Most popular New York theater and Broadway shows

Theater review by Adam Feldman  “I don’t want realism,” says Blanche DuBois, the cracked libertine belle of Tennessee Williams’s 1947 masterwork, A Streetcar Named Desire. “I'll tell you what I want. Magic!” The Streetcar revival now playing at BAM, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, doesn’t have much truck with magic; it does not invite the audience, even momentarily, to share the nympho- and dipsomaniacal Blanche’s delusions of gentility. But neither does it go for realism: There is barely any set, and nearly all of the action is squeezed onto a central square platform on cinderblocks that suggests a boxing ring minus the ropes; an onstage drummer sometimes bangs loudly on his kit, like a migraine in Blanche’s head, and there are occasional shifts into dancey stylized movement.  What this Streetcar does have is the gifted Irish actor Paul Mescal, whose star has risen swiftly from his breakthrough role in the 2020 Hulu series Normal People to the leading fighter in last year’s Gladiator II. The Mescaline Conquest now finds him playing the most famous sexy brute in dramatic history: Blanche’s brother-in-law and nemesis Stanley Kowalski, the part that made Marlon Brando a star, and he takes off his shirt more than once. The rest of the principal cast from London’s Almeida Theatre—where Frecknall’s Streetcar premiered in 2022—has also made the trip: the birdlike Patsy Ferran as Blanche; Anjana Vasan as her protective younger sister, Stella; and Dwane Walcott as Stanley’s poker...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! is not just funny: It is dizzyingly, breathtakingly funny, the kind of funny that ambushes your body into uncontained laughter. Stage comedies have become an endangered species in recent decades, and when they do pop up they tend to be the kind of funny that evokes smirks, chuckles or wry smiles of recognition. Not so here: I can’t remember the last time I saw a play that made me laugh, helplessly and loudly, as much as Oh, Mary! did—and my reaction was shared by the rest of the audience, which burst into applause at the end of every scene. Fasten your seatbelts: This 80-minute show is a fast and wild joy ride. Escola has earned a cult reputation as a sly comedic genius in their dazzling solo performances (Help! I’m Stuck!) and on TV shows like At Home with Amy Sedaris, Difficult People and Search Party. But Oh, Mary!, their first full-length play, may surprise even longtime fans. In this hilariously anachronistic historical burlesque, Escola plays—who else?—Mary Todd Lincoln, in the weeks leading up to her husband’s assassination. Boozy, vicious and miserable, the unstable and outrageously contrary Mary is oblivious to the Civil War and hell-bent on achieving stardom as—what else?—a cabaret singer.      Oh, Mary! | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid  Described by the long-suffering President Lincoln as “my foul and hateful wife,” this virago makes her entrance snarling and hunched with fury, desperate to find a...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Oliver (Darren Criss) is a Helperbot, and he can’t help himself. A shut-in at his residence for retired androids in a near-future Korea, he functions in a chipper loop of programmatic behavior; every day, he brushes his teeth and eyes, tends to his plant and listens to the retro jazz favored by his former owner, James (Marcus Choi), who he is confident will someday arrive to take him back. More than a decade goes by before his solitary routine is disrupted by Claire (Helen J Shen), a fellow Helperbot from across the hall, who is looking to literally connect and recharge. Will these two droids somehow make a Seoul connection? Can they feel their hearts beep? That is the premise of Will Aronson and Hue Park’s new musical Maybe Happy Ending, and it’s a risky one. The notion of robots discovering love—in a world where nothing lasts forever, including their own obsolescent technologies—could easily fall into preciousness or tweedom. Instead, it is utterly enchanting. As staged by Michael Arden (Parade), Maybe Happy Ending is an adorable and bittersweet exploration of what it is to be human, cleverly channeled through characters who are only just learning what that entails. Maybe Happy Ending | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman In a Broadway landscape dominated by loud adaptations of pre-existing IP, Maybe Happy Ending stands out for both its intimacy and its originality. Arden and his actors approach the material with a delicate touch; they...

