Culture Watch

Theater World Hopes History Plays Make Up for Historic Hurricane Losses as Season Opens

by Bruce Chadwick

Bruce Chadwick lectures on history and film at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He also teaches writing at New Jersey City University. He holds his PhD from Rutgers and was a former editor for the New York Daily News.

The unprecedented weekend shutdown of New York’s Broadway and Off-Broadway theaters by Hurricane Irene August 27-28 cost the theater industry nearly $10 million in lost ticket sales.

The Broadway League’s figures showed that in the previous week, theaters earned over $20 million in ticket sales, but during the hurricane week, they took in just $11 million. Hurricane week had 131,000 ticket buyers versus 218,000 in the previous week. The drop off was about the same in percentages for Off-Broadway shows (one theater in Vermont was destroyed by the hurricane). The theaters have been shut down before, after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and during last winter’s blizzard, but those closures were just for a single day.

The theater needs another record-breaking season like last year to offset the hurricane losses and is once again relying on a number of plays about and from history to do so, starting with a very ballyhooed revival of Follies on September 12. It is the first of more than fifty plays about the past scheduled to open in New York this season, with more to be named later. .

Follies is the story of the memories of men and women who worked in an old 1920s vaudeville show, highlighted by sensational music by Stephen Sondheim. It opens on Tuesday and stars Bernadette Peters. It is one of several shows about the history of show business this season, including Funny Girl, End of the Rainbow (which debuts at Minneapolis’ Guthrie first), White Christmas (Paper Mill Playhouse, Millburn, N.J.), Bette Davis Ain’t for Sissies, part of the Fringe Festival Encore series and Ten Cents a Dance (McCarter Theater, Princeton, N.J.)

The history plays this season fall into a half dozen categories with, surprisingly, few about American politics. There are usually a number of plays about politics, but this year history plays are full of astronomers, singing French revolutionaries [politicians of a sort], noble southern lawyers and nineteenth-century Russian playwrights.

There are several important plays about race. These are led off on October 13 by Mountaintop, starring Samuel L. Jackson, the story of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last days in 1968. It is followed by To Kill a Mockingbird at the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey in mid-October (several theaters around the U.S. are staging it, too), about righteous 1950s southern lawyer Atticus Finch, and the controversial revival of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, which just opened at Boston’s American Repertory Theater and moves to Broadway in mid-winter.

There will be a number of plays about the past that deal with Europe, such as After Anne Frank, the story of how the Dutch girl’s World War II diary affected someone who read it years later. There will be a unique Off-Broadway production of Ernest Hemingway’s 1920s novel, The Sun Also Rises, using the dialogue of the characters alone as the story (the company staged the award-winning Gatz last season, which was a word by world reading/acting of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby). There will also be productions of Galileo, about the seventeenth-century Italian scientist, Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, which chronicles nineteenth-century Russian life, John Osborne’s British play Look Back in Anger, about the 1950s in England, and yet another revival of Brit Noel Coward’s Private Lives.

The media will get a look in The Columnist, about Washington, D.C. political columnist Joe Alsop, who wrote in the 1950s and ‘60s, and in Newsies, a musical based on the Disney movie of the same name about newspaper circulation wars in the 1890s (Paper Mill Playhouse, Millburn, N.J.).

Family life will be examined in another staging of Death of a Salesman and Other Desert Cities, which won a number of awards last year when it was produced at Lincoln Center.

Lovers of Old Greek drama should enjoy three new works based on them: Lysistrata Jones, an updated look at the old Lysistrata legend (this one is based on a contemporary U.S. basketball team), An Illiad, based on Homer’s work, and Phaedra Backwards, a modern look at the Phaedra story (McCarter Theater, Princeton, N.J.).

There will be a few plays about politics from William Shakespeare (King Lear and Titus Andronicus), a revival of the musical Evita, about Eva Peron and 1950s politics in Argentina, and Bongani, a Fringe Festival Encore show about post-apartheid life in South Africa.

This season will have some controversy, too, when The Gershwins Porgy and Bess opens in mid-winter. Director Diane Paulus and play doctors have rewritten the script of the legendary musical about African American life outside Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1920s that has theater purists up in arms.

Also in New York this year: Picnic, based on the 1953 play and movie; A Streetcar Named Desire; Nice Work If You Can Get It; Blood and Gifts, about wars in Afghanistan; Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard; Morini Strad; about eighteenth-century violins; February House, about famed boarders in a 1920s hotel; and Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. And the Mint Theater in New York just opened Temporary Powers, about a couple in 1920s Ireland.

Perhaps the most enchanting (oooh, wrong word) show could be the musical Bonnie and Clyde, the story of the much publicized 1930s bank robbers. The show is based on the movie, which was based on newspaper accounts of the daring duo (“We rob banks…”). It opens in December, just in time for a Christmas shootout.

The flood of history plays is not limited to New York.

A quick look at theater schedules around the country shows not only a season rich in history plays, but one filled with different kinds of history plays.

The Long Wharf Theater, in New Haven, Connecticut, has three plays about the past on its schedule: Ain’t Misbehavin’, the musical about 1930s songwriter/musician Fats Waller, It’s a Wonderful Life Radio Play, based on the famous movie starring James Stewart, and Macbeth 1969, a newly-designed story about Macbeth set in the turmoil of America in 1969 and the Vietnam War protests.

Across town in New Haven, the Yale Repertory Theater is one of many in the U.S. staging Chekhov plays this year. They are presenting Three Sisters, which just had a successful run in New York.

The Denver (Colorado) Theater Center is staging the musical Les Miserables, about a French Revolution, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

The Cleveland Playhouse has three history plays: The Life of Galileo (astronomers seem to be in demand this fall), Daddy Long Legs (a success on the West Coast last season) and a quirky holiday play called The Game’s Afoot, about Sherlock Holmes, England’s crackerjack 1880s sleuth.

Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center has three history stories, too: Come Fly with Me, a musical and dance extravaganza featuring the 1940s and ‘50’s music of Frank Sinatra and the choreography of Twyla Tharp, another revival of Les Miserables and a staging of the successful New York musical Billy Elliot, about British mining strikes.

Ford’s Theater in Washington, will present an absolutely intriguing schedule that includes Parade, about the lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia in the early days of the twentieth century and Necessary Sacrifices, a play about Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass (this ties into the 150th anniversary of the Civil War).

More history plays will be announced as the theater season rolls on.

Bruce Chadwick can be reached at bchadwick@njcu.edu.