5 Shows I Most Want to See in Spring 2025

Some theater-goers lust after seeing big-name stars and there will be plenty of them for those folks to see in the upcoming spring season, from theater-grown ones like Idina Menzel in Redwood, the original eco-musical that she co-conceived; to Hollywood imports like George Clooney, making his stage debut in Good Night, And Good Luck, a theatrical version of the 2005 movie he co-wrote about the showdown between the newscaster Edward R. Murrow and the demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy. 

I like seeing stars too, but only when they come with good acting as Rachel McAdams did with her impressive performance in last season’s Mary Jane. But, as anyone who has caught my podcasts Stagecraft and All the Drama can tell you, I’m most turned on by playwrights and so the shows I’m always most eager to see are those by smart writers who have interesting things to say about the ways in which we try to make sense of—and make connections in—this complicated world in which we all live. 

So my spring preview is a little different from others I’ve been reading. I do want to see the shows that so many of my colleagues are touting but below are five that I’m really desperate to see:

LIBERATION by Bess Wohl @ Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre, starting Jan. 31: One of the things I most admire about Wohl is her refusal to write the same kind of play twice. She’s written a romcom about young Nazi lovers, a musical about porn stars and a comedy about people at a silent retreat in which only a couple of lines of dialog are ever spoken. This time out she's given herself the challenge of looking at women’s attempts to figure out what they want for themselves in two separate time periods set 50 years apart and I can hardly wait to see what she makes of that. 

GRANGEVILLE by Samuel D. Hunter @ Signature Theater, starting Feb. 4: There have recently been a slew of works—Blood Quilt, The Hills of California, even the excellent movie “His Three Daughters”—about siblings coming together to mourn a dying parent but it’s hard to find a more thoughtful or sensitive playwright working today than Hunter and so I’m really curious about what spin his play centered on two half-brothers played by Brendan Fraser and Brian J. Smith will bring to that theme.

PURPOSE by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins in a Steppenwolf production @ the Helen Hayes Theater, starting Feb. 25: Although he’s been turning out one provocative work after another over the past 15 years, it was last season’s production of Appropriate that put Jacobs-Jenkins on many theatergoer’s radar. It featured a dysfunctional white southern family with some skeletons in their closet. This new work is switching the focus to an equally troubled midwestern black family who will be brought to life by such catnip performers as LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Henry Lennix, John Michael Hill and Kara Young.

WINE IN THE WILDERNESS by Alice Childress @ Classic Stage Company, starting March 6: Back in the 1950s and '60s, the theater world wasn’t quite ready for the nuanced ways that Childress insisted on portraying black people in plays like Trouble in Mind and The Wedding Band. But as the success of recent revivals of those works have shown, Childress, who died in 1994 at the age of 77, was a master storyteller and so I'm sure you'll understand why I'm over the moon about the fact that the actress and producer La Chanze is making her directorial debut with Childress' two hander about an artist and the model he believes will help him create his image of black womanhood. 

FLOYD COLLINS music and lyrics by Adam Guettel and book by Tina Landau @ Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, starting March 27: It’s not just writers who create straight plays who draw me in. I’ve been waiting for years for a revival of Guettel’s musical which I missed during its brief 25-show run in 1996. Its story, based on the true 1925 incident of a cave explorer who set off a media circus when he got trapped underground, sounds intriguing; Landau, who is also directing, is a whiz at staging shows and the role of the explorer seems almost tailor-made for Jeremy Jordan who left The Great Gatsby to take the part. But it’s the chance to hear Guettel’s score live that has me chomping at the bit because as he’s shown with The Light in the Piazza and The Days of Wine and Roses, he knows how to play to both the minds and hearts of theatergoers like me.   

 

 

 

 

The 10 Shows That Spoke to Me in 2024

It’s that time of year when people like me who are lucky enough to see lots of shows are supposed to look back and draw up a list of the ones we consider to have been the best. But that’s always been tricky for me because “best” is such a subjective word. I've always believed that art is a conversation between the people who make it and those of us who receive it. So below are 10 shows that may or may not have been the best that appeared on the boards over the last 12 months but are the ones that truly spoke to me.

