Theater Books for Summer Reading 2025

We’ve already had our first heat waves of the season—the temperature hit 101° in Central Park this past week!—which is a sure sign that summer is here. But for almost 20 years now, the summer has truly begun for me when I share my annual list of theater-related books for you all to read from now until Labor Day (or beyond). 

There are 16 of them this year, two for each of the official summer weeks. And as has become my custom, many of them are novels because I love stories set in the world of the theater. But there are some nifty memoirs and theater histories too. So I think you’ll be able to find something to scratch your theater itch while you’re sitting at the beach, kicking back in your yard, hanging out in the park, or, like me, lolling around on your terrace with a cool drink in hand—this year I’m recommending a tequila sunrise, whose mix of tequila, orange juice and grenadine actually looks like summer in a glass—and I hope that you’ll have as much fun with these summer reads as I’ve had finding them for you. 

By Any Other Name: A Novel by Jodi Picoult  The debate over who wrote Shakespeare’s plays fuels this story set in two time periods: the 1600s when it imagines that the real-life Emilia Lanier—who is believed to have been the first woman to publish poetry in England—was an unacknowledged ghostwriter for the Bard; and the present in which a woman playwright who has written a drama about Lanier faces contemporary misogyny.

Every Day a Little Death: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Stephen Sondheim edited by Josh Pachter   Who doesn't love a good mystery? And what theater lover doesn't love Sondheim? So how smart to get writers from both worlds—including my BroadwayRadio colleague Michael Portantiere—to contribute short mysteries inspired by the composer's songs. The result: lots of playful mayhem. 

Flop Musicals of the Twenty-First Century: Part I: The Creatives by Stephen Purdy  Even the most diehard theater lovers get a kick out of gossipy stories about shows that failed. A Broadway insider, Purdy not only tells 13 of them, from Dance of the Vampires to King Kong, but digs deep, interviewing folks who don’t often turn up in these kinds of books—assistant choreographers, swings, wig managers—but who were there at the creation of these misfires and are happy to share what they know. 

The Hypocrite: A Novel by Jo Hamya  This very literary novel muses on the before and after events that occur when the playwright daughter of a world-famous novelist invites her unsuspecting dad to see a play she’s written exposing his shortcomings as a father, a husband and even as a writer.

If We Were Villains: A Novel by M.L. Rio   If you’re a fan of Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History,” you’re likely to love this thriller even more because the group of precocious college students at its center are all theater kids at an elite arts school where the drama program is devoted entirely to Shakespeare and their final year is filled with poetry, rivalry, sex and a mysterious death.

Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones by Helen Sheehey  Over the last year or so we’ve had a generational changing of the guard in the nonprofit theater world but this excellent biography takes us back to its roots with one of the true pioneers of the regional theater movement and an early cheerleader for such playwrights as Horton Foote, William Inge and her close friend Tennessee Williams. 

The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler  Almost everyone has heard of "the Method” but Butler takes a deep dive into this famous but often misunderstood acting technique, tracking its evolution from the Moscow Arts Theatre, where Konstantin Stanislavski developed it; to the Actors Studio, where actors from Marilyn Monroe to Al Pacino studied it.  

Mona Acts Out: A Novel by Mischa Berlinski  The title character is a self-centered pain in the ass but the novel itself is a fun look at the downtown theater world, a smart tutorial on some of Shakespeare’s major female characters and a meditation on what to do with someone whose great talent has made good art but whose bad behavior has justifiably gotten him canceled.

Our Evenings: A Novel by Alan Hollinghurst  One of Britain’s most acclaimed novelists charts the five-decades-long relationship between a mixed-raced actor and a Boris Johnson-like conservative who first meet in one of the country’s elite private schools and how their interactions over the years reflect the changes in that country’s political, social and theatrical life. 

Playworld: A Novel by Adam Ross  Drawing on its author’s experiences growing up in the ‘80s as a child actor in a family on the fringes of show business (mom teaches ballet, dad does vocal coaching) and as the prey of lecherous adults, this wonderful coming-of-age tale deals with sex, money, ambition and finding one’s place in the world. 

Putting the Rabbit in the Hat by Brian Cox  He’s now probably best known as the patriarch of the family on HBO’s “Succession” but the Olivier Award-winning Cox got his start on the stage and he ruminates openly about his ambivalence toward working in the theater and his not always generous feelings about his many illustrious co-stars from Laurence Olivier to Ian McKellen.

