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NOVEMBER

Boys will be boys: Euan Morton as Boy George and Boy George as Leigh Bowery.   (Photo: Noby Clark )

Karma Chameleons
Euan Morton is Boy George, who is Leigh Bowery. Got it?

‘Most of my stage work in Britain has been in deep, meaningful plays where people get raped by their fathers and things,” says Euan Morton, Taboo’s 25-year-old star. “So musical theater is new for me.” The hit West End musical about the London club scene of the eighties, which stars Morton as Boy George and, yes, Boy George as Leigh Bowery (the transgendered icon and muse of painter Lucien Freud), opens on Broadway November 13. Some changes will be made (by producer Rosie O’Donnell) for the American audience, but Morton is sure nothing of substance will be lost. “There’s just something so attractive about that period and those costumes,” he says. “It’s a fantasy world.”

As for Boy George, “well,” says Morton, “when Culture Club made it big, I was only 5—put that in so George feels ancient—and later, I was far too busy listening to the Carpenters and being suicidally depressed . . . But my mother is a huge Boy George fan.”

The physical resemblance is remarkable. “I’ve had people ask me to sign something,” says Morton. “And I’m thinking they’re asking me, Euan—and then they say, ‘I loved your first album.’” —A.C.

Details: Taboo, Plymouth Theatre (opens November 13).

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More on Ashley's Next Act   (Photo: Patric Shaw)

Cat Power
A great American play slinks back onto Broadway.

Tennessee Williams, says Ned Beatty—who plays Big Daddy in the latest revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—“has been cut worse than Shakespeare.” Which is why director Anthony Page and his cast have culled from the writer’s many different versions what they feel should be the definitive script. “We called out to Tennessee—‘Come through, baby!’—to interpret what he wanted,” says Beatty. The play’s latest revival debuted with a lauded West End run starring Beatty as the red-necky but surprisingly tolerant patriarch. “Fairies landed on that production,” he says. Joining him are Ashley Judd, who will take over as Maggie the Cat, and Queens native Jason Patric as Brick, Maggie’s repressed homosexual husband. “I wanted to come to New York in a powerful way,” says Patric, who will be making his Broadway debut. Brick, whom Patric describes as “Williams’s Hamlet,” certainly qualifies. And the famously tortured Patric doesn’t seem nervous about taking on the role: Somehow, he says, “I don’t think the pent-up angst is going to be difficult for me.” —:A.C.

Details: Cat on a Hot Tin, Roof Music Box (November 2).

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Lavender mob: From left, Scott Foley, Laura Benanti, Jasmine Guy, Robert Sean Leonard, and Mario Cantone.   (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Time Machine
Take Me Out’s Tony-winning playwright, Richard Greenberg, steps out of the ballpark and takes on history, the nature of ambition—and fate.

It’s that time—“that wonderful New York hour when the evening’s about to reward you for the day . . . the violet light . . . ” So a character in Richard Greenberg’s poignant, funny new play explains the title of his novel and of the play itself: The Violet Hour. Walking through the city at sunset, past hundred-year-old buildings that seem on fire, can induce, Greenberg suggests, a kind of liminal experience: a feeling that the past and future are insinuating themselves into the present.

Greenberg (who won the Best Play Tony last year for Take Me Out) has an obsession with the experience of time, and not just because his rapid rise to national prominence—he’s had six plays produced in the last two years—has turned his own life into something of a blur. “I’ve always tried to make time real to myself,” he says, “and you can do that in a play more than in anything else.”

The Violet Hour, Greenberg points out, is set in 1919, “to give the sense of a cusp,” but anticipates the twenties, evoking what Greenberg describes as “a Fitzgerald-Hemingway-flapper world, with the Harlem Renaissance folded in.” All of these eras have meaning to Greenberg, but Fitzgerald in particular dominated his youth, so much so that Greenberg decided he wanted to go to Princeton when he read The Great Gatsby at the age of 12, and eventually did for just that reason.

The Violet Hour’s hero is an Ivy Leaguer, too. Robert Sean Leonard plays a young publisher who must choose between the unwieldy novel of his college friend and the autobiography of his lover, a Harlem singer played by Jasmine Guy. Early on, a machine in the office starts churning out books that haven’t been written yet, and suddenly the characters know their own fates. It sounds fantastical, but Greenberg is no fan of science fiction, and the conceit isn’t elaborated. “The people in the play just believe it quickly.”

But then they have to cope with the sudden realization that they are living in history—“Look at us, we’re period,” says Leonard’s character at one point. “These aren’t clothes we’re wearing—they’re costumes.” This raises questions, Greenberg says, like “If we could really have a vision of the consequences of all our actions, what would it do to ambition, to the urge to move at all?”

Forty-five-year-old Greenberg himself suffers from no such paralysis. Every time he starts a new play, he tells himself he’ll take a break when it’s finished, but he never does. “For the last two years,” says the time theorist, “I haven’t had an unobligated day.” —A.C.

Details: The Violet Hour, Biltmore Theatre (November 6).

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Best of The Rest

Broadway

Bobbi Boland Charlie’s Angel Farrah Fawcett makes her Broadway debut as a former beauty queen in Nancy Hasty’s drama set in Florida during the late sixties. In previews starting October 31 for a November 24 opening. (Cort Theatre; 212-239-6200.)

The Caretaker Patrick Stewart and Kyle MacLachlan star in Harold Pinter’s drama about how the arrival of a caretaker upsets a family’s delicate balance of power. In previews starting October 24 for a November 9 opening. (American Airlines Theatre; 212-719-9393.)

Henry IV Clearly the hot king this fall, with productions at both Lincoln Center and bam (September 30–October 4). Lincoln Center wins for star power, with Billy Crudup, Ethan Hawke, Audra McDonald, and Kevin Kline. In previews starting October 28 for a November 20 opening. (Vivian Beaumont; 212-239-6277.)

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All Historical heartwarmer about 99 years in the life of a Confederate captain’s wife, played by Tony winner Ellen Burstyn. In previews starting October 31 for a November 17 opening. (Longacre Theatre; 212-239-6200.)

Off Broadway

Bright Ideas Eric Coble’s satire about parents who really do kill to get their kids into the best school in town. In previews starting October 22 for a November 5 opening. (East Thirteenth Street Theatre; 212-279-4200.)

Fame on 42nd street Musical about those Performing Arts kids who are going to live forever. In previews starting October 7 for a November 11 opening. (Little Shubert Theatre; 212-239-6200.)

Where We’re Born The Rattlestick starts off its season with Lucy Thurber’s drama about a young woman trying to escape her alcoholic single mother and poor town. In previews starting November 11 for a November 17 opening. (Rattlestick; 212-868-4444.)