NYC Theatre Roundup

Happy Tony day to all who celebrate!

I’ve gotten some wild automatic OOO email responses from frantic assistants across Manhattan as they prep for the 78^thannual awards show.

People are always shocked when I tell them I wasn’t a theatre kid in high school. The closest I got was playing Gabriella in a bare bones production of High School Musical at my all-girls summer camp in New Hampshire.

Working for a Tony Award-winning playwright has meant seeing a lot more theatre than I ever hoped to in New York, which has reminded me how much I love it. Theatre (especially Broadway) is notoriously inaccessible, which gets a lot of heat in a city that is said to offer art at everyone’s fingertips. $500 tickets to see George Clooney in Good Night, and Good Luck were not in my budget… but I’ve found some helpful loopholes.

Namely, my generous boss (who is a Tony voter) occasionally buys me tickets to the shows he is most impressed by. My grandma’s best friend lives in the city and sees every single show, so we’ve seen a few together; she should be a Tony voter at this point. I’ve yet to attempt getting rush tickets or joining a lottery, but I highly recommend subscribing to TDF. $42 a year (or $25 for certain NYC employees!) gives you access to a ton of shows both on and off Broadway for no more than $60 per ticket. The seats are always somewhere in the orchestra section.

There is also so much great stuff happening off Broadway! I recently discovered that The Atlantic has a theatre production company and acting school in Chelsea. The Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Public Theater, and the Soho Playhouse are all worth checking out, too.

I’ve seen sixteen shows since moving to New York last September. June feels like the natural time to pause and share my thoughts on all of them—here—because there’s no Letterboxd for theatre. And thank God; that would be another level of insufferable.

Recent playbills!

Post-Tonys on my calendar I’ve got The Picture of Dorian Gray, Maybe Happy Ending, and Buena Vista Social Club. I am also hoping to see Jean Smart in Call Me Izzy and Kieran Culkin and Bob Odenkirk in Glengarry Glen Ross before it closes at the end of June. I absolutely love that half the cast of Succession is living their Broadway dreams!

There’s a ton of incredible shows out right now, as well as a fair share of terrible ones. In order of worst to best…

The Last Five Years

I grew up on this show. My friend Hannah and I were addicted to the 2014 movie and felt so seen by it at age 13, even though neither of us had never been in love. I used to beg my voice teacher to sing “Still Hurting” and “A Summer in Ohio”—she would oblige me, but she always made sure to remind me that Jason Robert Brown was an asshole.

He wrote the musical about his failed marriage with Theresa O’Neill, who sued him before the show opened in 2002, claiming that its content violated NDAs within their divorce decree. Ten years since I first saw the movie, it is glaringly obvious the extent to which Jason Robert Brown’s ego is reflected in Jamie’s character in the show. His flaws are excused and his charms are glorified.

23 years later The Last Five Years finally got its Broadway debut. It felt like beshert that Hannah and I were both living in New York and able to go see it together! The reviews were in, and they were terrible, but we remained optimistic.

It was probably the worst piece of theatre I’ve ever seen, and it devastates me to say that about a show that means so much to me. It’s a 90-minute Nick Jonas concert with zero emotion and zero chemistry between the leads, who also happen to be the only two characters in the entire show. Without incredibly emotional acting, this show cannot succeed. If I hadn’t gone into the theatre knowing the show forwards and backwards, I would have left feeling completely confused by the plot.

My favorite song in the whole musical is “Shiksa Goddess.” In the 2014 movie a magnetic Jamie (Jeremy Jordan) delivers a hilarious serenade to his Kathy (Anna Kendrick) about his failed relationships to tons of different Jewish girls, before meeting the shiksa goddess of his dreams. It’s delivered with such charm and humor. Meanwhile, not a single person in the Hudson Theatre laughed during Nick Jonas’s rendition. It was incredibly awkward.

Maybe Jonas had a hard time delivering the Jewish humor, given that he is not Jewish whatsoever. I watched an interview with Jason Robert Brown where he was asked why he cast a non-Jew in a very Jewish role, and he answered blatantly that they needed to cast a celebrity in order to sell tickets—religion was hardly a factor. Casting a celebrity really only works when it’s someone you know is going to deliver. Nick Jonas flopped and the reviews were horrible, so maybe they’d have been better off casting a talented actor with a lesser known name, and more people would have gone to see it simply because they heard it was good?

