While Broadway recovers from its post-Tonys hangover, London theaters are busier than ever, rolling out big shows featuring A-list movie stars, West End vets and even the songs of Bob Dylan. Do they live up the hype?
“Angels in America: Perestroika”
THE PLOT: This is the second part of Tony Kushner’s eight-hour gay epic after “Millennium Approaches,” which is also being revived at the National Theatre. Here, Prior Walter, wrestling with AIDS, has just received a divine message from an angel, while power-lawyer Roy Cohn lies dying in a hospital bed. Weighty Social Importance ensues.
WHY SEE IT: The acting is (mostly) excellent. Nathan Lane finally finds some real vulnerability as Roy Cohn, Russell Tovey nails the torment of a gay conservative Mormon, and Andrew Garfield’s turn as Prior is lithe and dangerous.
CONSIDER SUNGLASSES: It’s a design orgy — and a noisy one at that. Director Marianne Elliott (“War Horse,” “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”) throws in all her greatest hits: a part-puppet Angel, a clique of unitard-clad Cirque du So-set-movers and a UFO hood ornament that’s slapped over the stage.
CATCH IT STATESIDE: The production has been snooping around Broadway houses for a possible transfer this season, The Post’s Michael Riedel reports. But Americans can catch a sneak preview on July 20 and 27, when it’s broadcast in select theaters across the country.
“The Ferryman”
THE PLOT: The year is 1981, and a huge farming family in Northern Ireland is about to celebrate the harvest. The 13-person clan hates Margaret Thatcher (shocker), lives in a peat house straight outta “Playboy of the Western World” and has tenuous connections to the Irish Republican Army. (Just once, I’d like to see a play about a Northern Ireland beautician!)
WHY SEE IT: British playwright Jez Butterworth gave Broadway one of its most smashing plays in years with “Jerusalem” in 2011. And this latest, lesser drama is likely to come to New York this season, too, considering that the writer’s more obscure “The River” made the jump.
WATCH OUT FOR: Déjà vu. Where “Jerusalem” was all energy, the three-hour-plus-long “Ferryman” seems dated and overstuffed, despite resplendent performances from Paddy Considine and Laura Donnelly.
“Half a Sixpence”
THE PLOT: A poor orphan comes into a bundle of family money and, now living the high life, is torn between a girl from home and a ritzy lady of society.
WHY SEE IT: David Heneker composed this classic British musical in 1964, the same year the Sherman brothers wrote “Mary Poppins,” and George Stiles and Anthony Drewe, who contributed new music to the stage version of “Poppins,” have done the same here. So, theatergoers who enjoy jubilant, stompin’ tunes like “Step in Time” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” will absolutely lose it during “Flash, Bang, Wallop,” “Money to Burn” and “Pick Out a Simple Tune.”
A STAR IS BORN: It’s not all about the music: The material is given new life from star Charlie Stemp, a 23-year-old plucked from obscurity out of the ensemble of “Wicked.” Stemp is an ideal leading man — no egotism, all magnetism — and is as appealing to a NASCAR dad as he is to a Harry Styles-obsessed teen. For different reasons, of course.
SIT BACK AND RELAX: After a Broadway season featuring a suicide, an attempted suicide, a contemplated suicide and 9/11, this show goes down like a musical antidepressant.
“Girl From The North Country”
THE PLOT: Written and directed by Tony-nominated playwright Conor McPherson, this dreadful new musical uses Bob Dylan’s hits to tell the tale of a 1934 boarding house in Duluth, Minn., the musician’s birthplace. From there, the story of owner Nick (Ciarán Hinds) and the home’s depressing denizens becomes as incomprehensible as the accents — a mystifying Dublin-Dallas mix.
WHY SEE IT: Dylan’s music is sung superbly, with all the requisite passion and anguish, particularly by Sheila Atim and Shirley Henderson, a k a Jude (“It’s not you. You’re lovely. It’s vile Richard!”) from “Bridget Jones’s Diary.”
LYRICS BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND: Dylan’s lyrics are more poetic than specific, so they don’t much move the sedate story along. The characters croon to comment on whatever moody moment just happened. When Nick’s wife (Henderson), who suffers from dementia, belts out “Like a Rolling Stone” — with lyrics about being “on her own” and “a complete unknown” — it makes one helluva weird Act I finale.