Musical

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The Essentialisn't

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The Essentialisn't

The Essentialisn’t is the most awkward title of the theater season so far, but never mind that. Eisa Davis’s intimate musical enfolds its spectators in the cultural recollection of the earliest Africans brought to this country and in Davis’s own search for identity through music, acting, and dance. It’s an ambitious undertaking focused on what Davis calls “personal sovereignty.” Davis, who is billed as creator, performer, and director, poses a multivalent question—“Can you be Black and not perform”—which appears in bright fuchsia neon onstage throughout the play.

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Saturday Church

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Saturday Church

The new stage musical Saturday Church traces a Black teenager’s search for belonging through the glittering rhythms of ballroom culture and queer self-expression. Based loosely on Damon Cardasis’s 2017 indie film, the musical unites Cardasis and James Ijames’s book with songs from Sia’s catalogue, as well as Honey Dijon’s music.

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This Is Not a Drill

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This Is Not a Drill

This Is Not a Drill is York Theatre’s second production in a year built on a people-stuck-in-a-hotel template. Last December’s Welcome to the Big Dipper involved a blizzard; in Drill, guests of Honolulu’s Hibiscus Resort have their trips disrupted by an emergency alert about an inbound missile.

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The Porch on Windy Hill

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The Porch on Windy Hill

Emotions turn on a dime in The Porch on Windy Hill, the “new play with old music” at Urban Stages. They’re illogical and inconsistent, and that’s why you’ll probably enjoy the old music more than the new play, which is by Sherry Stregack Lutken, Lisa Helmi Johanson, Morgan Morse, and David M. Lutken. But as for the old music, you are likely to enjoy it very much indeed.

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Sober Songs

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Sober Songs

With sharp humor and raw vulnerability, Michael Levin’s Sober Songs, directed by Chris Mackin, dives into the tangled lives of six young adults navigating recovery and their gruff but compassionate sponsor, Cap. Through emotional ballads and witty dialogue, the musical delivers a candid, character-driven look at the messy highs and lows of sobriety.

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Exorcistic: The Rock Musical

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Exorcistic: The Rock Musical

Any number of things can go wrong when attempting a musical parody of The Exorcist. After all, William Friedkin’s 1973 classic horror movie was itself rumored to be cursed, having experienced more than its share of injuries and deaths during filming. Plus, it can be tricky finding the yucks in William Peter Blatty’s story, which takes blood and puke as seriously as it does Satan and the priesthood. Writer and performer Michael Shaw Fisher gives it a shot nonetheless with Exorcistic: The Rock Musical. Its dynamic cast is wholly committed to the bit and sing as if possessed, but Fisher’s script, which he began drafting in 2012, is convoluted to the point that audience members may be left wondering what the devil is going on.

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Rolling Thunder

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Rolling Thunder

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.

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Heathers The Musical

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Heathers The Musical

For at least two decades, musical theater has been adapting existing intellectual properties that have had cultural impact with teen audiences, such as Hairspray, Mean Girls, and the recent production of Beetlejuice. Heathers the Musical, a 2014 iteration of Daniel Waters’s 1988 film, is one of those that found new life through song. With book, music, and lyrics written by Kevin Murphy and Lawrence O’Keefe, the musical took the film’s signature sardonic humor to new heights during its original Off-Broadway run.

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Breakin’ NYC

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Breakin’ NYC

With Breakin’ NYC, director and choreographer Angel Kaba transforms the stage into a pulsing time machine, tracing hip-hop dance’s rise from the pavement of the Bronx to the global spotlight of the Olympic Games. More than a dance showcase, the production is a celebration of resilience, rhythm, and rebellion—told through the language of hip-hop. After a popular holiday run of 20 performances last year, Breakin’ NYC returns with its vibe intact. The charismatic Ajalé Olaseni Coard hosts the 75-minute show and keeps everything moving along.

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Bear Grease

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Bear Grease

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?

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Beau the Musical

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Beau the Musical

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.

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Lights Out: Nat “King” Cole

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Lights Out: Nat “King” Cole

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.

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Goddess

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Goddess

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.

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Gertrude Lawrence: A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening

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Gertrude Lawrence: A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening

If the British actress Gertrude Lawrence is remembered at all nowadays, it is primarily for originating the part of Anna Leonowens in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I (1951). She didn’t get the role in the 1956 film, and her reputation rests on a long theatrical career in Britain and America, as Lucy Stevens’s gossipy Gertrude Lawrence: A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening, makes clear.

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The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse

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The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse

The New Group, celebrating its 30th anniversary this spring, may not be so new anymore, but that doesn’t mean they have forgotten how to rock. Indeed, their latest production, a pop musical called The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse, is nothing if not a Gen Z shout-out to teenage angst. With his music and lyrics, Michael Breslin delivers a handful of clever, hard-driving songs into the hands of a capable company of young performers. Unfortunately, Breslin’s book, co-written with Patrick Foley, has all the charm of an undisciplined child.

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All the World’s a Stage

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All the World’s a Stage

There’s a lot to like about All the World’s a Stage, the Keen Company’s new musical at Theatre Row, but the most likable item of all might be … the strings. Michael Starobin’s orchestrations comprise piano, cello, violin, banjo, and guitar, infusing Adam Gwon’s songs with warmth, color, and the sort of lush sound that new scores haven’t proffered for years. We’ve gotten so used to artificial-sounding synthesizers, ear-rattling drums, and over-miked accompaniment that Gwon’s and Starobin’s work sounds fresher and newer than anything going on at whatever jukebox musical is playing down the street. And it’s serving a story that bears telling, and is told well.

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The Trojans

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The Trojans

The Trojans is a spirited musical about disengaged hourly workers acting out fictionalized memories of their long-gone high school days. A joint presentation of Loading Dock Theatre and Nancy Manocherian’s the cell, the show, directed by Eric Paul Vitale, is inspired—to some extent, at least—by Homer’s Iliad. It’s also the latest entry in an expanding catalog of American plays set in Amazon warehouses (in this instance, a fictional facility in Carlton, a small North Texas town with two high schools).

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The Jonathan Larson Project

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The Jonathan Larson Project

The Jonathan Larson Project arrives Off-Broadway like a breath of fresh air. Conceived by Jennifer Ashley Tepper and directed by John Simpkins, this musical memorial presents all those unheard pop songs and numbers from unfinished musicals that were left behind when Larson, the beloved creator of Rent, died suddenly at the age of 35 of an aortic dissection.

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B*tchcraft

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B*tchcraft

Of all the productions opening Off-Broadway this season, B*tchcraft may well be the most bewitching. With music and lyrics written by Bitch, and book by her and Margie Zohn, who also directs, it’s a wild journey into how Bitch, a quiet girl from suburban Michigan, shed her chrysalis to become the queer icon that she is today.

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Gil Scott-Heron’s Bluesology

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Gil Scott-Heron’s Bluesology

Playing at the Soho Playhouse as part of the Fringe Encore series, Gil Scott-Heron’s Bluesology is a heartfelt tribute of spoken-word and musical performance full of angst and warmth, lovingly hosted by his daughter Gia Scott-Heron. Gil Scott-Heron, who died in 2011, was a spoken-word artist and musician, and the show presents 17 of his works from a career that extended from 1970 through 2010. Bluesology is how he described his work—he saw himself as “a scientist who is concerned with the origin of the blues.”

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