Stages: A Theater Memoir by Albert Poland  His fascination with show business began when Poland started the official fan club for Judy Garland while he was still in high school and it blossomed into a five decade career as a major player in the early days of the off-Broadway theater world, working behind-the-scenes on such shows as The Fantasticks and Little Shop of Horrors. 

Station Eleven: A Novel by Emily St. John Mandel  It begins with an actor dropping dead onstage, an early victim of a pandemic that will wipe out most of the earth’s population. But among the survivors in this award-winning novel (and later acclaimed HBO series) are a troupe of actors and musicians who travel the countryside offering hope that art can save civilization.

Theater Kid: A Broadway Memoir by Jeffrey Seller  Readers may be discouraged when they discover that the first third of this memoir by the guy who produced Rent, Avenue Q and Hamilton is devoted to his hardscrabble childhood and college years but they should stick with it cause they’ll be delighted once Seller moves into the development of Rent and what it takes to make it in the business end of show business.

To Repair the World: Zelda Fichandler and the Transformation of American Theater by Mary B. Robinson  This loving but warts-and-all oral history pays long overdue tribute to the woman who created Washington's Arena Stage, midwifed the regional theater movement and nurtured generations of up-and-coming theater makers at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.   

The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf by Isa Arsén  Two very attractive actors enter into an unconventional marriage, get caught up with a pill-pushing Dr. Feelgood-style shrink and become entangled with the mob as it moves its illicit businesses west in this 1950s-era melodrama that is just begging to be a streaming series.

Finally, as always, if you’re looking for even more to read, here are the links to my suggestions from previous years:

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2022

2021

2020:

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Praise for the Reimagined Myth of "Eurydice"

In most tellings of the myth about the ill-fated love story between Orpheus and Eurydice that famously has him going to the underworld to bring her back from the dead, he gets top billing and sometimes he even flies solo in the title as in the 17th century opera “L'Orfeo” or the 1959 film “Black Orpheus.” But that’s not the case with Sarah Ruhl’s 2003 play Eurydice, which is currently being revived at Signature Theatre.  

Ruhl's version not only centers the story on Eurydice but offers a rival for her affection in the form of her dead father whose love for his daughter is so strong that he maintains his memories of their times together on earth even though it’s made clear that such recollections are usually wiped away in the afterlife.

Ruhl wrote the play while she was mourning the death of her own father and those feelings of grief and longing ripple through Eurydice. She had originally intended to be a poet and Ruhl's plays, particularly her early work, sometimes have the enigmatic quality of modernist verse, which can make them challenging to grasp. 

But the director Les Waters has made a specialty of translating Ruhl’s works, having staged 14 productions of them (click here to read an interview with the two of them). This is Waters' third go at Eurydice and although I didn’t see his earlier ones or the opera that Ruhl created in 2020 with the composer Matthew Aucoin, it’s hard to imagine a more hauntingly effective production than this.

That’s due in large part to the moving performances by Maya Hawke in the title role and Brian D’Arcy James as her father. There’s been a lot of badmouthing about nepo babies, the children of famous people who get prominent roles in movies and plays, and I confess that I rolled my eyes when I heard that Hawke was getting this one. But what’s seldom said in such conversations is that—credit nature or nurture—talent sometimes runs in families. 

Or at least so it seems with Hawke, the daughter of the much-acclaimed actors Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, who imbues Eurydice with a passionate intelligence that allows her to be simultaneously feisty and vulnerable and totally deserving of having the play named after her (click here for more about the actress). 

I had no reservations about D’Arcy James, who I’m convinced can do anything. And here he makes the father the ideal parent we all yearn to have as he tenderly reassures Eurydice when she arrives in the afterlife, patiently rekindles their relationship and then selflessly lets her go when Orpheus comes to reclaim her.

There are elements in this production—the commedia-costumed chorus called the Stones, the tricycle-riding Lord of the Underworld—that still left me scratching my head. But perhaps because I’m still working my way through a profound loss of my own, I found particular comfort in the play’s final image that suggests that in the end, and even beyond in oblivion, real love survives. 

