Saturation of Shakespeare Offers Tough Choices Patrick Stewart, left, and Ian McKellen in "Waiting For Godot." Not all potential theatergoers look to New York's stages hoping to see singing Mormons or the warbling witches of Oz, and this season, producers would give their horses, if not their kingdoms, for their attention and ticket-buying dollars. The current theater season has been a veritable snob's paradise, with Broadway offering four Shakespeare productions, including an acclaimed "Twelfth Night" and "Richard III"; two plays by the Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter; and Beckett's "Waiting for Godot." Off Broadway has yielded two incarnations of "Hamlet"; a "Midsummer Night's Dream" directed by Julie Taymor; and yet another "Twelfth Night" on the way. "It's unprecedented in my lifetime, anyway," said Michael Sexton, the artistic director of the Shakespeare Society, a nonprofit organization that promotes the study of the playwright and his work. It's a happy time for us. There's plenty to enjoy and discuss and disagree about. When David Schmidt, a retired drama teacher in Burke, Va., was organizing a trip to New York for high school students and choosing which tickets to buy for them, he was delightedly overwhelmed by his options. Mark Rylance in "Twelfth Night." "Oh, my God, it was so hard to pick," Mr. Schmidt said, sounding not unlike the excitable teenagers he oversees. It was like being in London. It was like, "Wow, this is real theater this year." " But the glut has also led to marketing challenges. While the productions say this confluence offers a chance to build on one another's success, they also acknowledge, in much more than a stage whisper, that they need to stand out from the pack. When Philadelphia's Pig Iron Theater Company decided to bring "Twelfth Night" to the Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side, it could not have known that its well-liked production, which opens on Feb. 4, would be following on the heels of a critical and commercial juggernaut: The Shakespeare's Globe Theater's all-male version of that same play, imported from London and starring the Tony Award winner Mark Rylance. So Pig Iron is doing what it can to convey to audiences, through advertising, word-of-mouth and social media, that the rollicking ensemble nature of its "Twelfth Night" - with a five-piece Balkan-inspired jazz band onstage for much of the show - will feel "more like coming to a party" than to a traditional play, said John Frisbee, the managing director. Meanwhile, the Acting Company is hard at work selling its own repertory initiative: "Hamlet" and Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," which has not been revived in New York in 27 years. A review is on Page 3. With a marketing budget of just $20,000, the company has had to rely on email blasts, print advertising and program inserts at its Off Broadway theater to push these two plays, selling them on their complementary nature (they tell different sides of a similar story) and the lower costs of their tickets, which run from $35 to $60. Frank Langella as King Lear. Margot Harley, co-founder of the Acting Company, said the plays had sold 30 percent of their tickets before performances began this month. These strong advance numbers, she said, were "unbelievable," and driven by this season's rapacious appetite for classical theater. "In another year, I might not have been so positive," Ms. Harley said. We might have been at nothing. On Broadway, attention-grabbing musicals still dominate: They represent about two-thirds of the roughly 30 shows playing there and generate more than $25 million of the $30 million weekly gross at the Broadway box office. But if, as most theater producers agree, a straight play needs to sell 40 to 50 percent of its tickets at regular price to be financially viable, then several star-studded Broadway productions have done that and more. On the strength of relentless marketing and the magnetism of Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz that allowed huge swaths of tickets to be sold at premium prices, a revival of Pinter's "Betrayal" closed this month after grossing $17.5 million. Producers of the repertory productions of "No Man's Land" and "Godot," with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, have extended the run another month, to March 30, thanks to audience demand. "Twelfth Night" and "Richard III" have recouped the producers" $3.1 million investment; during one prime holiday season week, those shows were the only nonmusicals in the top 10 of the Broadway box office. A scene from the Pig Iron Theater Company's staging of "Twelfth Night," which features a five-piece Balkan-inspired jazz band onstage for much of the time. Josh Koenig The season has had its share of highbrow boldface casualties, too: "Romeo and Juliet," with the "Lord of the Rings" star Orlando Bloom, found its house plagued by poor reviews and was playing to less than 40 percent capacity before its doomed lovers went to their last demise in early December. Group-sales agencies like Group Sales Box Office say that straight plays account for about 10 percent of their overall business, so there is not as much incentive to push them, as they do the flashier Broadway musicals. Still, these agents know that a select audience seeks out the plays for their literary reputations, their enduring presence on high school and college reading lists or their celebrity casts - even star-crossed productions like "Romeo and Juliet." And these ticket sellers report strong advance interest in coming Broadway productions of "A Raisin in the Sun, " starring Denzel Washington, and "Of Mice and Men," with James Franco, as well as a "Macbeth" at the Park Avenue Armory that will star Kenneth Branagh. Where classical theater is concerned, "It's like what they say about the bus - if you miss one, there's another one coming around the corner," said Scott Mallalieu, president of the group sales site GreatWhiteWay.com. That latest one, for the moment, has Frank Langella driving: He plays the title role in a Chichester Festival Theater production of "King Lear" that opened last week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. While the academy's subscriber base puts it in a different category from commercial productions, the organization has mounted a "substantial campaign" to promote its "Lear," said Soo Pak, its vice president for marketing and communications, including mailings, brochures and outdoor advertising built around Mr. Langella's recognizable face. John Skelley in the Acting Company's production of "Hamlet." Micahel Lamont "He's definitely the selling point," Ms. Pak said. Meredith Lucio, the lead producer of the Bedlam company's four-person Off Broadway repertory productions of "Hamlet" and "Saint Joan," said the group considered its options when it realized that it would face competition from the bigger Broadway repertory plays. But, Ms. Lucio said, "We decided that for our shows, it would actually help us rather than hurt us. We knew there was going to be a conversation about the classics and Shakespeare and repertory. In its advertising and messaging, Ms. Lucio said Bedlam is trying to emphasize the accessibility of its performances - "Our actors" treatment of the language is really understandable at a beginner's level," she said - and the chance that its ensemble might contain a future star or two. "Mark Rylance started somewhere once," she said. We are just at the beginning of that trajectory. Mr. Schmidt, the tour organizer in Virginia, said that he ultimately chose "Waiting for Godot," "Richard III" and "Twelfth Night" for his groups, partly because of the esteem for these productions, and partly because they were plays that high school students do not often get to see. He opted against Lincoln Center Theater's production of "Macbeth," now closed, which was not as well reviewed and whose lead actor, Ethan Hawke, he felt would be too distracting to impressionable young theatergoers. "They probably would have fallen in love with Ethan Hawke," Mr. Schmidt said. But then they might not actually be listening to Shakespeare.