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.

Why "Disruption" Really Turned Me Off

The love-hate relationship so many of us have with technology in general and AI in particular purports to be the main subject of Andrew Stein’s Disruption, which opened this week at the Pershing Square Signature Center. It’s obviously a timely topic so I’m sorry to have to say that my overall response to the way the play deals with it tilts toward the negative end of the critical spectrum.

Disruption centers around a thirtysomething tech entrepreneur named Nick, who has come up with software that aggregates all the data most of us already willingly share online—the stuff we buy, the subjects we Google, the comments we post—and puts them through an algorithm that determines which life choices an individual should make to be happy. And then it sells that information to companies who want to make a buck off of it.  

This probably sounded cool and futuristic back in 2023 and the play did draw raves when it debuted in London that year. But technology moves fast and people are now regularly consulting ChatGPT, Claude and their ilk on all kinds of things from what kind of couch they should buy (that would be me) to how to confront a friend about a long-held grievance (not me; that’s what shrinks are for). So the play’s shock value now arrives somewhat diminished.  

I can’t really blame Stein for that but it also doesn’t help that his knowledge of the tech world seems no deeper than a Wikipedia synopsis of it. However getting into the kind of nitty-gritty about exactly how the algorithm might work and what its ethical implications would be is not what truly interests the playwright. For his drama kicks off when Nick invites his oldest and closest friends to a dinner where he offers them the opportunity to invest in his new venture and become filthy rich just like him. 

The $500,000 entry fee Nick quotes hardly seems enough to be a rounding number in his billion dollar project. But it turns out that Nick doesn’t really want his friends' money; what he wants, without telling them, is to use them as guinea pigs to test out his software. And that was another red flag for me:  why didn't Nick and his brainy business partner Raven just go the conventional route and recruit volunteers or college students as their subjects? 

I suspect the reason is that Stein is simply more interested in exploring the woes of being an affluent Millennial. Nick’s friends are three couples—a college professor and his psychotherapist wife debating whether to have a kid; a magazine editor and his lawyer wife debating the best way to get their kids into a top prep school; and a surgeon and his photographer wife debating whether they can afford a seven-figure Brooklyn brownstone. 

All are in thrall in one way another to their millionaire pal Nick but they’re so sketchily drawn that it’s hard to care about any of them. A few background details—one is secretly gay, another has slept with a spouse other than their own—are thrown in but then are almost immediately discarded.

Luckily, director Hersh Ellis has recruited a top-notch cast of actors who find nuance and texture between the lines they've been given to say. The standouts for me were Irene Sofia Lucio, feisty, funny and sexy as the photographer and Conrad Ricamora giving such a grounded performance as Nick’s best friend the professor that I almost wished the play had just been about him (click here to read an interview with him). 

The weak link for me was John David Washington as Nick. Many reviewers have praised Washington’s innate charisma and his movie-star presence is clearly helping to sell tickets but his performance failed to actually show me how someone who so professes to love his friends could so easily sell them out.

Yet, perhaps the most egregious thing for me is the play’s end. Despite the otherwise fine performances and this production’s snazzy set— a glossy black box that sits runway-style with the audience seated on both sides and video projections running along the floor and walls to mimic the algorithm’s calculations—it's not clear what message Stein wants to get across. But the soul-disrupting one that I took away from his play is that what brings happiness is not just money but lots of it.

 

"The Saviors" Confirms Its Author's Talent

It is such a relief to have discovered that the young playwright Bubba Weiler is not a one-show wonder. I was knocked out by his debut Well, I'll Let You Go when I saw it last year (click here to listen to my conversation about it with Weiler) and so I worried when I heard that the Atlantic Theater Company had so quickly scheduled another play of his called The Saviors because sophomore productions are often cursed by unrealistic expectations. 

The Saviors, now playing at Atlantic's Linda Gross Theater, seems to have been created first and it isn't as polished or revelatory as Well, I'll Let You Go, but it is still an engrossing work with impressively complex characters and really substantive things to say about faith and friendship, the forgiveness of sins and the stories that both we and organized religion tell in our efforts to make sense of it all.  

The entire play takes place in the sanctuary of a Catholic church in an unidentified midwestern town and David Zinn has recreated a wonderfully authentic setting, complete with stained glass windows and the slightly scary Baroque effigies that peer down on the altar. The fact that the theater itself is in the reconverted parish hall of an actual church only adds to the verisimilitude. For The Saviors' narrative centers around two of the fictional church’s altar boys, best friends Michael and Paul. They’re 13 and 14 and preparing for their upcoming confirmation ceremony and their overall passage from boyhood into manhood. 

