Ginger Twinsies is a parody of the 1998 film The Parent Trap, itself a reboot of the 1961 film of the same name. Although the parody focuses on the 1998 Lindsay Lohan version, both films share a completely ridiculous storyline that allows a child actor to play two characters. So many coincidences and lapses in logic boggle the rational mind. Therefore, Ginger Twinsies, written and directed by Kevin Zak, has carte blanche to unmercifully mock its source material. It is 80 minutes of high-energy hijinks, slapstick, sight gags, wordplay, and enough 1990s trivia to be its own Trivial Pursuit category.
The Irish Rep is currently staging its fourth production since 2013 of Conor McPherson’s 1997 play The Weir, with several of the cast reprising roles. And yet there is nothing stale about this staging—instead, the play is brought to exhilarating life by a marvelous ensemble, under Ciarán O’Reilly’s assured direction. The Weir is essentially a collection of four ghost stories, which arise naturally out of the banter in a rural Irish pub, that ultimately reveal more about the loneliness of the people telling them than anything supernatural.
A multitude of transgressions come to light in Terry Curtis Fox’s Transgression. This melodrama about New York artists consists of 19 scenes toggling back and forth between 2010 and 1970. At irregular intervals, the playwright detonates ugly, morally irksome surprises. The result is a two-hour, slow-motion collision between louche mores in the Warhol era and the subsequent new-millennial sensitivity that augured the eruption of #MeToo.
Rolling Thunder, a hybrid jukebox musical and Vietnam War docudrama, has, in fact, been on a roll. After opening in Brisbane in 2014, it toured Australia twice, in 2016 and 2023. Now, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, writer and onetime Sydney Morning Herald theater critic Bryce Hallett has adapted his script for an American audience, bringing this hard-rocking reckoning of the 1960s to New World Stages for its Off-Broadway premiere.
Can one improve upon Shakespeare? That is the question. Or at least that is the question that propels the plot of Brian Dykstra’s Polishing Shakespeare. For more than 400 years, Shakespeare’s identity has been debated, challenged, and disputed, and his plays have been revised, reimagined, and rewritten. Yet it is only recently that the literary ethics of directly translating his works from early modern to present-day English have been thoroughly considered.
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.
Bess Wohl’s new comedy Make Believe portrays a quartet of Gen-X siblings at two points of life-changing family crisis. The first is in 1980, when the Conlees, two sisters and two brothers, are small children. The second is 32 years later. In both instances, the kids are gathered—it’s tempting to say “barricaded”—in a gargantuan nursery at the top of their parents’ luxe suburban home.
Director Sam Gold, still draped in laurels from the Broadway premiere of A Doll’s House, Part 2, is exorcising demons of cliché and supposition from Shakespeare’s most frequently staged tragedy. Gold’s Juilliard contemporary Oscar Isaac stars in this reimagined Hamlet, a revenge tragedy that is arguably the greatest drama in the language.
