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.

 

 

The Martin Musicals: "Smash" & "Boop!"

Bob Martin burst onto the Broadway scene back in 2006 with The Drowsy Chaperone, a loving send-up of Broadway musicals that ran for 674 performances, was nominated for 13 Tony awards and won five of them including Best Book of a Musical, which Martin shared with his co-writer Don McKellar. He followed that up by collaborating with Thomas Meehan on the musical adaptation of the movie "Elf". That one only ran for 74 performances but it has since become a Christmas staple. Next Martin collaborated on the book for The Prom, whose relatively short yearlong run belies the true depth of affection that theater folks have for this tale of a group of self-involved performers who put aside their narcissism to help a young lesbian who wants to take a girl to her high school dance. 

So it makes perfect sense to me that producers wanting a big, flashy feel-good musical should turn to Bob Martin. And this season two shows, both of them opening over the past week, did exactly that. The book for Smash, an adaptation of the TV show about the making of a musical, was co-written by Martin and Rick Elice, who, having written Jersey Boys, is no slouch himself. And Martin flew solo with the book for Boop!, a modern-day fantasia about the cartoon character Betty Boop (click here to read a piece about how he managed working on both). 

The strengths and weaknesses of the two shows are the same: Martin’s love for the old-fashioned musicals of yesteryear is evident in everything he does but he seems far better at parodying those old shows than he is at coming up with fresh ideas for new ones.

The underlying storyline for Smash remains the same as it was on TV: a group of theater people try to create a bio-musical about Marilyn Monroe called “Bombshell”. The series, which itself stumbled through only two seasons, had lots of subplots but its central question was whether Monroe should be played by a veteran performer who worked her way up through the ranks or a fresh-faced newcomer—and how far each would go to win the role. 

Martin and Elice's stage musical has done away with the subplots. And they’ve thrown out the central question too. Instead, they’ve replaced them with a dim sum menu of well-worn backstage tropes: the gay director with an eye for cute chorus boys, the drunk writer who can’t hold his liquor, the overweight stage manager who once dreamed of being onstage, the imperious star who has pretensions of being a method actress. 

But because they don’t want to insult anyone who is gay, has a drinking problem, has a weight problem or is an asshole, they go out of their way to give each of these characters a scene in which they get to redeem themselves. And no matter how well intentioned, that performative earnestness saps the humor. 

Old comic hands like Brooks Ashmanskas as the director and Kristine Nielsen as a vampirish drama coach are capable of pulling laughs out of thin air. But too many supposedly funny bits fall flat, leaving other talented folks like Krysta Rodriguez, John Behlmann and Caroline Bowman adrift.

Stage vet Robyn Hurder is supposed to be the star of the show (click here to read about her) and she belts her heart out but she lacks leading lady “ris” and having to share the show’s signature song “Let Me Be Your Star” with two other actresses (it’s reprised over and over and over again) doesn’t help.  

As they did for the TV show, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman supply the score and their songs are serviceably tuneful. But Martin, Elice and their director, the usually resourceful Susan Stroman, haven’t figured out how to smoothly integrate them into the plot. Although that may be because there really isn’t one.

The best scenes in the show may be the two video montages put together by S. Katy Tucker to make fun of Reddit and TikTok influencers. They made me laugh but they also made me wonder if a show, particularly a wobbly one like this one, can afford to piss off a group that is becoming increasingly, well, influential when it comes to getting butts in seats.

Martin fares better with Boop!  But only slightly. Appearing for the first time in 1930, Betty Boop had big eyes, long lashes and pouty lips pasted onto a big head. And unlike so many cartoon heroines who were thin and had long blonde locks, Betty’s hair was dark and bobbed and she had a curvy body outfitted in a tight Jazz Age-mini dress. Her sassy signature tag line was “Boop Oop a Doop,” 

That innocent sexiness appealed to me when her cartoons started popping up on TV in my girlhood and she appealed to lots of others too (click here to read more about that) but I wasn’t sure that Betty was remembered well enough nowadays and I was nervous about how she’d be treated on Broadway. 

