LightningCloud, a portmanteau of the wife-and-husband writing team Crystle Lightning and Henry Cloud Andrade, have rumbled into town with their touring production of Bear Grease. Inspired by a certain 1972 stage hit, and even more so by the subsequent film version starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, this Indigenous take on an old favorite asks the musical question: What if the hot boys and cool girls of high school also happen to be Enoch Cree and Huichol? However, as directed by Lightning, the more relevant query for this rambling vehicle is: What happens when a piece that began life as a one-hour parody is stretched into a two-hour variety show?
In A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First, playwright-directors Natasha Roland and Xhloe Rice blur the line between 1960s Boy Scout rituals and the drafting of U.S. soldiers to Vietnam. What emerges is an absurdist meditation on masculinity, obedience, and the perilous passage to manhood.
Jordan Tannahill’s drama Prince Faggot, a love story about a gay heir to the British throne and his boyfriend, is admirably multifaceted: part fantasia, part social and political commentary, part agitprop. At heart, though, Prince Faggot is a bittersweet romance about a royal and a commoner, a sort of Roman Holiday for the 21st century—if Audrey Hepburn’s princess had become a devotee of drug-assisted intercourse and Japanese rope bondage.
The first thing to know about Out of the Box Theatrics’ Beau the Musical is that it’s mostly not about Beau. He’s an important supporting character in the show by Douglas Lyons (book, music and lyrics) and Ethan D. Pakchar (music), but Ace Baker (Matt Rodin) is very much the star. He narrates, plays the guitar, and sings practically every song. The next thing to know about Beau is, you have to stick with it. At first it feels pat, clichéd, and straight off the gay-pride-musical assembly line. Then, finally, Lyons’s characters acquire some individuality and become more interesting.
At the Barricades, a play drawn from original sources by James Clements and Sam Hood Adrian, explores the price of freedom and the complexities of political idealism. The play highlights the fight of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a battalion of international volunteers numbering roughly 2,800 Americans who fought on the side of the Republicans (the democratically elected government) during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) against the Nationalists, the rising fascist dictatorship under Generalissimo Francisco Franco.
In political parlance, the term A Special Relationship refers to the longstanding alliance of America and its “closest ally” Britain (the phrase “America’s oldest ally” refers to France). Disparities in language are a prominent feature in Tim Marriott and Jeff Stolzer’s winsome comedy, which is playing as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival. The piece takes as a major theme George Bernard Shaw’s maxim (sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill or Oscar Wilde): “England and America are two countries divided by a common language.”
John Krasinski first made a splash on the TV series The Office (2005–13), and after that with the creepy horror film A Quiet Place (2018) and its goosebump-laden sequels. He has a long film resume as actor, writer and director, and lately he has boosted his credits as an action star in the Amazon Prime series Jack Ryan. Yet, although Krasinski appeared in the play Dry Powder with Hank Azaria and Claire Danes in 2017, film acting doesn’t necessarily point toward stage prowess. But the confidence with which Krasinski takes the stage in the first moments of Angry Alan gives one hope that he’s an exception, and it only increases as the actor’s masterly performance opens Studio Seaview (formerly 2nd Stage) with a bang.
In a whirlwind of wit and whimsy, Abigail Pickard Price’s (with Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches) new stage adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice offers an unexpectedly funny take on the classic, featuring just three actors who embody 18 characters. Directed by Price, this madcap rendition breathes fresh life into Austen’s sharp social satire, as the performers navigate cultural pitfalls of Regency England.
In life, people are all haunted by one thing or another. For some, it might be love, loss, or anything in between. For the characters in Tim Mulligan’s latest play, Point Loma, what haunts them are literal ghosts. The play explores the supernatural with an immersive production by the Manhattan Repertory Theatre.
Kelundra Smith’s The Wash is an inspiring play about the originators of the Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike of 1881, a little-known chapter in American labor history. Making its New York premiere, Smith’s drama captures the black strikers’ struggles during the Jim Crow era in the post–Civil War American South, including public indifference to the women’s working conditions and the demeaning, hateful attitude of their white customers toward them.
