2017? Let it go. After an unusually bleak year on Broadway, the 2018 season will open with a few escapist musicals – and still more bleakness. Spring will bring a full complement of starry casts and prestige projects and even the promise of giddy fun, but there’s very little in the way of experiment or innovation. The season is a minor calamity for new American plays; there are none fully scheduled, though Tracy Letts’s The Minutes is a likely addition once it secures a theater and Young Jean Lee’s Armie Hammer-starring Straight White Men, the first Broadway play by an Asian American woman, will open post-Tonys in July.
It’s dispiriting to see that seeming game changers like Hamilton and Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 don’t seem to have changed any Broadway games and that the abundance of American plays last year – Oslo, Sweat, Indecent, A Doll’s House, Part 2 – is now a famine. But plays can be a hard sell as can musicals that don’t have a pop culture hook. So it’s understandable that producers would make safer, less ambitious choices.
Those trying to make a fetch evening happen will head to Mean Girls, a musical based on the celebrated 2004 Tina Fey film. Fey wrote the book, her husband Jeff Richmond wrote the music, with assists from lyricist Nell Benjamin and director Casey Nicholaw. Dad rocker extraordinaire Jimmy Buffett lends old and new songs to Escape to Margaritaville, a romantic comedy musical, directed by Christopher Ashley, in which a high-powered lawyer falls for a low-powered bartender. Sparks and frozen drinks fly.
But icier pleasures await fans of Frozen, the Disney phenomenon that has been converted by its creators, Jennifer Lee, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, and Robert Lopez, and the director Michael Grandage, into a book musical complete with snowman and reindeer, starring Caissie Levy and Patti Murin.
The two other musicals are cakewalk (or clambake?) revivals, Jack O Brien’s Carousel starring Joshua Henry, Jessie Mueller and Renée Fleming, and Bartlett Sher’s My Fair Lady, starring Lauren Ambrose, Diana Rigg and Norbert Leo Butz.
When it comes to plays, much of the excitement whirls around British imports concerning characters whose books have meaningfully altered western culture. Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, directed by Patrick Marber and starring Tom Hollander, a nimble farce that moves among Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara. But Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the wildly ambitious and extremely long and pretty remarkable play by Jack Thorne, directed by John Tiffany, may generate slightly more anticipation.
Audiences can decide whether Lord Voldemort or Roy Cohn is the worse villain with the arrival of another two-part London transfer of Marianne Elliott’s production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, which arrives with most of its London cast intact, including Nathan Lane as Roy, Denise Gough as Harper and Andrew Garfield as Prior.
Though Robert Falls’s The Iceman Cometh played New York pretty recently, the Iceman is coming again, with Denzel Washington, who won a Tony award for Fences, in the role of traveling salesman Hickey under George C Wolfe’s direction. While O’Neill’s bar flies are dreaming paper-thin fantasies, a few blocks away, a young woman receives holy visions. The director Daniel Sullivan revives George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, with the luminous Condola Rashad as the French martyr.
While Joan busies herself fighting off the English, John Lithgow attempts a more modest undertaking, telling the tales he heard and loved as a kid in John Lithgow: Stories by Heart. And the security guard protagonist of Kenneth Lonergan’s 2001 play, Lobby Hero, isn’t a martyr to much of anything. Trip Cullman’s production will inaugurate Broadway’s newest theater, Second Stage’s the Helen Hayes. The play’s star, Michael Cera, last seen on Broadway in the early Lonergan play This Is Our Youth, will be joined by Chris Evans, Brian Tyree Henry and Bel Powley.
Elsewhere, it’s boys, women and children and plenty of bold-faced names. Tony winner Laurie Metcalf appears alongside Glenda Jackson and Alison Pill as Joe Mantello directs the revival of the Edward Albee play Three Tall Women. Joshua Jackson and newcomer Lauren Ridloff star in the Broadway revival of Mark Medoff’s romantic drama about a teacher who tries to encourage a deaf woman to speak. There will be plenty of talking at The Boys in the Band, the 1968 Matt Crowley play, which indulges in some problematic depictions of queer self-loathing. But who could loathe a cast that includes television stars Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer and Andrew Rannells.
It’s an eclectic season, if not a particularly risky or striving one, and it’s tricky to discern its themes in advance. Still, several of the plays and musicals ask questions of whether it’s really possible to change one’s fate or meaningfully alter one’s social position, while other works are about the search for love, acceptance, certainty – or simply, that long lost shaker of salt.
