NEW YORK – A funny thing has happened on the way to Broadway’s perennially busy spring. New plays could provide more excitement during the second half of the 2006-07 season than new musicals, long the engine that drives commercial New York theater.

Add several potentially potent play revivals, featuring such stars as Kevin Spacey, Christopher Plummer, Brian Dennehy and Liev Schreiber, and serious-minded theatergoers will have a variety of tempting productions to choose from before mid-May.

“While Broadway trends are really more a matter of coincidence, it is heartening to think that the prevalence of plays this spring may be something more,” says Howard Sherman, executive director of the American Theatre Wing.

“After many years of hearing that plays on Broadway are a dying breed, the combination of star-driven productions, British imports and the touring success of ‘Twelve Angry Men,’ ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ and ‘Doubt,’ is demonstrating that there is an appetite and a commercially viable model, for dramatic theater.”

Musicals this spring will be less starry than plays, which could account for their lack of early buzz. Producers are promoting the productions, not the actors in them which- make them easier to sell when the original casts leave. Check the ads for last season’s two biggest musical hits – “Jersey Boys” and “The Drowsy Chaperone” – and you will see the shows being celebrated, not their performers.

Becoming original

First up in the new-play category is “The Year of Magical Thinking,” a drama with an impeccable pedigree. The author, Joan Didion, has based the play on her best-selling memoir about events following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne.

“I resisted the idea because I had never written a play,” Didion said in January during a panel discussion. “And then after some weeks, it occurred to me that that was the very reason to do it. It was time to do something I had never done before.”

The star is Vanessa Redgrave, last seen on Broadway in her Tony-winning performance as Mary Tyrone in the 2003 revival of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” And the director is David Hare, no slouch as a playwright either. “Magical Thinking” opens March 29 at the Booth Theatre.

Next to arrive is the British hit, “Frost/Nixon,” Peter Morgan’s drama based on a 1977 TV interview between the disgraced American president and British talk-show host David Frost. Its London stars, Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost, will appear in the New York production, directed by Michael Grandage, who runs London’s esteemed Donmar Warehouse. “Frost/ Nixon” opens April 22 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre.

America’s fascination with Nixon – judging from the interest, for example, in “All the President’s Men” as a book and film – could make the play even more popular here than it was in England.

Another English success, “Coram Boy,” a sprawling stage adaptation by Helen Edmundson of Jamila Gavin’s novel for young adults, arrives May 2 at the Imperial Theatre. The play, which has a cast of more than three dozen actors, is set in 18th-century England. It tells the story of two orphans and the Coram Hospital for Deserted Children, where Handel gave the first performance of his “Messiah.”

Angela Lansbury hasn’t been on Broadway since a short-lived revival of “Mame” in 1984. Now the four-time Tony Award winner is finally back, co-starring with another New York favorite, Marian Seldes, in “Deuce,” a new comedy by Terrence McNally. The play concerns two retired tennis players who meet again at the U.S. Open. Michael Blakemore directs for an opening May 6 at the Music Box Theatre.

“We have theater royalty in this country, and I think Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes are our equivalent of any two Dames across the ocean,” says McNally, author of the Tony-winning “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and “Master Class.”

“‘Deuce” is a reflective play about looking back on one’s accomplishments and one’s professional and personal relationships and also toward the future. The characters were partners in a doubles tennis team, and in the theater, I depend on partners – directors and actors – and how we support each other to achieve our goals.”

It’s a sad milestone of sorts – the last August Wilson play, “Radio Golf” which opens May 8 at the Cort Theatre. The drama, directed by Kenny Leon, is the final chapter in Wilson’s epic, 10-play cycle examining the black experience in 20th century America. Set in the 1990s, “Radio Golf,” deals with a successful middle-class entrepreneur, played by Harry Lennix, as he tries to reconcile the present with the past. Tonya Pinkins will portray his upwardly mobile wife. Wilson died of liver cancer in 2005, just as “Radio Golf” began an extended tour of regional theaters.

Tried and true

Play revivals are almost as numerous.

“Prelude to a Kiss,” Craig Lucas’ charming fantasy, was a big hit off-Broadway in 1990 and later moved to Broadway for a yearlong run. Now, courtesy of the Roundabout Theatre Company, it is getting another major New York outing with a cast that includes John Mahoney, Annie Parisee, Alan Tudyk and Robin Bartlett. The director is Daniel Sullivan. Look for it March 8 at the American Airlines Theatre.

Three days later, March 11, Eric Bogosian’s “Talk Radio” returns, this time to the Longacre Theatre. The original production, starring Bogosian, opened off-Broadway in 1987 and ran for six months. Now, Liev Schreiber portrays a hard-nosed radio talk-show host in a cast that also includes Peter Hermann, Erik Jensen and Stephanie March. Robert Falls, artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, directs.