Anyway, I could go on, but the long and short of it is: don’t see the Broadway debut of this musical, even if you’ve loved other versions of it. It’s tragic, but it’s true…

Swept Away

I don’t have a ton to say about this one. It’s a cool enough concept—a jukebox musical featuring songs from the Avett Brothers, directed by Michael Mayer. But the story itself is a bit of a bore; it’s based on a true story that explores the lengths the all-male (blah!) crew on a sinking whaling ship go to in order to survive.

The staging was cool; a life-sized ship occupied most of the stage and completely tilted upwards when the ship sank, and the integration of the Avett Brothers’ music was interesting. But it only lasted a little over a month on Broadway.

Floyd Collins

I needed to see Lizzy McAlpine’s Broadway debut. I just love her theatre kid origin story and was blown away when I saw her perform at Lollapalooza last summer. Jeremy Jordan sweetened the cast, but ultimately, I would have loved to have seen them both in any musical other than this one. Similar to Swept Away, the story just felt a bit dry.

It’s based on a true story of a coal miner named Floyd Collins during the Kentucky Cave Wars in 1925 who got stuck 200 feet underground amidst turning a Kentucky cave into a tourist attraction. Jeremy Jordan is off to the side of the stage, laying down on a slab of rock to imply that he is stuck underground—for the entire duration of the show. The one part that stuck with me was the role the media and curious bystanders played in shaping this tragic event into a public spectacle, especially at a time when newspapers were brand new.

The score features a mix of folk and bluegrass music, which was cool to hear. Lots of yodeling right up and down the break in Lizzy’s voice—an impressive feat. The sound is haunting, as it reverberates off the cave walls.

I thought Lizzy was very well cast. I wouldn’t run to see the show, but I found it interesting. And the Vivian Beaumont Theatre is so stunning that it’s kind of worth seeing anything there.

Just In Time

I saw this musical during previews with my grandma’s friend (now my friend, too), who is a lifelong fan of both Bobby Darin and Jonathan Groff. Her expectations were high going in. We left in agreement that it was an entertaining show, but it felt overly kitschy at the expense of any character depth and development. It’s unfortunate when a biographical jukebox musical attempts to cram all details of the person’s life into the plot. The show was almost three hours long but still felt rushed.

Groff is amazing and always dazzling. I was invested in Gracie Lawrence’s Broadway debut performance; a fellow Brown grad (well, I think she should have graduated a few years before I did but dropped out?) who recently made an appearance in The Sex Lives of College Girls in addition to leading an ongoing world tour with her funky pop band Lawrence. She’s wearing many hats and wearing them pretty well. Her voice leans Broadway in a way that worked here, but I couldn’t help but notice that her acting as Connie Francis was practically identical to her portrayal of a virgin theatre nerd in Sex Lives… So that was disappointing. And certainly not Tony-worthy. Sorry! Overall, it’s a fun show, but it didn’t move me in any sort of way.

Cult of Love

This play stressed me out and made me laugh and also brought me into the holiday spirit via putting dysfunctional family dynamics on full display. It’s doomed from the start when the Dahl siblings reluctantly reunite for Christmas at their parents’ home in New England. The mom won’t admit anything is wrong with her perfect Christian children—a disillusioned divinity student turned lawyer, a lesbian (not possible!), a recovering drug addict, and a pregnant psycho who can’t stop yelling about the devil.

Shailene Woodley shines in her Jesus freak role. The humor peaks in the moments in which the family’s dysfunctional dynamics are shown to outsiders who are brought into the chaos by friends and spouses.

It is impressive that almost immediately all ten characters onstage become distinct from one another and easy to track, but at times it felt more like I was watching a TV pilot than a stage play. Ultimately, it reminded me a lot of the ever-iconic Christmas episode of The Bear (Season 2, Episode 6), which stars Jamie Lee Curtis and breaks from the traditional narrative structure of the show to do a deep dive on the family’s dynamics at Christmas dinner. One of my all-time favorite episodes of television, and in my opinion, it stands alone stronger than this play does.

Stereophonic

I know Stereophonic was last season and has long moved on from Broadway to London’s West End, but I wasn’t able to see it until December. I was more excited about this new original play than I have been about any theatre in years. It sounded so up my alley, given my obsession with Fleetwood Mac and my love for all things that fall into any category with Almost Famous.

I had already read Making Rumours by Ken Caillat (producer of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album) and heard all about his lawsuit, which claimed that Stereophonic playwright David Adjmi based certain parts of the play off direct material from his memoir. I remember being kind of let down by the memoir itself—it wasn’t as well written it should have been to tell a story that is both wild and true.