Betty’s short animated features were simple. Men chased her and she hit them over the head with heavy objects to make them stop. But as with Smash, this musical version of her story is filled with lots and lots of storylines: a cartoon character discovering the real world, an orphan misfit pursuing her dream of becoming an artist, a crooked politician running for mayor, a woman realizing her full potential, three separate love stories, including a gay one and a cute puppet dog (copies of it available for sale in the lobby). 

The result is a little bit of Annie, a little bit of Back to the Future, a little bit of The Wiz and a lot of both the movie “Barbie” and Martin’s own Elf adaptation. David Foster has written the bouncy if anodyne music and Susan Birkenhead has done the lyrics, some of them clever. The show is directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell, a firm believer that more is more, that kicklines are essential in musicals and that there’s no situation that can’t be helped by a confetti canon.

David Rockwell’s sets and Gregg Barnes’ costumes are thoroughly delightful. In a reverse homage to the classic 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz," Betty’s cartoon life is all in black and white and then everything bursts into color when she transports to the real world of contemporary New York. In one highlight, the ensemble is dressed in costumes that are black and white on one side and candy-colored on the other, allowing them to flit back and forth between Betty's worlds just by turning around as they dance.

But what really makes this show spin is a star-is-born performance by Jasmine Amy Rogers, a 25-year-old former finalist of the Jimmy Awards and a triple threat who has a terrific singing voice, can dance up a storm and knows how to hit every comic note be it with a quip or a sly smile (click here to read more about her). The show wouldn't be even half as good as it is without her. 

The critical reviews are all over the place for both Smash and Boop!. So whether you'll find these shows to be delights or disappointments will depend on what you're looking for in a musical. As for me, I'm afraid I'll be looking elsewhere.   

 

Star-Struck on Broadway: "Glengarry Glen Ross," "Good Night, and Good Luck," "Othello" and "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

As everyone knows, big name movie and TV stars have been invading Broadway this spring (click here for a rundown of who is doing what) and theatergoers are paying big bucks for the bragging rights to say that they’ve seen them (you can check out the grosses here). So the big question is whether all the hoopla and moola are worth it. I know it's been awhile since I've written here (although I have been posting mini reviews on Broadway & Me Quickies) so I'm happy to be back with some thoughts on four big star-studded shows I’ve recently seen:  

The show: GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS

The stars: Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk

The ticket price: $799 for the top price at the box office, but $200 average price

David Mamet’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winner about a group of salesman peddling shady real estate properties has been revived on Broadway twice before with the sensational 2005 production lead by Liev Schreiber and Alan Alda deservedly winning that year’s Tony for Best Revival of a Play (plus a Tony for Schreiber) and the 2012 production with Bobby Cannavale and Al Pacino rightfully closing after just 45 performances.  

I suspect that this current production now playing at the Palace Theatre will land somewhere between those two: no awards but a longer run. The latter mainly because people want to see its stars: recent Oscar and Emmy winner Culkin and prestige TV fan favorite Odenkirk. They’re both OK, although Culkin’s eccentric interpretation of the office hotshot Ricky Roma starts off somewhat muted. In fact, the entire production is somewhat muted. 

Mamet created a group of society’s losers who know they’ve drawn the short end of the stick but are still desperate to succeed and fighting for whatever they can grasp. But director Patrick Marber has the actors in this production taking a laid-back approach as though they think that if the deals at play don’t work out, they’ll just try something else. So what we get is basically a fan-service version of the play with the actors trading on their well-worn personas instead of digging into their characters. 

Burr comes off best as the office hothead Dave Moss but that’s because the role is so similar to the angry guy he projects in his stand-up routines that Nathan Lane—who was originally slated to play the role of the office sad sack Shelley Levine now played by Odenkirk—recommended Burr for the role (click here for more on that). And Burr does bring some much needed energy every time he hits the stage but how I wish we could have seen Lane’s spin on Levine. The revival we’ve got without him is not a bad production but it’s not a great one either. 