DEAD OUTLAW: You might not think that a show—a musical no less—centered around a corpse could charm anyone but composer David Yazbek, book writer Itamar Moses and director David Cromer turned the macabre saga of a bumbling outlaw whose mummified remains ended up as a sideshow attraction into a nuanced commentary on today’s obsession with true crime stories and an even more valuable meditation on death itself. It also featured a terrific toe-tapping score and a you-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it performance by Andrew Durand as the titular cadaver that all left me grinning. A Broadway run was recently announced so there will be another chance for us all to enjoy this one in the spring.

GYPSY: I’ve seen three of the four previous revivals of this classic 1959 musical about a mother who pushes her kids into show business and I marveled each time at the music by Jule Styne, the lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and the book by Arthur Laurents but I’ve never been as moved as I was this time as I watched Audra McDonald play Madam Rose not as a monster or even a self-involved stage mom but as a woman simply desperate to make a way for her girls in an unforgiving world. There were moments when, although they don’t look at all alike, that I'd have sworn I was looking at the brave yet vulnerable single mother who raised me.  

THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA: Jez Butterworth also beautifully rendered the ineffable bonds that bind mothers, daughters and sisters to one another in this drama about a working-class British mother whose ambitious dreams for her four daughters cause her to make a decision that will haunt all five of them for the next two decades. Two separate quartets of actors played the sisters as teens and as grown women and under Sam Mendes deft direction, they were all terrific, particularly so when the younger versions sang swing-era songs in perfect close harmony. It’s a real shame that this one closed last weekend, far earlier than it should have.

MARY JANE: Back in 2017, I was so knocked out by the New York Theatre Workshop production of Amy Herzog’s play about a single mother caring for a severely ill child that I was instantly dismissive when I heard that Rachel McAdams, a movie actress who hadn’t appeared on stage since high school, was bringing the play to Broadway this year. Boy, was I wrong.  McAdams turned in an exquisitely calibrated performance that drove home the sustaining power of love in even the most dire of circumstances. It won't be the same but an audio version has just been released on Audible.

MAYBE HAPPY ENDING: This surprisingly charming tale about two humanoid robots who fall in love features an unexpectedly jazzy score and a wholly original book by Will Aronson and Hue Park, witty performances by Darren Criss and Helen J Shen and clever direction by the always inventive Michael Arden, who has found really smart ways to use the trendy technology of cameras and screens without sacrificing good storytelling. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that more and more theatergoers give it a shot because this one is really a special treat and deserves a good run.

MEDEA: RE-VERSED: Greek dramas don’t get done as much as, say, Shakespeare's do but this very clever rap version of Medea is a reminder of why those stories have held on for thousands of years. The tale of the princess who betrays her own people to help the Greek warrior Jason find the Golden Fleece but later murders their young sons when he casts her aside for another woman remains the same as it is in the Euripides version but playwright Luis Quintero updated the storytelling and demonstrated his love for classic theatrical forms with smart rhyming couplets and hip-hop emcees stepping in as the chorus. 

MOTHER PLAY: By this time, you’re probably thinking that I’m obsessed with mothers and will give a pass to just about any show sympathetic to them. Maybe. But Paula Vogel’s semi-autobiographical three-hander totally earns its place on this list—and in my heart. With unusually forgiving grace, it tracks four decades in the life of a not very good single mother who copes by guzzling gin, chain smoking and browbeating her children, both of whom eventually come out as gay. Under Tina Landau’s sensitive direction, Jessica Lange, Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger gave performances that balanced the pathos of the family’s struggles with the humor they employed to survive them. 

