Broadway & Me

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.

Theater Books for Summer Reading 2025

2025-06-28T07:03:00.000-05:00

We’ve already had our first heat waves of the season—the temperature hit 101° in Central Park this past week!—which is a sure sign that summer is here. But for almost 20 years now, the summer has truly begun for me when I share my annual list of theater-related books for you all to read from now until Labor Day (or beyond).

There are 16 of them this year, two for each of the official summer weeks. And as has become my custom, many of them are novels because I love stories set in the world of the theater. But there are some nifty memoirs and theater histories too. So I think you’ll be able to find something to scratch your theater itch while you’re sitting at the beach, kicking back in your yard, hanging out in the park, or, like me, lolling around on your terrace with a cool drink in hand—this year I’m recommending a tequila sunrise, whose mix of tequila, orange juice and grenadine actually looks like summer in a glass—and I hope that you’ll have as much fun with these summer reads as I’ve had finding them for you.

By Any Other Name: A Novel by Jodi Picoult 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.

Every Day a Little Death: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Stephen Sondheim edited by Josh Pachter 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.

Flop Musicals of the Twenty-First Century: Part I: The Creatives by Stephen Purdy Even the most diehard theater lovers get a kick out of gossipy stories about shows that failed. A Broadway insider, Purdy not only tells 13 of them, from Dance of the Vampires to King Kong, but digs deep, interviewing folks who don’t often turn up in these kinds of books—assistant choreographers, swings, wig managers—but who were there at the creation of these misfires and are happy to share what they know.

The Hypocrite: A Novel by Jo Hamya 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 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.

Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones by Helen Sheehey Over the last year or so we’ve had a generational changing of the guard in the nonprofit theater world but this excellent biography takes us back to its roots with one of the true pioneers of the regional theater movement and an early cheerleader for such playwrights as Horton Foote, William Inge and her close friend Tennessee Williams.

The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler Almost everyone has heard of "the Method” but Butler takes a deep dive into this famous but often misunderstood acting technique, tracking its evolution from the Moscow Arts Theatre, where Konstantin Stanislavski developed it; to the Actors Studio, where actors from Marilyn Monroe to Al Pacino studied it.

Mona Acts Out: A Novel by Mischa Berlinski 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.

Our Evenings: A Novel by Alan Hollinghurst 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.

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.

Putting the Rabbit in the Hat by Brian Cox He’s now probably best known as the patriarch of the family on HBO’s “Succession” but the Olivier Award-winning Cox got his start on the stage and he ruminates openly about his ambivalence toward working in the theater and his not always generous feelings about his many illustrious co-stars from Laurence Olivier to Ian McKellen.

Stages: A Theater Memoir by Albert Poland His fascination with show business began when Poland started the official fan club for Judy Garland while he was still in high school and it blossomed into a five decade career as a major player in the early days of the off-Broadway theater world, working behind-the-scenes on such shows as The Fantasticks and Little Shop of Horrors.

Station Eleven: A Novel by Emily St. John Mandel 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.

Theater Kid: A Broadway Memoir by Jeffrey Seller Readers may be discouraged when they discover that the first third of this memoir by the guy who produced Rent, Avenue Q and Hamilton is devoted to his hardscrabble childhood and college years but they should stick with it cause they’ll be delighted once Seller moves into the development of Rent and what it takes to make it in the business end of show business.

To Repair the World: Zelda Fichandler and the Transformation of American Theater by Mary B. Robinson This loving but warts-and-all oral history pays long overdue tribute to the woman who created Washington's Arena Stage, midwifed the regional theater movement and nurtured generations of up-and-coming theater makers at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf by Isa Arsén 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.

Finally, as always, if you’re looking for even more to read, here are the links to my suggestions from previous years:

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

Praise for the Reimagined Myth of "Eurydice"

2025-06-07T06:54:00.000-05:00

In most tellings of the myth about the ill-fated love story between Orpheus and Eurydice that famously has him going to the underworld to bring her back from the dead, he gets top billing and sometimes he even flies solo in the title as in the 17th century opera “L'Orfeo” or the 1959 film “Black Orpheus.” But that’s not the case with Sarah Ruhl’s 2003 play Eurydice, which is currently being revived at Signature Theatre.

