe left, is also, it turns out, spectacular comedy on stage.
We’re going to head off-Broadway and you want us to know about Gatz? It’s starting for a one-month run at the Public Theater starting Nov. 1. I understand it’s long. [The show runs for about eight hours, including intermissions and a 90-minute dinner break.]
Shaw: Well, sure.
(laughs) How long is too long?
Shaw: You go to work all day and you’re okay with that? Just go to the theater all day. It’s just as peaceful. You may have noticed that there are great Gatsby adaptations coming out of our ears. There is one on Broadway now. There was one at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge recently. That, of course, is because copyright has lapsed.
Oh, we like the public domain around here.
Shaw: “Gatz” is a much more mischievous project because it started when it wasn’t in the public domain. They got shut down a couple of times, and you have to respect that. The second thing I love about it is it’s the entirety of the book. Scott Shepherd plays an office drone. He sits there and he reads the entire book to you while it coalesces around him. The thing that I’ve been missing from those other two adaptations is the text, and you don’t miss it here, you get it all. I’ve seen it, I think, twice, and I’m ready to do it again.
Let’s ask about “Bad Kreyol.” What’s going on there?
Shaw: Dominique Morisseau …
Who I love, by the way, as a playwright.
Shaw: I wanted to talk about this project partially because I think Dominique Morisseau is exciting, but also because “Bad Kreyol” is the last show of hers that’s going to be at the Signature.
Signature Theatre, as you can tell from the title, is interested in the playwright’s signature. They’ve had several of her pieces there. What they do is they program seasons, which can sometimes extend over many years. Playwrights of sometimes old stuff, sometimes new stuff.
For instance, last season we saw “Sunset Baby,” and now we’re going to get “Bad Kreyol,” which is a new work. This is the kind of longitudinal syllabus viewing where you really get to understand what is going on in one of our great creators. “Confederates” is, for me, her finest play. It was also at Signature. I’m really thrilled to see what she does as her swan song there.
What about “McNeal?”
Shaw: I’m a cheerleader for the theater in general. I would never say anything concerned about a show when I haven’t seen it. However, when we were talking about stars earlier, I am interested to see what happens when Robert Downey, Jr. comes to a stage, which he has not chosen to be on for some decades. Might it be a car crash?
Possible.
Shaw: It might be, but a car crash worth seeing.
Anything else that you’ve seen that you’re in love with?
Shaw: My own personal root taste is I love being in a basement with someone throwing salami at me. Do you know what I mean? It’s got to be weird. The top weird stuff right now is at NYU Skirball Center, BAM, and at Japan Society.
It’s these festivals of very short runs of international projects, many of which look very cool to me. I think the top one — the one where I am the most sort of, hahaha, it’s coming here — is a one-person cabaret version of the movie “Showgirls,” in which a cabaret star sitting at her makeup table is entering into the mind of the Verhoeven movie. Nothing says theater like that.
I go to a lot of theater, not as much as you do, but I do go to a lot of theater. Something I noticed is that some people don’t really know how to react anymore. I don’t know if it’s because they’ve been at home on the couch? A woman yelled in the middle of a silent scene the other day at the theater. Have you seen that at all, or is this just my luck?
Shaw: No, it’s happening. Some theater artists are playing with it. Philip Howes, who did a show called “Six Characters” that was at Lincoln Center at the end of this past season, psyched us all out by, as we walked into the theater, we had to put on wristbands if we were willing to participate. I will tell you, I do not like to participate. I like to sit in my seat and be invisible. I was like, “No, thank you so much.”
Then it was all a fake out. There was sort of violation of the fourth wall, but we didn’t ever actually have to participate. Yet, what it had done was create this real porous relationship. People were yelling at the stage. People were saying, “Hey, go to the next step!” at a guy who was on a ladder who couldn’t reach something.
It was actually pretty thrilling. Do I feel that, say, “King Lear” at The Shed is going to have the same excitement around an audience that says, “Pick your younger daughter, she’s the one who loves you?” Probably not.