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It has been enough of a gift having Angela Lansbury back on Broadway in recent seasons. But it's particular cause for celebration that she is appearing, for the first time in more than 25 years, in a musical. And not just any musical—a work by Stephen Sondheim, with whom she has already made magic more than once. Lansbury created roles in two Sondheim shows, the short-lived cult classic Anyone Can Whistle (undone by a messy libretto) and the enduring masterpiece Sweeney Todd. Now, at 84, she is gloriously reviving the part of Madame Armfeldt in director Trevor Nunn's new production of A Little Night Music, which opened Sunday at the Walter Kerr Theatre.
The Playbill for David Mamet's Race features a photo of a woman's body clad in a tight minidress. The monochrome shot makes it hard to determine her skin color, but she's obviously young and very fit. It's a hint that the concerns addressed in Mamet's new play, which opened Sunday at Broadway's Ethel Barrymore Theatre, aren't limited to the title subject.
Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room or the vibrator play, which opened Thursday at the Lyceum Theatre, is set in the 1880s outside New York City, in the home of an impeccably gracious physician who has grown fond of the aforementioned gadget—as a therapeutic device. He uses it on hysterics, as emotionally disturbed women were known in that era, to produce healing, um, "paroxysms."
The musical Ragtime is based on E.L. Doctorow's sprawling historical novel, which offered food for thought by tracing the dawn of 20th-century American society through real and imagined characters. But those who plan to see the theatrical version, now in revival at the Neil Simon Theatre, are advised to put away their thinking caps and bring their hankies. As a work of social commentary, Ragtime, introduced on Broadway in 1998, is hokey and pedantic, much like that other, plodding musical adaptation of historical fiction, Les Misèrables.
Under any circumstances, a revival of Simon's portrait of a thoroughly endearing Jewish family in late 1930s Brooklyn, would be a welcome diversion. But the new production that opened Sunday…
