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“Let Me Tell You” is a series of columns from our expert editors about NYC living, including the best things to do, where to eat and drink, and what to see at the theater. They are published every week.
This past Sunday, I went to the Broadway Flea Market, as I do every year, in search of cast recordings on CD to add to my already disquietingly large collection. (Yes, on CD. I know. I have a problem.) The ebullient actor Todd Buonopane, who was hosting a charity auction, spied me in the crowd and invited me to join him on the small stage that had been set up in Shubert Alley. Noting my bag of CDs—I know!—he observed that I was a Broadway fan as well as a Broadway critic. And then he asked what seemed like a simple question: What shows was I most looking forward to this fall?
It's a question I get pretty often around this time of year, and I should have had an answer at the ready. But I realized, in that moment, that I did not. The best I could do was summon the names of the first three shows that came to my head. (It was an odd assortment; people looked puzzled.) I had spent most of the previous two weeks putting together fall previews: a complete guide to the shows coming to Broadway this fall, and a second assemblage of 30 promising shows in the Off Broadway world. But I'd been so busy getting the information in our system that I hadn't stopped to process my expectations.
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As a critic, expectations aren't great. They can get in the way of your judgment; you want to evaluate every show on its own terms, not in comparison to what you imagined it would be. But as a fan, expectations are to some degree unavoidable. There are 17 new productions opening on Broadway this fall—a big step up from last year, when there were just 10—and I hope all of them are good; I go into every production hoping for the best. But I'd be lying if I said there weren't a few that I was particularly eager to see.
So let me put it all on the table. These are the six Broadway shows (three new works and three revivals) that I am most excited to check out this fall—as a fan, if not necessarily as a critic.
The Hills of California
Jez Butterworth's last two Broadway plays, Jerusalem and The Ferryman, were pretty terrific: ambitious dramas that were not afraid to go big. So I am very curious to taste what he's been cooking up for the past seven years. And The Hills of California reunites him with two keys to The Ferryman's success: director Sam Mendes, most recently represented on Broadway by The Lehman Trilogy; and Butterworth's wife, actor Laura Donnelly, who inspires him to write beautiful roles for her. The play was well received in in London earlier this year, and the main female performers from that production are all making the leap across the Pond.
Sunset Boulevard
Another British import! I saw the lavish original Broadway production of this Andrew Lloyd Webber musical toward the end of its run, with Elaine Paige as the secluded and deluded former film star Norma Desmond, and reviewed the concert-ish revival a few years back with original star Glenn Close. The musical itself is not my favorite Lloyd Webber effort, though the parts with Norma are undeniably compelling. But I am intrigued by the casting of Pussycat Dolls frontwoman Nicole Scherzinger in this revival—she got fabulous reviews in the London production, but English taste in musicals doesn't always always align with mine—and I loved the minimalist approach that director Jamie Lloyd brought to A Doll's House last year; my hope is that his version of Sunset strips away some of the flab, as John Doyle's 2016 revival of The Color Purple did with that show.
Tammy Faye
A third London transfer on this list? Oh, dear. That doesn't look very good, but for what it's worth, I don't think English theater is better than ours overall; it's just that the English productions that come to Broadway, having already proved themselves in the West End, tend to be better than average. Anyhow, this biomusical comes with a strong pop pedigree—the songs are by Elton John and Jake Shears (of Scissor Sisters fame)—and an inherently interesting subject: PTL Club televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, who went down in a blaze of scandal in the 1980s. I'm both old enough to remember the Bakker story as news (did I mention I collect CDs?) and gay enough to have seen Bernadette Peters play Tammy Faye, opposite Kevin Spacey as Jim, in the 1990 TV movie Fall from Grace. So I may be the target audience for this.
Death Becomes Her
The two main attractions of this musical dark comedy, adapted from the fondly remembered 1992 film, are obvious. Assuming the dueling-diva roles originated by Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn are two of the funniest women in musical theater today: Anyone who saw the omnitalented Megan Hilty in 2016's Noises Off can testify to her prodigious comic abilities, and Jennifer Simard's genius has been on evidence in many scene-stealing roles in musicals, most recently Once Upon a One More Time. And here's something else: I haven't heard the original score by newcomers Julia Mattison and Noel Carey, but I did see them years ago (when they were mere striplings, I tell you!) in a cabaret show at 54 Below; she was playing a washed-up showbiz barely-survivor and he was accompanying her as—incongruously and hilariously—Randy Newman. They were very funny then, so I have reason to hope they'll be funny now.
Gypsy
Let's face it: They had me at Audra. Gypsy is perhaps the best Broadway musical of all time, and its central character, Mama Rose, is certainly the best musical-theater role for a woman. So it was only a matter of time until Audra McDonald, the leading leading lady of her generation, took a crack at it. But this production also surrounds her with a dream team: George C. Wolfe as director, and Danny Burstein and Joy Woods in the major supporting roles. I thought Patti LuPone was definitive in the last Broadway revival, but it's not a contest; I love that so many different stars have made the part their own, and McDonald has certainly earned her turn. (Calling the character Mama Rose, by the way—instead of Madam Rose, or worse yet Madame Rose—is a hill I will die on if it comes to that, which in my circles it someday might.)
Eureka Day
There's been a minor trend on Broadway lately toward shows that ran Off Broadway several years earlier. Last season gave us a completely new production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's 2013 play Appropriate, and now Manhattan Theatre club is mounting a reimagined take on Jonathan Spector's 2019 dark comedy about a mumps outbreak at an ultraliberal elementary school. I really enjoyed the Off Broadway production, and am curious how the play's prescient topicality—including deeply felt disagreements about vaccination—will land in a post-Covid landscape. I'm also excited to see what the stacked new cast—Bill Irwin, Jessica Hecht, Thomas Middleditch, Amber Gray and Zoë Chao—will bring to the playroom table.
