The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Glenn Close, and a revival of the Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein classic “Show Boat,” starring Robert Morse and Elaine Stritch, are expected to be the big draws on the Broadway theater scene this fall.
Other East Coast hot tickets include a New York production of Brian Friel’s tempestuous Irish play “Philadelphia, Here I Come!,” which enjoyed a successful outing in Chicago; A.R. Gurney’s off-Broadway adaptation of John Cheever short stories, “A Cheever Evening”; and, in Washington, a Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts production of “Flying West,” Pearl Cleage’s drama about the strength and determination of African-American families settling the west in the late 19th Century.
In art, the main New York attractions will be the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Origins of Impressionism”; the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “Franz Kline: Black and White, 1950-1961”; the Guggenheim Museum’s retrospective of Italian art and culture in the tumultuous years following World War II, “The Italian Metamorphosis”; and, in Washington, the National Gallery of Art’s show of prints by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein.
“Sunset Boulevard,” which played to packed houses during its U.S. premiere in Los Angeles last winter, opens at New York’s Minskoff Theatre Nov. 17 with Close continuing her role as faded screen star Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson in the movie on which this musical is based. The rest of the L.A. cast is largely intact, including Alan Campbell as writer Joe Gillis and George Hearn as Max. Ticket prices range up to $70.
“Show Boat’s” top ticket prices are a record $75, but for this, its producers assure, you get an epic-a 71-member cast, 31-member orchestra, 21 costume dressers, 500 costumes, 120 sound speakers, eight stage computers, 22 miles of cable, plus a “Cotton Blossom” showboat 25 feet tall and 48 feet long, a Molly Able towboat 20 feet long and a 1902 DeWit Motor Car.
You also get some of the most enduring American music ever written: “Ol’ Man River,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” “Why Do I Love You?,” “Only Make Believe” and “Bill.” Not counting operatic productions, this is the fourth major revival of show, based on the Edna Ferber novel, since it first opened on Broadway in 1927. “Show Boat” opens Oct. 2 at the Gershwin Theater.
Friel’s “Philadelphia, Here I Come!,” which opened Thursday at Broadway’s Roundabout Theatre, is set in the same sort of Irish countryside as his earlier hit “Dancing at Lughnasa” and deals with an emotional father-son relationship as the younger man is about to set off for a new life in the United States. The son has a private persona, played by Robert Sean Leonard, and a public one, performed by Steppenwolf Theatre’s Jim True. Milo O’Shea stars as the father, and Joe Dowling of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre directs. The show closes Oct. 16.
In “A Cheever Evening,” A.R. Gurney, author of “The Cocktail Hour” and “Love Letters,” has drawn from elements of a number of John Cheever’s short stories in creating another drama about the American family-eastern upper-middle-class variety. Starring Laura Linney, remembered from PBS’ “Tales of the City,” and Jack Gilpin, it opens Oct. 6 for a one month run at the Anne Wilder Theatre on West 42nd St.
Ruby Dee stars in the Kennedy Center’s “Flyin’ West,” which originated as a production of the Crossroads Theatre Company of New Brunswick, N.J., and dramatizes the 1890s exodus of black Americans from the South to new lands in Kansas and the West where they hoped to find freedom. It opens Monday.
Washington’s prestigious Shakespeare Theatre (formerly the Folger) opens its season Sept. 26 with a rare adaptation of parts 1 and 2 of “Henry IV,” giving theatergoers the full experience of the Prince Hal and Falstaff saga in a single evening. Ted van Griethuysen plays Henry IV, Derek Smith is Prince Hal, David Sabin is Falstaff, Frenchelle Stewart Dorn is Mistress Quickly and Caitlin O’Connell is Lady Percy.
Philadelphia’s Arden Theatre Company opens its season Sept. 15 with the daft comedy “Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet),” about a professor who travels back through time into the worlds of Othello and Romeo and Juliet, inadvertently turning the tragedies into comedies; and follows Nov. 10 with the world premiere of the comedy “An Empty Plate in the Cafe du Grand Boeuf,” about an eccentric billionaire in 1960s Paris who wanders into a fantastic restaurant wherein is celebrated the joys of sex, gourmet cooking, bullfighting and the books of Ernest Hemingway.
The very grand “Origins of Impressionism” exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum explores, through a collection of 175 paintings, the roots and development of one of the most important and popular artistic movements.
It begins with French art as manifest in the highly classical Paris Salon of 1859 and follows the development of Impressionism through the next decade.
Courbet, Degas, Manet, Monet, Pisarro, Renoir, Cezanne and all the other great artists associated with Impressionism are represented, with particular attention paid to their effect on one another. Among the works is Manet’s 1863 “Dejeuner sur l’herbe,” which caused a scandal because, by adding a pile of clothing to the foreground of a traditional picture of a nude woman in a landscape, the artist transformed her from a classical nude to an actual woman who’d removed her clothing out of doors. The show runs from Sept. 27 to Jan. 8.
Running from Dec. 16 to March 12, the Whitney’s Franz Kline exhibition presents 35 paintings and 15 works on paper from the realist-turned-abstractionist artist’s last 10 years of life. A product of the coal-mining country of eastern Pennsylvania, Kline in the 1940s produced powerful landscape, urban and portrait studies; turned to abstraction after 1950; and abandoned color for black and white imagery, influencing the work of contemporaries Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, among others.
Italy’s transformation from the Fascism and ruin of World War II to the sleek, fashionable prosperity of the 1960s involved a cultural revolution whose explosive reach extended beyond painting and sculpture to architecture, design, literature, fashion, jewelry, photography and cinema. The Guggenheim show, “Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-1968,” is designed to capture all of that, including paparazzi photographs. It runs Oct. 7 through Jan. 29.
The Lichtenstein show at Washington’s National Gallery of Art, Oct. 30-Jan. 8, is the first comprehensive exhibition of the pop artist’s prints in two decades. Its works start with his first pop image in any medium, his 1956 “Ten Dollar Bill,” and include his 1992 “The Oval Office,” which was made up in pin form for VIP guests at President Clinton’s inaugural.
On Sept. 16, Mexican Independence Day, Washington’s National Museum of American Art opens the first major retrospective of the works of fiberglass sculptor Luis Jimenez. The 41 outsized pieces in the show include some of his most famous creations, including “Sodbuster” (1981), “Southwest Pieta” (1984) and “Howl” (1986). Accompanying the sculptures are drawings used in their preparation. The show closes Jan. 2.
From Sept. 25 through Nov. 20, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is staging a mammoth, 250-object exhibition of Japanese design over the last four decades. The displays will show off uniquely Japanese contemporary high art as well as Sony Walkmans and robot transformers.
