New Angles on the American Musical From "Copperfield!" "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" "The Heart" "I Became We"

Wither the American musical?  I know that sounds pretentious but it also seems to be the question everyone is now asking. Even the current issue of The New Yorker magazine has jumped into the debate with its piece “Why the American Musical Refuses to Die” (click here to read what they say). Part of the hang wringing and head scratching has been prompted by the rising cost of putting on these shows (the average cost of a Broadway musical was under $1 million in 1976 but has now risen to around $15 million) and part is due to the artistic drive to do something new.  

Some promising ideas about what to do may be coming from a bunch of shows I recently saw that, in their own ways, are wrestling with those questions and trying to offer answers that will both pull in audiences (hopefully some of them under 60) and push the art form forward (maybe even doing so less expensively). 

Two of them—Copperfield! and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button—seem to be hedging their bets: basing their books on proven stories and crafting their scores around familiar genres but they’re also borrowing a page from Paul Sills’ storybook-style of theatermaking that favors stripped-down staging and actors breaking the fourth wall to narrate the action; and another page is from director John Doyle’s even more contemporary—and cheaper to produce—technique of having actors double as a show’s musicians.  One of those shows worked for me and one less so.

Charles Dickens may be my all-time favorite author and “David Copperfield,”  the semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel that he published in 1850 is my favorite of his many works. So I was primed to see this new musical version that is now playing at The Duke on 42nd Street.  But its creator Jeffrey Scharf, who wrote the show’s book, music and lyrics, may have bitten off more than he can chew. Scharf hasn’t created a bad show but rather a generic one that seems like it might have drawn a B- if it had been a BMI Workshop assignment to musicalize a well-known property.

Part of what has always made Dickens so special is his ability to combine his deep interest in the social issues of his day (income inequality, a corrupt legal system, child abuse) and his delight in making people laugh, mainly through the shenanigans of the colorful characters he created. Scharf’s book hits all the major points in the novel and crams in all the characters but it isn’t clear why he’s telling us this story now. That might be O.K. if his show was simply amusing in its own right but, alas, it isn’t. And the score is so similarly undistinguished that it might have been used for any show from 1956 to 1996. 

None of this has stopped Copperfield!’s backers from putting together a fine-looking production with a multi-level set and period-appropriate costumes. Director Gabriel Barre keeps the action moving even if the acting ability of the 13-member ensemble—who, to be fair, are playing multiple characters—varies (although Bobby Conte provides a solid anchor in the title role) but they all get big thumbs up for how well they all play multiple instruments. 

The actor-musicians in The Public Theater production of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button struck me as equally impressive music makers and, as a whole, more accomplished actors. But that may be because the show they’re in is simply a better one. 

It’s based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story (and the 2008 Brad Pitt movie) about a man who, born as a 70-year-old, ages in reverse, growing younger each year until he declines into the oblivion of infancy. But Jethro Compton, who not only wrote the book and lyrics but directed the show and designed its minimal but flexible set, has taken Fitzgerald’s basic idea and created a completely different story, turning it into a meaningful post-pandemic meditation on the illusions of time and the sustaining power of love that wowed theatergoers in London where it won three Olivier Awards, including Best New Musical of 2025 (click here to read more about the origins of the show).

An American cast has replaced the British one that ran on the West End and it would be hard to find a better Benjamin than Andrew Durand, who not only convincingly reverse ages without the help of makeup or significant costume changes but brings a sweet melancholy to the role. Compton’s version moves the story from pre-Civil War Baltimore to a small Cornish fishing village in England beginning around the time of the first World War and centers Benjamin’s journey around his love for a woman named Elowen, beautifully played by Kelsee Kimmel. 

Along the way Benjamin engages with a cast of eccentric characters that might do Dickens proud. Some accept him, some, including his parents, see him as a freak (tolerance for people who are different is a major subtheme) but regardless Benjamin is constantly aware that for him time is winding down. 

This could be depressing except that Compton has partnered with the composer Darren Clark, who wrote a score teeming with the defiantly joyous sounds of Celtic music that have animated sea shanties and folk ditties for centuries. It’s hard to keep your own toes from tapping to that music. And as I watched this lovely show, it was hard for me to keep from smiling, even if at times ruefully as it reminded me of my own ticking clock.

