Theater

A starry Sondheim revival on Broadway, Alicia Keys’s new musical and John Turturro in a Philip Roth adaptation: a guide to this season’s theater.In a different reality, this list of show openings across the country might be longer. You’d see the world premiere of Larissa FastHorse’s “Fake It Until You Make It,” for example, one of many productions canceled or postponed because of the powerful economic headwinds that theaters are facing. Still, there’s hope: Exciting ideas are taking shape in regional theaters, where works like “Run Bambi Run,” “Illinois” and “The Salvagers” are being staged. In New York, “Swing State,” “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Sabbath’s Theater” are among the shows that remind us of theater’s promise. And Broadway, of course, with intriguing new shows like “Gutenberg! The Musical,” “I Need That” and “How to Dance in Ohio,” will always survive. (Dates are subject to change.)SeptemberDIG The owner of a dying plant shop forms an unlikely relationship with a woman carrying a lot of baggage in this play by Theresa Rebeck, who also directs the Primary Stages production. Developed at the Dorset Theater Festival, “Dig” had a well-received premiere there in 2019. (Sept. 2-Oct. 22, 59E59 Theaters)DRACULA: A COMEDY OF TERRORS Count Dracula is a pansexual Gen-Z type experiencing an existential crisis in this comedy, written by Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen and inspired by the Bram Stoker classic. Expect a gender-bending celebration of sex, goth and goofiness, directed by Greenberg. The cast features James Daly as Dracula and, all appearing in several roles, Jordan Boatman, Arnie Burton, Ellen Harvey and Andrew Keenan-Bolger. (Sept. 4-Jan. 7, New World Stages)PURLIE VICTORIOUS: A NON-CONFEDERATE ROMP THROUGH THE COTTON PATCH Leslie Odom Jr. stars as Purlie Victorious Judson in Ossie Davis’s 1961 comedy about a traveling preacher who returns to his hometown in Georgia to save the community church and stand up to the oppressive white plantation owner Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee. Billy Eugene Jones (“Fat Ham”) and Kara Young (“Cost of Living”) also star. Kenny Leon directs. (Performances begin Sept. 7, Music Box Theater)SWING STATE The recently widowed Peg unintentionally sets off a small-town feud in this new play by Rebecca Gilman about the political polarization in America. In his rave review of its premiere last year at the Goodman Theater, The Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones called it “perhaps the first of the great American post-Covid plays.” Robert Falls directs this Audible Theater production, featuring the original Chicago cast, including Mary Beth Fisher as Peg. (Sept. 8-Oct. 21, Minetta Lane Theater)Rebecca Gilman’s new play, “Swing State,” arrives this month at the Minetta Lane Theater, with, from left, Anne E. Thompson, Kirsten Fitzgerald and Mary Beth Fisher.Liz LaurenMARY GETS HERS In plagued 10th-century Germany, an orphan named Mary is rescued by people desperate to protect her, and her chastity, at all costs in this new play by Emma Horwitz. The play is inspired by “Abraham, or the Rise and Repentance of Mary,” a comedy-drama written more than 1,000 years ago by Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, one of the earliest-known female poets in Germany. The show, directed by Josiah Davis, is being produced by The Playwrights Realm, which is in residence at MCC Theater. (Sept. 11-Oct. 7, MCC Theater)JAJA’S AFRICAN HAIR BRAIDING A group of West African immigrant women working together in a Harlem hair salon share their secrets, dreams and doubts in this new play by Jocelyn Bioh (“School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play”), her Broadway playwriting debut. Whitney White (“Our Dear Dead Drug Lord”) directs this Manhattan Theater Club production. (Sept. 12-Oct. 29, Samuel J. Friedman Theater)RUN BAMBI RUN Gordon Gano of the Violent Femmes and the playwright Eric Simonson (“Lombardi”) have collaborated on this new true crime saga in the form of a musical. With new songs from Gano, Simonson’s book is based on the story of Lawrencia Bembenek, a Milwaukee police officer who was convicted in 1981 of killing her husband’s ex-wife. Known as Bambi, Bembenek escaped from prison, was later caught and maintained her innocence until her death in 2010. Mark Clements directs. (Sept. 13-Oct. 22, Milwaukee Repertory Theater)MELISSA ETHERIDGE: MY WINDOW From her Kansas childhood to her years in the male-dominated rock business, Melissa Etheridge entertains with stories and many of her songs. Seen Off Broadway at New World Stages last year, Etheridge’s show has a lot of humor and a few gut punches too (her son died of a drug overdose). The almost-solo show (a roadie character is along for the ride) heads to Broadway with the same director, Amy Tinkham. (Sept. 14-Nov. 19, Circle in the Square Theater)Melissa Etheridge, the Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, brings her memoir-style show to Broadway this fall after a run Off Broadway last year.Richard Termine for The New York TimesTHE REFUGE PLAYS This new epic tale by Nathan Alan Davis (“Nat Turner in Jerusalem”) follows a Black family over 70 years, beginning with a ghostly visit to a woman who is told she will die within 24 hours. This Roundabout Theater Company presentation is produced in association with New York Theater Workshop, whose new artistic director, Patricia McGregor, will direct a cast including Nicole Ari Parker, Daniel J. Watts, Ngozi Jane Anyanwu and Jon Michael Hill, among others. (Sept. 14-Nov. 12, Laura Pels Theater)GUTENBERG! THE MUSICAL! I still remember how much my abs hurt — back in 2011 — from laughing at Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells in “The Book of Mormon.” So their reunion is a season highlight. This time, they play aspiring (and inept) musical theater creators doing a backer’s audition of their new play about the inventor of the printing press. If the subject sounds dry, don’t worry — they have injected plenty of wildly inaccurate history into their script to spice things up. The show, written by Scott Brown and Anthony King (“Beetlejuice”), started out at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, and has run Off Broadway. Alex Timbers directs. (Sept. 15-Jan. 28, James Earl Jones Theater)BILLY STRAYHORN: SOMETHING TO LIVE FOR This new musical tells Strayhorn’s story, from his poor upbringing in Pittsburgh to fame as one of the greatest jazz composers, including his collaborations with Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, and his life as an openly gay Black man living through the early days of the civil rights movement. The Broadway veteran Darius de Haas (who did the vocals for the Shy Baldwin character in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) stars as Strayhorn, with J.D. Mollison as Ellington. The book is by Rob Zellers and Kent Gash, who also directs. The music and lyrics are by Strayhorn, and Matthew Whitaker will conduct a nine-piece jazz band. (Sept. 19-Oct. 11, Pittsburgh Public Theater)MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez star in this Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s musical about three friends trying to make it in showbiz. The story is told in reverse chronological order, allowing us to see the broken ties of later life before the starry-eyed hopefulness of younger days. Maria Friedman directs. The 1981 Broadway debut was a flop, but this production, with a sold-out, well-reviewed run at New York Theater Workshop, might have the makings of a smash. (Sept. 19-March 24, Hudson Theater)ULYSSES Elevator Repair Service brings the epic and challenging James Joyce novel about one day in 1904 Dublin to the stage in this new production, commissioned by the Fisher Center at Bard College. While the company is not doing the entire text, as it had for “The Great Gatsby,” selections from each of the 18 episodes in the Joyce novel will be performed, using a fictional academic panel discussion as the jumping-off point. The cast features company regulars including Scott Shepherd, Vin Knight and Maggie Hoffman, with John Collins directing. (Sept. 21-Oct. 1, Fisher Center at Bard)THE WIZ This musical — an adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s children’s book with an all-Black cast — was a hit in 1975 with André De Shields in the title role. The new production kicks off a national tour in Baltimore, starring Alan Mingo Jr. as the Wiz, Nichelle Lewis as Dorothy and Deborah Cox as Glinda. The show is intended to hit Broadway in spring 2024, with Wayne Brady stepping into the title role in time for appearances in San Francisco and Los Angeles. “The Wiz” features a book by William F. Brown, with additional material by Amber Ruffin and a score by Charlie Smalls (and others). Schele Williams (“The Notebook”) directs. (Tour begins Sept. 23, Hippodrome Theater)HERE WE ARE Stephen Sondheim fans will get to see one more new musical by the master, who died in 2021, when this long-gestating show, a collaboration with the playwright David Ives and the director Joe Mantello, has its world premiere. The musical is adapted from two Luis Buñuel films, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel.” Sondheim was guarded about the exact story, telling The New York Times days before he died: “I don’t know if I should give the so-called plot away, but the first act is a group of people trying to find a place to have dinner, and they run into all kinds of strange and surreal things, and in the second act, they find a place to have dinner, but they can’t get out.” The talented cast includes Tracie Bennett, Bobby Cannavale, Micaela Diamond, Amber Gray, Denis O’Hare, Steven Pasquale and David Hyde Pierce. (Sept. 28-Jan. 7, the Shed’s Griffin Theater)ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE: HOW SHAKESPEARE INVENTED THE VILLAIN Patrick Page is no stranger to playing bad guys (Hades in “Hadestown” comes to mind), but he doesn’t often play a bunch of them in one show. In this solo creation, Page embodies more than a dozen of Shakespeare’s great villains — even Lady Macbeth — as he explores their motivations and Shakespeare’s interpretation of villainy. The show was presented at the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, D.C., a couple of years ago, and The Times’s Maya Phillips wrote that seeing Page in action was “like watching a chameleon change hues before your eyes: stupefying, effortless.” Simon Godwin directs. (Sept. 