The tills of the West End may be alive with the sound of musicals new and old, but the Brits on Broadway are remarkably well represented at a time when theatre in New York is still suffering a delayed downturn from the after-effects of 9/11. It is indeed some indication of a renewed faith in Broadway, and a reborn interest in straight plays which we could do well to copy, that David Hare is about to première his The Vertical Hour (with Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy, as directed by Sam Mendes) in New York rather than London, having recently triumphed there with his Iraq talkfest Stuff Happens. Additionally, Tom Stoppard’s epic three-play The Coast of Utopia, first seen four years ago at the National and dealing with the birth of Bolshevism, is about to open at the Lincoln Center with an all-star American cast headed by Ethan Hawke and Billy Crudup.
Then again there are major revivals of Simon Gray (Nathan Lane in Butley) and Bernard Shaw (Heartbreak House), while recent award-winners from this side of the Atlantic have included Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, the Ralph Fiennes–Ian McDiarmid Faith Healer and the Rufus Norris–David Eldridge Festen. All that and Siân Phillips in a new Paul Rudnick comedy, while the talk for the spring is of Ian McShane in Pinter’s The Homecoming.
On the jukebox front, we even got Shout, billed as ‘a salute to London in the Swinging Sixties’ and featuring some fairly implausible lookalike-soundalikes of Petula Clark, Lulu and even the late Dusty Springfield. And for those of you still missing the Four Seasons (the guys, not the Vivaldi), the most likely London import over the next few months, in the wake of Buddy, looks like being Jersey Boys, a slickly packaged celebration of the group with a star turn from John Lloyd Young as Frankie Valli. Not
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