Broadway Beckons With Drama, Laughs, Music

It’s a safe bet that for many visitors to New York City, Broadway is the first word they would free-associate with the city’s name. Psychiatrists and others attending APA’s 2004 annual meeting in May will have a confounding array of dramatic plays and musicals from which to sample, including some plan-way-ahead blockbusters and several lesser-known productions.

First, a geographical note—there are only a couple of “Broadway” theaters that are actually on the Great White Way. Theaters referred to as Broadway theaters are actually scattered across more than a dozen blocks of midtown Manhattan from Times Square on the south to the mid-50s on the north, and from Sixth Avenue west to Ninth Avenue.

One of the most eagerly anticipated shows—and one of the hardest tickets to get—is a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins.” When “Assassins” opened originally in December 1970, it played only 73 performances, making it one of the composer/lyricist’s least successful shows, at least from a financial standpoint.

While replete with songs that rival his most famous shows for complexity and wit, some blamed the show’s subject matter for the lack of enthusiasm in response. Never afraid to expand the subject matter that could be turned into musical theater, the composer framed the show around the stories of actual and would-be presidential assassins. The cast of characters include notorious figures such as Leon Czolgosz, Charles Guiteau, Lee Harvey Oswald, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, and of course John Wilkes Booth. The show will be at Studio 54, the notorious nightclub popular with the glitterati during the 1970s.

A nonmusical revival that also promises to be a hit is the comedy “Twentieth Century,” which will star Alec Baldwin and Anne Heche. The show, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur in 1932, is a farce set on the eponymous luxury train that was the ultimate way to travel between New York and Chicago before air travel became commonplace. The play centers around the antics of a Broadway producer and the attractive star he is trying to convince to sign a contract with him before his sagging career comes to an ignominious end. The play will be at the American Airlines Theatre.

A relatively new play that opened last year to rave reviews has the intriguing title “I Am My Own Wife.” The one-man play by Doug Wright at the Lyceum Theater is based on the true story of an East German transvestite, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who died in 2002. Actor Jefferson Mays plays 40 characters as Charlotte spins the tales of her life and how she survived both the Nazis and later the Communists, sometimes by cooperating with the oppressors. Charlotte told the story of her life to Wright over many years. The truth of these tales—some amusing, others heart-rending or frightening—is one of the enigmas that theatergoers will ponder. The New York Times said the play “powerfully makes the case for the necessity of storytelling in our lives,” and how “the perspective, sympathy, and reliability of the narrator are crucial to our understanding of them. In other words, to endure the world, people lie about themselves or to themselves, and the lies are as important as the truth.”

When “The Boy From Oz” opened last fall, critics searched for superlatives to describe Hugh Jackman’s performance as the late, legendary pop entertainer and songwriter, Peter Allen. The bisexual Allen was discovered by Judy Garland and later married and divorced her daughter Liza Minnelli. Allen died in 1992 of AIDS at the height of his career. Those who know Jackman only from films will be astounded to see that he can hold his own with Broadway’s legendary singers and dancers.

Among the long-running blockbuster musicals are “The Producers,” “Hairspray,” “The Lion King,” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie.” But “Cats,” whose motto was “Now and Forever,” is finally no more, at least on the Great White Way. ▪