Around Broadway

Sometimes it’s hard to know whether a statement should be taken literally or not. For instance, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma is not from the Sooner State, it’s based here in New York.  On the other hand, its current show, Life and Times: Episodes 1-4 could hardly be more literal. 

Movie star Scarlett Johansson made a very successful Broadway debut in 2010, so successful that she won a Tony Award for her work in Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge.” Three years later, she’s back on Broadway in a much more substantive role as Margaret, or “Maggie the Cat” (as the character is more often referred to), in Tennessee Williams' “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" at the Richard Rodgers Theatre.

She’s best-known to the world-at-large for her long-running role as Jackie, sister of the title character in the TV sitcom, “Roseanne.” But actress Laurie Metcalf has had a long and distinguished career as a stage actress.

The name Quiara Alegría Hudes may not be on the average theatergoer’s short list of major playwrights, but it’s well-known to the Pulitzer Prize committee. Hudes wrote the book for In the Heights, the Tony Award-winning musical, which was a finalist in 2009 for a Pulitzer Prize.

Two of the major regional theaters in New Haven, Conn., have mounted new productions recently, one a premiere and the other a revival.

As always at holiday time, theaters across the city and, indeed, the country, program Christmas entertainment with the perennial Dickens' classic A Christmas Carol and numerous Nutcrackers leading the way. In New York this year, however, there are two brand-new entries in the holiday theater sweepstakes: on Broadway, a new musical adaptation of the popular movie “A Christmas Story,” and Off Broadway at New York Theater Workshop, a more somber and unusual work of seasonal fare, A Civil War Christmas.

Clifford Odets was a vibrant New York playwright in a vibrant period in American theater: the 1930s. Life during the Great Depression provided rich material for works confronting the difficulties and opportunities that lay in the American experience. Odets explored those ideas first in the theater, and then in Hollywood, writing for the screen. Three of his works have been revived recently in New York. The latest is Golden Boy, about a young man with both artistic talent and a taste for quicker, cruder fame.

With a cast led by a two-time Tony Award-winner Norbert Leo Butz, and an actress currently best-known for her off-screen life, Katie Holmes, the new play Dead Accounts, gives fans of both acting and star-gazing a reason to head to the Music Box Theatre.

Fans of Anton Chekhov will likely recognize three of the four title names in playwright Christopher Durang's new comedy, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which stars Sigourney Weaver and David Hyde Pierce in the Lincoln Center Theater production at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater.

August Wilson’s play The Piano Lesson is one of the few in his 10-play “Century Cycle” that has not seen a major New York revival since its original Broadway production in 1985. The Signature Theatre, which devoted a whole season to Wilson’s work a few years ago, has now revived this Pulitzer Prize winner, in a production directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson at the Pershing Square Signature Center.