29-Jan. 7, DR2 Theater)OctoberDRUIDO’CASEY The Irish playwright Sean O’Casey, who wrote about the Easter Rising of 1916 and Dublin’s working classes, is getting quite the celebration at the N.Y.U. Skirball Center. O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy — “The Plough and the Stars,” “The Shadow of a Gunman” and “Juno and the Paycock” — is being presented in this Druid Theater of Galway production, directed by Garry Hynes, Druid’s artistic director. The works, which audiences can watch as a marathon or single-play performances, are being produced in partnership with the Public Theater. (Oct. 4-14, N.Y.U. Skirball Center)Aaron Monaghan and Hilda Fay in Sean O’Casey’s “Juno and the Paycock.” The Druid Theater of Galway production, in partnership with the Public Theater, will be at N.Y.U. Skirball Center.Ros KavanaghSTEREOPHONIC A rock band recording a new album in the mid-1970s is catapulted to stardom much quicker than its members could have imagined in this new play by David Adjmi (“Marie Antoinette”), featuring music by Will Butler, formerly of Arcade Fire. Does the group make it, and stay together? Daniel Aukin directs. (Oct. 6-Nov. 19, Playwrights Horizons)I CAN GET IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE Santino Fontana stars in a revival of this 1962 musical about a shamelessly corrupt Depression-era shipping clerk. The original book, by Jerome Weidman, based on his 1937 novel, has been revised by his son, John Weidman, with music and lyrics by Harold Rome. Trip Cullman directs a cast that also includes Adam Chanler-Berat, Rebecca Naomi Jones, Judy Kuhn, Sarah Steele and Julia Lester. (Oct. 10-Dec. 3, Classic Stage Company)POOR YELLA REDNECKS The inventive playwright Qui Nguyen (“Vietgone”) is influenced as much by his Vietnamese background as by a love for comic books and action movies. His latest is about a Vietnamese family, with big dreams and small salaries, trying to adapt to a new life in Arkansas. There will be struggle and drama … and also Kung Fu and hip-hop. May Adrales directs the play, co-commissioned by South Coast Repertory and Manhattan Theater Club. (Oct. 10-Nov. 26, New York City Center Stage I)SABBATH’S THEATER Philip Roth’s raunchy, funny 1995 novel, about a debaucherous womanizer and retired puppeteer questioning the value of his life (and goaded toward suicide by his mother’s ghost), is being adapted for the stage by John Turturro and Ariel Levy. Turturro also stars as Mickey Sabbath, alongside Elizabeth Marvel and Jason Kravits. Jo Bonney (“Cost of Living”) directs this world premiere for the New Group. (Oct. 10-Dec. 3, Pershing Square Signature Center)MERRY ME Hansol Jung (“Wolf Play”) is inspired by restoration comedy and Greek theater for this new play about women on a Navy base seeking libidinous pleasure, while also trying to save the world. The show, directed by Leigh Silverman (“Hurricane Diane”), sounds unique, intriguing and naughty at the same time. (Oct. 11-Nov. 19, New York Theater Workshop)THE GREAT GATSBY The heartthrob Jeremy Jordan is the eccentric millionaire Jay Gatsby in this new musical based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, about a man on a mission to pursue the love of his life: Daisy Buchanan (Eva Noblezada of “Hadestown”). The book is by Kait Kerrigan (“The Mad Ones”), the score by the Tony Award nominees Nathan Tysen and Jason Howland (“Paradise Square”), with Marc Bruni (“Beautiful: The Carole King Musical”) directing. (Oct. 12-Nov. 12, Paper Mill Playhouse)HELEN. Caitlin George’s story about three sisters, which interweaves mythology and history, is being produced by the SuperGeographics and presented by La MaMa in association with En Garde Arts. (Oct. 13-29, La MaMa)I NEED THAT Danny DeVito stars as a hoarder facing eviction if he can’t clean up his act in Theresa Rebeck’s new comedy. DeVito’s daughter Lucy DeVito plays his fictional daughter in the play, also starring Ray Anthony Thomas. Rebeck teams up again with her “Bernhardt/Hamlet” director, Moritz von Stuelpnagel, for this Roundabout Theater Company production. (Oct. 13-Dec. 23, American Airlines Theater)HARMONY After many years of development, this musical by Barry Manilow (music) and Bruce Sussman (book and lyrics) is Broadway bound. And no, it’s not a Manilow jukebox musical (though I don’t hate that idea). Instead, “Harmony” is based on the true story of the Comedian Harmonists, a wildly successful singing group formed in Berlin in 1927, and follows them during the rise of Nazism. The ubiquitous Warren Carlyle directs a cast including Chip Zien, Julie Benko and Sierra Boggess. (Performances begin Oct. 18, Ethel Barrymore Theater)THE GARDENS OF ANUNCIA The adolescent years of the director and choreographer Graciela Daniele, who grew up in Argentina during the fascist regime of Juan Perón, form the basis for this musical featuring a book, music and lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa. The show had its premiere at the Old Globe Theater in 2021 and will be presented in New York by Lincoln Center Theater. Daniele, still working at 83, directs and co-choreographs with Alex Sanchez. (Oct. 19-Dec. 31, Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater)NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL Boundary-pushing theater tends to be the first to suffer from budget cuts (farewell, Under the Radar Festival), so it’s heartening that the Brooklyn Academy of Music is sticking with this annual event, even if it’s much smaller than in past years. “Food” (Nov. 2-18) stars the absurdist performer Geoff Sobelle, who gathers the audience at a massive table for a meditation on how and why we eat. Lee Sunday Evans co-directs with Sobelle, who cocreated the show with Steve Cuiffo. Also on the program is “How to Live (After You Die),” Dec. 7-9, a solo show by the Australian artist and filmmaker Lynette Wallworth, about her experience of being drawn into cultism and escaping through art. (The festival runs Oct. 19-Jan. 13, Brooklyn Academy of Music)In “Food,” Geoff Sobelle presents a dinner party that’s an absurdist theatrical spectacle. It will be presented at the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Iain MastertonTHE FRIEL PROJECT The Irish Repertory Theater honors the great Irish playwright Brian Friel with three of his plays set in the fictional town of Ballybeg. First up is “Translations,” set in the 1830s, when British rule made efforts in Ireland to erase the Gaelic language; Doug Hughes directs (Oct. 20-Dec. 3). The Friel season continues with “Aristocrats,” directed by the theater’s artistic director, Charlotte Moore (Jan. 11-March 3); and “Philadelphia, Here I Come!,” with the theater’s producing director, Ciarán O’Reilly, directing (March 16-May 5). (Irish Repertory Theater)HELL’S KITCHEN Ali, a 17-year-old girl growing up in a tiny New York apartment with her single mother, has big dreams but feels trapped. When she hears a neighbor playing the piano, she sees a path out. This show features music and lyrics by Alicia Keys (some new music and some previous hits), and is loosely based on her experience growing up in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, surrounded by a community of artists. The project, more than a decade in the making, will now have its world premiere at the Public Theater. The book is by Kristoffer Diaz, choreography by Camille A. Brown, and Michael Greif directs. (Oct. 24-Dec. 10, Public Theater)SCENE PARTNERS Dianne Wiest stars in a neat twist on the “young wannabe starlet heads to Hollywood” story: Meryl, at 75 years old, decides to leave her Milwaukee home for Los Angeles, where she is determined to become a movie star. Who says it’s too late for her big break? Rachel Chavkin directs this new play by John J. Caswell Jr. (“Wet Brain”). (Oct. 26-Dec. 3, Vineyard Theater)DANNY AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA John Patrick Shanley’s 1984 Bronx-set drama about two outsiders circling the drain earned a young John Turturro his first rave in The Times. Aubrey Plaza (“The White Lotus”) makes her stage debut in this revival, alongside Christopher Abbott (“Girls”), with Jeff Ward directing. (Oct. 30-Jan. 7, Lucille Lortel Theater)SPAMALOT The over-the-top, delightfully goofy Monty Python musical set during the days of King Arthur (and the Knights Who Say ‘Ni!’) is returning to Broadway, where it first had us in stitches more than a decade ago. This new production, whose cast includes James Monroe Iglehart, Christopher Fitzgerald, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, Michael Urie and Ethan Slater, had a well-received run in May, with Josh Rhodes directing and choreographing, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The book and lyrics are by Eric Idle, music by Idle and John Du Prez; Rhodes directs and choreographs again. (Performances begin Oct. 31, St. James Theater)“Spamalot” heads to the St. James Theater, with Nik Walker as Sir Galahad and Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer as the Lady of the Lake, after a brief run at the Kennedy Center in Washington in May.Jeremy DanielNovemberPAL JOEY The nightclub singer and cad Joey Evans is transformed into an ambitious (but more redeemable) Black jazz singer, played by Ephraim Sykes in this new version of the 1940 musical based on stories by John O’Hara, with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart. Richard LaGravenese and Daniel Beaty are rewriting its book to include the original songs along with other Rodgers-Hart classics like “My Heart Stood Still.” Savion Glover and Tony Goldwyn direct this City Center gala presentation. (Nov. 1-5, City Center)WAITING FOR GODOT Some classics, like this 1953 Samuel Beckett tragicomedy, continue to attract actors and directors aiming to make their mark. Having (ahem) played Estragon in college, I confess the play has a long-lasting appeal to me and seeing Michael Shannon take on the role in this Theater for a New Audience production sounds especially exciting. Arin Arbus directs a cast that also includes Paul Sparks (Vladimir), Jeff Biehl (Lucky) and Ajay Naidu (Pozzo). (Nov. 4-Dec. 3, Theater for a New Audience)SPAIN A couple of filmmakers find an unlikely backer — the KGB — for their epic Spanish Civil War movie in Jen Silverman’s new comedy about the age of disinformation. The cast will include Marin Ireland (“Reasons to Be Pretty”), Zachary James (“The Addams Family”) and Erik Lochtefeld (“Metamorphoses”). Tyne Rafaeli directs. (Nov. 8-Dec. 17, Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater)HOW