Entertainment

BRITISH ACCENTS; BEST PICKS FOR EXPORT TO B’WAY

LONDON – Winston Churchill called the United States and Britain two nations divided by a common language. Maybe, but New York and London are certainly two cities joined by a common theater.

Much of what you can see in one city you could have seen a season or so earlier in the other. Witness “Mary Poppins, opening on Broadway this fall, and “Billy Elliot, scheduled to land in 2007 after a little tactful Americanization.

The question is, what’s next? It might well be “We Will Rock You. This worthless Queen hit is the kind of show that gives the jukebox musical a bad name, but its box-office draw here might tempt a hungry Broadway consortium.

Other distinct possibilities are the revivals of “Evita” and “Guys and Dolls, both staged by Michael Grandage.

Less possible, perhaps, is the revival I most enjoyed: a spectacularly staged version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George.

Sam Buntrock’s stunning production, which uses Georges Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte” to magical effect, started life at the Meunier Chocolate Factory, a major player in the London fringe.

They can’t quite fix the faults of the musical’s second act, but the performances by Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell could charm the paint off canvas, and in a small Broadway theater, it might prove a winner.

Still, the shows most likely to come to Broadway aren’t musicals but plays, both brilliant political theater.

My tip for the first to emerge on Broadway would be Peter Morgan’s “Frost/Nixon, also helmed by the indefatigable Grandage, this time at his own theater, the Donmar Warehouse.

Morgan – who also scripted the upcoming Stephen Frears film “The Queen” – specializes in semi-documentary theater. This time, he’s taken that extraordinary 1977 TV interview series between former President Richard M. Nixon and British talk-show host David Frost, where, finally, Nixon virtually apologized to the nation for the Watergate cover-up.

Frank Langella offers an almost tragic figure of the embattled but still hubristic Nixon, while Michael Sheen – who was Mozart in the last Broadway revival of “Amadeus” and plays Tony Blair in “The Queen” – cuts a wonderfully seedy yet charismatic figure as Frost. It’s totally engrossing theater.

Surely Broadway-bound is Tom Stoppard’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll, which enfolds the history of 20th-century communism into a human saga of an academic family in Cambridge, England, while using rock ‘n’ roll as a metaphor for the quest for freedom and the individual spirit in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

Deftly staged by Trevor Nunn and marvelously acted by a cast led by Brian Cox, Sinead Cusack and Rufus Sewell, the play has precisely that mix of wit, humanity, generosity and pure theater that reveals Stoppard at his dazzling best.