Theater review by Raven SnookThe path to greatness is paved with blood, sushi and tears in Sumo, Lisa Sanaye Dring’s hearty new play about Japan’s spiritually infused national pastime. The relatively diminutive Akio (a winning Scott Keiji Takeda) is a lowly newcomer at an elite Tokyo training facility. He’s stuck doing menial work and desperate to get a shot in the sumo ring himself, but he faces hefty competition from other wrestlers in the stable—particularly the disdainful highest-ranked fighter, Mitsuo (a quietly intimidating David Shih), who abuses and dismisses him. Anyone who's ever seen a sports movie knows what comes next. That seems to be by design: Dring transports a traditional hero's-journey plot to a setting that is rarely seen in American theatre, which gives it some freshness without taking it too far afield from the familiar. The ferocious sumo matches—fight-directed by James Yaegashi and Chelsea Pace, and choreographed to Shih-Wei Wu's live taiko drumming—get your blood pumping. Paul Whitaker's lighting is appropriately dramatic; Hana S. Kim's eye-popping projections set the scene and fill in cultural gaps, as do three Shinto priests who serve as narrators. Sumo | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus None of the actors have the sheer mass of authentic sumo greats, but they pull more than their weight. Director Ralph B. Peña elicits substantial performances from the entire cast of the production, which is presented jointly by Ma-Yi Theater Company and the...

Theater review by Raven SnookThe program may say, "Time: Now. Place: Here."—a hat tip to A Chorus Line—but The Jonathan Larson Project is a celebration of a time and a city long gone. Best known for his game-changing 1996 rock opera Rent, a portrait of East Village artists in the specter of AIDS, Larson died of an aortic dissection on the day before that show's first preview. He didn't get to see it transfer to Broadway, win multiple awards and inspire a generation of musical-theater makers and mavens. (Lin-Manuel Miranda figures prominently in The Jonathan Larson Project's opening video). This revue, conceived by theater historian Jennifer Ashley Tepper and based on a series of concerts she curated at 54 Below, doesn't attempt to tell Larson's story; you can stream the marvelous tick, tick …BOOM! for some of that. Instead, as five powerhouse vocalists perform 20 previously obscure songs from Larson’s trunk and archives, it offers a sometimes exhilarating, sometimes frustrating peek at what was and what might have been. Divorced from their original contexts, the numbers can be intriguing or confounding, and sometimes both; a helpful program insert with background info for each song is best read before the show begins. Some of the selections, like "Casual Sex, Pizza, and Beer" and "Break Out the Booze,” are merely cute; one, the wan futuristic political satire "The Vision Thing," is pretty cringey. But there are also some gems in the bag. Andy Mientus, decked out as a jaded...

Hot on the heels of her turn in The Barbarians, Chloe Claudel hits the Tank with an original piece that combines elements of the 1975 classic The Dead Class—a post-traumatic encounter with devastation by the Polish avant-garde artist and theater maker Tadeusz Kantor—with fragments of memories, memoirs, photographs and voice mails, as well as original text by Eliya Smith and live music by Sasha Yakub. Claudel also co-directs the piece with Mitchell Polonsky for the Goat Exchange. Along with Claudel, the cast comprises Marcus Amaglo, Luke Bosco, Juliana Sass and two downtown pillars (and Gatz alums), Jim Fletcher and Pete Simpson. 

George Clooney makes his Broadway debut in a stage adaptation of his 2005 film portrait of the storied CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow, who helped turned the tide against McCarthyism in the 1950s. In the Oscar-nominated movie version—which Clooney directed and co-wrote, like the play, with Grant Heslov—he played Murrow's colleague Fred Friendly; this time around, he steps into the lead role originated by David Strathairn. David Cromer (The Band's Visit), one of the theater world's most reliably intelligent and insightful directors, directs the world premiere. 

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  In the 1950 film masterpiece Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood glamour is a dead-end street. Stalled there with no one coming to find her—except perhaps to use her car—is Norma Desmond: a former silent-screen goddess who is now all but forgotten. Secluded and deluded, she haunts her own house and plots her grand return to the pictures; blinded by the spotlight in her mind, she is unaware that what she imagines to be a hungry audience out there in the dark is really just the dark.  One of the ironies built into Billy Wilder’s film, which he co-wrote with Charles Brackett, is that there really was an audience in the dark watching Norma: the audience of Sunset Boulevard itself, whom Norma is effectively addressing directly in her operatic final mad scene. That slippage between the real and the imaginary is even more pronounced in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1993 musical adaptation of the story, by dint of its being performed live onstage. And Jamie Lloyd’s very meta and very smart Broadway revival of the show—which stars the utterly captivating Nicole Scherzinger as Norma and Tom Francis as Joe Gillis, the handsome sell-out screenwriter drawn into her web—pushes it even further through the prominent use of live video. The tension between the real and the imaginary is expanded to include a mediating element: the filmic, whose form can range from documentary to dreamscape.  Thus described, Lloyd’s approach may sound academic—but in practice, it is often...

Ephraim Birney and Joel Meyers play two gay Jewish men trapped together by inclement weather after an anonymous Grindr hookup—and fumbling to forge a deeper connection—in a new two-hander by Danny Brown. Noah Eisenberg directs for Out of the Box Theatrics (in conjunction with his own Ice Berg Productions). 

