Broadway lullaby has a British accent

Strange things are happening in New York. Tony Blair is more popular than George Bush, and a play about Morecambe and Wise is the talk of the town.

What is more, a sizeable chunk of Broadway is looking like the West End on tour. Eddie Izzard, nearly as much a household name among Manhattan hipsters as he is here, is reprising his turn in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg; Charlotte Jones's Humble Boy is following another National Theatre export, Vincent in Brixton, across the Atlantic with Jared Harris in the lead; and Sam Mendes is taking on the holy of holies, Gypsy, the all-American show termed by the critic Frank Rich "the King Lear of musicals".

There are seven more London productions or British-led projects either running or about to open on and off- Broadway. David Leveaux is at the helm of another classic musical, Nine, and even Alan Bennett, that most quintessentially English chronicler of lower-middle-class cringe, is in on the act, with a revival of Talking Heads.

But the undisputed kings of the theatre strip this week are two British comic actors whose reputation barely extended beyond the London fringe a few years ago.

Sean Foley and Hamish McColl, collectively known as The Right Size, and their squashed sidekick, Toby Jones, have a huge hit on their hands with The Play What I Wrote, their hilarious homage to Morecambe and Wise, which had audiences here laughing to the point of incontinency.

True, allowances have been made for the Americans - all references to Eric and Ernie are excised - but they still get the joke. The New York Times called it a "manic masterpiece". It was "crazy, sweet, dangerously funny" and watchable night after night "as long as Foley, McColl and Jones are there to make me giggle like a gurgling drain".

So far the show's director Kenneth Branagh's prodigious address book has delivered Liam Neeson, Roger Moore, Nathan Lane and Kevin Kline as "mystery guests" to be mercilessly sent up. The show's executive producer, Dafydd Rogers, insisted that if the show could leap the gulf in humour between Britain and the US it could play anywhere.

Rogers said there was not a "feeling of a British invasion, we don't like to talk like that" - but then it would not be in the Brits' interest to seem too triumphant.

Matt Wolf, of Variety magazine, said Broadway was perpetually inundated with British talent. "The British, of course, are always coming, but this time I suppose they really are," he said.

What was different now was the number of British directors, such as Mendes and Leveaux, being trusted with musicals. "Inevitably there will be people who will say, 'Why can't our guys do this?' The musical, after all, is the American art form. Sometimes there is perhaps frustration within the industry when they see all this talent coming across from London doing things they can't do for various reasons. On the other hand, there is a real Anglophilia among the audiences."

But Wolf believed the British were good at walking the tightrope of American ambivalence, and anyway, the economic reason for their semi-permanent presence was over-powering. "It is no longer possible for American producers to try out shows out of town," he said. "They can no longer afford to do that, so savvy producers see London as a one-stop shop where they can pick up tried and tested work of quality."

Not all the Brits had an easy ride. Vincent in Brixton was not universally adored in the way it was here, and despite raves for the Donmar Warehouse season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Simon Russell Beale was sniped at after the New York Times billed him the greatest stage actor of his generation.

Star turns: All this and Mendes's Gypsy too

The Show What I Wrote

It's not the Morecambe and Wise show anymore; instead Sean Foley and Hamish McColl play up the tensions that bedevil all double acts for American audiences

A Day in the Death of Joe Egg

Eddie Izzard and Victoria Hamilton reprise their acclaimed turn in Peter Nichols' tough, fantastic comedy about a couple raising a handicapped child

Gypsy

Sam Mendes takes the helm of his first big-scale all-American musical on Broadway, based on the vaudeville life of burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee. Produced by Robert Fox, of Iris and The Hours fame

Vincent In Brixton

Nicholas Wright's love story, about how Vincent Van Gogh fell for his older south London landlady, started life at the National Theatre directed by Richard Eyre

Life (X) 3

Yasmina "Art" Reza's most recent hit, first seen in London in Christopher Hampton's translation, is directed by wunderkind Matthew Warchus. Hollywood stars Helen Hunt and John Turturro do the honours

Humble Boy

Charlotte Jones' National Theatre and West End hit traverses astrophysics, gardening and family secrets in the course of a dinner party

Nine

David Leveaux directs the musical about movie director on the skids set in a Venetian bathhouse and adapted from Federico Fellini's film 8

Talking Heads

It's a long way from Leeds, but Alan Bennett's six monologues - including A Chip in the Sugar and Bed Among the Lentils - that began life on television are likely to have a long afterlife on Broadway

Dublin Carol

The young Irish writer Conor McPherson's tragi-comedy about an alcoholic undertaker reopened the Royal Court and has had a two-month run at the Atlantic Theatre

Long Day's Journey into Night

Vanessa Redgrave stars as the morphine-addicted wife of a superannuated matinee idol in Eugene O'Neill's dark drama based on his own life

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme

Irish playwright Frank McGuinness' modern classic about Irish Protestant squaddies waiting for the big push is dusted off as the attack begins on Baghdad