The show: GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK

The star: George Clooney

The ticket price: $775 for the top price at the box office, but $299 average price

The politically savvy Clooney—an editorial he wrote helped push Joe Biden to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race—and his longtime friend and producing partner Grant Heslov scored with their 2005 film about the TV journalist Edward R. Murrow’s battle against the demagogue Joseph McCarthy who ruined thousands of lives in the 1950s with his unsubstantiated allegations that they were disloyal Americans and members of the Communist party. 

The film, anchored by a marvelously nuanced performance by David Strathairn as Murrow, earned six Oscar nominations and currently racks up a 93% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. So I suppose it’s understandable why Clooney and Heslov wanted to mount a stage version, particularly right now when so many McCarthy-like forces are at play in today’s politics. 

But as dozens of movie-to-musical transfers have shown, you can’t just put the script for a movie onstage and expect it to work. Clooney and Heslov, who wrote both the screenplay and the Broadway script, should have brought in an experienced playwright for the latter because they haven’t figured out how to dramatize their story for the stage. 

Subplots that added texture to the film—a couple hiding their marriage because of the network’s anti-nepotism rule, an anxious journalist afraid of being blacklisted—get lost in this stage version. Meanwhile artful touches that elevated the movie—the presence of a jazz singer whose tunes literally underscore the onscreen action—seem not only superfluous but distracting onstage.

And while I get that they need to fill the huge stage of the Winter Garden Theatre, a less imposing set than the full TV studio that scenic designer Scott Pask has created might have allowed the focus to fall where it needs to be: on the people in the story.  

That’s the kind of intimate production that is director David Cromer’s specialty. But I suspect that Cromer was constricted by Clooney and Heslov’s determination to repeat so much of what they’d done onscreen 20 years ago. Which may explain why in this era of producers loving small-cast shows, this production has more than a dozen supporting players even though few of them have more to do than rush around thrusting papers and reels of film at one another.

Clooney, who played Murrow’s producer Fred Friendly in the movie has now shifted into the Murrow role. He looks great and his movie star charisma is intact but this is his Broadway debut (click here to read about that) and his stage insecurity shows, except when he delivers one of the many speeches Morrow gives throughout the play and especially when he gets to deliver them into one of the many cameras onstage, which, of course, is his comfort zone.

I also get why audiences—and some critics—are cheering this one, particularly Morrow’s final rallying cry to stand up against authoritarianism, but I streamed the Strathairn movie the day after seeing the play and had a much better time watching it.

The show: OTHELLO

The stars: Denzel Washington, Jake Gyllenhaal

The ticket price: $897 for the top price at the box office, but $379 average price

This revival of Shakespeare’s tragedy now running at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre appeals to so many demographics that it’s no surprise that it’s been at or near the top of Broadway’s leaderboard for weeks now. I mean who doesn’t want to see the Oscar and Tony-winning Washington as the noble Moor who has defended Venice and rewarded himself with a marriage to the fair Desdemona. Or to see Gyllenhaal, one of the leading actors of his generation and a specialist in portraying complex characters, as the duplicitous Iago who tricks his commanding officer Othello into believing that his new bride is cuckolding him with an officer who has gotten the promotion that Iago believes should have been his.

Race has always been a central issue in the play, with the black Othello surrounded by the white people of Venice who relish the stories about his years in slavery and who cheer his military victories against their enemies the Turks but who never fully accept him into their society. Yet for some reason, director Kenny Leon has decided to downplay all of that, in the process gutting much of Iago’s motivation with colorblind casting, including having Iago’s wife Emilia played by the black actress Kimber Elayne Sprawl.

That’s not Leon’s only mystifying choice.  He posts a sign ostentatiously announcing that the play is set “in the near future” but he never does anything with that.  He has the actors rush through many of the speeches so that not only much of the poetry is lost but so is the prose that makes clear what is happening.  Meanwhile, a playlist of Luther Vandross-style ballads for the pre-show music sets the mood for an altogether different show than the one we get. And many of the costumes by the usually terrific Didi Ayite are downright ugly. The initial white outfit Desdemona wears looks like a cheap prom dress that was the last one left on the rack.

