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.
Girl, Interrupted comes in a choice of formats. Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir is a flippant quick read with an irresistible neurotic edge. The 1999 movie version features Angelina Jolie chewing the scenery around a quietly intense Winona Ryder. “Queens of the Summer Hotel,” the 2021 album by indie star Aimee Mann, is a collection of songs inspired by the book, its sweet melodies belying the dark undertone of its lyrics. Her tunes were originally meant to serve as the score of a staged musical, and now, after a COVID-era delay, they have arrived at the Public Theater as the backbone of a new work, with Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Martyna Majok faithfully adapting Kaysen’s story, if not her impudent attitude.
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.
The Bad Daters, by Ireland-born New Yorker Derek Murphy, arrives Off Broadway with a winning blend of sharp Irish wit and disarming emotional honesty, transforming a premise about romantic misfires into something unexpectedly tender. Under the deft direction of Colin Summers, and buoyed by finely tuned performances from Kate Arrington and Shane McNaughton, this U.S. premiere proves as affecting as it is entertaining—a love story that earns its poignancy without sacrificing its bite.
In Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s Rheology, now at Playwrights Horizons after a spring 2025 run at the Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn, the writer and director creates a form of exposure therapy for his consuming fear of his mother’s death by confronting the prospect directly, in performance, alongside his real-life mother, Bubul Chakraborty. She is not an actor or a theater-maker, but an acclaimed theoretical physicist and professor at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.
In Cumulo, creator Emily Batsford conjures a visually arresting, nonverbal puppetry work that transforms a simple free fall into a poetic meditation on autonomy and self-reclamation. Inspired by Batsford’s recurring nightmares of falling, the piece asks: how does one assert identity under circumstances beyond one’s control, when stability itself feels elusive?
Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine shows surprising vitality after more than a century. Although critic Edmund Wilson disdained the play in 1924 for its “pessimistic heresies” and “effects of ferocious ugliness,” the importance of it did not escape other critics. When Death of a Salesman premiered in 1949, Harold Clurman noted that the theme of Arthur Miller’s play was “not, strictly speaking, new to our stage,” citing Rice’s 1923 work. With Salesman now on Broadway to rehash the shortcomings of capitalism, the New Group deserves kudos for offering a chance to see its precursor.
A one-man theatrical hurricane, Ned Van Zandt barrels onto the stage in Lost in Del Valle, a genre-bending dark comedy that transforms the Huron Room at SoHo Playhouse into a fever dream of excess, ruin, and hard-won redemption. Directed with razor-sharp precision by Amir Arison, and accompanied on stage by guitarist Mike Moore, this U.S. premiere is as unflinching as it is mesmerizing—an unforgettable descent into the chaos of a life lived on the edge.
On the tiny stage of Irish Rep’s basement Studio Theatre, two women sit at a cafe table catching up on their lives. The Approach has a cast of three, and the pairing of women changes for each scene. This Dublin-set play centered solely on women talking with one another is written and directed by men (Mark O’Rowe and Conor Bagley, respectively)—and, alas, for a good portion of its 70-minute run time, it fails the Bechdel test.
Scorched Earth, a dance theater piece created, directed and choreographed by Luke Murphy, asks, “What does it take to be of a place?” At the center of the play is the tension between William Dean (Will Thompson), a confident new arrival in a rural Irish community, and John McKay (Luke Murphy), a local tenant who lives on land that is up for auction. The work digs into territorialism and the violence that can occur over land disputes.
Bent Through Glass, written and performed by Alex Koltchak, transforms unimaginable loss into a work of emotional clarity, as a grieving father traces the aftershocks of his daughter’s suicide with unflinching honesty. Under the sensitive direction of Michael Sladek, this deeply personal solo piece becomes not only a testament to anguish, but a quietly radiant affirmation of love’s endurance, shaped by Koltchak’s willingness to bare his soul.