Let Down By "Lights Out: Nat 'King' Cole"

Several years ago, I reported a piece on the Smithsonian's "American Popular Song" album, which was intended to be a collection of the best rendition of each song in the Great American Songbook. But the head curator told me that so many of the songs were best sung by Nat King Cole that they had to go with the second-best rendition for many of those tunes or they'd have ended up with an entire Nat King Cole album. So that was one of several reasons that I was looking forward to seeing Lights Out: Nat "King" Cole, the new musical that opened this week at New York Theatre Workshop.

Another reason was that the show is a passion project of Colman Domingo, who we theater lovers have claimed as one of our faves long before he became the twice Oscar-nominated actor that he now is. One other reason was that it stars Dulé Hill, a triple-threat performer—can act, can sing, can really dance—returning to the New York stage for the first time in a decade. 

And yet another reason—sadly relevant in this historical moment—is that the show focuses on the final episode of Cole’s pioneering TV show which ran for just one year between 1956 and 1957 because national advertisers wouldn't sponsor a show starring a black entertainer because they were afraid that doing that might alienate their white southern customers.

So I think you will understand how much it pains me to have to say how disappointed I was by Lights Out. Domingo has recruited Patricia McGregor, the artistic director at NYTW and one of the few black women to lead a major theater company, to co-write and direct the show (click here to read about their collaboration). But despite years of workshops and tryouts (earlier versions were done in Pennsylvania and L.A.) the show remains a work in progress.

Domingo and McGregor have imagined Lights Out as a fever dream that Cole has in the minutes before he goes on air for his final episode and is trying to decide whether he should bow out with the elegant graciousness that has become his trademark or let loose all the anger and frustration he's felt at both the major slights and micro-aggressions he’s had to endure throughout his career.

The subject of how black celebrities were mistreated in mid-century America—selling out at nightclubs around the country but only allowed to enter them through the back door—is a fascinating one and the idea of framing that experience as a fever dream is terrifically intriguing. But the storytelling here is convoluted and McGregor’s direction is so additionally muddled that it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on. 

And there is a lot going on in the show's 90-minutes of running time. Cole’s celebrity friends Eartha Kitt and Peggy Lee pop up to duet with him. Parodies of period commercials are performed. Ghosts from the singer’s past, including his mother, appear to give him advice. Openly racist versions of his white agents and producers turn up to harass him, even hurling the n-word at him.  And all of this is set, juke-box-musical style, to a playlist of Cole’s greatest hits, from “Mona Lisa” to “Unforgettable.”

The actors do what they can. Hill deftly mimics Cole’s smooth vocal stylings and as a former Tap Dance Kid, he brings both the noise and the funk during a dance battle (tap choreography by Jared Grimes) that is a true showstopper. The other challenger in that battle is Daniel J. Watts, who plays Sammy Davis Jr. as the mischievous trickster orchestrating Cole’s fever dream, daring him to stand up for himself and for black people as a whole.  

Cole and Davis were friends in real life (click here to watch them make fun of one another)  but the show never makes clear why Davis, who proudly allied himself with the otherwise all-white Rat Pack lead by Frank Sinatra and later endorsed Richard Nixon for president, has been assigned the role of Cole’s black conscience. 

Still, I’m very glad they gave him that role because Watts runs with it and is hands down the best part of the show. He not only mimics Davis perfectly but brings both a much needed energy to the antics he’s called to perform and a sharp edge to the questions about race that I had hoped the entire production would more ably explore.    

Why Just About Everyone Loves Kara Young

This is a slightly different post than I use write but maybe like me, you have wondered why the nominators for so many different theater awards seem to love the actress Kara Young so much that they keep nominating her for their awards. Over the past four years, Young has picked up more than two dozen nominations, including four consecutive Tony nods for best featured actress in a play. And she won that one last year for her performance in the much celebrated revival of Ossie Davis’ Purlie Victorious. 

The short answer to that “why” question is probably that Young is just good. But I think there’s something more to it than that. Young is one of those rare actors who has the ability to infuse each character she plays with her own personality (click here to read a bit more about her) and at the same time is able to fulfill the vision that the playwright intended for the character: so her performances are simultaneously comfortably familiar and reliably surprising. 