The other two shows I saw—I Became We and The Heart—have found ways to stretch the definition of a musical even further. An onstage Steinway piano was the sole instrument in I Became We, a wholly original show that opened this past week at the Atlantic Theater’s Linda Gross Theater with a book and lyrics by the playwright Mona Pirnot and music and lyrics by the composer Jack D. Coen (click here to listen to an interview with them). 

Pirnot subscribes to the autofiction style of storytelling that weaves together real-life autobiographical experiences (some really mundane) with fictional flourishes to create a thematic narrative. Her previous works have dealt with the trauma of coping with a severely ill relative and the challenges of working as a contemporary artist. This time out the theme is Pirnot’s mid-life crisis over whether or not to have a baby. But what sets this first-person story apart is that it’s told by a 16-member choir of classically trained singers, all dressed in formal attire, standing on risers with music in hand and singing the hell out of the score.

The songs Pirnot and Coen, who also conducts the choir, have composed range from the intentionally funny opening number that begins “I saw a segment on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ called, ‘What Do You Know About the Female Body?’” to gorgeous meditative arias. The singers who performed in solos, duets, quartets and as a group were all fantastic and I was happy to see each given complete bios in the Playbill. Director Sarah Benson’s main contribution may have been the decision to project the lyrics on a screen positioned above the choir, which I greatly appreciated because it meant that none of the often very witty lyrics are missed.

However, while I am a fan of this clever new approach to a musical, I have to admit that I found the subject of one woman’s decision to have a baby to be a touch too solipsistic. But the entire song cycle runs a tidy 70 minutes, most critics have been charmed by it and I’m happy to join in the applause for what turned out to be a truly entertaining chamber musical in every sense of the word.

Still, the show that really knocked me out was The Heart, an exhilarating new musical that just opened at the Roundabout Theater's Laura Pels Theatre. It's centered around the unlikely subject of a transplanted heart with a book by Kait Kerrigan and a techno music score by the husband-and-wife team of Anne and Ian Eisendrath that provides a steady and propulsive beat that aptly mimics those of the heart. 

The story, based on a French novel, begins with the fatal car accident of a 19-year-old surfer and then follows the journey of his still healthy heart through vignettes that involve his divorced parents who have to make the agonizing decision to donate their son’s heart, the transplant coordinators who have only a limited time to find the right recipient for it, the ailing 50-year-old woman who had given up hope of getting a heart in time to save her life and the members of the medical team that performs the procedure.

That’s a lot to pack into 90-minutes and yet the songs (both Kerrigan and the Eisendraths are credited with the lyrics) are so skillful, Christopher Ashley’s direction is so sharp and the cast led by Joaquina Kalukango as the anguished mom, Heidi Blickenstaff as the anxious recipient and Drew Gehling as the cocky surgeon are all so specific in their acting choices that each character comes vividly to life. 

The entire creative team is equally in sync. Mandy Moore’s choreography is minimal but still manages to convey the urgency of the situation. Similarly, Lucy Mackinnon’s video projections are mainly expressionistic but their images also covey the pulsating energy of the endeavor. 

But it was mainly the music that most excited me. Hip-hop has been sneaking into more shows in the wake of Hamilton and pop-rock keeps popping up in jukebox musicals but to have a show so animated by electronic dance music—while still making room for more traditional genres when needed—is a reminder that the musical cannot only survive but thrive as a contemporary art form.

Some critics have complained that The Heart is little more than a fancy PSA to get people to sign up as organ donors. I suppose there is some truth in that. I learned a lot of facts about the whole organ donation process. But I was also moved to tears by the show (I laughed some too; it's a bighearted show). And so how can I not cheer a show that has found such a fresh way to appeal to both my head and, yes, my heart.

