In the swirl of the new theater season, with three shows opening on Broadway last week and another this week, and daily announcements of the season ahead (of Broadway debuts, for example, for Succession’s Sarah Snook and Stranger Things’ Sean Astin) as well as talk of the future (the expansion of the National Black Theatre), the way that the Broadway community reacted to the events of exactly a year ago, October 7, 2023, may be only distantly remembered. It feels worth a reminder: Scroll to the bottom for the video, again, of “Bring Them Home: A Broadway Prayer.”
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
Yellow Face
The misunderstanding, hate, fear, suspicion, and outrage surrounding issues of identity seem to have taken center stage in this country. This might well make audiences find new relevance in David Henry Hwang’s comedy.. Mixing fact with fantasy, “Yellow Face” is as thoughtful as it is playful, not the self-indulgent autobiography that “DHH” himself calls it in the play itself – one of its many mischievous meta-theatrical touches. Full Review
McNeal
“McNeal” is a great showcase for Robert Downey Jr., making his Broadway debut as the novelist Jacob McNeal, who is unraveling just at the moment of his greatest acclaim. But Downey also seems a vehicle by which playwright Ayad Akhtar attempts to address some age-old questions about the creative process, with a new twist:
How much are invasion of privacy and outright theft permissible in the effort to create great art? Is any creative work truly original? And how do the sudden advances in Artificial Intelligence alter the answers to these questions, and make them more urgent?
Akhtar seems more interested in exploring these questions than in the plot he develops as the frame onto which to hang the discussion Full Review
(see link to The Atlantic interview below)
Good Bones
The familiar clash of views over gentrification is the foundation of “Good Bones,” but playwright Ijames and director Saheem Ali try, with modest success, to build a believable world on top of it…..what most moves “Good Bones” forward is not plot or character or argument, but the design. Full Review
The Week in New York Theater News
“Operation Mincemeat” will open March 20 at John Golden Theater. The Olivier Award winning musical is based on the improbable true story of a successful British operation in World War II to deceive the Germans before the Allied invasion of Sicily by dressing up a corpse as if it had been an officer of the Royal Marines and planting a fake letter between two generals that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia.
The musical is written and composed by the comedy group, SpitLip, which is made up of David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts. Casting for the Broadway premiere “will be announced soon.” (The photograph above is obviously not of the not-yet-existing Broadway cast)
The adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” with Sarah Snook (of “Succession”, playing 26 roles has been announced for Broadway – with a promise that it “will open at a Shubert theatre in March for a strictly limited engagement.” In other words, it has neither an opening night nor a venue. Same for “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” by Taylor Mac and Jason Robert Brown. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Purpose” has a theater, but no opening date yet. George Clooney’s “Good Night and Good Luck” has neither.
I’ve added section entitled No Opening Date Yet, and/or No Venue to my Broadway 2024-2025 Season Preview Guide
New cast of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” starting November 12: Matthew James Thomas as Harry Potter, Sarah Killough as Ginny Potter and Alex Serino* as their son Albus Potter. Daniel Fredrick continues as Ron Weasley alongside new cast members Rachel Christopher as Hermione Granger and Ayanna Nicole Thomas as Rose Granger-Weasley. Aaron Bartz and Erik Christopher Peterson continue as Draco Malfoy and his son Scorpius Malfoy. Kristen Martin joins as Delphi Diggory.
Sean Astin will make his Broadway debut in “Elf” as Grey Henson’s boss — i.e. Santa.
TLA Theater Book Award Winners 2024
The Rabid Fans of Sleep No More (Washington Post)
It’s been almost a year since “Sleep No More” announced it would close in January 2024. It didn’t. It’s extended several times; it’s now slated to close November 6 (the day after Election Day.)
A New Yorkers named Jen DiGiacomo didn’t even attend the show until she had heard it was closing. In the year since, she’s seen it 55 times. Above is a wall of her apartment, with the masks she’s collected from the show.
