Jeff Lunden

Make no mistake: With a cast of more than 40, Follies is a really big show. The legendary musical takes place on the stage of a Broadway theater, at a reunion of former showgirls, with a domestic drama unfolding in the present while the stage is literally filled with ghosts from the past.

The 1946 musical "Sweet Bye and Bye" was an unmitigated disaster and never made it to Broadway. The show closed in Philadelphia and seemed to be lost forever — until the score was rediscovered in a New Jersey warehouse in 1986.

Right now, in New York City, one of the world's finest theater ensembles is putting on a repertory season of five Shakespeare plays. England's Royal Shakespeare Company – the RSC – has brought 41 actors, along with a replica of their main theater, and put it smack in the middle of the Park Avenue Armory.

After months of previews, cast injuries, scathing reviews, innumerable jokes and the firing of its creator and director, the $75 million musical Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark officially opens Tuesday night on Broadway. The show — the most expensive in Broadway history — has been almost completely revamped.

Last year, I wrote that the most highly anticipated musical of the 2009-2010 season was Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Back then, the Julie Taymor/Bono/Edge show — which had a reported budget of $40 million — had been postponed for lack of funds. So as the season wrapped, it was still highly anticipated.

Last October, Nathan Schram was giddy with anticipation. He was only a year out of Indiana University and he'd just joined a prestigious program, designed to help classical musicians like himself take on the challenges of building a 21st-century career.

He did it through The Academy, a program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and the Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education

When it premiered in 1985, Larry Kramer's play, The Normal Heart, seemed ripped from the headlines. A thinly-veiled autobiographical work, it dealt with the early days of the AIDS crisis and elicited both admiration and controversy.

Ireland has a strong tradition of folk music and poetry that's familiar to many Americans. But in the hands of Dublin-born composer Donnacha Dennehy, it's transformed into something completely different.

Police barriers have been put up by many Broadway stage doors recently to control crowds who want to catch a glimpse of some of the Hollywood stars who are appearing in shows: A-list names like Kiefer Sutherland, Daniel Radcliffe and Chris Rock, among them. Monday night, you can add three more names to that list: Ben Stiller, Edie Falco and Jennifer Jason Leigh are all opening in a revival of John Guare's play, The House of Blue Leaves.

Lanford Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright whose work made waves both on and off-Broadway, passed away yesterday at age 73.

Wilson's work was always personal, whether he was writing about characters from his native Missouri or the prostitutes and junkies in the greasy spoon across the street from his New York apartment. In 1965, that coffee shop became the setting for his first major success.