Plenty of Star Power Should Lift This Fall’s Off-Broadway Theater Season

Theatergoers seeking high-profile names needn’t necessarily look to Times Square this fall. Productions scheduled to open off-Broadway between now and Christmas range from a new play co-written by and starring Tom Hanks — cast opposite a musical theater goddess, Kelli O’Hara — to a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Anna Christie” starring Michelle Williams and Tom Sturridge.New works by Ethan Coen, John Leguizamo, and a Pulitzer Prize winner, James Ijames, are also on tap, along with a fresh revival of “The Baker’s Wife,” a cult classic by the “Wicked” composer/lyricist, Stephen Schwartz, starring Ariana DeBose, a Broadway veteran and Oscar winner. Our critic culled from oodles of options to put together a selective list. (Dates and other details are subjects to change.) “Saturday Church” Mr. Ijames, best known for “Fat Ham,” an uproarious “Hamlet” retake, teamed with Sia, the popular songwriter and performer, to craft a musical — based on Damon Cardasis’s 2017 film of the same title — tracing a teenager who finds refuge in a church program for LGBTQ+ youths. Mr. Cardasis co-wrote the book with Mr. Ijames, along with additional lyrics to supplement Sia’s for this world premiere; Whitney White directs at New York Theatre Workshop. (In previews, opens September 15)“Masquerade” A Tony Award winner, Diane Paulus, praised for her zesty revivals of classic musicals such as “Pippin” and “Hair,” takes on Andrew Lloyd Webber in a production that, according to a press release, “blurs the lines of reality, bringing audiences inside and closer than ever before to the strange affair of The Phantom of the Opera—a mystery never fully explained.” (In previews, opens September 29)“The Wild Duck” Brooklyn’s Theatre for a New Audience presents British playwright and screenwriter David Eldridge’s version of the Ibsen classic. (September 2, September 14)“The Other Americans” Mr. Leguizamo wrote and stars in a new play (not to be confused with Laila Lalami’s novel) following a Colombian-American laundromat owner in Queens, with Ruben Santiago-Hudson, the Tony Award winner, directing at the Public Theater. (September 11, September 25)“Caroline” Another celebrated director and actor, David Cromer, guides Amy Landecker and Chloë Grace Moretz, both appearing in a New York stage production for the first time in more than a decade, in a multi-generational study of mothers and daughters by Preston Max Allen, at MCC Theater. (September 12, September 30)“Last Call, a play with cocktails” En Garde Arts will stage an immersive world premiere of a work by Hansol Jung, an Obie Award winner whose credits include the gorgeously harrowing “Wolf Play,” in private homes and apartments across New York City. Ms. Jung co-directs with Dustin Wills, her frequent collaborator. (September 19, September 25)“And Then We Were No More” At La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club — also technically off-off-Broadway — the always intriguing Elizabeth Marvel stars in a new play by veteran actor and writer Tim Blake Nelson, set in the near future, where a lawyer must try to save a prisoner from a supposedly painless new form of execution. (September 19, September 28)“Let’s Love!” Atlantic Theater Company’s longtime artistic director, Neil Pepe, helms a trio of one-act pieces by Mr. Coen, the venerated filmmaker and sometime playwright, examining love “in all its miserable glory,” according to the company’s site. The cast includes such popular actors as Aubrey Plaza, following her well-received off-Broadway debut two years ago, Chris Bauer, and Noah Robbins. (September 25, October 15)“Oh Happy Day!” Jordan E. Cooper, a playwright and actor who made a splash on Broadway a few years ago with the blazing satire “Ain’t No Mo’,” reunites with director Stevie Walker-Webb at the Public (where that show had its premiere) for an account of a family facing literal and figurative floods, with music by gospel artist Donald Lawrence. (October 3, October 15)“Kyoto” Joe Murphy and Joe Roberston’s Olivier Award-nominated play tracing the forging of the Kyoto Protocol — the seminal international treaty on climate change signed nearly 30 years ago — arrives at Lincoln Center Theater, with acclaimed directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin and duly loved American actor Stephen Kunken in tow. (October 8, November 3)“Romy & Michele: The Musical” The famously wacky 1997 film has been adapted for the stage, with a book by a screenwriter, Robin Schiff, and music and lyrics by Gwendolyn Sanford and Brandon Jay, known for their work on the series “Orange is the New Black” and “Weeds.” (October 14, October 28) “Queens” Trip Cullman directs, for Manhattan Theatre Club, a newly imagined version of Pulitzer winner Martyna Majok’s 2018 play focusing on an immigrant woman living in a basement apartment, featuring a young Ukrainian searching for her mother. The cast includes such reliably winning troupers as Anna Chlumsky, Marin Ireland, and Julia Lester. (October 14, November 5)Aaron Monaghan in ‘Endgame.’ Ros Kavanagh“Endgame” Irish Arts Center presents the renowned, Galway-based Druid Theatre’s staging of Samuel Beckett’s bleak gem, directed by Garry Hynes, one of the company’s founders — and the first woman to win a Tony for direction of a play, in 1998. (October 22, October 26)“The Baker’s Wife” Ms. DeBose plays a woman torn between her adoring older husband and a younger, more patently dashing man in a musical first conceived by Mr. Schwartz — whose radiant score includes the soaring “Meadowlark” — and “Fiddler on the Roof” librettist Joseph Stein back in the 1970s. Gordon Greenberg directs at Classic Stage Company. (October 23, November 11)“Archduke” One of Broadway’s great heavies, Patrick Page, follows his triumphant tour of “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain” by starring in Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of a new play by a Pulitzer finalist, Rajiv Joseph, about the revolutionaries behind the assassination that launched World War I. A Tony-winning theater and opera director and Serbian native, Darko Tresnjak, directs. (October 23, November 12)“Meet the Cartozians” Mr. Cromer directs Second Stage Theater’s world premiere of a play by Talene Monahon, who is of Irish and Armenian descent, which follows Armenian Americans in the 1920s and a century later. Performers include Will Brill, a recent Tony recipient for his performance in “Stereophonic,” and Andrea Martin. (October 29, November 17)“This World of Tomorrow” More than a decade after making his Broadway bow, Mr. Hanks returns to the New York stage in a new play based on his own short stories, co-written with James Glossman and tracing a time-traveling scientist as he seeks true love. Tony winner Kenny Leon directs a company that includes, in addition to Ms. O’Hara, other stage stalwarts such as Mr. Santiago-Hudson and Jay O. Sanders. (October 30, November 18)“The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” Twenty years after arriving on Broadway, William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin’s giddy musical comedy is back at New York, in a new staging by Danny Mefford, featuring such rising Broadway stars as Justin Cooley and Jasmine Amy Rogers, fresh from her luminous turn in “Boop! The Musical.” (November 7, November 17)“Anna Christie” Ms. Williams and Mr. Sturridge, who have both won acclaim in Broadway productions over the past decade, head to Brooklyn, along with stage and screen star Brian d’Arcy James, for a new revival of O’Neill’s Pulitzer-winning drama at St. Ann’s Warehouse. (November 25, December 11)______________Correction: Ethan Coen is the author of the one-act plays in “Let’s Love!” An earlier version misspelled his surname.

Plenty of Star Power Should Lift This Fall’s Off-Broadway Theater Season

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