Reviews

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Rock & Roll Man

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Rock & Roll Man

The last time that Constantine Maroulis trod the boards of New World Stages was in 2008. Capitalizing on his dynamic American Idol appearances, he was cast as the hard rocking Drew in the ’80s-themed jukebox musical, Rock of Ages, a part that he would parlay into a Broadway run. Now, as the title character in Rock & Roll Man, he has returned to the venue, with shorter hair, to lead another period musical that’s full of classic hits. But this time he leads from behind, supporting a sensational ensemble that steals the show and never gives it back.

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Cassie and the Lights

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Cassie and the Lights

A foster-care placement, no matter where or when, can be a difficult, even traumatic transition for all parties involved. Much can go awry, especially when children expect that their parent or parents will return for them. Alex Howarth, writer and director of Cassie and the Lights, draws the audience almost vicariously into the fantasy-filled and emotion-and-guilt-fraught world of three sisters in foster care in northern England. Their strongest, and possibly only, tool for survival is their bond with one another.

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Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground

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Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground

Richard Hellesen’s new solo show Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground resurrects the 34th President with much sound and fury. Directed by Peter Ellenstein, and with the superb John Rubinstein playing the eponymous role, this play may well overhaul that musty image of Dwight D. Eisenhower as a “do-nothing” president.

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The Gospel According to Heather

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The Gospel According to Heather

The first thing to know about The Gospel According to Heather: It’s way out of author Paul Gordon’s wheelhouse. Gordon, the rare writer who creates book, music, and lyrics, specializes in adaptations of lofty classics, most prominently Jane Eyre. His  2009 version of Daddy Long Legs gets produced a lot (while convincing some of us that epistolary musicals aren’t a great idea). For The Gospel According to Heather he turns thoroughly contemporary, with an original story so current that there are jokes about drag storybook hour, Dylan Mulvaney’s Budweiser ad, and the congressional tussle over gas ovens. Heather, like its title character, isn’t perfect, but it has more on its mind than the average musical comedy, and it dispenses its outrage with verve and good humor.

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The Comeuppance

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The Comeuppance

In his new play, The Comeuppance, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins checks in with his generation of Americans nearing 40. The five principals in this world premiere are gathering for their 20th high school reunion, and Jacobs-Jenkins, 38, draws his structure from notable plays that involve excessive drinking after sundown: Long Day’s Journey into Night, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Boys in the Band. In addition, those who have read Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons may recall that comeuppance figures heavily in that novel. There’s also a smidgen of The Big Chill and a larger scoop of John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra.

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Days of Wine and Roses

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Days of Wine and Roses

In Days of Wine and Roses, the new musical based on JP Miller’s 1958 teleplay and Blake Edwards’s 1962 Warner Bros. film, the central characters introduce themselves in song as “two people stranded at sea.” Even when offered lifelines, as the boozy, destructive duo often are, they respond like drowning victims, clawing and scratching, threatening to bring their rescuers down with them. With a book by Craig Lucas and a score by Adam Guettel, Days of Wine and Roses presents a searing and sobering portrait of the devastating costs of addiction.

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Singfeld! A Musical Parody About Nothing

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Singfeld! A Musical Parody About Nothing

Brothers Bob and Tobly McSmith have created a cottage industry of musicals based—unauthorized, they always make it clear—on popular movies and TV shows of the past 30 years. They even have a cottage for their industry: the Theater Center at 50th and Broadway, where their new show Singfeld! A Musical Parody About Nothing has joined The Office! The Musical Parody and Friends: The Musical Parody in repertory.

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Invisible

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Invisible

Nikhil Parmar’s relentlessly kinetic solo show Invisible is an impressive hourlong workout for the actor. The words tumble out, the situations are plentiful, and he breaks the fourth wall time and again. If he had not written the piece for himself, one might regard the movement as a mistake by a novice, but Parmar intends to show what he can do, vocally and physically, and with a vengeance.

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Lizard Boy

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Lizard Boy

Justin Huertas’s Lizard Boy, a queer pop-rock indie musical with a sci-fi vibe, is funny, poignant, and life-affirming. Huertas, as the titular character, is a sweet and likable protagonist in this coming-of-age love story even though he suffers from having green, scaly skin. Cleverly directed by Brandon Ivie, and under the aegis of Prospect Theater Company, this show is a terrific homage to—and satire of—comic-book mythology.

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Foxes

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Foxes

Foxes, set in a Black Caribbean community in London, is a sly and thoughtful exploration of a series of taboo subjects. Meera (Nemide May), who is from a Muslim family, tells her boyfriend Daniel (Raphel Famotibe), who is from a Caribbean Christian family, that she is pregnant. That creates a big problem: how will these two young people, from different cultural and religious backgrounds, work it out? They are also at the beginning of their young adult life, trying to determine their future. Daniel is planning on going to university, or “uni” as the Brits call it.

