Broadway & Me

Why "Disruption" Really Turned Me Off

2026-08-08T07:46:42.005-05:00

The love-hate relationship so many of us have with technology in general and AI in particular purports to be the main subject of Andrew Stein’s Disruption, which opened this week at the Pershing Square Signature Center. It’s obviously a timely topic so I’m sorry to have to say that my overall response to the way the play deals with it tilts toward the negative end of the critical spectrum.

Disruption centers around a thirtysomething tech entrepreneur named Nick, who has come up with software that aggregates all the data most of us already willingly share online—the stuff we buy, the subjects we Google, the comments we post—and puts them through an algorithm that determines which life choices an individual should make to be happy. And then it sells that information to companies who want to make a buck off of it.

This probably sounded cool and futuristic back in 2023 and the play did draw raves when it debuted in London that year. But technology moves fast and people are now regularly consulting ChatGPT, Claude and their ilk on all kinds of things from what kind of couch they should buy (that would be me) to how to confront a friend about a long-held grievance (not me; that’s what shrinks are for). So the play’s shock value now arrives somewhat diminished.

I can’t really blame Stein for that but it also doesn’t help that his knowledge of the tech world seems no deeper than a Wikipedia synopsis of it. However getting into the kind of nitty-gritty about exactly how the algorithm might work and what its ethical implications would be is not what truly interests the playwright. For his drama kicks off when Nick invites his oldest and closest friends to a dinner where he offers them the opportunity to invest in his new venture and become filthy rich just like him.

The $500,000 entry fee Nick quotes hardly seems enough to be a rounding number in his billion dollar project. But it turns out that Nick doesn’t really want his friends' money; what he wants, without telling them, is to use them as guinea pigs to test out his software. And that was another red flag for me: why didn't Nick and his brainy business partner Raven just go the conventional route and recruit volunteers or college students as their subjects?

I suspect the reason is that Stein is simply more interested in exploring the woes of being an affluent Millennial. Nick’s friends are three couples—a college professor and his psychotherapist wife debating whether to have a kid; a magazine editor and his lawyer wife debating the best way to get their kids into a top prep school; and a surgeon and his photographer wife debating whether they can afford a seven-figure Brooklyn brownstone.

All are in thrall in one way another to their millionaire pal Nick but they’re so sketchily drawn that it’s hard to care about any of them. A few background details—one is secretly gay, another has slept with a spouse other than their own—are thrown in but then are almost immediately discarded.

Luckily, director Hersh Ellis has recruited a top-notch cast of actors who find nuance and texture between the lines they've been given to say. The standouts for me were Irene Sofia Lucio, feisty, funny and sexy as the photographer and Conrad Ricamora giving such a grounded performance as Nick’s best friend the professor that I almost wished the play had just been about him (click here to read an interview with him).

The weak link for me was John David Washington as Nick. Many reviewers have praised Washington’s innate charisma and his movie-star presence is clearly helping to sell tickets but his performance failed to actually show me how someone who so professes to love his friends could so easily sell them out.

Yet, perhaps the most egregious thing for me is the play’s end. Despite the otherwise fine performances and this production’s snazzy set— a glossy black box that sits runway-style with the audience seated on both sides and video projections running along the floor and walls to mimic the algorithm’s calculations—it's not clear what message Stein wants to get across. But the soul-disrupting one that I took away from his play is that what brings happiness is not just money but lots of it.

"The Saviors" Confirms Its Author's Talent

2026-08-01T11:18:37.886-05:00

It is such a relief to have discovered that the young playwright Bubba Weiler is not a one-show wonder. I was knocked out by his debut Well, I'll Let You Go when I saw it last year (click here to listen to my conversation about it with Weiler) and so I worried when I heard that the Atlantic Theater Company had so quickly scheduled another play of his called The Saviors because sophomore productions are often cursed by unrealistic expectations.

The Saviors, now playing at Atlantic's Linda Gross Theater, seems to have been created first and it isn't as polished or revelatory as Well, I'll Let You Go, but it is still an engrossing work with impressively complex characters and really substantive things to say about faith and friendship, the forgiveness of sins and the stories that both we and organized religion tell in our efforts to make sense of it all.

The entire play takes place in the sanctuary of a Catholic church in an unidentified midwestern town and David Zinn has recreated a wonderfully authentic setting, complete with stained glass windows and the slightly scary Baroque effigies that peer down on the altar. The fact that the theater itself is in the reconverted parish hall of an actual church only adds to the verisimilitude. For The Saviors' narrative centers around two of the fictional church’s altar boys, best friends Michael and Paul. They’re 13 and 14 and preparing for their upcoming confirmation ceremony and their overall passage from boyhood into manhood.

Michael is the more exuberant and seemingly more devout, while Paul seems slightly reserved and more thoughtful. There is an obvious—if carefully unacknowledged—sexual tension between the two and I thought at first that this might be another coming out story. But Weiler, who himself was once an altar boy and who is now happily married to a man, is too gifted a playwright to settle for that alone (click here to read about the genesis of his story). He complicates his story with the arrival of a shabby stranger who stumbles into the church claiming to have once been an altar boy there and now seeking refuge from a winter storm and more.

Despite his piety, Michael wants to send the man whose name is Julian onto a homeless shelter blocks away. But Paul not only insists that Julian stay and sleep in the church but he returns later with food and to share stories about Julian’s past and about Paul’s concerns about his future. Meanwhile Michael seeks comfort in a recently widowed church volunteer named Judy whom he admires and wants to impress because everyone in the church has heard the stories about the missionary work her son is doing in Africa.

That’s a lot to cram into 90 minutes particularly when the storylines start to tangle but Weiler and his director Jack Serio deftly knit it altogether in a way that is entertaining and ultimately heartbreaking (click here to read more about how they collaborate). They’re aided by a superb cast. Both playwright and director were determined that the boys should be played by actual teens and they—and their casting people—somehow found two young gems.

Ivan Howe as Michael and Julius Rinzel as Paul are delightfully gawky in the play’s early humorous scenes where the boys horse around, racing to see who can snuff out the most candles, putting one another in headlocks and trading gruesome stories about tortured saints. But they’re even more impressive in the later dramatic scenes that call for their characters to express, often without words, the contrasting love they feel for one another and the confusions that are roiling inside them.

The adult cast is excellent too. Stanley Simon's Julian is the classic fuck-up who wants to do good but Simon also makes it clear that Julian knows that he will fail again and again. And Crystal Fox is a marvel as Judy. She initially seems to be the play’s comic relief but Fox quietly shows how this woman knows the shortcomings of good intentions. Her final moment of truth is truly devastating.

All four of them are trying in one way or another to save at least one of the others and in the process themselves. But, particularly in the play's powerful climactic scene, Weiler seems to be saying that our sins can only be forgiven when we forgive the ones that are committed against us.

Female Rage is Center Stage in the Musical "Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo"

2026-07-18T07:53:03.475-05:00

Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo, the new musical now playing downtown at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, is a patchwork quilt of other musicals: one swatch a revenge plot like the one in Sweeney Todd, another the villainous husbands like the one in Waitress, a patch of go-go heroines like the duo in Wicked, another of rap riffs like those in Hamilton.

Maybe that’s why the critical response has been so all over the place for this show, with many of those who say they admire it nitpicking its weak points and making unfavorable comparisons to those other shows even though this one is a first-time effort, written entirely by Jennifer Nettles, the singer-songwriter who made her name as half of the Grammy-winning country duo Sugarland (click here to read more about her).

And for some reason that critical waffling has made me defensive about this show. It's not perfect. But I liked it. I liked it a lot. And I think if they can see it, a lot of other folks would like it too. Nettles, who also stars in the title role, has based her debut musical on the tale of Giulia Tofana, a 17th century female apothecary who, according to legend, concocted a largely undetectable poison that she sold to women seeking to get rid of unwanted husbands, eventually leading to the deaths of some 600 of them.

In Nettles’ telling of the story, Giulia first poisons her own husband after he attempts to abuse their daughter. When the word gets around, other beleaguered women start asking for similar help. Giulia complies even though she worries, as she sings in one number, that doing something wrong for the right reason may not make it right. And she knows that if the authorities find out what she’s doing, they will label her a witch and make her pay the ultimate price for her crimes.

Director Mary Zimmerman, still best-known for her 2002 production Metamorphoses, has staged Giulia’s story with elegant simplicity: whenever a trio of doors at the back of the stage open they reveal different scenarios that provide sometimes literal and sometimes metaphorical settings for what’s going on in front of them.

Meanwhile, the cast sings the hell out of a wide-ranging score that includes power ballads, comic numbers, choral anthems and raps, all of which move the plot along. And several of them give individual cast members chances to shine. The second-act solo “The Wolf” that Quentin Earl Darrington sings as a hypocritical cardinal is an out-and-out showstopper.

Still, the word that many of the critical naysayers—mainly men—keep using to describe the show is "earnest". But what’s wrong with being passionate and purposeful? Sure, the male villains—Darrington’s churchman and a smarmy politician played with almost a touch too much relish by Christopher M. Ramirez —would be right at home in any 19th century melodrama but is the critics' real issue that this is an unabashedly feminist tale? I mean who objects to the earnestness of Benjamin Barker or Jean Valjean?

Nettles who has appeared briefly in such shows as Chicago (I know, who hasn’t) and Waitress, is not only comfortable onstage and has an incredible voice but is also unafraid to put the focus on women and the unvarnished rage they felt back in the 17th century when women had so few rights or ways to protect themselves and today when such rights as controlling our own bodies to serving in the military are being severely threatened. And I'm glad she's doing it regardless of how uncomfortable it might make some men feel.

BONUS: All Kinds of Novels About Theater

2026-07-11T07:13:55.937-05:00

To celebrate the 20(!) summer reading lists I’ve posted over the years, I’m highlighting what I’ve most enjoyed about putting them together: finding, reading and sharing novels and short stories set in the world of theater. So below is a very slightly annotated list of all 90 of them with the year they appeared on each summer’s list (meanwhile, I’ve already started collecting for next summer):

MY FAVORITES

A Bright Ray of Darkness by Ethan Hawke: (2021) The undeniable parallels between both the author’s tabloid divorce from his movie-star wife Uma Thurman and his portrayal of Hotspur in Lincoln Center’s starry 2003 production of Henry IV may be what draw readers to this novel but the real delights are the dynamic prose and obvious passion for the craft of acting that Hawke packs into this winner. He also obviously had fun narrating the audiobook version of this roman à clef and listening to him read it puts the cherry on top of a very yummy sundae.

The Confessions of Edward Day by Valerie Martin (2010). Novels about the theater tend to divide into two camps: backstage mysteries or comic romps, the latter often centered around a gay protagonist. This one is something different. It’s a lovely literary novel about a promising young actor trying to break into the New York theater scene in the mid-‘70s when groups like Manhattan Theatre Club and the Roundabout Theatre were just starting up. The plot centers around a romantic triangle but the true love affair here is with the theater itself.

The Garrick Year by Margaret Drabble (2014). No doubt borrowing from her own early years as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and 15-year marriage to an actor, Drabble tells the story of Emma, a restless young mother with two small children who is forced to leave London when her husband is hired for a season with a celebrated repertory company in residence in rural Hereford. Emma encounters all the usual backstage suspects, as well as the temptation of an affair with the company’s charismatic leader. This deliciously high-brow soap, which first came out in 1964, was out of print for a while but it’s now available as a download on both Amazon and iTunes.

Next Season by Michael Blakemore (2010). Theater lovers already know that he's a terrific director and now it turns out that Blakemore, whose stage credits range from City of Angels to the recent revival of Blithe Spirit, is also a wonderful novelist. His story of a moderately talented actor who gets a job in a summer-stock type repertory company focuses not on the above-the-marquee names but on the journeymen who play the character roles and bit parts not for money or glamour but for love of the craft. It’s one of the best theater novels I’ve ever read.

Playworld: A Novel by Adam Ross Drawing on its author’s experiences growing up in the ‘80s as a child actor in a family on the fringes of show business (mom teaches ballet, dad does vocal coaching) and as the prey of lecherous adults, this wonderful coming-of-age tale deals with sex, money, ambition and finding one’s place in the world.

She’s a Lamb!: A Novel by Meredith Hambrock (2026) If Norma Desmond and Tom Ripley had a child, it would be Jessamyn St. Germain, the main character in this oh-no-she-didn’t thriller about an actress with delusions of grandeur who is willing to do anything to land the starring role of Maria in a regional Canadian production of The Sound of Music

Station Eleven: A Novel by Emily St. John Mandel (2025) It begins with an actor dropping dead onstage, an early victim of a pandemic that will wipe out most of the earth’s population. But among the survivors in this award-winning novel (and later acclaimed HBO series) are a troupe of actors and musicians who travel the countryside offering hope that art can save civilization.

Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls: (2021) An amateur production of Romeo and Juliet provides the background for this bittersweet novel that flashes back to the love story between two teens who are trying to figure out who they are and then returns to the present to look at who they’ve become. Along the way it makes small detours into the lives of their troubled parents as well as those of the eccentrics and misfits who make up the theater company putting on their show. They’re all good company and give good testament to the power of art.

The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips (2011). The question of who really wrote Shakespeare is an evergreen in scholarly circles and with mystery writers looking for a good MacGuffin. But no one has mined the subject to better effect than Phillips, who has not only written a real romp of a novel but included a complete faux Shakespeare play as well.

Vamp Until Ready by James Magruder. (2022) It would be hard to find a lovelier collection of theater-related short stories than this one. These five are linked by a group of people—gay and straight, theater professionals and amateurs—who are connected to a summer stock theater company in Ithaca, New York during the Reagan-Bush era and by the ways in which theater can change and expand lives. Supporting characters in one story become the leads in others, a sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant reminder that we’re all the stars in the tales we tell ourselves.

CLASSICS

Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk (2020): A bestseller in the 1950s, this door-stop of a novel tells the story of a young Jewish girl who dreams of becoming a Broadway actress but some of its best scenes take place at a summer resort where hopefuls hone their skills by putting on weekly shows just as folks like Carol Burnett, Jerome Robbins and Neil Simon once did at the legendary Camp Tamiment.  