 

 

 

Social Media Mania is the Main Social Issue in the Plays "Anon," "Degenerates" and "Fish"

One of the theatrical genres I most admire is the state of the nation play that wrestles with contemporary political and social issues. The Brits have a long tradition of this dating back to Shakespeare and running straight through such modern-day works as David Hare’s Racing Demon, Lucy Prebble’s Enron and James Graham’s Ink, which have taken on the Church of England’s struggle to adjust to a changing world, the hubris of corporate greed and the destructive rise of click-driven media. But in recent years, more American playwrights have begun to explore how and why our country has gotten into the fractious mess in which we now find ourselves. Here are three new shows that share a belief that social media has played a major role in getting us there: 

 ANON by Anne Washburn @ MCC Theater

The Issues: Conspiracy Paranoia and Social Media Mania

The Story: A conservative TikToker tumbles down the rabbit hole of extremist QAnon-style conspiracy theories, alienating her family and posing a challenge to the gay couple who recently moved in across the street and put up a gay flag on their home.

The Takeaway: The overt allusions to Shakespeare’s King Lear that are woven into this drama suggest that Washburn intends her play to be a similar kind of grand tragedy. But she seems to have worked harder at drawing those connections than she has at developing her characters or her narrative. Perhaps to compensate, she and director Anne Kauffman lean heavily into the humor as tensions escalate between the neighbors but that undercuts what might have been a powerful message. So what we get is a story that only makes occasional sense and that instead of making a clear statement just peters out. When I saw the play it took a while for the audience to realize that the show was over despite the fact that a character's final words were “the end.”  

And yet, there are some terrific performances, led by the increasingly—and deservedly—ubiquitous Crystal Finn as the TikToker. Meanwhile, Jared Mezzochi, perhaps the best video projection designer working today, has created some nifty visuals. But perhaps the best storytelling is done by the set by the design group dots; it’s a simple dining room table and chairs that double as the home of both Finn’s TikToker and her politically opposite but also increasingly paranoid gay neighbors, a subtle suggestion that red, blue or in between we’re all susceptible to online madness.

DEGENERATES by Else Went @ Playwrights Horizons 

The Issues: Male Loneliness and Social Media Mania

The Story: Three lonely young men— a would-be macho bully boy who lives at home with his mom, a very fem teen who supports himself with sex work on an Only Fans-like website and a guy so despairing of making a connection with anyone that he thinks suicide may be the only solution—turn to an online chat group to share their hostile feelings toward women who they blame for turning them into incels or involuntarily celibates, and to fend off the uncomfortable questions they have about their own sexuality.

The Takeaway: Went is terrific at crafting dialog that captures the way young people talk even though some of those speeches go on far longer than need be. But the actors that she and her director wife Emma Rose Went have found are excellent at portraying the anger, angst and dismay that seem to be spreading among so many young people today. Christopher Dylan White is particularly affecting as the camboy who's trying to determine if they are trans. 

Now there’s no way around it, this show is a tough watch. The crude and lewd language used to talk about women may offend some people and the sex scenes are the most brutal and graphic I’ve ever seen on a stage. But this is also an important show because it pushes aside the usual stereotypes and instead tries to understand the real pain that can come when a group of people begin to believe that they are ignored by the mainstream. I think this play could be a serious contender for the Pulitzer Prize.

FISH by Melis Aker @ the WP Theater 

The Issues: Catfishing, Racial Stereotyping and Social Media Mania

The Story: When a teen turns to the internet to find the brother that she and her Turkish immigrant mother fear has been radicalized online she becomes involved in a bizarro cat-and-mouse relationship with some men who purport to be members of ISIS. 

The Takeaway: What begins as a prank when the girl’s bestie dares her to reach out to the terrorists becomes increasingly comic and improbable. And a couple of the supporting characters, particularly the brother’s ex-girlfriend and a hunky swimming instructor are underdeveloped, although director Tatiana Pandiani has cleverly staged scenes in the swimming pool that are laugh-out-loud funny. 

But what truly salvages it all is the winning performance by Yasmin Ranz-Lind, who is almost convincing as a teen and who radiates a sweet goofiness that calls to mind a young Gilda Radner. And it’s also great to see the mom portrayed as a full person who worries about her kids but who also indulges in some sexual fantasies of her own. This is basically a coming-of-age comedy but tucked inside is a cautionary tale about the dangers that lurk on the web. 