If you were alive in the late 1990s, you probably remember the ubiquitous 1997 album Buena Vista Social Club, which reunited elderly musicians to recreate the atmosphere and songs of a Havana nightspot before the Cuban Revolution. This original musical by Marco Ramirez—directed by Saheem Ali and choreographed gorgeously by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck—brings their story to Broadway, in slightly fictionalized form, after a highly enjoyable debut at the Atlantic last year. As winter pokes its frigid fingers into New York City, this lively celebration of Cuban music offers an irresistable tropical getaway.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  How is she? Ever since May, when it was confirmed that Audra McDonald would star in the latest revival of Gypsy, Broadway fans have speculated about how Audra would be as Mama Rose—or, more nervously, whether Audra could be Mama Rose, the implacable stage mother who sacrifices everything to make her two daughters into stars, including those two daughters themselves. The casting seemed inevitable: the pinnacle role for a woman in musical theater, essayed by the most accomplished musical-theater actress of her generation. It’s Audra’s turn. Yet to some, the casting also seemed unlikely: Rose has traditionally been played by big belters, from Ethel Merman in 1959 through Patti LuPone in 2008, not dramatic sopranos like McDonald. So let’s get that question out of the way up front. How is Audra as Rose? She’s a revelation.  So, too, is the rest of George C. Wolfe’s deeply intelligent and beautifully mounted production, which comes as a happy surprise. Gypsy is a model musical in every regard, from Arthur Laurents’s airtight book, inspired by the memoirs of striptease queen Gypsy Rose Lee, to Jule Styne’s thrilling music, which grabs you at the overture and doesn’t let go, to Stephen Sondheim’s dazzlingly witty and insightful lyrics. But this is the show’s fifth Broadway revival, and its third in the 21st century alone. One might reasonably wonder what is left to reveal in a show as well-known as this one. But like the monster some people believe...

Review by Adam Feldman  The low-key dazzling Speakeasy Magick has been nestled in the atmospheric McKittrick Hotel for more than a year, and now it has moved up to the Lodge: a small wood-framed room at Gallow Green, which functions as a rooftop bar in the summer. The show’s dark and noisy new digs suit it well. Hosted by Todd Robbins (Play Dead), who specializes in mild carnival-sideshow shocks, Speakeasy Magick is a moveable feast of legerdemain; audience members, seated at seven tables, are visited by a series of performers in turn. Robbins describes this as “magic speed dating.” One might also think of it as tricking: an illusion of intimacy, a satisfying climax, and off they go into the night. The evening is punctuated with brief performances on a makeshift stage. When I attended, the hearty Matthew Holtzclaw kicked things off with sleight of hand involving cigarettes and booze; later, the delicate-featured Alex Boyce pulled doves from thin air. But it’s the highly skilled close-up magic that really leaves you gasping with wonder. Holtzclaw’s table act comes to fruition with a highly effective variation on the classic cups-and-balls routine; the elegant, Singapore-born Prakash and the dauntingly tattooed Mark Calabrese—a razor of a card sharp—both find clever ways to integrate cell phones into their acts. Each performer has a tight 10-minute act, and most of them are excellent, but that’s the nice thing about the way the show is structured: If one of them happens to...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Halfway through Redwood, a new musical conceived by Idina Menzel and director Tina Landau, Menzel—playing Jesse, a woman on the run from her own grief—is suspended on a platform midair, belting a personal-breakthrough song about clarity and new possibilities. Unavoidably, this recalls her performance of the Act I finale of Wicked, in which Menzel’s original Elphaba was also midair and belting a personal-breakthrough song about clarity and new possibilities. This time, however, gravity wins. Even as Menzel's Jesse climbs to new physical heights, the lumbering Redwood brings her down.  Jesse is a capable, cosmopolitan Jewish woman paralyzed by sadness about the recent death of her college-age son (Zachary Noah Piser). Her desperation literally drives her up a tree: She leaves New York City—where, of course, she owns an art gallery—and motors to California, where she persuades a pair of environmentalists, Finn (Michael Park) and Becca (Khaila Wilcoxon), to let her join them in scaling an enormous redwood for science. Can “nature’s remedy” help this neurotic city gal find her bearings? Naturally, it can. Redwood | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy The arc of Jesse’s healing is long—nearly two hours without intermission—and it bends toward banality. The subject matter cries out for inventive nuance, but Landau’s book charts a familiar route to exactly where you know it’s going, with rest stops for mostly blah songs (music by Kate Diaz, lyrics...

