But help is on the way for the second half of the season. Almost two dozen productions are scheduled to open in the next three months (as against 28 all last season), including new plays by Neil Simon, John Guare, Lanford Wilson, August Wilson and Alan Ayckbourn. The tidal wave of monster international musicals has momentarily stopped, replaced by the bracing air of classic American revivals. To mitigate the box-office risk of dreaded serious plays, producers are bringing in an occupying force of movie stars, among them Jessica Lange, Gene Hackman, Glenn Close, Alec Baldwin, Richard Dreyfuss and AI Pacino. Perhaps most important, the not-for-profit theater will be out in force-eight of 13 straight plays coming to the Great White Way are from noncommercial sources. All this doesn’t guarantee a great season, but it does mean that Broadway is starting to offer more choices: it’s becoming a microcosm of theater across America rather than the gambling den of a handful of high-rolling crapshooters.
The most obvious cure to try for this chronic invalid was summoning Hollywood to its bedside. A revival of Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” will star Jessica Lange-who has never been on Broadway-and Alec Baldwin, who has. “It’s exciting that someone who can earn considerably more money in considerably less time comes to Broadway for the plain thrill of it,” says “Streetcar” director Greg Mosher. Alan Alda, who will star in “Jake’s Women” by Neil Simon, says returning to the stage after 20 years has changed him as an actor. “In movies there’s no time to let anything sink into you,” he says. “I like the British system where actors move freely from the stage to movies and television.”
The most star-infested show is “Death and the Maiden,” by the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, with Glenn Close, Gene Hackman and Richard Dreyfuss. It’s about a woman who kidnaps a man (Hackman) she believes raped her years before and puts him on trial in her living room while her husband (Dreyfuss) defends him. Variety reported that the three stars will receive 6 percent of the gross, or about $20,000 a week each. But the real star is director Mike Nichols, who gets $13,000 a week until the show recoups its $1.3 million investment, after which he gets 20 percent of the profits, or about $33,000 per week. Is it worth paying the stars that kind of money? Producer Roger Berlind thinks so. “Those people who come to see the stars will get hooked on live theater and want to return,” he says. Well, maybe.
Meanwhile, in one of the oddest star moves, AI Pacino will play the evil King Herod in Oscar Wilde’s “Salome " (holy fin de siecle!). Gregory Hines has been cast as jazzman Jelly Roll Morton in “Jellys Last Jam,” written and directed by George C. Wolfe. And let’s not forget Joan Collins, who’s swapping TV bitchery for stage suavity in Noel Coward’s “Private Lives. "
There’s no new international monster musical opening, but impresario Cameron Mackintosh is bringing his small, engaging London hit, “Five Guys Named Moe,” featuring the works of ’40s rhythm-and-bluesman Louis Jordan, to New York, and it could become the “Ain’t Misbehavin’ " of the ’90s. Then there are three potentially hot revivals: “The Most Happy Fella,” a stripped-down, two-piano version of Frank Loesser’s 1956 classic; Loesser’s masterwork “Guys and Dolls” from 1950, with Jerry Zaks directing, and “Crazy For You, " a mutation of “Girl Crazy, “the 1930 Gershwin musical that launched Ethel Merman singing “I Got Rhythm.”
But the most promising prospect has to be the new play by John Guare, “Four Baboons Adoring the Sun,” which follows Guare’s prize-winning hit “Six Degrees of Separation” into Lincoln Center. The play, directed by Sir Peter Hall, stars Stockard Channing and James Naughton as newlywed archeologists who bring their nine children from previous marriages to a dig under a Sicilian volcano.
The new Guare play is just one example of the decisive presence of not-for-profit theaters like Lincoln Center in the new Broadway bazaar. Circle in the Square is bringing in Pacino’s project; Circle Repertory will present “Redwood Curtain,” the new play by Pulitzer Prize winner Lanford Wilson; Yale Repertory Theatre is producing August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running,” the fifth in his 10-play cycle on African-Americans through each decade of the century, and the Manhattan Theater Club will do “A Small Family Business, “by England’s prolific Ayckbourn.
For years, it was too risky and expensive to premiere most new plays on Broadway. But subsidized theater companies can often develop new work on regional and off-Broadway stages, then sponsor a Broadway run, often in partnership with a commercial producer. What was a trickle of these works to Broadway has now become a massive presence. Guare’s “Six Degrees " played to an astonishing audience of 500,000. “If one of our living playwrights can write something of interest to a half million people, that’s what theater is about,” says Lincoln Center executive producer Bernard Gersten. “How many people saw ‘Hamlet’ at the Globe?”
And though Broadway is currently feeling an audience slump, producers are trying to lure theatergoers with cheaper tickets, at least for those shows without big-name stars. In the last decade, the average aid admission to a Broadway show has leapt from about $18 to twice that. Cameron Mackintosh, who set the record with his$ 100 top ticket to “Miss Saigon, " will cut the top price to a mere $65 next month, and slash some of the lowest tickets to $15 for “Saigon” and his other hits, “Les Miserables” and “The Phantom of the Opera.” “My shows are paid for, " he explains. “Part of profits is not what you make that week but sustaining the show for a long time. " “Grand Hotel " is following Mackintosh’s lead, pricing some seats at $25 and some at a movielike low of $7.50.
Broadway, of course, never gives anything away. With the new price scale, Phantom” will actually raise its gross potential from $635,000 to $658,000, to offset increased operating costs, including new union contracts. How? By hiking the top ticket to $65 from $60.
All the cheap tickets or big stars or new gimmicks can’t ensure against lousy shows. But the stepped-up activity on Broadway in the next few months is creating a crossroads of two cultures-the big-money, big musical culture, and the human-scale culture of work that’s not driven by profit. If Broadway builds on this symbiosis; it may restore itself not as the Great White Way but as the Rainbow Way that reflects the spectrum of diverse new realities.
