Things to do in New York this Saturday

Broadway review by Adam Feldman Yes, I have seen the new Othello with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, the one that is raking in almost $3 million a week by selling out Broadway’s Barrymore Theatre with tickets priced at up to $900. And no, you probably won’t see it. Jealous? Well, you shouldn’t be. It’s not just that jealousy itself—famously described in Othello as "the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on”—is deleterious to the soul. It’s that this production, though perfectly good in most regards and better than that in several, isn’t worth voiding your purse. At any rate, but ideally a lower one, you’ll have many opportunities to see Othello in the future, even if it is the least frequently produced of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies; the last Broadway production was in 1982, with James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer. There are reasons for this relative rarity, which stem from some of the very things that make the play appealing: its swiftness and sweeping passion. The respected general Othello (Washington), a Moor in cosmopolitan Venice, marries a beautiful young Venetian woman, Desdemona (Molly Osborne), to the fury of her wealthy father, Brabantio (Daniel Pearce). But he is soon deceived by his trusted aide Iago (Gyllenhaal) into believing that she is cheating on him with his handsome right-hand man, Cassio (Andrew Burnap). Stirred to rage, he suffocates the faithful Desdemona in their wedding bed. Othello | Photograph:...

Theater review by Adam Feldman Some of the best ensemble acting in town is currently at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, which is remarkable not because of the material—Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya has always been a great piece for ensembles—but because it’s a one-man show. That’s perhaps slightly less surprising if you know that the man in question is the extraordinary Andrew Scott, who has played roles as varied as the wicked Moriarty on Sherlock, the titular sociopath on Ripley, the sensitive gay writer in All of Us Strangers and, of course, Fleabag's Hot Priest. But none of these performances, by themselves, can prepare you for the gorgeous finesse with which he shuffles the roles in Vanya. The dexterity of his hand is equaled by the gentleness of his touch.  In adapting Chekhov’s 1897 tragicomedy for solo performance, playwright Simon Stephens (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) has also moved its time and place, Anglicizing the characters’ names and transporting them, if not quite to the present, then at least (based on the tech they use) to some point in the '80s. Many modern versions of Uncle Vanya—including last year’s revival at Lincoln Center and Richard Nelson’s in 2018—are set in recent times, but Stephens reimagines the world of the play more thoroughly than most, while retaining its essential qualities. For example: Aleksandr, the pompous and gouty professor of the original, is now Alexander, a pompous and gouty film director; the bitter title...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s fantastical 1891 novel—a gothic meditation on the blurry lines that separate art from life, appearances from reality, body from soul—there's a curious moment when the barrier between Wilde himself and the novel he is writing briefly disappears. “Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not,” he says, departing from third-person narration for the first and only time in the book. “It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.” This revealing blink of an “I” does not make the cut in writer-director Kip Williams’s dynamic stage adaptation of the book, a solo performed with astonishing stamina and skill by Sarah Snook. But it everywhere informs the production’s clever embrace of artifice and self-reproduction as theatrical devices.  One can see the appeal of this show for Snook at this time in her career. It's dangerous for an actor to be too closely associated with a single role, as she is at risk of being for her cracking portrayal of Shiv Roy on HBO’s Succession. What better way to avoid being pigeonholed than to spread her wings across 25 parts at once? In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Snook incarnates the narcissistic title character, the ultimate demon twink, who models for a worshipful portrait by the idealistic painter Basil Hallward. “How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young,” he laments. “If it were only the...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Buena Vista Social Club offers an irresistible tropical vacation. A celebration of Cuban musical history, it’s a getaway and a gateway: To attend this show—which premiered last season at the Atlantic Theatre, and has now moved to Broadway—is to enter a world thick with history that you’ll want to learn more about afterward, if you don’t know it already. While you’re there, though, you don’t need to think too hard. Just give yourself over to the sounds that pour out from the stage.  The 1997 album Buena Vista Social Club gathered an extraordinary group of elderly musicians to recreate the atmosphere and the traditional musical styles—son, boleros, guajiras—of a racially inclusive Havana nightspot before the Cuban Revolution. It became a worldwide sensation upon its release, and was the subject of a 1999 documentary film by Wim Wenders. Marco Ramirez’s stage version has a less factual bent. “Some of what follows is true,” says the bandleader Juan de Marcos (Justin Cunningham), who was instrumental in assembling the album’s participants. “Some of it only feels true.”  Buena Vista Social Club | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy The musical focuses on four of the album’s principal performers: vocalists Omara Portuondo (a regal Natalie Venetia Belcon) and Ibrahim Ferrer (Mel Semé), guitarist-singer Compay Segundo (Julio Monge) and pianist Rubén González (Jainardo Batista Sterling). Scenes from the album’s 1996 recording process alternate with...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The scrappy British musical Operation Mincemeat, the comic tale of a military spy plot in World War II, has arrived to storm the shores of Broadway with plenty of backup. Critics in the U.K. have loved it; it has been billed as “the best-reviewed show in West End history”—Time Out London’s own Andrzej Lukowski called it “a glorious spoof”—and it won the 2024 Olivier Award for Best New Musical. The show is the debut offering of a young comedy-theater troupe called SpitLip, which has been performing variations of it since 2019, and local critics were clearly rooting for it. (“It’s really hard to be anything but delighted for the company,” wrote Lukowski. “This is very much their triumph.”) Perhaps, in riding this wave of praise to Broadway, the production has lost some of what made the operation itself an unlikely success in 1943: the element of surprise.  Operation Mincemeat | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes Like Six, the show is an irreverent look at English history, devised by university chums, that worked its way up from the Edinburgh Fringe to the West End; like Dead Outlaw, which will also open on Broadway this season, it features a small cast playing multiple roles, and centers on the unusual use of a human corpse. In this case, the subject is the real-life Operation Mincemeat, which also inspired a 2022 film drama of the same name: a bold ruse, devised by the intelligence agency MI5, to plant false intelligence on the body of...

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...

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).

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The Jasper family home in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s great American play Purpose announces what it is right away: the setting for a classic drawing-room drama. On one side is a dining table, where food is sure to come with a fight; an elegant doorway is on the other, and a giant staircase winds down the middle. Since the Jaspers are modeled closely on the family of Jesse Jackson, Todd Rosenthal’s set also serves as an exquisitely curated museum of Black pride: elegant African statues and textiles, historical photos on clay-orange walls, a painting of Martin Luther King Jr. presiding over all. This is the image the Jaspers present to the world, and to some extent to themselves. Entering their company, it’s hard, as one character observes, to avoid “being all dazzled by all the Symbolic Blackness before you—so blinded by the Black Excellence, Black Power, Black Righteousness.”  In his trenchant Appropriate, which was expertly revived on Broadway last year, Jacobs-Jenkins depicted a white Southern family with an outsider’s eye for the characters’ self-deceptions. This time, his call-outs are coming from inside the house. The Jaspers, like the Jacksons, have issues. The family patriarch, Solomon (Radio Golf’s tall, strapping Harry Lennix), is a major figure in Civil Rights history whose hopes for a dynasty have crumbled, and who now glowers like a lion licking his paws. As in medieval times, his elder son was groomed to inherit his mantle and his...