The Oxford English Dictionary lists eight different meanings of the word babe, and that’s not even counting the famous talking pig. Playwright Jessica Goldberg is specifically interested in two of them. In Babe, her 2022 short and sour drama, currently receiving a well-appointed staging by the New Group, Goldberg offers an example of how the term can simultaneously signal affection and condescension. Pitting a powerful, wrong-headed man against two smart women of different generations, the trio admire one another for their singular skills while ruing the destructive power plays that undo their workplace relationship.
Pony Cam’s Burnout Paradise is a madcap smorgasbord of actions that are tied together by a final aim: complete a number of tasks in a certain amount of time, all while walking on a treadmill. Part performance art, part physical theater, the show opens with four performers—Claire Bird, William Strom, Dominic Weintraub and Hugo Williams—on treadmills under a large screen displaying the words “Warm Up.” A soft, muttering soundscape (created by the ensemble) floats through the air, offering thoughts on greatness—“If greatness doesn’t come knocking on your door, you should go knocking on its door.”
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.
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.
Justin Huertas’s Lizard Boy, a queer pop-rock indie musical with a sci-fi vibe, is funny, poignant, and life-affirming. Huertas, as the titular character, is a sweet and likable protagonist in this coming-of-age love story even though he suffers from having green, scaly skin. Cleverly directed by Brandon Ivie, and under the aegis of Prospect Theater Company, this show is a terrific homage to—and satire of—comic-book mythology.
Waiting in the Wings is the sort of show that materializes every June with a gay-themed subject to celebrate Pride Month intentionally or obliquely. This adaptation of a 2014 movie, in which Sally Struthers, Christopher Atkins and Shirley Jones appeared, stars Jeffrey A. Johns, who wrote the screenplay and reprises his writing and acting roles for the stage.
Tony Sportiello and Albert M. Tapper’s new musical comedy On the Right Track invites audiences to ride the rails on a New Jersey Transit train carrying three couples who have three very different problems. Sensitively directed by Mauricio Cedeño, the show is not only entertaining but edifying. It also reminds folks that “sometimes the key to happiness is simply a matter of knowing which door you want to open . . . and which one you want to keep closed.”
Perhaps because one must dodge homeless people to get to the theater the time seems right for the new one-woman musical, Walking with Bubbles. Created, written and performed by Jessica Hendy, and based on her journey as a single mother rebuilding her life after her husband Adam’s mental illness and homelessness, this female-driven narrative is inspiring and may well impart hope to others in crisis.
Vanities—The Musical, featuring a book by Jack Heifner and music and lyrics by David Kirshenbaum, is a reworking of their 2006 effort, Vanities, A New Musical, which itself was based on Heifner’s 1976 straight play, Vanities. With Will Pomerantz along as director, the result is a decidedly male, and unfortunately stale, exploration of the lives of three imperfect women and the thinly drawn men in their orbit. The use of a talented, racially diverse cast calls attention to the work’s less-than-inclusive perspective rather than broadening it.
Parents who love their children often give them mixed messages, and children who get mixed messages often give their parents problems. Such is the case with Timmy, whose often rocky and self-centered relationship with his parents in the new musical comedy I Love My Family But… is followed from infancy through marriage, divorce—and the latter’s repercussions. This relationship most certainly qualifies as a I Love My Family But… situation.
There are music lovers who embrace jazz, some who adore R&B, and others with a penchant for soul. Yet even among these aficionados, how many know that each genre is heavily indebted to gospel music, and to black churches, where ministers and choirs rouse their congregants in praise and in prayer? Mama, I Want to Sing collectively celebrates legendary black singers whose musical roots were embedded in gospel music and who broke through color barriers as performers. It does so indirectly by tracing the life journey of Doris Winter—stage name Doris Troy—an aspiring singer in a gospel-rich choir. The guide through this journey is the DJ/Narrator, played by Vy Higginsen, the real-life younger sister of Doris Winter. She and her husband, Ken Wydro, co-created the script.
In the Roaring ’20s and Depression ’30s, women playwrights contributed substantively to the theater, but Black women playwrights’ work went largely unnoticed in the broader literary world. To counter this, Black magazine owners advertised contests to encourage new scripts. She’s Got Harlem on her Mind features three of Eulalie Spence’s four prizewinning scripts: The Starter (1923), Hot Stuff (1927), and The Hunch (1927). These one-act Harlem Renaissance vignettes reflect the everyday lives and cultures of its Black community. They provide a window into the hopes and shattered dreams of Harlem’s inhabitants.