Ruhl's version not only centers the story on Eurydice but offers a rival for her affection in the form of her dead father whose love for his daughter is so strong that he maintains his memories of their times together on earth even though it’s made clear that such recollections are usually wiped away in the afterlife.

Ruhl wrote the play while she was mourning the death of her own father and those feelings of grief and longing ripple through Eurydice. She had originally intended to be a poet and Ruhl's plays, particularly her early work, sometimes have the enigmatic quality of modernist verse, which can make them challenging to grasp.

But the director Les Waters has made a specialty of translating Ruhl’s works, having staged 14 productions of them (click here to read an interview with the two of them). This is Waters' third go at Eurydice and although I didn’t see his earlier ones or the opera that Ruhl created in 2020 with the composer Matthew Aucoin, it’s hard to imagine a more hauntingly effective production than this.

That’s due in large part to the moving performances by Maya Hawke in the title role and Brian D’Arcy James as her father. There’s been a lot of badmouthing about nepo babies, the children of famous people who get prominent roles in movies and plays, and I confess that I rolled my eyes when I heard that Hawke was getting this one. But what’s seldom said in such conversations is that—credit nature or nurture—talent sometimes runs in families.

Or at least so it seems with Hawke, the daughter of the much-acclaimed actors Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, who imbues Eurydice with a passionate intelligence that allows her to be simultaneously feisty and vulnerable and totally deserving of having the play named after her (click here for more about the actress).

I had no reservations about D’Arcy James, who I’m convinced can do anything. And here he makes the father the ideal parent we all yearn to have as he tenderly reassures Eurydice when she arrives in the afterlife, patiently rekindles their relationship and then selflessly lets her go when Orpheus comes to reclaim her.

There are elements in this production—the commedia-costumed chorus called the Stones, the tricycle-riding Lord of the Underworld—that still left me scratching my head. But perhaps because I’m still working my way through a profound loss of my own, I found particular comfort in the play’s final image that suggests that in the end, and even beyond in oblivion, real love survives.

Let Down By "Lights Out: Nat 'King' Cole"

2025-05-24T07:03:00.000-05:00

Several years ago, I reported a piece on the Smithsonian's "American Popular Song" album, which was intended to be a collection of the best rendition of each song in the Great American Songbook. But the head curator told me that so many of the songs were best sung by Nat King Cole that they had to go with the second-best rendition for many of those tunes or they'd have ended up with an entire Nat King Cole album. So that was one of several reasons that I was looking forward to seeing Lights Out: Nat "King" Cole, the new musical that opened this week at New York Theatre Workshop.

Another reason was that the show is a passion project of Colman Domingo, who we theater lovers have claimed as one of our faves long before he became the twice Oscar-nominated actor that he now is. One other reason was that it stars Dulé Hill, a triple-threat performer—can act, can sing, can really dance—returning to the New York stage for the first time in a decade.

And yet another reason—sadly relevant in this historical moment—is that the show focuses on the final episode of Cole’s pioneering TV show which ran for just one year between 1956 and 1957 because national advertisers wouldn't sponsor a show starring a black entertainer because they were afraid that doing that might alienate their white southern customers.

So I think you will understand how much it pains me to have to say how disappointed I was by Lights Out. Domingo has recruited Patricia McGregor, the artistic director at NYTW and one of the few black women to lead a major theater company, to co-write and direct the show (click here to read about their collaboration). But despite years of workshops and tryouts (earlier versions were done in Pennsylvania and L.A.) the show remains a work in progress.

Domingo and McGregor have imagined Lights Out as a fever dream that Cole has in the minutes before he goes on air for his final episode and is trying to decide whether he should bow out with the elegant graciousness that has become his trademark or let loose all the anger and frustration he's felt at both the major slights and micro-aggressions he’s had to endure throughout his career.