Though apparently popular in its own time, Titus Andronicus (ca. 1592), Shakespeare’s first tragedy, and his bloodiest, hasn’t enjoyed much esteem since. One 17th-century playwright declared it a “heap of rubbish”; T.S. Eliot thought it “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written.” Others conveniently decided that something so barbarous could not have been written by Shakespeare (although it likely contains some material by the dramatist George Peele, there is no doubt of Shakespeare’s authorship of the bulk of the play). It’s a good thing, then, that Red Bull Theater, led by Jesse Berger, was undeterred: Berger directs a harrowing, and funny, production of the play, featuring a ferocious Patrick Page in the title role.
Just what is John Patrick Shanley, a major playwright and screenwriter, doing at the Chain Theatre, a black box on the third floor of a dowdy Garment District office building? Premiering a lesser work, that’s what. Much lesser. The Pushover, his frenetic new drama, might generously be described as an exploration of good vs. evil, a character study of troubled individuals struggling to wriggle free of the personas they’ve created for themselves, or a noirish crime caper. Mostly, what’s on the small Chain stage is three romantically entangled women, arguing, acting out, and pulling power plays on one another. It’s very loud, even without miking, and while there are intimate moments and the occasional arresting snatch of Shanley dialogue, the tone seldom varies from harsh and antagonistic.
Titling her play Heartbreak Hotel is a major bit of misdirection from New Zealand dramatist Karin McCracken. Elvis’s recording of his classic 1956 single (by Mae Boren Axton and Tommy Durden) is barely mentioned, and its bouncy blues are a far cry from McCracken’s gloomier deep dive into the nature of heartbreak. Directed by Eleanor Bishop, the play reaches beyond McCracken’s personal drama to examine unexpected, more clinical aspects of a breakup, such as psychological, biological, and physiological symptoms. Interspersed with those sequences are musical interludes—she took up the synthesizer to occupy herself after the end of a six-year relationship, and she has learned six “powerful” chords.
In Nicole Travolta Is Doing Alright, a one-woman play by performer Nicole Travolta (cowritten with Paula Christensen), the star delivers a dazzling, deeply felt turn that fuses stand-up, confessional storytelling, and incisive character work into an evening of theatrical vitality, fluidly staged by directors Margarett Perry and Paula Christensen. With razor-sharp wit, Travolta transforms her trials of credit card debt and compulsive shopping into a bold, laugh-out-loud meditation on identity, resilience, and reinvention.
11 to Midnight is a funky, dance-driven show by Austin and Marideth Telenko (the social media sensations Cost n’ Mayor) in partnership with Lyndsay Magid Aviner (who also directs) and Jacob Aviner of Hideaway Circus. Set on New Year’s Eve between the hours of 11 and midnight, the production presents a festive feel before it begins. Cast members casually chat with the audience as they take their seats, holding a large stack of sticky notes on which they write down missives, meant to echo New Year’s resolutions.
Two occupants of 59E59 from recent seasons inform the new musical now playing there. The Sabbath Girl, from 2024, was a sweet musical romance of a Jew and a non-Jew in modern-day Manhattan. Dear Jack, Dear Louise, from 2025, had playwright Ken Ludwig affectionately serving up the epistolary wartime courtship of his parents, an Army doctor and a chorus girl. Pour these two shows into a blender, add a generation, hit Purée, and you come up with How My Grandparents Fell in Love.
In Julissa Reynoso’s autobiographical drama Public Charge, co-written by Michael J. Chepiga, one witnesses how Reynoso, played with fierce tenacity by Zabryna Guevara, solved a political impasse as a senior diplomat in the Obama administration. While the play offers an earnest and often compelling meditation on democracy in action, its heavy-handed didacticism ultimately mutes its dramatic impact.
The poster for Milo Cramer’s No Singing in the Navy, showing three wide-eyed sailors, evokes classic military-themed musicals—not only wartime ones like On the Town (1944) and Anchors Aweigh (1945), but also the nostalgia-tinted shows of a generation later: Dames at Sea (1966) and Over Here! (1974). Its “score,” however, bears little resemblance to melody-rich 1930s and ’40s musicals, and its book is awash with absurdist episodes that misfire.
