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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

"The Antiquities" is Superbly Up-to-Date

History, they say, is written by the winners and the winners in Jordan Harrison’s thought-provoking new play The Antiquities are the artificial intelligence entities that the play imagines will eventually replace human beings. The time seems to be somewhere in the late 22nd century and the setting is a history museum that gives the play its full formal title: A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities. 

And so each of the play’s scenes represents an exhibit centered on a distinct time period, ranging from 1816 to 2240, in which humans wrestle in one degree or another with technology. The first exhibit is a re-creation of the now legendary evening in which Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and their friend the physician John Polidori challenged one another to come up with the best horror story. Mary won with her tale "Frankenstein" about a scientist who uses his skills to give life to an inanimate creature.  

Other exhibits focus on rural 19th century laborers adjusting to factory work, a 20th century family getting its first dial-up computer, 21st century techies fine-tuning the voice for a Siri-like digital assistant and a writer a few decades later consulting with her doctor about a digital implant that will make her smarter.

In each case trade-offs are made. The humans in every era believe that the new technology will make life easier, longer and perhaps may even develop a way to make them immortal. But at the same time, they are also giving up more and more control to the inanimate but increasingly powerful entities they’ve created.

Now I don’t usually go in for this kind of speculative sci-fi stuff but Harrison is the author of Marjorie Prime, a drama about a future in which holograms of the dead serve as companions to those left behind. It was so finely and sensitively rendered that it was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (click here to read my review of it).  

And Harrison is just as effective here, refusing to give in to the usual dystopian tropes that fuel so many current movies and TV series but also sidestepping the future-is-ours optimism that dominated so much of the last century.  Instead he asks what makes humankind believe that evolution stops with us? (click here to read more of what he has to say).

He's aided by a cast of nine incredibly ambidextrous actors, who, with the help of Brenda Abbandandolo’s sly costumes—and what must be an army of quick-change dressers—transform themselves into dozens of distinct characters, sometimes so completely that they’re not recognizable from one scene to the next.  

The show’s set design by Paul Steinberg is sleekly futuristic, its lighting by Tyler Micoleau is nimble and its sound design by Christopher Darbassie creates a subtle soundscape that is just slightly—but totally appropriately—off-kilter. 

Holding it all together is the sure-handed direction of David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan. I have no idea how they divided their directorial duties but the result is seamless. Without undermining the seriousness of the questions Harrison’s script raises or fabricating feel-good answers, they find a way to make room for the humor and the sexiness he’s also tucked into it. 

It's anyone's guess what some entity in the future might make of this play, a co-production of Chicago's Goodman Theatre, the Vineyard Theatre and Playwrights Horizons that has just been extended at Playwrights Horizons through March 2, but right now it’s a superb demonstration of what humans can do.  

 

"A Knock on the Roof" Pushes too Hard

When the Palestinian playwright Khawla Ibraheem began working on her one-woman show A Knock on the Roof a decade ago, it was a 10-minute monologue. Now the show, which is currently playing at New York Theatre Workshop, runs about 85 minutes and I wish I could have seen the shorter version. I don’t mean that to be a slam against the current show’s message. I’m just lamenting how it goes about delivering it.

The title refers to the Israeli military’s practice of dropping a small “warning” bomb on the rooftop of a building in Gaza or the West Bank to alert the inhabitants that they have just a few minutes to get out before a larger bomb will destroy the entire structure and everything in it. 

This story about one woman's attempt to live an ordinary life in the face of such extraordinary circumstances is particularly resonant right now after 15 months of Israel’s scorched-earth response to Hamas' Oct. 7 assault has led to the deaths of over 45,000 Palestinians and the displacement of nearly 2 million others.  

Ibraheem’s character Mariam is the young middle-class mother of a six-year-old son who has become obsessed with how she might respond to the “knock.”  And so she begins to rehearse grabbing up her son along with whatever necessities she can stuff into a backpack and making practice runs to see how far away she can get from danger. 

It’s a compelling set-up. And it’s a welcomed reminder that there are real people behind the statistics we see on the news, people who worry about serious things like how to deal with aged parents and frivolous ones like which skin care regimens really work just the way those of us in far less fraught situations do.

But Ibraheem and director Oliver Butler who is credited with developing this longer version with her (click here to listen to an interview about how they did it) don’t seem to know what to say once they’ve gotten our attention and so they just keep repeating the same things over and over again. 

My friend Lisa suggests that the repetitions might represent Mariam's mounting mania. It's a good theory but if that's the case, I wish Ibraheem and Butler had been able to make that clearer.

Instead, they introduce some other characters—Mariam’s mother who further complicates things by moving in with her daughter and grandson, her husband whose constant calls from abroad where he's studying become another hassle and their young son—but since Ibraheem is the only performer, she has to portray all of them, and I'm afraid she doesn't always make them distinct enough. 

To be fair, Ibraheem is an engaging performer but her accent and the pitch of her voice can make it difficult to understand some of the dialog, regardless of who’s supposed to be speaking.  And I just got tired of watching her pretend to run on NYTW’s bare stage. 

There are a few attempts to more actively involve the audience (some members are seated onstage, the lights are often left up and Ibraheem occasionally asks questions like how many underwear should she pack and then waits for people to answer) but, at least at the performance I attended, those interactions were awkward. The show's surprise ending was strained too.

A story as intrinsically powerful as this one doesn’t need a lot of gimmicks. It doesn’t need to be drawn out either. As the saying goes, sometimes less can be more.

5 Shows I Most Want to See in Spring 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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