OH, MARY: Campy humor isn’t usually my thing but Cole Escola’s bizarro-world version of Mary Todd Lincoln’s activities in the weeks leading up to the assassination of her husband is so delightfully daffy that I found it impossible to resist. And I clearly wasn't alone in that. For the show has been packing them in for months after making the surprising move from the Lucille Lortel uptown to the Hudson on Broadway. Escola, who has been deservedly drawing the lion’s share of the praise, has been given invaluable support by Sam Pinkleton’s pitch-perfect direction and by a totally game cast, especially Conrad Ricamora as a horny Abe Lincoln.

OUR CLASS: Inspired by true events, this story of how the Holocaust affected a group of Jews and Christians in one small Polish village over seven decades—from their grade school years to their days in nursing homes for the few who survived that long—is innately powerful but director Igor Golyak’s inventive stagecraft turned it into a potent cautionary tale about how people can act when faced with truly horrendous choices. It kept me thinking for weeks about what I might or might not do in similar circumstances.

SUFFS: What does a woman have to do to make her voice heard in this country? Or on Broadway? Shaina Taub won this year's Tonys for both the book and the score for her musical about the struggle to get American women the right to vote. A diverse all-female identifying cast played the hell out of it. Audiences cried and cheered during its climactic anthem “Keep Marching.” And yet, the show is closing just eight months after it opened. Luckily PBS is filming the current production for its “Great Performances” series so it will able to inspire future generations to continue the fight.

 

 

 

Wishing you a theatrically merry little Christmas…

"Cult of Love" Fails to Keep the Faith

Leslye Headland has developed a following for her acclaimed Netflix series “Russian Doll” and for “The Acolyte,” the Disney Channel’s latest installment of the “Star Wars” saga. And if Cult of Love, her new show that just opened on Broadway, were a multi-episode TV soap like “Succession” or “Yellowstone” it might have worked better for me. 

For Cult of Love certainly has all the elements of those melodramas: a star-studded cast, a large dysfunctional family and clashes over issues like sex, money, drugs, what to do with difficult aging parents and who mom loves more. The problem for me is that Cult of Love doesn’t really dig into any of those subjects. Instead it devotes much of its energy to fooling around with—and making foolish fun of—religion and the people who have faith in it.  

And yet, the audience at the performance I attended was delighted with the show, literally cheering its slaps at religious faith. Headland famously grew up in a strictly religious household and so I suppose she is still working out her feelings about that. Fair enough. I don’t know how closely the Dahls, the family in the play, resemble her own parents and siblings but it’s clear why anyone would have conflicted feelings about being related to them.

Mom Ginny is a passive-aggressive control freak who deals with problems by pretending they don’t exist and downing a cocktail. One of those problems is her husband Bill, who is blithely slipping into dementia. But their grown children aren’t in much better shape.

The eldest son Mark studied at the Yale Divinity School but dropped out to become a lawyer, although he is now restless again even after having clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. And he’s also struggling with a failing marriage to his wife Rachel, a Jewish woman doubting her decision to convert to marry Mark and join a family that years later still regards her as a heathen.  

Evie, the oldest Dahl daughter is successful in her career as a chef but she’s resentful because the family hasn’t fully accepted her recent marriage to a woman. Younger brother Johnny is a heroin addict who’s in such shaky recovery that he’s brought the woman he’s sponsoring with him to the family’s Christmas Eve celebration for moral support (John Lee Beatty designed the Christmas-cardy set).  And then there’s the baby of the family, Diana, who is married to a timid Episcopalian priest and fanatically devout.

Ostensibly, the Dahls love one another but they don’t know how to talk to one another and so when they run out of things to say they pick up instruments and start to sing as though they were refugees from some old John Doyle musical. They sing a lot. I sighed when I realized they were going to go through all 10 verses of the spiritual “Children Go Where I Send Thee.”

Like most families, mine hasn’t been immune from holiday drama but I didn’t believe a bit of this one. That’s not because of the acting. The strong cast lead by Mare Winningham and David Rasche as the elder Dahls, Zachary Quinto as Mark, a scene-stealing Molly Bernard as Rachel and Shailene Woodley making an impressive stage debut as Diana (click here to read an interview with her) all work hard to create a semblance of both the family’s bonds and it fractures.  

