Broadway's highbrow season kicks into high gear

NOT all potential theatregoers look to New York's stages hoping to see singing Mormons or the warbling witches of Oz, and this season, producers would give their horses, if not their kingdoms, for their attention and ticket-buying dollars.

The current theatre season has been a veritable snob's paradise, with Broadway offering four Shakespeare productions, including an acclaimed Twelfth Night and Richard III; two plays by the Nobel Prize-winner Harold Pinter; and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Off-Broadway has yielded two incarnations of Hamlet; A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Julie Taymor; and yet another Twelfth Night on the way.

"It's unprecedented in my lifetime, anyway," said Michael Sexton, the artistic director of the Shakespeare Society, a non-profit organisation that promotes the study of the playwright and his work. "It's a happy time for us. There's plenty to enjoy and discuss and disagree about." When David Schmidt, a retired drama teacher in Burke, Virginia, was organising a trip to New York for high school students and choosing which tickets to buy for them, he was delightedly overwhelmed by his options.