Part of that is casting her in the right roles. But a larger part of it is simply Young’s innate artistry. I remember the first time I saw her back in 2018 in a small off-Broadway production. I wasn’t crazy about the play but I was fascinated by the young actress at the center of it and I kept asking myself—and probably annoyingly my companion—“who is she?” 

Young popped up in a stream of productions after that, usually playing a streetwise teen and I started worrying that directors were just hiring her to do the same thing over and over again. But then I realized that she was coloring each character slightly differently, layering in the nuances that allowed her to sidestep the stereotype.

And then came Purlie Victorious. Ossie Davis had originally written the role of the naïve by spunky Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins for his wife Ruby Dee, a tough act to follow.  Then Melba Moore put her Tony-winning spin on Lutiebelle in the musical Purlie, another tough act to follow.  But Young proved more than up to the challenge. Her Lutiebelle was uniquely hers: loopy, sexy, altogether endearing and yes, Tony worthy.

Last summer, Young took on what struck me as her first fully adult role as a woman contemplating getting back together with an ex in Douglas Lyons' romcom Table 17 and she aced that one too. 

But now she’s being praised for her performance in Purpose, Branden Jacobs-Jenkin’s newly-anointed Pulitzer Prize winner about the dysfunctional family of a Civil Rights icon who bears more than a passing resemblance to Jesse Jackson. 

Young plays the outsider whose presence forces the family to confront the cost their public lives have exerted on their private ones. And hitting all the notes—hilarious and heartbreaking—that Jacobs-Jenkins has crafted for the character has made Young a frontrunner for yet another Tony win.

The Angry Young Women in "John Proctor is the Villain" and "Five Models in Ruins, 1981"

A new genre has been developing over the past few years, one that in tribute to the post-war change in British theater I’ve been calling “angry young women plays.”  

These new works more or less follow a certain formula: a group of women get together to engage in an activity as in Clare Barron’s 2018 Pulitzer finalist Dance Nation, then they start noting how society has misunderstood or mistreated them as in Liliana Padilla’s How To Defend Yourself which ran at New York Theatre Workshop a couple of years ago and finally they perform some kind of ritual to exorcise their frustrations and rally their abilities to deal with them as they do in Alexis Scheer’s Our Dear Dead Drug Lord.   

Intentionally tapping into both comedy and tragedy, these plays give lots of young actresses a chance to show off the full range of what they can do. And they give those of us in the audience fair warning that young women are tired of taking shit and ready to do something about it. Or at least that’s how I felt after recently seeing two shows that hewed to the angry young women formula—one doing it smartly, the other doing it messily.

The smart one is John Proctor is the Villain, playwright Kimberly Belflower’s sharp response to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and it has been nominated as best play of the season by the Tony, Outer Critics Circle and Drama Desk awards.  

Miller used the Salem Witch Trials that began in 1692 to comment on the McCarthyism of the 1950s. His protagonist John Proctor has an affair with his teenage servant girl but Miller casts him as the play's noble hero for refusing to name his neighbors or himself as being—as the surrounding hysteria charges—allies of Satan.

Belflower focuses her play on a group of high school students in a small Georgia town as they read Miller’s play, debate all of John Proctor’s behavior and try to figure out what to do with the men in their own lives—boyfriends, fathers, teachers—during the height of the #MeToo revelations.

And so Belflower has crafted both a literary critique of one of the most popular classics in the midcentury canon and a social commentary on the ways in which today's young women are dealing with toxic masculinity.

She’s aided by a terrific cast of young actresses. Sadie Sink, one of the stars in the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” has picked up a Tony nomination (click here to read more about her) but under the surehanded direction of Danya Taymor, they’re all giving kickass performances. Their characters’ moment of catharsis, set to one of the best playlists of the season, left me with a big grin on my face.

More messy is the production of Five Models in Ruins, 1981 that opened this week in LCT3’s Clair Tow theater. Its conceit is that a group of models have been hired for a Vogue magazine fashion shoot that will photograph them in a dilapidated English country house wearing the also-ran bridal gowns that Diana Spencer rejected for her wedding (costume designer Vasilija Zivanic’s dresses are not only witty imitations of some name-brand designers but also say a lot about each of the characters wearing them).

