Until this extraordinary season, Broadway was thought to be a graveyard for plays—apart from, of course, the usual suspects: Tom Stoppard and the Irish. However, the traditional home of multi-million-dollar mega-musicals is battling the recession with less costly dramas and comedies that in turn have attracted a phenomenal number of star performers. True, a Broadway play without at least a minor TV star in it would be like a circus without a clown. But the big names currently lighting up the marquees are the real thing.

Among them: Academy Award winners Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon in Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist Exit the King; the legendary two-time Oscar winner Jane Fonda, guaranteeing enthusiastic audiences for 33 Variations; and the eternally boyish Matthew Broderick, as a preening professor in Christopher Hampton’s high comedy The Philanthropist. British Tony winner Janet McTeer and Royal Shakespeare Company stalwart Harriet Walter play the competing monarchs in Friedrich Schiller’s classic Mary Stuart. Even Samuel Beckett is back on Broadway with his modernist masterpiece Waiting for Godot, starring Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin. And a perfect quartet is triumphing in Yasmina Reza’s comedy of ill manners, God of Carnage: James Gandolfini, Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, and Marcia Gay Harden (another Oscar winner, mind you).

The starry plays have taken over the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York! Now, if only the godfathers of Broadway would kindly bring the ticket prices down.

Award-winning journalist John Heilpern is the author of Conference of the Birds: The Story of Peter Brook in Africa.