THE new Broadway season looks pretty well set, but there’s always something out there to keep your eye on — something that could come in at the last minute and shake up the terrain.
One potential spoiler is “Women on the Verge,” a musical based on Pedro Almodovar‘s 1988 comedy “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.”
Bart Sher, whose production of “South Pacific” continues to make Lincoln Center Theater the richest nonprofit in town, staged a by-invitation-only workshop earlier this summer.
Lincoln Center honcho Andre Bishop was pleased with the show, and there’s talk that he’ll slip it into a Broadway theater before the Tony Award cutoff in April.
(Although the Tonys are hopelessly compromised, conflicted-riddled awards, theater producers, especially those who work at nonprofit institutions, still covet them and will do anything to get their hands on as many as they can.)
The score is by David Yazbeck, who wrote the underappreciated “Full Monty” and the underpowered “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.” Almodovar is overseeing the musical, but he’s not writing the script because his English is, well, Spanish.
Here’s what he said about the show to reporters in Cannes last May: “The songs are finished, and the dialogues are done.”
“The dialogues,” which on Broadway are called “the book,” are, in fact, by Jeffrey Lane, Yazbeck’s collaborator on “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.”
Catherine Zeta-Jones had been offered the role of Pepa Marcos, a depressed, pill-popping TV actress. But then Lincoln Center decided she should probably audition, which, I’m told, she took as an insult. She passed on the show and will instead do “A Little Night Music.”
So the hunt is on for a star.
THE ever-dwindling New York Drama Critics Circle has lost another one: John Heilpern, who left the New York Observer after 17 years.
“Nobody asked me to leave,” he says. “I just felt it was time to move on. Read into that what you will.”
What a good idea!
My hunch is that Heilpern, an elegant, erudite and delightfully WASPish critic, wasn’t too pleased that his reviews were being cut down to make room for short, punchy showbiz items.
Under its young publisher, Jared Kushner, the Observer has become more tabloid-y, with a heavy emphasis on the real estate deals of celebrities.
“I wish the paper all the best,” says Heilpern. “I don’t want to be too negative about the 12-year-old owner, Jared Kushner, but as my ma and pa from Manchester, England, used to say, ‘That boy couldn’t run a chip shop.’ ”
When I called Kushner for a comment, he seemed unaware that his critic had resigned.
He giggled at Heilpern’s zinger and took the high road: “All I can say is that I appreciate all of John’s contributions to the paper.”
Heilpern’s being replaced by two critics. One will be Jesse Oxfeld, a former Gawker editor who has written about theater for New York magazine. The other has yet to be named.
“We are committed to covering the New York theater scene,” says Observer editor Tom McGeveran.
Heilpern will be missed.
He was the only major critic who regularly savaged New York’s lumbering nonprofit theaters for catering to their ancient subscribers by producing unadventurous, middlebrow fare.
When the Roundabout produced the musty comedy “Old Acquaintance,” Heilpern said the theater should have its funding withdrawn.
Sitting through “South Pacific” at Lincoln Center, he said, “was like being in a retirement home.”
“My friends at Lincoln Center will be dancing the hora nightly now that I’m gone,” he says.
(Actually, since they’re producing “Women on the Verge,” they’ll probably be doing some flamenco.)
You can still read Heilpern in Vanity Fair, where he writes the “Out to Lunch” column. And he’s at work on a couple of books. (His 2007 biography of playwright John Osborne — “The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man” — is one of the best theater books I’ve read.)
“I’ve got plenty to do,” he says. “But I will miss tilting at windmills, even a $40 million windmill like ‘Spider-Man.’ “
michael.riedel@nypost.com