YEAR IN REVIEW 1997: PERFORMING-ARTS: THEATRE

THEATRE: U.S. and Canada. In 1996 sleaze died on New York City's 42nd Street. The redevelopment of the Broadway theatre district--in the works for the better part of a decade--took a giant leap forward as the Walt Disney Co. began a $34 million restoration of the historic 1,800-seat New Amsterdam Theater, once home to the Ziegfeld Follies, and opened an expansive retail store a few doors down at the corner of 42nd Street and 7th Avenue. Disney's heightened presence (the stage version of its animated musical Beauty and the Beast had been running since April 1994) galvanized efforts to close Times Square pornography shops, clean up street crime, and transform the district's rough-and-tumble atmosphere into that of a safe, spiffy, neon-lit theme park--as the press would have it, the Disneyfication of Broadway. Disney was not the only entertainment corporation staking its claim on Broadway in 1996. Warner Bros. Studios signed a long-term lease for One Times Square, the building from which the ball drops on New Year's Eve. Commercial theatre observers believed the neighbourhood's shiny new image would translate into healthier ticket sales and increased family audiences, but some worried that there would be a homogenizing effect on the kinds of shows that were produced. A live version of another animated hit, The Lion King, and a musical rendition of the biblical tale of King David were among Disney's announced stage projects. The U.S. theatrical season's most notable success, on Broadway and beyond, was, however, a far cry from squeaky-clean Disney fare. Rent, a high-decibel pop-rock musical that updated Puccini's La Bohme to New York City's grimy East Village of the '90s, deals with such unsavoury issues as homelessness, drug addiction, AIDS, and dog-eat-dog capitalism--though it infuses these darker realities of contemporary life with a lyrical, wide-eyed optimism. A media sensation attended the show's February opening at off-Broadway's New York Theatre Workshop after its 35-year-old composer and librettist, Jonathan Larson, died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm on the night of the final dress rehearsal in late January. Larson's propulsive, grunge-influenced score, sung by a youthful, exuberant cast--including Adam Pascal and Daphne Rubin-Vega as the doomed lovers Roger and Mimi, struggling against the ticking of their HIV-positive clocks--helped Rent capture the zeitgeist and the attention of the entertainment industry's rich and powerful (mogul David Geffen produced the cast recording and held an option to film the play). At the year's end director Michael Greif's original production was housed in Broadway's Nederlander Theater, a U.S. tour was under way, and international productions were in rehearsal. Rent won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony for best musical as well as Obie, Drama Desk, and other awards. Rent was, in fact, the centrepiece of an exceptional year for the American musical. Critical adulation and jubilant audience response also greeted the innovative Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk, which used tap dancing as a lens through which to explore the African-American experience in the U.S. A collaborative creation of the prodigious young dancer Savion Glover (see BIOGRAPHIES), director George C. Wolfe, and the poet Reg E. Gaines, Noise/Funk brought the energy, anger, and virtuosity of street dancing to the Broadway stage. It originated at the Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival. A pair of highly original chamber musicals--Adam Guettel's fierce and melancholic Floyd Collins, based on the true story of a Kentucky spelunker fatally trapped in a cave, and Polly Pen's delicately modulated Bed and Sofa, which musicalizes a Russian silent film about a mnage trois--debuted at Philadelphia's American Music Theater Festival and New York's Vineyard Theatre, respectively. Among the most produced plays of the regional theatre season were David Ives's sextet of comic vignettes All in the Timing, Edward Albee's potent memory play Three Tall Women, and Wendy Wasserstein's barbed comedy The Sisters Rosensweig. New plays earning critical approbation included Terrence McNally's Tony-winning Master Class, in which an aging Maria Callas intimidates and inspires young singers; and One Flea Spare, Naomi Wallace's harsh drama about London's Great Plague of 1665, which debuted at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Ky., and won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Shakespeare had a heady year in film, and his plays remained a staple of the American stage as well, with Tony Taccone's high-octane Coriolanus at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Rene Buch's unadorned Romeo and Juliet at the same theatre, and two strong-minded reenvisionings of the plot-heavy early histories Henry VI: Parts 1, 2, and 3 (Michael Kahn's Bard-meets-Mel Gibson version at Washington, D.C.'s Shakespeare Theatre, and experimentalist Karin Coonrod's darker, more cerebral reading at New York's Public Theater with a cast of only 10 playing four times that many roles). Vanessa Redgrave and her Moving Theatre company from Great Britain took up residence at the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, where the actress directed and acted in a controversial Antony and Cleopatra; by year's end she was in New York City refining her vision of the play for a new production at the Public. Redgrave was but one of a virtual pantheon of British actors working in the U.S. On Broadway, Michael Gambon portrayed the unhappy, blustering antihero of David Hare's Skylight with precision; the luminous Fiona Shaw managed to encapsulate the sorrows of a century in her staged recitation of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land; Roger Rees and David Threlfall, indelibly teamed in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Nicholas Nickleby a decade earlier, were reunited in a less-than-sturdy rendering of Jean Anouilh's The Rehearsal at the Roundabout Theatre Company; and Daniel Massey earned kudos for his bravura turn as conductor and accused Nazi sympathizer Wilhelm Furtwngler in Taking Sides. The year's landmarks included the launch of a major international theatre festival at Lincoln Center, where the complete works of Samuel Beckett were showcased in a visit from Dublin's Gate Theatre; the October closing, after a six-month run, of Big, a $10 million-plus megamusical that could prove one of the most costly failures in Broadway history; the dissolution of Circle Repertory Company, the groundbreaking playwrights' theatre, after several years of financial struggle; and the passing of such notable theatrical figures as Bernard B. Jacobs, the influential president of the Shubert Organization, author and former New York Times critic Walter Kerr (see OBITUARIES), the director Norman Rene, and the playwright Steve Tesich. In Canada headlines went to the development and debut of a pair of ambitious musicals based on rather unlikely literary sources. Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty's Broadway-bound adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime was produced by the Livent company. Toronto critics heartily approved of the Once on This Island team's musicalization of Doctorow's popular fact-meets-fiction novel, though visiting New York critics had some reservations. A $10 million touring production was scheduled to open in Los Angeles in mid-1997, prior to the Toronto original's later move to New York. The second adaptation--an almost through-sung $4.5 million version of Jane Eyre penned by Paul Gordon and John Caird and produced by Mirvish Productions--opened simultaneously in Toronto, to less-approving response. One of the most interesting new plays in Canada was 2 Pianos, 4 Hands, which follows the lives of two pianists-in-training as they pursue careers in classical music. Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt's funny and perceptive play debuted in the spring at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre, winning the 1996 Dora Mavor Moore award for outstanding midsize production. High Life, a first-time play by Lee MacDougall that premiered at Toronto's Du Maurier World Stage Festival, makes energetic comedy out of the adventures of four morphine addicts who pull a bank job to support their habit. (JIM O'QUINN) This article updates theatre, history of.