But the play’s100-minute running time doesn’t leave enough time for them to do more than state their positions and then move on to the next plot point. A speech in the final moments tries to sum up the play’s themes but it's too late by then. I wanted more show and less tell and I resented that the serious questions about faith hadn't been treated seriously until then.

I also didn’t believe that the spouses and significant others would have stuck around while the Dahls were going at one another. And I really didn’t believe that they would have joined in with the singing. 

 

 

"Shit. Meet. Fan" Just Pretends to Be Bad

There are lots of marquee-names in Shit. Meet. Fan., the naughtily-titled comedy that is currently running at MCC Theater. But the show’s true star may be its set, a duplex apartment that scenic designer Clint Ramos has outfitted with fantastic views, a sleek chef’s kitchen and an incredibly well-stocked bar. I got to my seat early and as they came in, each person in my row turned to me and said something along the lines of “I could move in there right now.”

Of course it’s unlikely that any of us would want to live there if it meant we had to share those digs with the characters who are its occupants. They are Eve and Rodger, a smug therapist and plastic surgeon who are hosting a cocktail party for their longtime friends who include the sleazy lawyer Brett and his boozy wife Claire, a lascivious paramedic named Frank and his new young bride Hannah and Logan, a divorced gym teacher who is supposed to be bringing the new woman he’s dating but shows up stag. Hannah is Asian-American. Logan is black.

It's hard to believe that such a motley crew would have much in common but we're told that the guys were once frat brothers, the couples still take an annual ski vacation together and they’re all so trusting of one another that they agree to Eve’s proposal that they spend the evening playing a game in which all of them put their cellphones on the table and agree to read every incoming text out loud and to put all incoming calls on speakerphone. 

Needless to say secrets are revealed. Lots of secrets. Nearly all of them involving sex. It's a ridiculous premise but the show, which was written and directed by Robert O’Hara, was adapted from the 2016 Italian film “Perfect Strangers” that has also inspired some 20 film remakes in countries ranging from Azerbaijan to Vietnam. Sex jokes clearly sell everywhere.

What sells them in this production is a cast filled with folks who know how to squeeze laughs out of even the loopiest situations. Jane Krakowski and Neil Patrick Harris, who honed their comedic chops in popular TV sitcoms as well as onstage, play Eve and Rodger, who despite the tensions in their marriage relish being the most successful in the friend group. And the gifted Debra Messing knows just how far to push Claire's sloppy drunkenness. 

But O’Hara, who directed Slave Play and who has written such transgressive satires as Bootycandy (click here to read my review of that one) and Barbecue (click here to read my review of this one), likes to make his audiences uncomfortable.  And so his version of this story weaves in some strands designed to reveal the group's problematic attitudes on race, class and homophobia that lie just below the surface of their regular interactions—and maybe those of the people watching them as well. 

Not all of this works. And very little of it is new or as naughty as the play's title suggests. But not every show needs to have a deeper meaning or to break fresh artistic ground. Sometimes people just want to have some easy laughs. Or to see some famous faces up close. Or to look at and dream about living in a great apartment. And Shit. Meet. Fan checks all those boxes.

Some Quick Thoughts on Four Big Musicals

As everyone knows, musicals are the mainstays of Broadway and four big ones opened over the last two weeks. But I’ve been so busy running out to see them—and seeing other shows too (if you have a moment, please click here to listen to an interview I did with playwright Jessica Goldberg about her play Babe, which just opened as part of the New Group's 30th anniversary season)—that I haven’t really had time to do full reviews of those new musicals. But people have been expressing such definite opinions about them that I wanted to have my say too. So I’m plagiarizing the approach I use for the mini reviews I post on my Broadway & Me Quickies site (click here to check it out) so that I can share some brief thoughts on each of those four new shows:  

