With the recent opening of Follies the curtain has risen on a new Broadway season. It’s no surprise that the new revival of the James Goldman and Stephen Sondheim musical is already a hot ticket, given that its score features some of Sondheim’s most popular songs and the cast includes Bernadette Peters, Jan Maxwell, Danny Burstein, Ron Raines and Elaine Paige. We can anticipate a similar excitement among theatergoers for the slew of new productions (musicals, star concerts, return engagements, and plays), which promise to appeal to a wide variety of theater tastes and are scheduled to start performances before the end of this year.

Musicals

The year Follies premiered on Broadway, in 1971, a very different kind of musical, Godspell, based on the Gospel of St. Matthew, debuted off-Broadway. The joyous musical, which includes the hit song “Day by Day,” enjoyed a long and successful run and an eventual transfer to Broadway, launching the career of composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz. A new revival of Godspell, featuring Weeds star Hunter Parrish in the role of Jesus, will open on Broadway, where Schwartz’s 2003 hit Wicked is still drawing crowds. As is common practice with musical revivals, Schwartz has made a few tweaks for this 40th anniversary production, which will also be staged in the round. Quite substantial changes, however, are in store for the two other musical revivals scheduled for the first part of the 2011-2011 season: On a Clear Day You Can See Forever and Porgy and Bess.

Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner’s On a Clear Day You Can See Forever has generally been regarded as a problem musical since its debut on Broadway in 1965. This opinion may change with the “reconceived” version directed by Michael Mayer. The “revisal” of On a Clear Day enhances the score with Lane’s music from the 1970 movie adaptation (which starred Barbra Streisand) and the 1951 movie Royal Wedding, and it introduces a new book by playwright Peter Parnell. Harry Connick Jr. (who starred in the 2006 revival of The Pajama Game) plays a psychiatrist who is helping a patient to quit smoking through hypnosis. In this version’s significant gender-bending change, the patient is now a young gay man who regresses under treatment into a past life as a female jazz singer from the 1940s.

The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess is the full title under which the beloved classic, with music by George Gershwin and book and lyrics by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin, returns to Broadway. The 1935 opera has been “re-imagined” by director Diane Paulus (Hair), Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog) and Obie-winning composer Diedre L. Murray, and features a stellar cast that includes four-time Tony Award® winner Audra McDonald as Bess, Norm Lewis as Porgy, David Alan Grier, and Joshua Henry (a Tony nominee last season for The Scottsboro Boys).

With two new musicals scheduled to start performances in November, it’s not just going to be about musicals from the past this season. First up is Bonnie and Clyde, from Frank Wildhorn, the composer who had the distinction of having three musicals running simultaneously on Broadway in 1999 (Jekyll & Hyde, The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Civil War). Laura Osnes, winner of NBC’s Broadway-competition reality show Grease: You’re the One That I Want!, and Jeremy Jordan play the infamous Depression-era outlaws who robbed banks in the new musical, which has lyrics by Don Black, a book by Ivan Menchell and a score that combines rockabilly, blues and gospel music. Lysistrata Jones, which transfers to Broadway after a critically successful sold-out engagement downtown earlier this year, is a pop-musical comedy with music and lyrics by Lewis Flinn and a book by Douglas Carter Beane (Xanadu), based on a classic Greek comedy by Aristophanes. In this version, a group of female cheerleaders try to reverse their college basketball team’s 30-year losing streak by withholding sex from them until they win a game.

Star concerts

Sometimes all it takes is the name of a star on the marquee to draw an audience. The simply titled Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway tells you all you need to know. Besides thrilling movie fans as X-Men’s Wolverine, Australian superstar Hugh Jackman has previously captivated Broadway audiences in the musical The Boy from Oz and the gritty police thriller A Steady Rain. In his latest Broadway appearance, the multi-talented actor will perform some of his favorite musical numbers in concert. Similarly, musical theater fans know just what to expect from An Evening with Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin. The Tony Award winning stars of Evita reunite on Broadway for a concert performance that celebrates some of the greatest songs written for the stage.

Return Engagements

Before Nina Arianda made her spectacular Tony-nominated Broadway debut last season in Born Yesterday, she created a stir off-Broadway playing an actress who pulls out every stop in her determination to land the lead in a new play based on a famous erotic novel. We get another opportunity to see that incandescent performance in the Broadway engagement of Walter Bobbie’s production of David Ives’ Venus in Fur. Another Off-Broadway transfer this season, Other Desert Cities will afford theatergoers a second opportunity to catch Stockard Channing’s acerbic and complex performance as a staunch Reagan-era Republican in Jon Robin Baitz’s play about a family harboring a secret. The cast includes Stacey Keach, Thomas Sadoski, Judith Light, and Rachel Weisz; the director is Tony-winner Joe Mantello (who was nominated for a Tony this year as an actor, for his performance in The Normal Heart).

