‘Center’ of the world

Oscar winner Cate Blanchett will star in “Uncle Vanya” with the Sydney Theatre Company. (Lisa Tomasetti)

Dancers from Paris, opera singers from China, Chekhov from Down Under — and star turns by Cate Blanchett, Alan Cumming and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

This year’s Lincoln Center Festival will deliver all that and more. It’s the United Nations of the art world, minus the squabbling.

“The comments I get from visiting artists are that they really want to perform for New York audiences,” says Nigel Redden, who’s overseen the festival since it started in 1996. “[People] here are discerning, and we found we can do demanding works and get an active, engaged audience.”

With 67 performances by artists from seven countries, Lincoln Center Festival 2012 — running Thursday to Aug. 5 — is a far cry from what its creators originally conceived: a light little place-holder for the vacationing Philharmonic, Met Opera and other resident artists.

As Redden recalls it, the festival was supposed to be “nothing heavy — just Strauss waltzes.

“But it wasn’t interesting to do Strauss waltzes!” he adds. “You don’t come into the theater to turn off your mind.”

There’s nothing frothy about the National Theatre of Scotland’s “Macbeth.” Helmed by Andrew Goldberg and John Tiffany, the Tony-winning director of “Once,” it’s set in an insane asylum where some poor man can’t stop spouting Shakespeare.

One London critic called it “bold and a bit bonkers” — which pretty much describes its star, Alan Cumming. The last time he performed at the Lincoln Center Festival — as the decadent heart of 2008’s “The Bacchae” — the walls of the Rose Theater literally burst into flames.

“It’s probably the most amazing effect I’ve ever seen in a theater,” Cumming recalls. “The only fireworks here is me as Macbeth, but a lot of spooky things happen — and there’s a video camera to augment my witchiness.” And yes, he’s playing all three witches, too. Performances run Thursday through July 14.

There may be no flames in “In Paris,” but the box office is on fire — perhaps because it stars Mikhail Baryshnikov, who left the Soviet Union in 1974 for a brilliant career in everything from the American Ballet Theatre to “Sex and the City.” Here, he plays a former general of the White Russian army who falls in love with a young Russian émigrée waitress — and no, it’s not a comedy (Aug. 1 to 5).

Leave it to Australia’s Sydney Theatre Company to find the sunny side of being Russian in its “Uncle Vanya” (July 19 to 28). Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving head a cast that won rapturous reviews when it played the Kennedy Center last summer.

But while New York’s been chock-full of Chekhov, we don’t see much of Tom Murphy — the man Lincoln Center Theater’s Andre Bishop calls “the least-known, best-known Irish playwright in America.” That’s about to change, as Ireland’s Druid Theatre presents three works by the 76-year-old playwright.

“He’s obsessed by Irishness,” Redden says of Murphy’s “Conversations on a Homecoming,”

“A Whistle in the Dark” and “Fam
ine.” Revolving around emigration, fractured families and, yes, the infamous potato famine, the Murphy cycle will be directed by Tony winner Garry Hynes and performed by a 16-member ensemble (Lynch Theater, Thursday through July 14).