‘A temple of liberation’: behind the unwavering rise of the National Black Theatre (Guardian)
Created in 1968 and making groundbreaking strides, the organisation is looking to further expand
“The NBT, a groundbreaking organisation forged in the searing political heat of 1968, prepares to move into a major new arts complex spanning an entire city block on 125th Street in Harlem, New York. Set to open in 2027, the $80m project will contain two hi-tech theatres as well as affordable artist housing, a set-building shop and site-specific installations by artists Sanford Biggers and José Parla.”
The Playwright in the Age of AI by Jeffrey Goldberg (Atlantic Magazine)
Ayad Akhtar new play, McNeal, starring Robert Downey Jr., subverts the idea that artificial intelligence threatens human ingenuity.
“I’ve been in conversation for quite some time with Akhtar, whose play Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, about artificial generative intelligence and its impact on cognition and creation. He’s one of the few writers I know whose position on AI can’t be reduced to the (understandable) plea For God’s sake, stop threatening my existence! In McNeal, he not only suggests that LLMs* might be nondestructive utilities for human writers, but also deployed LLMs as he wrote (he’s used many of them, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini included). To my chagrin and astonishment, they seem to have helped him make an even better play. As you will see in our conversation, he doesn’t believe that this should be controversial.”
Jeffrey Goldberg: Did you write a play about a writer in the age of AI because you’re trying to figure out what your future might be?
Ayad Akhtar: We’ve been living in a regime of automated cognition, digital cognition, for a decade and a half. With AI, we’re now seeing a late downstream effect of that, and we think it’s something new, but it’s not. Technology has been transforming us now for quite some time. It’s transforming our neurochemistry. It’s transforming our societies, you know, and it’s making our emotionality within the social space different as well. It’s making us less capable of being bored, less willing to be bored, more willing to be distracted, less interested in reading….The technology’s moving quickly, so it’s a reality. And worrying? I’m not trying to predict the future. And I’m also certainly not making a claim about whether it’s good or bad. I just want to understand it, because it’s coming….”
*LLMs stands for large language model,which is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) program that uses deep learning to perform natural language processing (NLP) tasks
“Every time I talk to her, I want to write. Every time I hear her music, I learn something,” Lin-Manuel Miranda writes about Shaina Taub as part of the TimeNext100 2024 list, which also includes Cynthia Nixon on Cole Escola and Tina Fey on Ashley Park.
Miranda offers a glimpse into his creative process in an interview with Fast Company headlined Lin-Manuel Miranda talks about how he decides which ideas are worth developing, with a list of five insights into the creative process (with subheads that aren’t always clear)
Ideas Love Company (It’s not just the initial inspiration; it’s the ideas that flow from it. “If it’s just one idea, it will probably die in the impulse phase.”)
Never Go It Alone (Collaboration is key)
Write it down – when you can (“I have hundreds of little notepads everywhere..”
Create what you want to see in the world when the time is right (He was first presented with the idea of Warriors in 2009 but didn’t start working on it until 2017. He didn’t think it would work at first.)
Never Stop Being Curious (“When I see theater and I see something I don’t like, I don’t turn my brain off. I go, Why isn’t this working?” )\
In Memoriam
Gavin Creel, 48, Tony-Winning Musical Theater Actor
A Look Back At Gavin Creel’s Broadway Career
The Broadway League: “To honor his memory, the Committee of Theatre Owners will dim the lights of one theater from every Theater Owner on Broadway, including the Circle in the Square, Eugene O’Neill, Helen Hayes, Marquis, New Amsterdam, Samuel J. Friedman, Shubert, Stephen Sondheim, St. James, Studio 54, Todd Haimes, and Vivian Beaumont theatres at a date and time to be coordinated with the family at their request.”
Change.org petition: Dim All Broadway Lights in Honor of Gavin Creel.
More than 21,000 signatures gathered so far.
The Week’s Theater Video
On the anniversary of the October 7th massacre and mass kidnapping, here again is the video, Bring Them Home: A Broadway Prayer, in which dozens of Broadway performers have recorded the song from “Les Miserables” with a slightly altered title on behalf of the more than two hundred people who were kidnapped in Israel on October 7th. The names and ages of the victims run along the bottom of the video, which concludes with a collage of the victims’ faces.
A year later, of the 251 hostages taken in the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023. more than 100 have been freed; 101 are reportedly still hostages. The rest are dead.