Playwright Caitlin Saylor Stephens has assembled the expected crew of twentysomething models—an eager newbie, a drug-addled prima donna, a jaded old-timer, a wisecracking outsider—but she doesn’t know what to do with them. And so they just stand around griping for most of the play’s 100-minute. running time.

Some of what they say about what they've experienced in the business is truly disturbing, justifying any anger they might have. But the models are more often treated as superficial twits and too much of what they say is just blather.

The play’s most potentially interesting character is the female photographer who is finally getting the chance to shoot a cover for the magazine. Although that could be because she’s played by the always watch-worthy Elizabeth Marvel (if you get to the theater early you’ll be treated to a silent pre-show of Marvel moving the set’s furniture around while fully in character). 

But even Marvel has a tough time with the storyline about how the photographer’s failing love affair is inhibiting her work. And there’s more than a hint that she may have gotten the job because she was sleeping with someone influential. I mean what the hell kind of feminism is that supposed to be representing? 

And even worse is director Morgan Green’s decision to let the climactic scene go on and on and on and on for almost four minutes, sending the audience out of the theater feeling exhausted instead of exhilarated.

Celebrating the OCC's 75th Anniversary— and Its Nominees for the 2024-2025 Season

The 2024-2025 theater season ends on Sunday with the dual openings of the musicals Dead Outlaw and Real Women Have Curves. And I’m exhausted. But it’s the kind of good exhaustion that comes from doing something you love. For over the past four weeks, I’ve seen 22 shows as I worked my way through all the final Broadway and major off-Broadway openings so that I could fulfill my responsibilities as a nominator for this year’s Outer Critics Circle Awards, which were announced yesterday. 

Helping to put together the OCC's slate of nominees is a task I never take lightly but it’s one that I’m particularly proud to be a part of this year because this season marks the 75th anniversary of the OCC, which was started by a group of critics who didn’t write for the major New York newspapers (there were seven of them) but who were just as passionate about the theater as those who did.

The major force behind the OCC back then was John Gassner, who emigrated with his family from Hungary to this country when he was eight. He had planned to go to medical school but gave that up while still a college student at Columbia University to pursue his true love of theater. 

Over the following years, Gassner, who died in 1967 at the age of just 64, headed the play department at the Theatre Guild, wrote and edited several books, taught playwriting at the Yale School of Drama, chaired the drama jury for the Pulitzer Prize for many years and served as an early booster of and mentor to many of the leading midcentury playwrights including Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. So it’s fitting that every year, the OCC gives a special award in his honor to a new playwright.  

This year’s nominees for the Gassner Award are an eclectic group but all of their works deal in one way or another with important contemporary topics including climate change, free speech and gender politics. They are:

Amy Berryman for Walden


George Clooney and Grant Heslov for Good Night, and Good Luck


Marin Ireland for Pre-Existing Condition


Lia Romeo for Still


Emil Weinstein for Becoming Eve

It's been a fascinating season (whittling down our choices was tough) and the competition for awards—ours and others—is going to be fierce and fun to watch over the next six weeks until the Tonys are given out on June 8. 

Our OCC winners, who will be voted on by our full membership, will be announced a few weeks before that on Monday, May 12 and we’ll celebrate them at a ceremony on May 22, which is always one of my favorite events of the year. In the meantime, below is the full list of our nominees:  

 

*OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY PLAY


Cult of Love


The Hills of California


John Proctor Is the Villain


Purpose


Stranger Things: The First Shadow


*In case you're wondering, we nominated both Job and Oh, Mary! when those productions ran off-Broadway last season; in fact, Oh, Mary!'s co-stars Cole Escola and Conrad Ricamora graciously announced all of our nominees
for this year

*OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL

Boop! The Musical


Death Becomes Her


Maybe Happy Ending


Operation Mincemeat


Real Women Have Curves

*And we nominated both Buena Vista Social Club and Dead Outlaw when those productions ran off-Broadway last season 


OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY PLAY

The Antiquities


Grangeville


Here There Are Blueberries


Liberation


Table 17
 

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL

The Big Gay Jamboree


Drag: The Musical


We Live in Cairo


OUTSTANDING REVIVAL OF A PLAY

Beckett Briefs: From the Cradle to the Grave


Glengarry Glen Ross


Romeo + Juliet


Vanya


Yellow Face
 


OUTSTANDING REVIVAL OF A MUSICAL

Cats: The Jellicle Ball


Floyd Collins


Gypsy


Once Upon a Mattress


Sunset Boulevard
 


OUTSTANDING LEAD PERFORMER IN A BROADWAY PLAY

Kit Connor, Romeo + Juliet


Laura Donnelly, The Hills of California


Mia Farrow, The Roommate


Jon Michael Hill, Purpose


Louis McCartney, Stranger Things: The First Shadow
 


OUTSTANDING FEATURED PERFORMER IN A BROADWAY PLAY

Kieran Culkin, Glengarry Glen Ross


LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Purpose


Francis Jue, Yellow Face


Mare Winningham, Cult of Love


Kara Young, Purpose
 


OUTSTANDING LEAD PERFORMER IN AN OFF-BROADWAY PLAY 

Caroline Aaron, Conversations with Mother


F. Murray Abraham, Beckett Briefs: From the Cradle to the Grave


Jayne Atkinson, Still


Adam Driver, Hold On to Me Darling


Anthony Edwards, The Counter


Paul Sparks, Grangeville
 


OUTSTANDING FEATURED PERFORMER IN AN OFF-BROADWAY PLAY

Betsy Aidem, Liberation


Sean Bell, The Beacon


Michael Rishawn, Table 17


Richard Schiff, Becoming Eve


Frank Wood, Hold On to Me Darling
 


OUTSTANDING LEAD PERFORMER IN A BROADWAY MUSICAL

Darren Criss, Maybe Happy Ending


Jeremy Jordan, Floyd Collins


Audra McDonald, Gypsy


Jasmine Amy Rogers, Boop! The Musical


Nicole Scherzinger, Sunset Boulevard


Jennifer Simard, Death Becomes Her


OUTSTANDING FEATURED PERFORMER IN A BROADWAY MUSICAL

Danny Burstein, Gypsy


Jak Malone, Operation Mincemeat


Michele Pawk, Just in Time


Christopher Sieber, Death Becomes Her


Michael Urie, Once Upon a Mattress
 


OUTSTANDING LEAD PERFORMER IN AN OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL

Nick Adams, Drag: The Musical


Marla Mindelle, The Big Gay Jamboree


Nkeki Obi-Melekwe, Safety Not Guaranteed


Alaska Thunderfuck, Drag: The Musical


Taylor Trensch, Safety Not Guaranteed
 


OUTSTANDING FEATURED PERFORMER IN AN OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL

Ali Louis Bourzgui, We Live in Cairo


Paris Nix, The Big Gay Jamboree


Eddie Korbich, Drag: The Musical


J. Elaine Marcos, Drag: The Musical


Andre De Shields, Cats: The Jellicle Ball


Henry Stram, Three Houses
 


OUTSTANDING SOLO PERFORMANCE

David Greenspan, I'm Assuming You Know David Greenspan


Khawla Ibraheem, A Knock on the Roof


Sam Kissajukian, 300 Paintings


Andrew Scott, Vanya


Sarah Snook, The Picture of Dorian Gray
 


OUTSTANDING BOOK OF A MUSICAL (BROADWAY OR OFF-BROADWAY

Will Aronson and Hue Park, Maybe Happy Ending


David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts, Operation Mincemeat


Daniel Lazour and Patrick Lazour, We Live in Cairo


Bob Martin, Boop! The Musical


Marco Pennette, Death Becomes Her
 


OUTSTANDING SCORE (BROADWAY OR OFF-BROADWAY)

Will Aronson and Hue Park, Maybe Happy Ending


David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts, Operation Mincemeat


David Foster and Susan Birkenhead, Boop! The Musical


Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez, Real Women Have Curves


Julia Mattison and Noel Carey, Death Becomes Her
 


OUTSTANDING ORCHESTRATIONS (BROADWAY OR OFF-BROADWAY)

Will Aronson, Maybe Happy Ending


Doug Besterman, Death Becomes Her


Joseph Joubert and Daryl Waters, Pirates! The Penzance Musical


Daniel Lazour and Michael Starobin, We Live in Cairo


Andrew Resnick, Just in Time
 


OUTSTANDING DIRECTION OF A PLAY

Trip Cullman, Cult of Love


Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, Stranger Things: The First Shadow