A Sampling of My Fall Preview Wish List

The fall theater season has already begun and it’s more jam-packed than it has been in years. No matter what kind of show you like, there is bound to be something that you'll want to see. But no matter how avid a theatergoer you are, there’s no way to see all of it. So this isn’t a full fall preview. Instead, it’s a sampling of shows that—with fingers crossed that they'll live up to my expectations—I'm really looking forward to seeing over the next couple of months.

A BROADWAY PLAY: Other Desert Cities, opening Oct. 18 at the Hudson Theatre: Jon Robin Baitz’s sensational drama is about a wealthy, right-wing couple whose adult daughter returns home with a book she’s written that will expose long-buried family secrets. It was one of my favorite plays of the year when I saw the original off-Broadway production in 2010 and then again when I got to see the Broadway production the next year.  And I wasn’t the only one knocked out by it; the play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. So I would have wanted to see this revival even if it didn’t have the killer cast of Lily Rabe as the daughter, Ed Harris as the father, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, making her Broadway debut as the mother, and Allison Janney, playing the tart-tongued alcoholic aunt, a role that won Judith Light her second Tony Award.  

But you might also want to check out Downstate, Bruce Norris’ drama about the challenging question of what to do with convicted sex offenders once they’ve served their sentences. 

 

A BROADWAY MUSICAL: Wanted, opening Nov. 8 at the James Earl Jones Theatre: Liisi LaFontaine and Solea Pfeiffer star in this wholly original musical that tells the tale of the Clarke sisters, African-American twins who were light enough to pass for white and bold enough to become outlaws in 1893 Texas. Angelica Chéri, a protégée of the award-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, wrote the book and lyrics based on stories that her own family has passed down over the past century and a half. And her collaborator Ross Baum has written a score filled with bangers and soulful ballads that might feel right at home on Spotify's Top Tracks list.

But you might also want to check out Galileo, Raul Esparza’s return to Broadway for the first time in 14 years in a rock musical about the 17th century scientist whose discoveries brought him into conflict with the Catholic Church.

 

AN OFF-BROADWAY PLAY: The Verge, opening Nov. 5 at the Public Theater: If Eugene O’Neill is the father of modern American drama, then Susan Glaspell is its mother. A co-founder of the Provincetown Players who helped to nurture O’Neill’s early career and a pioneering feminist, Glaspell was also the second woman to ever win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. But she doesn’t get done much anymore, not even by companies that pride themselves on reviving works by neglected playwrights. This drama about a woman whose desire to be more than just a wife and mother drives her insane was Glaspell’s big breakout but it hasn’t had a major New York production since its debut in 1921. So it’s beyond exciting for me that the Fiasco Theater Company is staging this revival at the Public Theater, starring Miriam Silverman, a recent Tony winner for her breakout performance in the 2023 revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window.

But you might also want to check out A View From the Bridge, Arthur Miller’s tragedy about a longshoreman’s lust for his niece, which is being revived at, of all places, the iconic downtown avantgarde theater La MaMa, with a  starry cast that includes Sam Rockwell, Marin Ireland and Alfred Molina

 

AN OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL: Imitation of Life, opening Dec. 3 at the Shed: The novelist Fannie Hurst centered her 1933 tearjerker around two single mothers, one white and one black, struggling with the challenges of race, class, identity and female ambition. It’s been made into a movie twice and now it’s a musical with a book by Lynn Nottage and a score by the 13-time Grammy-winning singer and songwriter John Legend. The production will star Adrienne Warren and Jessica Vosk and I’m so eager to see this one that I bought my tickets the day they went on sale back in May.

But you might also want to check out: Memoirs of an Amorous Gentleman, based on a series of Japanese graphic novels and the final show with a score by Duncan Sheik, who died just last month a few days before previews began, it revolves around a Parisian courtesan who relates the stories—and kinks—of her various clients as she tries to figure out her own desires.   

 

 

 

Facing Up to Some Hard Truths About "How Shakespeare Saved My Life" & "In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat"

Toward the beginning of his solo show How Shakespeare Saved My Life, Jacob Ming-Trent talks movingly about how his father, a drug addict, left the family and his son adrift until the 12-year-old stumbled into a Shakespeare class and discovered that the Bard’s words could provide the ballast he needed and help him shape the rest of his life and career.  