Show Boat by Edna Ferber (2024) I don’t know why it took me so long to read this 1926 novel that inspired Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's genre-defining musical because the book is steeped in its love for the theater, particularly the titular variety that traveled the nation's waterways during the 19th century taking shows to isolated parts of the country. Hammerstein made some tweaks but the familiar characters are here, as well as the themes of romance and racial intolerance. And so is the Mississippi River, which, as every theater lover knows, just keeps rollin' along.

Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (2019): First published in 1900, this novel from the American canon isn’t really a theater book but it provides a fascinating look at the theater world during the Gilded Age as its determined titular heroine transforms from a poor insecure shop girl into a celebrated leading lady of the stage, blithely ruining the lives of several men as she makes her ascent.

Wise Children: A Novel by Angela Carter (2026) People have been telling me for years that I should read this novel about an eccentric theatrical family whose members include multiple generations of twins who become famous performers, a Hollywood script writer-turned oil mogul, a game show host and the leading Shakespearean actor of his generation and now I'm telling you that you should read it

OTHER LITERARY FICTION

Actress: A Novel by Anne Enright (2020): In this elegant novel a grown daughter looks back at the life of her actress mother Norah O’Dell, a great star of the Irish stage, from the 1940s when Norah breaks into Hollywood movies through the ‘70s as she declines into bit roles back in Ireland and a kind of madness that will leave a stain on both their lives.

At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón. (2014) Four summers ago, The New Yorker named Alarcón one of the 20 most promising writers under 40 and so this novel sits high up on the literary food chain. Alarcón, who was born in Lima, Peru, but grew up in Birmingham, Ala., centers his tale around a young South American actor who joins a guerrilla theater troupe that travels through the countryside performing a politically provocative play. Then, unexpectedly, he finds himself playing a different kind of role in a real-life drama. The writing is languid, the narrative is quixotic but the belief in the power of theater is spellbinding.

Audition: A Novel by Katie Kitamura (2026) A finalist for several prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, this literary brain teaser centers around the unsettling interactions between an actress in a major stage production and a young man who may or may not be her son but the author's central theme is the ways in which all of us are always performing for one another

Booth by Karen Joy Fowler (2022) This novel about the celebrated 19th century acting clan was written by a finalist for the prestigious Booker Prize and so can be added to your calorie count for literary fiction. Beginning in 1822 and ending with the aftermath of John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Lincoln (an avid theater lover) it is both a family saga and a historical chronicle of the events leading up to and through the Civil War. But the best parts are the vivid details—the constant and uncomfortable travel, the fierce rivalries that animated audiences, the declamatory style that exhausted its practitioners—that defined the theater world of the Antebellum era.

Bring the House Down: A Novel by Charlotte Runcie (2026) Written by an arts journalist, this delightful story about two critics for a major London paper who find themselves in the midst of a firestorm after one of them pans a show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe fans out into a timely meditation about the role of criticism, an incisive debate on cancel culture and a witty satire about the festival itself

By Any Other Name: A Novel by Jodi Picoult (2025) The debate over who wrote Shakespeare’s plays fuels this story set in two time periods: the 1600s when it imagines that the real-life Emilia Lanier—who is believed to have been the first woman to publish poetry in England—was an unacknowledged ghostwriter for the Bard; and the present in which a woman playwright who has written a drama about Lanier faces contemporary misogyny.

City of Girls Elizabeth Gilbert (2019). Although best known as a non-fiction writer and the author of the you-go-girl bestseller "Eat, Pray, Love," Gilbert has also written several novels and her latest is centered around an off-Broadway theater in the 1940s that is home to a motley crew of misfits led by a lesbian version of Auntie Mame. Or at least that's what the best half of the book is about. The story peters out whenever the location shifts but the hard-partying show girls, moody writers and show-must-go-on actors make for good company and an easy summer read.

Cyclorama by Adam Langer (2023) If you read and liked Susan Choi’s “Trust Exercise” (which I recommended back in 2019) then you’ll probably like this new novel about a group of high school kids in the Chicago suburbs and the dangerously charismatic drama teacher they had in the 1980s. But this isn’t just a rip-off of Choi’s National Book Award winner, Langer has a lot to say about current politics, the environment and most especially about how teachers can affect the lives of their students for years after they graduate.

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad (2023) A company working on a play is a familiar subject for theater-themed novels and this one offers the usual rivalries between actors and the stressful events that threaten to jeopardize the production. But what sets this version apart is that the play, Hamlet, is being readied for a performance in the Israeli-controlled West Bank by an all-Palestinian cast. It’s told through the experience of a British-Palestinian actress who, fleeing London after a bad love affair, tries to reconnect to the homeland she left years before and to the art that defines her true identity.

Flashout: A Novel by Alexis Soloski (2026) Using the knowledge she’s gained during her two decades as a New York Times critic and culture reporter, Soloski has written a tense literary thriller about a woman forced to look back at some unsolved mysteries that occurred in her youth when she got swept up by a cult-like avantgarde theater troupe in the 1970s

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo: (2021) Drawn from Evaristo’s experience as the co-founder of Britain’s Theatre of Black Women in the 1980s, these interlocking stories center around 12 characters, many of them actors, directors and playwrights, as they grapple with such societal issues as racism and patriarchy and such intimate ones as friendship and gender identity. Although it won the prestigious Booker Prize for Fiction in 2019, some critics have complained about Evaristo’s unconventional punctuation but once again I listened to the audio version and I was inspired by these stories of women determined to succeed on their own terms.

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood (2017) This retelling of The Tempest is the first book I read in the Hogarth Shakespeare series that commissions leading authors to write novels that reimagine the Bard's plays in modern-day settings. And I couldn't have picked a better start. Attwood's book in which a disgraced theater director stages a prison production of Shakespeare's revenge tale about an exiled sorcerer and his daughter is part witty satire of the theater world, part brilliant analysis of Shakespeare's final play, part celebration of the power of theater and a complete delight.

Hamlet, The Prince of Denmark: A Novel by David Hewson and Richard Armitage. (2014) Rewriting Shakespeare has become a cottage industry; Amazon lists at least a half-dozen novelizations of Hamlet alone. But this latest one is so cleverly done I almost forgot that I knew how the story ends. Not all of the backstories the authors devise—turning Polonius from a foolish busybody into a Machiavellian manipulator, making Hamlet and Ophelia secret lovers—worked for me but this is fan fiction of the highest order. It’s only available as an audiobook but A.J. Harley is an elegant narrator and who doesn’t like to hear a good story well told?

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (2021): Only the bare facts are known about William Shakespeare’s personal life but this lush, literary novel imagines the love story between him and his wife Anne Hathaway (called Agnes here, as the author says Hathaway’s father called her in his will). At the tale's center is the grief the couple shared over the loss of their only son and the subsequent creation of one of the Bard’s greatest works. Also included is a bravura set-piece tracing the journey of the bubonic plague from an Egyptian port city to the village of Stratford-upon-Avon that eerily echoes our own recent pandemic experience.

The House is On Fire by Rachel Beanland (2024) The devastating fire that killed 72 people after a theater curtain accidentally caught fire during a performance in Richmond, Virginia, in 1811 really happened. But the true drama in this excellent historical novel centers on the aftermath of that tragedy and its effect on four characters whose fates will be determined by their class, their gender and their race.

The Hypocrite: A Novel by Jo Hamya (2025) This very literary novel muses on the before and after events that occur when the playwright daughter of a world-famous novelist invites her unsuspecting dad to see a play she’s written exposing his shortcomings as a father, a husband and even as a writer.

If We Were Villains: A Novel by M.L. Rio (2025) If you’re a fan of Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History,” you’re likely to love this thriller even more because the group of precocious college students at its center are all theater kids at an elite arts school where the drama program is devoted entirely to Shakespeare and their final year is filled with poetry, rivalry, sex and a mysterious death.

In Sunlight and In Shadow by Mark Helprin (2012). The main characters in this literary novel are Catherine, a young heiress trying to make a name for herself in the New York theater world; and Harry, a former OSS officer struggling to save his family business from the mob after returning home from World War II. Their love affair plays out over 700-pages and the parts devoted to the theater are smaller than I wanted them to be but the writing is gorgeous. If beautiful prose is your thing, this could be an enchanting way to while away lazy summer afternoons.

The Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller (2011). Some people will see this as a 9/11 novel but those of us who love theater will cherish this story about a young playwright whose lover died in the attacks and an actor whose wife is terminally ill as a sensitive portrayal of the connection that every great artist draws between art and life.

Leading Men by Christopher Castellani (2019). Tennessee Williams wrote many of his greatest plays during the time that he and Frank Merlo, a working class guy from New Jersey, were a couple. And although far from monogamous, their 15-year relationship may count as one of the midcentury's greatest love stories. Castellani’s novel offers a fictionalized version of a pivotal summer in their lives and its aftermath. I got impatient with chapters devoted to a character inspired by Williams’ longtime confidante and literary executive Maria Britneva but when the book focuses on Williams and Merlo, it’s terrific.

Lucky Break by Esther Freud 2012). Good contemporary novels about actors are hard to come by. So it’s great to have this collection of interlocking stories that follow a group of British actors from their first day in drama school into the mid-career choices of their 30s. The author, who is the daughter of the painter Lucien Freud and the great granddaughter of Sigmund, eschews the psychological explorations that are her patrimony, but having been an actress, and now married to one, she still knows how to plumb the theater world and the result is a fun beach read.

The Marvels by Brian Selznick (2015) London's Theatre Royal provides the backdrop for this graphic novel about a 13-year-old boy who runs away from school and seeks refuge with his uncle who lives in a mysterious house that is believed to have been owned—and is perhaps now haunted—by a legendary family of actors. Selznick won the Caldecott Medal for "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," which John Logan adapted for the 2011 movie directed by Martin Scorsese and so the artwork is superb. And the narrative, which begins in 1766 and ends in 1990, is surprisingly moving, even for people like me who don't usually read illustrated books.

Mister Monkey by Francine Prose (2017) A collection of linked stories by one of the country's most celebrated fiction writers, this novel centers around various people connected to the hapless performance of a children's theater production. They range from a Yale Drama School-trained actress who yearns for a more distinguished career to a super fan who so loves theater that he has seen even this inept show dozens of times. All 12 vignettes are both funny and touching.

Mona Acts Out: A Novel by Mischa Berlinski (2025) The title character is a self-centered pain in the ass but the novel itself is a fun look at the downtown theater world, a smart tutorial on some of Shakespeare’s major female characters and a meditation on what to do with someone whose great talent has made good art but whose bad behavior has justifiably gotten him canceled.

Morality Play by Barry Unsworth (2010). Short-listed for Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize, this Medieval mystery centers around a monk who joins a band of traveling players in 14th century England. It’s a terrific re-creation of the theater world at the time when some daring actors were beginning to move away from performing Church-sanctioned Bible stories in favor of plays that dealt with more secular concerns. A film version starring Paul Bettany and Willem Dafoe, and blandly renamed “The Reckoning,” came out in 2003 and is available on DVD. But the book is far better, especially at conveying the almost religious calling that so many actors feel about their craft.

The Mother Act: A Novel by Heidi Reimer (2026) I actually found it kind of hard to like either of the main characters in this novel about a famous feminist actress and the daughter she abandons for the sake of her career but I also couldn’t resist being drawn in by the important questions it poses about the personal cost of making art and how those choices affect the art that gets made

The New Boy by Tracy Chevalier (2017) The most recent addition to the Hogarth Shakespeare series of novels that update the Bard's plays sets Othello in a Washington, D.C. grade school in the 1970s. In this version, the Moor becomes Osei, the 11-year-old son of a Ghanaian diplomat who has transferred into an all-white suburban school. His Iago is the class bully and his Desdemona a girl with blonde pigtails who is beguiled by the exoticism of the dark-skinned boy. The plot unfolds in just one day and although it's a little unbelievable that sixth graders would develop such passionate feelings in that short a time, Chevalier, the author of such acclaimed historical novels as "Girl with a Pearl Earring," is a fine writer and clearly a lover of this tale.

The New York Stories by John O’Hara (2015) The midcentury writer John O'Hara wrote novels, a newspaper column, screenplays and even a couple of plays but he's probably best known for his short stories and this wonderful collection of tales centers around characters who are actors, musicians and their fellow travelers, some successful, most not but all desperate for a moment in the limelight. The audiobook version is an extra treat because the stories are read by a who’s who of terrific stage actors including Dylan Baker, Bobby Canaveral and Jan Maxwell.

Our Evenings: A Novel by Alan Hollinghurst (2025) One of Britain’s most acclaimed novelists charts the five-decades-long relationship between a mixed-raced actor and a Boris Johnson-like conservative who first meet in one of the country’s elite private schools and how their interactions over the years reflect the changes in that country’s political, social and theatrical life.

Tempest-Tost by Robertson Davies. (2012) The acclaimed Canadian writer's first novel, written back in 1951, is the droll tale of an amateur theater group’s production of The Tempest. It’s filled with familiar types from the bossy ex-actress who leads the group to the Walter Mittyish accountant who dreams of a starring role to the dotty old makeup woman who can no longer see. People who love “Slings and Arrows,” the terrific Canadian TV show about a theater festival, should really get a kick out of this book.

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters (2020): Class and gender issues come into play in this lesbian Bildungsroman about a working-class girl who falls for a closeted Victorian music hall star. Their love story manages to be simultaneously instructive about Victorian mores, inspiring about female empowerment and erotic as all get out.

Tom Lake: A Novel by Ann Patchett (2024) While she may be most celebrated as a top literary novelist, Patchett clearly knows her way around the theatrical canon too. She’s set this story in a cherry orchard, albeit one in northern Michigan, where three sisters have come home during the pandemic to help their parents harvest the crop and save the family farm. As they work, their mother regales them with the story of her days as a young actress and how being cast in a summer stock production of Our Town changed her life. It’s a lovely tale about love and art and family. And having Meryl Streep read the audiobook version is, well, the cherry on top of an already very satisfying sundae.

Too Soon: A Novel by Betty Shamieh (2026) The struggles of three generations of Palestinian women both in their homeland and here in the U.S. are framed by the efforts of the youngest, an American-born theater director, as she tries to stage an avant-garde production of Hamlet in the West Bank

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi (2019). Centered around a group of students who attended a performing arts high school in Houston during the 1980s, Choi’s coming-of-age novel, inspired in part by her girlhood experiences at such a school, won raves when it came out earlier this year. As might be expected, it features a charismatic but slightly mysterious teacher who serves as a mentor to the students who all compete to win his favor. But the narrative, which extends into the students’ adulthood, veers from the predictable and ends up posing significant questions about the role of art, friendship, memory and revenge.