Death Becomes Her @ the Lunt-Fontanne

The Show: An unabashedly campy and deliciously funny version of the 1992 Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn movie about two frenemies so worried about growing older that they take a mysterious potion that gives them a whole bunch of new problems 

Music and Lyrics by: Julia Mattison and Noel Carey   Book by: Marco Pennette   Directed by: Christopher Gattelli

One good thing: Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard are hilarious as the frenemies but when everything clicks in a show it’s usually because of the director and so I’m giving biggest props to Gattelli who hasn’t shied away from going big in every way, including the outrageous costumes, recreating the movie’s memorable special effects that are how-did-they-do-that harder to pull off onstage and hiring such a great-looking and well-toned ensemble that the production budget must have a separate line for gym memberships

One not-so-great thing: The score isn’t particularly memorable but it doesn’t get in the way of the fun

Maybe Happy Ending @ the Belasco

The Show: A surprisingly sweet and moving tale about two helper robots who fall in love

Music, Lyrics and Book by: Will Aronson and Hue Park   Directed by: Michael Arden

One good thing: There’s so much good stuff about this one that I can't actually pick one thing so instead I’m going to pack in as much as I can about what makes it so special—first off, it’s a refreshingly original idea that isn’t based on a movie or built around familiar pop songs; its set makes smart use of the trendy technology of cameras and screens but does it without sacrificing the storytelling; its score is a lovely and unexpected mix of cool-jazz era tunes and swoony romantic ballads; and its performances by newcomer Helen J Shen and especially by Darren Criss are witty and totally winning

One not-so-great thing: Sorry, but it’s all great

Swept Away @ the Longacre

The Show: Four shipwrecked seamen are faced with a terrible choice about how to save themselves in this dark and sober musical about sacrifice and redemption

Music and Lyrics by: The Avett Brothers   Book by: John Logan   Directed by: Michael Mayer

One good thing: John Gallagher Jr. as a gruff veteran mate and Stark Sands as an unwilling but sensitive recruit are both fine but the show’s real star is Rachel Hauck’s set, which beautifully creates a 19th century whaling ship during the first half of this 90-minute show and then, assisted by Kevin Adams’ muscular lighting and John Shivers’ visceral soundscape, transforms during the shipwreck into a lifeboat stuck in purgatory 

One not-so-great thing:  The Avett Brothers’ folk rock songs, taken from one of their earlier albums about a similar real-life shipwreck, are pretty and fit the story but they sound so much the same that the score became a sonic blur for me

Tammy Faye @ the Palace

The Show: This baffling bio-musical about the rise and fall of the eccentric televangelist Tammy Faye Baker doesn't seem to know what it wants to say about her life

Music by: Elton John   Lyrics by: Jake Shears   Book by: James Graham   Directed by: Rupert Goold

One good thing: In addition to the all-star creative team there’s a lot of talent onstage too, including Katie Brayben who won an Olivier for singing her ass off as Tammy Faye in the London production; Christian Borle who stars as her morally-flawed husband Jim; and Michael Cerveris who plays their nemesis, the holier-than-thou evangelical and conservative activist Jerry Falwell

One not-so-great thing: It’s a shame that a show so confused about what it wants to be was chosen to be the first major production at the refurbished Palace Theatre so it's not really a surprise that the notice that the show will close on Dec. 8 was posted just five days after it opened 

 

"A Wonderful World" isn't Wonderful Enough

People have been trying to put Louis Armstrong’s life onstage ever since that master jazzman died in 1971. My BFF Phil took me to a backers’ audition for one attempt to build a musical around Armstrong back in the ‘80s. That one never got made. Then there was Satchmo: America’s Musical Legend, which played at the Kennedy Center in Washington for two weeks in 1987 but it was described by The Washington Post as “a textbook example of how not to write a musical.”  

Satchmo at the Waldorf, the one-man play by my friend the late theater critic Terry Teachout also used one of Armstrong’s many nicknames in its title but it fared better with a tight dramatic focus on Armstrong’s later years. John Douglas Thompson’s much celebrated dual portrayals of Armstrong and his white manager Joe Glasser ran for four months at the Westside Theatre in 2014 and the play, which Terry drew from his excellent biography “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong,” has been produced around the country.  

