In the good old days of the 1980s, the “British invasion” of
Broadway meant ancient plays and rock operas—Shakespeare and
Lloyd Webber. But neither writer is as active as he once was, and
British directors who want to keep their hand in have had to turn
to other material. At the moment, the current director of
London’s Royal National Theatre, his predecessor, and his
designated successor are represented on the New York stage by
three new productions—respectively, Oklahoma!, The Cruci-
ble,
and The Sweet Smell Of Success. Another Briton, Terry Johnson,
is in town with his adaptation of The Graduate, which—on the
strength of the briefest, dimly-lit nude scene with Kathleen
Turner—managed to rack up the biggest advance for a non-musical
production in the history of the American theater. What all these
properties have in common is that they’re American. Chances are
these days that if you go to a New York theater to see a major
work of the American stage it will be directed by an Englishman.

Does this matter? Not in Richard Eyre’s production of The
Crucible (at the Virginia), a powerful, straightforward revival
with a gripping central performance by Liam Neeson. For thirty years
now, Arthur Miller has been a bigger deal in London than in New
York, and his political preoccupations get a more sympathetic
hearing from Britain’s subsidized companies than from Broadway
producers.

But Rodgers and Hammerstein are not Arthur Miller. Trevor Nunn’s
Oklahoma!
is now