Up With the Sun by Thomas Mallon (2023) The actor Dick Kallman won a Theater World Award for his performance in the 1951 musical Seventeen and he starred in the short-lived TV sitcom “Hank” a decade later but Kallman’s career never really took off, in part because of his abrasive personality. In 1980, he achieved the kind of fame no one wants when he became the victim of a gruesome murder. All of that is compellingly recounted in Mallon’s fictional version of Kallman’s life's story but the best part of the book may be its vivid portrayal of how young Broadway actors came of age in the 1950s and ‘60s.

The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf by Isa Arsén (2025) Two very attractive actors enter into an unconventional marriage, get caught up with a pill-pushing Dr. Feelgood-style shrink and become entangled with the mob as it moves its illicit businesses west in this 1950s-era melodrama that is just begging to be a streaming series.

MORE POPULAR FICTION

Act Like It by Lucy Parker (2017) What's a summer reading list without a good beach book? There's admittedly not much tension in this romance novel about two gorgeous-looking West End actors who get together as a publicity stunt and then fall in love. And the behind-the-scenes theater stuff falls off in the second half of the book. But Parker is an amiable writer and her rom-com goes down as easy as an icy drink on a sultry day.

All the World’s A Stage Fright: Misadventures of a Clandestine Critic: A Novella by Bob Abelman (2024) This humorous roman a clef is about a theater critic who secretly embeds himself in a local company’s production of As You Like It with actors he’s previously panned as his co-stars. It's theater critic Bob Abelman’s sly way of showing his appreciation for the people and the work that go into making theater at every level. It also offers a pretty smart analysis of what makes Shakespeare so special.

Better Nate Than Ever and Five, Six, Seven, Nate! by Tim Federle. (2014) These are really YA novels but more and more adults are reading kids’ books and this series is tailor-made for us grown-up theater geeks. They chronicle the adventures of Nate Foster, a middle-school misfit with a passion for musicals and a more than passable singing voice. With the help of his best friend Libby, he sneaks away from his small Pennsylvania hometown to a New York audition for a musical version of “E.T.” In the process, he meets all kinds of showbiz types, learns what goes into making a Broadway show and finds the courage to be himself. The result are books that are equally heartwarming and hilarious.

Broadway Melody by Jack Viertel (2024) Few people know the inner workings of Broadway better than the producer Jack Viertel, who spent 34 years at the Jujamacyn theater company and 20 years heading up the Encores! series. Now he’s put all that knowledge to work in this novel that covers seven decades in the lives of two Broadway insiders—a musician and a stagehand—and the female singer they both love. The book was inspired, in part, by the career of Viertel’s and my mutual late friend the legendary musical contractor Seymour Red Press. But it’s so readable that I’d be recommending it even if I hadn’t known and loved Red.

The Chelsea Girls: A Novel by Fiona Davis 2020): Set against the backdrop of the Red Scare, this story centers around the friendship between two ambitious young women, one an actress and the other a playwright. But its true main character is New York's famed Chelsea Hotel during its heyday as a home for artists and other bohemians who became some of the prime targets for Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts.

The Dramatic Life of Jonah Penrose: A Novel by Robyn Green (2026) This enemies-to-lovers romcom about two super-talented and super good-looking British actors who are hot for the same role and for one another is just as steamy and satisfyingly a guilty pleasure as the hit HBO series “Heated Rivalry”

Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles by Mark Russell (2019) This graphic novel tranposes the Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters into the theater world of the 1950s when the House Un-American Activities Committee was on the prowl. Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman make cameo appearances but the titular theater-loving mountain lion steps in for Tennessee Williams and anchors a story about the committee's oppression of homosexuals. It's an offbeat but still moving way to look back at that reign of terror.

Fallout by Sadie Jones (2022) In all honesty, the characters are annoying in this novel about the personal and professional entanglements of four twentysomethings trying to start their theatrical careers. But the glimpses the story provides into the London theater scene of the 1970s is catnip for any theater lover. I don’t know enough about the players in that theater scene but I suspect others who do know it will have extra fun figuring out the real-life inspirations for the folks in the book. Email me if you have any informed guesses on who the villain—the slightly older and sexually ambivalent producer—might be.

Good Company by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney (2022) If you’re a fan of the Noah Baumbach movie “Marriage Story,” that starred Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, there’s a strong chance that you’ll love this engaging novel about a couple who, after scrimping and maneuvering to maintain a small New York theater company for 20 years, move to Los Angeles, where they make discoveries about themselves, their definitions of success and their marriage.

I'm Glad About You by Theresa Rebeck (2018) There isn't as much theater as I hoped there would be in this romcom about Alison, a New York-based actress from Ohio trying to get back with her high-school sweetheart. But the book is by the frequently produced playwright Theresa Rebeck and she knows the theater world. The demands put on young actresses in the book ring true, as do the audition scenes in which scores of contenders struggle to stand out from the crowd. As fans will know, Rebeck created the behind-the-scenes TV show "Smash" and was then fired from it and she's even tougher on the TV industry.

Once More With Feeling: A Novel by Elissa Sussman (2024) The main character here is a disgraced pop star who tries to revive her career by going back to her first love: Broadway musicals. The show she signs on to do is written and composed by her longtime best friend whom she met when they were girls in theater summer camp. And, of course, it’s directed by the former boy band member who was one third of the love-triangle scandal that destroyed her singing career. There’s more romcom than musical comedy in this one but it’s still a fun and breezy summer read.

Rhapsody by Mitchell James Kaplan: (2021) If romance novels are your thing, this one which centers around Kay Swift, the great love of George Gershwin’s life, may be for you. It serves up a fictional account of the couple’s 12-year relationship during which Gershwin and his lyricist brother Ira wrote their biggest Broadway hits and their masterpiece Porgy and Bess. Meanwhile Swift, also an accomplished musician, composed four Broadway shows including Fine and Dandy which produced “Can’t We Be Friends,” the breakout song she wrote with her husband the financier James Warburg. The novel also details how Swift eventually divorced Warburg but—80-year spoiler alert—failed to marry Gershwin before his premature death in 1937 at the age of just 38.

Seen It All and Done the Rest: A Novel by Pearl Cleage (2009). The drama in this novel centers around the issue of gentrification in Atlanta’s black neighborhoods but it’s on this list (and in the window of the Drama Bookshop) because its lead character, Josephine Evans, is an African-American actress who has built a 30-year career performing in Europe. The story kicks off when mounting European resentment against the Iraq War and everything American causes Josephine to be fired from her job as the resident star of a classical repertory company in Amsterdam. She returns home to Atlanta until she can force them to take her back or figure out what to do next and she spends most of her time there fighting developers and trying to help her granddaughter who’s become embroiled in a sex scandal. I could have done with less real estate and even less sex in favor of more theater stuff. Even so, it’s hard not to appreciate the fact that there aren’t a lot of other novels where Euripides and Ntozake Shange get equal billing.

Serendipity: A Novel by Louise Shaffer (2009). An Emmy winner for her work in the daytime drama “Ryan’s Hope,” Shaffer has spent much of the last 30 years working on TV soap operas but she got her start as an understudy and bit part player on Broadway and her heart is obviously still there. This family saga’s main protagonist, Carrie Manning, isn’t in the business but her grandmother is a legendary Broadway star (kind of like Mary Martin) and her father was a genius writer and director of shows (kind of like Moss Hart). Their stories—and a lot of family secrets—unfold in a series of flashbacks. The revelations wouldn’t be out of place on one of Shaffer’s old daytime soaps but it’s still fun to read the parts set in the late ‘60s when Broadway stars and their spouses were objects of

Showbiz, A Novel by Ruby Preston (2013). If you’re still in “Smash” withdrawal, this may be the one for you. For Showbiz is a mash-up of fiction (the murder of a theater critic) Broadway legends (an ogre-like producer named Margolies borrows the birth name and personality of David Merrick) and the contemporary Broadway scene (everyone is competing for Hollywood stars to anchor their shows). It follows the professional and amorous adventures of a young producer named Scarlett Savoy as she tries to solve the whodunit and put on her first show. Just as with “Smash,” true insiders may wince at some of the details (I mean does anyone really call the restaurant Angus McIndoe, “The Angus"?) but the story is still a romp and Preston has already written a sequel called Staged

The Show Girl by Nicola Harrison 2022) Set during the final years of the Roaring Twenties, this novel focuses on the personal and professional ups-and-downs of an ambitious young woman who becomes a showgirl in the Ziegfeld Follies. It’s basically a romance novel complete with a rich and hunky love interest but it’s also a fun behind-the-curtains look at what life might have been like for Sally, Phyllis and the other “girls upstairs” in Follies.

The Sisters Sweet by Elizabeth Weiss (2022) The old sensation-loving vaudeville circuit provides the backdrop for this novel about twin sisters who climb up the billboard when their father, who once had stage dreams of his own, comes up with the idea of them pretending to be cojoined, or Siamese, twins. The deception works until the ambitions of one destroys the act and leads them down separate paths. The story is so redolent of that itinerant showbiz era that I kept expecting Mama Rose to make a cameo.

Someday, Somewhere, Maybe by Lauren Graham (2023) Although she’s now probably best known for starring in the cult TV show “Gilmore Girls,” Graham remembers what it was like trying to break into show business—working low-paying day jobs, sharing cheap apartments, going on endless auditions—and she’s turned all of that into this charming romcom about a young actress who is making one final run at her dreams (including a possible relationship with the hunky movie star in her acting class) before giving up, returning home and settling for marriage to the longtime boyfriend she rarely sees and hardly knows any more. The outcome isn’t really in doubt for attentive readers but Graham makes it fun getting there.

The Summer Set by Aimee Agresti (2020). If social distancing has left you longing for romance, this romcom offers a barrel of it including the on-again-off again relationship of a wild-child actress and the director of a summer theater, the romantic entanglements of some college students apprenticing there, the love stories of two longstanding gay couples and a liaison between a glamorous trans woman and an unexpected suitor.

Temper by Layne Fargo (2019). Fans of David Ives' psychological thriller Venus in Fur will undoubtedly get a kick out of this Fifty Shades of Greyish story about a thirtysomething Chicago actress who gets cast in a new play by the domineering artistic director of a theater company known for doing edgy work. The play is a two-hander about a troubled married couple but the novel's cast of characters include the company's female co-founder, the actress' male roommate and a reporter who covers the local theater scene. Nearly all of them are bisexual and hot for one another, which sets the stage for jealousies, rivalries and some serious S&M entanglements.

A Tender Thing by Emily Neuberger (2023) Set in 1959, this novel is another pastiche of familiar tropes: the young heroine’s passion for Broadway and for a talented theater maker is reminiscent of the classic novel “Marjorie Morningstar;” (which I recommended in 2020); the everyone-hates-him-but-he’s-brilliant director is a nod to Jerome Robbins and their musical about an interracial love affair borrows heavily from West Side Story. Even so, I still couldn’t put this one down. But do avoid the audiobook version because Neuberger, who narrates it herself, takes every opportunity she can to sing numbers from her faux musical, which is fine at first but really annoying by the sixth, seventh and eighth time she does it.

Three Girls and Their Brother: A Novel by Theresa Rebeck (2008). This lively comic novel, which came out earlier this year, has been billed as a satiric look at the culture’s current obsession with fame and it does tell the story of an hilariously tumultuous year in the life of the gorgeous granddaughters of a renowned literary critic after their photo appears in "The New Yorker," leading to their becoming top fashion models and hot commodities on the celebrity circuit. Rebeck, the author of such plays as Mauritius and Omnium Gatherum, which she co-wrote with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, has a lot of fun with the vagaries of fashion shoots, TV interview shows and the movie business but the best part of the book is her also-amusing but totally affectionate look at the off-Broadway theater world when the youngest girl tries her hand at doing a play and falls in love, as Rebeck clearly has, with stage life.

The Understudy: A Novel by David Nicholls (2009). Don’t confuse this novel with "The Understudy," the 1975 book by Elia Kazan, who not only directed the original productions of Death of A Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire but also wrote bestselling books. Kazan’s "Understudy" is a serious, Bellowesque story about the conflicted relationship between an aging actor and his protégé. Nicholls’ book is an amusing Nick Hornby-style romp about an underachieving British actor whose career highlights are playing a squirrel in a series of educational films for kids and serving as stand-by for a Jude Law-like superstar who’s playing the lead in a West End production. The story is part showbiz fairytale (will the understudy get a show-must-go-on break?) part romantic comedy (will the beautiful wife of the philandering star fall in love with our hero?) part slacker-comes-of-age story (can he finally make his young daughter proud of him?) and a total delight.

The Understudy by Ellen Tovatt Leary: (2021) A former actress who spent most of her career in the 1970s as an understudy, Leary conveniently sets her story in a world before cellphones so that just the right kinds of misunderstanding can happen. With one how-did-this-get-into-the-story exception, this is an amiable fantasy version of what every young actress hopes her life will be and it goes down as easy as a gin and tonic on a hot summer’s day.

We Play Ourselves by Jen Silverman: (2021) Part of this gentle satire about the agonies and ecstasies of being an artist take place in Los Angeles but the best parts are set in the New York theater world that Silverman, the author of such provocative plays as The Moors and Collective Rage: A Play In 5 Betties, knows well. And it’s great fun trying to figure out the real-life counterparts to her colorful cast of characters.

GOOD OLD MYSTERIES

Bad Publicity by Joanne Sydney Lessner (2012). Isobel Spice, the heroine of this mystery series, is a struggling actress who makes ends meet by taking temp jobs. As luck would have it—and fiction demands—people keep turning up dead wherever she’s assigned and so, in between auditions, she helps suss out who the killer is. There are more red herrings in this book than you’ll find pickled at a kosher deli but Lessner, herself an actress (and, full disclosure, a friend) has a good time tossing in bits of theater lore as well.

The Best Revenge: A Novel of Broadway by Sol Stein (2009). What if Don Corleone had been a show queen? If he had been, he might have ended up in this backstage story about a Broadway producer who is unable to raise money for a show he is certain will be a hit and so turns to some mafia connections for a favor he knows they won't refuse. It’s written in the hardboiled style of classic crime fiction and it’s nice to find a macho novel about Broadway

The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber (2011). Imagine "The Da Vinci Code," only the object of the mysterious treasure hunt isn’t the Holy Grail but a long-lost Shakespeare manuscript. There are the usual hidden clues and improbable coincidences typical of the genre but this is still a page turner even if you don’t know your Mercutio from your Malvolio.

