Broadway: Reverent or irreverent?

"Evita," by Joan Marcus

It was also a good season for the songs of George and Ira Gershwin, which are featured in “Porgy and Bess” and “Nice Work If You Can Get It.”

The season was also big on audience involvement. In “Once,” before the show, the actors, who are also the show’s musicians, play Irish standards in a Dublin pub set, and audience members are invited to join them for a drink from the onstage bar.

Some members of the audience at “Leap of Faith” have fake money on their seats that they “donate” when baskets are passed around during a revival scene.

The season was a strong one for plays, although Martin said the group market is musical-driven, and the economy of Broadway is such that only one or two plays get a year’s run.

One play Martin particularly likes, which also happens to have some music in it, is “One Man, Two Guvnors.” “It is one of the funniest plays I have seen in 40 years of going to the theater,” he said. “I am glad to see the critics and the public alike agree with me.”

Martin said most of the Broadway theaters are filled, leaving new shows waiting in the wings. “There are shows out there dying to get in,” he said.

Among the shows that are expected to open this fall as theaters open are a revival of “Annie” and “Rebecca,” a musical based on the novel and movie. “Harvey,” starring Jim Parsons, Sheldon on television’s “The Big Bang Theory,” opens this month at Studio 54.

According to Playbill, among the shows under development for possible debuts next year are “Big Fish,” directed by Susan Stroman and based on the 2003 movie of the same name; “Cinderella,” a reimagined revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical; “Houdini” starring Hugh Jackman; and “Bullets Over Broadway,” a musical adaptation of Woody Allen’s Academy Award-nominated film.