Many an actor has played Shakespeare’s problematic Shylock, the centerpiece of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, since Elizabethan times. Even in “officially” Jew-free England (nominally from 1290–1656, though Sephardic Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition did live there), stereotypes of Shylock the Jew prevailed. Yet relatively rarely has a Jewish actor been cast as Shylock, especially in today’s “cancel culture.” In Playing Shylock, dramatist Mark Leiren-Young’s solo play, actor Saul Rubinek channels this issue.
In this theatrical age of digital scenery, hybrid storytelling and contemporary subject matter, Reunions seems old-fashioned with its painted backdrop for scenery and simply told stories set in pre–World War I Europe. Yet from this old-fashioned presentation come many of the show’s pleasures, including some charming ditties, fine period costumes and note-perfect performances, particularly by a couple of beloved old hands of the New York stage.
Relationships are hard—even moreso when you’re working from the literal points of view of both parties. In writer/director/performer Natalie Palamides’ Weer, love takes a dangerous—if a bit weird—turn while jumping through time across the entire lifespan of one couple’s wild relationship. Making its début at the Cherry Lane Theatre, newly reopened under the acclaimed independent film studio A24, the play arrives after a successful run in London.
In Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s The Wasp, two women—Carla (Amy Forsyth) and Heather (Colby Minifie)—meet at an outdoor café. Carla arrives first. Heavily pregnant, she lights a cigarette and, even seated, has a swagger about her. When Heather enters and sees Carla, she launches into nervous small talk, which Carla swats away with silence. The initial tension seems to stem from Carla’s dour and angry demeanor, but as the play unfolds, the core conflict revolves around their shared past, future consequences, and a morally difficult proposition.
Rare is the musical that begins with an undescended testicle. But that’s the opening parry of Fixing Frankie, by Joe Langworth (book and lyrics) and Steve Marzullo (music). More than the troubled hero’s scrotum needs fixing, and Langworth and Marzullo take him down some curious byways, piling on unnecessary details and side stories. Ultimately, though, Frankie’s healing is a touching little story, if one that could use a little touching up.
Jonathan Spector’s This Much I Know is an erudite, ambitious, and wide-ranging play in the vein of Tom Stoppard. Three actors play dozens of parts, spanning nationalities and time periods; historical events and personages alternate with the everyday problems of people trying to navigate 21st-century life; and questions of cognition, epistemology, and politics are interrogated.
Leo McGann’s The Honey Trap, tautly directed by Matt Torney at the Irish Rep, probes memory, violence, and reckoning in Belfast. What begins as a seemingly ordinary night in 1979 reverberates across decades, forcing one soldier to confront the shadows of his past.
Brian Watkins’s Weather Girl is a state-of-the-nation play that delivers 70 minutes of theatrical fireworks and a dire warning. No names of politicians or officeholders get mentioned; no political parties or ideologies are discussed. Yet Weather Girl is unmistakably about our nation’s well-being (or lack thereof), with special attention to the lethal effect we’ve had on the earth and its atmosphere.
This is pretty high-profile stuff for La MaMa, and a far more elaborate production than their norm: A major stage performer and a noted film actor in a new play by a well-known movie and TV actor. And Then We Were No More, by Tim Blake Nelson, thrusts the audience into a depressing future that may not be far off—but one that feels more familiar, what with the surfeit of apocalyptic and otherwise downbeat futuristic dramas flooding the marketplace, than Nelson likely intended.
The 30–40 guests attending each performance of Last Call, A Play with Cocktails know they’re going to immersive theater, but they may not expect that what they’ll be immersed in are marriage counseling and an authoritarian dystopia.
John Leguizamo’s The Other Americans, now playing at the Public Theater, depicts not a melting pot of cultures, all successfully rising to the top, but rather the isolation and obstacles of the immigrant’s reach for a piece of the American pie.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“I’ve heard that this is being referred to as an Off-Broadway play,” sighs comedian Julio Torres at the outset of Color Theories. Julio, author and leading actor, casts a knowing glance across the audience, pausing for a comically timed beat, and shakes his head laconically: “No … no, no, no, no. … That could not be further from the truth.” As this sly, charming theater piece zips along, however, it becomes clear that Color Theories is indeed an Off-Broadway play, not merely a spiffily staged stand-up routine.
Just like that other Alexander currently celebrated on the New York stage, fashion designer Alexander McQueen rose from humble origins to make his mark in an elite milieu. Darrah Cloud’s new bio-play House of McQueen features Bridgerton heartthrob Luke Newton in the title role, with Broadway musical star Emily Skinner as McQueen’s mother, Joyce, and Catherine LeFrere as his friend and patron Isabella Blow—the two most important women in McQueen’s life.
Henrik Ibsen’s play The Wild Duck received a confused reaction from most critics after it was published in 1884. Almost alone, George Bernard Shaw acclaimed it, and while its reputation has gradually grown, it isn’t performed nearly so much as A Doll’s House or Hedda Gabler or Ghosts: the last New York City production in English was in 1987. For a play that the stern critic John Simon called “one of the finest tragicomedies in all dramatic literature,” the neglect is shocking, so Theatre for a New Audience deserves kudos for resurrecting it. The result, however, is often disappointing.
It’s a minor theatrical annoyance, but one that does irk some critics: When your set displays a large wall clock, center stage, make sure it’s running. The wall clock in This Is Government, Nina Kissinger’s disappointing new comedy at 59E59, displays 4:55 in the 15-minute first scene and stays there, with the three denizens of Washington’s Cannon House Office Building moving the hands manually to tick off the subsequent scenes in a roughly seven-hour dramatic arc. It plays amateurishly, and so, unfortunately, does much of This Is Government.
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.
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.
Romina Paula’s The Whole of Time chronicles the seismic impact of a seemingly casual visitor on an Argentine family. Written in 2009 and translated for the English-speaking stage by Jean Graham-Jones, the play was first presented in New York in 2024 at Torn Page, a nonprofit theater company in Chelsea. It was nominated for a Drama Desk Award that season. The Torn Page staging, directed by Tony Torn, has now been reassembled at The Brick in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as a co-production of The Brick and A/Park Productions.
After a year’s hiatus, Free Shakespeare in the Park triumphantly returns to the revitalized Delacorte Theater with Saheem Ali’s multicultural staging of Twelfth Night. With wit, music, and romance seamlessly entwined, this timeless comedy revels in love’s unexpected twists and delightful disguises.
In Omar Bakry’s In the Shadow of Her Father, directed by Vincent Scott, Ava Wolski (Inji El Gammal), in her forties, lives a quiet life in rural Ohio with her adoptive father, Walter (Roger Hendricks Simon), in his seventies. Walter is a man haunted by alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But when a stranger appears at Ava’s door, he ignites buried secrets and desires. Tackling alcoholism, PTSD, and the immigrant experience, Bakry’s drama is both a meditation on survival and a tender love story.
Playwright Rishi Varma was motivated to write Sulfur Bottom by his concern for environmental justice, defined by the show’s partner organization WE ACT as “ensuring that people of color and/or low-income residents participate meaningfully in the creation of sound and fair environmental health and protection policies and practices.”