Every Day a Little Death: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Stephen Sondheim edited by Josh Pachter (2025) Who doesn't love a good mystery? And what theater lover doesn't love Sondheim? So how smart to get writers from both worlds—including my BroadwayRadio colleague Michael Portantiere—to contribute short mysteries inspired by the composer's songs. The result: lots of playful mayhem.

The Fury by Alex Michaelides (2024) All of the main characters are connected to London’s West End in this Agatha Christie-style mystery about a murder that occurs when a group of friends and frenemies who have had varying degrees of success in work and love gather for a vacation on a private and isolated Greek island. The narrator is unreliable, the storyline is twisty and both are even more delicious in the audiobook version because it's read by the always deliciously entertaining British actor Alex Jennings.

Little Did I Know by Mitchell Maxwell (2014) It’s Andy Hardy meets “Chinatown” in this noirish novel about a freshly-minted college grad and his pals who open a summer stock theater in a New England town dominated by a powerful rich man, his floozy wife and a mysterious crime. It takes a while for this novel to get going and there’s more noir than suits my taste but the let’s-put-on-a-show parts provide a fun look a at what makes people fall in love with making theater.

One Good Turn: A Novel by Kate Atkinson (2024) The Edinburgh Festival Fringe provides the backdrop for this whodunnit in which Atkinson's retired detective Jackson Brodie is reluctantly pulled in to help solve a string of murders and attempted murders. And since Atkinson never saw a narrative that she didn’t want to fracture much of the fun—and it is great fun—lies in figuring out how all the suspects and their various larcenies fit together.

Macbeth by Jo Nesbø (2017) Filling the slot for this year's entry in the Hogarth Press series of reimaginings of Shakespeare's plays by major contemporary writers is a brooding version of the Bard's tragedy about unbridled ambition. In this update, set in a drug-plagued Scottish town during the 1970s, Macbeth starts his climb when he's the valorous head of the local police department's SWAT team, his wife owns the local casino and the three sisters are drug dealers. All the familiar double crosses are there and most of the famous lines are interpolated into the text but while Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's shortest plays, this version comes in at over 500 pages and some of the additional plot twists struck me as silly. Still, the book is written by the Norwegian crime novelist who has huge followings among both literary readers and thriller lovers and if you count yourself among either of those groups it might be just the thing for you.

Macdeath by Cindy Brown (2015) Part of a comic-mystery series built around an actress who also works part time as a private investigator, this murder mystery is set backstage at a theater company in Phoenix that is doing a production of the Scottish play. Its tongue sits firmly in its cheek and it's just the kind of easy read that's as yummy as a juicy popsicle on a hot summer afternoon.

Night at the Vulcan by Ngaio Marsh (2010). Who doesn’t love a good-old fashioned British murder mystery? This one is set in a London theater run by an Olivier-like actor-manager right after WWII. Shortly after a mysterious ingénue joins the company, an unpopular actor is killed in his dressing room during a performance. Only someone in the company could have done it and just about everyone had motive to do it. Marsh’s Inspector Roderick Alleyn arrives to sort it all out. But there is plenty of romance, rivalry and other backstage shenanigans to keep you riveted before he reveals the culprit.

Payment in Blood by Elizabeth George (2017) What could be more enjoyable than a British country house mystery on a summer afternoon? This one, originally published in 1989, deals with the murder of a playwright who has gone to a remote town in Scotland with a group of top London actors to rehearse a play backed by a leading West End producer. George's intrepid detective is Inspector Thomas Lynley, who also just happens to be an earl. His loyal No. 2 is Barbara Havers, a female sergeant from a working-class background, which makes for all kinds of gender and class conflicts. A modern master of the genre, the American-born George is a first-class writer and she's deft with all the tricks of her trade. The result, if you know how these books work, is totally predictable but it's also totally delectable.

Stagestruck by Peter Lovesey (2011). Few things are more relaxing than curling up with a good old-fashioned British mystery on a summer afternoon. This year’s recommendation is an updated spin on the old familiar tropes: the idiosyncratic detective, the isolated group of suspects—each with a good motive for the murder, and the requisite red herrings are all there but so are cell phones, laptops and social networking. Plus, there's a theater ghost.

The Twist of a Knife by Anthony Horowitz (2023) This delightful murder mystery is set in London’s Theaterland. And it has great fun blurring the line between fiction and fact with Horowitz inserting a same-named version of himself into the narrative as the prime suspect when a mean-spirited theater critic is murdered after publishing a savage review of the play he’s just opened. The only hope the fictional Horowitz has of clearing his name is if he can persuade the detective who is supposed to have co-authored his previous books to track down the actual culprit.

Untimely Death: A Shakespeare in the Catskills Mystery by Elizabeth J. Duncan (2020). Who doesn't get a kick out of a cozy country-house murder mystery? This one, the first in an ongoing series, is set during the rehearsal period at a summer Shakespeare festival and features a British costume mistress, a hunky local cop, some red herrings and a very obvious suspect. The backstage look at what goes into costuming a play is an extra bonus.

Violencia!: A Musical Novel by Bruce Jay Friedman (2009). Friedman usually writes satirical stories about Hollywood but this time he’s turned the spotlight on Broadway and he’s produced a doozy. The plot centers around an ordinary guy who earns his living writing a newsletter about the homicide unit in a police precinct. He is swept into the glamorous world of show business when a no-talent composer decides the newsletter will make a great musical and drafts him to write the book for it. Their collaborators include a high-strung director, an aging and totally miscast star and a suspiciously funded producer. “Violenica,” the musical they cobble together (“Bi Guys Can Be Nice Guys” is one of its big numbers), is a show that only Max Bialystock could love and Friedman has a ball following its development from meet-and-greet dinners in Broadway hangouts to a disastrous out-of-town tryout. The mounting inanities did wear thin for me after a while but the book’s affection for show people kept me reading.

Theater Books for Summer Reading 2026

2026-07-03T09:09:07.930-05:00

Happy Semiquincentennial Weekend! Or at least I hope it is being so for you. This is a stranger summer than usual for me. My building has scheduled work to be done on our terraces and so the time I’ve been able to spend outside in my seasonal happy place has been restricted. Meanwhile, the number of show openings are fewer than they have been in recent summers which has made me a bit restless. And of course, there’s been all the angst leading up to this weekend’s celebration of 250 years of American democracy. In other words, I’ve needed the comfort of good books more than ever, particularly books about theater.

But it also means that I’m even happier than usual to share this annual summer reading list with those of you who love theater and find solace in it too. Half of the 16 books below are novels because I love losing myself in fictional worlds about theater but there are also some great biographies and memoirs, and a few other goodies too. So whatever your reading preference there should be something to keep you company between now and Labor Day. In the meantime, my BroadwayRadio boss James Marino and I are once again discussing some of my choices on a special podcast that you can listen to by clicking here. And now, for the books:

Audition: A Novel by Katie Kitamura A finalist for several prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, this literary brain teaser centers around the unsettling interactions between an actress in a major stage production and a young man who may or may not be her son but the author's central theme is the ways in which all of us are always performing for one another

Bring the House Down: A Novel by Charlotte Runcie Written by an arts journalist, this is a delightful story about two theater critics who find themselves in the midst of a firestorm after one of them pans a show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe but it also fans out into a timely meditation about the role of criticism, a thoughtful debate on cancel culture and a witty satire about the festival itself

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival by Stephen Greenblatt Now to be honest, this biography of the playwright Christopher Marlowe is kind of heavy reading for summer but it's also a fascinating look at the creation of British theater in the 16th century and it makes a convincing argument that it was Marlowe—and not William Shakespeare—who really got the ball rolling

The Dramatic Life of Jonah Penrose: A Novel by Robyn Green This enemies-to-lovers romcom about two super-talented and super hunky British actors who are hot for the same role and for one another is just as steamy and satisfyingly a guilty pleasure as the hit HBO series “Heated Rivalry”

Flashout: A Novel by Alexis Soloski Using the knowledge she’s gained during her two decades as a New York Times critic and culture reporter, Soloski has written a tense literary thriller about a woman forced to look back at some unsolved mysteries that occurred in her youth when she got swept up by a cult-like avantgarde theater troupe in the 1970s

Kids, Wait to You Hear This by Liza Minnelli As the daughter of Judy Garland and the movie director Vincent Minnelli, this iconic star’s life has always played out in public and so you probably already know its highs (the award winning performances, the celebrity friendships) and its lows (the bad marriages, the drug and alcohol abuse) but the same raw vulnerability that has endeared the now 80-year-old to legions of fans will also pull you in here

Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner Interviews with some 150 people—from the 46-year-old composer’s parents and high school girlfriend to such collaborators as the directors Thomas Kail and Jon Chu—has resulted in a biography that is filled with deeply detailed descriptions about the development of works from In the Heights and Hamilton to the upcoming production of The Warriors, all of which adds up to a must-read

The Mother Act: A Novel by Heidi Reimer I actually found it kind of hard to like either of the main characters in this novel about a famous feminist actress and the daughter she abandons for the sake of her career but I also couldn’t resist being drawn in by the important questions it poses about the personal costs of making art and how those choices affect the art that gets made

Never Mind the Happy: Showbiz Stories from a Sore Winner by Marc Shaiman Is there anybody in show business that this versatile music man hasn’t worked with? His memoir is not only stocked with amusingly self-deprecating stories about such hits as Hairspray and misses as Smash (both the TV show and the staged musical) but if you get the audio version you can also hear him break into song, with pals like Christian Borle, Norbert Leo Butz, Megan Hilty and Jennifer Lewis joining in.

The Periodic Table of Broadway Musicals: An Illustrated Guide to 118 Essential Musicals by Andrew Gerle and Joseph Zellnick When you get right down to it, this is just another annotated list of great shows but this married couple, both of whom have deep roots in musical theater, have organized their list by adapting the chart of scientific elements that you used to see on the wall of your high school chemistry classroom and it’s fun to figure out which shows you’d gather together under such categories as 'The Broadway Operas' or 'The Leading Ladies Series'

Public/Private: My Life with Joe Papp at The Public Theater by Gail Merrifield In addition to being the widow of the legendary founder of the Public Theater, Merrifield was the Public’s first dramaturg and served for many years as its Director of New Plays and Musicals Development and while her memoir is clearly a loving tribute to her late husband, its best parts reveal her own significant contributions to the creation of such shows as The Normal Heart and The Mystery of Edwin Drood

She’s a Lamb!: A Novel by Meredith Hambrock If Norma Desmond and Tom Ripley had a child, it would be Jessamyn St. Germain, the main character in this oh-no-she-didn’t thriller about an actress with delusions of grandeur who is willing to do anything to land the starring role of Maria in a regional Canadian production of The Sound of Music

The Show Goes on by Ron Fassler This delicious celebration of the performers who serve as understudies, stand-bys and replacements is filled with great interviews and anecdotes about the people who actually do keep shows going on

Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy by Daniel Okrent Yes; it’s one more book about the revered composer but this one by the longtime culture critic (and my former work colleague) digs deep into the connection between the songs Sondheim wrote and his life, including his notoriously complicated relationship with his mother

Too Soon: A Novel by Betty Shamieh The struggles of three generations of Palestinian women both in their homeland and here in the U.S. are framed by the efforts of the youngest, an American-born theater director, as she tries to stage an avant-garde production of Hamlet in the West Bank

Wise Children: A Novel by Angela Carter People have been telling me for years that I should read this novel about an eccentric theatrical family whose members include legendary showgirls, a popular game show host and the leading Shakespearean actor of his generation; and now I'm telling you that you should read it

This marks the 20th time I've shared one of these lists and I'm going to celebrate that in a separate post but right now below, as always, are the links to my suggestions from previous years:

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

Tuning Into "ll:Girls:ll ll:Chance:ll ll:Music:ll"

2026-05-30T15:24:20.218-05:00

Maybe it’s because I live with a musician but ll:Girls:ll ll:Chance:ll ll:Music:ll, the new play with music by Eisa Davis that opened this week at the Vineyard Theatre, struck a deeper chord with me than have most of the now seemingly endless stream of plays centered around the coming of age of a group of precocious young women.

The four teens in ll:Girls:ll ll:Chance:ll ll:Music:ll (and no, I don’t know how to say the title out loud either) are participants in a summer music program in Berkeley, just as Davis herself was as a kid (click here to read more about the real program).

Here all the girls are gifted but as is customary with fictional quartets ranging from Dorothy and her three pals in “The Wizard of Oz” to Sarah Jessica Parker and her trio of besties in “Sex and the City,” each of these girls represents a different approach to music—and to life.

Fax is a classicist, literally: she’s training to be an opera singer and is determined to perform all the notes exactly as they’re written. Margot is a free-spirited drummer who loves to improvise and has an almost mystical relationship with music. Rile is an ambitious pianist and eager to do whatever it takes to succeed. Meanwhile, Clementine, the most musically ambidextrous of the group who plays a variety of instruments, just enjoys playing.

But because they are caught in that confusing middle ground between girlhood and full womanhood, each of them is also dealing with other issues that include eating disorders, sexual identity, suicidal ideation and in one case the search for a birth father.

Although we don’t see their parents, it's clear that they run the gamut from warm and supportive to careless and even remote, and that all are affecting how their children define themselves. As the play unfolds over an intermission-less 1 hour and 45 minutes, the girls come together in various constellations to help one another, to challenge one another, to undermine one another and ultimately to change one another.

Davis and her director Pam MacKinnon set themselves (and their casting director) a big challenge in finding four actors who could really play their instruments and convincingly play youngsters probably a decade younger than they actually are. And they somehow pulled it off.

The entire cast is fantastic—they particularly shine in an improvised jam session about halfway through the show—but I found myself unable to take my eyes off Hillary Fisher, who has the same kind of gawky charm and clarion voice that has endeared Sutton Foster to so many fans.

The creative team is pitch perfect too. Particularly the gorgeous lighting by Russell H. Champa and the all-important sound design by Fan Zhang.

