Broadway

NEW YORK - Maggie Grace had a scary moment during a recent matinee of Picnic , which is in previews and opens Sunday on Broadway. William Inge's script calls for a struggle at the end of the play between Grace's character, the beautiful young Madge, and her onstage mother, played by Mare Winningham. As they grappled, Grace heard a crack. After the curtain call, she couldn't contain her worry; she put her arm around Winningham and was seen urgently whispering with her costar as the two disappeared into the wings.

Albert Marre, 87, the Tony Award-winning director of the original Broadway production of Man of La Mancha - and three of its four Broadway revivals - died Sept. 4 in Manhattan, said his wife, Mimi Turque Marre. Mr. Marre directed or staged more than two dozen Broadway shows during his more than 50 years in theater, among them the musicals Kismet and Milk and Honey. But it was Man of La Mancha , the musical adaptation of Don Quixote (written by Dale Wasserman, with lyrics by Joe Darion and music by Mitch Leigh)

NEW YORK - The folks who brought magic to the new Pippin in Massachusetts are coming south to Broadway. Producers on Monday said Matthew James Thomas would star this spring as Pippin; Patina Miller would be the Leading Player; Terrence Mann would be Charles; Charlotte d'Amboise would play Fastrada; Rachel Bay Jones would be Catherine, and Andrea Martin would play Berthe. All starred in the show that ended its run last month at the American Repertory Theater outside Boston.

What a divine season it is for Jesus on Broadway. On one stage, nuns make a joyful noise in Sister Act. On another, he figures highly in The Book of Mormon . Yet another has him as the central figure in Godspell . And he is now in revival - here, we're talking Broadway more than theology - in an effusive Jesus Christ Superstar , the Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that opened Thursday. It's full of powerful, melodic '70s-tinged music - the show premiered in 1971 and "I Don't Know How to Love Him" broke out to become a hit. The score, with Rice's clever lyrics and Lloyd Webbers many fanfare songs, is great fun to hear again, or probably also for the first time.

It was Peter Pan who long ago captured a little guy in Overbrook named Stephen C. Byrd and goaded him, during the next several decades, to Neverland. His grandma was an accessory to this - she took him to see the play at a theater in Philadelphia. Byrd thought about it a lot over the years: Not just the sprite who wouldn't grow up but all the rest, the plays he saw with his grandmother after Peter Pan , the theater he later saw on his own. And eventually it struck him that Neverland - hereinafter called Broadway - was not so great at attracting people like him, black people.

Clybourne Park , a provocative and funny play about the way people discuss race - has become a magical stage property, its rapid trajectory unstoppable. The play, set in the same Chicago house that figured in Lorraine Hansberry's groundbreaking 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun , premiered just two years ago Off-Broadway, hit London 18 months ago, and then Washington. It got legs, as they say - and quickly - with recent productions in Toronto and Germany. In March, Clybourne Park won Britain's prestigious Olivier Award, in April the Pulitzer Prize.

Joseph Alsop and his brother, Stewart, were kingpins of the opinion pages after World War II, when syndicated columnists meant fear and respect in an era before the Internet empowered everyone to be a publisher. David Auburn's new historical drama "The Columnist" illuminates the different sides of Joseph Alsop, who went on to write the column alone _ and in about 200 newspapers — after Stewart became a reporter for The Saturday Evening Post. In "The Columnist," which packs a tidy punch in a down-to-earth telling, Alsop is a mercurial know-it-all who was a curmudgeon long before he reached the age when such crankiness is tolerable, if not excusable.

NEW YORK - The immensely satisfying Porgy and Bess that opened in a Broadway revival Thursday night is not your grandma's P&B . In a controversial makeover that has ended up neither controversial nor very much made over, what you get is a compelling and confident mixture of opera and stage sense that drives the music as well as the story. Some people - most notably Steven Sondheim - protested after news last summer that Pulitzer-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks ( Topdog/Underdog)

We're at Scene 26 in A Chorus Line, its last moments, and we're swelling with anticipation. All night we've felt for these kids, desperate to be hired into the cookie-cutter chorus line of the show for which they're auditioning. Now, after coming to understand them as individuals, we're about to see them fulfill their ultimate goal: to become a single unit. And so begins one of the great finales in American musical theater, backed at first by only a piano. Out comes a lone gold-tuxedoed man, dancing across the stage.

SOMETIME around 10 p.m. Tuesday at the Academy of Music, the Philadelphia debut of the latest iteration of "West Side Story," which runs through April 8, will conclude with a reprise of "Somewhere. " At this point, the audience will no doubt rise to its feet and reward the cast with a loud and appreciative ovation. But no matter how enthusiastic the crowd's response may be, it probably won't match that of those at Washington, D.C.'s National Theatre on Aug. 19, 1957. "We got like 15 curtain calls," recalled Michael Callan, 77, of the night the groundbreaking contemporary adaptation of William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" had its pre-Broadway premiere.