The subject of how black celebrities were mistreated in mid-century America—selling out at nightclubs around the country but only allowed to enter them through the back door—is a fascinating one and the idea of framing that experience as a fever dream is terrifically intriguing. But the storytelling here is convoluted and McGregor’s direction is so additionally muddled that it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on.

And there is a lot going on in the show's 90-minutes of running time. Cole’s celebrity friends Eartha Kitt and Peggy Lee pop up to duet with him. Parodies of period commercials are performed. Ghosts from the singer’s past, including his mother, appear to give him advice. Openly racist versions of his white agents and producers turn up to harass him, even hurling the n-word at him. And all of this is set, juke-box-musical style, to a playlist of Cole’s greatest hits, from “Mona Lisa” to “Unforgettable.”

The actors do what they can. Hill deftly mimics Cole’s smooth vocal stylings and as a former Tap Dance Kid, he brings both the noise and the funk during a dance battle (tap choreography by Jared Grimes) that is a true showstopper. The other challenger in that battle is Daniel J. Watts, who plays Sammy Davis Jr. as the mischievous trickster orchestrating Cole’s fever dream, daring him to stand up for himself and for black people as a whole.

Cole and Davis were friends in real life (click here to watch them make fun of one another) but the show never makes clear why Davis, who proudly allied himself with the otherwise all-white Rat Pack lead by Frank Sinatra and later endorsed Richard Nixon for president, has been assigned the role of Cole’s black conscience.

Still, I’m very glad they gave him that role because Watts runs with it and is hands down the best part of the show. He not only mimics Davis perfectly but brings both a much needed energy to the antics he’s called to perform and a sharp edge to the questions about race that I had hoped the entire production would more ably explore.

Why Just About Everyone Loves Kara Young

2025-05-17T09:11:00.001-05:00

This is a slightly different post than I use write but maybe like me, you have wondered why the nominators for so many different theater awards seem to love the actress Kara Young so much that they keep nominating her for their awards. Over the past four years, Young has picked up more than two dozen nominations, including four consecutive Tony nods for best featured actress in a play. And she won that one last year for her performance in the much celebrated revival of Ossie Davis’ Purlie Victorious.

The short answer to that “why” question is probably that Young is just good. But I think there’s something more to it than that. Young is one of those rare actors who has the ability to infuse each character she plays with her own personality (click here to read a bit more about her) and at the same time is able to fulfill the vision that the playwright intended for the character: so her performances are simultaneously comfortably familiar and reliably surprising.

Part of that is casting her in the right roles. But a larger part of it is simply Young’s innate artistry. I remember the first time I saw her back in 2018 in a small off-Broadway production. I wasn’t crazy about the play but I was fascinated by the young actress at the center of it and I kept asking myself—and probably annoyingly my companion—“who is she?”

Young popped up in a stream of productions after that, usually playing a streetwise teen and I started worrying that directors were just hiring her to do the same thing over and over again. But then I realized that she was coloring each character slightly differently, layering in the nuances that allowed her to sidestep the stereotype.

And then came Purlie Victorious. Ossie Davis had originally written the role of the naïve by spunky Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins for his wife Ruby Dee, a tough act to follow. Then Melba Moore put her Tony-winning spin on Lutiebelle in the musical Purlie, another tough act to follow. But Young proved more than up to the challenge. Her Lutiebelle was uniquely hers: loopy, sexy, altogether endearing and yes, Tony worthy.

Last summer, Young took on what struck me as her first fully adult role as a woman contemplating getting back together with an ex in Douglas Lyons' romcom Table 17 and she aced that one too.

But now she’s being praised for her performance in Purpose, Branden Jacobs-Jenkin’s newly-anointed Pulitzer Prize winner about the dysfunctional family of a Civil Rights icon who bears more than a passing resemblance to Jesse Jackson.

Young plays the outsider whose presence forces the family to confront the cost their public lives have exerted on their private ones. And hitting all the notes—hilarious and heartbreaking—that Jacobs-Jenkins has crafted for the character has made Young a frontrunner for yet another Tony win.