It’s a heartwarming story and it reminded me of one that Roger Guenveur Smith tells in his show In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The equally moving scene in his show centers around how the young Roger was inspired by his father who worked as an elevator operator in the Capital, where he suffered various indignities but dreamed of a better life for his son.  

Part of what makes those references so powerful is that both Ming-Trent and Smith are black and the fact that they’re telling these stories in such places as, respectively, The Public Theater and New York Theatre Workshop, offers living proof that they’ve overcome the adversity and other disadvantages of their boyhoods. It’s the kind of up-from-their-bootstraps stuff that audiences love.  

But what really connects the two shows for me is that those anecdotes are only partially true. In an interview he gave when his show played at the Folger Theatre earlier this year, Ming-Trent discloses that his father was a novelist and his grandmother, a journalist and poet (click here to hear more). Smith’s Wikipedia page says that his father was a judge. 

Now I’m not trying to rag on these guys. It’s possible that Ming-Trent’s dad was a novelist and an addict.  And maybe Smith’s dad went to school at night, got his law degree and worked his way up to the bench. Besides, as the old saying goes, when it comes to fictional or theatrical narratives, the truth should never get in the way of a good story.  

Still, these shows also reveal a different and, at least for me, more uncomfortable truth: theater producers and audiences continue to feel most comfortable with stories about black people who are downtrodden. And that may be handicapping artists who want to tell black stories. Because as talented as Ming-Trent and Smith are—Ming-Trent was a terrific Falstaff in the Public’s Merry Wives of Windsor a few summers ago and Smith won an Obie for his performance as the leader of the Black Panthers in A Huey P Newton Story—neither of their current solo shows really work.

Because their foundations are shaky, the stories are wobbly too, veering off in directions that don’t really make sense. How did a homeless Ming-Trent find the money to make his way from Pittsburgh to New York? His story skips over that. Did Smith and the celebrated artist Basquiat have more than a passing acquaintanceship?  His story sidesteps that.

Both Ming-Trent and Smith are such charismatic presences that their shows are still entertaining and they're smart enough to keep them short. But it’s clear that each wanted to focus on something other than the stereotypical dysfunctions that the larger society continues to associate with being black in America. 

Ming-Trent is passionate about the connection he sees between Shakespeare and hip-hop artists like Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. And he’s terrific when he’s quoting lines from all three. Meanwhile, Smith is most committed to exploring the challenges that black artists of all stripes—including those from middle-class, or even affluent, backgrounds—face. Those objectives get somewhat lost in these shows.

If unshackled from having to incorporate trauma tropes into their work, both writer-performers might have been able to create more complex narratives. But I don’t know if mainstream theatrical gatekeepers are ready to let them do that. 

However, they might want to beware. In 2020, the writer-director Rhada Blank released her semi-autobiographical film “The 40-Year-Old Version” about a black playwright who abandons the theater after a white producer encourages her to put more black suffering into her work. Her response before leaving was to strangle him.

Falling in Love With "The Invention of Love"

All art is a conversation between the people who make the thing and the people seeing, reading or listening to it. And the first time I saw Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, it didn’t speak to me at all. That 2001 production of this eulogistic memory play about the poet and classics scholar A.E. Housman was staged by the powerhouse duo of director Jack O’Brien and set designer Bob Crowley. It ran for 108 performances, was nominated for five Tonys and both Richard Easton and Robert Sean Leonard won for playing the older and younger versions of Housman. 

But the play might just as well have been speaking Greek to me. I found it to be tedious and pretentious. So I was totally unprepared for how deeply affected I was by the far more modest production of the play that The MAP Theater has just opened at Theaterlab, a small space on the third floor of a building on West 36th Street.

Maybe age and my increasing thoughts about mortality have something to do with that. For the play opens as Housman, who having just died at the age of 77, is greeted by Charon, the ferryman in Greek mythology who transports souls across the River Styx that separates the realms of the living and the dead. 