I felt similarly about the play, especially given the universally positive press it received. It remains the most Tony nominated play of all time! 13 nominations, 5 wins. The 5 wins were warranted, the 13 nominations not so much.

I loved the set and sound design. It was very cool that the recording studio they set up onstage actually functioned properly, with different conversations taking place on either side of the glass. The best parts of the play were when the band stopped blabbing at each other and actually sang (as I’m sure is the case in real life recording sessions). They sounded good! The one song they sang chunks of over and over was very good, and I felt like there should have been more music woven throughout. I know it’s a play not a musical, but that begs the question, does a play that doesn’t integrate music and intentionally doesn’t have much of a plot really need to be three hours long?

Despite it not being a musical, the acting felt very caricature musical theatre to me. The show relies on tons of dialogue and very little real plot, and most of the characters did not seem like real people to me.

Maybe Adjmi should’ve just bought the rights to Caillat’s memoir and made this into a Fleetwood Mac jukebox musical instead. There is always a fine line when taking inspiration from real people and events; Daisy Jones and the Six did it well, Stereophonic, less so.

The Ford/Hill Project

The Public Theater showed The Ford/Hill Project for a limited run in fall 2024. It was the last piece of theatre I saw before the election (eerie) and my first time at The Public. There is so much great stuff coming through there for short periods of time that it’s difficult to keep up with their schedule.

The verbatim script was a re-enactment of the sexual assault accusations at Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas (Eric Berryman) and Brett Kavanaugh (Dylan Baker) by Christine Blasey Ford (Elizabeth Marvel) and Anita Hill (Amber Iman).

The Senate hearings occurred 30 years apart, but the interweaving of them throughout the show demonstrates exactly how history repeats itself. Real excerpts from the hearings are also integrated into the show to create a powerful commentary on the theatricality of politics (which, since I saw this show, has become more darkly theatrical in ways I never could have predicted then).

Certain elements of the show felt a little thrown together, but The Public often is a bit scrappy, and that isn’t a bad thing. I’d love to see this adapted into a limited series; it’s certainly an important story to tell and keep retelling.

A Streetcar Named Desire

I patiently waited in a hellish online queue of thousands to secure my tickets to see Paul Mescal in A Streetcar Named Desire six months in advance. When the show opened, all I was seeing online were videos of Paul from superfans who shared that he did, in fact, take his shirt off four different times throughout the play, which made it worth spending $200+ on a ticket.

Of course he is hot, and he’s hot when he’s angry, which is something we rarely see from his acting. He is best known for playing fragile, sensitive, and sometimes troubled men who never raise their voice (Normal People, All of Us Strangers, Aftersun). It was jarring to see him yell at a woman, but he was just following Tennessee Williams’s orders!

Anjana Vasan’s performance as Stella was also exceptional—full of love and hurt that is often overlooked and flatlined. The ensemble delivered, as well.

The staging was interesting. It looked much more like a boxing ring than it did a quaint New Orleans home, but I wasn’t mad at it. The harsh lighting intensified the battle set up by the minimalistic staging. I took issue with some of the seemingly random experimental elements that were integrated, like the loud beating of drums during tense moments (which really drowned out dialogue). I did think the rain that poured down around all four sides of the stage was effective and interesting.

This production was my first experience with this play since reading it in middle school English class. I’d never seen it staged before. Maybe if you’d seen the show a bunch of times this rendition could feel redundant and stale, but to someone who’d never seen a version of it performed, it felt fresh.

Grief Camp

I bought myself a $10 ticket to Grief Camp on its closing night at the Atlantic Theater and absolutely loved it. The humor of sleepaway camp coupled with the sorrow and tragedy of each child’s loss made for a heartwarming and thought-provoking show that accurately portrays what grief journeys look like for different young people in a way I’ve never seen done on a stage before.

It's not just about grief, but more so about how grief never exists in a vacuum. It always infringes upon whatever stage of life you’re at when you lose that person. In many ways these kids appear to be normal teenagers dealing with normal teenage things at camp, like a crush on a counselor or thinking out loud about what they want their futures to look like. But underneath the surface they are working through tremendous pain—some of them guilt, too.

The performances were emotionally dynamic and impressive, especially from such a young cast. The monologue at the very end made me feel incredibly seen—I rarely cry during shows, but I did then. Just inhabiting this cabin with these kids is visceral. Camp is the perfect escape from reality for young kids, but in this case, no camper can hide from their tragic past.

