It looks to be a terrific time for travelers headed for Broadway and the nation’s major art centers this fall and winter.
A new musical based on the ’80s rock movie hit “Footloose,” a new play from South Africa’s Athol Fugard, a musical based on Rudyard Kipling’s classic “Captains Courageous” and a wrenching drama about the troubles in Northern Ireland are the highlights of the upcoming New York and East Coast theater season.
In art, Washington’s National Gallery of Art is staging the biggest and greatest Van Gogh exhibition ever held in the U.S., and New York’s Museum of Modern Art is putting on a historic show of the incandescent work of Jackson Pollock, billed as the most influential American artist of the century. And Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is holding an exhibition of the many last works of Impressionist painter Claude Monet.
A few details about these and other fall shows:
THEATER
After a preliminary run at Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts that concludes Sept. 20, the much-awaited “Footloose” opens Oct. 22 at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre (800-755-4000).
Based on the enduringly popular 1984 film starring a young Kevin Bacon, it’s about a free-wheeling teen who takes on a mean-minded minister in bringing rock music to a puritanical town that hates dancing.
Produced by the Kennedy Center and Dodger Endemol Theatricals — the same team responsible for the stage hit “Titanic” and the recent revivals of “Guys and Dolls” and “The King and I” — the stage musical stars Jeremy Kushnier of “Rent” as Ren McCormack and two Tony-nominated players, Dee Hoty as Vi and Martin Vidnovic as the pious Rev. Shaw Moore.
– Fugard shows a lighter, and at turns more rollicksome side with his new work “The Captain’s Tiger,” which runs at the Kennedy Center (202-467-4600) from Sept. 22 through Nov. 1, and then reopens at New York’s Manhattan Theatre Club’s Stage II (212-399-3030) Jan. 5, after previews starting Dec. 15.
It’s about a young writer’s adventures trying to see the world on a leaky old tramp steamer, haunted by a photograph of his mother as a young woman. Fugard directs and appears in the play.
– Movie star Treat Williams will be the brave, stubborn fisherman in the musical “Captains Courageous,” which opens for previews at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Stage I (212-399-3030) Jan. 12.
This is the second attempt to stage a musical based on Kipling’s classic tale of a spoiled rich kid who falls overboard from a luxury liner and learns the true values and meaning of life from the hardy Portuguese fishermen who rescue him from the deadly waters of the Grand Banks near Newfoundland. The first effort, which premiered some years ago at Washington’s Ford’s Theater, never made it to New York.
– Opening Oct. 4 at off-Broadway’s Douglas Fairbanks Theatre (212-239-6200), “A Night to Remember” is a one-man show starring Irish/British actor Dan Gordon as an East Belfast Protestant whose deep-seated bigotry brings his life to an unexpected major turning point on the eve of the 1994 World Soccer Cup championship match between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. The play won rave reviews and was sold out during a brief, limited run at New York’s Irish Arts Center earlier this year.
– “Only a Kingdom,” a musical about Britain’s wimpy, perverse, pro-Nazi King Edward VIII (the Duke of Windsor) and the hustling American social climbing divorcee Wallis Simpson who won him (but not the throne), opens Nov. 15 at the Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, Calif. (626-356-PLAY).
– Terrance McNally’s highly controversial — and briefly shelved — play “Corpus Christi,” about a Christ-like figure who is gay, opens at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Stage I on Oct. 13.
– “Little Me,” a revival with author updates of the Neil Simon-Cy Coleman musical, opens Oct. 29 at New York’s Roundabout Theatre (212-719-1300). It stars Tony Award winners Faith Prince and Martin Short.
– On the same Roundabout stage beginning Feb. 3, African-American movie star Laurence Fishburn plays England’s Henry II in a revival of James Goldman’s “The Lion in Winter.”