TO DANCE IN OHIO A group of young adults on the autism spectrum prepares for a spring dance, hoping to learn to better navigate social challenges in this musical that had its premiere at Syracuse Stage last year. It’s based on a 2015 documentary by Alexandra Shiva, and features a cast made up largely of autistic actors from the Syracuse production. The book and lyrics are by Rebekah Greer Melocik and music by Jacob Yandura, with Sammi Cannold directing. (Performances begin Nov. 15, Belasco Theater)MANAHATTA A Native American woman, also a promising businesswoman with an M.B.A. from Stanford, heads to Oklahoma for a banking job, connects with her Lenape ancestry and tries to straddle the worlds of finance and her family in this new play by Mary Kathryn Nagle. Laurie Woolery directs. (Nov. 16-Dec. 17, Public Theater)BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB A group of great talents from the golden age of Cuban music in the 1940s and 1950s gathered in Havana for a week in 1996 to record the album “Buena Vista Social Club.” This new musical, with a book by Marco Ramirez (“The Royale”), tells the story of these artists and the creation of the unlikely blockbuster album and a 1999 documentary. Saheem Ali (“Fat Ham”) directs the world premiere for Atlantic Theater Company, featuring music from the album. Musical direction by David Yazbek (“The Band’s Visit”) and choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck. (Nov. 17-Dec. 31, Linda Gross Theater)THE SALVAGERS A father and son (only 14 years apart in age) have a tense enough relationship when possible romance opportunities come up for both and complicate their lives further in this new play by Harrison David Rivers (“The Bandaged Place”). Mikael Burke directs. (Nov. 24-Dec. 16, Yale Repertory Theater)SWEPT AWAY After a brutal storm sinks their whaling ship off the Massachusetts coast, four men struggle to survive in this new musical with a book by John Logan (“Red”) and music and lyrics by the Avett Brothers, based on their 2004 album “Mignonette” (which, in turn, was inspired by a 1884 shipwreck off the Cape of Good Hope). The show premiered at Berkeley Repertory Theater last year, and among the cast returning for this Arena State run are John Gallagher Jr., Stark Sands, Adrian Blake Enscoe and Wayne Duvall. Michael Mayer directs. (Nov. 25-Dec. 30, Arena Stage)APPROPRIATE When the Lafayette family returns to their dead father’s Arkansas home to settle his affairs in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Obie Award-winning play, a photo album of disturbing images creates tension and raises questions about the man they thought they knew. Jacobs-Jenkins’s works include the Pulitzer Prize finalists “Gloria” and “Everybody,” but this Second Stage production is the first play he has written to land on Broadway. Lila Neugebauer (“The Waverly Gallery”) directs a cast that includes Sarah Paulson. (Performances begin Nov. 29, Hayes Theater)Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Appropriate,” which ran Off Broadway in 2014, is getting a Broadway run this winter with a cast that includes Sarah Paulson.Richard Termine for The New York TimesDecemberREAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES Ana, full-figured and fresh out of high school, dreams of an education, but as a first-generation Mexican American in 1987 Los Angeles, she must battle her immigrant mother and the expectation she works in a sweatshop. This new musical is based on the 1990 play by Josefina López that inspired the 2002 film by López and George LaVoo. The new musical version features music and lyrics by Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez and a book by Lisa Loomer, with the Tony winner Sergio Trujillo directing and choreographing. (Dec. 8-Jan. 21, American Repertory Theater)PRAYER FOR THE FRENCH REPUBLIC A Jewish family in 2016 Paris question their safety in an increasingly hostile world in this play by Joshua Harmon (“Bad Jews”), which had its premiere Off Broadway via Manhattan Theater Club last year. David Cromer returns to direct this Broadway transfer. The story, which moves between two time periods, also includes the family’s older relatives, who in 1944 managed to survive in occupied Paris. (Dec. 19-Feb. 4, Samuel J. Friedman Theater)From left, Nancy Robinette, Kenneth Tigar, Peyton Lusk and Ari Brand in “Prayer for the French Republic,” about a family grappling with antisemitism, at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in Manhattan. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJanuaryILLINOIS This new dance-theater hybrid is based on Sufjan Stevens’s 2005 concept album “Illinois,” about people, places and events in the Prairie State. With a story by Jackie Sibblies Drury (“Fairview”) and choreography and direction by Justin Peck, the show had a premiere at the Fisher Center at Bard this past summer. (Jan. 12-28, Chicago Shakespeare Theater)THE CONNECTOR A talented up-and-coming journalist faces off with a diligent copy editor in this new musical, conceived and directed by Daisy Prince. The book is by Jonathan Marc Sherman and music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown (“Parade”), who also leads the band in this MCC Theater world premiere. (Jan. 12-Feb. 18, Newman Mills Theater)ENCORES! Don’t be fooled by the words “staged concert readings”; these productions, now in their 30th year, are more elaborate and moving than simple readings. This season includes “Once Upon a Mattress,” the 1959 musical comedy adapted from the fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea” (Jan. 24-Feb. 4), directed by Lear deBessonet and starring Sutton Foster; “Jelly’s Last Jam,” the 1992 musical about the life of the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton (Feb. 21-March 3), directed by Robert O’Hara; and “Titanic,” a 1997 musical recounting of the famous maritime disaster (June 12-23), directed by Anne Kauffman. (New York City Center)FebruaryDOUBT: A PARABLE Tyne Daly and Liev Schreiber star in a revival of John Patrick Shanley’s powerful Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a Catholic school nun who suspects a priest of sexual abuse. Scott Ellis directs the Roundabout Theater Company production, the first Broadway revival of “Doubt” since the 2005 premiere. (Feb. 2-April 14, American Airlines Theater)THE NOTEBOOK Nicholas Sparks’s 1996 novel about romantic idealism and lifelong love comes to Broadway as a new musical (there was a screen adaptation in 2004 too, of course). The book is by Bekah Brunstetter, music and lyrics by Ingrid Michaelson, and Michael Greif and Schele Williams direct. “The Notebook” arrives in New York following a well-received premiere last year at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. (Performances begin Feb. 6, Gerald Schoenfeld Theater)REDWOOD Idina Menzel stars in a new musical about a seemingly successful businesswoman who suffers heartbreak and escapes her life and family to immerse herself in the redwoods of Northern California. Tina Landau wrote the book and directs this world premiere; the music is by Kate Diaz and lyrics by Diaz and Landau, with additional contributions from Menzel. (Feb. 13-March 17, La Jolla Playhouse)TEETH I can’t believe a team decided to adapt the 2007 cult classic film about a young woman with toothed genitalia. Talk about pushing boundaries. The film, about an evangelical Christian teenager whose body bites back, didn’t even get the greatest reviews, but I’m in. The book is by Anna K. Jacobs and Michael R. Jackson (“A Strange Loop”), with music by Jacobs and lyrics by Jackson. Sarah Benson (“Blasted”) directs. (Performances begin Feb. 21, Playwrights Horizons)MarchONE OF THE GOOD ONES A young Latina brings her boyfriend home to meet the parents in this new comedy by Gloria Calderón Kellett (“One Day at a Time” reboot); naturally biases come to the surface. The Pasadena Playhouse, winner of the 2023 regional theater Tony Award, commissioned this new play. (March 13-April 7, Pasadena Playhouse)PURPOSE A youngest son’s homecoming forces a politically powerful Black American family to grapple with some secrets, faith and radicalism in this new play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Phylicia Rashad directs the world premiere for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company, leading a cast including Alana Arenas, Glenn Davis and Jon Michael Hill. (March 14-April 21, Steppenwolf Theater)THE OUTSIDERS It’s the poor Greasers vs. the rich Socs in this new musical about angsty teenagers in 1960s Tulsa based on the S.E. Hinton novel (as well as Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film starring C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon and a bunch of other now-famous actors). The show, which had its premiere at La Jolla Playhouse earlier this year, features a book by Adam Rapp with Justin Levine and music and lyrics by the folk duo Jamestown Revival (Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance) and Levine. Danya Taymor directs. (Performances begin March 16, Bernard B. Jacobs Theater)“The Outsiders” will make its way to Broadway in the spring, following its premiere earlier this year at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, Calif.Rich Soublet IISALLY & TOM A playwright and director (who are also a married couple) star in a play about the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson — that is the setup of Suzan-Lori Parks’s new play about history, consent and power. The show, directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, is being presented in New York by the Public Theater in association with The Guthrie Theater, where it had its premiere last year. (March 28-April 28, Public Theater)April and beyondTHREE HOUSES A new musical by Dave Malloy (“Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812”) is always going to be a highlight. In his latest, Malloy employs book, music and lyrics to explore our post-pandemic world, bringing together three strangers after a long period of a time that was as communal as it was solitary. Annie Tippe directs. (April 30-June 9, Pershing Square Signature Center)MOTHER PLAY Jessica Lange, Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger star in this new play by Paula Vogel (“How I Learned to Drive”). Vogel’s latest, set outside Washington, D.C., in 1962, is a study of the power of family bonds, focusing on a mother (Lange) with firm ideas about what her two teenage kids need to do to be successful. Tina Landau directs this Second Stage Theater premiere. (Performances begin April 2, Hayes Theater)ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE The “Succession” star Jeremy Strong takes the stage in Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 classic about a small-town doctor who tries to speak truth to power when he discovers the community’s water is tainted, and nearly ruins his life in the process. Sam Gold will direct this new production, an adaptation by the playwright Amy Herzog, whose revision of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” ran on Broadway this year. (Performances dates and theater to be announced)CABARET Eddie Redmayne starred in a recent, lauded London revival of this 1966 Kander and Ebb musical that shows us the Nazi rise to power through the lives of people in a Berlin nightclub. Redmayne is expected to reclaim the role of the Emcee when this new production, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, opens on Broadway. The book is by Joe Masteroff, music by Kander and lyrics by Ebb. (Previews begin in the spring, August Wilson Theater)GATSBY American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., is planning its own musical adaptation of the Fitzgerald novel, directed by Rachel Chavkin. The A.R.T. production will feature a score by Florence Welch (Florence + the Machine) and Thomas Bartlett (Doveman) with a book by Martyna Majok (“Cost of Living”). (May 25-July 21, 2024, American Repertory Theater) More

