What is theatre if not a way to transform a room into a world? In Emma Donoghue’s novel “Room,” from 2010, a woman held prisoner for seven years protects her young son by convincing him that their tiny quarters are the only world there is, even as she plots their escape. The book became a 2015 film, for which Brie Larson won the Oscar for Best Actress. Donoghue has now adapted it for a Broadway play, directed by Cora Bissett (at the James Earl Jones, starting previews on April 3). Adrienne Warren (“Tina: The Tina Turner Musical”) stars as the captive mother.
Two Broadway comedies bring fresh takes to old tales. James Ijames’s “Fat Ham,” last year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for drama, resets “Hamlet” at a back-yard barbecue in North Carolina, with a queer Black protagonist; Saheem Ali’s production at the American Airlines starts on March 21. In Larissa FastHorse’s satire “The Thanksgiving Play” (Hayes, March 25), a troupe of white theatre artists strives, clumsily, to create a socially aware Thanksgiving pageant; Rachel Chavkin (“Hadestown”) directs. Speaking of theatrical endeavors gone haywire, the madcap Brits behind “The Play That Goes Wrong”—Mischief Theatre’s Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields—return with “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” (Barrymore, March 17), in which an accident-prone drama society stages J. M. Barrie’s chestnut.
Other Broadway plays offer star turns. Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht play Ohio women who form a bond during the Bicentennial, in David Auburn’s “Summer, 1976” (Samuel J. Friedman, April 4), directed by Daniel Sullivan for Manhattan Theatre Club. The English actress Jodie Comer (“Killing Eve”) makes her Broadway début, in Suzie Miller’s drama “Prima Facie” (Golden, April 11), as a barrister facing a legal and moral crisis. And the sitcom star Sean Hayes plays a television staple of a bygone age, the multifaceted pianist and wit Oscar Levant, in Doug Wright’s “Good Night, Oscar” (Belasco, April 7), set during a 1958 appearance on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show.”
Musicals are fewer. “New York, New York” (St. James, March 24), loosely based on the 1977 Scorsese film and set in postwar New York City, features songs by John Kander and the late Fred Ebb, with additional lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda and choreography and direction by Susan Stroman. “Once Upon a One More Time” (Marquis, May 13) revamps the stories of Snow White, Cinderella, and other fairy-tale heroines using—what else?—the songs of Britney Spears.
Off Broadway, Michael R. Jackson, the Tony-winning writer of “A Strange Loop,” returns with “White Girl in Danger” (Tony Kiser, March 15), directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, in which the soap-opera town of Allwhite collides with the marginalized world of the Blackgrounds. The author Zadie Smith’s first play, “The Wife of Willesden” (BAM’s Harvey Theatre, April 1), recasts Chaucer’s Wife of Bath as a pub-dwelling Jamaican Englishwoman, played by Clare Perkins. And, in Rajiv Joseph’s “King James” (City Center Stage I, May 2), directed by Kenny Leon for M.T.C., two Cleveland sports fans follow the roller-coaster career of LeBron James. ♦
