The long-shuttered, decaying auditorium of the historic 1904 Liberty Theater, whose entrance was on West 42nd Street, but whose auditorium was on West 41st Street, has risen from the ash heap of bird droppings, infestation and a putrid basement lake to become the showpiece of Times Square Hospitality Group's Famous Dave's restaurant.

Fred and Adele Astaire set the gold standard for brother-sister showbiz teams -- but she retired very early, leaving him to become a star on his own. Today, we have two super-talented pairs of male/female theatrical siblings in our midst, although neither works as a team. Incredibly enough, both pairs hail from Detroit, Michigan. (Really, what are the chances?) They are Sutton and Hunter Foster, and Celia and Andrew Keenan-Bolger.

Content dictates form, which is why this year-end look back at New York theater in 2011 is somewhat different from my previous surveys. Usually I provide a fairly lengthy list of what I consider to be the highlights of the year and completely avoid the negative. But while there certainly were highlights in 2011, it was not a good calendar year for theater overall. The fall season on Broadway was especially disappointing, and the most deplorable of this year's shows -- both on and off Broadway -- were so shockingly awful that I think they really need to be singled out for censure.

To say director/choreographer Warren Carlyle’s been busy is an understatement. He worked as choreographer on Eric Schaeffer’s Kennedy Center Follies revival, now on Broadway; was creative producer of An Evening with Hugh Jackman in San Francisco and Toronto; and is director/choreographer of Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway and Cotton Club Parade (which plays six performances at City Center, November 18–22, 2011).

Baritone Nathan Gunn has a firm hold on his career as he moves from triumphs in such operas as Billy Budd, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Die Zauberflöte, and An American Tragedy to his upcoming appearances in high-profile concert performances of two great American musicals, Camelot and Show Boat.

What happens to Humana Festival plays after they're made stageworthy and spotlighted in the annual celebration of new works at Actors Theater of Louisville? They don't just fade away. "On any given day, somewhere in the world," as ATL notes, "a play is performed or read that had its origin at the Humana Festival."
That's quite an achievement for an event that has kept Louisville on the international theatrical map for 32 years.

No sooner had the Alabama Shakespeare Festival's Southern Writers' Project's Festival of New Plays (May 16-18, 2000) ended than two entered the 2008-2009 ASF season line-up: Bear Country and The Furniture of Home. Both were commissioned by ASF and received staged readings, along with three other dramas, one with music. All SWP plays concern Southern topics as well as African-American issues in general, presented by Southern and Black writers.

 Most people seem to agree that the Tony Awards already have enough categories, so don't expect any major additions in the future. (Remember "Best Replacement Actor," or whatever the hell it was called? That one was announced but never happened.) But I do sometimes wish that the award categories were tailored more specifically to the shows and artists of each season.

To be approached in Central Park by someone begging for change isn't always a pleasant experience. But it was fun when it happened to me early last fall because it was during a Public Theater performance of the "American tribal love-rock musical," Hair, at the Delacorte, and the guy who hit me up for a quarter or two was the mega-talented singing actor Will Swenson in the guise of proto-hippie George Berger.

The American Theater Critics Association, which moves around the country for its annual convention, this year spent a recent week in the nation's capital and environs. The area houses 75 theatres – 43 in the District of Columbia, 17 in nearby Maryland, and 15 in the contiguous portion of Virginia. From the many current offerings, the attendees, thanks to two large buses, were able to sample ten presentations.

ABC is promoting the heck out of next Monday's much-anticipated telecast of Kenny Leon's production of the three-hour presentation of the new movie adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. It stars Sean Combs and the leads of the Tony and Drama Desk-nominated 2004 Broadway revival that not only brought in a new breed of theatergoers, as Oprah's The Color Purple has these last two seasons, but also broke box office records.

The Atlantic Theater Company, which recently moved their earlier mainstage production (and their first musical), Spring Awakening, to Broadway, has been thrilled with the success of Harley Barker-Granville's The Voysey Inheritance. Artistic director Neil Pepe noted that the demand for tickets prompted, for the first time in Atlantic's history, a third extension.

Approaching Salvage, part three of Lincoln Center Theater's production of Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia trilogy, which begins previews on Tuesday and officially opens February 18, it might be wise to keep in mind some comments the author made at the recent SRO Drama Desk panel, A Conversation with Tom Stoppard. He was very amused by the list of background books The New York Times published not long ago in their Arts and Leisure Section as recommended reading to get a full grasp of the events and time depicted in Utopia.

Donna Murphy, the award-winning actress who is one of theater's brightest talents, lights up the stage in the <I>LoveMusik</I> as Lotte Lenya in the semi-biographical musical about the rocky and open marriage of Lenya to composer wunderkind Kurt Weill, played by Tony winner and multiple Tony and Drama Desk nominee, Michael Cerveris. <P>The show is nominated for twelve 2007 Drama Desk nominations, including Outstanding Musical, Director, Book, Actress, Actor, Featured Actor and Choreography. Will there be more to come?

Rosetta LeNoire, "Rosie" to everyone who loved her (and that list was a very, very long one), at 5' 2" was tiny in statue but was quite the dynamo. After years of acting in starring roles and seguing into major and memorable character portrayals, she had a dream to form a theater company that wasn't black or white but a company for everyone.

Ms. LeNoire's family emigrated from the Caribbean island of Dominica. She suffered from rickets and wore leg braces for 13 years.

Camille Forbes introduces us to a long-ago world of intense racism in America, but a world where the color barrier was broken on Broadway and a medicine-show performer became a star in "Introducing Bert Williams" [Basic/Civitas Books, 404 pages; Photos, index, extensive bibliography; SRP $27.50].

If you missed 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue during its Broadway run, you are forgiven. The show lasted only 13 previews and seven regular performances at the Mark Hellinger Theater (now a church!) in 1976, although it boasted music by Leonard Bernstein, book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, and a cast that included Ken Howard, Patricia Routledge, Emily Yancy, Beth Fowler, and Reid Shelton. Even Michael Lichtefeld was in it!

 After Marlon Brando, George C. Scott was America's finest actor, a performer whose
power and ferocity made him seem like a force of nature. Unlike Brando (who quit the stage forever after starring in A Streetcar Named Desire), Scott loved to appear in plays and continued to do so even after he won fame and fortune in such films as "Dr. Strangelove," "Patton" and "Anatomy of a Murder." Not only that, he also directed and produced many plays, both on and off Broadway.