Lunar Eclipse, Donald Margulies’s 2023 play now receiving a Second Stage Theater production (at Signature Center), opens with one of the two characters, George, sobbing alone. George is a farmer in his 70s, sitting in darkness in a field in western Kentucky, where he is soon joined by his wife, Em, to watch a lunar eclipse. George and Em will not simply observe the overnight event: they will overcome George’s gruff exterior and look back over the course of their life together, facing difficult subjects, including the death of a child, and ultimately reaffirming their connection.
The Imaginary Invalid is of interest to historians not just because it is Molière’s last play and not just because Molière himself performed the lead role of Monsieur Argan. It is also due to the fact that, while Argan is a hypochondriac, Molière suffered from dire, real-life ailments that caused him to collapse on stage during just his fourth performance. He died soon afterward. Such dark irony does not haunt his lighthearted comedy, though, and so it has floated, for more than 350 years, from one fizzy reinterpretation to the next. The latest, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher and produced by Red Bull Theater, is a loosey-goosey affair. The vibe is French farce à la The Marx Brothers. The company is a puff pastry stuffed with ham. And the story is King Lear, but with enema jokes.
Encountering adaptations of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice seems as inevitable as Orpheus’s fateful turning around to look toward Eurydice on their journey out of Hades. Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, from 2003, is receiving a revival to conclude her Signature Theatre residency. The production is directed by Les Waters, who also helmed the play at Yale in 2006 and at Second Stage in 2007. Ruhl’s mournful and whimsical take emphasizes Eurydice’s life and point of view, hence the title excising “Orpheus and,” even bestowing its heroine with some agency, especially during that oh-so-famous moment of Orpheus looking back.
Lights Out: Nat “King” Cole is a fanciful fever dream of the final taping of The Nat King Cole Show on NBC in December of 1957. This musical hits some high notes with Dulé Hill and Daniel J. Watts’ excellent acting but is hamstrung by a disjointed book by Colman Domingo and Patricia McGregor, who also directs.
The new musical Goddess signals from the get-go that it has Broadway ambitions. Vivid with saturated colors, eye-catching in Arnulfo Maldonado’s underground nightclub, and bursting with energetic dancing and singing, the Public Theater production is a grand assemblage of first-rate talent. And, as in the long-running Hadestown, another show with a subterranean setting, the characters are a mixture of supernatural entities and humans.
Bus Stop, the third of four Broadway successes that playwright William Inge scored between 1950 and 1959 (the second, Picnic, won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize), takes place in a small-town diner on a route between Kansas City and Topeka. Grace (Cindy Cheung), the proprietor, keeps the place open all night, when necessary, as a refuge for travelers marooned by inclement weather. During a blizzard, a Topeka-bound bus arrives around 1 a.m.; the driver, Carl (David Shih), informs his four passengers that they’re stranded until highway crews clear the road ahead.
Two-character plays are a tricky thing to pull off. When they are successful, they can be engaging entertainments. Sleuth boasted a great deal of mind games, along with costume changes. In the past season, The Roommate and Dakar 2000 traveled through scene and time changes, but with expectations often upended. Although Philip Stokes’s Shellshocked also relies on mind games, it feels hermetically sealed.
Cracked Open is about one family’s journey with mental illness after their 18-year-old daughter suffers a psychotic breakdown. Presented during Mental Health Awareness Month, this drama, written and directed by Gail Kriegel, explores the stigma of mental illness and the often bewildering path for a family to find an effective treatment for a loved one.
In a letter to Jay Laughlin, founder of the publishing house New Directions, in late 1945, Tennessee Williams wrote about his process: “All of my good things, the few of them, have emerged through this sort of tortured going over and over—Battle [of Angels], [The Glass] Menagerie, the few good stories. ... But always when I look back on the incredible messiness of original trials I am amazed that it comes out as clean as it does.” The bill of two one-acts under the umbrella title Outraged Hearts—early versions of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, revived by the Fire Weeds theater company—confirms the messiness Williams alludes to. As ambitious as Fire Weeds’ project is, it yields little beyond the confirmation of Williams’s own words.
Taylor Mac is chronicling slapstick goings-on backstage at a not-for-profit’s fundraising gala in his new comedy Prosperous Fools. Murphy’s Law is in high gear, and things are haywire. Since the not-for-profit is called National Ballet Theater, it’s clear this is Mac’s assessment of the state of the arts under the new federal administration that has made its leader chair of the board at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.