All kinds of stars are shining on Broadway this season. You’ve got Molly Ringwald shaking it in thigh-highs in Cabaret, you’ve got Bill Pullman wooing a goat in the new Albee; rapper Mos Def is making his Broadway (and acting) debut in Top Dog/Underdog, while Bea Arthur is droppin’ knowledge in her one-woman show. But one star, somehow, is burning a bit brighter than the rest: Chicago’s own Mary Zimmerman, charming the pants off Broadway with Metamorphoses.

While her actors splash about in the pool constructed at Circle in the Square Theatre, Zimmerman has been swimming in a warm pool of critical acclaim. The New York Times’ Ben Brantley has essentially proposed to our Mary twice now. When the show bowed off-Broadway in the fall he said that, "Ms. Zimmerman makes an ardent and eloquent case for the importance of a personal mythology that gives order to the chaos of suffering." For the return engagement he out-raved his original rave; Brantley opened with, "The images snag on the edges of thought, stirring up fragments of half-remembered dreams." Something rarely written about, say, Tony 'n’ Tina’s Wedding.

Clive Barnes in The New York Post loved Metamorphoses too, albeit under the hideous headline: "Don’t Myth It"; Howard Kissel loved it in the Daily News, though he mislabeled it "Story Theatre." And most importantly, Mr. and Mrs. New York are loving it, too. As reported in Variety on March 13, in its first week Metamorphoses was "playing to 89 percent capacity…Ovid’s splashfest…close[d] with $228,879 on its $346,638 potential." This, by the way, came under the welcome headline: "B’way comes in like a lion"–receipts are up 19 percent over last March, which no one would have predicted back in October. (Starting to wane in popularity only now is another big hit with a Chicago pedigree, the wink-and-a-nod musical Urinetown, which was reported at 63.1 percent capacity the same week.)

Your "ArtsLine" correspondent is sorely tempted to suggest that Metamorphoses is what William Goldman referred to in his backstage classic "The Season" as the "snob hit": the brainy, unlikable show everyone pretends to like out of fealty to the notion that theatre is supposed to be good for you. However, I’ve seen the thing and–though it didn’t stir up any fragments, per se–it is an amazing evening.

Zimmerman’s own metamorphoses has been from well-regarded regional theatre director to the toast of New York City. There was a profile on her cast in the Daily News, bearing the brutal headline: "Young Cast Says Let’s Myth-Behave." There was the loving opening night scene-piece in Variety, in which author Robert Hofler was sure to mention where Zimmerman and her Lookingglass Theatre Company pals were dining (the Blue Finn) and what kind of shoes she had on (velvet), tell-tale symptoms of the journalistic swoon. Chris Jones, the Chicago Tribune arts reporter, profiled her in an American Theatre (AT) cover story, and Peter Marks of the Times appeared to be in vying with his colleague Mr. Brantley for the fair Mary’s hand. In a profile, Marks wrote quite tenderly of "the way in which Ms. Zimmerman creates the richly imagistic works that stamp her productions, the way her eye refines and refinishes, drawing ever-sharper pictures from the ancient texts she theatricalizes." Sigh…

But it’s Jones who has been the Bob Woodward of the Metamorphoses beat. Besides the AT profile, he did an opening-night-on-Broadway report for the Tribune and, most interesting, a February 28 piece on the show’s origins and history, focusing on how Lookingglass had been looking the wrong way when it came time to secure their rights. "After originating the first professional version of this stunningly successful show on Chicago’s North Side in 1998, Lookingglass is now enduring a painful lesson in theatre economics," Jones wrote. "Metamorphoses could make as much as $10 million on Broadway and beyond, and Lookingglass does not have a formal piece of the financial pie."

Later in the article, with some help from the show’s Broadway producer, Roy Gabay, Jones puts together some impressive figures. On a relatively tiny production budget of $1.5 million, Zimmerman and co. reaped a $750,000-plus advance sale, and stand to make at least $9 million off a projected year’s run at Circle in the Square. "And that’s," Jones concludes, "before a London production, which Gabay said he is already contemplating."

Tough patootie for Lookingglass. Jones expounded on the theme in a telephone interview with "ArtsLine," reiterating that Zimmerman was in no way out to screw her longtime chums. "The gist [of the article] was that Lookingglass, although Metamorphoses developed at Lookingglass…let’s say I think they were not as sophisticated as they should have been," Jones explained. "I don’t think it was Mary Zimmerman’s fault. She’s always very generous with them."

There’s also the question of why Zimmerman is suddenly the it-girl, after a solid decade of directing–and not just in Chicago.

"I would say there’s a few factors involved," ventured Jones. "One is that New York never notices anybody until they’ve done work in New York, and she’d not done the kind of work she’s famous for in Chicago. She’d done Shakespeare in the Park, but this was the first Mary Zimmerman auteur project that’s hit New York. That kind of work, which is frankly common in Chicago–it’s not just her—suddenly in New York everybody is like 'What is this? It’s not a play!’ In Chicago we shrug and go 'here we go again.’"

Jones also noted, as "ArtsLine" has in the past, the tendency of journalists to write about things they think other journalists are going to write about. "Not only was [Metamorphoses] opening on Broadway, but it was more or less a guaranteed hit"–because it had done so well off-Broadway–"so that caused people to jump on the bandwagon, as cynical people do."

How will we know when the New York theatre press has sincerely embraced Mary Zimmerman? When they deign to refer to her by a nickname, as with director/choreographer Susan "Stro" Stroman.

So…Zimmer?