In her Off Broadway drama, which had an acclaimed run in Chicago, the playwright looks for hope to outweigh despair in a fractious, anxious time.The playwright Rebecca Gilman moved away from small-town Alabama long ago, but a soft Southern lilt still shapes her words. In all the years she lived and worked here in her adopted city of Chicago, she remained immune to its Bill Murray accent. The broad tones of nearby Wisconsin have likewise left no mark.Rural Wisconsin itself, though, has burrowed deep in her soul. After more than a decade of traveling back and forth from Chicago, Gilman relocated full-time to Green County, Wis., about four years ago. If you want to send her into a soliloquy, just ask what she loves about the prairie. She will talk about its colors and how they change throughout the year — from white to pink to purple to a wind-stirred sea of yellow — and then she will venture into its metaphors.“When you go to a prairie, it’s just teeming with life — butterflies, bugs, birds, everything,” she said on a stiflingly hot August afternoon in an upstairs lounge at the Goodman Theater, where her new play, “Swing State,” was in rehearsals for its New York run. “It’s an ecosystem. Everything depends on everything else. Some of the plants have to be pollinated by particular butterflies. Particular butterflies have to have lupine to lay their eggs. Monarchs have to have milkweed. And it is not a monoculture. It cannot thrive unless it’s as diverse as diverse can be.”Gilman, 58, worries about the prairie’s destruction, but she acts on that fear, volunteering with an endearingly named group, the Prairie Enthusiasts, to protect the land. She worries, too, about threats to wildlife — like white-nose syndrome, which has killed millions of bats — so she recently trained as a “bat ambassador,” to raise awareness of their plight.And like so many inhabitants of this bellicose, burning planet, Gilman worries about its survival if people cannot find a way to coexist and cooperate, at the most intimate local level and beyond. In “Swing State,” which is scheduled to begin previews on Friday, at the Minetta Lane Theater in Manhattan, she wrestles with that anxiety, and with the hopelessness that it can bring.The actors Bubba Weiler and Mary Beth Fisher rehearsing the play at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where “Swing State” had an acclaimed run last year.Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesDirected by Gilman’s longtime collaborator Robert Falls, the play is set in what is known as the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, where the rolling landscape is untouched by glacial sediment, or drift. The principal characters are driftless, too — lacking the purpose that human beings require to thrive.Peg, a recent widow in her 60s, cherishes the acres of ancient prairie on her land, and takes crotchety good care of her 20-something neighbor Ryan, a recovering alcoholic who looks out for her, too, as he scrambles to get his life together. But with the natural world in escalating peril, and her husband now just ashes in a box, Peg cannot summon the will to go on.Set in 2021, “Swing State” is only subtly a play about the coronavirus pandemic, depicting the isolation that people felt in its early stages, and the knee-jerk, politicized hostility that arose around masks and vaccines. It is more interested in the ways that antagonism has replaced goodwill, and how lethal to community such hardheartedness can be.When the play had its premiere at the Goodman last October, the critic Chris Jones wrote, in a rave review in The Chicago Tribune, that Gilman had captured “the feeling that America has atrophied, the sense that once-shared values have swung so far to the extremes that the bones of a nation have crumbled.”Yet she frames it all in up-close, personal terms, using just four characters — all residents of the same tiny township. The story isn’t overtly about civic life; at the same time, it is hugely about civic life.“The play, for me,” Falls said, perched in a cushy chair a few feet from Gilman, “is sort of about loss and everything we’re losing. One could say civility in politics. One could say very much the environment. One could say a democracy.”For all the rough-and-tumble raucousness of the national shouting match, though, “Swing State” takes a gentle tone.“In a way,” Falls said, “it becomes the quietest play, sitting in the middle of the biggest epic social circumstances.”The longtime collaborators at a rehearsal last month. Falls said the play “is sort of about loss and everything we’re losing.”Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesA TONY AWARD WINNER for his 1999 production of “Death of a Salesman,” Falls, 69, was nearing the end of his long tenure as the Goodman’s artistic director when he decided he wanted to stage one more Gilman play. It would be the sixth in a collaboration that began with her 2001 play “Blue Surge.”In late 2020, when the pandemic was keeping him at home in Evanston, Ill., wondering darkly if actors would ever act without masks on, Gilman was at home in southern Wisconsin, not knowing if she would ever write another play — because, she said, “everything just seemed sort of pointless.”But then he called her up and asked her to. Always, he said, he has felt a connection to her voice, and to the “moral sensibility” at the heart of her plays — a quality he ascribed to her deeply understanding “how the world truly works” yet rejecting “the cynicism of just throwing up your [expletive] hands.”“I really wanted to do a new play by Rebecca,” he said, “to the point where it didn’t really matter what Rebecca wanted to write about.”Gilman had two conditions, swiftly granted: that Falls would direct and that Mary Beth Fisher — who originated lead roles in two of Gilman’s best known plays, “Spinning Into Butter” (1999) and “Boy Gets Girl” (2000), both at the Goodman — would star.As Gilman wrote the role of Peg for Fisher, she poured into the play what was on her mind. Even in those dire days when theaters were shut down and the industry’s future was grim, Gilman’s eyes were on a more collective danger.“The world is in trouble,” she said. “It’s not just the theater that’s in trouble. The world is in trouble. And if the planet dies, all of our precious art is going to die with it. That was the urgency I was feeling. Like, can we create something that also communicates this?”In her swing-state township that Joe Biden won by two votes, where she and her husband joke that maybe they tilted the balance, Gilman doesn’t really talk politics with people anymore: too hazardous.“There’s so much potential for conflict and animosity,” she said, “that you kind of just don’t go down that road because you also have to live next to each other, where there aren’t very many people. You don’t want to make enemies of your neighbors. I don’t know my neighbors’ politics, and I don’t need to know, and I don’t want to know, because I need them if we get stuck in the snow, or they need me to come to their daughter’s high school graduation party.”Fisher, right, with Anne E. Thompson, left, and Kirsten Fitzgerald in the play.Liz LaurenThat polarity and interdependence are woven into “Swing State”; likewise what Gilman said was her fear of losing the people most precious to her, and her alarm at what was vanishing from her beloved outdoors.“Despair is a really strong word,” she said. “But when you do go out into the natural world regularly, it’s impossible not to see what’s dying. It’s impossible not to see what we’re losing.”When bird-watching became a popular pandemic activity, friends would ask her to take them. It gave them solace and gave her solace, too, but hers came with an asterisk.“I was so happy that they were discovering it,” she said. “But at the same time, I was thinking, there used to be so many more birds here. Every time we’d go out, I’d think, oh, gosh, I wish you had come out with me 10 years ago. I wish you’d come out with me five years ago. The birds that we used to see here are not here anymore.”Falls spent his first 13 years of life surrounded by cornfields in rural Illinois, where his mother’s side of the family were farmers. He has always preferred city to country, books to bird-watching. Yet when Gilman took him onto the prairie and handed him a pair of binoculars, he immediately made a rare sighting: a Henslow’s sparrow, a type of bird that figures poignantly in “Swing State.”Theater people in general being fond of superstition, he took that as a “great omen” for the play. Maybe it was, given the show’s success so far — the accolades in Chicago, then the transfer of the Goodman production to New York by Audible Theater, which will record an audio version for wide release.The play’s title, by the way, isn’t just about Wisconsin as a purple state. It’s about the characters’ emotional landscapes, Gilman said, “swinging between despair and hope.”She has no interest in providing false hope, preferring to acknowledge reality. But she doesn’t want to knuckle under to despair, not least because it’s unfair to abandon the world’s troubles to generations that didn’t cause them.So, she said, it’s a balancing act, one in which “meaningful work that makes the world better” — the kind her characters are in search of, and that she has discovered on the prairie — is part of finding a way to heal.“Put despair and hope on the scale,” she said. “You’re going to have to work to make hope outweigh despair, but I do think it’s possible. And I do think that the work is necessary in a way it never has been before.” More

