In 2021, Sam Kissajukian created 300 large-scale paintings over only five months. This astonishing creative output is even more mind-boggling because Kissajukian wasn’t a trained or practiced artist—he was a stand-up comedian who had become disillusioned with the profession and moved into isolation in a windowless concrete warehouse. And, it turned out, he was experiencing a prolonged manic episode as a result of undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
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.
If you’re of an age, you can’t forget it: That jingle, insistently catchy, as maddening as the one for the Mister Softee truck. “Cellino & Barnes! Injury attorneys! 800-888-8888!” It first appeared in 1998, haunted generations, and if Roy Cellino Jr. and Steve Barnes had not squabbled their empire into dissolution shortly before Barnes crashed his plane in 2020, we might be listening to it yet.
Doménica Feraud’s new play is set in a grief support group, where members reminisce about the “someone spectacular” they’ve lost and figure out how to cope without them. This should be very moving, but instead it seems trite and formulaic.
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.
Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author is considered a pillar of modern drama. To say Phillip Howze’s new play Six Characters deconstructs it would be a massive understatement, as Howze pours a bewildering array of ideas and scenarios into his homage.
To “kill,” in the parlance of stand-up comedy, is to fully win over an audience. And while a burly comic is one of the central characters staggering his way through Joe Thirstino’s toxic satire Bringer of Doom, the specter of killing, in the traditional sense of the term, is the larger presence on stage. There are no guns going off, but there are plenty of triggers. Attempted murder, attempted suicide, alcoholism and depression are the stars of this production, with cameo appearances by vengeance and indifference, not to mention an offstage death caused by a wayward sea mammal.
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.
Sam Collier’s A Hundred Circling Camps arrives at Atlantic Stage 2 as part of Dogteam Theatre Project’s inaugural season, under the aegis of Middlebury College in Vermont. Directed by Rebecca Wear, and with impressive ensemble acting, the production underscores the power of public protest.
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.
Ryan Spahn’s Inspired by True Events is an amalgamation of docudrama, backstage comedy, psychological thriller, and immersive theater. The boundaries between the genres often blur, and the effect is often comical, sometimes chilling, and occasionally disorienting. The production’s fun-house quality is encapsulated in the paradoxical and droll preshow announcement: “The following story you’re about to witness is inspired by true events. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.”
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.
If you think puppet shows are for kids, think again. Bill’s 44th is a comic puppet play for adults with original recorded music that makes one marvel at the sheer inventiveness of the human imagination. Co-created by Andy Manjuck and Dorothy James, this wordless theater piece invites one to reflect on the inescapable reality of ageing and loneliness.
There’s perhaps just enough time until the 2024 election that a play about internecine strife among Democrats can be palatable rather than infuriating. In fact, Mario Correa’s N/A, a battle of ideas between N (Holland Taylor), the first woman Speaker of the House, and the insurgent A (Ana Villafañe), the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, is downright enjoyable, with sharp, quippy, idea-laden writing that can feel as though plucked from The West Wing (minus the walking). Staging this play in the fall, on the eve of the election, would have been sadistic; in the election’s aftermath it might feel like an afterthought. So the moment is ripe to watch two fiercely intelligent, trailblazing women debate their ideals and approaches to wielding power.
In Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin, the time is 1759, and the residents of a rural English community have one eye on the sky—welkin is an archaic word for heaven—for the appearance of Halley’s Comet. It’s a rare occurrence that takes their minds off their hardscrabble 18th-century lives.
The skirmish of wits between Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick takes on a modern spin in a new production of Much Ado About Nothing, set in 1940s Italy. Director Thomas G. Waites utilizes the unflagging energy of a rotating cast from Waites TGW studio to fire up Shakespeare’s romantic comedy.
Following its co-commission of Public Obscenities, a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Drama, NAATCO—the National Asian American Theatre Company—leans even more heavily into the theme of gender identity with its new production Isabel, an adventurous but impenetrable 70-minute drama by Reid Tang.
Dark Noon, the South African-devised history of the American West now visiting Brooklyn from the Edinburgh Festival, foregrounds violence by white Europeans against blacks, Asians, and native Americans to debunk the mythology of America established by heroes in film westerns. The title deliberately references High Noon (1952), but the piece belongs to the “in yer face” school of theater, established in Britain in the 1990s. Although “slapstick humor” is billed as one element of the production, the send-up is a heavy-handed attack on the depredations of Manifest Destiny.
What happens when the adults of a town ignore the wisdom of their children? That’s the haunting question underlying Amina Henry’s new adaptation of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Directed by Michole Biancosino, Henry’s play retools the myth, emphasizing the natural virtues possessed by children. Replete with song, dance, and a 10-member ensemble who double as rats, this take on the legend reveals surprising depths.
June is Pride month, and in theater one can expect a smattering of shows geared toward the LGBTQIA+ community. Even OpenTable has a guide to drag brunches—they are apparently a thing. Capitalizing on the June celebration is Midnight Coleslaw’s Tales from Beyond the Closet!!!, featuring three one-acts written by Joey Merlo and starring Charlene Incarnate, who plays Midnight Coleslaw. If OpenTable were listing it, the 55-minute show would only qualify as a side dish.
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.
Simpatico is one of Sam Shepard’s later works. Although he wrote for the stage until the year of his death—his final play, A Particle of Dread, was produced in 2017—when Simpatico premiered in 1994 Shepard had already forged three decades’ worth of cryptic messages and weird interludes. So perhaps the playwright is enjoying a well-earned laugh at his own expense when, early in the first scene, one of the play’s two protagonists turns to the other and asks, “Do you wanna talk or do you wanna be cryptic and weird?”
