If the last season on Broadway overflowed with new musicals, this fall is looking like the beginning of the season of the diva. We’ve got Nicole Scherzinger in Sunset Boulevard , Audra McDonald in Gypsy , and dueling musical-comedy treasures Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard in Death Becomes Her , with more to come in the spring, and a few divas having already debuted over the summer (shout-out to raging misfits Princess Winnifred and, well, Mary Todd Lincoln). But if you zoom out a bit, the larger theme may just be stardom in general.
In the wake of that post-strike Hollywood contraction, the serious men of film and television are coming to New York’s stages too, with Robert Downey Jr. alighting at Lincoln Center and Adam Driver and Kenneth Branagh squeezing into smaller spaces Off Broadway. There are also new productions about chasing fame, as with The Hills of California or even Tammy Faye ; plays that might launch lesser-known names into greater fame; and return engagements of famed productions, as with Gatz .
Curtain up! Light the lights! Lincoln Center Theater, September 5–November 24 While Kylo Ren sings the blues downtown, Iron Man (and, I guess, Doctor Doom ?) is coming to Broadway in Pulitzer Prize-winner Ayad Akhtar’s new play. Bartlett Sher directs Robert Downey Jr. as Jacob McNeal, a “great American novelist” with an estranged son and a sinister obsession with AI.
He may not have an arc reactor implanted in his chest, but through his increasingly maniac.