Plays

This season is particularly notable for the number of women playwrights with new plays on Broadway. One of them is 29-year-old Katori Hall, who makes her Broadway debut with The Mountaintop. In her fictional account which takes place in 1968, she imagines a late night encounter between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a mysterious woman on the night before King was assassinated in Memphis, the playwright’s own hometown. Movie and television star Samuel L. Jackson plays the great civil rights leader and Angela Bassett the nocturnal visitor. The production is directed by Kenny Leon, who received a Tony nomination last year for directing Fences. Leon also helms the production of Stick Fly, which marks the Broadway debut of another African-American woman playwright, Lydia R. Diamond. Stick Fly is a comedy of manners about an affluent black family spending a summer weekend at their home in Martha’s Vineyard. Playwright Theresa Rebeck (last represented on Broadway with Mauritius), is the third female playwright to be represented this season. Her play, Seminar, is a dark comedy about a famous writer who unscrupulously exercises his power over the four students in his private writing class. In what seems a most appropriate casting choice, the writer is played by British actor Alan Rickman, a Tony nominee for his two previous Broadway appearances, Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the 2002 revival of Private Lives, but who will always be associated with the sneering Professor Severus Snape of the Harry Potter movies.

Among the other new plays scheduled for the first half of the season is the latest from David Henry Hwang, winner of the 1988 Best Play Tony Award for M. Butterfly. The new play, Chinglish, is a timely comedy about a businessman from Cleveland who travels to a small provincial city in China in the hopes of reviving his family-owned signage business. Written to be performed by actors fluent in both English and Mandarin, and inspired by his own experiences from recent visits to China, Hwang explores Sino-American (mis)communication and mis-information. Relatively Speaking is an evening of three one-act plays by Ethan Cohen (co-writer and director Fargo), Elaine May (screenwriter Heaven Can Wait and Primary Colors) and quintessential New Yorker Woody Allen. The three comedic writers dissect family insanity, death, and a wedding, in their own inimitable styles. Actor turned director John Turturro directs a cast that includes Julie Kavner, Steve Guttenberg and Marlo Thomas.

Six-time Tony nominee Rosemary Harris (last seen on Broadway as the matriarch in The Royal Family) plays a reclusive artist whose eccentricity and non-conformism threaten her conservative neighbors in Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca. This revival marks the first New York production of the play since its Off-Broadway debut in 1988. Playwright Fugard, now 79, regarded by many as the moral conscience of South Africa for his devastating chronicles of the inhumanity of Apartheid, received a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre last June.

This fall also brings to Broadway revivals of works by Terence Rattigan and Noël Coward. From the late 1930s to the late 1950s, Rattigan, with hits like The Winslow Boy and The Deep Blue Sea, was arguably the most popular English playwright of his day. He inherited that mantle from Noël Coward who reigned supreme over pre-war British theater. By the mid 1960s, however, both playwrights saw their popularity dwindle, challenged by a new wave of writers, the so-called Angry Young Men. This year, which is also Rattigan’s birth centennial, the Roundabout Theater is reviving Man and Boy, one of his lesser-known works from 1963. Tony Award-winner Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon) plays a Depression era financier who is not above using his own son (played by Adam Driver) as sexual bait to snare an investor who could save his tottering business. Coward is represented this year on Broadway with the revival of his glittering 1930 success, Private Lives. Sex and the City’s Kim Catrall and Paul Gross (Slings and Arrows) play the dueling divorced couple who still find each other irresistible in this effervescent romantic comedy.

Man and Boy (American Airlines) opens October 9

The Mountaintop (Bernard B. Jacobs) starts September 22, opens October 13

Relatively Speaking (Brooks Atkinson), starts September 20, opens October 20

Chinglish (Longacre) starts October 11

Other Desert Cities (Booth) October 12, opens November 3

Godspell (Circle in the Square), starts October 13, opens November 7

Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway (Broadhurst) starts October 25, opens November 10

Private Lives (Music Box) starts November 6, opens November 17

Seminar (Golden) starts October 27, opens November 20

An Evening with Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin (Ethel Barrymore) starts November 16, opens November 21

Venus in Fur (Samuel J. Friedman) starts October 13, opens November 8

Bonnie and Clyde (Gerald Schoenfeld), starts November 4, opens December 1

Stick Fly (Cort) starts November 18, opens December 8

On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (St. James) starts November 12, opens December 11

Lysistrata Jones (Walter Kerr) starts November 12, opens December 14

Porgy and Bess (Richard Rodgers) starts December 17, opens January 12

The Road to Mecca (American Airlines), starts December 16, opens January 17