Around Broadway

Carole King is one of the great pop songwriters of the 1960s and '70s. Now, her songs — from early novelties such as “Who Put the Bomp” to intimate, soulful compositions such as “So Far Away” and “A Natural Woman” — are on Broadway in the biographical show Beautiful: the Carole King Musical. The show, at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, stars Jessie Mueller as King, and features a book by Doug McGrath. The director is Marc Bruni.

January is traditionally a lean month for the commercial theater, with tourists leaving and Broadway offering discounts. If you need help climbing out of the winter theater doldrums, New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood suggests you consider some newly minted — as well as more experimental — works being presented in two festivals in New York.

A playwright’s art imitates a financier’s life in a work about the reverberations of corruption and public scandal in The Commons of Pensacola by actress Amanda Peet, who embarked on a new career as a playwright this past fall.

The turn of the year marks the halfway point in the New York theater season. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood runs down a partial list of some 20 new shows opening between now and the Tony Awards in June. There are some new plays, some new musicals, a revival or two and headliners ranging from Alan Cumming to Denzel Washington, Toni Collette and Marisa Tomei.

The distinctive performance artist Marina Abramović is telling her life story — and attending her own funeral — at the Park Avenue Armory. Be assured, Abramović is very much alive, but she, with the help of the singular director Robert Wilson, is looking backward from the future in The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, a theatrical event made distinct by the sensibilities of these two artists.

When it comes to the songs of Burt Bacharach, you know more than you think you do. Bacharach, best known for his collaborations with lyricist Hal David, has written in a style that is very much a hybrid of pop, jazz and his own unique touch. His songs have surprising chord progressions and even more surprising rhythmic changes and yet they’re real pop tunes — catchy and sing-along-able. For the movies, Bacharach and David wrote the theme from “Alfie” and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” For Broadway, they wrote the score of Promises, Promises, which includes “I Say a Little Prayer for You” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” two songs that were big hits for singer Dionne Warwick. In all, Bacharach has placed 73 songs in Billboard magazine’s Top 40 music chart. We told you that you know more Bacharach than you think.

Two fabled knights are jousting on Broadway these days, and no, it’s not a revival of Camelot. The knights are Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart and they’re appearing together at the Cort Theater in two plays, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, both directed by Sean Mathias. 

Actor Jefferson Mays is only one man, but he’s happy not to limit himself to a single role when he goes on stage. In 2004, Mays won a Tony Award and several other awards for his two-character turn in Doug Wright’s play, I Am My Own Wife. But now he's quadrupled that load in the new musical A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder at the Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway.

An iconic moment in American history is the subject of a new Broadway revue at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. After Midnight purports to take its audience to a Jazz Age Harlem nightclub. It was a time and place in which America’s new music, jazz, was burgeoning. Conceived by Jack Viertel, and directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, this new show pays homage to the Cotton Club and other Harlem hotpots that had their heyday in the 1920s and 1930s. The show features more than 25 songs from the era, with an emphasis on both compositions and arrangements by Duke Ellington.

Crime novelist John Grisham is one of the most successful novelists of our time. Now, his novel "A Time to Kill," has come to the Broadway stage at the John Golden Theater. It’s Grisham’s first novel, and the first of his books that he has allowed to be adapted for theatrical presentation.

More than a century after the incident that inspired it, Terence Rattigan’s play The Winslow Boy, is back on Broadway at the American Airlines Theatre in a production from Roundabout Theatre Company.

Janis Joplin's star burned briefly, but brightly. For only about three years was her name prominent among pop musicians of the late 1960s. She made a single — "Me and Bobby McGee" — that reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart, and two albums that reached into the top five. She died of an accidental drug overdose at age 27. But her powerful, gutsy vocals and performance style continue to be distinctive among the singers of her era. Now her enduring appeal is recognized with a Broadway show at the Lyceum Theatre.

Billie Holiday’s voice and image are icons of 20th century America and the jazz world. Now her story comes to the stage in the musical biography Lady Day at the Little Shubert Theater.

Fans of “Breaking Bad” star Bryan Cranston can see him up close at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lucy Thurber is getting an honor not usually granted to mid-career playwrights: a cycle of five of her plays is being mounted in New York City. The cycle, called “The Hill Town Plays,” centers around one character, a smart young heroine struggling to form an identity independent from her western Massachusetts upbringing. 

"The Cheaters Club" is the latest production from The Amoralists, a downtown theater group self-described as producing “work of no moral judgment.”

Labor Day Weekend is here – alas, the unofficial end of Summer. But with that ending comes many new beginnings, one of which is the new theater season in New York City.

Who doesn't remember the awkwardness of a first date? First Date, the first new Broadway musical of the season playing at the Longacre Theatre, is a romantic comedy about a young couple meeting for the first time on a blind date. The book is by Austin Winsberg and the score is by Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner. Zachary Levi from the television series "Chuck" stars alongside Krysta Rodriguez, who appeared in the backstage-on-Broadway series "Smash."

The second offering from The Public Theater’s free Shakespeare in the Park this summer is a musical adaptation of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the Bard's early comedy about four young men who swear off romance to devote themselves to study, only to promptly fall in love. The play has been adapted and directed by Alex Timbers, the director of Peter and the Starcatcher, among many other shows, and the songs are by Michael Friedman, the house composer of the downtown theater troupe the Civilians.

The 1967 animated Disney film "The Jungle Book" — inspired by Rudyard Kipling's book of the same name — springs to life in a new musical that had its world premiere at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. Written and directed by Mary Zimmerman, best known for her stage play based on Ovid's "Metamorphoses," the new show features all the songs from the movie, including the hit tune "The Bare Necessities."