Along the way, Housman looks back at scenes from his life, including his student days at Oxford, the poetry he wrote, the many scholarly debates he had over the meanings of art and beauty but, most of all, he recalls the lifelong unrequited love he had for his classmate Moses Jackson at a time when Oscar Wilde ended up serving time in prison for loving another man.

I’m not going to pretend that I now understand all the literary and philosophical allusions in The Invention of Love. Stoppard liked to insist that he just wanted to be entertaining (click here to read about that) but he packed so much of that intellectual stuff into this nearly three hour play that the Broadway production included a packet of explanatory notes inside its Playbill. 

But all of that seems to matter less this time around because MAP’s artistic director Zachary Elkind has homed in on the emotional underpinnings of the play: the frustration caused by having to repress the passions one feels, the resignation that comes with realizing that certain dreams will never be accomplished, the melancholy of accepting that time actually is finite. 

And now that a quarter century of experiences has passed since my first encounter with the play, I found myself checking off all three. Although you don't really need to be AARP eligible to appreciate this production. The twentysomething-year-old woman seated next to me looked to be just as moved by it as I was.

Elkind’s staging is spare but effective. He keeps things moving so that the words don’t overwhelm but he leaves ample room for the considerable humor that Stoppard has sprinkled throughout the play. Charon’s boat, which sits in the middle of the playing space with the audience seated on both sides, is the primary set piece, serving a role similar to the centering one that the car played in the recent revival of Death of a Salesman.  And the costumes here are just simple late Victorian suits and academic gowns, although I’m not quite sure why nearly all the actors are barefoot. 

Such simplicity puts an even greater weight on the acting. And, for the most part, Elkind’s cast delivers. It’s no surprise that David Greenspan, an icon of the downtown theater community, so deftly captures the arrogant prissiness, the wry humor and the wistfulness of the older Housman, with even his ramrod posture making clear how Housman felt pride in being smarter than most of his peers and regret for being less emotionally secure. 

Yaron Lotan, an actor new to me, was just as captivating in a performance that combines the gawkiness of the younger Housman with distinctive shadings of the later man that we see in Greenspan’s rendering of him. Meanwhile José Espinosa portrays the straight Moses Jackson with pitch perfect golden-boy insouciance. And Daniel Liu is so wonderfully natural as Housman’s best friend the bibliographer and scholar Alfred Pollard that I found myself leaning forward in delight every time he walked on stage.  

The Invention of Love doesn’t get done a lot. And so I’m sure that devotees of Stoppard, who died last year at the age of 88, already have this rare revival on their must-see list. But take it from a former apostate like me, this potent little production has found a way to speak eloquently to the rest of us too.

The Gimmick's The Thing in the Trendy Shows "Becoming Hamlet," "Garry Starr: Penguin Classic" and "The Real Ivanov"

“You Gotta Get a Gimmick,” that’s what the strippers in the musical Gypsy told young Louise when she and her mama Rose were looking for a way to survive in show business. And that seems to be the philosophy of several of the shows I’ve seen over the last few weeks as traditional theaters, hard pressed for cash and desperate for new audiences, have been renting out their spaces to productions that in other days might have played in some Lower East Side basement or in a Fringe festival, here or in Edinburgh.  

These shows share some dramaturgical tics. The most popular seems to be to trade on the name and therefore good will of some better known work, like a play by Shakespeare or Chekhov or maybe the whole literary canon. Another seems to be to lean in on audience participation to one extent or another. Some of these shows are clever or entertaining or provide fresh insights into old works. Some do none of those things. My thoughts about three of them follow:

BECOMING HAMLET @ The 52nd Street Project’s Five Angels Theater, thru Oct. 3

The Source: William Shakespeare’s tragedy about the indecisive Danish prince struggling to avenge his father's murder.

The Gimmick: Multiple audience members are given parts—sometimes just a line or two written on a card; at other times, long segments that are projected on screens—from some of the Bard’s most famous speeches to recite alongside the actors onstage.

