Peter Danish’s Last Call is a fairy tale with heroes, villains, operatic emotions, and a countertenor. It’s a three-actor play set in the magical kingdom of classical music during the era of two potentates, Herbert von Karajan (1908–89) and Leonard Bernstein (1918–90), who reigned supreme in concert halls and recording studios around the world for much of the 20th century.
A one-man Uncle Vanya could easily have come off as a stunt. How do you turn an Anton Chekhov staple, one that has visited New York stages multiple times in the past few seasons alone, into a solo show, and an utterly new experience? But Vanya turns out to be good theater and, more surprisingly, very good Chekhov.
Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, Leo Tolstoy famously wrote in his opening line of Anna Karenina, and Joshua Harmon shows that every unhappy family member is unhappy in her own way in We Had a World, his stirring new play that gets at universal truths through a very personal story.
For all the theater community’s opposition to Donald Trump, there have been relatively few stage works taking on Trumpism. Amerikin, by Chisa Hutchinson, looks like it could be one during its first half, with its portrayal of “just your white supremacists next door,” but the story heads in a different direction when new characters and themes are introduced in Act II. Though her first act is definitely stronger, Hutchinson overall has crafted an absorbing look at life in these United States.
Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire has one of drama’s greatest female roles—Blanche DuBois, perhaps only rivaled by Shaw’s St. Joan and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. It’s a theatrical mountain that any serious actress would like to scale, and Patsy Ferran deserves credit for doing so, even if the Almeida Theatre production visiting BAM from London comes up short. Directed by Rebecca Frecknall, this Streetcar also features the better-known Paul Mescal (of Gladiator II renown) as Stanley Kowalski.
Peter Danish’s Last Call is a fairy tale with heroes, villains, operatic emotions, and a countertenor. It’s a three-actor play set in the magical kingdom of classical music during the era of two potentates, Herbert von Karajan (1908–89) and Leonard Bernstein (1918–90), who reigned supreme in concert halls and recording studios around the world for much of the 20th century.
In the 1990s, Rajiv Joseph spent three years in the Peace Corps in Senegal. Dakar 2000, currently at Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC), draws on the playwright’s memories of that experience and his understanding of East Africa at the advent of the new millennium.
At the start of Still, two people—long ago, a couple; now, well over 60—are getting reacquainted in a swank hotel bar with a cocktail and a conundrum. Helen (Melissa Gilbert) comments that “the cells in your body” are “renewing themselves all the time,” and “after seven years you’re a completely different person,” at least “on a cellular level.” Mark (Mark Moses) recalls a “brain teaser” about a ship: “it’s made of wood, and every time part of it breaks they replace it with a part made of metal. And eventually every single part has been replaced. Is it still the same ship?”
A superb company of actors, the Arlekin Players Theatre, is in residence at Classic Stage Company (CSC) with The Merchant of Venice. The energetic production on CSC’s Lynn F. Angelson stage, however, may come as a jolt to playgoers fond of Shakespeare’s play.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, streamlined to 90 minutes and staged outdoors by Classical Theatre of Harlem, is as cool and fizzy as a glass of Prosecco. Judging by the wild guffaws and applause on opening night, the zanies who populate this most fanciful of Shakespeare’s comedies (embodied by a top-flight cast of youthful New York actors) kept a steady hold on playgoers’ attention, despite the distraction of sirens punctuating the Bard’s iambic pentameter, helicopters overhead, and heat only slightly below the day’s high of 90 degrees Fahrenheit. At a dramatic moment, an explosion of amateur fireworks just outside the amphitheater added a fortuitous burst of red and orange to the twilit sky, eliciting a gasp of audience amusement.
The New Federal Theatre is inaugurating a new residence on the Upper West Side with The World According to Micki Grant. This original, 90-minute revue, compiled and directed by Nora Cole, consists of songs, verse, and autobiographical prose by composer-poet-playwright-performer Grant, who died three years ago at age 92.
October 7: A Verbatim Play by Phelim McAleers depicts events in the Gaza Envelope of southwest Israel on the day of last year’s attack by the Islamist organization Hamas. It’s based on interviews conducted by McAleers and his wife, journalist-filmmaker Ann McElhinnie, immediately after the siege that reportedly killed 1,200 people, wounded an estimated 5,400, and resulted in seizure by Hamas of more than 250 hostages. In a May 7 speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s annual Days of Remembrance ceremony, President Joe Biden lamented that, eight months after the assault (and despite ongoing warfare in Israel and Gaza), “people are already forgetting” the brutality of that day. McAleer’s play is agitprop against forgetfulness, burning a sense of the day’s agony into playgoers’ imaginations.
Playwright Sarah Ruhl and performance-artist Taylor Mac, both recipients of MacArthur Foundation “genius grants” and past finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, are currently at the Signature Theatre for a revival of Ruhl’s 1998 adaptation of Orlando, the 1928 novel by Virginia Woolf. Mac, who’s playing the title role, is renowned as a dramatist but, on this occasion, serves strictly as an actor.
Len Cariou—Stephen Sondheim’s original Sweeney Todd—plays the title role in Sea Dog Theater’s revival of Tuesdays with Morrie by Jeffrey Hatcher and Mitch Albom. Amid the stark, solemn beauty of Charles Otto Blesch and Leopold Eidlitz’s Romanesque-revival chapel at St. George’s Episcopal Church on Stuyvesant Square, director Erwin Maas has built a fleet, music-filled production around the distinguished Canadian actor, who’s sharp and feisty at 84. In the role of a professor experiencing the galloping effects of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease), Cariou steers clear of mawkishness with a performance that’s wry and witty from beginning to end.