Twelve years after opening “The Book of Mormon,” the two actors — and good friends — return with “Gutenberg! The Musical!”Josh Gad still remembers the first time he and Andrew Rannells met, in June 2010 in a Los Angeles audition suite. No matter what Gad did during their scenes together, Rannells didn’t laugh. Not once.Rannells was auditioning for “The Book of Mormon,” the new musical from the creators of “South Park.” Gad, then a correspondent on “The Daily Show,” had long been attached. The producers wanted a celebrity opposite him, and they’d invited several to these tryouts. Rannells, a replacement actor in “Hairspray” and “Jersey Boys,” was not remotely famous. Confronted with Gad’s cyclone energy, he chose stillness.“I was so intimidated. And it really upset me,” Gad said, over dinner at Chez Josephine, a theater district mainstay where Rannells, in younger days, used to work the coat check. Gad turned to Rannells. “I had that Tony locked until you walked in the door. And I still had a grudge because you beat me out for ‘Jersey Boys.’” (It was unclear if Gad was joking. Then again, Gad is almost always joking.)“The Book of Mormon” opened in 2011, to rapturous reviews, with Rannells as the strait-laced Mormon missionary Elder Price and Gad as his co-evangelist Elder Cunningham, whose laces are a lot looser. Both men were nominated for a Tony Award and both men lost out to Norbert Leo Butz for “Catch Me If You Can.” Somewhere along the way, they became close friends, which was apparent over dinner, a symphony of bits, riffs and callbacks between bites of tuna tartare and duck breast. They had ordered identical meals and identical Diet Cokes.Rannells, 45, has spent his post “Mormon” years in other Broadway shows and on television (“Girls,” “Black Monday,” “Girls5Eva”). Gad, 42, has since become a voice-over luminary (“Frozen,” Frozen 2,” “Central Park”). Now they are reuniting, one block south and one block east of their “Mormon” haunts, in “Gutenberg! The Musical!” which begins previews at the James Earl Jones Theater on Sept. 15.“Gutenberg!” directed by Alex Timbers and written by Scott Brown and Anthony King, is a farcical, largehearted duet about a pair of nursing home workers, Bud and Doug, bitten grievously by the Broadway bug. Using an inheritance and the proceeds from the sale of a home, they rent a Broadway theater for one night, hoping to find a producer for their deeply misguided and tragically under-researched original musical about Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of movable type and the publisher of the Gutenberg Bible.“The Book of Mormon” opened in 2011, to rapturous reviews, with Rannells as the strait-laced Mormon missionary Elder Price and Gad as his co-evangelist Elder Cunningham, whose laces are a lot looser.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTwo old friends finding a vehicle for a Broadway return has the whiff of a vanity project. But this deliriously silly show, in which the two actors play dozens of characters and wear a combined 107 baseball caps, demands that vanity be left at the stage door.Over dinner, Gad joked (probably!) that when Timbers had sent him a photo of those 107 hats, each inscribed with the name of one of the show’s characters, he’d tried to back out.“It was too late,” Rannells said.“I know,” Gad said. “I read my contract last night.”The day after dinner, at a rehearsal space at the Alvin Ailey Extension, Gad and Rannells were stumbling through (with an emphasis, perhaps, on stumbling) the second act of “Gutenberg!” In a scene at the top of the act, as Bud and Doug introduced themselves to the audience, Rannells hit Gad in the face, perhaps accidentally.“That’s assault,” Gad said.“You walked into it,” Rannells replied. Moments later they were standing cheek to cheek, singing spooky oo-oo-oos.Rannells was wearing a shirt and shorts in complementary greens, his wavy hair reliably perfect. Gad was all in black. He was also drinking an iced coffee. Given his typical energy levels, this seemed like a bad idea. He had burst into the rehearsal room after the lunch break singing “Unchained Melody” with heavy vibrato. He also riffed on a line from “Sunset Boulevard”: “We taught the world new ways to dream.”“No,” Rannells said. He hugged Gad. Or maybe he gave him a mild version of the Heimlich maneuver. This is more or less their way, with Gad as an avatar of chaos and Rannells in smirking control.Casey Nicholaw, the director of “The Book of Mormon,” had noted this contrast. “Josh’s comedy basically just says, ‘Watch me. Love me.’ Josh is just out there,” he said. “And Andrew’s is sneaky. Andrew knows how to just hold himself with grace and dignity and then just go for it.”Each has a different process, a different style, a different affect. Collaborators I spoke with compared them to famous comic duos — Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello. Gad cited “The Odd Couple.”“I definitely am more anxious than he is,” Gad said over dinner. “I’m a bundle of anxiety when it comes to learning dances. I’m a bundle of anxiety when it comes to getting lines right.” Gad said that he is also a hypochondriac and that sometimes, offstage during “The Book of Mormon,” Rannells would suggest possible diseases for him.“He’s got a mean streak,” Gad said. “I can say that now.” Rannells, sipping his Diet Coke, didn’t deny it.Despite that mean streak, a friendship endures. Nikki M. James, their “Mormon” co-star, recalled watching it begin. “Onstage, they played very different people who end up becoming each other’s best friends,” she said in a recent interview. “That camaraderie and friendship and love and sense of family, it was very clear offstage as well.”That show left them inextricably linked. “When I die, if I get an obituary in The New York Times, Josh’s name will also be in it,” Rannells said, somewhat darkly.And after they departed “The Book of Mormon,” each for a quickly canceled sitcom (“1600 Penn” for Gad, “The New Normal” for Rannells), they would often talk about how they might work together again. A revival of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” was mooted. So was a revival of “The Producers.” About four years ago Timbers (“Moulin Rouge,” “Beetlejuice”) had another idea.Brown and King (“Beetlejuice”) had first conceived “Gutenberg!” more than 20 years ago. Back then, King was a musical theater intern at Manhattan Theater Club. Tasked with sifting through the slush pile, he found himself listening to home-recorded tapes and CDs of new musicals, most of them sung through by the author or authors, most of them hopeless. King thought that he and Brown could write something just as bad. Worse even.“We tried to come up with, like, what’s a terrible idea for a musical?” King said.But what began as a way to prank King’s boss evolved into something just a little more sincere. As King put it, “We fell in love with our own dumb stuff.”In 2003, Brown and King performed a 45-minute version of the show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York. It ran for about two years. With encouragement from a producer, they wrote a second act and took it to London. The show that emerged was never about the real Gutenberg — Bud and Doug have only the vaguest ideas of how movable type and medieval history work. Instead it was a loving lampoon of Broadway wishes and tropes.Gad and Rannells’s characters in “Gutenberg! The Musical!” hope to find a producer for their musical about the inventor of movable type.Adam Powell for The New York TimesBut for the Off Broadway premiere in 2006, directed by Timbers, the creators stepped out in favor of actual actors, Christopher Fitzgerald and Jeremy Shamos, which made it feel more like a real show and less like a goofball routine written by two starving artist roommates.There had been conversations about moving the show to Broadway. Those conversations had never been especially earnest. Then Timbers slipped Gad the script, hoping that he would share it in turn with Rannells. Which is exactly what happened.With Brown and King and Timbers, the actors met for a reading in workshop in Los Angeles in March 2020, an inauspicious moment for Broadway-bound musicals. The reading went well. To succeed, the friendship between Bud and Doug has to feel ardent, unbreakable. Gad and Rannells had that.So after a delay of about three years, conversations began again. A two-person show felt overwhelming, especially one in which the actors also had to serve as their own crew, moving each prop and set piece. Gad described it as “more intimate, and yet much more insane than even ‘Mormon.’” Still, he and Rannells agreed.In rehearsal, that insanity was in evidence. The two men were playing not only Bud (Gad), the composer, and Doug (Rannells), the book writer, but also every other baseball-capped character. And they had to play them with all the naïveté and enthusiasm that newbie writers would bring, but also with the necessary skills of a practiced musical theater performer, because bad acting and bad singing aren’t funny for long.“You have to commit to doing fully lived-in characters by performers who otherwise would not be on Broadway,” Gad said.“It’s literally a hat on a hat on a hat on a hat,” Rannells sighed.Hats aside, they seemed to be having a pretty good time, particularly during one sequence where Rannells reenacted an eagle attacking a sea gull, while Gad, playing a pubescent girl, did a sexy, scary skeleton dance.It wasn’t all skeletons and sea gulls. Opening a Broadway show is stressful. “I think our actual human sweat will give us away,” Rannells said. “I’m going to be a real mess 10 minutes into the show.” Opening a Broadway show with a best friend in accidental smacking distance is stressful in a different way. But it’s also pretty nice. “Gutenberg!” is about two characters supporting each other, through thick and thin and third reprise. And as Gad and Rannells tell it, that tracks for the actors, too.“There are times where I want to fall down and just cry at how tiring the show is,” Gad said. “Then I look at Rannells and I’m like, ‘OK, he’s going to keep me upright.’”He turned to Rannells, adding, “I’m so happy you got ‘Jersey Boys’ now. Now I actually think they made the right choice.” More