The Show: This kind of participatory theater clearly worked when Daniel Radcliffe (and later Mariska Hargitay and Tracee Ellis Ross) recently did it in Every Brilliant Thing. But its main character was played by one person who provided an emotional focus for the show. Here, Damon Horowitz, who also did the adaptation, does a decent enough job of playing Hamlet but because he ends up sharing the role with at least a dozen audience members, it’s hard to work up any feeling for the character.

The set is a simple white platform. The costumes are all over the place, suggesting no time or location with Gertrude and Claudius in brocade, Horatio in a striped sports jacket and Hamlet in a fleece vest so I'm not sure what story they were telling. And the heels Gertrude and Ophelia wore looked so precarious that I worried for their safety. But as Shakespeare said, the play's the thing and here its lines are spoken from all over the room so that the poor actors who are scene partners with Hamlet don’t even know where to look when they’re speaking to him. 

In fact, the performances—both those from the professional cast members and from the recruited audience members—were uneven. Although a few of the volunteers read their parts so well that I wondered if they knew the conceit and had practiced at home with the hope that they'd have a chance to show off. 

So Does the Gimmick Work: Well, not for me. I couldn’t figure out the point of the show, not even after reading the program notes several times. I mean forget "to be, or not to be," the question this production doesn't really answer is why anyone should want to become Hamlet. 

 

GARRY STARR: CLASSIC PENGUINS @ Studio Seaview, thru Oct. 11

The Source: The penguin-logoed library of paperbacks with black and orange covers and helpful introductions designed to make high-brow literature more accessible to the hoi polloi.

The Gimmick: In this more or less solo show the actor uses titles from the Penguin books as prompts for jokey skits and physical stunts.  And oh yes, he does most of it while naked.

The Show: The Australian actor Damien Warren-Smith is so charismatic that the shock of his nudity (he starts the show wearing only a frock coat, an Elizabethan ruffle and orange flippers in homage to the titular seabird, although all of that soon comes off) quickly disappears, allowing the viewer to really focus on the athleticism, the crowd control skills and the go-for-broke silliness that animate this 70-minute show, which the friend who saw it with me described as a cross between a party at a smart boys’ frat house and the opening act for a drag show at a really cool gay bar.

Some of the stunts are funny. Some of them are intentionally gross. Nearly all, wittily directed by Cal McCrystal, seemed to be crowd pleasers and the folks who agreed to interact with Warren-Smith’s stage alter ego, the titular Garry Starr, seemed so completely game for all of them that I couldn't help thinking that at least a few of them might have been plants. Although at one point a whole section of the audience was drafted and they all seemed to be having a ball.

So Does the Gimmick Work: Yeah. This isn’t really my cup of tea but it’s a lot more entertaining than I expected it to be.

 

THE REAL IVANOV @ Classic Stage’s Lynn F. Angelson Theater, thru Sept. 19 

The Source: An early Anton Chekhov play about a man who is inept at running his estate, deep in debt, no longer in love with his ailing wife who once gave up everything to marry him and lusting after the young daughter of his more affluent neighbor.

The Gimmick:  The four-act play has been edited down to about 100 minutes and there is basically no set at all

The Story: Both the adaptation and direction are by the Chekhov scholar Laura Strausfeld but while streamlining the text is one thing, cutting back on the stagecraft is another. It makes no sense to have no furniture if you're going to have characters inviting one another to sit down and if the staging doesn't devise some artful things for them to do when they're asked to do that. 

There’s no actual audience participation but the show is performed in the round and gestures are made to people in the front row as though they are guests at events in the play. There are also a few attempts to create impressionistic moments by having the lighting change or crowding the actors on a strip of carpet but they largely come off as pretentious. And unless you already know who the characters are and their relationship to one another—always tricky in any Chekhov production—it’s too easy to get lost here.  

That confusion is exacerbated by the performances of an uneven cast. The British actor Sam Underwood is one of the show’s lead producers and stars in the title role but it often seems as though he’s wandered in from another production since he uses his own accent and gives a brooding, Method-style performance while most of the rest of the cast speaks in American English and alternates between mugging and walking through their roles. 

So Does the Gimmick Work: Afraid not. Sadly nothing here worked for me. 

