Mama I’m a Big Girl Now!, the new musical entertainment at New World Stages, seems so eager to race to the exclamation point that it’s even missing a comma. The show wants to spread exuberance, excitement, and joy. It mostly succeeds.
It may be an overgeneralization, but let’s put it out there: In stage comedies, the more the cast laughs at its own purportedly hilarious exploits, the less the audience does. The onstage hollers and whoops are frequent and loud in The Z Team, Jeff and Jacob Foy’s workplace yuk-fest at Theatre Row, and while some of the audience seemed to enjoy it, those seated in E1 and E2 barely cracked a smile.
Loneliness and pandemic: two words that soared in usage in 2020 and 2021, when the COVID lockdowns kept people apart from their friends, family and regular activities. That pandemic is not the one playwright Olivia Haller references in the title Loneliness Was a Pandemic. Her occasionally thoughtful but not fully engaging drama (in which the word pandemic is never said) is concerned with another topic that’s been top of mind over the past few years: artificial intelligence.
Given recent electoral events it doesn’t require a huge imaginative leap to envisage a dystopian United States in the “not-so-distant future.” That future is when Amy Berryman’s philosophical, sci-fi–infused play Walden, which premiered on London’s West End and now comes to Second Stage Theater, takes place, depicting a world wrecked by climate catastrophe, human folly, and rapaciousness.
It’s a fallacy that addiction can be cured by a stint in rehab. Anyone celebrating sobriety can affirm that the process of recovery takes decades—and is often lifelong. Nevertheless, a rehab experience can trigger a life-changing awakening. This unpredictable process is at the center of Spike Manton and Harry Teinowtiz’s Another Shot, a poignant exploration of Teinowitz’s alcoholism and treatment. Director Jackson Gay keeps the play teetering between denial and acceptance, and between comedy and tragedy.
Brothers Bob and Tobly McSmith have created a cottage industry of musicals based—unauthorized, they always make it clear—on popular movies and TV shows of the past 30 years. They even have a cottage for their industry: the Theater Center at 50th and Broadway, where their new show Singfeld! A Musical Parody About Nothing has joined The Office! The Musical Parody and Friends: The Musical Parody in repertory.
Chasing Jack, by John S. Anastasi, is the story of a man willing to lose it all for the thrill of throwing the die. Dr. Jack Chase (played with boundless energy by Emanuele Secci) is a tireless cardiac surgeon who appears selfless but has one too many skeletons in the closet. The biggest one—a gambling addiction—can no longer remain hidden, and, after losing a patient, he finds himself in court.
If ever there was a film that deserved to be satirized, it is the 14 men meet 13 women across 10 subplots glorification of romantic, platonic and familial love known as Love Actually. Why it took 16 years for a work such as Love Actually? The Unauthorized Musical Parody to arrive on the scene is anybody’s guess, but the timing is right in at least one aspect. ’Tis the season when quirky Christmas musicals dot the Off-Broadway landscape, and this one, with its many flings being flung across five weeks of winter, is as full of holiday cheer as it is overflowing with whirlwind performances and witty pop-culture shout-outs.
The ranks of triple-threat musical theater writers—individuals responsible for book, music, and lyrics—are small. Michael John LaChiusa springs to mind, and Lionel Bart (Oliver!), Frank Loesser (The Most Happy Fella), and Sandy Wilson (The Boy Friend), but just try to think of others. Add to this exclusive club Francine Pellegrino, whose Molasses in January is premiering at the Theater Center. It’s an original book, based only on history—that of Boston’s molasses disaster of 1919, when a tank burst and sent syrup cascading through the streets, killing 21. Pellegrino is not overly experienced in any of these three skills, and she proves to be way better at one of them than the other two.
A retitled version of Regretrosexual—The Love Story, a play written roughly 10 years ago by Dan Rothenberg and Colleen Crabtree, the “new play” Hot Mess is about the authors’ unusual courtship and marriage. Both were comedians working in Los Angeles, and the work focuses on a particular hurdle Rothenberg had to overcome: he had lived as a gay man for two years in San Francisco before meeting and marrying Crabtree. Scrubbing out the “regret” part of the former title and using the catchier Hot Mess eliminates the implication of previous disappointment in the age of political correctness.
A newsreel about faith-based adoption restrictions on Jewish, Muslim and interfaith couples in the state of Texas plays somberly over a smooth jazz gospel concert at the start of The Crusade of Connor Stephens, a new play by Dewey Moss. In between the voices of newsreaders decrying the discriminatory new laws and the gospel choir, an evangelist preacher calls for us to repent our sins and come into the light of the Lord Our God. It’s enough to make a New York audience gag.