The Broadway revival saw an immediate change in its fortunes when the actress stepped into the production last September.“That was my dream come true,” Lea Michele gushed from the stage on Sunday after her final performance in “Funny Girl,” the Broadway revival that the actress breathed new life into when its future looked grim one year ago.Michele’s sudden addition to the production, which closed with its star’s exit, stretched its run to nearly 600 performances and allowed it to recoup its capitalization costs — far from a guarantee on Broadway. At Sunday’s matinee, the actress basked in the show’s success, and received seven standing ovations, including for the insistent barn burner “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and the reflective ballad “People.”“I was truly given the greatest gift that surpassed this dream and that was the unconditional true love and support from this cast, who has worked so, so, so hard,” Michele added. “I was embraced with open arms the minute I came in.”Just as Michele reversed the show’s fortunes, “Funny Girl” appeared to have reversed hers. Three years ago, Michele’s celebrity had been clouded by a wave of criticism over bullying behavior and a prima donna attitude. Since she stepped in as the show’s lead, Michele has reassumed the role of a celebrated Broadway star, announcing Tony nominees, performing on late-night shows and booking a solo concert this fall at Carnegie Hall.At her final show at the August Wilson Theater, Michele gave the audience an extra song: “My Man,” which includes lyrics from an original performed by Fanny Brice, the pioneering Jewish entertainer whose life is the basis for the musical.Although the song was not part of the score in either Broadway production, the show’s original star, Barbra Streisand, sang it at the end of her final performance in 1965 and then in the 1968 film adaptation.Michele has said that the song has been an important one to her since she sang it on the television series “Glee.” A belter about devotion to a man despite him being a constant disappointment, “My Man” was dedicated in the series to a character played by Cory Monteith, whom Michele dated both on TV and in real life. Monteith, who had struggled with substance abuse, died of a combination of heroin and alcohol in 2013.“The whole thing with life imitating art imitating life really gets me,” said Richard Gruber, who saw Michele in “Funny Girl” seven times and was seated in the theater’s second row at the performance on Sunday.Gruber, 69, who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., flew in Sunday morning for the final performance and had a return flight Sunday night.“I just find her riveting,” Gruber said, clutching a white rose that the production gave audience members at the front of the house to toss at curtain call.The strength of a performance: Michele and “Funny Girl” cast members performed at the Tony Awards in June, though it wasn’t eligible for any awards.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOver the years, theater producers had trouble reviving “Funny Girl” because of its inextricable association with Streisand, who was 21 when the original production first opened on Broadway. (Streisand is not known to have attended any performances of the revival.)Streisand has long been an idol to Michele, who started as a child actress on Broadway, became a known entity as a lead in “Spring Awakening” and rose to become a household name in “Glee” as an uptight but talented high school glee club member. In a blending of TV and reality, Michele’s character, Rachel Berry, landed the role of Brice, and Michele performed several of the musical’s songs on the show.Michele had long been discussed as an option for a “Funny Girl” revival, but the show’s director, Michael Mayer, who has directed Michele in “Spring Awakening,” said last year that he had sensed that she was not ready to return to work after the birth of her child. The actress Beanie Feldstein was cast in the role, but she drew middling reviews when the show opened in spring 2022. It received one Tony nomination, for Jared Grimes, who portrays Brice’s dance coach and sidekick.When Feldstein bowed out of the show earlier than expected, Michele was tapped to replace her, fueling a flood of press attention, social media debate and, once she made her debut, rave reviews that bolstered ticket sales. A tour, featuring Katerina McCrimmon, starts on Saturday in Providence, R.I.With “Funny Girl,” Michele made her first appearance in a Broadway cast in 15 years. She has indicated that the next gap won’t be so significant. The actress told Variety that she has already booked her next job, hinting that it is a show she expects people will recognize, but that is very different from the one that drew her back to Broadway. More

He wrote plays that tackled big issues like the death penalty and gun violence. He also wrote for series including the superhero saga “Luke Cage.”Nathan Louis Jackson, an acclaimed playwright who grappled with serious issues like the death penalty, homophobia and gun violence — and was also known for his work on television shows like “Luke Cage,” a Netflix series about a Black superhero — died on Aug. 22 at his home in Lenexa, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City. He was 44.His wife, Megan Mascorro-Jackson, confirmed the death. She said that she did not know the cause, but that Mr. Jackson had had cardiac problems over the past few years, including an aortic dissection and an aortic aneurysm.Mr. Jackson was still attending the Juilliard School when his play “Broke-ology,” premiered in 2008 at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts. The story of a Black family in a poor neighborhood of Kansas City, Kan., where Mr. Jackson grew up, it focuses on the confrontation between two brothers over the care of their father, William (played by Wendell Pierce), who has a debilitating case of multiple sclerosis — a disease that Mr. Jackson’s father, who died in 2001, also had.Reviewing the play in The Boston Globe, Louise Kennedy wrote that “what makes Jackson’s writing feel true and fresh — aside from its great humor”— was the way he portrayed the brothers. Malcolm, she noted, “isn’t just a selfish striver,” nor is Ennis “just a resigned martyr” — and William “isn’t just a passive victim.”Crystal A. Dickinson and Wendell Pierce in “Broke-ology,” which one critic called “a very promising debut in the big time for a playwright with a rare quality: heart.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA year later, after Mr. Jackson received his artist diploma in playwriting from Juilliard, “Broke-ology” opened at the Off Broadway Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.“‘Broke-ology’ is a decidedly imperfect work,” Robert Feldberg wrote in The Record of Hackensack, N.J., “but it’s a very promising debut in the big time for a playwright with a rare quality: heart.”Mr. Jackson’s next play, “When I Come to Die,” explored the emotional turmoil of a death row inmate whose execution goes awry — the drug cocktail that was supposed to kill him managed only to stop his heart temporarily — forcing him to wonder what to do with an unexpected extension of his life, and if he will face another execution.“I started thinking about people in weird time positions, and these cats know exactly how much time they have left on this earth,” he said of death row inmates in an interview with The New York Times in 2011, when the play was running Off Broadway at the Duke Theater, a production of Lincoln Center Theater’s program for emerging playwrights. “But what happens if you get more of it?”Although Mr. Jackson established an early place for his work in New York City, he remained close to his Midwestern roots. In addition to living in Kansas, he was the playwright in residence at the Kansas City Repertory Theater, in Missouri, from 2013 to 2019.From left, Michael Balderrama, Chris Chalk and Neal Huff as Adrian Crouse in Mr. Jackson’s play ‘When I Come to Die.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat theater staged productions of “When I Come to Die” and “Broke-ology” and the world premieres of his “Sticky Traps,” about a woman’s response to protests by a homophobic preacher at the funeral of her gay son, who had killed himself, and “Brother Toad,” about the reactions in the Kansas City community to the shooting of two Black teenagers.“The beautiful thing about his writing is that he never told the audience what to think,” Angela Gieras, the executive director of the Kansas City Rep, said in a phone interview. “He’d share a story that was compelling and truthful and let the people have their own conversations.”Nathan Louis Jackson was born on Dec. 4, 1978, in Lawrence, Kan. His father, Cary, was a heating and cooling service technician. His mother, Bessie (Brownlee) Jackson, was a preschool teacher.Nathan said that he was not a good student in high school, and that he studied as little as he could.“Ironically, I failed English,” he told Informed Decisions, a Kansas State University blog, in 2017. “I didn’t want to read Shakespeare.”He graduated from Kansas City Kansas Community College with an associate degree in 1999. At Kansas State, where he majored in theater, he made his first attempt at playwriting by creating monologues for forensics competitions.“I’m there in the Midwest, and there ain’t no other Black folks doing this, so I’d just end up doing August Wilson every time,” he told The Times. “I wanted to do a piece that speaks for me, so I said, ‘I’ll just write my own stuff.’”Mr. Jackson wrote two plays in college that were recognized after his graduation by the Kennedy Center. He won the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award twice, for “The Last Black Play” and “The Mancherios,” which he adapted into “Broke-ology,” and the Mark Twain Comedy Playwriting Award, also for “The Last Black Play.”After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 2003, Mr. Jackson acted in a children’s theater, took graduate courses in environmental science and writing, and worked as the manager of a barbecue restaurant.He moved to New York City to attend Juilliard in 2007. He and his wife lived in a diverse neighborhood there, and he remembered seeing people from all over the world on the subway.But at the theater, “I did not see that,” he said in an interview with KCUR-FM, a public radio station in Kansas City, Mo., in 2016, “What I saw was predominantly white, older, and with a little money in their pockets.”He strove to write plays featuring “people marginalized by poverty, incarceration or gun violence,” Ms. Mascarro-Jackson said in a phone interview.“Lots of times they were Black characters,” she added, “because that’s what he knew.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Jackson is survived by his mother; a daughter, Amaya; a son, Savion; a sister, Ebony Maddox; and a brother, Wardell.Over the last decade, while continuing to work in the theater, Mr. Jackson also wrote episodes of several TV series, including “13 Reasons Why,” “Resurrection,” “S.W.A.T.,” “Southland,” Shameless” and “Luke Cage,” for which he was also an executive story editor. He spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, where he suffered the aortic dissection in 2019.“The series makes a bigger, grander statement about African American men and how we view them,” he told The Kansas City Star in 2016, referring to “Luke Cage,” a Marvel show whose title character is a former convict (played by Mike Colter) with superhuman strength and unbreakable skin who solves crimes in Harlem.He added: “It is undoubtedly a Black show. But at the same time, it’s just a superhero show. We deal with something all the other superheroes deal with. We just do it from a different standpoint.” More