Gypsy

My original association with Gypsy is from my favorite childhood movie, Eloise at Christmastime. I watch it every Christmas with my family (and sometimes in the off season, too). In it, Bill (Gavin Creel—rest in peace; he was incredible) and Rachel (Sara Topham) perform an adorable duet to “Together Wherever We Go” on a Baby Grand piano in a banquet room at the Plaza Hotel. Towards the end of the movie, Bill buys them two tickets to see Gypsy on Broadway, despite Rachel’s plans to marry a different man the very next day.

I was ecstatic to finally see a production of the show, and starring Audra McDonald, no less. I keep hearing people say that she was amazing but not as good as they thought she would be. Or that she’s had enough time in the spotlight—maybe true, but she’s the first Black woman to ever play Rose on Broadway. I tried to go in with zero expectations of her performance—a tough thing to do for the most nominated performer in Tony history. And I thought she was superb. Her rendition of “Roses Turn” was vocally immaculate and emotionally guttural. The excerpt from Angels in America about how people change was a welcomed addition.

The show was too long, but I enjoyed almost all of it. The top half of the second act definitely dragged. I also feel like when reviving a musical as iconic as this one, there are ways to make it feel more relevant today without stripping it of its history. This was my first time seeing it, so I’m sure a lot was changed between previous versions and this one, but toxic stage parents are still incredibly prevalent in culture and the media. I immediately think of Jennette McCurdy’s 2022 memoir and Dance Moms. Much less of a traditional stage mom story and more one of just straight abuse, but I also think of Gypsy Rose Blanchard. I wondered if she was named after Gypsy Rose Lee, but it seems as though it’s just a weird coincidence.

Anyway, my great grandparents were big in Vaudeville and even owned some of the Downtown Los Angeles theatres that were displayed on the set of Gypsy. While the show could have been a bit tighter overall, I think McDonald could be headed for a 7^th Tony this weekend.

The Threepenny Opera

When my boss invited me to see a three hour-long opera all in German, I suspected he was testing my attention span and ability to stay awake throughout the whole show. I quickly realized that his obsession with Bertolt Brecht runs many decades deep and that he knows almost every word to The Threepenny Opera, a 1928 “play with music” that highlights a socialist critique of the capitalist world—very much still relevant almost a century later. For those unfamiliar with everything I’ve said so far, this opera is the origin story of Mack the Knife, both the character and the song.

I was blown away! The music feels traditionally jazzy yet contemporarily German. The characters are darkly funny, and the humor translates seamlessly from German to English in most cases. The staging was fascinating; for the first half all the characters are trapped inside a geometric box of stairs and platforms.

This version, directed by Australian director Barrie Kosky, was only at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a short run. It’s something I never would have thought to see on my own, but I highly recommend seeing a version of it the next time one pops up.

Our Town

Now this is a truly timeless piece of theatre. As described by Thornton Wilder himself, “The monumental is always expressed in the miniature, and the miniature is always crushed by the monument.” A stunning epigraph for his play, which had its fifth Broadway revival this past fall. I always admire when a writer can take something so small and stretch it to profundity without any evidence of really trying. The quotidian nature of the show leaves the perfect amount of room for performances to shine and subtext to be interpreted by the audience in a way that winds up making the story relatable to every viewer across many demographics and over almost a century of the play being performed.

Jim Parsons was the perfect choice to play the Stage Manager—he grounds the story of the small New Hampshire town in sincerity and light. My favorite moment was when the smell of bacon wafts through the theatre as the characters make breakfast. It’s that attention to detail within the context of a minimalist set that make this show so special!

Who doesn’t benefit from a sweet yet sad reminder to appreciate the small things in life?

Sunset Blvd

I was not expecting to enjoy this revival as much as I did. I love the original movie and was immediately hesitant about the modernized, stripped-down version that lacks a grand Hollywood mansion as the physical backdrop and all the fun paraphernalia that Norma Desmond brings with her. I was even less enthusiastic about the camera operating as its own character. But weirdly, it works.

Jamie Lloyd knew that a show about greed and fame and relevance was begging for a makeover. Nicole Scherzinger is phenomenal; her performance carries the show. I’ve never seen an audience give standing ovations for songs in the middle of a show, but each one was warranted. Her vocal power is jaw dropping.

