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.
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.
Sashay away? Nah, in Little House on the Ferry the drag queen tap-dances—and it’s just one of the old-fashioned musical-theater pleasures of this exuberant production, described in promotional material as an “immersive nightclub musical.”
Kafkaesque!, a clever new musical comedy with book, music, and lyrics by James Harvey, draws together the life of Czech novelist Franz Kafka and his major (and one minor) works. The show opens with Kafka (Harvey, a talented composer and pianist) at the piano as he defines who he is: a writer whose work has had so much impact that he’s become an adjective. The opening song about “the evils of bureaucracy, modernity’s alienation, man’s talent for hypocrisy, neuroses and fixation!” showcases the main themes of Kafka’s work that are woven together in the musical.
There’s sure been a passel of Medeas lately. An operatic one by Fusion Theatre back in March. Red Bull Theater’s Medea: Re-Versed, the recent hip-hoppy version. And now Medea: A Musical Comedy, written, directed by and starring one John Fisher, currently infesting the Actors Temple Theatre. The very title is a joke, and be assured, Fisher will keep piling the yuks on top of one another. If only the vast majority of them weren’t so juvenile.
Distant Thunder arrives Off-Broadway with the distinction of being the first mainstream Native American musical to be staged in New York. Written by Lynne Taylor-Corbett (book) and her son Shaun Taylor-Corbett and Chris Wiseman (music and lyrics), this musical soars with an indigenous cast.
Scott Elmegreen and Drew Fornarola’s lively satiric musical Ghost of John McCain has a throw-anything-at-the-wall feel to it, but it’s apt: the action takes place inside the mind of President Donald Trump between Aug. 25, 2018 (the date of John McCain’s death) and Jan. 6, 2021. Given the attention span of the ex-President, it’s no wonder that events in his mind carom around like billiard balls.
Broadway productions may be acclaimed or panned, long-running or doomed to early closure, launch a career or cancel it. Inevitably, though, they are easy targets for satirists. Forbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song, created, written and directed by Gerard Alessandrini, spares no barbs when humorously and semi-lovingly critiquing new Broadway hits, revivals, and their audience.
Medea Re-Versed, co-conceived by Luis Quintero and Nathan Winkelstein, gives Euripides’ ancient tragedy hip-hop vibes. Directed by Winkelstein, this coproduction by the Off-Broadway companies Red Bull Theater and Bedlam aims to expand the traditional theater audience—and with the dynamic Sarin Monae West as the princess and sorceress, it’s likely to succeed.
Michael John LaChiusa’s chamber musical See What I Wanna See is receiving a rare revival at Theatre 154 with an Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) cast. Directed by Emilio Ramos, and based on three short stories of Japanese literary master Ryunosuke Akutagawa, it is a dark meditation on the subjective nature of truth.
That Parenting Musical, written by real-life mom-and-dad team Graham and Kristina Fuller, is a show that whimsically explores the ups and downs of parenting. Breezily directed and choreographed by Jen Wineman, it is two hours of rib-tickling fun.
Among the crop of summer Off-Broadway musicals, and it’s been a flavorless crop, here’s something of an anomaly. The Sabbath Girl (book by Cary Gitter, lyrics by Gitter and Neil Berg, music by Berg) isn’t overproduced like Empire, or bathetic like From Home. Whatever its deficiencies, and it does have them, The Sabbath Girl also has something we haven’t been seeing in a lot of new musicals: it has a heart.
Renaissance Theatre Company’s From Here is an impactful musical tribute to the resilience of the Orlando, Fla., community in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting in June of 2016. This production features some of the original Orlando cast, which brings a deeply personal touch to this Off-Broadway premiere.
Empire, a musical about the building of the Empire State Building—has a lot of heart. Set in three time periods—1929, 1930, and 1976—the story moves back and forth between Sylvie Lee (Julia Louise Hosack) and Mohawk Grandmother (April Ortiz) in the 1970s and the character of Frances Belle (Kaitlyn Davidson), a.k.a. “Wally,” a firecracker of a woman who is classy in pants, working her magic in a man’s world in the 1920s and ’30s, as the iconic skyscraper is being built.
It’s not hard to appreciate what Albert M. Tapper, the AMT in AMT Theater, and his cowriters are trying to accomplish with David, a New Musical (yes, that’s the title): create a brand-new Big Old Musical, with big tunes, big ensemble, big emotions. The project appears to be very close to Tapper’s heart, and, along with collaborators Gary Glickstein (book and lyrics) and Martha Rosenblatt (book), he has played by the rules of traditional musical-theater storytelling. But his team has made several misjudgments.
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.
Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs’s new musical Teeth has bite. Adapted from Mitchell Lichtenstein’s 2007 cult horror-comedy film of the same name and directed by Sarah Benson, Teeth is a tongue-in-cheek look at sex, shame, religious repression, and more. The story revolves around a devout evangelical teen named Dawn who discovers she has a secret weapon: vagina dentata (Latin for “toothed vagina”), which swings into action when she is sexually threatened.
The afterlife of outlaw Elmer McCurdy was as brilliant as his failed life of train and bank robbery was bleak. In the new musical Dead Outlaw, David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna (music and lyrics), and Itamar Moses (book) team up with director David Cromer to tell the true story of a turn-of-the-century outlaw who became a famous carnival attraction after his untimely death.
A Sign of the Times, a new jukebox romp featuring musical riffs and cultural rifts from the 1960s, is full of statements. It has something to say about civil rights, women’s liberation, Vietnam, the course of true love and the influence of Pop Art. But this York Theatre Company production also leaves behind some nagging questions. Can a musical be “woke” when its book is tired? Can stock characters find believable ways to bond? Was Petula Clark right that things will be great when you’re downtown?
A sign in the lobby of Theater 555 says: “Warning: This performance features theatrical haze, flashing lights, and closeted Republicans.” And the set by David Goldstein that greets the audience is a gleefully tacky, Vegas-esque sea of silver tinsel streamers, with a “Make America SLAY Again” banner above. It all primes one for a good time. And then Five: the Parody Musical half-delivers.
The recent revival and reworking of I Can Get It For You Wholesale by Classic Stage Company brilliantly demonstrated the possibility of staging a riveting musical with an unlikable and irredeemable protagonist—in that case, the avaricious garment-industry upstart Harry Bogen. Now composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown and book writer Jonathan Marc Sherman showcase their own antihero with the new musical The Connector at MCC, featuring wunderkind journalist Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross) as the show’s despicable, win-at-all-costs centerpiece. Daisy Prince, who directs, is credited with having conceived the story.