The handwriting on the company’s wall, in chalk, was traced by a closing night crowd sharing memories of more than 30 years of landmarks and larks.The last performance of the last show at the 74-seat New Ohio Theater, on Christopher Street in Manhattan’s West Village, was “Ultra Left Violence,” a poetical, political, work-in-progress play by the company’s artistic director, Robert Lyons. Wrapping up the New Ohio’s final Ice Factory festival on Aug. 12, it was thrillingly, even touchingly, weird.Mid-show, members of the convivial audience were given chalk — a motif in the production design — to cover the black-painted walls with their memories of the New Ohio and its predecessor, the Ohio Theater, on Wooster Street in SoHo. After the spectators returned to their seats, the performance continued with the frenzied, prolonged smashing of a watermelon, which sent chunks and juice flying. (Tarps and rain ponchos were provided.)Experimental work was the soul of the New Ohio, a producer and presenter that closed for good on Aug. 31. The publicity line has been that the shutdown is the end of 30 years, but that’s a give-or-take number. It rounds up the life span of Ice Factory, the festival of new works that Lyons founded in 1994, and rounds down his tenure, which started at the Ohio Theater in 1988, when the owner of that space, Bill Hahn, hired Lyons, then 28, to run it. He served as the building’s super, too, and got a rent-free loft in exchange.“My wife says it wasn’t a job, it was a lifestyle choice,” Lyons said. “We lived upstairs. My daughter was raised there.”In 2011, after the Wooster Street building was sold, the Ohio was reincarnated as the New Ohio. Cumulatively, the two stages saw a jaw-dropping profusion of downtown artists (Taylor Mac, Mimi Lien, Knud Adams, Sam Gold, Lee Sunday Evans, James Ortiz) and companies (the Mad Ones, Half Straddle, Target Margin, New Georges, Ma-Yi Theater Company, Rude Mechanicals, Clubbed Thumb, Ping Chong and Company, Elevator Repair Service, Vampire Cowboys, the Talking Band).The shows Lyons remembers most fondly include “Surrender,” by International WOW; “Boozy,” from Alex Timbers; and “Particularly in the Heartland,” by Rachel Chavkin and the TEAM. Back in 1988, Lyons recalled, Anne Bogart’s “No Plays No Poetry” put the Ohio Theater on the map.As for the rented space that was home to the New Ohio, it will remain a theater, renamed 154 and run by the nonprofit ChaShaMa. In the coming season, 154 will host the company Out of the Box Theatrics, which focuses on marginalized communities.Three days after the final performance of “Ultra Left Violence,” Lyons arranged two chairs on the New Ohio’s immaculate empty stage and sat down for an interview. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.What’s your own favorite memory of those 30 years?Definitely one of them was when we did the Vaclav Havel festival, and he came to the [Ohio Theater] two or three nights in a row. Edward Einhorn did the festival. I directed one of the shows, and Havel came and saw it. Then he just hung out, and I bought him a beer at the concessions, and he was telling me about this play he was working on.That seems to epitomize what theater is to you: art and politics and hanging out.Exactly right, yeah. The thing I love the most about these 30 years is the community of people that I’ve got to know and bond with.What grabbed you about the old Wooster Street space?It was spectacular. It was 5,000 square feet of raw space with the old creaky floors, the columns, the barn doors that opened out onto the street. It was falling down around us. It had no air conditioning. It was famously hot during the summer, and it didn’t matter. People were willing to suffer for their art — to consume it and to perform it. It was a different time. I don’t think you could get away with that now.The other night here, what were you thinking as you watched the final show?It was very emotional, of course. I was trying to hold it together. [laughs] But I was just surrounded by so many of my friends. So it was a very warm, safe room to be in. It was a crazy show, and I was very happy to finish on that note. Like, let’s just do a bonkers intellectual circus, and see if it works.Why go out with a work in progress?I was consciously trying to make a statement to myself and maybe to everybody that I’m going to continue to do theater past this date. I’m going to stop running a theater, but I’m not done making theater. Now we’re spring-boarding into the next unknown.I’ve been getting a very steady flow of people telling me how sorry they are that we’re closing. But it was the right time. I’m 64, you know. For me, it’s not so much of a sad thing, but —Is it really not a sad thing?Talk to me in a month. [laughs] I’m still sitting here. I’ve had a key to a theater for 35 years in New York. I could always open up the door to a theater and go in. And Sept. 1, I won’t. The reality of that is going to hit.But it’s the right time?I was kind of done with the day to day of keeping a machine going. There was a point where I said, OK, we have the funding to get through this year. Then next year is a complete catastrophe. Because that’s where the field is, and all that PPP money and Covid money is ending. I would rather go out and [be able to] meet all my obligations and enjoy it instead of do one more year and be chasing money the whole time and worrying about “Can I keep it open?” and then maybe closing in the middle of the season.Your audience stuck around, but the funding got scarcer and —And the cost of making the work and the cost of staffing. That’s the combination.Is there still room for the truly experimental?Here [a downtown producer and presenter] is very good at it. Their work is very strange. They’re also paying people living wages. But I do think it’s harder. We’re always on the margin of a marginal form. I don’t know if we’ve ever been more than that, really.But you seed the wider theater.I agree. This is where everyone gets their chops. This is where everybody learns what they have to say and how to say it and what their aesthetic is. That translates throughout the regional theater system and uptown in the larger spaces. All of those have gotten more adventurous over the 30 years, because people are bringing their aesthetic — maybe not as wild, but still carrying it with them.In your final show, so much was drawn and written in chalk, meant to be wiped away — ephemeral, like theater.It’s very fleeting. Part of the magic of it is you do all the labor that goes into making a piece — the design team, the cast, the stage management team, the writers. Putting all that effort and creativity and thought and commitment into this, and we did it for four performances. You just think, who does that? And it’s theater people. That’s who.What makes it worth it?What do I want the fabric of my life to be? If it’s playing with other people as though it’s the most serious, important thing in the world, that’s a pretty good way to spend your time. More

She worked on “Sweeney Todd” and “Candide” and also on the early seasons of “Saturday Night Live,” contributing to the look of the Blues Brothers and the Killer Bees.Franne Lee, a costume and set designer who while doing Tony Award-winning work on Broadway in the 1970s also made killer-bee suits and cone-shaped headwear for early “Saturday Night Live” sketches, helping to create some of that era’s most memorable comic moments, died on Sunday in Atlantis, Fla. She was 81.Her daughter, Stacy Sandler, announced the death, after a short illness that she did not specify.Ms. Lee did some of her most high-profile work in the 1970s while in a relationship with the set designer Eugene Lee. She collaborated with him on productions including an acclaimed “Candide,” directed by Harold Prince at the Chelsea Theater Center in Brooklyn in 1973. It moved to the Broadway Theater in Midtown Manhattan the next year and ran there for 740 performances.