The Angry Young Women in "John Proctor is the Villain" and "Five Models in Ruins, 1981"

2025-05-10T06:50:00.000-05:00

A new genre has been developing over the past few years, one that in tribute to the post-war change in British theater I’ve been calling “angry young women plays.”

These new works more or less follow a certain formula: a group of women get together to engage in an activity as in Clare Barron’s 2018 Pulitzer finalist Dance Nation, then they start noting how society has misunderstood or mistreated them as in Liliana Padilla’s How To Defend Yourself which ran at New York Theatre Workshop a couple of years ago and finally they perform some kind of ritual to exorcise their frustrations and rally their abilities to deal with them as they do in Alexis Scheer’s Our Dear Dead Drug Lord.

Intentionally tapping into both comedy and tragedy, these plays give lots of young actresses a chance to show off the full range of what they can do. And they give those of us in the audience fair warning that young women are tired of taking shit and ready to do something about it. Or at least that’s how I felt after recently seeing two shows that hewed to the angry young women formula—one doing it smartly, the other doing it messily.

The smart one is John Proctor is the Villain, playwright Kimberly Belflower’s sharp response to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and it has been nominated as best play of the season by the Tony, Outer Critics Circle and Drama Desk awards.

Miller used the Salem Witch Trials that began in 1692 to comment on the McCarthyism of the 1950s. His protagonist John Proctor has an affair with his teenage servant girl but Miller casts him as the play's noble hero for refusing to name his neighbors or himself as being—as the surrounding hysteria charges—allies of Satan.

Belflower focuses her play on a group of high school students in a small Georgia town as they read Miller’s play, debate all of John Proctor’s behavior and try to figure out what to do with the men in their own lives—boyfriends, fathers, teachers—during the height of the #MeToo revelations.

And so Belflower has crafted both a literary critique of one of the most popular classics in the midcentury canon and a social commentary on the ways in which today's young women are dealing with toxic masculinity.

She’s aided by a terrific cast of young actresses. Sadie Sink, one of the stars in the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” has picked up a Tony nomination (click here to read more about her) but under the surehanded direction of Danya Taymor, they’re all giving kickass performances. Their characters’ moment of catharsis, set to one of the best playlists of the season, left me with a big grin on my face.

More messy is the production of Five Models in Ruins, 1981 that opened this week in LCT3’s Clair Tow theater. Its conceit is that a group of models have been hired for a Vogue magazine fashion shoot that will photograph them in a dilapidated English country house wearing the also-ran bridal gowns that Diana Spencer rejected for her wedding (costume designer Vasilija Zivanic’s dresses are not only witty imitations of some name-brand designers but also say a lot about each of the characters wearing them).

Playwright Caitlin Saylor Stephens has assembled the expected crew of twentysomething models—an eager newbie, a drug-addled prima donna, a jaded old-timer, a wisecracking outsider—but she doesn’t know what to do with them. And so they just stand around griping for most of the play’s 100-minute. running time.

Some of what they say about what they've experienced in the business is truly disturbing, justifying any anger they might have. But the models are more often treated as superficial twits and too much of what they say is just blather.

The play’s most potentially interesting character is the female photographer who is finally getting the chance to shoot a cover for the magazine. Although that could be because she’s played by the always watch-worthy Elizabeth Marvel (if you get to the theater early you’ll be treated to a silent pre-show of Marvel moving the set’s furniture around while fully in character).

But even Marvel has a tough time with the storyline about how the photographer’s failing love affair is inhibiting her work. And there’s more than a hint that she may have gotten the job because she was sleeping with someone influential. I mean what the hell kind of feminism is that supposed to be representing?

And even worse is director Morgan Green’s decision to let the climactic scene go on and on and on and on for almost four minutes, sending the audience out of the theater feeling exhausted instead of exhilarated.

