For its third mainstage production under new owners A24, Cherry Lane Theatre brings in a London success—Benedict Lombe’s romantic two-hander Shifters, directed by Lynette Linton—with some boldface names on its U.S. producing team, including actors Idris Elba and Danai Gurira and rapper Little Simz.
After spending decades bringing history’s greatest composers to vivid theatrical life, Hershey Felder turns his storytelling gifts inward in Hershey Felder: The Piano and Me. The result is an intimate and deeply affecting autobiographical portrait that reveals how music shaped not only an extraordinary career but also an extraordinary life.
Eric Marlin’s What a World! What a World! explores gender identity, drag, and gay love in a dialogue-heavy production that opens on a bare stage reminiscent of a 1970s avant-garde drama. Queen-Tiye Akamefula and Annie Hoeg exchange overripe melodramatic dialogue while moving and posing in tandem, using gestures that recall the 19th-century Delsarte system—back of hand to forehead, arms outstretched—executed with the measured precision of tai chi. The result is alternately intriguing and irritating, but emotionally remote.
In a recent New York Times interview, singer-songwriter Jennifer Nettles remarked of her new show, Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo, “The joke of it, the irony, is that my little musical about poison is the antidote we need right now.” Based on the audience response at a recent performance, her point was well taken. In witnessing a succession of abusive, barbarous, and toxic men succumbing to murder, many in the crowd clearly found their retribution. As news feeds clutter with stories of national leaders, Senate candidates, and millionaires evading justice for their crimes against women, there is indeed something quite gratifying about watching vigilante vengeance set to an intoxicating, pop-music beat.
Family entertainment often settles for amusing the children while asking adults to patiently endure the ride. The Listies: Make Some Noise gleefully defies that formula, delivering an hour of quick-witted comic anarchy in which playwright-performers Richard Higgins and Matthew Kelly prove that silliness, when executed with razor-sharp timing and imagination, can delight audiences from preschoolers to grandparents.
The ideals and experiences that bond people together when they are young may be the very things that divide them when they mature. This we learn from the protagonists in Birthright, Jonathan Spector’s play that tracks the lives of six Jewish friends from 2006 through 2024. In each of the three nearly one-hour acts, perceptible changes occur in each character’s priorities and attitudes, at least in part because in their discussions, no topic is sacrosanct.
Life and Trust, a new theatrical event from Emursive, which produced the Punchdrunk hit Sleep No More, takes as its inspiration the Faust legend and mixes it with the 1929 stock market crash, the structure of A Christmas Carol, and glimmers of Citizen Kane. As with Sleep No More, attendees wear masks and performers do not, and silence is the rule. The audience, too, plays a part: The evening begins in a cavernous lobby with red-marble columns at “Conwell Tower” (formerly City Bank–Farmers Trust), half a block from Delmonico’s in lower Manhattan. A placard announces the date, Oct. 23, 1929, and the event: Life and Trust Bank’s Prospective Investors’ Fête. The audience is the “investors.”
Ars Nova’s KPOP begins with a chorus of glittering young Korean pop performers belting the lyrics “the future’s standing right in front of you.” Indeed, the purported mission of the play’s fictional management enterprise, JTM Entertainment, is to bring K-Pop to American audiences, and the production delivers K-Pop-styled numbers in droves.