THE GREAT WHITE WAY is about to get a little more Philly. Producers of a musical version of "Rocky" have announced that they are bringing the story of the Italian Stallion to Broadway after a run in Hamburg, Germany, where it was called "Rocky: Das Musical. " They expect it to be at the Winter Garden theater by February. Produced by Sylvester Stallone and Stage Entertainment USA, "Rocky" was written by Thomas Meehan ("The Producers," "Hairspray"), with music by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens ("Ragtime")

  Through all the set and scene changes, not once will the curtain fall during the North Penn High School production of Elton John and Tim Rice's Aida. To make that work will require sophisticated staging, a choreographed performance from a costumed stage crew, and 50 hours of rehearsal. In fact, this year's musical production at the Montgomery County school is so elaborate that it's costing about 20 percent more than those of recent years, said Andrea Roney, North Penn's theater director-producer.

Transformers star Shia LaBeouf was all psyched to make his Broadway stage debut in Orphans , Philadelphia playwright Lyle Kessler 's famed '83 play set in North Philly. It costars Alec Baldwin and Tom Sturridge . Well, he'll have to wait for another show: Shia has dropped out. Producers say it's due to "creative differences. " Sources tell People mag the actor clashed constantly with director Daniel Sullivan , while the New York Daily News suggests Shia also had problems with Baldwin.

The Great White Way is still white. Although minimally less white. The Asian American Performers Action Coalition this week released its second annual look at ethnic representation on New York stages. The study found that minority actors overall saw a 2 percent increase from the previous season and now stand at 23 percent. The report found that African-American actors were cast in 16 percent of all roles, Hispanics in 3 percent and Asian-Americans in 3 percent. Caucasians filled 77 percent of all roles, far outweighing their respective population size in the metro and tristate areas.

*  SMASH. 9 p.m. Tuesday, NBC10. LIKE A Broadway-bound show that opens out of town - or has a rocky time in previews - NBC's "Smash" returns for its second season Tuesday still a work in progress. But at least there is progress. Maybe no one ever envisioned that a show about the making of a Broadway musical would become a metaphor for the process itself, but with creator Theresa Rebeck having exited at the end of a first season that attracted nearly as many hate-watchers as it did fans, "Smash" is working to clean up the nonmusical parts of its act. Which is also what's happening on "Bombshell," the show's Marilyn Monroe musical.

NEW YORK - The folks who brought magic to the new Pippin in Massachusetts are coming south to Broadway. Producers on Monday said Matthew James Thomas would star this spring as Pippin; Patina Miller would be the Leading Player; Terrence Mann would be Charles; Charlotte d'Amboise would play Fastrada; Rachel Bay Jones would be Catherine, and Andrea Martin would play Berthe. All starred in the show that ended its run last month at the American Repertory Theater outside Boston.

It's virtually impossible to watch Smash star Katharine McPhee on screen and not be smitten. The American Idol alumna has a way to go before she masters the intricacies of acting, but it was thrilling to see her sing and dance - and above all be sweet, heartbroken, and sweetly heartbroken - on the first season of NBC's disarming, surprisingly enjoyable, if sometimes mediocre, musical drama, which returns for its sophomore year Tuesday night...

TO A CERTAIN segment of the population, Tom Wopat will forever be "Luke Duke," one of the lead characters on the 1980s TV series, "The Dukes of Hazzard," which focused on the comical misadventures of a couple of reformed redneck moonshiners. But Wopat's greatest triumphs have occurred about as far - philosophically and artistically - as you can get from formulaic weekly television. For decades, the 61-year-old actor-singer has been a Broadway mainstay, in a slew of hit musicals and dramas.

NEW YORK - Maggie Grace had a scary moment during a recent matinee of Picnic , which is in previews and opens Sunday on Broadway. William Inge's script calls for a struggle at the end of the play between Grace's character, the beautiful young Madge, and her onstage mother, played by Mare Winningham. As they grappled, Grace heard a crack. After the curtain call, she couldn't contain her worry; she put her arm around Winningham and was seen urgently whispering with her costar as the two disappeared into the wings.

T AYLOR SWIFT is going in another Direction. Life & Style reports that she has split with Harry Styles . The puppy-love affair of the century lasted two months. "They are both really busy and never in one place for long," an unnamed source told Life & Style . "Harry's really upset about the split and is really sensitive about it. Loads of his friends told him to be careful and that it was never going to last, and he feels a little foolish now that it's fallen apart so quickly.