WOMEN WITH SOMETHING TO SAY

[Hailing from the worlds of American politics, Hollywood deal making, children’s literature, urban fable and the Bible, they are figures prone to saying what other people will or can not. This means that even when these characters whisper, their voices have the volume of bullhorns.]

By Ben Brantley

Lorenzo Agius; Tullio M. Puglia/Getty Images; Jonathan Pushnik; 

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Coming to Broadway, clockwise from top left: Emilia Clarke of 

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s”; Fiona Shaw of “The Testament of Mary”; 

Bette Midler of “I’ll Eat You Last”; and Holland Taylor in “Ann.”

A brigade of outspoken women is poised to take over Broadway this season, turning big New York stages into personal podiums and, quite possibly, pedestals. For these are women (and one little girl) who have inspired veneration and emulation throughout the years — in one case through millenniums.

Hailing from the worlds of American politics, Hollywood deal making, children’s literature, urban fable and the Bible, they are figures prone to saying what other people will or can not. This means that even when these characters whisper, their voices have the volume of bullhorns.

It also means that actresses bold enough to play them have the opportunity to make 10-course meals of their roles and to grab the Tony nominating committee by the lapels. So clear your throats and start talking, Ann Richards, Sue Mengers and Holly Golightly. You too, blessed Virgin Mary and little Matilda. We’re all ears.

First up is Richards, the former governor of Texas, who died in 2006 and has been reincarnated by Holland Taylor. You remember Ann Richards. She’s the one who stole the 1988 Democratic convention with one of the most quotable political speeches in recent memory, which described George H. W. Bush as being “born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

Those words are not cited in “Ann,” the one-person show written by and starring Ms. Taylor and directed by Benjamin Endsley Klein, which opens at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on March 7. But there are plenty more where they came from, because Richards was a master of salty phrases that stung when the occasion required. As a gal amid good old boys and a Democrat in a red state, she had to be.

Like Richards, Mengers stormed and set up camp in a traditionally male bastion. Mengers, whose name became a byword for chutzpah, was an über-agent in Hollywood, where the corridors of power are even more slippery and treacherous than those of Austin and Washington.

She will be played by an actress who knows from Hollywood — and from chutzpah: Bette Midler, who opens on April 24 at the Booth Theater in John Logan’s “I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers.” Ms. Midler, whose scenery-chomping bravado seems made for Broadway but hasn’t been there in decades, will be directed by Joe Mantello.

Since one of the show’s producers is the Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, a friend and mythologizer of Mengers (who died in 2011), it seems safe to assume that this portrait of an agent will be friendlier than the savage cartoons inspired by her in the film satires “The Last of Sheila” and “S.O.B.” (Of the creator and star of “S.O.B.,” the director Blake Edwards and his wife, Julie Andrews, Mengers said, “An Alp should fall on their house.”)

Though Ms. Taylor and Ms. Midler had the chance to meet the women they are portraying, I am presuming that the same cannot be said of Fiona Shaw, who appears in yet another one-woman show, “The Testament of Mary,” which opens on April 22 at the Walter Kerr Theater. Ms. Shaw, last seen on Broadway in 2003 as the child-killing title character of Euripides’ “Medea,” is taking on a very different and even more famous mother, perhaps the most famous mother of them all.

Written by Colm Toibin and first staged in Dublin in 2011, “The Testament of Mary” (which is also the title of the short novel by Mr. Toibin, published last year) is an intense monologue centered on the Crucifixion of Jesus and its aftermath from the unflinching perspective of his mother. Unlike Richards and Mengers, Mr. Toibin’s Mary does not quip wise. But like them she has plenty to say about a world ruled and ruined by men.

“I tell the truth not because it will turn night into day,” Mary says in Mr. Toibin’s novel. “I speak simply because I can.” The lyrical but austere prose in which she delivers her truth is, to put it mildly, a challenge for any performer. But you might recall that Ms. Shaw managed to turn a solo performance of T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land” into gripping visceral theater in 1996. That production was staged by her frequent collaborator Deborah Warner, who has auspiciously reunited with Ms. Shaw for “Testament.”

Holly Golightly is not, strictly speaking, a truth teller. This glamorous gamin, created by Truman Capote in the 1958 novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” is a masterpiece of self-invention, a country girl transformed into the ultimate big-city party girl and, to use Capote’s words, “American geisha.” But if she depends on the kindness of men with money, she is also a defiantly independent figure and, for all her pretensions, an expert in deflating the hypocrisies of others.

Immortalized on celluloid by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 movie, Miss Golightly will assume flesh at the Cort Theater, where Richard Greenberg’s stage adaptation, directed by Sean Mathias, opens on March 20. Emilia Clarke, who has been occupying the tumultuous Middle Ages for several seasons on HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” time travels to mid-20th-century Manhattan to embody the willowy and wily Holly.

And then there is Matilda Wormwood, the youngest but by no means weakest of this season’s female powerhouses. True, the title character of “Matilda the Musical,” a British import that opens on April 11 at the Shubert Theater, is a mere schoolgirl. But she possesses the gift of telekinesis and, just as important, a gift for language, both of which come in handy when she leads a revolution against a tyrannical headmistress.

Adapted from Roald Dahl’s 1988 children’s book by Dennis Kelly (script) and Tim Minchin (songs) and directed by Matthew Warchus, “Matilda” is about both speaking up and taking control of the narrative of your life. (She will be played in rotation by four young actresses: Sophia Gennusa, Oona Laurence, Bailey Ryon and Milly Shapiro.) As Matilda sings at one point, “Nobody but me is going to change my story.” You can imagine Holly, Sue and Ann (Mary might perhaps demur) agreeing with the wisdom of these words. 