Not everything works. The girls are dealing with so many issues that too many of them get short shrift and it can seem as though Davis, who is currently working with Lin-Manuel Miranda on the upcoming Warriors which is scheduled to debut next spring, forgot to delete unnecessary storylines as she revised drafts of the script.

Still, the central point remains that one of the hardest lessons we can learn when we're young is that there are many ways to define success. And as I’ve learned from my husband and his musician friends, the trick is finding your own rhythm and then marching—or even stumbling through—to the beat of your own drum.

"The Receptionist" Revival Misses Its Call

2026-05-09T11:52:00.000-05:00

Shows get revived for all kinds of reasons. Maybe they were under appreciated in the past. Or they may have something particularly relevant to say about current events. A director may have come up with an innovative way to tell the old story. Or a producer may believe that a familiar comfort-food title will sell tickets. And sometimes a star wants to take a crack at an iconic role, to give a boost to a favorite one or just to try something different from what they've done before.

As its name suggests, the Second Stage theater company was created to do revivals that would give living American playwrights a second chance to get their work onto a New York stage. And right now 2ndStage, as it likes to bill itself, is having a terrific success with a star-studded revival of Becky Shaw, Gina Gionfriddo’s 2009 Pulitzer finalist centered around a bad blind date and the interlocking network of unhappy people connected to it. I had a terrific time at this dark comedy, liking it even more than I did when I first saw it back in 2008 (click here to read my earlier review).

And it isn't just me who's feeling that way either. This new Becky Shaw has picked up nominations for Best Revival from the Drama Desk, the Outer Critics Circle and the Tony nominators. The New York Drama Critics Circle gave its Best Individual Performance award to the production’s star Alden Ehrenreich.

Meanwhile, I was looking forward to seeing what the company would do with The Receptionist, a cautionary tale by Adam Bock that shook me when I saw it in 2007 with Jayne Houdyshell in the title role and that is now being revived with the two-time Tony winner Katie Finneran. You wouldn’t normally expect to see the easy-going Houdyshell and the high-spirited Finneran going up for the same role but I figured it would be fun to see what different choices such very different actors might make.

The Receptionist, which opened at the Pershing Square Signature Center this week, is set in the kind of brightly-lit and blandly decorated office that might serve as the gathering spot in a TV sitcom. Its titular character, a woman named Beverly, would fit right into that kind of show too. She’s the office busybody, nudge, and self-appointed social activities organizer.

When the play opens her boss is unusually late but that means that Beverly and her co-worker Lorraine have more time to gossip. When a man from the central office arrives, Beverly tries to cover for the boss’ absence. Lorraine flirts with the guy. So far, so sitcom. But then about a third of the way into this tight 80-minute play one of them makes a casual comment about a recent meeting that sends the whole thing careening into the kind of storyline that might turn up on an episode of the sci-fi series “Black Mirror.”

The two things I remember most from seeing The Receptionist in 2007 was how knocked out I was by Houdyshell’s performance and how shaken I was by the growing sense of unease as it became clearer to me what the business of the office was and how easy it can be for nice, likeable people to do really horrible things. Alas, I didn’t feel any of that while watching this revival.

Finneran is a very gifted comedienne and director Sarah Benson gives the actress plenty of room to do what she does best, which means lots of little bits of comic business that drew big laughs from the audience at the performance my theatergoing buddy Bill and I attended (click here to read an interview with the actress). But Finneran seemed a lot less sure of herself as the tone shifted into more serious territory and our view of Beverly becomes more complicated. And that unbalanced the whole evening for me.

The play itself is as relevant today as it was 20 years ago when the recent wounds of 9/11 had the country debating how far the government should go to keep Americans safe, what the definition of safety should be and how much responsibility each of us should bear for the actions taken to secure it. With its emphasis on the humor that admittedly was always there, this production makes it OK to smile and then look away, to pretend that things may not be as bad as they seem. It’s taken the cautionary out of the tale.

Thrilling New Life for "Death of a Salesman"

2026-04-11T07:31:00.000-05:00

One of the things we theater obsessives love to do is argue about which is the greatest American play. I’m a Tennessee Williams stan and so I always try to get A Streetcar Named Desire into the mix. But I’m also the kind of traditionalist who feels that respect must be paid to Eugene O’Neill so I also throw in The Iceman Cometh. At the same time, I do acknowledge the gamechanger that Tony Kushner’s Angels in America has been and so I can make the case for that too. And there’s no way I’m going to let any debate like this go on without offering up something by August Wilson; you can pick your favorite but I’m going with his and mine: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, which is scheduled for a revival later this month.

However, I just saw the Joe Mantello-directed revival of Death of a Salesman that opened this week at the Winter Garden Theatre with Nathan Lane as the doomed Willy Loman and Laurie Metcalf as his long-suffering wife Linda and it left no doubt in my mind that THE Great American Play is this 1949 masterpiece by Arthur Miller.

Salesman is no newcomer to my list of great play contenders. In high school I did a project that had me reading all of Miller's plays and even as a 16-year-old, I was knocked out by this tragedy about a 63-year-old traveling salesman who finds himself at the end of the road, no longer able to close deals or to pay his bills or to pretend that he has prepared the two sons he so loves to make something more of their lives.

Over the years, I've seen a half dozen or so productions of this play. And I did an episode on it for All the Drama, my podcast on Pulitzer Prize-winning plays (click here to listen to that). And yet, Mantello's production has made me appreciate Death of A Salesman in a whole new and more visceral way.

Now I will admit that I was dubious when I first heard that Mantello was taking an approach to the play that would do away with a traditional set. And although I knew that Nathan Lane was a good actor, I had some questions about whether he could pull off this Mount Everest of a role. But in stripping the play down to its most essential elements, they have made it live up to its name. This entire three-hour production is set in the titular character's mind in the moments before his death. And it’s shattering.

It actually helps that Lane, perhaps our greatest living comic actor, plays Willy (click here to read an interview with him). For even though Lane makes his entrance weighed down by large suitcases just like every other actor who's ever played Willy, I sensed the audience at the performance I attended waiting for him to lighten things up with one of his trademark ad libs or at least an ingratiating smirk. But when Lane did neither and instead dug deep into Willy’s sorrows, relentlessly snuffing out all optimism, I also sensed the audience gradually accepting that for many people like Willy the American Dream has drifted out of reach.

Laurie Metcalf stays closer to her brand. Her Linda is tougher than many of the others I’ve seen but Metcalf makes her a fierce guardian for the man she loves even though she knows that he’s not the man either of them wants him to be so she is willing to do anything to hold him up, even when it means putting herself down.

The other two major characters are the couple’s sons Biff, a former high school football star gone to seed; and Happy, the baby brother who has inherited his father’s delusion that affability is the golden ticket to success. They’re not easy roles to calibrate and I’m usually disappointed by one or the other. But here, although I’d assume that the actors playing them had been hired for their TV followings—Christopher Abbott broke out in the Lena Dunham series “Girls” and Ben Ahlers has recently become celebrated as the 'Clock Twink' on “The Gilded Age”—both more than hold their own.

At first I worried that Abbott's Biff seemed too drawn into himself almost to the point of catatonia but that makes all the more powerful his speech in the play’s penultimate scene when he forces the family to face the uncomfortable truths they've been trying to avoid. And Ahlers (click here to read more about him) deftly balances his own innate charisma and Happy's superficial charms in a star-making performance.

Jack O’Brien, a Tony winner for productions ranging from Hairspray to The Coast of Utopia, once said that when everything in a production works, the credit has to go to its director. And so despite all the talent onstage the MVP here is Mantello.

The way the director has staged the scenes of Willy’s past and present— aided by Jack Knowles’ exquisite lighting and Mikaal Sulaiman’s haunting sound design—flows back and forth more clearly than they have in other productions, evoking the free association of memories and thoughts as they rub against one another in Willy's mind.

And Mantello has added subtle contemporary touches by adding anachronistic props such as Willy's young boss's Starbucks-like coffee cup and by casting black actors as the Loman’s next door neighbors, whose successes make Willy even more uncomfortable, each quietly suggesting the timelessness and timeliness of the play.

But when all is said and done, it’s the text that continues to make this show so great. It’s become fashionable to bash Miller (hello John Proctor is the Villain) but even back in the glow of midcentury American might, Miller knew and tried to caution the rest of us about the fragile promises of the American Dream.

There are stories of how middle-aged men who attended the original production sat in their seats and cried long after the curtain came down. During last week’s curtain call, the old guy sitting next to me brushed away tears too. I'm not one who usually cries in the theater but there was moisture in my eyes too.

Giving a Head Pat to "Dog Day Afternoon"

2026-04-04T07:58:00.000-05:00

Just about everyone—and here I mean most of the critics—seems to have something bad to say about Dog Day Afternoon, the new Stephen Adly Guirgis adaptation of the 1975 movie about a bank robbery gone wrong that opened at the August Wilson Theatre this week (click here to listen to a quick summary of complaints about the show). But to my surprise, I had a pretty good time.

Maybe that's a result of expectations. Sidney Lumet’s movie and its iconic performances by Al Pacino and John Cazale have been beloved by generations of moviegoers (including me) and what seems to have most disappointed the people who don’t like the staged version is that it’s different from the film. But if you want an exact replica of the movie maybe you should just stay home and stream the movie.

The story is the same in both versions cause each is based on a real-life crime chronicled in the old Life magazine (click here to read that). Here's the gist of it: a couple of guys named Sonny and Sal enter a Brooklyn bank around closing time on a hot summer day so that they can steal money to pay for the gender reassignment surgery for the person Sonny calls his wife but they end up bungling the robbery and have to hold the bank staff hostage until they can figure out how to get away. So screen and stage share the same narrative but it’s the tone that differs.

Before I saw the show, a friend emailed to say that it was “extremely goofy.” That’s not the adjective I’d choose but Guirgis and his director Rupert Goold do lean into the humor of two losers trying to pull off a simple heist. And a few days before the show opened the New York Times ran a story (click here for it) saying that the producers had temporarily barred Guirgis from the theater after he clashed with one of the show’s main producers.

But anyone who hands scriptwriting duties to Guirgis, the author of such irreverent plays as The Motherfucker With the Hat and Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, should know that they’re going to get a Guirgis show. And that means lots of characters, most of them struggling to make it on the margins of society and nearly all of them constantly wisecracking while doing it.

This Dog Day stars the longtime friends Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, now probably best known for their roles as the dead brother and the tetchy cousin on the TV show “The Bear” (click here to read more about them). But Guirgis doesn’t really believe in star vehicles. His years as the in-house playwright for the LAByrinth Theater Company have instilled in him a love of stories filled with lots of colorful characters and a sense of duty to make sure that each of them gets at least a moment or two to shine. So they get backstories. They get dialogue. They get jokes.

Some of the humor works. It’s fun to see Jessica Hecht who so often plays mousy characters getting to play a mouthy one as the head bank teller who challenges the robbers before eventually bonding with them. But some of the humor doesn’t work. Having the shot bank guard who has been lying on the stage for most of the first act rouse himself to make a lame joke about donuts isn’t worthy of even the dumbest TV sitcom.

On the other hand, Guirgis refuses to play Sonny’s relationship with a trans woman for laughs as the movie did with the straight actor Chris Sarandon flouncing around and crying hysterically in a way that made me uncomfortable even when I first saw it. Here the nonbinary actor Esteban Andres Cruz plays the character as a dry-eyed real person and gets to wisecrack just like everyone else.

Bernthal and Moss-Bachrach make their characters their own too, not ignoring what Pacino and Cazale did with the roles but not imitating them either. Where Pacino’s Sonny was a fireball of angst, Bernthal’s is more boyishly ingratiating, which made it easier to understand why the hostages would eventually become so protective of him. John Ortiz, a frequent Guirgis collaborator, is also winning as the unflappable detective who negotiates with Sonny.

Now I’m not trying to change anyone's mind about the show but I am saying that if you're curious about the story or want to see the two guys from “The Bear” or simply want an entertaining evening out, you might find this Dog to have just enough bite.

Chilly Thoughts on "Cold War Choir Practice"

2026-03-14T06:21:00.000-05:00

Most of the reviews for Cold War Choir Practice devote most of their word count to laying out its multi-pronged plot which includes Soviet spies, former Black Panthers, Regan-era conservatives, the dangers of wellness cults, the joys of roller skating and the comforts of choral singing. I’m going to skip all that. In part because I’m still trying to figure out how all those things hang together—and how I feel about this show, which opened this week at MCC Theater after a brief run in Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival last year.

I should be an ideal candidate for this play because when I was in grade school I—like its 10-year-old main character Meek—was a little back girl who thought I could resolve the major geopolitical conflict of the day. I wrote a letter to then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev telling him that I thought both American kids and Russian kids wanted peace between our two countries so that we could grow up without the fear that they were going to bomb one another—and us—into oblivion. My mother, probably worried about McCarthyism-like repercussions, made me tear up the letter.

But nowadays there seems to be a growing interest in that midcentury period in which young people in the U.S. and Russia were trying to sort out the future. The Paul Thomas Anderson film “One Battle After Another,” a frontrunner to win the Best Picture Oscar this weekend, looks back affectionately at American radicals from the '60s like the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. Lauren Yee’s Mother Russia, which is currently running at the Signature Center, imagines what might have happened to young Russians when the Cold War ended. Meanwhile Choir Practice wrestles with the side effects of all those changes.

Each of these fictional representations wraps itself in absurdist humor and I’m not sure what to make of that or what to take away from them in our current not-much-to-laugh-about times. Choir Practice’s playwright Ro Reddick seems to flirt with the idea that whatever happens, the best that regular folks can hope for is to negotiate some wiggle room for their loved ones and to find something to watch on TV. Which strikes me as cold comfort.

That’s not to say that there aren’t things to enjoy in Reddick’s play, which just won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for this year’s best play by a female identifying playwright (click here to read an interview with her). Or that there aren’t similar pleasures to be found in the supple staging by Knud Adams.

Additionally, as the title hints, there are lots of songs in this show, which bills itself as a play with music. And all of them are composed by Reddick. They’re tuneful, clever and sprightly performed largely by a trio headed by the always amusing Grace McLean.

The rest of the cast is good too, particularly Alana Raquel Bowers, as convincing as an adult can be as Meek; Will Cobbs as her passionate ex-Panther dad who runs the neighborhood skating rink; Lizan Mitchell, having a great time as Meek’s no-nonsense granny; and Crystal Finn, a hoot as the zombied-out white wife of Meek’s conservative uncle. Most of their actions are over-the-top cartoonish but the actors commit to them as though they’re performing Chekhov.

