Word: broadway
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...biggest corporate fraud in history is turning into one of Broadway's most expensive plays. A team of theater producers is spending nearly $4 million to bring Enron to New York City from London. That's a fraction of what Hollywood routinely doles out, but on Broadway the multimillion-dollar budget of the play, which is set to open for previews on April 8, is drawing attention...
...What's more, producers say business plays can draw a bigger crowd than other productions. Susan Gallin, who produced in the mid-1980s the off-Broadway hit Other People's Money, about corporate raiders, says she remembers more men in the audience of that play than in others she has worked on. "There is an audience for business plays that just doesn't exist for other plays," says Gallin...
...trouble with most new plays I see these days - not just commercial fare but also the supposedly more adventurous work off-Broadway - is that they are too simple: the characters too familiar, the stories too formulaic, the messages too spoon-fed. Donald Margulies' new Broadway offering, Time Stands Still, to take a typical example, won warm praise from most critics, but I found its alternately jokey and sanctimonious portrayal of a photojournalist and her war-correspondent boyfriend one giant media-friendly cliché. And I had to laugh at New York Times critic Ben Brantley's praise of Next Fall...
Time travel is hardly a stylistic innovation in theater these days. One pretty good new off-Broadway play, Clybourne Park, dramatizes the racial changes in an inner-city Chicago neighborhood by twinning two scenes 50 years apart: the arrival of the neighborhood's first black family in 1959 and the invasion of the first gentrifying white couple in the now all-black neighborhood in 2009. But When the Rain Stops Falling goes far beyond such schematic parallelism. Bovell's time-hopping structure is intricate but surprisingly natural - never strained or purposely obfuscating. Rather, as in the works of Faulkner...
David Cromer - the Chicago-based director who won acclaim for his recent off-Broadway revival of Our Town - handles all this with sensitivity and solemnity. (This is a real rara avis in New York theater: a play without laughs.) A cast of mostly Americans (among them Mary Beth Hurt and Victoria Clark) conveys the British and Australian milieus with as much authenticity as you're likely to find on these shores. The play is unrelievedly bleak but with a denouement of unexpected hope: a moving, almost revelatory evening of theater, and easily the best new play of the year...