Anthropomorphism is at the center of The Dog Show: Come. Sit. Stay., David Javerbaum’s cleverly conceived work about dogs and their views of the world. Directed by Richard Israel, it’s playing at the Triad, the original home of Celebrity Autobiography. The Dog Show adopts a similar format as that hit: actors reading from scripts, mostly at stands. But it’s no less enjoyable for that: a winning cast of four helps the unflashy production breed satisfaction for its audience.
Though advertised as “a new play,” Matthew Freeman’s The Ask, now at Theater 555, premiered in New York City more than two years ago. In this drama of ideas, two strong-willed strangers clash in a mating dance essential to American charities: the solicitation of wealthy donors by career fund-raisers. Back in 2024, The Ask--expertly directed by Jessi D. Hill--packed the same wallop it does now (and even more, thanks to the superb performance of Betsy Aidem as Greta); but the original run was brief and so far Off-Broadway that it failed to create the splash that might have been expected. Now, in a more prominent venue, again directed by Hill, this substantial intermissionless drama is likely to make waves and, in due course, be seen around the country.
As a portrait of two relationships imploding when the couples are confined together, Kate Vozella’s Machine Learning provides 90 minutes of fiercely acted, propulsive drama. As a portrait of AI’s expanding influence in our lives, however, it underwhelms.
Life for blacks in the antebellum South, during the Civil War, and for generations thereafter consisted of a confluence of injustices at the intersection of class, race, and gender. Todrick Hall's complex new musical Midnight grapples with those injustices by reimagining what it might be like if the oppressors became the oppressed.
The producers of Copperfield! have added the subtitle The New Musical, presumably to alert anyone who saw the notorious 1981 flop Copperfield, which ran only 39 performances, that this show is not a revival of that one, which New York Times critic Frank Rich described as “the kind of musical that sends you out of the theater humming every score other than the one you’ve just heard.” On the contrary, the new Copperfield! is an energetic and melodious delight. If Dickens at Christmastime is a tradition, and A Christmas Carol is starting to feel shopworn, Copperfield! is an ideal substitute.
In Myth, directed by Becky Baumwoll, Broken Box Mime Theater transports audiences to a distant planet where two moons illuminate an alien world of strange flora, fauna, and unexpected possibilities. Through the expressive power of the body, the adventurous company uses speculative fiction to explore how we remember, revise, and sometimes forget the histories that shape our present.
Mime is a silent art of storytelling that requires great physical expressiveness. It is often associated with street performers, but Broken Box Mime’s Take Shape sets a new paradigm for the art form: mime as performance for the theater. Eight vignettes range in themes from global warming to cooking and parenting. There are no props, stage design or costume changes. All the stories in Take Shape are conveyed through the highly physicalized art of pantomime.
