If “Hello, Dolly!” were a title fight, the septua-genarian Channing wouldn’t be sanctioned by any athletic commission. But she is probably the most indomitable theater animal in our history, currently taking “Dolly” on a worldwide tour (including China, Japan and Australia) on its road to Broadway. Andrews, practically a one-woman counter-counter-culture in the mid-’60s with her two fearsomely sunny movie successes, “The Sound of Music” and “Mary Poppins,” now rides the gender-bending wave with “V/V.” As for Burnett, Broadway is clearly relying on her high BQ (Beloved Quotient) developed in her classic 12-season TV show.
If there’s such a thing as a male diva, it may be Tommy Tune, still dancing at 56. Tune will star in “Busker Alley,” a musical based on the 1938 English movie “Sidewalks of London,” a tear-jerker about cockney huskers (street performers). This sounds like dicey stuff for Broadway, but Tune says it’s the best material he’s had since his college Shakespeare. To busk or not to busk, that’s the question.
Clinching this season’s Broadway as a theme park for divas will be Terrence McNally’s “Master Class,” a play about the ultimate diva, Maria Callas. Zoe Caldwell, who can’t sing, plays the retired Callas. She speaks the arias and leaves the singing to her students, played by real opera singers.
Why this sudden divandalizing of Broadway? Yale professor Wayne Koestenbaum, author of “The Queen’s Throat,” a study of opera and homosexuality, thinks the burgeoning gay culture has a lot to do with it. “Gay people have been the custodians of lost cultural treasures,” he says. “Stars who meant a lot to me during my proto-gay youth are being brought back.” Koestenbaum calls this “a beautiful moment. It’s a sign of a certain artistic maturity and not a sign of senility that we’re rummaging in theaters past like this.” Will theater goers buy into Broadway’s rummage sale?
JACK KROLL
DANCE:
Maybe dance doesn’t age quite so gracefully as theater. Founded in 1926, the Martha Graham Dance Company is the oldest in the country, and sometimes her trail-blazing choreography shows its wrinkles. But since her death in 1991, guest choreographers have brought a welcome burst of fresh ideas. This season Robert Wilson– a stalwart of the avant-garde, once called “America’s weirdest theater director”–will stage a new work titled “Snow on the Mesa,” evoking Graham’s life.
Maguy Marin may not be the weirdest theater director in Europe–competition for that title is intense–but her iconoclastic modern-dance company is one of the most popular in France. Marin has set “Cinderella” in a dollhouse and “Coppelia” in a housing project; her troupe tours the United States this fall with her acclaimed “Waterzooi,” which brings together toy instruments and readings from Descartes. It’s named for a Belgian stew–and audiences eat it up.
LAURA SHAPIRO
Psychotherapy as farce:
San Diego will see Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s ‘The Doctor Is Out,’ in which patients seek their missing shrink.
In Los Angeles, Freud himself careers through his own subconscious in Terry Johnson’s ‘Hysteria.’
Seattle premieres John Patrick Shanley’s ‘Psychopathia Sexualis,’ about a man who can’t make love unless he’s wearing his father’s argyle socks.