Like the movie “One Battle After Another,” Choir Practice ends with a sliver of hope that the next generation really will figure out a way to save the world. Fingers crossed that they do.

Real Families Really Matter in “The Reservoir” and “You Got Older”

2026-02-28T08:19:00.000-05:00

Ever since Sophocles put the fall of the House of Oedipus onstage, the theatrical canon has been chock-a-block with unhappy families. And that makes sense because they make for good drama. But despite the failings they may have, few real families are so totally dysfunctional and so I found it refreshing to see two recent shows centering their stories around the kinds of supportive—even if flawed—families that most of have or are struggling to create.

Josh, the central character in The Reservoir, a new dramedy by the young playwright Jake Brasch that’s now playing at the Atlantic Theater Company's Linda Gross Theater, is a mess. Even though he’s only 20, Josh has been in and out of rehab for years and was recently kicked out of NYU. When the play opens, he’s just coming out of a bender and, as he explains to the audience, he has no memory of how he’s ended up sprawled alongside the titular waterway back in his hometown of Denver.

His mom is so fed up with Josh that she requires him to take a Breathalyzer test before she’ll let him into the house. So Josh turns to his grandparents for emotional support. But they’re by no means perfect. His sweet cookie-baking grandmother Irene is an evangelical who’s uneasy with the fact that Josh is gay; and her husband Hank is trying to cope with Irene’s descent into dementia by downing beers and watching junk TV.

On the other side are Josh’s Jewish grandfather Shrimpy, who is working hard to fend off the ravages of aging by acting younger than he is, including preparing for a second bar mitzvah. And finishing up the quartet is Shrimpy’s long divorced wife Bev, a retired career woman who takes pride in being the cool grandparent but who is guarding some secrets of her own. What unites all four is their love for Josh and their desire to help him stay sober.

Now I know much of this sounds grim but Brasch, aided by Shelley Butler’s simple but buoyant staging, interlaces the serious themes of alcoholism and dementia with humor that is alternately heartwarming and laugh-out-loud funny.

It would have been easy for the grandparents to disappear into old-people clichés as so often happens but here they are played by some of the best older actors in the business, with Mary Beth Peil as Irene, Peter Maloney as Hank, Chip Zien as Shrimpy and most especially Caroline Aaron as Bev, all investing their characters with a precise admixture of fortitude and vulnerability, Meanwhile, Heidi Armbruster and Matthew Saldívar are just as good in a variety of smaller supporting roles.

But this is Josh’s play and Noah Galvin channels all of his own affability into portraying a guy who knows that he can get by on his charm but who is also frightened that he may have little more than that to offer. The ending isn’t entirely happy but there’s great satisfaction in watching as both Josh and his grandparents benefit from leaning on and propping up one another.

Mae, the main character in the revival of Clare Barron’s You Got Older, which opened this week at the Cherry Lane Theatre, goes through a similar experience. After her life crumbles—a bad affair results in her losing her married boyfriend, her job at a law firm and her apartment—Mae also finds herself returning home, in this case to Washington State. And she too finds an ailing relative, her widowed father who has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer.

I didn’t see the Obie-winning original production of this play that ran at HERE Arts Center in 2014 and helped to establish Barron as an exciting and distinctive voice in the American theater but the unique mix of You Got Older’s dark humor and genuine open-heartedness make clear what that initial fuss was all about.

In her 30s, Mae is older than The Reservoir’s Josh and she isn’t as troubled as he is but she’s still struggling to move ahead. And her futile coping mechanisms from making up erotic S&M fantasies—which play out on stage—to hooking up with an oddball former schoolmate she barely remembers aren’t working.

Instead what sustains her are the laconic conversations she has with her dad (here played by the always terrific Peter Friedman) and the amusingly banal exchanges traded with her three siblings as they all gather around their father’s hospital bed.

Alia Shawkat’s performance as Mae didn't grab me at first (click here to read more about the actor who is making her stage debut in this play) but the more I thought about it and about Anne Kauffman’s overall shrewd direction the more their deadpan approach seemed to accurately and viscerally evoke the numbness that so often creeps in when life beats us up.

I suspect that what makes The Reservoir and You Got Older work so well is that their playwrights are drawing directly from their own life experiences. In their Playbill bio, Brasch, who is in recovery, dedicates the play to their “Grandma B.” and in earlier interviews, Barron has said she wrote her play while going through a medical crisis with her own dad. Both their plays are bearing testament to the existence of functional families—onstage and off—and the power of that unconditional love.

The Infectious Qualities of "Bug"

2026-01-17T08:01:00.000-05:00

Maybe it’s the current dystopic state of the world but I had a hard time with Bug, the revival of Tracy Letts’ 1996 play that opened this month at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. It tracks one couple’s descent into the morass of conspiracy theories and the unease of watching that spool out has stayed with me.

Letts has said he was inspired to write the play after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. It was his effort to figure out what might cause people like the once-patriotic soldier Timothy McVeigh to become so insanely alienated that he would blow up a federal office building, killing 167 people, including 19 kids whose parents had left them in what they thought would be the safety of the building's first-floor day care center.

Letts focused his narrative on a paranoid soldier named Peter who hooks up with a severely depressed waitress named Agnes and, taking advantage of her insecurities, draws her into his delusions, especially those about how the government monitors people by infesting them with mind-controlling insects.

So the deceptively simple title can be interpreted to mean the bugs that Peter swears he sees all over the low-rent motel room they share, the surveillance “bugging” that he imagines is happening or the fact that he’s simply bugged-out crazy.

Bug originally opened in London but had an off-Broadway run at the Barrow Street Theatre in 2004 and then was made into a movie in 2006. I didn’t see any of those productions but even so I knew that all three featured a breakout performance by Michael Shannon, who brought his trademark hyper intensity to the role of Peter.

The focus in this latest revival has switched to Agnes, who is played by Carrie Coon, now a big-name TV star thanks to “The Gilded Age” and “The White Lotus” but who is also a formidable stage actor who happens to be the playwright’s wife (click here to read more about how they collaborate).

That shift works. Particularly right now. The text suggests that Peter is clinically deranged but Agnes is just a sad person, desperate to make sense of a world that seems to have spun out of her control. In other words, she’s like so many of us.

Both Coon and Namir Smallwood, who makes his Peter a more slowly-ticking time bomb than I’ve read Shannon’s was, are fine actors—both are members of Chicago's famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company—and they've clearly given a lot of thought to their roles but I found myself observing how well they were crafting their performances rather than being moved by them.

I don’t know why that is. It could be because David Cromer, usually a master orchestrator of intimate drama, has been stretched too thin by directing some half-dozen shows over the past year and so didn’t have time to calibrate this one enough as he moved it to Broadway after its pandemic-era run at Steppenwolf.

Or maybe it’s because the fringe fanaticism that Bug explores has become so much more mainstream than it was 30 years ago that watching it play out onstage is just too close for comfort.

People on both the right and the left now believe all kinds of things—Obama is a Muslim plant! Trump is a Russian plant!—and are so totally unabashed about spreading their beliefs that I’m not sure how much longer I can stand to stay on Facebook.

However the one thing I don’t doubt is how prescient Letts was about how easy it is for people—average people—to fall into those sinkholes. We’re no longer shaking our heads about how people can be so incredulous; we’re nodding them because we see those people all around us.

Such farsightedness is what we need from good theater. Plays like Bug and the current revival of Jordan Harrison’s 2014 play Marjorie Prime, which meditates on the growing presence of AI—as well as Harrison's similarly-themed The Antiquities, which Cromer also directed last year— help us to see not only where we are but where we might be headed.

Of course what we do with that knowledge is up to us no matter how uncomfortable the reality of it may make us.

10 Shows That Meant the Most to Me in 2025

2026-01-03T08:15:00.000-05:00

As usual, I’m late with a list of the shows I most enjoyed in 2025 but I’m going to share it anyway and since I am late, I’m also going to cut right to the chase. There were musicals I liked a lot (Beau, Floyd Collins, Mexodus, Operation Mincemeat, Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York) and revivals that gave me a whole new appreciation for shows I’d seen in the past (The Brothers Size, Eurydice, Gruesome Playground Injuries, Marjorie Prime, The Weir) but my Top 10 for last year are all original plays because I love discovering new work and each of the following ones, listed alphabetically, brilliantly showed me something worth knowing about the way we live now.

ANGRY ALAN @ Studio Seaview: British playwright Penelope Skinner’s sly satire chronicles one middle-aged white guy’s descent into the most toxic and self-pitying parts of the manosphere and how its insistence that men are victims of society can unleash destructive rage, a message amplified by a terrific performance from the usually menschy John Krasinski, driving home the point that almost anyone can be pulled into that cesspool.

THE ANTIQUITIES @ Playwrights Horizons: Set in a museum sometime in the late 22nd century, this fascinating cautionary tale by Jordan Harrison (also the author of the similarly thought-provoking Marjorie Prime) imagines a future in which AI has triumphed and humans exist only as figures in diorama-style exhibits detailing how they surrendered control to the inanimate but increasingly powerful entities they hubristically created

CAROLINE @ MCC Theater: The title character is a young trans girl (beautifully played by the child actor River Lipe-Smith) but the sticking point in Preston Max Allen’s quietly powerful domestic drama isn’t her gender identity but the contrasting—although equally well-meaning-—views of her mother and grandmother about what it means to be a good and supportive parent

GRANGEVILLE and LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD @ Signature Theatre and Broadway’s Booth Theatre: OK, I’m cheating by listing two entries here but Samuel D. Hunter is one of my favorite playwrights and both of the works he offered this past year—the first about two estranged brothers trying to reconnect and the second about a strained reunion between a reclusive aunt and her disaffected nephew—continue Hunter’s heartfelt meditations on the ability to forgive past sins, although it’s hard for me to forgive the poor ticket sales that caused Little Bear to end its limited run early

THE HONEY TRAP @ the Irish Rep: There have been scores of books, movies and plays about the violent period from the 1960s through the 1990s when Protestants and Catholics clashed in Northern Ireland, but Leo McGann has set his tense psychological thriller years later and focused it on a cat-and-mouse game between a former British solider and a former IRA operative struggling to deal with the repercussions of the fateful decisions each made back during that time aptly named The Troubles

JOHN PROCTOR IS THE VILLAIN @ Broadway’s Booth Theatre: Both a literary critique of one of the most popular plays in the midcentury canon and a social commentary on the gender politics of the #MeToo era, Kimberly Belflower’s sensational play fired up a new generation of theatergoers as it showcased a group of high school students wrestling with the ways in which the patriarchal hero in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible treated women and with what to do with the similarly patronizing men in their own lives

MEET THE CARDOZIANS, a Second Stage production @ the Signature Center: Inspired in part by a 1925 Supreme Court decision, Talene Monahon’s dramedy about the struggles of Armenian-Americans to balance the burdens and privileges of racial identity in this country during two very different time periods manages to make serious points about contemporary politics without being overly didactic and while being laugh-out-loud funny

OEDIPUS @ Broadway’s Studio 54: You may be wondering why I didn't include Sophocles’ 2000-year old tragedy, which has been done 10 times before on Broadway, in the group of revivals I liked but the smart, contemporary language of director Robert Icke’s adaptation and its updated setting to the election eve for a modern-day change-style politician transformed this revisal into an enthralling political thriller. And the performances by Mark Strong and Lesley Manville were so stunningly good that this is hands-down my favorite of the 150+ shows I saw this past year

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY @ Broadway’s Music Box Theatre: I'm not usually a big fan of one-person shows or of lots of video screens onstage but Kip Williams' witty adaptation of the 1890 Oscar Wilde novel about a man who trades his soul in exchange for a life of endless beauty and sensual pleasures, the bravura performance by Sarah Snook who played all 26 characters in the production and the you’ve-got-to-see-it to-believe-it video wizardry by David Bergman had me swooning with delight

WELL, I’LL LET YOU GO @ The Space at Irondale: First-time playwright Bubba Weiler’s small play about a widow wrestling with the loss of her husband and his death’s effect on their small Middle American community was staged in a church in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn far away from Broadway but it punched way above its weight, in no small part due to the sensitive direction of David Cromer protégé Jack Serio and performances by a cast of some of the top actors in the city, including Michael Chernus, Constance Schulman and an incandescent Quincy Tyler Bernstine

Happy New Year!

2026-01-01T08:21:00.002-05:00

Wishing You All the Merriest Christmas...

2025-12-25T16:53:00.000-05:00

...from me and some of our mutual friends:

Challenging Power Plays in "The Burning Cauldon of Fiery Fire" and "Practice"

2025-12-13T11:17:00.000-05:00

Getting others to see the world in a certain way and then convincing them to do almost anything to preserve that point of view requires a toolbox of skills that include charisma and a fervent belief that one's way is the only right way. And as two recent plays demonstrate the fallout from that dynamic can be destructive—and it can happen anywhere: in a social community, a theater company or maybe even a country.

Thomas, the patriarchal leader of a small northern California commune is willing to go to great lengths to defend the way of life in the sanctuary he’s created with a group of wounded souls in Anne Washburn’s The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, which closed at the Vineyard Theatre last weekend.

One of the group’s survivors, who grew up in that community and who serves as this memory play’s narrator, recalls how its peaceful but fragile existence was disrupted by the arrival of two outsiders and the death—perhaps a suicide, perhaps a murder—of one of them. But although this whodunnit eventually turned into a somewhat confusing what-was-that, the thing that remained clear was how an ideology, no matter how initially benign, can turn ugly.

Washburn and her director Steve Cosson refused to answer other questions—why the basement door is padlocked, how people just eking out a living manage to buy elaborate costumes for the pageant staged by the commune’s children—but Burning Cauldron dared its audiences to think about how much of one’s self an individual should be willing to give up for what someone else dictates to be the peace and security of the larger community.

Practice, Nazareth Hassan’s cautionary tale which has been extended at Playwrights Horizons through Dec. 19, is more direct about the tyranny it wants to challenge: it’s theater itself. Or, as Hassan explains in his program notes, it's the harmful ways in which he believes some gatekeepers in the theater world operate.