On Set with Theda Bara is a single-actor comedy-drama by Joey Merlo that revolves around the suspicious disappearance of a genderqueer teenager. In this pastiche of film noir, Merlo piles mystery upon outlandish mystery, and David Greenspan leads the spectators (limited to 50 a performance) through a 65-minute, mazelike tale that’s at once intriguing and mystifying.
Jen Silverman’s Spain is inspired by a kernel of historical fact—just a kernel. It concerns a documentary, The Spanish Earth, calculated to rouse sympathy in the United States for Spain’s Second Republic in the long civil war against General Francisco Franco’s fascist insurgency. There was (or, rather, is) such a documentary, produced by Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and American editor/producer Helen Van Dongen, released in 1937. A number of noteworthy American intellectuals worked on the film, including novelists Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, playwright Lillian Hellman, actor Orson Welles, poet Archibald MacLeish, and composer Virgil Thomson. In stage directions, Silverman writes that Spain is not “a history play in the most conventional meaning.” It’s “set in 1936 in the West Village,” she says, then adds, “Sort of.” This 90-minute comedy-drama is an absurdist-tinged fantasy that seizes a moment of history and bends it to the breaking point.
Gingold Theatrical Group (GTG) is back at Theatre Row with Bernard Shaw’s 1894 comedy Arms and the Man, directed by David Staller. In the 17 years since its founding, GTG has presented all 65 of Shaw’s plays in full productions or staged readings at least once (generally with élan), and Staller has become our nation’s foremost Shavian outside academia.
The Second Stage production of Toros deserves a prominent spot in New York theater annals thanks to Frank Wood’s tenderly compelling portrayal of Tica, a golden retriever on her last legs. Danny Tejera’s sometimes comedic drama is a largely slice-of-life depiction of three privileged, emotionally stunted millennials living in Spain after the election of President Donald J. Trump and just before the onslaught of COVID-19. Tica—loyal, empathetic, and loving—is a foil to the humans rather than the play’s focus. Wood’s impeccable performance is calibrated to avoid upstaging the other actors, yet his Tica is the most memorable aspect of this arresting, if sometimes unsatisfying, play.
Deirdre Kinahan’s The Saviour is Irish Repertory Theatre’s second presentation within a year of the “world stage premiere” of a script written for online distribution during the COVID-19 pandemic and now retailored for in-person performance. The previous such work, Tracy Thorne’s Jack Was Kind, was acted as a solo by the author in the Irish Rep’s tiny basement venue in autumn 2022. The Saviour is on the company’s more capacious main stage, giving it a misleading sense of heft. Directed by Louise Lowe, the production features Marie Mullen, a Tony winner for Martin McDonagh’s memorable The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Like Jack Was Kind, The Saviour is a miniature drama intensely focused on up-to-the-moment societal problems.
New York Classical Theatre (NYCT) is a small troupe presenting distinguished plays, mostly tried and true, with occasional novelties in public spaces around New York City. Stephen Burdman, the company’s founder, espouses a performance style he calls “panoramic theater,” which involves spectators following actors as they perform scenes in multiple spots.
At the outset of Orlando, playwright-performer Lucy Roslyn says she discovered Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel (also titled Orlando) at a “jumble sale” when she was 12. Roslyn, from England’s West Midlands, explains that a jumble sale is what Americans call a yard sale. She also mentions that hers is a Coventry accent and that Woolf’s Orlando, in successive editions, has been a treasured companion since she bought that flea-market paperback years ago.
As the loopy title suggests, Regretfully, So the Birds Are is theater of the absurd. Julia Izumi’s play concerns three New Jersey siblings adopted from Southeast Asia by a Caucasian couple (Gibson Frazier and the incomparable Kristine Nielsen) who’ve refused to tell the children where they were born. The parents’ rationale is that, if their adoptive offspring don’t know where they come from, they’ll feel their “origins are the Whistler family” rather than separate, far-off countries.
The Wife of Willesden, novelist Zadie Smith’s captivating playwriting debut, is a contemporary version of The Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. As many an English major will attest, Alyson, the Wife of Bath, is the most colorful of the pilgrims whose verse monologues form the bulk of Chaucer’s 14th-century masterpiece. Using rhymed couplets with 10 syllables per line (as did Chaucer), Smith has transformed Alyson to Alvita, a Jamaica-born Londoner of today, in a comedy faithful to its source material yet discerning about contemporary social issues.
Keith Bunin’s The Coast Starlight is one of those “ship of fools” dramas that throw together unacquainted travelers on a common carrier. The title comes from a real passenger-train service running daily from Los Angeles to Seattle. Amtrak’s website promises potential Coast Starlight customers a “grand West Coast train adventure … pass[ing] through Santa Barbara, the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, and Portland.” For Bunin’s characters, however, the reality is not so much an adventure as an anxious long-haul.
Jonathan Larson, author and composer of Rent, died of an aortic aneurism on Jan.25, 1996, the night before his magnum opus, an innovative rock opera inspired by Puccini’s La Bohème, was to play its first public performance in New York. At 35, Larson had been writing Rent for seven years and would soon be honored posthumously with a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Awards for best musical, lyrics, and original score of the 1995–96 theater season.