ART
The National Gallery’s Van Gogh show, opening Oct. 4 and running through Jan. 3, will be nothing short of stupendous. Called “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs,” it features an unprecedented American gathering of 70 of the painter’s masterpieces from the Van Gogh Museum in the Netherlands. These are the paintings that the Van Gogh family retained and passed on as a national treasure. The Van Gogh Museum’s loan of these incredible works (whose staggering value runs into the many millions) to the gallery (Constitution Avenue at 4th Street, N.W., Washington) is a gracious gesture indeed.
However, this show is going to be mobbed from beginning to end. Though admission is free, daily passes will be required. Call 202-737-4215.
– Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario (317 Dundas St. West; 416-979-6648) is holding a somewhat complementary exhibition to the Washington Van Gogh event. Called “Art in the Age of Van Gogh,” it helps put the troubled genius’ work in context by showing some 70 paintings by his fellow Dutch artists done in the same late 19th Century period. It includes a Van Gogh self-portrait and landscape, as well as some early Symbolist landscapes by Piet Mondrian.
– New York’s major offering of the fall is the sprawling, 180-piece career retrospective of “splatter painter” Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) at the Museum of Modern Art (11 W. 53rd St.; 212-708-9400) from Nov. 1 through Feb. 2.
Wyoming-born, the rough and rugged individualist Pollock was king of the New York-based Abstract Expressionists who came to dominate world art in the cultural wreckage left after World War II. New York’s last Pollock retrospective was at MOMA in 1967. The museum hopes to reacquaint a new generation with this powerhouse and show how and why his work was so challenging and pervasively influential. For any aficionado of contemporary art, this show is a must.
– Much gentler on the eye and soul, though just as important intellectually, is “Monet in the 20th Century,” a collection of 80 of the beloved Impressionist’s late paintings on view from Sept. 20 through Dec. 27 at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (465 Huntington Ave.; 617-267-9300).
Though much associated with the late 19th Century, Monet (1840-1926) was also a 20th Century artist whose innovation, curiosity and strength of purpose kept him apace with younger, more provocative artists of the modern era. In the last 26 years of his life, he produced 450 paintings. In his 70s and 80s, he was creating work as daring and challenging as many younger painters — and on heroic-sized canvases, some of them 12 to 18 feet long.
The Boston show is arranged chronologically, but also by themes. Groupings include paintings of London, Venice, Monet’s Giverny garden, water lilies as well as his large-scale water-lily panels.
– Also highly recommended this fall is a delightful exhibition of, yes, “Victorian Fairy Painting” at New York’s too-often overlooked Frick Collection (1 E. 70th St.; 212-288-0700).
Though fairies and other creatures of fable are the theme and subject, the 27 works in this exceedingly charming show include examples of 19th Century British romantic landscapes, nudes, costume studies, sentimental narratives and literary, theatrical and historical images. The artists include such masters as Edwin Landseer and W.J.M. Turner.
– The Whitney Museum of American Art (945 Madison Ave.; 212-570-3600) is showing the first comprehensive exhibition ever of the life-size, lifelike human form creations of sculptor Duane Hanson (1925-1996). On view from Dec. 17 through March 21, these astounding creations celebrate ordinary people and the joys and tragedies of ordinary life in such pieces as “Trash,” “Gangland Victim,” “Motorcycle Accident” and, making its debut here, “Man on a Lawn Mower.”
– John Singer Sargent’s show at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts (1001 Bissonet St.; 713-639-7300) is only from Oct. 11 to Nov. 8. It includes not only some of his most brilliant portraiture, but also examples of his Impressionist paintings, watercolors and travel scenes. The exhibition is the centerpiece of the museum’s 1998 gala ball, “La Belle Epoque.”
– For travelers to Los Angeles, a visit to the new Getty Center and museum (1200 Getty Center Dr.; 310-440-7300) is now almost obligatory, and this season they’re offering some exciting inducements, most especially an exhibition of more than 100 of the amazing photographs by American expatriate extraordinaire Man Ray, including his portraits of fellow Parisians Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Henry Miller and Marcel Proust. Imagine all of them in the same room.