His play centers around the eccentric Asa Leon, a MacArthur genius grant winner who heads up an avantgarde theater company that places great demands—physical, spiritual and emotional—on its members as they devise a new performance piece.

These selected performers, who are introduced as each of them puts their distinctive spin on the same audition speech, are required to live together and to bare their souls to one another under Asa’s imperious commands. Secrets are revealed, and exploited. Demands, sexual and otherwise, are made. People are intentionally pushed to their limits. Only one opts out.

Practice places demands on the audience too. The first act runs for two hours and is filled with repetitive acting exercises, including running in place almost to the point of exhaustion (when one character threw up, I wasn’t sure at first if that was part of the script or a real reaction). There are also multiple instances in which director Keenan Tyler Oliphant has the troupe members set a table, eat a meal, clear the table and then moments later do the same thing all over again.

The shorter second act is devoted to the actual performance piece and to Asa’s spoken manifesto about the kind of theater he believes in. The question of whether he is indeed a genius, a sadistic cult leader or just a manipulative fraud is left up to the audience. As is the question of how much of one’s self should be sacrificed for the sake of art. Or for the sake of anything else for that matter.

I found both of these shows to be well acted and obviously thought-provoking. But I can't really say I fully enjoyed either because they made me feel so uncomfortable. But I suspect that may have been exactly what they intended.

Thankful Thoughts for This Thanksgiving

2025-11-27T11:25:00.001-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving!

It’s been a crazy month. An avalanche of shows have been opening both on and off Broadway. I’ve seen 20 of them over the past four weeks—some good, some just OK, a few actually great and, to be honest, at least one that was dreadful. But I’ve been so busy seeing them (and trying to tend to the other things in my life, including squeezing in a birthday celebration for my husband K who has very patiently put up with all this theatergoing) that I haven't had the chance to write here as much as I would have liked.

However I did manage to share some thoughts about a half dozen shows on Broadway & Me Quickies, my collection of short reviews that I hope give a sense of what’s good and not so good about the productions I’ve seen for folks who may not have time to get through longer reviews (you can check those quickies out by clicking here).

And last Sunday, I joined my BroadwayRadio pals James Marino, Peter Filichia and Michael Portantiere on the “This Week on Broadway” podcast to talk about a few of the season’s big shows, including Chess, Oedipus and the Tom Hanks’ play This World of Tomorrow (you can hear all of that by clicking here).

Finally, I do try to keep up with the news about what’s going on in the theatrical world and to share it in my Flipboard magazine, which you can read by clicking here. And I've created a Substack archive of all the episodes of "All the Drama," my podcast on Pulitzer Prize-winning plays and musicals (I’m really excited about the one for December that's going to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Hamilton and hope you’ll check that out)

So although I’m a bit tired—and despite the ongoing challenges in the world—I’ve a lot to be thankful for, including those of you who read this blog and listen to my podcasts. And I’m hoping that your holiday weekend is filled with loved ones, good food and drink, lots of laughter and maybe some theatergoing too.

"Kyoto" is a Call to Action on Climate Change

2025-11-08T08:35:00.000-05:00

The only thing small about Kyoto, the latest import from Britain that opened this week at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse theater, is its one-word title. Everything else is outsized: the show runs nearly three hours, it features a cast of 14, it has two authors (Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson) and two directors (Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin). And its subject is the 10-year struggle to get the nations of the world to come together on a plan to address the outsized issue of climate change. Those negotiations resulted in the titular Kyoto Protocol that was finally adopted in 1997 but which the U.S. Congress still has yet to ratify.

Now negotiations surrounding an international treaty would hardly seem to be compelling theater. And a lot of complicated information about climate science and bureaucratic procedures does get tossed around. Yet I found this to be a fascinating evening of theater.

Murphy and Robertson, who a few years ago dramatized the international immigrant crisis with their much-acclaimed immersive piece The Jungle, have centered this story around Don Pearlman, the real-life American lawyer who became an oil industry lobbyist and the chief mastermind when it came to thwarting any efforts to address climate change (click here to read more about him).

In the tradition of Shakespeare’s Richard III, Pearlman serves as the show’s narrator and its primary villain. The American actor Stephen Kunken portrayed Pearlman when this production played to sold-out audiences in London and he’s come home with it, offering the kind of seductively wily performance that makes you root for his character even though you know you shouldn’t.

Most of the production takes a Brechtian approach to telling Pearlman’s story. Characters don’t have names but are identified by the countries they represent at the series of conferences held over the years to address the climate problem.

And under Daldry and Martin's energizing direction both the delegates’ language and their movements are often highly stylized. Believe it or not, one of the most amusing scenes in the play is one in which the delegates debate grammar.

Video projections, aided by Aideen Malone's excellent lighting, help to establish the location of each meeting and provide context about what’s going on in the world at the time. The audience is pulled into playing a role too. When you enter the theater, you’re handed a badge that identifies you are as one of the groups attending the proceedings. I was an NGO.

A few audience members are also seated at the big round table that is scenic designer Miriam Buether’s main set piece. At times they’re instructed to take an even more active part in what’s going on. The ones at my performance looked to be having a great time.

The actual actors also hand up a few cameo appearances of recognizable personalities who turn up at the various conferences: the German chancellor Angela Merkel, the film director Werner Herzog and the then-U.S. vice president Al Gore.

But besides Pearlman the only characters we really get to know are Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, the amiable Argentinian diplomat who chairs the Kyoto meeting (Jorge Bosch reprises his Olivier-nominated performance) and Pearlman’s wife Shirley, who becomes increasingly horrified as she learns how far her husband will go to undermine any and all attempts to cut back on the damaging use of oil and other fossil fuels.

Played in a finely understated performance by Natalie Gold, Shirley Pearlman serves as a stand-in for those of us who are too often willing to look the other way from the climate threat for the sake of personal convenience and she's a reminder that we should be paying better attention if we have any interest in keeping the planet habitable for future generations.

And here's where I should confess that I have a weak spot for big one-word, state-of-the-world plays like Oslo, Patriots, Ink and my personal favorite Enron, which ran for just 16 performances back in 2010. Even when flawed, these shows make me reckon with my own role in the world, which is what I think good theater should do.

Still reviews for Kyoto have been mixed and the response from the audience the night I saw the show was muted. Which is ironic because that kind of apathy is the point of the play.

Going Solo: "The Least Problematic Woman in the World," "Other" and "Did You Eat?

2025-11-01T07:33:00.000-05:00

One-person shows are popping up everywhere. And it makes sense that they should. They’re comparatively cheap to put on since by definitiion there’s only one performer to pay and the costume and set—when there is a set—are usually simple, all of which matter in this high-cost theatrical environment. Plus as United Solo, the theater festival currently running at Theatre Row through Nov. 23, demonstrates, these shows come in lots of different forms: stand-up routines, formal recitations, full narratives in which the one actor plays many characters and, increasingly, confessional pieces in which the performer shares past trauma.

The latter seem to be the one breaking out of the festival circuit and I recently saw three of those autobiographical works in well-established off-Broadway venues. As I watched those shows, I found myself wondering why the performers were telling me such intimate things, whether it was difficult for them to relive those painful experiences night after night and, finally, why I should care about any of it. Yet each audience was full and many people seemed moved by what they were seeing. You may be too so here’s a sneak peek at each of them:

The show: The Least Problematic Woman in the World @ the Lucille Lortel Theatre

The performer: The social media personality Dylan Mulvaney, who chronicled her gender transition on TikTok

What she shares: The 28-year-old recounts her full life as a trans woman, from her childhood days desperately wishing she could dress as a girl right up through the controversy when MAGA conservatives threatened to boycott Bud Light after the beer brand featured Mulvaney in a social media promotion. Her show works because Mulvaney is not only naturally engaging but also a trained musical-comedy performer who appeared in The Book of Mormon and she uses all of her skills to give her current audience a good time so that even before the show starts, she wanders around in an angel-winged costume to take selfies with fans. Tim Jackson has directed the show smartly and both the set (primarily a pink Barbie’s Dream House interior) and her costumes are just tacky enough to fit in with the sweetly campy vibe. Plus there are nifty original songs by such well known composers as Ingrid Michaelson and Six creators Toby Marlow & Lucy Moss.

Did I care: Yeah. Although with an official 75 minute run time—that can stretch past 90—the show is too long but trans people are under serious threat right now and having someone like Mulvaney standing centerstage and proudly telling her story is meaningful.

The show: Other @ Greenwich House Theatre

The performer: Tony winner Ari’el Stachel, who won a supporting actor award for his performance in The Band’s Visit

What he shares: Shame is the motivating factor driving Stachel’s show. It charts his struggle with severe anxiety, which he traces all the way back to when he was diagnosed at just five with obsessive-compulsive disorder and which now manifests itself in panic attacks that can cause sweat to literally drip off the actor whenever he’s feeling stressed, including when he's onstage (many hankies were soaked as he blotted off the perspiration at the performance I attended). But the show is also fueled by the lifelong uneasiness and shame Stachel has felt about his racial identity as the son of a light-skinned Ashkenazi Jewish-American mother and a darker-skinned Yemenite Jewish father who bore a resemblance to Osama bin Laden, the latter a real problem in the wake of 9/11 when schoolmates started calling young Ari a terrorist. And so over the years, Stachel has claimed at various times to be white or black and he has faced push back when he has been cast in roles that others considered to be rightfully theirs. This show, under the tight direction of Tony Taccone, is his declaration that he is no longer ashamed of who he is or how he presents and is now on his way to making peace with himself.

Did I care: Kind of. I wish Stachel had settled on one of his issues and really dug deep into it. Instead, right now the show seems more like a therapy session than a performance piece. And to my shame, I have to confess that I was put off by all the visible sweating.

The show: Did You Eat?

The performer: Korean-American actor and writer Zoë Kim

What she shares: Emotional hunger and how to survive an abusive childhood are the subject of this autobiographical piece by Kim who grew up in Korea as the only child of parents who desperately wanted a son. And then when she migrated to the U.S. to attend school in her teens, she continued to be plagued by the obligations and oppression of her home culture that prized male children. Director Chris Yejin and choreographer Iris McCloughan have put together a production that uses English, Korean (subtitles are projected on screens) and stylized movement to tell Kim’s often harrowing story, which includes a kidnapping and a murder attempt.

Did I care: Not enough. Kim is a lovely performer but her story seems too specific to her and at the same time she skips over too many important plot points (how did she survive so much physical abuse without people noticing? how did she meet the man who helped her to heal?) The result is that I spent more time wondering how things could have happened than I spent truly feeling for what had been done to her.

Wrestling with the Head Trips of "And Then We Were No More" and "This Much I Know"

2025-10-04T08:50:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while I see a show that is filled with smart ideas, and that is interestingly directed and well-performed and yet still leaves me cold. Over the past week or so I saw two shows like that: the new play And Then We Were No More, which is scheduled to run at La MaMa through Nov. 2; and a remounted production of the 2023 drama This Much I Know, which opened this week at 59E59 Theaters. I suppose they were so disappointing to me because I had so been looking forward to seeing both of them.

And Then We Were No More is a cautionary tale about a future in which everyone seems to have given up all their rights in exchange for being kept safe, which in this case means that people who commit crimes can be tortured and then executed by a pneumatic device that, after its victims are dressed in weird outfits, vaporizes them out of existence.

This dystopian view of where we might be headed comes with an impressive pedigree: it’s written by the actor Tim Blake Nelson who so loves exploring ethical and philosophical issues that he actually wrote a whole play about Socrates and it’s directed by Mark Wing-Davey who has frequently collaborated with the always thought-proving playwright Caryl Churchill. But I wanted to see this show because it stars Elizabeth Marvel, an actor whose performances consistently live up to her surname.

And once again Marvel delivers, this time as a lawyer assigned to represent a young woman who has committed a heinous crime. The lawyer knows that verdicts are pre-determined but she is so moved by her client (portrayed with aching vulnerability by recent NYU grad Elizabeth Yeoman) that she attempts to make the case for a more just judicial system. Meanwhile, Scott Shepherd’s government official argues that the needs of the greater society should outweigh those of the individual.

It's important stuff. But here it’s never really turned into dramatic stuff. And over the course of the two plus hours of back and forth debate I found my mind wandering to where my theatergoing buddy Bill and I might eat after the show and whether it might be warm enough for us to eat outside. None of which is what I think a play with such heady prentions intended me to be thinking about.

I didn’t fare much better with This Much I Know either. I’d want to see this one because it’s written by Jonathan Spector whose Tony-winning play Eureka Day not only found a way to look at both sides of the intense debate over vaccination requirements for school kids but also managed to do that in an engaging—and sometimes even amusing—way.

But This Much I Know is way more ambitious and far less accessible. Inspired by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s bestselling book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” it’s a heady—and very talky—meditation on why people make the decisions they do and the moral implications that can accompany those choices.

And Spector amps ups the complexities even more by exploring his theme through three storylines centered on different protagonists and set in different time periods: a present-day psychology professor who is trying to figure out why his wife recently left him, the college-aged son of a leading white supremacist who is trying to separate himself from his father’s beliefs and the young Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin who in 1967 would defect to the west.

The three actors who play these roles—Firdous Bamji, Ethan J. Miller and Dani Stoller—also portray all the other people who interact with the main characters and under the nimble direction of Hayley Finn, they’re terrific as they switch from one to another simply by changing accents, gestures and maybe a hat or two. But I found it hard to care about any of them as the narrative hopped around from one storyline to the next and I grew tired of trying to figure out how each of those narratives connected to the other two.

And yet, I’m glad I saw both plays because they made me think really seriously about why I go to theater and what I’m looking for when the lights go down. It turns out that the priority for me is a visceral experience rather than a purely intellectual one.

Now, I still like Big Idea shows. But watching these two made me realize that a show also needs to make me feel something. In other words to work for me, it needs to appeal to my heart as well as my head. And alas, neither of these did that.

"Mexodus": a Hip Mix of Hip-Hop and History

2025-09-27T07:17:00.000-05:00

Theater lovers have been celebrating the 10th anniversary of Hamilton this year, and well we should. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical about the Founding Fathers made seeing musicals cool again, and judging by all the young people now mobbing stage doors that perception is still holding strong.

At the same time Hamilton also made hip-hop a viable sound for the musical and so I thought rap lyrics and hip-hop beats would infiltrate subsequent musicals the way that jazz did in the 1920s after Shuffle Along or rock did a half century later after Hair. But, except for a novelty song here or there, that hasn’t happened.

