THE THEATRE - Barn-Burner Sondheim, Irish Drama, Antic Musicals

Sharpen your pencils and grab your backpacks: autumn in New York is back-totheatre season. With the city as your campus, there’s a certain scholastic crispness to this fall’s programming.

- Helen Shaw

For example, the barn-burner revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along,” from 1981, transfers to the Hudson Theatre on Sept. 19—with Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez, and Daniel Radcliffe—in the same month that Sondheim’s Luis Buñuel-inspired, last-ever musical, “Here We Are,” gets a blockbuster, all-star cast (Amber Gray! David Hyde Pierce!) for its posthumous première at the Shed (starting previews on Sept. 28). If you see them both, you’re basically taking an informal seminar in Sondheimian aesthetics.

There’s enough this season, too, for a (self-administered) degree in Irish drama. You could start by studying Seán O’Casey, the socialist giant: Druid Theatre’s “Druid-O’Casey” (N.Y.U. Skirball; Oct. 4-14) brings his entire Dublin Trilogy from the nineteen-twenties—“The Plough and the Stars,” “The Shadow of a Gunman,” and “Juno and the Paycock”—in the season’s most exciting international visit. Follow that up at our own Irish Repertory The-atre, which stages Brian Friel’s masterpiece