Celebrating the OCC's 75th Anniversary— and Its Nominees for the 2024-2025 Season

2025-04-26T07:53:00.000-05:00

The 2024-2025 theater season ends on Sunday with the dual openings of the musicals Dead Outlaw and Real Women Have Curves. And I’m exhausted. But it’s the kind of good exhaustion that comes from doing something you love. For over the past four weeks, I’ve seen 22 shows as I worked my way through all the final Broadway and major off-Broadway openings so that I could fulfill my responsibilities as a nominator for this year’s Outer Critics Circle Awards, which were announced yesterday.

Helping to put together the OCC's slate of nominees is a task I never take lightly but it’s one that I’m particularly proud to be a part of this year because this season marks the 75th anniversary of the OCC, which was started by a group of critics who didn’t write for the major New York newspapers (there were seven of them) but who were just as passionate about the theater as those who did.

The major force behind the OCC back then was John Gassner, who emigrated with his family from Hungary to this country when he was eight. He had planned to go to medical school but gave that up while still a college student at Columbia University to pursue his true love of theater.

Over the following years, Gassner, who died in 1967 at the age of just 64, headed the play department at the Theatre Guild, wrote and edited several books, taught playwriting at the Yale School of Drama, chaired the drama jury for the Pulitzer Prize for many years and served as an early booster of and mentor to many of the leading midcentury playwrights including Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. So it’s fitting that every year, the OCC gives a special award in his honor to a new playwright.

This year’s nominees for the Gassner Award are an eclectic group but all of their works deal in one way or another with important contemporary topics including climate change, free speech and gender politics. They are:

Amy Berryman for Walden 

George Clooney and Grant Heslov for Good Night, and Good Luck 

Marin Ireland for Pre-Existing Condition 

Lia Romeo for Still 

Emil Weinstein for Becoming Eve

It's been a fascinating season (whittling down our choices was tough) and the competition for awards—ours and others—is going to be fierce and fun to watch over the next six weeks until the Tonys are given out on June 8.

Our OCC winners, who will be voted on by our full membership, will be announced a few weeks before that on Monday, May 12 and we’ll celebrate them at a ceremony on May 22, which is always one of my favorite events of the year. In the meantime, below is the full list of our nominees:

*OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY PLAY 

Cult of Love 

The Hills of California 

John Proctor Is the Villain 

Purpose 

Stranger Things: The First Shadow 

*In case you're wondering, we nominated both Job and Oh, Mary! when those productions ran off-Broadway last season; in fact, Oh, Mary!'s co-stars Cole Escola and Conrad Ricamora graciously announced all of our nominees for this year

*OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL

Boop! The Musical 

Death Becomes Her 

Maybe Happy Ending 

Operation Mincemeat 

Real Women Have Curves

*And we nominated both Buena Vista Social Club and Dead Outlaw when those productions ran off-Broadway last season  

