BROADWAY FALL PREVIEW: David Mamet (Twice), Edward Albee, Annie, Jessica Chastain, Cyrano, Patti LuPone

By Robert Simonson
03 Sep 2012

Al Pacino
Al Pacino

The coming months on Broadway will offer a new play by David Mamet, Chita Rivera in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, an essential social drama by Henrik Ibsen, two Christmas-themed musicals, plus Katie Holmes, Charlie Chaplin, Patti LuPone, Tracy Letts, Henry Winkler, Theresa Rebeck, Kathie Lee Gifford and more. Here's a walking tour of Broadway's fall attractions.

*

Broadway theatregoers looking to catch up on their classics, both straight and musical, are in luck this fall. Times Square will be serving up titles that even readers of "Theater for Dummies" will recognize, including David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, and the Tony Award-winning musicals Annie and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Of those attractions, it's an easy guess as to who'll be strutting around with the most Broadway bravado this autumn: Al Pacino, who will headline the second Broadway revival of Glengarry Glen Ross in a decade. Pacino famously played hotshot salesman Ricky Roma in the film version of Mamet's brutal drama of cutthroat capitalism. This time out, he'll be the down-on-his-luck Shelly Levene. Daniel Sullivan will direct at the Schoenfeld, beginning Oct. 16.

The only stars that come within shouting distance of Pacino's level of fame are featured in the other Mamet play scheduled to bow this fall. The Anarchist, beginning Nov. 13 at the Lyceum Theatre, will be directed by the writer himself. At this point, no one should be surprised by the unlikely subjects Mamet chooses for his latter-day plays. Still, a women's prison drama doesn't hit Broadway every day. Patti LuPone will play Cathy, a longtime inmate with ties to a violent political organization, who pleads for parole from the warden, played by elusive film star Debra Winger.

 Continued...