NYTimes.com: With the new year come renewed theatrical hopes, which, in the case of London 2013, means having to equal the especially strong theater year just gone— both for the classics (Shakespeare especially) and for new plays (the 2012 place to be on that front was the Royal Court).
All manner of anticipation is stirring for the prospect of better and more exciting musicals and a bracing array of star directors and star actresses, sometimes both at the same time. This week has already brought an example of that commingling, with the director Phyllida Lloyd (“The Iron Lady”) guiding the actress Fiona Shaw in an audacious theatrical appropriation of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, performed alongside the young dancer Daniel Hay-Gordon in the bowels of the Old Vic Tunnels (in conjunction with the Young Vic Theatre).
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Then we'll have the article about what shows from London are being ported over to New York... Matilda and The Bodyguard being the notable ones this season, with We Will Rock You beginning a national tour. The difference in the two cultures is really interesting to me - where Broadway's commercialism pushes more and more musicals based on movies and where some really good plays fall to less-than-interested audiences, London seems to really key into the intellectual and classical plays and its two musical ports from Broadway this season (Once and Book of Mormon) are the two musicals this past few seasons that ostensibly add something creative and wholly original to the mix. I'll be interested to see how each of these swaps do in their new environment - while I see some unanimous appeal for The Book of Mormon based on its overwhelming strength here, I wonder how audiences in the US will take the British take on an American film (we saw how Ghost did this season) and Matilda, which is informed for London audience members by the more formal school system there.
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