But no effort has been as ambitious as A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical, which after pre-Broadway stops in Armstrong's early stomping grounds of New Orleans and Chicago, opened at Studio 54 this week, with James Monroe Iglehart in the title role. Yet the reception for this one has been less wonderful than those involved surely hoped it would be.

A Wonderful World tells the story of Armstrong’s life through his marriages to four women who represent the phases of his career as he developed from a young innovator of the new art form of jazz at the beginning of the last century to his role as an established and somewhat old-fashioned entertainment figure by its midpoint. 

That's a lot of territory to cover but the show’s real problem is that it doesn’t say anything about those events. It might have helped if each of the women had been used to reveal a different aspect of Armstrong’s personality, letting us in on something about the man that we didn’t already know. Instead the show just chugs along from one incident to the next. 

That may reflect the fact that there were too many competing ideas for what A Wonderful World should be. For while Aurin Squire gets the credit for the show's book, both Christopher Renshaw and Andrew Delaplaine are credited as its co-conceivers. 

Meanwhile Renshaw also shares co-directing credit with Christina Sajous and the show’s star Iglehart (click here to read more about all of that). There’s no indication of who, if anyone, had what they call in the movie business final cut. So what we get are likely to be the bland compromises that were least objectionable to all of them.

There are a few attempts to add some oomph by noting some of the racism that Armstrong experienced—one of his band members is lynched; he and the actor Lincoln Perry, whose professional alter ego was the slow-witted character Stepin Fetchit, commiserate over the demeaning ways black men had to behave to survive in the Hollywood of their day; Armstrong’s trademark geniality is tested when four girls are killed in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church—but after each incident is cited the show rushes on to squeeze in another song and dance number.

The music presents its own problems. Like most jukebox musicals—this one’s score is composed of more than two dozen tunes Armstrong played and sang throughout his career— A Wonderful World strains to find songs that tap into the inner lives of its characters. And since nearly all of the songs come out of the midcentury American Songbook, it seems unlikely that audience members under 60 are going to receive them the way they do the more recent pop hits in & Juliet, Moulin Rouge or MJ the Musical.

But perhaps the biggest challenge for this show is that like any bio-musical it needs to present its subject in a way that people can easily recognize him while also going beyond simply mimicking him. Iglehart has totally captured Armstrong’s distinctively raspy voice. And he has his mannerisms down too: the rolling eyes, the waving handkerchief and, of course, his big toothy grin. 

What’s missing is the disarming sweetness that Armstrong brought to his public personae. He always seemed so intent on making people happy that it was almost rude to respond any other way. Of course Iglehart, a Tony winner for his ingratiating performance as the Genie in Aladdin, has his own winning ways but they’re more effortful. And here, you can see how hard he’s working. You root for him.  But you, or at least I, worry about him too, so much so—will all that vocal fry hurt his own voice? will all that running around onstage wear him out?—that it took me outside the show itself.

Still, there are pleasures to be had in A Wonderful World. The actors playing the four wives—Dionne Higgins, Jennie Harney-Fleming, Kim Exum and Darlesia Clearcy— are all terrific singers, even if each overindulges in the now-standard practice of holding a note hostage until the audience whoops in support of the feat. 

Meanwhile, Toni-Leslie James’ period-perfect costumes are colorful and plentiful.  And choreographer Rickey Tripp has not only devised more novel variations on the familiar dance moves of the 1920s and ‘30s than I thought possible but has been blessed with a talented and seemingly tireless ensemble that knows how to put those moves over too.

So A Wonderful World isn’t a bad show. In fact, there was a time when loosely-plotted revues built around the songbooks of black musical icons like Fats Waller (Ain’t Misbehavin) and Duke Ellington (Sophisticated Ladies) were hot tickets that enjoyed long runs. But that was now a long time ago.