Sam Shepard's 1978 dysfunctional-family play Curse of the Starving Class, a dark satire of the American Dream set on a crumbling California farm, was revived at the Signature just six years ago, and the New Group's current revival of it in the same theater complex provides no good reason to see it anew. Christian Slater and Calista Flockhart are deeply miscast as the screwy Tate parents—each trying to sell the place out from under the other—as is the gentle-miened Cooper Hoffman as their violent son. (The scenes between Slater and Hoffman should be ticking time bombs; instead, they just tick.) Stella Marcus fares better as the outlaw Lisa Simpson of the factious clan, and Jeb Kreager adds a jolt of real energy in his brief turn as a local barman. But the star of this version is unquestionably a fluffy live sheep named Lois, who provides moments of authenticity that are otherwise rare in Scott Elliott's torpid, disjointed production. When Lois takes a poop onstage, at least she does it literally.

Theater review by Adam Feldman  What makes Samuel D. Hunter's work so consistently beautiful is his ability to capture big things in small forms without being reductive. His plays—which have included The Whale, The Harvest and Greater Clements—are like ships in a bottle: exquisitely crafted and detailed depictions of life in rural Idaho that explore recurring themes (physical and financial limitations, queer identity, crises of family and faith) with endless variety and sympathy. His latest work, Grangeville, is very much in that tradition, and Hunter gatherers won't want to miss it. Hunter's last drama at the Signature Theatre, A Case for the Existence of God, won the 2022 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. Like that show, Grangeville—whose world premiere at the Signature is sensitively directed by Jack Serio—has only two actors. Brian J. Smith is Arnold, a gay visual artist who has fled Idaho to live in the Netherlands, and Paul Sparks is Jerry, his older half-brother and former bully, who reaches out when their mother is on her deathbed. For most of the play, their interactions are long-distance, via phone or computer, and their mutual estrangement intially finds them completely in the dark. But as their lines of communication open, the production's lighting (by Stacy Derosier) gradually reveals more of its set (by the design collective dots): brutalist black walls that evoke volcanic rock, the hardened vestige of former heat. Sparks is superb as Jerry,...

Having taken the U.K. by storm in productions about the country, culminating in a well-received foray into the West End, this scrappy musical comedy about a wacky real-life British spy operation in World War II now invades New York City. The entire original company of five re-ups for the Broadway production: co-authors David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts—who wrote the show with Felix Hagan, their comrade in the comedy troupe SpitLip—as well as Claire-Marie Hall and Olivier Award winner Jak Malone. Robert Hastie directs the military mayhem. 

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The Great Gatsby looks great. If you want production values, this adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, directed by Marc Bruni, delivers more than any other new musical of the overstuffed Broadway season. It’s the Roaring Twenties, after all—now as well as then—so why not be loud? Let other shows make do with skeletal, functional multipurpose scenic design; these sets and projections, by Paul Tate de Poo III, offer grandly scaled Art Deco instead. Linda Cho’s costumes are Vegas shiny for the party people and elegant for the monied types. The production wears excess on its sleeveless flapper dresses. The Great Gatsby | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman   The Great Gatsby often sounds great, too. Its lead actors, Jeremy Jordan as the self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby and Eva Noblezada as his dream girl, Daisy Buchanan, have deluxe voices, and the score gives them plenty to sing. Jason Howland’s music dips into period pastiche for the group numbers—there are lots of them, set to caffeinated choreography by Dominique Kelley—but favors Miss Saigon levels of sweeping pop emotionality for the main lovers; the old-fashioned craft of Nathan Tysen’s lyrics sits comfortably, sometimes even cleverly, on the melodies.  In other regards, this Gatsby is less great. Book writer Kait Kerrigan has taken some admirably ambitious swings in adapting material that has defeated many would-be adapters before her. She cuts much of Gatsby’s backstory,...

The Russian writer-director Dmitry Krymov, working in exile in NYC since the invasion of Ukraine, returns to La MaMa's breast with an experimental dark comedy about anxiety, mourning and puppets. The show is performed by a cast of ten actors, puppeteers and musicans. 

Good news for people who like feeling aged: Gen Zers are now old enough to experience nostalgia! In this new play by Daniel Holzman, nine middle school students in 2012 must create order for themselves when their teacher locks herself in the bathroom. The text is drawn from unreliable memories and social-network communications of that long-ago time.

The expert Jack O'Brien directs the latest revival of Henrik Ibsen's once-scandalous 1882 play about the roots of deadly social disease, a classic indictment of bourgeois hypocrisy. Stage A-listers Lily Rabe, Billy Crudup and Hamish Linklater star opposite second-generation acting stars Levon Hawke and Ella Beatty in this Lincoln Center Theater production, which marks the New York debut of a new translation by Ireland's Mark O’Rowe. 

