10 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER11, 2019
ILLUSTRATION BY SIMON LANDREIN
Ivo van Hove is an anomaly: an avant-
garde European stage auteur who has
become a name brand on Broadway.
After his kinetic reinventions of “A
View from the Bridge,” “The Crucible,”
and “Network,” he returns to scramble
up another American classic: “ We s t
Side Story.” Few musicals carry such
familiarity and sentimental value—
qualities that van Hove will inevita-
bly strip away in search of something
newer and stranger. The production,
beginning previews on Dec. 10, at
the Broadway Theatre, features cho-
reography by Anne Teresa De Keers-
maeker (supplanting the iconic work
of Jerome Robbins) and thirty-two
actors making their Broadway débuts.
The show joins a number of Broad-
way offerings in which the star is not an
actor but a writer, a director, or a concept.
“Girl from the North Country,” which
uses the songs of Bob Dylan to tell the
story of boarding-house denizens in
Depression-era Minnesota, moves to
the Belasco after a lauded run at the
Public; previews start on Feb. 7, under
the direction of Conor McPherson, who
also wrote the script. Marianne Elliott,
who directed “Angels in America” last
year, revives the 1970 Sondheim musical
“Company,” but with gender-swapped
characters: Katrina Lenk (“The Band’s
Visit”) plays Bobbie—formerly Bob-
by—a thirty-five-year-old bachelorette
(March 2, Jacobs). “Six,” a new musical
by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, refracts
the lives of Henry VIII’s doomed wives
through the lens of twenty-first-cen-
tury girl power (Feb. 13, Brooks At-
kinson). Stefano Massini’s epic drama
“The Lehman Trilogy,” adapted by Ben
Power and directed by Sam Mendes,
traces the Lehman brothers from their
immigrant roots to the 2008 financial
collapse (March 7, Nederlander).
That’s not to say that Broadway is
forgoing big-name actors. Laurie Met-
calf and Rupert Everett headline the
latest Broadway revival of Edward Al-
bee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,”
directed by Joe Mantello (March 3,
Booth). There’s a dollop of star power
Off Broadway, too: Rose Byrne andBobby Cannavale play a couple riven
by infidelity and bloodlust in an adap-
tation of Euripides’ “Medea,” written
and directed by Sam Stone ( Jan. 12,
BAM’s Harvey Theatre). The Ethiopi-
an-Irish actress Ruth Negga makes her
American stage début in the title role
of “Hamlet,” in a Gate Theatre Dub-
lin production directed by Yaël Farber
(Feb. 1, St. Ann’s Warehouse).
Duncan Sheik, the pop star turned
prolific musical composer, lends his wry
touch to “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,”
a musical based on the 1969 Paul Ma-
zursky film, about two married couples
who dabble in free love; Scott Elliott
directs for the New Group ( Jan. 16,
Pershing Square Signature Center). The
English monologuist Daniel Kitson
weaves his latest existential yarn in
“Keep” (Dec. 4, St. Ann’s Warehouse).
Raja Feather Kelly directs “We’re Gonna
Die” (Feb. 4, Second Stage), a rock show
about mortality by Young Jean Lee
(“Straight White Men”). And the British
director Richard Jones returns to the Park
Avenue Armory, where his eye-catching
production of “The Hairy Ape” played
in 2017, with Ödön von Horváth’s rarely
seen 1937 play “Judgment Day” (Dec. 5).
—Michael SchulmanWINTERPREVIEW
Reënvisioned Classics, Gender Swaps