So it was a delight for me to discover the terrifically entertaining new show Mexodus that is now scheduled to run through Oct. 18 at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre, where it is billing itself as “a two-person live-looped new musical.”

The two persons are Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson, who wrote the show, are its only performers and its sole musicians (click here to read more about them). Although their show's impressive aural achievement owes a huge debt to the looping technique constructed by Mikhail Fiksel, the audio wiz behind the sound design for Dana H. that helped Deidre O’Connell lip sync her way to a Tony back in 2022.

The story Mexodus tells is as fresh as its format. It centers around the little-known history of the underground railroad's southern route that allowed slaves to escape into Mexico, which abolished slavery in 1829, more than three decades before Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation.

This version of that history, inspired by Robinson’s own family lore, focuses on the relationship between a black man named Henry who flees across the Rio Grande after accidentally killing the white man who owned him; and a Mexican man named Carlos, a former army medic whose bitterness about the way the U.S. confiscated so much of his country's land after the Mexican-American War makes him willing to take the risk of providing a refuge for Henry.

In turn, Henry shares his farming know-how with Carlos, who's been having trouble bringing in his crops. The subtext about the way black and brown people can mutually benefit by uniting against "The Man" in the present day is clearly intentional.

Now these are admittedly heavy topics for a feel-good show (and this show is that) but Robinson, tall and almost majestic, and Quijada, more compact and mischievous, are equally engaging performers and they’ve laced their tale with the kind of sly humor and strategic fourth-wall breaking that allow them to sidestep pedantry. They’re also wonderfully versatile musicians.

Between them, they play piano, drums, double bass, guitar, harmonica, accordion, trumpet and a washer board. The looping technique allows them to record live a few phrases or riffs on one of those instruments and then play it back as they overlay another track and another until a satisfying melody has been created.

Plus they sing. Really well. And the resulting songs, which include blues ballads, canciónes rancheras and straight-ahead rap, are shoulder-bouncing good. They also serve the story, additional proof, if still needed, that this kind of music can bring a contemporary vitality to the standard musical vocabulary.

The entire creative team—including director and costume designer David Mendizábal, choreographer Tony Thomas, lighting designer Mextly Couzin, projection designer Johnny Moreno and scenic designer Riw Rakkulchon who has devised all sorts of clever places for the instruments to be stored when they’re not being played—is just as inventive.

Throughout the show Quijada shifts back and forth between English and Spanish, with a little Spanglish thrown in for good measure. But there’s never a need for translation. The whole thing is simplemente fantástico.

The 4 Shows I Most Want to See in Fall 2025

2025-09-13T06:51:00.001-05:00

Once again I seem to be late to the party. Other bloggers, critics and influencers have been putting out lists of the things they most want to see in this new theater season since mid-August. And I can understand why they've been so eager to share their thoughts because this is shaping up to be the most promising fall season in years. There is so much I want to see but I’m limiting this list to just four shows, more or less. It wasn’t easy but here goes:

BROADWAY PLAY: OEPDIPUS @ the Roundabout Theatre’s Studio 54: This was the easiest choice for me because this is the single show I’m most looking forward to seeing this fall. Why? Well, I’m intrigued whenever there’s a major production of one of the great Greek plays because, unlike Shakespeare or Chekhov, they don’t get done a lot and almost never on Broadway; I just checked and over the last 80 years, there have been five productions of Oedipus that ran for a combined 32 performances (that was not a typo; really just 32 performances). I’m betting that director Robert Ickes’ update of Sophocles' tragedy about—two millennia spoiler alert—a man who unknowingly murders his father and marries his own mother will run longer. The production drew raves when it played in London and won the Olivier Award for Best Revival of a Play. But what has me most stoked is that Oedipus is being played by Mark Strong and his mother Jocasta by the can-do-for-me-no-wrong Lesley Manville, finally making her Broadway debut.

Runner-Up: Little Bear Ridge Road Because this play about a gay man and his aunt—played by Laurie Metcalf—sheltering togetherr through the Covid shut-down is the Broadway debut of playwright Samuel D. Hunter, who has seldom let me down.

BROADWAY MUSICAL: THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES @ the St. James Theatre: Who wouldn’t want to see the first new musical that Stephen Schwartz has brought to Broadway since Wicked back in 2003, especially since he and his original Glinda, Kristin Chenoweth, have teamed up again to tell the true-life story of a rich couple’s foolish attempt to build the largest home in America. But what has really got me wanting to see this one is that the production is being directed by Michael Arden who over the past decade—and especially with last season’s Tony-winning surprise Maybe Happy Ending—has shown that he has one of the most inventive minds around when it comes to making musicals so I can hardly wait to see what he does with this one.

Runner-Up: Chess Because although the ABBA duo Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus’s musical about a Cold War-era championship match has been revised over and over again, I’ve never seen it so I want to know what all the fuss has been about.

OFF-BROADWAY PLAY: ANNA CHRISTIE @ St. Anne’s Warehouse: There were so many contenders for this slot that I almost lined them up and threw darts to decide which to choose but I have a soft spot for Eugene O’Neill and so this revival of his Pulitzer-winner about a prostitute seeking to reunite with the father who abandoned her as a child and to start a new life with a young sailor who doesn’t know about her past won out because the title role is being played by Michelle Williams, who is almost unrivaled at playing tough and tender women. She’s being joined by the equally gifted Brian D’Arcy James as the father and Tom Sturridge as the sailor and they’re all being directed by Williams’ real-life husband Thomas Kail, who in addition to being the director of Hamilton also seems to have written his college senior thesis on O’Neill.

Runners-Up (sorry but I just couldn’t keep it to one): Archduke, Rajiv Joseph’s political thriller about the start of World War I because it’s starring my will-see-him-in-anything fave Patrick Page; and And Then We Were No More, Tim Blake Nelson’s drama about capital punishment because it’s starring my will-see-her-in-anything fave Elizabeth Marvel.

OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL: THE BAKER’S WIFE @ Classic Stage Company: It probably isn’t fair to choose two Stephen Schwartz shows but this one, with a book by Joseph Stein about French villagers who unite to bring back the young wife of their local baker after she runs off with a lover, has become a cult favorite among the musicals cognoscenti despite being rarely done—or ever seen by me—and this revival will feature Ariana DeBose, who will appear in a show on a New York stage—and a small and intimate stage at that—for the first time since winning an Oscar for her turn as Anita in Stephen Spielberg’s “West Side Story” and becoming everyone’s favorite awards show host.

Runner-Up: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee Because I’m really looking forward to seeing Jasmine Amy Rogers, who was so sensational as the animated-in-every-way Betty Boop in last season’s short-lived Boop!, put her spin on the very different shy bee contestant Olive Ostrovsky.

A Labor Day Salute to the Back Office Folks

2025-08-30T12:53:00.000-05:00

Well, here we are: it’s Labor Day Weekend already. And every year since I started writing here, I’ve marked this unofficial end of summer—and the real start of the fall theater season—with a tribute to the various folks who work so hard to make the theater so many of us love. I’ve shouted out actors, playwrights, musicians, stage managers, set designers, drama teachers and even unions.

But to be honest I thought I might take a break this year because I’ve got a lot of other stuff I need to do. But then this morning I read my latest copy of “Nothing for the Group,” the terrific weekly newsletter that the dramaturg Lauren Halvorsen sends out each week (click here to learn more about it) and one off her entries in this recent issue made me rethink taking a hiatus.

Tucked in among Halvorsen’s usual roundup of premieres and other productions opening around the country was a feature she calls “not a living wage,” which lists jobs in the industry and compares their salaries to what it actually cost to live in the city where the theater offering that position is located. None of the jobs paid a living wage. And yet, I’m pretty sure that all of them are going to be filled, mostly by people who not only love the theater but who rarely get a chance to share fully in the glamor of it.

The folks who plan the budgets, clean the theaters, work in the box office, order the supplies, manage the marketing campaigns and coordinate the educational programs don’t walk red carpets, get Tony, OCC or Drama Desk awards or have TikTok followings. And they don’t make a lot of money. Those who work in the increasingly financially-squeezed regional theaters make even less money.

But the theater doesn’t work without them. And so the least I can do is to take this time to acknowledge all the marketing associates, literary managers, outreach coordinators, casting directors, props supervisors, logistics technicians and the scores of others who work in the back offices but whose labor plays an important role in producing the pleasure I get each time I walk into a theater. To all of them I say: Bravo—and thanks.

A Highly Subjective List of the (So Far) Best Plays and Musicals of the 21st Century

2025-08-02T07:47:00.002-05:00

The New York Times recently published a fancy interactive list of what it considers to be “The Best Movies of the 21st Century.” The editors say they assembled the list by asking more than 500 filmmakers—including directors like Pedro Almodóvar, Sofia Coppola and Barry Jenkins; movie stars ranging from the recent 26-year-old Oscar winner Mikey Madison to the 79-year-old vet John Lithgow and influential film fans (whoever they are)—to name what they believe to be the Top 10 movies that have been released since Jan. 1, 2000. Then the folks at the paper tallied up the results and came up with the final list (which you can check out by clicking here).

Like all lists, this one says more about the people making the list than it does about the films on the list. But it got me thinking about what a similar list of the best plays and musicals that have opened over the past 25 years might look like. The Times weighed in on that back in 2018 when its then theater critics Ben Brantley and Jesse Green put together a list of “The 25 Best American Plays Since ‘Angels in America’” (click here for that one) but I didn’t agree with everything they had on their list. So I’ve put together my own.

I started by listing all the Pulitzer winners and finalists since 2000, then I threw in all the shows that got Tony nominations for Best Play and Best Musical during that period. Finally, I added in the shows that made it onto the annual lists of my favorites that I’ve published in each of the past 18 years that I’ve been writing this blog.

Whittling down the list proved easier than I thought it was going to be. I ended up with 10 (hey, it's just me and not 499 other people) and I was delighted to see that without even trying to make the list diverse, it more or less is in terms of gender, genre and race.

Now my 10 may not be the best shows (whatever that slippery adjective means) or the ones with the most awards or longest runs but they are the shows that regardless of when I saw them have stayed with me, changing the way I look at theater and the world.

Of course what I’d really love to know is what your choices might be. In the meantime my contenders are below:

Casa Valentina by Harvey Fierstein, 2014: A deeply moving piece inspired by the real-life stories of pre-Stonewall-era men who found comfort in dressing as women but also a work that courageously acknowledged the battles that can occur within a community struggling to self-define its place in the broader society

Cost of Living by Martyna Majok, 2016: A beautifully rendered meditation on the need to love and be loved and also a powerful reminder that disabled people should not be defined solely in terms of their physical limitations

Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar, 2012: An uncompromising look at an assimilated Muslim attorney and his white wife in post-9/11 America that sidestepped all stereotypes.

Downstate by Bruce Norris, 2018: An unsentimental challenge to the ideas of empathy and forgiveness that centers around a quartet of pedophiles who have served their time in prison but who still have to figure out how to reckon with the burden of their sins

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity by Kristoffer Diaz, 2009: A laugh-out-loud satire that used hip-hop and pro-wrestling to examine America’s ongoing fixations on celebrity, money and race

Fun Home music by Jeanine Tesori, and book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, 2013: The poignant musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel's graphic novel contrasting her coming out as a lesbian and her father's closeted life as a gay man

The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia by Edward Albee, 2000: It’s far from the most famous of Albee’s works but this challenging exploration of love, taboos and the meaning of fidelity rocked me to my core in a way that few things have

Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda, 2015: The reframing of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton's life not only revolutionized—and made cool again—the American musical but made the case that the passion, idealism and daring that went into making this country is shared by all who live here

The Hot Wing King by Katori Hall, 2020: A big-hearted rumination on black masculinity viewed through the experiences of a loving gay couple and their extended family and friends

Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Baitz, 2011: Dysfunctional family plays are the bread and butter of theater but Baitz added a new spin that goes right to the core of the right-left divide that has defined this country since the Baby Boom generation came of age

Why "Ginger Twinsies" Just Isn't for Me

2025-07-26T06:47:00.001-05:00

It's often said that imitation is the highest form of flattery but sometimes it's just a knock-off of something more original. And I'm afraid the latter seems to be the case with Ginger Twinsies, which opened this week at the Orpheum Theatre.

Written and directed by Kevin Zak, this parody of the 1998 Lindsay Lohan version of “The Parent Trap” movies is clearly hoping to cash in on the newfound appreciation for campy humor that has turned Titanique and Oh, Mary! into mainstream hits. But Ginger Twinsies simply isn’t as clever as they are.

Those earlier shows didn’t skimp on looniness but they bolstered it with well-constructed storylines: what if Celine Dion got to bring her diva-like earnestness and her entire songbook to James Cameron’s movie about the sinking of the Titanic instead of just singing its theme song? what if First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln were a dipsomaniac who would go to any lengths to fulfill a dream of becoming a cabaret star?

As ridiculous as they may be, those conceits provide context for the daffiness that follows in each show and make it easy to enjoy them even if you’ve never seen Cameron’s movie or played hookey when your history classes covered the Civil War.

By contrast, the source material for Ginger Twinsies is both far-fetched and very specific. Identical twins who were separated at birth when their parents split up discover one another at a summer camp years later and decide to trade places as part of a scheme that’s supposed to get their parents back together.

In short, it’s already so silly that there’s not much left to lampoon and if you're not familiar with the details of the plot, you probably won't get the jokes that are handed out.

The show’s main riff is to make one of the twins black and the other white instead of having a single actor play both roles as the movie does. But the joke that everyone still confuses them despite their obvious difference gets old real fast.

Meanwhile, the rest of the show tries to squeeze out laughs with winking shout-outs to other pop culture—Hamilton! “The Devil Wears Prada”!! the “Sex and the City” reboot!!!—whether there's any connection or not.There's also lots and lots of shouting of the f-word and several butt hole jokes, both of which strike me as bargain-basement substitutes for truly imaginative humor.

I'll confess that I was never a big fan of camp. Then Titanique and Oh, Mary! came along and made me think I might be a fan after all. But now I realize that what I liked about those campy shows is what I look for in any kind of theater: they took their art form seriously, worked hard to come up with a fresh take and produced something really good. Ginger Twinsies doesn't do enough of any of that.