At the newly revitalized Delacorte Theater, Saheem Ali’s stirring production of Romeo and Juliet reimagines Shakespeare’s Verona as a divided community along the U.S.-Mexico border, bringing fresh urgency to the tale of the star-crossed lovers. By allowing Romeo and Juliet to speak to one another in Spanish amid a world of conflict, Ali illuminates both the intimacy of their bond and the forces determined to keep them apart.
Angsty-girl plays have been flourishing on New York stages, and in several of these ensemble dramas, the characters use music to let out their frustrations—see, for example, the group dance breaks in John Proctor Is the Villain, All Nighter and the just-extendedDad Don’t Read This. For the title characters of Eisa Davis’ disarming ||:Girls:|| ||:Chance:|| ||:Music:||, though, music represents more than a release. It’s their way of communicating, of making sense of their world, of discovering just what they’re capable of and what (and who) they truly care about.
And Then the Rodeo Burned Down is New York City’s third exposure to the antic stagecraft of Xhloe and Natasha, who write, perform, co-direct, and design and recently snagged major prizes in three consecutive years at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. These Gen-Z collaborators (full names Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland) deploy their well-honed professional skills—acting, clowning, dance, acrobatics, and stand-up—with astonishing energy and rugged charm. As writers, their stock-in-trade is a skeptical reassessment of myths about American history. As performers, their mission is to challenge those entrenched falsehoods in a style that’s more imagistic than analytic and informed by Theater of the Absurd.
Abigail Pickard Price’s production of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield may not include all the great characters of the 800-plus pages of the novel, but her exciting adaptation (with Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches) for the Guildford Shakespeare Company is not to be missed.
Eljon Wardally’s Blooming in Dry Season turns a family dispute over a daughter’s future into a moving examination of ambition, sacrifice, and the burdens parents pass to their children. Over the course of two acts, layers of conflict gradually emerge, deepening one’s understanding of the characters’ lives. Wardally skillfully builds suspense through subtle clues that reveal the emotional toll hidden beneath the characters’ seemingly happy lives, and director Jackie Alexander paces the production adroitly and guides the powerful performances of an excellent cast.
At the newly revitalized Delacorte Theater, Saheem Ali’s stirring production of Romeo and Juliet reimagines Shakespeare’s Verona as a divided community along the U.S.-Mexico border, bringing fresh urgency to the tale of the star-crossed lovers. By allowing Romeo and Juliet to speak to one another in Spanish amid a world of conflict, Ali illuminates both the intimacy of their bond and the forces determined to keep them apart.
Angsty-girl plays have been flourishing on New York stages, and in several of these ensemble dramas, the characters use music to let out their frustrations—see, for example, the group dance breaks in John Proctor Is the Villain, All Nighter and the just-extendedDad Don’t Read This. For the title characters of Eisa Davis’ disarming ||:Girls:|| ||:Chance:|| ||:Music:||, though, music represents more than a release. It’s their way of communicating, of making sense of their world, of discovering just what they’re capable of and what (and who) they truly care about.
And Then the Rodeo Burned Down is New York City’s third exposure to the antic stagecraft of Xhloe and Natasha, who write, perform, co-direct, and design and recently snagged major prizes in three consecutive years at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. These Gen-Z collaborators (full names Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland) deploy their well-honed professional skills—acting, clowning, dance, acrobatics, and stand-up—with astonishing energy and rugged charm. As writers, their stock-in-trade is a skeptical reassessment of myths about American history. As performers, their mission is to challenge those entrenched falsehoods in a style that’s more imagistic than analytic and informed by Theater of the Absurd.
Abigail Pickard Price’s production of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield may not include all the great characters of the 800-plus pages of the novel, but her exciting adaptation (with Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches) for the Guildford Shakespeare Company is not to be missed.
Eljon Wardally’s Blooming in Dry Season turns a family dispute over a daughter’s future into a moving examination of ambition, sacrifice, and the burdens parents pass to their children. Over the course of two acts, layers of conflict gradually emerge, deepening one’s understanding of the characters’ lives. Wardally skillfully builds suspense through subtle clues that reveal the emotional toll hidden beneath the characters’ seemingly happy lives, and director Jackie Alexander paces the production adroitly and guides the powerful performances of an excellent cast.
John J. Caswell, Jr.’s Jerome is a departure from the typical gay play that pops up in June, geared toward Pride month: its focus is older gay men. A chalkboard in front of the proscenium curtain charts the decline of Jerome, Ariz., a mining town, from 10,000 population (crossed out) to lesser numbers (also crossed out) to, finally, Ghost City. That’s a tipoff that this eerie, intriguing drama is going to be different.
Jean Genet’s The Maids remains one of the theater’s strangest and most unsettling explorations of class, identity, fantasy, and performance. In director Kip Williams’s “new version,” Genet’s world of ritualized role-playing is transplanted into the age of Instagram filters, live-streams, and social media influencer culture—a contemporary framework that proves surprisingly well-suited to Genet’s original obsessions.
In A Night of Chekhov, director Sanio Kurtesevic ambitiously compresses three lesser-known Anton Chekhov works into a brisk evening of comic despair and emotional misfire. While flashes of Chekhov’s wit emerge throughout Swan Song, The Proposal, and The Bear, the ensemble has not yet fully settled into the rhythms of the material, resulting in performances that often feel tentative and uneven.