But of course it's the players and not the play that are the thing here. Washington brings his usual swagger to the role of Othello but he didn’t make me feel the pain that the character must be experiencing as he grows to believe there is no one he can trust. And while it may not be fair, I kept imaging Paul Robeson (who famously did the role in 1943) and James Earl Jones (who I saw do it in 1982) saying the Moor's lines and Washington’s prosaic renditions just didn’t measure up to those grand ones.  

Gyllenhaal, who reportedly spent an entire year preparing for his role (click here to read more about that) acquits himself better, offering up a wily and conflicted Iago. I wish I could have seen him in a different and better conceived production.

The show: THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

The star: Sarah Snook

The ticket price: $497 for the top price at the box office, but $170 average price

2025 is poised to go down in theatrical history as the year when video projections came into their own with Broadway audiences dazzled by those in Redwood, Sunset Blvd., Maybe Happy Ending and McNeal. But no show uses high-tech imagery more inventively than this adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 1890 cautionary tale about the titular young dandy who is so afraid of aging that he trades his soul in exchange for eternal youth so that the ravages of time—and his many misdeeds—show up on the face of a portrait he keeps hidden away while his looks remain unblemished. 

And yet, what really stands out in this production is the very human and very soulful performance of Sarah Snook, who, aided by a team of camera operators and pre-recorded and highly choreographed images of herself, plays all of the show’s 26 highly distinctive characters, who are often in heated conversation with one another. At one point seven of them sit down for dinner together and trade Wildean witticisms.

Screens pop up all over the stage of the Music Box theater to help facilitate all this stage magic (click here to read about how they do it) but Snook, the Australian-born actress best known to American audiences for her Emmy-winning performance as the scheming daughter Shiv Roy in the HBO series “Succession,” anchors it all, never leaving the stage, changing costumes, wigs and facial hair right in front of the audience, and all the while delivering the most clearly enunciated dialog I’ve heard spoken in a theater in ages. 

And through it all, Snook looks as though she’s having the time of her life, frequently cocking an eyebrow or darting a glance to invite the audience into the fun, while simultaneously reminding us that our curated Instagram feeds and TikTok video filters are a modern-day form of Dorian Gray-style vanity. She won an Olivier for her performance when the show ran in London and she should make room on her mantle for a whole slew of awards here too.

Also deserving a big shoutout is Kip Williams who adapted the story for the stage and directed the production with unbridled creativity that ranges from setting a scene in a miniature music box theater to orchestrating a panoramic chase sequence through a dense forest, none of it gratuitous, all in service to the storytelling. And so for all its use of screen technology, this is a show that truly comes alive onstage—and I was delighted to have had the chance to see it.

A Tardy Celebration of 18 Years of B&Me

Even though these are crazy times, I don’t know how I let last week’s anniversary of Broadway & Me slip by. I started writing here on Feb. 14, 2007, which means it’s now been 18 years (and eight days) that I’ve had the joy of sharing my thoughts with you about the shows I've seen, theater books I've read, theater movies I’ve watched and theater podcasts I’ve listen to.

This past year was a tough one for me personally and more than ever I leaned on theater (and of course on my ever-supportive husband K) to lift up my spirits. And theater delivered in more ways than I could have anticipated. One of them was being asked to serve as the chair of last year’s jury for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, which went to Eboni Booth’s lovely play Primary Trust. 

I was also delighted to be asked to be a nominator for the Lortel Awards that celebrate off-Broadway shows, which often are among my favorite shows. And I continue to enjoy joining my friend Patrick Pacheco to talk about the New York theater season on occasional episodes of his TV show “THEATER: All the Moving Parts” (our spring preview is coming up soon).