Michael is the more exuberant and seemingly more devout, while Paul seems slightly reserved and more thoughtful. There is an obvious—if carefully unacknowledged—sexual tension between the two and I thought at first that this might be another coming out story. But Weiler, who himself was once an altar boy and who is now happily married to a man, is too gifted a playwright to settle for that alone (click here to read about the genesis of his story). He complicates his story with the arrival of a shabby stranger who stumbles into the church claiming to have once been an altar boy there and now seeking refuge from a winter storm and more. 

Despite his piety, Michael wants to send the man whose name is Julian onto a homeless shelter blocks away. But Paul not only insists that Julian stay and sleep in the church but he returns later with food and to share stories about Julian’s past and about Paul’s concerns about his future. Meanwhile Michael seeks comfort in a recently widowed church volunteer named Judy whom he admires and wants to impress because everyone in the church has heard the stories about the missionary work her son is doing in Africa.  

That’s a lot to cram into 90 minutes particularly when the storylines start to tangle but Weiler and his director Jack Serio deftly knit it altogether in a way that is entertaining and ultimately heartbreaking (click here to read more about how they collaborate). They’re aided by a superb cast. Both playwright and director were determined that the boys should be played by actual teens and they—and their casting people—somehow found two young gems. 

Ivan Howe as Michael and Julius Rinzel as Paul are delightfully gawky in the play’s early humorous scenes where the boys horse around, racing to see who can snuff out the most candles, putting one another in headlocks and trading gruesome stories about tortured saints. But they’re even more impressive in the later  dramatic scenes that call for their characters to express, often without words, the contrasting love they feel for one another and the confusions that are roiling inside them.

The adult cast is excellent too. Stanley Simon's Julian is the classic fuck-up who wants to do good but Simon also makes it clear that Julian knows that he will fail again and again.  And Crystal Fox is a marvel as Judy. She initially seems to be the play’s comic relief but Fox quietly shows how this woman knows the shortcomings of good intentions. Her final moment of truth is truly devastating.

All four of them are trying in one way or another to save at least one of the others and in the process themselves. But, particularly in the play's powerful climactic scene, Weiler seems to be saying that our sins can only be forgiven when we forgive the ones that are committed against us.

Female Rage is Center Stage in the Musical "Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo"

 

Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo, the new musical now playing downtown at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, is a patchwork quilt of other musicals: one swatch a revenge plot like the one in Sweeney Todd, another the villainous husbands like the one in Waitress, a patch of go-go heroines like the duo in Wicked, another of rap riffs like those in Hamilton. 

Maybe that’s why the critical response has been so all over the place for this show, with many of those who say they admire it nitpicking its weak points and making unfavorable comparisons to those other shows even though this one is a first-time effort, written entirely by Jennifer Nettles, the singer-songwriter who made her name as half of the Grammy-winning country duo Sugarland (click here to read more about her). 

And for some reason that critical waffling has made me defensive about this show. It's not perfect. But I liked it. I liked it a lot. And I think if they can see it, a lot of other folks would like it too. Nettles, who also stars in the title role, has based her debut musical on the tale of Giulia Tofana, a 17th century female apothecary who, according to legend, concocted a largely undetectable poison that she sold to women seeking to get rid of unwanted husbands, eventually leading to the deaths of some 600 of them. 

In Nettles’ telling of the story, Giulia first poisons her own husband after he attempts to abuse their daughter. When the word gets around, other beleaguered women start asking for similar help. Giulia complies even though she worries, as she sings in one number, that doing something wrong for the right reason may not make it right. And she knows that if the authorities find out what she’s doing, they will label her a witch and make her pay the ultimate price for her crimes. 

Director Mary Zimmerman, still best-known for her 2002 production Metamorphoses, has staged Giulia’s story with elegant simplicity: whenever a trio of doors at the back of the stage open they reveal different scenarios that provide sometimes literal and sometimes metaphorical settings for what’s going on in front of them. 

Meanwhile, the cast sings the hell out of a wide-ranging score that includes power ballads, comic numbers, choral anthems and raps, all of which move the plot along. And several of them give individual cast members chances to shine. The second-act solo “The Wolf” that Quentin Earl Darrington sings as a hypocritical cardinal is an out-and-out showstopper.

Still, the word that many of the critical naysayers—mainly men—keep using to describe the show is "earnest". But what’s wrong with being passionate and purposeful?  Sure, the male villains—Darrington’s churchman and a smarmy politician played with almost a touch too much relish by Christopher M. Ramirez —would be right at home in any 19th century melodrama but is the critics' real issue that this is an unabashedly feminist tale? I mean who objects to the earnestness of Benjamin Barker or Jean Valjean?

Nettles who has appeared briefly in such shows as Chicago (I know, who hasn’t) and Waitress, is not only comfortable onstage and has an incredible voice but is also unafraid to put the focus on women and the unvarnished rage they felt back in the 17th century when women had so few rights or ways to protect themselves and today when such rights as controlling our own bodies to serving in the military are being severely threatened. And I'm glad she's doing it regardless of how uncomfortable it might make some men feel.