Give My Regards To Malibu

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A year ago, Broadway was mired in the slough of despond, waiting out the waning weeks of one of its skimpiest seasons and wondering whether the Great White Way would ever glisten again. As so often in the theater, the death rattle turned out to be just a cough. This season the number of new productions has shot up more than a third, from 28 to 38. Total attendance since Jan. 1 has been 13.4% higher than in the same period last year. The range of fare has been unusually broad, from tap dance to Ibsen, from sitcom to Shakespeare. But the biggest buzz is about the abundance of high-profile movie and TV stars who have returned to the risks and rigors of the live stage.

Want to share in the sweaty embraces of Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange? They are entwined in A Streetcar Named Desire. Prefer the wry wit of Alan Alda or the in-your-face comic angst of Judd Hirsch? They play beleaguered husbands and failed fathers in splendid new tragicomedies from Neil Simon and Herb Gardner. If your taste runs to grandes dames, Rosemary Harris enacts the mean matriarch in Simon's previous play, Lost in Yonkers, while Lynn Redgrave evokes the aggrieved wife of a self-anointed genius in Ibsen's The Master Builder.

Keith Carradine continues in the title role of the musical The Will Rogers Follies, and Cyd Charisse has re-emerged via Grand Hotel. In coming weeks they are being joined in musical stardom by Raul Julia and pop singer Sheena Easton in Man of La Mancha, Peter Gallagher (of the movie sex, lies, and videotape) in Guys and Dolls and Gregory Hines in Jelly's Last Jam, a portrait of composer Jelly Roll Morton. Next month Pulitzer prizewinner August Wilson's subtly tragic and robustly comic Two Trains Running will feature Larry Fishburne from the film Boyz N the Hood, while the Australian drama Shimada, about a Japanese-led corporate takeover, will offer Ellen Burstyn, Ben Gazzara and Estelle Parsons. Al Pacino opens in two one-act plays in late May.

Other recent limited runs featured Martin Sheen in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Rob Lowe and Tony Randall in a Feydeau farce (both shows from Randall's new National Actors Theater), Jane Alexander in The Visit and, most opulently, Joan Collins, whose Private Lives ended last week. Says Harvey Sabinson, executive director of the League of American Theaters and Producers: "None of us who have been around a long time can recall a moment when so many major Hollywood stars came to Broadway."

Of all the current displays of star power, the most profligate is Death and the Maiden, which opened last week. A political thriller cum debate by Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman about the difficulties of shifting from dictatorship to democracy, it stars five-time Oscar nominee Glenn Close as a woman raped and tortured by the old regime who wants to hunt down her abusers. Oscar winner Gene Hackman plays the genial doctor who may or may not have been the blindfolded woman's chief tormenter 15 years ago. Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss portrays her husband, a liberal politician who seeks to preserve the uneasy peace of the present even if it means suppressing the truth of the past. Although the setting is described as "probably" Chile, the play's polemics apply to a long, sad roster of other places where the price of newfound freedom is forceful forgetting. London critics have hailed a hard- edged production there as "grasping the pulse of the century."