Mark Povinelli plays the remarkable Benjamin Lay, a 4-foot-tall Quaker who moved to Pennsylvania from England by way of Barbados and established himself as one of the 18th century's most fervent abolitionists. (His antislavery book All Slave Keepers That keep the Innocent in Bondage was published by Benjamin Franklin in 1737.) A collaboration between the playwright Naomi Wallace (One Flea Spare) and the historian and activist Marcus Rediker, the play debuted in London in 2023, directed by Ron Daniels; it now hops the Pond to make its U.S. premiere at the Sheen Center, a project of the Archdiocese of New York that focuses on works that engage with questions of religious faith. (A companion exhibition about Lay's life is also at the Sheen Center from March 7 through April 13, and is open between the hours of 10am and 5pm.)

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  There’s a big twist at the end of the first act of Death Becomes Her; the plot of the second includes a giant hole. And those are just two of the injuries that the vain actress Madeline Ashton (Megan Hilty) and the bitter writer Helen Sharp (Jennifer Simard) inflict on each other in this new Broadway musical, a savagely funny dark comedy about how the quest for beauty—in a misogynist world where the “F” word is fifty—can bring out the beasts in women. Its two central characters are old frenemies whose shared rage at age is understandable: They’re Mad and Hel, and they’re not going to take it anymore. The problem is how and on whom they take it out. Adapted from the hit 1992 movie, Death Becomes Her introduces Madeline in a delicious show-within-a-show production number that sets up the musical’s themes with a giant wink. As the star of a Broadway musical called Me! Me! Me!, she wonders why she stays in “the chase to stay young and beautiful”—“Is it the fact that I’m attracted / To each kernel of external validation?” she sings, with nifty internal rhymes—before launching into a punning answer: “Everything I do is for the gaze.” The song then morphs into a pull-the-stops-out campfest, staged by director-choreographer Christopher Gattelli and costumed by Paul Tazewell as a spoofy tribute to Liza Minnelli in The Act. As colorful streamers fly into the audience, you might worry that Death Becomes Her is peaking too soon. It’s not: Having popped...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Great expectations can be a problem when you’re seeing a Broadway show: You don’t always get what you hope for. It’s all too easy to expect great things when the show is a masterpiece like Cabaret: an exhilarating and ultimately chilling depiction of Berlin in the early 1930s that has been made into a classic movie and was revived exquisitely less than a decade ago. The risk of disappointment is even larger when the cast includes many actors you admire—led by Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee of the show’s decadent Kit Kat Club—and when the production arrives, as this one has, on a wave of raves from London. To guard against this problem, I made an active effort to lower my expectations before seeing the latest version of Cabaret. But my lowered expectations failed. They weren’t low enough. Cabaret | Photograph: Courtesy Marc Brenner So it is in the spirit of helpfulness that I offer the following thoughts on expectation management to anyone planning to see the much-hyped and very pricey new Cabaret, which is currently selling out with the highest average ticket price on Broadway. There are things to enjoy in this production, to be sure, but they’re not necessarily the usual things. Don’t expect an emotionally compelling account of Joe Masteroff’s script (based on stories by Christopher Isherwood and John Van Druten’s nonmusical adaptation of them, I Am a Camera); this production’s focus is elsewhere. Don’t expect appealing versions of the songs...

International Culture Lab mounts its eighth annual festival of neobutoh performance, with programming that mixes ritualistic physical theater with dance, cabaret, burlesque and sideshow elements. This year's edition is organized around the theme of resistance, so radical oppositional political content will certainly be on the menu. The fest is divided into three slates of short performances, all hosted by Ritcab T. Clownington: "Mythical Beasts" on March 28 and "Black Magic" on March 29, each of which comprises five pieces; and "The Living Newspaper," the March 30 matinee, which has nine of them (with titles like Trump’s Nightmare, Executive Disorder and Donny Walks the Plank). Leigh Ann Gann's Sacred Bone Alignment and Mae B Raab's Proof of Dance are in the venue's Freak Bar for all three shows.

Nina Hoss, who gave a riveting performance in 2018's Returning to Reims, is now returning to St. Ann's Warehouse to star in writer-director Benedict Andrews's new adaptation of Anton Chekhov's 1903 tragicomedy about a family on the edge of ruin in a country on the brink of revolution. Hoss plays the profligate Ranevskaya, an aristocrat stymied by nostalgia, and Adeel Akhtar is the rich but lower-class merchant with designs on her family estate. The production arrives at St. Ann's on the heels of a highly acclaimed U.K. run at the Donmar Warehouse (no relation).