Around Broadway

There’s a new murder mystery in town and it comes with musical comedy included. Murder for Two may be a two-man show, but the characters onstage appear in numbers far greater than that of the performers. Jeff Blumenkrantz and Brett Ryback not only play all the characters, but they are also the musicians, each taking turns at the piano to accompany the other, and even sharing the keyboard on occasion.

Reality television is lampooned a lot  — and loved a little bit, too — in a new musical now running at Second Stage Theatre. Written by the playwright Itamar Moses and the composer and lyricist Gaby Alter, Nobody Loves You follows a philosophy student’s televised pursuit of his girlfriend on a reality show that looks a lot like "The Bachelor." Other contestants, a telegenically smarmy host, and even a Twitter-addicted fan, all make appearances.

Did you know that Barbra Streisand has a shopping mall in the basement of her barn? (You did know she had a barn, didn’t you?) Playwright Jonathan Tolin has taken that surprising thread of superstar trivia and woven it into the one-man show Buyer & Cellar at the Barrow Street Theater.

A Chinese fable told in music and visual spectacle is one of the signature offerings of this year’s Lincoln Center Festival. Monkey: Journey to the West is a collaboration of director Chen Shi-Zeng and musician Damon Albarn, the songwriter and singer of the British band Blur. His collaborator on the virtual band Gorillaz, Jamie Hewlett, designed the costumes and the animation.

Charles Isherwood, theater critic at The New York Times, just got back from a week in London and he spent substantial amounts of it going to the theater.

The task of getting your child into the best possible preschool is a gauntlet run by a particular stratum of Manhattan parent. Daniel Pearle’s new play A Kid Like Jake, examines that famously difficult process with a dramatic twist or two. Directed by Evan Cabnet and starring Carla Gugino and Peter Grosz as Jake’s parents (the child is unseen in the play), A Kid Like Jake closes the season at Lincoln Center Theater’s LCT3 program, which is dedicated to developing both new artists and new audiences for New York theater. 

You know summertime in New York has arrived when the Delacorte Theater unwraps itself for Shakespeare in the Park. The Public Theater presents two free Shakespeare works this season: The Comedy of Errors and later in the season, Love’s Labors Lost.

The American Theatre Wing gave out its Tony Awards this past Sunday night at Radio City Music Hall and the big winner of the night was Best Musical Kinky Boots, which also brought home statuettes for Billy Porter as Best Performer by a Leading Actor in a Musical and Cyndi Lauper for Best Original Score. 

Imagine turning Tolstoy’s famously epic novel "War and Peace" into a musical. Actually, hold it. Imagine turning 100 or so pages of "War and Peace" into a musical. That's a more manageable chunk of the novel, for sure, and there are still plenty of relationships and nearly inscrutable Russian names to sort out.

She’s famous as a movie star, a recording artist and a concert performer, but you may not be familiar with Bette Midler as Broadway actress. Well, it has been a while.

The scene is now set for Broadway’s big night, the 67th annual Tony Awards. The nominations were announced Tuesday and among the musicals up for the most awards are Kinky Boots, Matilda, Pippin, and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella.

Wait a minute. A girl who can make objects move just with her mind. Hasn’t this been on Broadway already — and failed? Yes, but that was Carrie, an altogether different girl. This girl is Matilda and her new Broadway musical is based on a children’s book by Roald Dahl.

Broadway musicals have always sought to entertain with custom-made songs designed to move the story along, songs that are full of catchy melody and clever lyrics that hook you into wanting to hear them again and again. Lately, however, musicals have come with the musical appeal built in, through the use of popular hit songs the audience already knows. Those songs are then refitted into a plot, sometimes comfortably, sometimes not. But the formula has had huge successes: Mama Mia using songs of '80s pop group ABBA and Jersey Boys, which tells the story of Franki Valli and the Four Seasons using their music.

Tom Hanks, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, is making his Broadway debut in Lucky Guy, a new play by the late Nora Ephron. Directed by George C. Woolfe and now playing at the Broadhurst Theatre, Lucky Guy is a true New York story about Mike McAlary, a New York storyteller himself — a tabloid reporter for, variously, The Daily News and the New York Post. McAlary’s career waxed and waned, but waxed again just before his death in 1998 at age 41.

Hands on a Hardbody is the decidedly catchy title of a musical with a particular catch in its plot: A group of people are in a contest to win a new truck. The competition is simple enough. The contestants stand around truck with one hand on it and the last person to let go of the truck is the winner.

Ann Richards was silver-haired, sharp-tongued, brassy, bold and mostly beloved. She came to national prominence with a speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention and served a term as governor of Texas starting in 1991, making a very distinctive mark both politically and personally.

The Flick is the newest play by Annie Baker, whose frequent collaborator, Sam Gold, directs the production now running at Playwrights Horizons.

A young, idealistic, American married couple move to Paris to live together and do good work. But youth and idealism aren’t enough to build a life on in a strange city, unless the foundations of the relationship are solid. Amy Herzog’s new play Belleville, described as a “psychological thriller,” is in its first Manhattan production at New York Theatre Workshop.

Sometimes we look back on the low moments in our lives and realize, hey, we did learn something from that awful episode; it wasn’t as bad as we remember, after all. Can the perspective afforded us by the passage of time yield the same realization at the theater?

What's a theater critic doing at the opera house? Well, opera is theater, after all. But it's the particular Broadway connection of director Michael Mayer that caught New York Times critic Charles Isherwood's eye on the marquee at the Metropolitan Opera.