Category — The Path To Broadway

The playwright makes her Broadway debut with “The Mountaintop”

Note: TDF members can purchase discount tickets to The Mountaintop through December 24.

Playwright Katori Hall has the best kind of laugh—a loud explosion that almost forces you to laugh along. During a recent phone interview, she was so buoyant and effusive, laughing at herself and her own good fortune, that it was easy to imagine her slapping five with passers-by.

She’s got plenty of reasons to be in a good mood. The Signature Theatre just announced she’s one of five playwrights to receive a five-year residency award, meaning Signature will produce three of her plays in the next five years while offering health insurance and other support.

More immediately, Hall’s debuting on Broadway with The Mountaintop, now playing at the Bernard Jacobs. The play imagines a meeting between Martin Luther King, Jr. (Samuel L. Jackson) and a mysterious hotel maid (Angela Bassett), and when it premiered on London’s West End, it won the 2010 Olivier Award for Best Play—the equivalent of a Tony.

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The “Chinglish” actors speak two languages in their Broadway debuts

At the moment, Broadway shows are set everywhere from the African plains to the Australian outback to the trenches of World War I, but no matter how cosmopolitan they are, they’re all performed in English. Except for Chinglish.

Sure, David Henry Hwang’s new comedy is frequently in English, but it also features monologues, arguments, and entire scenes in Chinese.

The overlapping languages are central to the play, now in previews at the Longacre Theatre. We follow an American businessman who wants to revive his career by landing a contract with the Chinese government, so he hires a British expat named Peter Timms to help him impress local officials. Things go awry when a Chinese minister named Xi Yan reveals that she understands enough English to know when an American is acting like a fool. From there, language barriers inform everything from an awkward dinner to a surprising romance.

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Glenn Davis and Necar Zadegan are making their Broadway debuts with Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Rajiv Joseph’s tense and metaphorical drama about American soldiers, Iraqi civilians, and a thoughtful speaking tiger. But while they’re new to the Rialto, they’re no strangers to the play.

Like most of the seven-person cast, the actors were in Bengal‘s first two productions, at L.A.’s Kirk Douglas Theatre in 2009 and L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum in 2010. (Robin Williams, who plays the tiger, is the only newbie in the New York run.)

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It may be hogging all the attention, but Spider-Man isn’t the only show getting its world premiere on Broadway this spring. On February 8, previews begin for David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People, making it the rare play to hit the Rialto without a test run.

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How an outsider director rose to Broadway fame

This fall, The Path to Broadway will ask artists and audiences to reflect on their first Broadway experiences. To read all the stories in this series, just go here.

If you were describing the “typical Broadway director,” then you might never mention Alex Timbers. After all, he’s made his name helming low-budget, high-concept shows like Gutenberg!: The Musical and artistic directing Les Freres Corbusier, an off-Off Broadway theatre that used robots in a production of Hedda Gabler and elementary school students in a Christmas pageant about Scientology. It’s hard to imagine him leaping from those back alleys to the Great White Way.

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