The fall season of Broadway is starting up, and there are definitely going to be some interesting shows. You’ll be able to catch a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or a famous cartoon in human form. The Associated Press has put together some highlights of the first half of the 2017-18 Broadway Season.
October
A revival of Time and the Conways, starring Downton Abbey’s Elizabeth McGovern, follows a well-to-do upper-middle-class family that toys with the idea of time. It opens Oct. 10 at the American Airlines Theater.
Bruce Springsteen will be playing a solo show starting Oct. 12 at the Water Kerr Theater. He will perform songs from his career, interspersed with readings of his best-selling memoir, Born to Run, reports AP.
M. Butterfly, the 1988 Tony Award winner for best play, will open Oct. 26 at the Court Theater, starring Clive Owen. David Henry Hwang’s play is a re-creation of a spy scandal and a love affair involving a French diplomat and Chinese opera singer who turns out to be a man.
November
Pulitzer Prize winner playwright Ayad Akhtar has turned his attention to 1980s-era finance in Junk, starring Steven Pasquale. It opens Nov. 2 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater and is both a “modern-day morality tale and a road map to the way we live today” writes AP.
One of the off-Broadway highlights from last year has made the jump to Broadway with original stars Tony Shalhoub and Katrina Lenk. The Band’s Visit is a musical based on a 2007 Israeli film when an Egyptian orchestra shows up to perform at the wrong Israeli town. The score is by David Yazbek, and the show opens Nov. 9 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.
Emmy winner John Leguizamo stars in his original one-man comedic play, Latin History for Morons, starting Nov. 15 at Studio 54 theater. The show is about the forgotten history of Latinos in the Americas.
Be be prepared to laugh in November at the Booth Theater, when Amy Schumer and Steve Martin team up, one onstage and the other off it. AP writes that Schumer will star in Martin’s four-person comedy Meteor Shower, about two couples who get together to observe just that. The show opens Nov. 29.
The Parisian Woman stars Uma Thurman, making her Broadway debut, as a political wife to contemporary Washington, D.C. Beau Willimon, who developed House of Cards has updated the play from the 19th century. It opens Nov. 30 at the Hudson Theater.
December
Once on This Island opens Dec. 3 at the Circle in the Square Theater, and it is a musical starring Tony Award winner Lea Salonga. The story is about a “romance that grows between a young woman and a man from the wealthy side of the island on which she lives, guided by the island’s gods,” writes AP.
Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? Spongebob Squarepants. But now he is coming to Broadway starting Dec. 4 at the Palace Theater. It will be a stage musical with real actors and original songs by Steven Tyler, Sara Bareilles, John Legend, Lady Antebellum, Cyndi Lauper and David Bowie.
Mark Rylance is returning to Broadway with Farinelli and the King, a 2015 play in which he starred at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, writes AP. The play is lit by candlelight, and the music centers on a castrato who gives up his career to sing privately for a Spanish king. The show opens Dec. 17 at the Belasco Theater.
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