The London reviews were raves for the Old Vic production of Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” starring Kevin Spacey as the alcoholic actor James Tyrone Jr. Also in the cast were Eve Best and Colm Meaney. Now New York will get to see all three actors and what the fuss was all about. “Moon,” directed by Howard Davies, opens April 9 at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre.

“Inherit the Wind,” written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, is one of those sturdy courtroom dramas that always has been an audience favorite. A fictionalized retelling of the 1920s Scopes monkey trial, it was a big Broadway hit in 1955 and later a popular movie. And according to the Dramatists Play Service, which licenses the work, “Inherit the Wind” has, over the last five years, averaged 100 nonprofessional productions a year in the United States and Canada.

This revival, starring Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy, tells the story of a Tennessee science teacher, John Scopes, who was put on trial for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. Directed by Doug Hughes, “Inherit the Wind” opens April 12 at the Lyceum Theatre.

Plummer will portray lawyer Henry Drummond, based on the famous attorney Clarence Darrow, and Dennehy will be Matthew Harrison Brady, based on politician William Jennings Bryan.

Bring on the music

And, yes, there are a few new musicals.

What could be the last John Kander and Fred Ebb score on Broadway (another of their unproduced New York shows is having a Connecticut run later this spring) will be “Curtains,” a murder-mystery musical arriving March 22 at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre.

“It’s a valentine to show business, hung on a whodunit hook,” says its director Scott Ellis. “What’s underneath ‘Curtains,’ the heart of it, is pure love of musical theater.”

“Curtains” stars David Hyde Pierce as a detective called in to investigate the murder of a Broadway star who dies during the curtain call of her new show on its opening night in Boston. The cast also includes Debra Monk, Karen Ziemba, Jill Paice and Edward Hibbert.

The book is by Rupert Holmes, who also wrote additional lyrics for “Curtains,” along with Kander, the show’s composer. Ebb, the original lyricist and Kander’s writing partner for some 40 years, died in 2004. Together, they wrote such classic musicals as “Chicago” and “Cabaret” as well as that Big Apple anthem, “New York, New York.”

Grace O’Malley may not be well known along Shubert Alley (the heart of New York’s theater district), but she is a legendary Irish lass who is the title character in “The Pirate Queen,” a lavish new musical set in Elizabethan England.

The musical, written by the team who created “Les Miserables” and “Miss Saigon,” opens April 5 at the Hilton Theatre. Grace will be played by Stephanie J. Block, with Linda Balgord portraying her nemesis, Elizabeth I. The book is by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, with music by Schonberg and lyrics by Boublil and John Dempsey.

Think pink. Particularly when you are talking about “Legally Blonde,” the girl-power musical based on the Reese Witherspoon movie opening April 29 at the Palace Theatre. Buoyed by favorable reviews during its San Francisco tryout, the lavish show, budgeted at just under $12 million, also has the benefit of a presold, popular title.

Laura Bell Bundy stars as Elle Woods, a determined young woman who, when dumped by her boyfriend, goes to Harvard Law School. Jerry Mitchell, who made such shows as “Hairspray” and the revival of “La Cage aux Folles” move, directs and choreographs.

Kurt Weill is at the center of “LoveMusik,” an examination of the relationship between Weill and his wife (and leading lady) Lotte Lenya. The book is by Alfred Uhry, author of “Driving Miss Daisy.”

Michael Cerveris, who starred last season in “Sweeney Todd,” is Weill and Donna Murphy, direct from her triumph in a City Center concert version of “Follies,” is Lenya. The legendary Harold Prince directs. The Manhattan Theatre Club production opens May 3 at the Biltmore Theatre.

Prince knew Lenya when he worked with her in the original production of “Cabaret,” but he never met Weill.

“I’m a huge fan of his,” Prince says. “I always thought their marriage was a modern one, in the true sense of the word. They adored each other, but they were independent creatures and practiced what we today would call an ‘open marriage.’ They were brilliant, funny and irreverent, and most of all, honest with everyone.

“Their journey from Europe in the ’20s to Broadway in the mid-’30s seems made for a musical. The entire project itself was jump-started when I read their published letters; often hilarious, always discerning.”

Audra McDonald, one of musical-theater’s most dazzling performers, has appeared in such shows as “Ragtime” and the Lincoln Center Theater revival of “Carousel.” Now she is coming back to Broadway in “110 in the Shade,” the charming Tom Jones-Harvey Schmidt musical about a love-starved woman in a drought-stricken Western town. It’s the spring’s only musical revival.

McDonald portrays the uptight Lizzie Curry, caught under the spell of a would-be rainmaker (Steve Kazee), who promises more than just a steady downpour. Christopher Innvar portrays the other contender for Lizzie’s affections. Veteran John Cullum plays her father.

The curtain goes up for the Roundabout Theatre Company production at Studio 54 on May 9, the final day a show can open to qualify for 2007 Tony Awards nominations.

Then the real drama begins.