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY PLAY

The Antiquities 

Grangeville 

Here There Are Blueberries 

Liberation 

Table 17 

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL

The Big Gay Jamboree 

Drag: The Musical 

We Live in Cairo 

OUTSTANDING REVIVAL OF A PLAY

Beckett Briefs: From the Cradle to the Grave 

Glengarry Glen Ross 

Romeo + Juliet 

Vanya 

Yellow Face   

OUTSTANDING REVIVAL OF A MUSICAL

Cats: The Jellicle Ball 

Floyd Collins 

Gypsy 

Once Upon a Mattress 

Sunset Boulevard   

OUTSTANDING LEAD PERFORMER IN A BROADWAY PLAY

Kit Connor, Romeo + Juliet 

Laura Donnelly, The Hills of California 

Mia Farrow, The Roommate 

Jon Michael Hill, Purpose 

Louis McCartney, Stranger Things: The First Shadow   

OUTSTANDING FEATURED PERFORMER IN A BROADWAY PLAY

Kieran Culkin, Glengarry Glen Ross 

LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Purpose 

Francis Jue, Yellow Face 

Mare Winningham, Cult of Love 

Kara Young, Purpose   

OUTSTANDING LEAD PERFORMER IN AN OFF-BROADWAY PLAY

Caroline Aaron, Conversations with Mother 

F. Murray Abraham, Beckett Briefs: From the Cradle to the Grave 

Jayne Atkinson, Still 

Adam Driver, Hold On to Me Darling 

Anthony Edwards, The Counter 

Paul Sparks, Grangeville   

OUTSTANDING FEATURED PERFORMER IN AN OFF-BROADWAY PLAY

Betsy Aidem, Liberation 

Sean Bell, The Beacon 

Michael Rishawn, Table 17 

Richard Schiff, Becoming Eve 

Frank Wood, Hold On to Me Darling   

OUTSTANDING LEAD PERFORMER IN A BROADWAY MUSICAL

Darren Criss, Maybe Happy Ending 

Jeremy Jordan, Floyd Collins 

Audra McDonald, Gypsy 

Jasmine Amy Rogers, Boop! The Musical 

Nicole Scherzinger, Sunset Boulevard 

Jennifer Simard, Death Becomes Her 

OUTSTANDING FEATURED PERFORMER IN A BROADWAY MUSICAL

Danny Burstein, Gypsy 

Jak Malone, Operation Mincemeat 

Michele Pawk, Just in Time 

Christopher Sieber, Death Becomes Her 

Michael Urie, Once Upon a Mattress   

OUTSTANDING LEAD PERFORMER IN AN OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL

Nick Adams, Drag: The Musical 

Marla Mindelle, The Big Gay Jamboree 

Nkeki Obi-Melekwe, Safety Not Guaranteed 

Alaska Thunderfuck, Drag: The Musical 

Taylor Trensch, Safety Not Guaranteed   

OUTSTANDING FEATURED PERFORMER IN AN OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL

Ali Louis Bourzgui, We Live in Cairo 

Paris Nix, The Big Gay Jamboree 

Eddie Korbich, Drag: The Musical 

J. Elaine Marcos, Drag: The Musical 

Andre De Shields, Cats: The Jellicle Ball 

Henry Stram, Three Houses   

OUTSTANDING SOLO PERFORMANCE

David Greenspan, I'm Assuming You Know David Greenspan 

Khawla Ibraheem, A Knock on the Roof 

Sam Kissajukian, 300 Paintings 

Andrew Scott, Vanya 

Sarah Snook, The Picture of Dorian Gray   

OUTSTANDING BOOK OF A MUSICAL (BROADWAY OR OFF-BROADWAY

Will Aronson and Hue Park, Maybe Happy Ending 

David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts, Operation Mincemeat 

Daniel Lazour and Patrick Lazour, We Live in Cairo 

Bob Martin, Boop! The Musical 

Marco Pennette, Death Becomes Her   

OUTSTANDING SCORE (BROADWAY OR OFF-BROADWAY)

Will Aronson and Hue Park, Maybe Happy Ending 

David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts, Operation Mincemeat 

David Foster and Susan Birkenhead, Boop! The Musical 

Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez, Real Women Have Curves 

Julia Mattison and Noel Carey, Death Becomes Her   

OUTSTANDING ORCHESTRATIONS (BROADWAY OR OFF-BROADWAY)

Will Aronson, Maybe Happy Ending 

Doug Besterman, Death Becomes Her 

Joseph Joubert and Daryl Waters, Pirates! The Penzance Musical 

Daniel Lazour and Michael Starobin, We Live in Cairo 

Andrew Resnick, Just in Time   

OUTSTANDING DIRECTION OF A PLAY

Trip Cullman, Cult of Love 

Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, Stranger Things: The First Shadow 

Sam Mendes, The Hills of California 

Phylicia Rashad, Purpose 

Danya Taymor, John Proctor Is the Villain 

OUTSTANDING DIRECTION OF A MUSICAL

Michael Arden, Maybe Happy Ending 

Christopher Gattelli, Death Becomes Her 

Robert Hastie, Operation Mincemeat 

Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, Cats: The Jellicle Ball 

Jerry Mitchell, Boop! The Musical   

OUTSTANDING CHOREOGRAPHY

Jenny Arnold, Operation Mincemeat 

Warren Carlyle, Pirates! The Penzance Musical 

Christopher Gattelli, Death Becomes Her 

Shannon Lewis, Just in Time 

Jerry Mitchell, Boop! the Musical   

OUTSTANDING SCENIC DESIGN

Miriam Buether, Jamie Harrison, and Chris Fisher, Stranger Things: The First Shadow 