@ The New York Times

HARD TIMES COME AGAIN, WITHSONG

[This spring, however, two new musicals are bringing real-world problems like chronic unemployment, financial distress and the collapse of manufacturing to the Broadway stage. The working classes are front and center in both “Hands on a Hardbody,” which depicts a group of financially burdened men and women competing to win a truck, and “Kinky Boots,” about a British factory imperiled by an evaporating market for its brogues.] 

By Charles Isherwood

For much of its history the Broadway musical has given us license to pursue our romantic ideals, indulge sweet reveries, contemplate cloudless skies. Sink down in your seat, listen to the orchestra tune up for the overture, and put your daily cares out of your mind. Escape, for two acts, to a world where the troubles that come will invariably be solved by the finale ultimo. Tomorrow there will be time to worry about the broken dishwasher, the grim job market, the rising cost of living.

There have always been exceptions of course, musicals that either faced a roiling society head-on (“West Side Story”) or depicted the classic battle of a him and her, to borrow a lyric from Lorenz Hart, against a grittier-than-usual background (“The Pajama Game”). But in the new century as in the last, musicals have generally fed our dreams and fueled our fantasies.

This spring, however, two new musicals are bringing real-world problems like chronic unemployment, financial distress and the collapse of manufacturing to the Broadway stage. The working classes are front and center in both “Hands on a Hardbody,” which depicts a group of financially burdened men and women competing to win a truck, and “Kinky Boots,” about a British factory imperiled by an evaporating market for its brogues.

After several years of economic struggle, both here and abroad, perhaps the time is a little riper for musicals that open a contemplative window on the world as it is, rather than taking refuge in nostalgia or fantasy. (Although the season naturally includes a little of those tonics too, with “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella” and “Motown: The Musical” among the other major productions of the season.)

The surprisingly robust success of last season’s Tony-winning best musical, “Once,” suggests that audiences are ready for tales with the tang of real life about them. Though fundamentally a bittersweet romance — the story of a girl, a guy and a guitar — it takes place in working-class Dublin.

Of course it’s not a coincidence that, like “Once,” both of the working-class musicals coming to Broadway this spring are based on movies. Producers always find it easier to rework proven material than to construct shows from the ground up. And both also seek to capitalize on another recent (and I think healthier) trend, also exemplified by “Once”: importing composers from the worlds of rock and pop to bring contemporary zest to the Broadway stage. “Hands on a Hardbody” features music by Trey Anastasio, a founder of the indie jam band Phish, and the songs for “Kinky Boots” are by Cyndi Lauper, the former chart-topping pop princess of the 1980s.

“Hardbody,” which opens March 21 at the Brooks Atkinson Theater, is unusual in being adapted from a documentary, not a feature film. Movie and musical depict an actual contest that took place annually in a small Texas town in which all comers were invited to place a hand on a pickup truck, then sit broiling in the sun and nodding through the night in the hopes of being the last to succumb to fatigue. It’s more or less a contemporary version of the marathon dance contests that were a grim diversion during the Great Depression.

Stage musicals that don’t turn away from the foibles of the workaday life still often scrape off some of the surface grit to accentuate the feel-good aspects of the tale being told. Consider “The Full Monty,” which punched up the comic relief and the striptease sizzle of its source material, or “Billy Elliot,” the feel-good story of a boy taking flight from economic hardship and labor strife — quite literally, in the musical — through a love of ballet.

“Hands on a Hardbody,” which I saw when it made its premiere last fall at La Jolla Playhouse, is unusual in keeping its feet firmly on the ground — much in the way its contestants must keep a hand on that chassis. Both the book, by Doug Wright (“I Am My Own Wife”), and the songs, by Mr. Anastasio and Amanda Green, expose the rough paths that have brought its characters to the same fate, standing around the lot of a Nissan dealership praying for endurance. (Keith Carradine is the cast’s most notable name.)

The details are very much of the moment. The contestants are plagued by lost jobs, Walmart-level wages, 401(k)’s that have crashed and burned up their meager savings. The gleaming red truck that sits at center stage symbolizes, for all of them, at least a small purchase on the American dream that so often of late seems only the province of the lucky few: bankers, Internet whizzes, Powerball winners.

“Kinky Boots,” which opens April 4 at the Al Hirschfeld Theater after a tryout in Chicago, has its own audience-pleasing attractions. (Chris Jones of The Chicago Tribune called it “warm, likable, brassy, sentimental” and “big-hearted” — all in the first sentence of his review.) While it is set in a British manufacturing town that has fallen on hard times, the troubles that threaten the family shoemaking business are ultimately solved in a style that lets the show spread sassy song, and probably a few sequins, across the stage. Billy Porter plays a transvestite named Lola who persuades the owner of the factory (Stark Sands) to push into a new market: making the kind of high-heeled strutters that drag queens employ to add a few inches to their statuesque heights, the better to throw shade.

Heaven knows, Harvey Fierstein, who wrote the book, is no enemy of old-style sentiment, as he proved in his moderately soppy book for another drag-driven show, “La Cage Aux Folles,” and in his writing for the spunky urchins in last season’s “Newsies.” Jerry Mitchell, who directs and choreographs the new show, has a splashy revival of “La Cage” on his résumé, as well as some splendidly energetic choreography for musicals like “Hairspray.”

But Ms. Lauper, born and raised in Ozone Park, Queens, has always exuded the brashness of a woman who grew up among regular folks. Even after decades of celebrity she speaks with a delicious urban squawk. Ms. Lauper’s songs were singled out in the Chicago reviews as among the show’s prime assets. I am hoping that while she infuses “Kinky Boots” with buoyant spirit — drag queens and factory workers just want to have fun too, after all — she also gives it a firm grounding in the state of the world today, which has many of us feeling that mindless entertainment is a luxury fewer and fewer can afford.

@ The New York Times