Sam Mendes, The Hills of California


Phylicia Rashad, Purpose


Danya Taymor, John Proctor Is the Villain


OUTSTANDING DIRECTION OF A MUSICAL

Michael Arden, Maybe Happy Ending


Christopher Gattelli, Death Becomes Her


Robert Hastie, Operation Mincemeat


Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, Cats: The Jellicle Ball


Jerry Mitchell, Boop! The Musical
 


OUTSTANDING CHOREOGRAPHY

Jenny Arnold, Operation Mincemeat


Warren Carlyle, Pirates! The Penzance Musical


Christopher Gattelli, Death Becomes Her


Shannon Lewis, Just in Time


Jerry Mitchell, Boop! the Musical
 


OUTSTANDING SCENIC DESIGN 

Miriam Buether, Jamie Harrison, and Chris Fisher, Stranger Things: The First Shadow


Rachel Hauck, Swept Away


Rob Howell, The Hills of California


Dane Laffrey, Maybe Happy Ending


Derek McLane, Death Becomes Her



OUTSTANDING COSTUME DESIGN

Gregg Barnes, Boop! The Musical


Wilberth Gonzalez and Paloma Young, Real Women Have Curves


Rob Howell, The Hills of California


Qween Jean, Cats: The Jellicle Ball


Paul Tazewell, Death Becomes Her
 


OUTSTANDING LIGHTING DESIGN

Kevin Adams, Swept Away


Natasha Chivers, The Hills of California


Jon Clark, Stranger Things: The First Shadow


Ben Stanton, Maybe Happy Ending


Justin Townsend, Death Becomes Her
 


OUTSTANDING SOUND DESIGN

Paul Arditti, Stranger Things: The First Shadow


Adam Fisher, Sunset Boulevard


Peter Hylenski, Death Becomes Her


Peter Hylenski, Maybe Happy Ending


John Shivers, Swept Away
 


OUTSTANDING VIDEO PROJECTIONS

59, Stranger Things: The First Shadow


Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom, Sunset Boulevard


David Bergman, The Picture of Dorian Gray


Hana S. Kim, Redwood


Finn Ross, Boop! The Musical

In case you're counting, Death Becomes Her lead the pack with 12 nominations and Stranger Things: The First Shadow was the most nominated play with 7 nominations. Other multiple nominees were Maybe Happy Ending with 9, Boop! The Musical with 8, The Hills of California and Operation Mincemeat with 6 each, Drag: The Musical and Purpose with 5 each and Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Sunset Blvd. and We Live in Cairo with 4 each. And then we spread our appreciation around to lots of other shows.

It's a Smackdown Between Show and Business in "Irishtown," "I'm Assuming You Know David Greenspan" and "minor•ity"

 

The ever present tension between art and commerce moves centerstage in three recently opened off-Broadway productions—Irishtown at the Irish Repertory Theatre, I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan at Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2, and Colt Coeur's production of minor•ity at the WP Theater—all three aiming to tickle theater insiders while also pointing out the more worrisome cracks in the current state of the art form.

Irishtown is set in the rehearsal room of a Dublin-based theater company that is preparing to bring a new production to New York. It’s a big deal for all of them: the high-strung playwright Aisling is eager to cash in on her recent hit, the British director Poppy needs a fresh start after leaving the Royal Shakespeare Company under mysterious circumstances, the veteran actress Constance sees the show as her last chance at the big time and the ambitious ingenue Síofra is more than willing to sleep her way to the top. Meanwhile Quin, the only male in the group, is a mansplaining malcontent.  

But everyone politely makes nice to everyone else until Quin raises the uncomfortable question of whether Aisling’s play, a #MeToo drama set in a British courtroom, is Irish enough. Where he wonders is the fiddle-playing, the poetic mysticism, the village drunk, the philandering priests, the downtrodden peasants or, at the very least, the trauma brought on by The Troubles?

The troupe’s attempts to add some of those elements because they think that’s the only kind of Irish work American audiences will pay to see allows the real-life playwright Ciara Elizabeth Smyth to poke some good-natured fun at the familiar tropes that turn up in so many Irish plays, including those that are usually done by the Irish Rep., which gets points for willingly going in on the joke.

But Smyth’s play also poses more serious questions about why certain cultural representations end up on our stages, limiting the kinds of stories that people from those groups get to tell about themselves and the ways that rest of us think about them.

