Broadway Across London

One of the biggest theatrical producers in the US is Broadway Across America, which presents touring product in cities across the nation (as well as owing Broadway.com). But right now we seem to have Broadway Across London, and not just in the West End with imports like The Book of Mormon and Once but further afield with new productions of American work in theatres large and small across the capital.

In the last week alone, I’ve seen the UK premiere productions of two plays, both coincidentally seen in New York under the auspices of Lincoln Center Theatre’s LC3 programme of work by new writers, directors and designers – last year’s Disgraced (originally premiered in Chicago earlier in the year by another company) and 2011’s 4000 Miles.

Those are both now playing respectively at the Bush and Notting Hill’s Print Room (transferred from Bath’s Ustinov Studio season of American plays), in terrific productions by Nadia Fall and James Dacre that show real understanding of the rhythms of plays both also coincidentally set inside Manhattan apartments — one in an affluent one on the swanky Upper East Side,  the other in a run-down rental in Greenwich Village. (Terrific British actors do impressive work in both plays, too, including Daniel Boyd, the young actor son of former RSC artistic director Michael Boyd in the latter).

I’ve also seen a revival of Christopher Sergel’s vintage stage adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird return to the Open Air Theatre, in a hauntingly evocative new production by director Timothy Sheader that summons the heat and intensity of an Alabama court room, despite the advancing chill of last Saturday night in the outdoors at Regent’s Park, and tonight I’ll be at Hampstead Theatre for the British premiere of David Mamet’s 2009 Broadway play Race, with Terry Johnson directing Clarke Peters and Jasper Britton.

These are just some of numerous American plays that have or will open between this month and July in London. As the headline to a blog by Matt Wolf for the International Herald Tribune recently succinctly put it, “Missed a Play on Broadway? See it in London”.

Still to come on the new American plays front are another transfer from Bath of Richard Greenberg’s The American Plan, directed (as was the most recent Broadway revival) by David Grindley, which begins performances at the St James on July 2, and the UK premiere of Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation, being staged as part of the Royal Court’s Theatre Local scheme at the Rose Lipman Building in Haggerston, N1, with a cast that includes Imelda Staunton and Toby Jones.

There’s also the London transfer for New York ensemble The TEAM’s 2011 Edinburgh hit Mission Drift, reappearing next week at the NT’s Shed, as well as this weekend’s English National Opera premiere of Philip Glass’s The Perfect American, which imagines the final months of the life of Walt Disney, directed by Phelim McDermott in a production produced in collaboration with McDermott’s company Improbable.

The Menier are also offering the UK premiere of the 2005 Broadway musical version of The Color Purple, from July 5, to join the current West End transfer of their brilliant reclamation of Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along (now at the Pinter Theatre in the show’s first commercial outing in the West End or on Broadway since its original 1981 flop at the latter).

There’s also another West End outing for August Wilson’s Fences (yet another production to originate at Bath, starring Lenny Henry that now comes to the Duchess from June 19 following a national tour) that was previously seen in the West End at the Garrick in a different production in 1990.

Then there are some more classic revivals, like the National’s re-visitings, a week apart, of O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, with Anne-Marie Duff in Simon Godwin’s production, and James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner, the latter as part of the Travelex £12 season, plus the Old Vic’s new production of Sweet Bird of Youth, starring Kim Cattrall and rising Broadway actor Seth Numrich under the direction of Marianne Elliott.

As Matt Wolf notes in his International Herald Tribune blog,

One could argue that Britain is especially favorably disposed to lesser-known works from canonical American writers, a function, perhaps, of the state-funded system in the United Kingdom that encourages risk-taking to a degree that is more difficult to come by stateside.

As he goes on to write,

The last major production of O’Neill’s Strange Interlude before the National version that opens June 4 was way back in 1985. Spawned in Britain, it starred Glenda Jackson and Edward Petherbridge and traveled from the West End to Broadway. Will the director Simon Godwin’s new staging, starring Anne-Marie Duff and Charles Edwards, achieve a similar transfer? Time will tell, but it’s a testament to British curatorial interest in American theater that this city has twice in 30 years latched on to a difficult 1928 text from which playhouses in the U.S. generally steer well clear.