And thanks to BroadwayRadio top gun James Marino, I've continued hosting the podcasts Stagecraft, which features interviews with playwrights and musical book writers about their new shows on both Broadway and off-Broadway; and All the Drama, which devotes each episode to one of the Pulitzer Prize-winning plays. Plus James has also frequently invited me to fill in on the network's flagship "This Week on Broadway" podcast when one of its regular commentators Peter Filichia or Michael Portantiere can't make it (click here to listen to my most recent time on the show). 

In addition to writing here, I also still post articles almost daily on the Flipboard site and even added a new magazine to keep up with all the recent news about Wicked. And I’ve migrated over to BlueSky to chime in on its discussions on all kinds of theater-related subjects. But I think that maybe my favorite thing I’ve done over the past year was to launch Broadway & Me Quickies, mini-reviews of shows I’ve seen that can be read in about a minute. 

My favorite thing about these anniversary posts is that they give me the chance to once again thank those of you who over the years have subscribed to and read these postings, listened to my podcasts, befriended me on Facebook, checked out my Flipboard magazines or more recently found me on BlueSky. And I also want to welcome those of you who may have just stumbled onto this blog for the first time. I'm grateful for all of you and, of course, for the theater we all love and nowadays need more than ever.

 

 

 

"My Man Kono" Tweaks the American Story

A thank you to the National Endowment for the Arts is prominently displayed on the cover of the program for My Man Kono, the new show that Pan Asian Repertory Theatre opened this week at A.R.T./New York Theatres.  

I winced when I saw it because now that the Trump administration has ordered the NEA to eliminate its grant program for underserved communities, withhold funds from organizations that promote diversity, equity and inclusion and discourage projects that criticize America in anyway, it’s unlikely that the NEA will be funding shows like My Man Kono anytime in the near future.

For playwright Philip W. Chung’s drama chronicles the real-life story of Toraichi Kono who immigrated to this country around the turn of the last century, worked as a chauffeur and general factotum for Charlie Chaplin and then just before WWII, was accused of being a spy for Imperial Japan. It’s a piece of American history little-known to most of us and Chung has gone all in on the research. Maybe too much so. 

The play, told in flashbacks, unfolds like the term paper of a student determined to earn an A+ in AP History. Chung makes the grade (it is instructive to learn that being relocated to internment camps wasn't the only hardship Japanese-Americans experienced before, during and after WWII) but Chung scores considerably lower when it comes to crafting a dramatic narrative. 

Because the play covers six decades of Kono’s life, the incidents he encounters and the people he meets are only sketchily drawn. And because seven of the eight-member cast play multiple roles it’s hard to latch on to any of them, be it Kono’s long-suffering wife or the third-rate actor who becomes his nemesis.  

Charlie Chaplin does stand out but that’s probably because most people who see the play will already have their own ideas—mainly positive—about the silent-movie icon. Chung and his director Jeff Liu know this and so they drop Chaplin into as many scenes as they can (his image even dominates the show’s logo). 

Conlan Ledwith does a good job of capturing the comedian’s onscreen mannerisms and real-life vocal patterns but devoting less space to Chaplin might have made more room for Chung and Liu to develop Kono’s character. 

Brian Lee Huynh gives an earnest portrayal of Kono but the Wikipedia entry I read when I got home (and the somewhat  rakish photo that accompanied it) suggests that the real Kono was a more dynamic and complex guy who naturally charmed officials both here and in Japan and who also delighted in his proximity to celebrity and the power that comes with it. 

But Chung has other things on his mind. The show's second act focuses on the 1948 deportation hearing on Kono’s involvement in passing military secrets to the Japanese. Chung clearly wants to use the case to illustrate the bias against immigrants and the anti-Asian racism that have long been a part of the American story. But in doing that he tamps down Kono's personality and leaves the question of his culpability in the espionage up in the air. 

Which is a shame because Kono’s story and those of other people from underserved or under-observed communities whose experiences also played a role in shaping the America of today are worth fully exploring—despite flaws in the subjects or in the storytelling—and there may now be fewer opportunities to get them.