I reviewed seven shows this past week – two on Broadway, two Off-Broadway, two Off-Off Broadway, and one in Kentucky.
A mad busy theatergoing week, prelude to an even more insane month, with yet another show announcing last week that it will open on Broadway in April. There are thus 15 shows opening on Broadway in the four weeks between World Theater Day (this coming Wednesday) and the cut-off date of April 25th to be eligible for Tony Awards for the 2023-2024 season. April showers indeed
And three more shows announced for the Fall 2024 Broadway season.
The Week in Theater Reviews
Jeremy Strong as a righteous scientist? Michael Imperioli as his pompous, persnickety brother? One might initially question this casting. [but] it’s the associations we make with these actors’ most famous roles that help complicate our understanding of the characters they are now portraying — and complicate what we take away from the play. Full Review.
It’s the Big Top-like entertainment, especially the heart-stopping acrobatics, which are not just athletically spectacular but often visually beautiful and emotionally expressive, enhancing the dancing and even advancing the story. Much else in “Water for Elephants” has its pleasures – the score, the singing, the puppetry, the acting, even the love story — but nothing else matches the circus artistry for its originality, variety and consistency. Full review
Bathhouse.pptx, “a mess” of a play about gay bathhouses that is “a symptom of loneliness and longing” (in the words of its playwright Jesús I. Valles), won the 2023 Yale Drama Series Prize, chosen from 1,500 entries by judge Jeremy O. Harris (best known for “Slave Play”), who described it as “one of the most exciting speculative fictions I’ve encountered in years, using a unique dramaturgy to explore a queer history that is quickly being erased.”
That is enough to make “Bathouse.pptx” – to paraphrase a term borrowed from law enforcement – a play of interest. Its first full production, running at the Flea through April 22, directed by Chay Yew and gamely performed by a versatile six-member cast, is funny, forlorn, full-frontal, yes a mess; but if a work in progress, a memorable one. Full review.
There are elements of a smart and campy popular entertainment, comparable to “Little Shop of Horrors,” in this latest musical from Michael R. Jackson ( “A Strange Loop,” “White Girl in Danger”) and his collaborators…But “Teeth” seems likely to turn off at least as many theatergoers as it would draw in: It’s deemed “appropriate for audiences ages 17+,” and it’s impossible to see how It could be otherwise, given that it’s an adaptation of a 2007 horror movie of the same name about a woman who has lethal teeth in her vagina…Full Review
The Dred Scott decision, widely considered the worst ruling in the history of the United States Supreme Court, inspired “American Rot,” which should have been a better play. It certainly has a fascinating back story: The playwright, Kate Taney Billingsley, is the great-great-great-grandniece of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, who issued the ruling in 1857, which in effect denied basic human rights to all enslaved people in the United States, and helped lead to the Civil War. In the course of her research into her ancestry, Billingsley met with Lynne M. Jackson, the great-great-granddaughter of Dred Scott, who had sued for his freedom against his owners because they had moved from Missouri (a slave state) to Illinois (a state where slavery was prohibited.)
The play imagines an encounter between two fictional characters who are likewise a Taney descendant and a Scott descendant. ...Full Review
.. in the more than two hours that Laurence Fishburne is on stage, he says almost nothing about his career as an actor, producer and director. What does he say? He tells stories. The stories, in eight different scenes or segments, range from harrowing to comic, and sometimes both; and are, he says, sometimes true, sometimes false, sometimes both.. Full Review
We’re in the parking lot of the New Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church on a hot Good Friday afternoon in Dallas, Texas. We’re also on stage in the Pamela Brown Auditorium of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky – and on computer and smartphone screens in New York, and anywhere else in the United States, via the League of Live Stream Theater.
On the lot, and the stage, and the screen, a quartet of devoted churchgoers, all four of whom are Black and queer, open up whole worlds to outsiders — of a church tradition full of Usher Boards and Holy Spirit seizures at Seven Last Word services, and of queer life within that tradition.
The Week in New York Theater News
“Illinoise,” dance theater piece based on Sufjan Stevens’ album that I called extraordinary when I saw the sold-out show at the Park Avenue Armory earlier this month, is transferring to Broadway’s St. James Theater, opening April 24, one day before the cut-off date for Tony Award eligibility.
“Tammy Faye” to play the Palace. The musical about the televangelist and singer will begin previews on Oct. 19 and open on Nov. 14 at the newly refurbished Palace Theatre, with a score by Elton John, and a cast starring Katie Brayben and Andrew Rannells reprising their performance in the West End production.
Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher will return to Broadway sometime in the Fall in “Left on Tenth,” a stage adaptation of Delia Ephron’s memoir about how she simultaneously battled cancer and found love in the years after the death of her husband and sister Nora Ephron.
A second Broadway revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Nicole Scherzinger making her Broadway debut, directed by Jamie Lloyd, will open October 20th at the St. James Theater.
The 2024 New York City Fringe Festival
47 shows from April 3 – 21
Conquering Broadway’s Cross Streets
Director Jessica Stone has two musicals almost across from each other on W 45th St: Kimberly Akimbo and Water for Elephants.
The Week’s Theater Video
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Maleah Joi Moon as Ali leads the company on The Tonight Show in performing “Kaleidoscope,” .one of the three new songs that Alicia Keys wrote for “Hell’s Kitchen,” which is transferring to Broadways Schubert Theater, opening April 20th: “It’s better to be alive than just be living>”
