Broadway favorites Kelli O’Hara, Brian d’Arcy James, and Heidi Schreck are returning, and Rachel McAdams making her Broadway debut, in two plays and two musicals that were newly announced for Broadway in 2024 this past week. The official opening of The PAC at the World Trade Center added to the excitement of a Fall season that has kicked off Off and Off-Off Broadway with some inventive, not necessarily easy, new theater.
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
Infinite Life
In Annie Baker’s new play about a group of mostly older women spending their vacations at a pain clinic in Northern California, almost nothing is spelled out, there is little in the play except subtext and subtlety. Full Review
alt-Hamlet
an in-your-face, vaudeville-infused dark comedy billed as “a post-Roe satire,” which is meant to be pointed, but winds up confusing Full Review
Psychic Self Defense
Gorgeous, impish and enveloping…It has few of the oft-quoted Aristotelian elements of drama…But it has an abundance of one element that has defined the legitimate stage for hundreds of years: Theater curtains. The show is alive with a huge variety of theater curtains…always in motion…I can’t say I never drifted, but the show seemed designed to encourage us to do so; to promote our own reverie. Full Review
The Week in New York Theater News
PAC NYC officially opens, with two billionaires, two mayors, two matinee idols, and a governor
The second half of the Broadway 2023-2024 season is shaping up, with four announcements this past week:
Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara will reprise their breathtaking performances at Broadway’s Studio 54 of this musical adaptation of the sad, dark story about a couple who fall in love with alcohol – originally a 1958 teleplay starring Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie, then a 1962 film with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick. I raved about it earlier this year Off-Broadway.
“Water for Elephant,” a new musical with music by Pigpen Theater Company, will open March 21 at the Imperial Theater. After losing what matters most, a young man jumps a moving train unsure of where the road will take him and finds a new home with the remarkable crew of a traveling circus. A 2011 film starring Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson, and Christoph Waltz was also based on Sara Gruen’s novel.
The exquisite Rachel McAdams (Slings and Arrows, Spotlight) makes her Broadway debut in “Mary Jane,” (first preview April 2, opening date to be announced) at MTC’s Samuel Friedman Theater. Playwright Amy Herzog reunites with director Anne Kauffman in a play they brought to Off Broadway in 2017 about a single mother who takes care of her two-year-old son Alex. Alex was born prematurely and wasn’t expected to live more than a few days. My review of Mary Jane Off-Broadway.
A new translation of Chekhov’a “Uncle Vanya,” by Heidi Schreck (writer and performer of What The Constitution Means to Me) will open April 24 at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater .
Out of the Box Theatrics has been selected to operate 154, the venue at 154 Christopher Street that was the home of the now defunct The New Ohio Theater. Founded in 2016 by Liz Flemming, the company’s best-known production has been the digital review of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last 5 Years
The Pulitzer Prizes will expand its eligibility requirements to consider authors, playwrights and composers who are not US citizens. The award for books, drama and music, which had previously been open to just US citizens, will now consider permanent residents of the US and those who have made the US “their longtime primary home” (The Guardian)
Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney (Choir Boy, Brother/Sister Plays, and the Oscar-winning screenplay for Moonlight) has been appointed the new artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, an unusual choice – not least because such positions usually go to producers or directors, not playwrights. (LA Times)
3 Actors, 1 Unshakable Bond: Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe are the heart of the tear-streaked “Merrily We Roll Along” Broadway revival. By Ben Brantley (NY Times)
All Arts Docs: Manhattan Theatre Club, a Home for Artists” will premiere on Nov. 21 at 9 p.m. ET on the All Arts app and website
Organizations in eighteen communities throughout the U.S. (including Urban Health Plan in the Bronx,) will put on productions on a single day, July 27, 2024 responding to the prompt, “No Place Like Home,” from the “Wizard of Oz.” The project, co-led by Lear deBessonet (formerly artistic director of Public Works, now of Encores!) is modeled on the 1936 production in 18 communities of the anti-Fascist play “It Can’t Happen Here,” which was under the auspices of the Federal Theater Project. (NY Times)
In Memoriam
Michael McGrath, 65, nergetic comic actor, fifteen-time Broadway veteran, e Tony-nominated for his three roles in Spamalot, including Patsy, the servant who banged coconuts together to imitate the sound of a galloping horse,and Tony-winner for Nice Work If You Can Get It.