Jill Sobule’s F*ck7thGrade, a queer musical-memoir that marries narrative and song, has returned to the Wild Project for a limited engagement. Directed by Lisa Peterson, Sobule (music, lyrics, and concept) shares her life story thus far, cleverly drawing upon her stultifying days in seventh grade as a jumping-off point to examine her life beyond middle school.
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.
For four decades in the mid-twentieth century, Hoagy Carmichael’s melodies enchanted audiences around the world. Despite massive social upheavals, including the Great Depression and World War II, his songs endured. Many, like Stardust, Georgia on My Mind, and Heart and Soul, became classics. The co-creators of Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust Road lead the audience through those turbulent times as a group of gifted singers and dancers reprise a repertoire of hits that ultimately led to his induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1971.
Sholom Aleichem, the famous Yiddish writer, satirized and chronicled Jewish life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The story of Tevye the dairyman, perhaps the best remembered of Aleichem’s works, and on which the musical Fiddler on the Roof is largely based, is being reprised by the National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene in Yiddish—a production that premiered to acclaim before the pandemic and has now returned.
A cast of 20. An original story, not based on a book or movie. Plenty of dancing. Few modern musicals have all these things, and that Only Gold does indicates the breadth of its ambition. Set in Paris in 1928, the show features an ensemble in near-constant motion on an art deco–styled stage with a long, winding staircase whose banister extends into a circular fixture suspended above the stage amid a sky of globular lights. In design and concept it’s a very ambitious project indeed.
The tensions between life and art, and between experience and imagination, lie at the heart of the 2003 chamber musical A Man of No Importance. When it premiered, Roger Rees played the homosexual director of a Dublin theater company in the 1960s, suffering from period repression and bigotry. Classic Stage Company’s revival stars Jim Parsons, the Big Bang Theory actor who apparently wants to demonstrate his acting and singing abilities beyond his Sheldon character—and succeeds.
When the fourth season of the Netflix hit Stranger Things premiered this past summer, it seemed like the show’s popularity had reached its zenith. From pushing a certain decades-old Kate Bush song back onto the Billboard Hot 100 to causing fangirls to rave online about the magnetism of breakout star Jamie Campbell Bower as Stranger’s newest baddie, the show’s powerful reach could rival the telekinetic abilities of one of the series’ other iconic characters, Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown). So it’s only natural that a musical parody of the show about superpowered teens, demonic beings and alternate dimensions would be the next step—here called Stranger Sings!, of course.
Following in the footsteps of the 2013 Tony winner for Best Musical, this polished, Off-Broadway revival of Kinky Boots shines under the direction and choreography of Jerry Mitchell, who helmed that Broadway production, and stars Callum Francis, recreating the role of the drag queen, Lola, after having previously donned the titillating titular zip-ups on Broadway as well as in London and Australia.
Whoa! At the ends of both acts of The Butcher Boy, the Irish Rep’s new musical adapted from Patrick McCabe’s 1992 novel, such unsettling things happen that you’re forced to revisit everything that preceded them, assessing how much was fact, how much was fantasy, and whether or not we should trust our narrating protagonist, Francie Brady (Nicholas Barasch, and we shouldn’t). The Butcher Boy isn’t comforting or reassuring or lovable, and it won’t send you out whistling a happy tune. But, and this puts it ahead of much of the current pack, it isn’t stupid.
Six months ago the Atlantic Theater presented Kimberly Akimbo, the musical tale of a 15-year-old girl whose young mind is trapped in a quickly aging body. Now, with the premier of The Bedwetter, it offers up the story of Sarah (Zoe Glick), a 10-year-old girl with a troubled, adult mind trapped in a child’s body that is always letting her down. And though Kimberly is headed toward an early death while Sarah advances toward certain fame, it is the latter character who wants our sympathy. She struggles, however, to fully earn it. In this uneven production, as director Anne Kauffman has discovered, a depressed kid with a foul mouth makes for a problematic protagonist.
Can an atheist serve as a guide to the history, customs, and longevity of the Jewish religion and its adherents? Moreover, how can an atheist recognize that a man who has just died is with God? At first glance, this seems quite absurd. Yet neither for Michael Takiff nor for his audience does it appear to be a problem. Jews, God, and History (Not Necessarily in That Order), Takiff’s one-man show, is a roller-coaster ride through Jewish belief, identity, and practice.