I also thought the refresh of Joe’s character and his peers—all clamoring for an opportunity to work with a deranged movie star like Norma—felt very on point with young people entering the entertainment industry today. I especially loved the extended opening number of Act II, where the company marches around backstage and then outside the theatre through Shubert Alley before finally walking back into the room where the audience watches a livestream of the whole thing. It’s relevant and meta, what with our new age of performance and celebrity depending on people’s willingness to share even the most mundane moments of their lives with a camera and an audience. It all felt contemporary in a way that didn’t make me cringe, and that is a very hard line to toe.

Death Becomes Her

It’s funny that Death Becomes Her and Sunset Blvd are on Broadway at the same time—both musicals based on movies about women grappling with fame and fleeting relevance and youth. I am sure that the original 1992 Death Becomes Her film took a ton of inspiration from the original 1950 Sunset Boulevard film, so it’s interesting to see these two stories placed side by side.

Where this version of Sunset Blvd strips down, Death Becomes Her goes above and beyond. It is glitzy and entirely over the top, and it’s the most fun I’ve had at a Broadway show in years. Marco Pennette tastefully updated this feud between two best friends to give the female characters ample depth and humanity, so that as they begin to spiral you really do feel badly for them. The humor is perfectly on point, which is hard to achieve here. I could not get over how stunning the sets and costumes were. Certain elements of magical realism I could not figure out logistically as I watched them, which made the experience even more fantastic.

This show feels like if The Substance were a cabaret with a little less body horror. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for something that feels classically Broadway yet is thoroughly entertaining and a fresh take on a 90s sensation.

John Proctor Is the Villain

I did not know much about this play going into it, and I wound up absolutely floored by it. There’s never been a play more meant for me. Like in the show, I was also a junior in high school in 2018, wishing I could write a comparative essay about The Great Gatsby and Lorde’s new hit song, “Green Light.” I was listening to the same music, grappling with many of the same big questions about becoming a person, and learning how to support my friends along the way.

The coed school in rural Georgia is very different from the all-girls prep school I attended in LA, but the students (especially the girls) were incredibly spot on and relatable, from their bold desire to start a feminism club without really understanding a lot about feminism to their defiant questioning of the English canon. They work together to unravel The Crucible and reach the conclusion that we should not be praising John Proctor as a hero, for really, he is the villain in the story.

Like in the play, my school faced a student/teacher relationship scandal during my time there, though the affair itself took place before I was a student. I’ve seen firsthand the traumatic ripple effect an incident like this can have on a school community and the individuals within it.

Sadie Sink’s performance was incredible. She is as nuanced as only a real teenage girl can be in her simultaneous confidence and deep insecurity. She is a bit too fearless for her own good—the exact archetype I attempted to embody at the age of her character in the play.

I’ve never felt so seen by a play before, and evidently, I wasn’t the only one. I saw women of all ages hugging each other and crying as soon as the curtain fell. My immediate reaction was to text my two favorite high school English teachers and encourage them to see it, too.

Oh, Mary!

There’s not much I can say that hasn’t already been shouted far and wide. One of the most original and daring plays in theatre history, made exceptional by no one involved taking it seriously. It is camp beyond belief, and you will not stop laughing for 85 minutes. My experience was enhanced by the fortunate coincidence that I found myself seated next to Jack Black, so his chortles were my laugh track.

I was lucky enough to attend a very special post-show talkback with Tony Kushner, Cole Escola, and Sam Pinkleton. The chemistry between these three geniuses was palpable. My favorite moment was when Tony asked Cole how much research they did about the Lincolns before writing this play, given that Tony has an encyclopedic knowledge of the President from when he wrote the movie Lincoln for Steven Spielberg. “I don’t know shit about the Lincolns!” Cole exclaimed. They intentionally wanted this show to operate from a third grader’s level of knowledge about Lincoln and his elusive wife, Mary Todd. It’s so stupid that it’s brilliant.

The bond between the cast and crew is so evident, and I believe Pinkleton’s direction is a huge part of that connection. He wanted the production to feel like high school theatre—because no one who has done high school theatre has ever cared about anything as much. The set is intentionally a bit flimsy and juvenile, which only adds to the fun.

Tony asked Cole what plans are in store for touring Oh, Mary! They were neither able to confirm nor deny, but I hope it tours and never stops. Cole shared during the talkback that they wanted the show to feel so tight and quick that when the 85 minutes are over, you want to get back in line and see it again. This is precisely how I felt.

Seeing this play made me want to write theatre, which is something I don’t often feel. Cole talked about how when they first conceptualized this play they were scared to actually put it on paper out of fear that it wouldn’t be perfect. First of all, it is. Secondly, I’ve never identified more with any sentiment. I’m rooting for Oh, Mary! all the way!