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Love + Science

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Love + Science

Beginning with a chance meeting, David J. Glass’s new play Love + Science traces the lives of two gay medical students amid the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. After a 1981 welcoming ceremony for medical students at Columbia, Jeff (Jonathan Burke) asks another student, Matt (Matt Walker), to take his picture. Soon they are revealing intimacies that suggest personal minefields: “My mother sent her best wishes,” says Matt, tentative and reserved, while the forthright Jeff announces, “I got, ‘Get out of my house, you faggot,’ when I was 17 … been on my own ever since.” Jeff also registers that Matt is a whiz kid—he’s only 20 (though he’ll be far older by the end).

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This Land Was Made

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This Land Was Made

Tori Sampson’s This Land Was Made is a steamy gumbo of history, humor, and imagination. Directed by Taylor Reynolds, it serves up a fictive account of the origins of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, Calif., in 1966. Although the play has some structural flaws, it invites one to ponder the issues that animated this revolutionary social organization—racist police brutality and economic injustice—and to consider how they still resonate today.

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Wet Brain

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Wet Brain

Memory, when conveyed on stage, traditionally arrives in the form of a flashback, or a soliloquy. But in John J. Caswell, Jr.’s frantic and surreal family drama Wet Brain, memory is a foreign object to be cut from the stomach, or a hypersonic shared experience that blasts through outer space even as it is grounded in that most triggering of locales, the family room in the house of a decidedly dysfunctional brood. 

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King James

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King James

Sports, friendship and Lebron James are central to Rajiv Joseph’s play King James. The renowned basketball player, known by the epithet of the title, brings two unlikely sports fanatics together to form a long-term bond that surpasses a ball game.

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Bees & Honey

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Bees & Honey

Romantic relationships can be a bushel of complex emotions. In her new play, Bees & Honey, Guadalís Del Carmen explores the intricacies of a Dominican American couple living in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. The play begins with a segment in which its two principals talk about Juan Luis Guerra’s bachata song, “Como Abeja al Panal” (i.e., “like a bee to its honeycomb”), which inspired the title Bees & Honey. The composer Guerra, as described in the play, “is and will always be the Beethoven of Latin America.”

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Being Mr. Wickham

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Being Mr. Wickham

Jane Austen’s work has never been an easy read, but in the way she weaves her characters’ complex personalities into her novels she attempts to provide the reader a window into their early 19th-century English culture. Yet perhaps because of cultural and linguistic norms of the time, some characters are not easily accessible. Writers Adrian Lukis and Catherine Curzon jointly explore George Wickham in Being Mr. Wickham, giving the audience a social, parlor-like closeup—an almost intimate one—of the very man whom Austen vilifies in Pride and Prejudice.

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Orlando

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Orlando

At the outset of Orlando, playwright-performer Lucy Roslyn says she discovered Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel (also titled Orlando) at a “jumble sale” when she was 12. Roslyn, from England’s West Midlands, explains that a jumble sale is what Americans call a yard sale. She also mentions that hers is a Coventry accent and that Woolf’s Orlando, in successive editions, has been a treasured companion since she bought that flea-market paperback years ago.

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Primary Trust

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Primary Trust

Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust is a tender and riveting play about trauma and the difficulties of human connection that is by turns funny and upsetting, and ultimately uplifting. Its power lies in Booth’s ability to avoid cynicism and create characters capable of genuine surprise, without veering into melodrama or oversentimentality. Director Knud Adams, who also directed Booth’s Paris at the Atlantic Theater in 2020, achieves a smart balance between naturalism and the unreality of a memory play, with a superb cast, led by William Jackson Harper in a performance of uncanny vulnerability.

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Romeo and Juliet

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Romeo and Juliet

The National Asian American Theatre Company’s Romeo and Juliet may just go down as the season’s most misdirected production. Employing Hansol Jung’s modern-verse adaptation as its text, codirectors Jung and Dustin Wills no doubt intended to revamp Shakespeare’s tragedy by leaning into its comedy to point up the darker aspects. But what one gets is a travesty of the play.

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Waiting in the Wings

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Waiting in the Wings

Waiting in the Wings is the sort of show that materializes every June with a gay-themed subject to celebrate Pride Month intentionally or obliquely. This adaptation of a 2014 movie, in which Sally Struthers, Christopher Atkins and Shirley Jones appeared, stars Jeffrey A. Johns, who wrote the screenplay and reprises his writing and acting roles for the stage.

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