Hannah Caplan’s This Is Not About Me, a play about creating art, demonstrates the best aspects of collaboration: a smart script, captivating direction, immersive set design, and wonderful performances. Caplan’s dialogue crackles with wit and insight, while director Douglas Clarke-Wood allows the play’s 20-plus scenes and multiple storylines to flow beautifully. The result is a production that is joyful, funny, and a delight for both the ear and the eye.
Before the age of global pop stardom, there was Harry Lauder—a kilted powerhouse of British music hall and vaudeville whose songs and irrepressible personality made him one of the most beloved entertainers of the early 20th century. In Lauder: Scotland’s Kilted King of Broadway, Jamie MacDougall brings this larger-than-life figure back to the stage with infectious warmth and musical flair that turns biography into jubilant theatrical celebration.
After Pulitzer Prize–winning plays in 1938 (Our Town) and 1942 (The Skin of Our Teeth), Thornton Wilder, in his remaining 33 years of life, didn’t write another full-length, original play. Our Town, likely the most produced American play of all time, still burns brightly, undimmed by the passing decades. It is, then, no mystery why the allure of The Emporium, an unfinished Wilder play that exists in 360 handwritten pages at Yale’s Beinecke Library, called, Siren-like, to playwright Kirk Lynn, who has undertaken the task of assembling, interpreting, and finishing it. The result is a road full of cracks and bumps, but one that leads somewhere impossible to forget.
British fascism may have preceded Hitler and Mussolini, but those dictators inspired homegrown demagogues who reveled in mass rallies and mobilized Blackshirts to harass and terrorize impoverished immigrants. Tim Gilvin’s and Alex Kanefsky’s musical Cable Street recounts, in scenes alternating between the modern day and 1936, how British fascism turned out differently, as residents of London’s multicultural East End united to deter a right-wing rally on their turf.
Well, I’ll Let You Go is written by actor Bubba Weiler, who’s a little over 30, and directed by Jack Serio, still under 30 and seemingly ubiquitous in New York theater. It’s set in a mid-size, midwestern town that has lost its skill-based, manufacturing economy. Weiler’s characters are adjusting, in sundry ways, to coarsening influences, including the regional fulfillment facility of a gargantuan online retailer, which is the town’s sole surefire source of regular employment. Weiler and Serio bring a balance of intellect and feeling to their work, and the result is a fresh, engrossing chronicle of ordinary citizens contending with change for the worse.
Randall Sharp has been writing and directing plays for her Axis Theatre Company for more than 30 years. Radiating from the basement of One Sheridan Square, the sacred and profane locale that once housed Café Society, then Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Sharp’s jabby storytelling is never without its quirks. Her latest work, a space oddity called Specimen, is no exception.
Adam Bock’s The Receptionist is a slippery workplace comedy that starts with a seemingly innocuous monologue by an unidentified male about his love of fishing, and then shifts to the workers in an office, where a Mr. Raymond (Nael Nacer, the monologuist) is unexpectedly late. Amid exchanges of personal gossip, the receptionist Beverly (Katie Finneran) and a supervisor, Lorraine (Mallori Johnson), receive a visitor from the “home office,” Martin Dart (Will Pullen), as they await Mr. Raymond’s return. Director Sarah Benson’s revival of Bock’s masterly piece sustains a sense of inconsequentiality, even as discordant notes pop up, until the play reveals itself as a chilling paradigm of what Hannah Arendt, in covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1963, called “the banality of evil.”
Family relationships are universally difficult for teens, and with unpredictable outcomes. American, Italian is Anthony P. Pennino’s touching, emotionally wrenching, and sometimes humorous exploration of family dynamics in two multigenerational Italian families.
Bedlam’s stripped-to-the-bone staging of Othello proves that less can indeed be electrifyingly more, as four actors conjure a harrowing world with precision and nerve. Under the incisive direction of Eric Tucker, this revival foregrounds the play’s racial tensions with clarity, inviting audiences to lean in—and reckon—with every word.
Director Robert Hastie brings his bold and inventive production of Hamlet for the National Theatre of Great Britain to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), a fitting first outing in the new partnership between these venerable institutions—BAM first performed Hamlet in 1861, and it was the National’s inaugural production in 1963. Hiran Abeysekera portrays the moody Danish prince as sweet, neurotic, and impish, drawing out the comedy in the play without sacrificing its complexity and tragic weight. Hastie and Abeysekera seize on Hamlet’s theatricality and theatrical self-awareness, taking it to a new and provocative level.
Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s master propagandist and serial womanizer, almost always had his way with women. Nevertheless, when he challenges filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl it’s a classic case of “the unstoppable force meets the immovable object.” It’s unclear from James Clements’ Beauty Freak whether Riefenstahl is the unstoppable force or the immovable object, but regardless, she emerges the winner—or so one is led to think.
He plays dozens of characters. He bolts around the stage like a dervish, rearranging props, setting up mikes, climbing stairs and changing personas with every move. He works up as much sweat as Jonathan Groff in Just in Time. And he tells a chilling true-crime story in the process, one to leave the observer unsettled as to whether justice was done, and if so, what the price of that justice was.
