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Ginger Twinsies

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Ginger Twinsies

Ginger Twinsies is a parody of the 1998 film The Parent Trap, itself a reboot of the 1961 film of the same name. Although the parody focuses on the 1998 Lindsay Lohan version, both films share a completely ridiculous storyline that allows a child actor to play two characters. So many coincidences and lapses in logic boggle the rational mind. Therefore, Ginger Twinsies, written and directed by Kevin Zak, has carte blanche to unmercifully mock its source material. It is 80 minutes of high-energy hijinks, slapstick, sight gags, wordplay, and enough 1990s trivia to be its own Trivial Pursuit category.

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The Weir

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The Weir

The Irish Rep is currently staging its fourth production since 2013 of Conor McPherson’s 1997 play The Weir, with several of the cast reprising roles. And yet there is nothing stale about this staging—instead, the play is brought to exhilarating life by a marvelous ensemble, under Ciarán O’Reilly’s assured direction. The Weir is essentially a collection of four ghost stories, which arise naturally out of the banter in a rural Irish pub, that ultimately reveal more about the loneliness of the people telling them than anything supernatural.

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Transgression

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Transgression

A multitude of transgressions come to light in Terry Curtis Fox’s Transgression. This melodrama about New York artists consists of 19 scenes toggling back and forth between 2010 and 1970. At irregular intervals, the playwright detonates ugly, morally irksome surprises. The result is a two-hour, slow-motion collision between louche mores in the Warhol era and the subsequent new-millennial sensitivity that augured the eruption of #MeToo.

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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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Polishing Shakespeare

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Polishing Shakespeare

Can one improve upon Shakespeare? That is the question. Or at least that is the question that propels the plot of Brian Dykstra’s Polishing Shakespeare. For more than 400 years, Shakespeare’s identity has been debated, challenged, and disputed, and his plays have been revised, reimagined, and rewritten. Yet it is only recently that the literary ethics of directly translating his works from early modern to present-day English have been thoroughly considered.

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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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Open

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Open

In the revival of Crystal Skillman’s Open, now playing under the deft direction of Jessi D. Hill, Megan Hill delivers a mesmerizing solo performance as the Magician—a woman who attempts to conjure the truth of a personal tragedy through the language of illusion. What unfolds is not merely a magic show, but a deeply felt meditation on love, loss, and the fragile hope that words—and maybe even spells—can undo the past.

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Out of Order

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Out of Order

Carl Holder’s new show is called Out of Order because, while it has all the usual components of a play—not only plot components like “inciting incident” and “rising action” but production components such as the curtain call, a talkback, even a content warning—they don’t occur in their usual order. 

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Duke & Roya

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Duke & Roya

It’s impossible to ignore chemistry, whether it’s as basic and essential as two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen, or as toxic and unwelcome as a string of PFAs. In Charles Randolph-Wright’s Duke & Roya, the chemistry goes beyond the molecular level, as Jay Ellis and Stephanie Nur demonstrate in the title roles. It’s a powerful component for this play, which by turns is romantic and political and covers a lot of ground without quite bursting at the seams.

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The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

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The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Jethro Compton’s stage adaptation of the classic short story The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance delivers a taut and compelling drama that both honors and subverts the conventions of the Western. Directed with precision and emotional clarity by Thomas R. Gordon, this new production retains the story’s essential moral conflict—between truth and legend, justice and lawlessness—but deepens its resonance by introducing a new character and themes that can speak powerfully to a modern audience.

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Trophy Boys

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Trophy Boys

In Emmanuelle Mattana’s Trophy Boys, four debaters huddle in an empty schoolroom (nifty scenic design by Matt Saunders), strategizing for the final match of an interscholastic tournament. They’re seniors at Imperium, an elite boys’ prep school; the imminent debate is against a team from a similarly tony girls’ school. This is the swan song of the boys’ high-school extracurricular lives. They’re undefeated and, being fiercely ambitious, terrified of losing this last debate, especially to a female team.

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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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Lowcountry

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Lowcountry

Abby Rosebrock’s 2018 dark comedy, Dido of Idaho, featured an act of extreme violence carried out with a household object. Her 2019 follow-up, Blue Ridge, focused on addicts trying to form relationships in the midst of a recovery program. Her new work, a twisted tale of good will and bad romance called Lowcountry, utilizes both of these dramatic elements in its exploration of a first date warped by bouts of desperation and deception. In this Atlantic Theater Company production directed by Jo Bonney, some scenes might be over-extended, but the sexual tension simmers, then boils over.

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Prosperous Fools

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Prosperous Fools

Taylor Mac is chronicling slapstick goings-on backstage at a not-for-profit’s fundraising gala in his new comedy Prosperous Fools. Murphy’s Law is in high gear, and things are haywire. Since the not-for-profit is called National Ballet Theater, it’s clear this is Mac’s assessment of the state of the arts under the new federal administration that has made its leader chair of the board at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

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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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A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First

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A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First

In A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First, playwright-directors Natasha Roland and Xhloe Rice blur the line between 1960s Boy Scout rituals and the drafting of U.S. soldiers to Vietnam. What emerges is an absurdist meditation on masculinity, obedience, and the perilous passage to manhood.

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Prince Faggot

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Prince Faggot

Jordan Tannahill’s drama Prince Faggot, a love story about a gay heir to the British throne and his boyfriend, is admirably multifaceted: part fantasia, part social and political commentary, part agitprop. At heart, though, Prince Faggot is a bittersweet romance about a royal and a commoner, a sort of Roman Holiday for the 21st century—if Audrey Hepburn’s princess had become a devotee of drug-assisted intercourse and Japanese rope bondage.

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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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At the Barricades

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At the Barricades

At the Barricades, a play drawn from original sources by James Clements and Sam Hood Adrian, explores the price of freedom and the complexities of political idealism. The play highlights the fight of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a battalion of international volunteers numbering roughly 2,800 Americans who fought on the side of the Republicans (the democratically elected government) during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) against the Nationalists, the rising fascist dictatorship under Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

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A Special Relationship

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A Special Relationship

In political parlance, the term A Special Relationship refers to the longstanding alliance of America and its “closest ally” Britain (the phrase “America’s oldest ally” refers to France). Disparities in language are a prominent feature in Tim Marriott and Jeff Stolzer’s winsome comedy, which is playing as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival. The piece takes as a major theme George Bernard Shaw’s maxim (sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill or Oscar Wilde): “England and America are two countries divided by a common language.”

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