The big shows for the new theater season are set. We’ll be singing “Let It Go” from “Frozen,” toasting the wit of Tina Fey in “Mean Girls,” enjoying the charms of “The Band’s Visit,” and hoping “SpongeBob SquarePants” is subversive enough to make it more than a kiddie show.
But what’s fun about covering Broadway is that there are always a few shows under the radar that burst onto the scene. And they often come from London.
Here’s a look at a few British shows that just might upend the 2017 to 2018 Broadway season:
Irish writer Conor McPherson (“The Weir, “The Seafarer”) has mined Bob Dylan’s catalog for a play about the Dust Bowl called “Girl From the North Country.” The Old Vic’s producing it, and the reviews are strong.
The setting’s almost a cliché: a guesthouse in Dylan’s Minnesota hometown populated by colorful characters: drunks, dreamers, con men, runaways, the forgotten and the lonely, all broken by the Great Depression. McPherson skillfully uses Dylan’s songs (“Slow Train,” “I Want You,” “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”) to illuminate the characters’ inner lives and the feelings they have for one another.
He smartly avoids the big hits such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” As critics have pointed out, this isn’t a jukebox musical, it’s a play with songs.
The first-rate cast includes several actors who’ve worked with McPherson before, including the excellent Ciarán Hinds and Jim Norton.
Twyla Tharp tried her hand with a Dylan musical several years ago, but struck out. “Girl From the North Country” looks set to sail across the Atlantic to Broadway.
Another West End show people are talking up is Jez Butterworth’s “The Ferryman.”
Butterworth, who had a Broadway hit a few years back with “Jerusalem,” tackles the IRA in the play, directed by Sam Mendes.
Set in 1981, when Bobby Sands was on a hunger strike, “The Ferryman” features more than 20 unforgettable Irish characters, all struggling with ancient history, hatred and tragedies.
The Guardian called it “juicy,” and “ boisterous, profligate and far-reaching.”
It’s not a short evening — over three hours — but a couple of Broadway insiders I know tell me the pace never flags. Sources say Sonia Friedman, whose name is on everything in London these days — she’s also producing “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” — is determined to bring it to Broadway.
And then there’s James Graham’s “Ink,” a rollicking play about Rupert Murdoch (full disclosure: he’s my boss! The best ever!) and his early days on Fleet Street, once the center of London’s news world.
Based on interviews with reporters and editors who worked with Murdoch at the time, “Ink” charts his rise as he took over the ailing tabloid the Sun in 1969 and turned it into England’s most influential (and controversial) newspaper of the ’70s and ’80s. Bertie Carvel, who played Miss Trunchbull in “Matilda,” gives what critics call an “unmissable” performance in the lead.
I read the play, and it’s great fun, although I have one quibble: Graham ascribes the headline “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” to the Sun. As every New Yorker knows, that immortal headline belongs to The Post.