Rachel Hauck, Swept Away 

Rob Howell, The Hills of California 

Dane Laffrey, Maybe Happy Ending 

Derek McLane, Death Becomes Her  

OUTSTANDING COSTUME DESIGN

Gregg Barnes, Boop! The Musical 

Wilberth Gonzalez and Paloma Young, Real Women Have Curves 

Rob Howell, The Hills of California 

Qween Jean, Cats: The Jellicle Ball 

Paul Tazewell, Death Becomes Her   

OUTSTANDING LIGHTING DESIGN

Kevin Adams, Swept Away 

Natasha Chivers, The Hills of California 

Jon Clark, Stranger Things: The First Shadow 

Ben Stanton, Maybe Happy Ending 

Justin Townsend, Death Becomes Her   

OUTSTANDING SOUND DESIGN

Paul Arditti, Stranger Things: The First Shadow 

Adam Fisher, Sunset Boulevard 

Peter Hylenski, Death Becomes Her 

Peter Hylenski, Maybe Happy Ending 

John Shivers, Swept Away   

OUTSTANDING VIDEO PROJECTIONS

59, Stranger Things: The First Shadow 

Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom, Sunset Boulevard 

David Bergman, The Picture of Dorian Gray 

Hana S. Kim, Redwood 

Finn Ross, Boop! The Musical

In case you're counting, Death Becomes Her lead the pack with 12 nominations and Stranger Things: The First Shadow was the most nominated play with 7 nominations. Other multiple nominees were Maybe Happy Ending with 9, Boop! The Musical with 8, The Hills of California and Operation Mincemeat with 6 each, Drag: The Musical and Purpose with 5 each and Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Sunset Blvd. and We Live in Cairo with 4 each. And then we spread our appreciation around to lots of other shows.

It's a Smackdown Between Show and Business in "Irishtown," "I'm Assuming You Know David Greenspan" and "minor•ity"

2025-04-19T07:46:00.000-05:00

The ever present tension between art and commerce moves centerstage in three recently opened off-Broadway productions—Irishtown at the Irish Repertory Theatre, I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan at Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2, and Colt Coeur's production of minor•ity at the WP Theater—all three aiming to tickle theater insiders while also pointing out the more worrisome cracks in the current state of the art form.

Irishtown is set in the rehearsal room of a Dublin-based theater company that is preparing to bring a new production to New York. It’s a big deal for all of them: the high-strung playwright Aisling is eager to cash in on her recent hit, the British director Poppy needs a fresh start after leaving the Royal Shakespeare Company under mysterious circumstances, the veteran actress Constance sees the show as her last chance at the big time and the ambitious ingenue Síofra is more than willing to sleep her way to the top. Meanwhile Quin, the only male in the group, is a mansplaining malcontent.

But everyone politely makes nice to everyone else until Quin raises the uncomfortable question of whether Aisling’s play, a #MeToo drama set in a British courtroom, is Irish enough. Where he wonders is the fiddle-playing, the poetic mysticism, the village drunk, the philandering priests, the downtrodden peasants or, at the very least, the trauma brought on by The Troubles?

The troupe’s attempts to add some of those elements because they think that’s the only kind of Irish work American audiences will pay to see allows the real-life playwright Ciara Elizabeth Smyth to poke some good-natured fun at the familiar tropes that turn up in so many Irish plays, including those that are usually done by the Irish Rep., which gets points for willingly going in on the joke.

But Smyth’s play also poses more serious questions about why certain cultural representations end up on our stages, limiting the kinds of stories that people from those groups get to tell about themselves and the ways that rest of us think about them.