The entire Irishtown cast—anchored by Kate Burton playing against type as the questionably talented Constance and Saiorse-Monica Jackson, a star of the popular TV series “Derry Girls,” appropriately annoying as Síofra (click here to read more about that actress)—is totally game as the fictional troupe improvises bits that pay comic homage to Samuel Beckett’s bowler-hatted simpletons and the ritualistic jig in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. But the direction by Nicola Murphy Dubey is so frenetic that they end up pushing too hard and Smyth’s smart satire collapses into just so-so farce.   

The playwright Mona Pirnot goes even more meta theatrical with I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan. She not only wrote the play as a one-man show for the downtown acting icon to perform (click here to learn a little more about him) but she also uses it to tell the story of how the show came to be and to explain why it’s so hard for playwrights today to do the kind of work they most want to do. 

I have to be honest and say that I wasn’t looking forward to this show because Pirnot practices the kind of writing popularized by the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgård who dispassionately blends memoir, fiction and cultural critique into hyper-realistic accounts of his life that are far too solipsistic for me. 

Similarly, Pirnot's previous work I Love You So Much I Could Die was a solo piece in which she spent the entire time with her back to the audience while a computer voice read texts about a tragic event in her life (click here to read my review of that one). 

So I was pleasantly surprised by how playful and just plain old funny I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan turned out to be. It’s about a group of women playwrights who get together for an informal reading of one of their plays. They’re all at various stages in their writing careers. 

Sierra has gone into the far more lucrative if less satisfying career of writing for TV. Mona, the same-named stand-in for the playwright, remains committed to the theater and is working on an experimental piece centered around the actor David Greenspan even though she knows it’s unlikely to have broad appeal. Meanwhile their host Emmy is at a crossroads, not sure she can afford to follow her playwriting passion while still paying her bills. 

All of them—and a fourth character—are played by Greenspan. Dressed in a casual shirt and dark pants and working on a bare stage except for a covered bench, he whirls around the stage for a full 90 minutes, recreating the disagreements and encouragements the women share with one another. 

Greenspan and his frequent collaborator director Ken Rus Schmoll have worked out a few signifying gestures and slight vocal changes to distinguish each woman. I still was sometimes confused about who was speaking but it ended up not mattering much.  

For there's no question that Greenspan is a beguiling performer and while they’re not new, the arguments that Pirnot makes about the challenges of making art are compelling. At one point the Mona character notes that a playwright can expect to make about $3,000 for the entire run of an off-Broadway production that may have taken them years to write. That's a little less than the average monthly rent for a studio apartment here in the city.

The battle between art and commerce zooms in on the black experience in the Cape Verdean-American playwright Francisca da Silveira's minor•ity, which focuses on three artists of African descent who have been invited to an international festival in Paris where wealthy white donors are looking for artists to sponsor.  

But for those artists that means balancing the integrity of their work with the images of African artists that those patrons prefer. And in some cases that means amping up their accents, trading jeans and designer jackets for traditional tribal garb and spinning tales about ancient African myths or contemporary African woes. 

Da Silevira manages to draw some humor from these choices (and from the shout-outs to the brands supporting the faux festival) but it's a kind of laugh-to-keep-from-crying humor. And because da Silveira is a young playwright (note the overly cutesy punctuation for the play's title) the pieces in minor•ity, don't line up quite as smoothly as one might want.

The show has also clearly been produced on a small budget, although costume designer Celeste Jennings seems to have grabbed most of it and used the money to good effect for her spot-on costumes. 

Luckily, the production has also been blessed with a strong cast, spearheaded by Ato Essandoh, who may be most familiar to some theatergoers as the chief-of-staff to Kerry Russell's American ambassador to England on the Netflix series "The Diplomat."  

Under the confident direction of Shariffa Ali, Essandoh and his castmates Nedra Marie Taylor and Nimene Sierra Wurch dig deep into the angst of these artists struggling to compromise just enough to be able to do their work without compromising their dignity.  

It's always been tough to be an artist. It's even tougher nowadays. These shows, faults and all, are a reminder that those of us who love theater should be grateful that despite such obstacles, artists like da Silveira, Smyth, Pirnot and Greenspan keep finding ways to make it for us.