“The production has been designed by those experts, Eugene and Franne Lee,” Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times, reviewing the Broadway incarnation, “and they have knocked the innards out of this respectable Broadway house and made it into an obstacle course of seats, musicians’ areas, catwalks, drawbridges and playing platforms, with one conventional stage thrown in at the end of the space for good measure and convenience.”The Lees shared the 1974 Tony Award for scenic design, and Ms. Lee won another for costuming, her specialty. As the story goes, one person who saw that “Candide” was a young producer named Lorne Michaels, who was creating an unconventional late-night show for NBC. He was impressed and brought the Lees in as designers on the show that, when it made its debut in October 1975, was called “NBC’s Saturday Night” but soon became “Saturday Night Live.”The original “S.N.L.” cast quickly made its mark with outlandish sketches, and Ms. Lee was integral to the look of those now famous bits — dressing John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in black when they became the Blues Brothers, turning cut-up long johns into the yellow-striped Killer Bee costumes, and more.Dan Aykroyd, left, and John Belushi as the Blues Brothers on “Saturday Night Live.” Ms. Lee designed their costumes.Edie Baskin/OnyxIt was costume designing on the cheap. Ms. Lee’s father, a tool-and-die maker, came up with the bouncy springs that were the Killer Bees’ antennae, which she finished off by sticking Ping-Pong balls on the ends. John Storyk, who first met Ms. Lee in 1968 when both worked at the short-lived Manhattan club Cerebrum, recalled in a phone interview dropping by the Lees’ apartment and seeing on her work table the beginnings of the cones that became the defining feature of the Coneheads, the extraterrestrials who were a recurring presence on the show in the late 1970s and later got their own feature film.In an interview for the book “Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers and Guests” (2002), by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, James Signorelli, a longtime “S.N.L.” producer, said that Ms. Lee influenced fashion beyond the studio walls.“The way Franne Lee, our costume designer, dressed Lorne for the show suddenly became the way everybody in New York was dressing,” he said. “Lorne used to come out onstage wearing a shirt, jacket and bluejeans. Nobody had ever seen it. But before you knew it, everybody was sitting around in Levis and a jacket.”Laraine Newman, an original “S.N.L.” cast member, recalled one time when Ms. Lee herself became part of the action — not on the show, but during a photo shoot Ms. Newman was doing with Francesco Scavullo, the noted fashion and celebrity photographer. Ms. Newman was working a vampire look, complete with fangs.“Franne found me this incredible Edwardian black lace dress,” Ms. Newman said by email, “and we did wonderful shots with that, and then Scavullo had this idea that Franne should be my victim, and so there are shots of me like biting Franne’s neck. It was so hard not to laugh because Franne was making these faces trying to look horrified or drained of blood. It’s a wonderful memory, and it still makes me laugh when I think about it. She was so very talented.”Len Cariou, left, and Angela Lansbury in the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd.” Ms. Lee won a Tony Award for her costumes.Martha Swope/New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman CenterThat talent earned Ms. Lee another Tony Award in 1979 for her costume designs for the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd,” the Stephen Sondheim musical about a murderous barber who has his victims made into meat pies. The show was directed by Mr. Prince, who Ms. Lee said initially told her he was reluctant to take on the project despite her urging.“He told me: ‘You’re crazy, absolutely crazy! You can’t do a musical about people eating people,’” she recalled in a 2002 interview with The Tennessean newspaper. “‘I said, ‘Why not?’”Frances Elaine Newman was born on Dec. 30, 1941, in the Bronx to Martin and Anne (Marks) Newman. Her father had a small machine shop on Long Island, and her mother was an offset printing supervisor.Ms. Lee was studying painting at the University of Wisconsin, her daughter said, when she discovered her love of theater and costume design. She was married to Ralph Sandler at the time and relocated to Pennsylvania when his job took him there, doing costume and design work for local theaters. The couple divorced in 1967, and Ms. Lee relocated to New York.“Franne and I both answered the same ad,” Mr. Storyk said, recalling how they found themselves working at Cerebrum. Mr. Storyk designed the club; Ms. Lee was what was called a guide, leading patrons through the place, which promoted consciousness-raising and featured various interactive environments. It closed in less than a year.Ms. Lee, though, continued to pursue her theatrical interests, creating costumes for groups including Theater of the Living Arts in Philadelphia. She also met Mr. Lee. Among their earliest collaborations as scenic designers — with Ms. Lee still credited as Franne Newman — was a version of “Alice in Wonderland” staged by the director André Gregory in 1970 that drew rave reviews.Ms. Lee in 2015.Amber Arnold/Wisconsin State JournalThe two became a couple and Franne adopted Mr. Lee’s name, though the nature of their relationship remained hazy; Patrick Lynch, a longtime aide to Mr. Lee, said the two were never formally married. (Mr. Lee died in February.) In any case, their personal and professional partnership continued until 1980, the year Ms. Lee left “Saturday Night Live.”She continued to design costumes for shows in New York in the 1980s and ’90s, including a few short-lived Broadway productions and, in the mid-’90s at the Public Theater, Christopher Walken’s examination of the life and legend of Elvis Presley, “Him.”She also tried the West Coast for a time, working on a few television shows and made-for-TV movies. In 2001 she settled in Nashville, where she was involved in founding Plowhaus, a gallery and artists’ cooperative. She later lived in Wisconsin, and since 2017 she had lived in Lake Worth Beach, Fla., about 65 miles north of Miami, designing costumes for theaters in that area.In addition to her daughter, from her marriage to Mr. Sandler, Ms. Lee is survived by a son from that marriage, Geoffrey Sandler; a son with Mr. Lee, Willie Lee; a brother, Bill Newman; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.The frugal D.I.Y. ethos of her “S.N.L.” years stayed with Ms. Lee throughout her costume-designing career. In 2018 she worked on costumes for a production of Conor McPherson’s thriller “The Birds” (based on the same source material as the Alfred Hitchcock movie) at the Garden Theater in Winter Garden, Fla. It required a wedding dress, which she bought at a thrift shop for $45.“I’m a senior citizen,” she told The Orlando Sentinel, “so if I go on Wednesday, things are half price.” More

Six shows and a fringe festival are among this month’s highlights in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and a bit beyond.Headlines about the theater industry’s troubles have been easy to find lately: layoffs, closures, shrinking audiences and seasons. The good news? There’s still a lot of theater out there.Philadelphia Fringe FestivalFringe theatergoing is a crapshoot; that’s pretty much a rule. But there is adventure to be had in plotting your way through hundreds of events, almost all of them uncurated. Circus, dance, comedy, cabaret, kids’ fare and more are part of the 27th year of this festival. Ticket prices are low, and offerings include a handful of digital shows. Sept. 7-24 at various locations in Philadelphia; phillyfringe.org‘The 12’The playwright Robert Schenkkan, a Pulitzer Prize winner for “The Kentucky Cycle,” dips into musical theater as the book writer of this show, with music by Neil Berg and lyrics by both of them. The Tony Award winner John Doyle directs this tale, which unfolds among the terrified disciples of Jesus, who have gone into hiding in the chaotic aftermath of his and Judas’s deaths. Sept. 8-Oct. 29 at the Goodspeed, East Haddam, Conn.; goodspeed.org‘Bulrusher’Jordan Tyson, left, and Robert Kellogg in rehearsals for a new production of Eisa Davis’s “Bulrusher,” a 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist.Dave TavaniDuring the pandemic shutdown of in-person theater, when the playwright Paula Vogel championed underproduced plays by staging them virtually, this linguistically inventive drama by Eisa Davis got her full-throated support, and a high-profile digital production. Here is a chance to see it live, in a McCarter Theater Center-Berkeley Repertory Theater co-production. Set in a mostly white California town in 1955, it tells the story of a clairvoyant multiracial teenager who grew up there, and whose world finds new dimensions with the arrival of a Black girl from the South. The play was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2007, when Vogel was on the jury. Sept. 13-Oct. 7 at the McCarter Theater Center, Princeton, N.J.; mccarter.org‘Lunar Eclipse’A deftly nuanced, easily knowing depiction of marriage won the playwright Donald Margulies the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for his domestic comedy “Dinner With Friends.” Now he returns to that territory with this new play, starring Karen Allen and Reed Birney as a long-wed couple having drinks on their Midwestern farm, watching a lunar eclipse on a summer night. James Warwick directs the world-premiere production. Sept. 15-Oct. 22 at Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, Mass.; shakespeare.org‘Ulysses’Not even Elevator Repair Service, the venerable experimental troupe best known for “Gatz,” a marathon-length enactment of the full text of “The Great Gatsby,” is heedless enough to stage the whole of James Joyce’s run-on, epic masterwork about Leopold Bloom’s daylong odyssey through Dublin. Directed by John Collins, the company’s artistic director, this world-premiere production instead samples chunks from each of the novel’s 18 episodes, letting them erupt in all their verbosity, vulgarity, vivacity and — it is Joyce, after all — opacity. Co-directed by Scott Shepherd, who is also part of the seven-actor ensemble, it has an entirely reasonable projected running time: two hours and 15 minutes. Sept. 21-Oct. 1 at the Fisher Center at Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.; fishercenter.bard.edu‘The Pianist’This new play with music retells the story of the musician and composer Wladyslaw Szpilman, whose 1946 memoir of surviving the Holocaust as a Polish Jew in Warsaw was the basis for the Roman Polanski movie “The Pianist.” The director Emily Mann has adapted Szpilman’s book for the stage, with an original score by Iris Hond. Sept. 26-Oct. 22 at New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, New Brunswick, N.J.; georgestreetplayhouse.org‘Lizzie’When a murder case is so notorious that it’s commemorated with a children’s rhyme, enduring curiosity about it is almost guaranteed. Cross that with the trans-Atlantic success of “Six,” and you arrive at this production: a Lizzie Borden rock musical with an all-female cast. Written by Steven Cheslik-deMeyer, Tim Maner and Alan Stevens Hewitt, and directed by Lainie Sakakura, this show promises “to explore the historical record.” Sept. 29-Oct. 22 at TheaterWorks Hartford, Hartford, Conn.; twhartford.org More