The entire Irishtown cast—anchored by Kate Burton playing against type as the questionably talented Constance and Saiorse-Monica Jackson, a star of the popular TV series “Derry Girls,” appropriately annoying as Síofra (click here to read more about that actress)—is totally game as the fictional troupe improvises bits that pay comic homage to Samuel Beckett’s bowler-hatted simpletons and the ritualistic jig in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. But the direction by Nicola Murphy Dubey is so frenetic that they end up pushing too hard and Smyth’s smart satire collapses into just so-so farce.

The playwright Mona Pirnot goes even more meta theatrical with I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan. She not only wrote the play as a one-man show for the downtown acting icon to perform (click here to learn a little more about him) but she also uses it to tell the story of how the show came to be and to explain why it’s so hard for playwrights today to do the kind of work they most want to do.

I have to be honest and say that I wasn’t looking forward to this show because Pirnot practices the kind of writing popularized by the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgård who dispassionately blends memoir, fiction and cultural critique into hyper-realistic accounts of his life that are far too solipsistic for me.

Similarly, Pirnot's previous work I Love You So Much I Could Die was a solo piece in which she spent the entire time with her back to the audience while a computer voice read texts about a tragic event in her life (click here to read my review of that one).

So I was pleasantly surprised by how playful and just plain old funny I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan turned out to be. It’s about a group of women playwrights who get together for an informal reading of one of their plays. They’re all at various stages in their writing careers.

Sierra has gone into the far more lucrative if less satisfying career of writing for TV. Mona, the same-named stand-in for the playwright, remains committed to the theater and is working on an experimental piece centered around the actor David Greenspan even though she knows it’s unlikely to have broad appeal. Meanwhile their host Emmy is at a crossroads, not sure she can afford to follow her playwriting passion while still paying her bills.

All of them—and a fourth character—are played by Greenspan. Dressed in a casual shirt and dark pants and working on a bare stage except for a covered bench, he whirls around the stage for a full 90 minutes, recreating the disagreements and encouragements the women share with one another.

Greenspan and his frequent collaborator director Ken Rus Schmoll have worked out a few signifying gestures and slight vocal changes to distinguish each woman. I still was sometimes confused about who was speaking but it ended up not mattering much.

For there's no question that Greenspan is a beguiling performer and while they’re not new, the arguments that Pirnot makes about the challenges of making art are compelling. At one point the Mona character notes that a playwright can expect to make about $3,000 for the entire run of an off-Broadway production that may have taken them years to write. That's a little less than the average monthly rent for a studio apartment here in the city.

The battle between art and commerce zooms in on the black experience in the Cape Verdean-American playwright Francisca da Silveira's minor•ity, which focuses on three artists of African descent who have been invited to an international festival in Paris where wealthy white donors are looking for artists to sponsor.

But for those artists that means balancing the integrity of their work with the images of African artists that those patrons prefer. And in some cases that means amping up their accents, trading jeans and designer jackets for traditional tribal garb and spinning tales about ancient African myths or contemporary African woes.

Da Silevira manages to draw some humor from these choices (and from the shout-outs to the brands supporting the faux festival) but it's a kind of laugh-to-keep-from-crying humor. And because da Silveira is a young playwright (note the overly cutesy punctuation for the play's title) the pieces in minor•ity, don't line up quite as smoothly as one might want.

The show has also clearly been produced on a small budget, although costume designer Celeste Jennings seems to have grabbed most of it and used the money to good effect for her spot-on costumes.

Luckily, the production has also been blessed with a strong cast, spearheaded by Ato Essandoh, who may be most familiar to some theatergoers as the chief-of-staff to Kerry Russell's American ambassador to England on the Netflix series "The Diplomat."

Under the confident direction of Shariffa Ali, Essandoh and his castmates Nedra Marie Taylor and Nimene Sierra Wurch dig deep into the angst of these artists struggling to compromise just enough to be able to do their work without compromising their dignity.

It's always been tough to be an artist. It's even tougher nowadays. These shows, faults and all, are a reminder that those of us who love theater should be grateful that despite such obstacles, artists like da Silveira, Smyth, Pirnot and Greenspan keep finding ways to make it for us.