Critic’s Notebook: A banner year for Broadway, but …
Broadway has had a good year by most accounts. Broadway hasn’t become that tourist-only zone so many of us feared, and by “tourist” I’m not referring to non-NYC ZIP Codes but to a “Gone Fishing” mentality that seeks frivolous escape with a Hollywood star, a pop music catalog, a borrowed movie title or some combination of all three. “Good People,” David Lindsay-Abaire’s Tony-nominated drama, which was produced by Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, has been widely hailed as a homegrown success. I’d like to think that producers who participated in the financial folly of moving “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” uptown from the Public Theater are helping to usher in a new Broadway sensibility. “The Normal Heart,” Larry Kramer’s AIDS play that ran forever at the Public Theater in the 1980s, was finally brought uptown in a superb new production that makes the drama seem like one of the freshest offerings in a long time.
Commentary: Everyone wants a piece of Broadway, but what is Broadway these days?
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