 

 

A Labor Day Salute to Theater Podcasters

The summer of 2026 has been a strange one for me. Nothing truly dire but my husband K and I experienced some challenges, some disappointments and a few losses. So I’m regarding this Labor Day as the fresh start of a new season and new possibilities. But I’m also going to stick with my long established tradition of marking the holiday with a salute to a group of theater workers. 

As longtime readers will know, over the years I’ve celebrated the labor of ushers, union leaders, stage managers, set designers, producers, drama teachers, composers, casting directors, actors and back office workers from the folks who clean the theaters and order the supplies to the ones who work in the box office or manage the marketing campaigns. But this year, I’m moving a little closer to home and singling out a handful of my fellow theater podcasters who work hard to make shows that offer truly informed ways of looking at and appreciating the theater we all love.  

THE THEATER HISTORY PODCAST: It’s been around for years but I only recently discovered this terrific series that takes deep dives into subjects ranging from ancient Greek drama to the musicals of Lin-Manuel Miranda through lively conversations with archivists, theater historians and working artists. The show’s producer and host Mike Lueger seems to have read everything about anything to do with theater and so knows how to ask the right questions but, just as importantly, he knows how to get out of the way so that his guests can share their impressive knowledge. The episode on the almost-forgotten 19th century actress Charlotte Cushman, who specialized in male roles and romanced some of her leading ladies, knocked me out.

MICKEYJOYTHEATRE: If you follow theater on social media, then you probably already know Mickey-Jo Boucher, the energetic theater critic, who’s based in the U.K. but who is equally up-to-date on what’s happening on this side of the Atlantic too. There are lots of theater TikTokers and vloggers but few are more savvy about the theater scene than Mickey-Jo, whose reviews are so detailed and vivid that you feel as though you were sitting in the theater right next to him. But what really sets him apart is his thoughtful analysis of news and trends which provide the kind of context that not only clarifies what’s happening but why it’s happening, as he did with a recent episode on Jonathan Bailey’s decision to bail on the West End revival of Sunday in the Park with George.   

THE PRESENT STAGE: CONVERSATIONS WITH THEATER WRITERS: In the interest of full disclosure I have to say that this show’s host Dan Rubins is a fellow board member of the Outer Critics Circle but he’s also one of the hardest working people I know. In addition to running a non-profit organization that helps kids with physical and developmental disabilities compose their own songs, Dan manages to see some 200 shows a year and to engage in deeply-researched discussions with many of the people who create them. When Moisés Kaufman appeared on Dan’s show to discuss his Pulitzer finalist Here There are Blueberries, which will open on Broadway in November, Kaufman said he’d agreed to do the interview because knew that Dan always did his homework. And he really does.

CHASING PHANTOM: Despite the title this isn’t a show about The Phantom of the Opera, instead it’s a celebration of all Broadway’s longest running shows. Its Virginia-based host David Timberline delves into the backstage stories of the shows that ran for 1,000 performances or more. Phantom still holds the top spot with 13,981 but episodes range from now-almost forgotten productions like the 1943 romantic comedy The Voice of the Turtle to such modern-day crowd pleasers as MJ, the Musical and Timberline and his guests always manage to find some new tidbit to share about them.

BROADWAY BOUND: THE MUSICALS THAT NEVER CAME TO BROADWAY: True Broadway fanatics love flops almost as much as they love hits and this show’s host Robert W. Schneider has a ball digging up and recounting the stories about the shows—many of them with big stars— that died out of town, from such notorious failures as Breakfast at Tiffanys to such now nearly-forgotten disappointments as The Prince of Grand Street. Himself a director, producer and writer, Schneider knows what he’s talking about; and an irrepressible wit, he's totally entertaining while he’s doing it, whether he's playing often-hard-to-find excerpts from the shows or breaking into impressions of Carol Channing or Gwen Verdon. 

BROADWAYRADIO: My southern-born grandmother used to say that it’s a poor dog that doesn’t wag its own tail and so I have to give a shout out to this network of shows, which has provided a home for my podcasts "All the Drama" and "Stagecraft," but most especially to its head honcho James Marino, one of the OG theater podcasters who began streaming shows back in 2009 and who not only continues to host its popular weekly review show but recently introduced an app that’s available for IOS and Android users.