Amid the busiest time for openings on Broadway and beyond, there is also news of an abrupt closing, a teased re-opening, and a promising summer theater season mostly outdoors and much of it free.
Details below.
Also below: Watch Sadie Sink when she was making her Broadway debut. A dozen years later, Sink is currently co-starring in the just-opened “John Proctor is the Villain.” Live long enough and your old random videos become history. Stranger things have happened.
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
Broadway: John Proctor is the Villain
The play by Kimberly Belflower, who is making her Broadway debut, is an intriguing feminist critique of Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, which is about the Salem witch hunts of the 17th century. The female students point to several aspects of the protagonist John Proctor that make them reject their teacher’s (and standard critical) claim of his heroism…Despite the play’s title, the focus is not on the students’ analysis so much as on the (perhaps too pat) parallels that the students are living through [during] the peak of the #MeToo movement…Central to the appeal of the production are the five actors who portray the female students. Their frank conversations about sex and celebrities, their shifting enmities and alliances, are funny but also feel spot-on. Their extended moments of laughing and crying and dancing together, even shrieking together, are infectious.
Off-Broadway: Caryl Churchill Quartet: Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp
Deirdre O’Connell as Dot keeps an imp in a corked old wine bottle, expecting it to work magic – to grant Dot’s wishes, as long as what she asks for is not too selfish. It’s true the imp has not granted any wishes so far. It’s also invisible. And Jimmy (John Ellison Conlee), the irascible old cousin who lives with Dot, says it’s just an empty wine bottle and there is no such thing as an imp. But Dot has faith.
“Imp” is the last and by far the longest of the four elusive plays by Caryl Churchill that have opened tonight on a single program at the Public Theater. I suspect that those theatergoers who consider the 86-year-old Churchill to be the greatest living playwright of the English language (and there are many) will act like Dot – faithfully looking for the magic that they have come to expect… What these [opaque] plays most clearly have in common is a seductive use of language and a devastating mix of tones – whimsical, even outright amusing…and then brutal.
Off-Off Broadway: Rheology
Rheology” begins with a physicist delivering a lecture about sand,..This goes on for a full twenty minutes. It’s only when she chokes on the dust-smoke from one of her demonstrations, and drops dead, that “Rheology” becomes a more obvious work of theater, albeit never a conventional one….it turns out [to be] a two-character work of theater driven by Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s anxiety; specifically: “I’ve always had a phobia of my mother’s death… If you were to die, I would just die too.”
So the play is ostensibly designed in collaboration with his scientist mother to test that hypothesis. The result is a sometimes brain-stretching exercise in physics and family. It takes a while to see any connection between Chakraborty’s straightforward scientific facts about sand and Chowdhury’s evocative stagecraft about…mortality? His relationship with his mother? His relationship to theater?
Fringe: Bad Muslim
Azhar Bande-Ali was in a plane that had a mechanical problem that prevented it from landing, which provoked a spiritual problem; he worried that the plane would crash, and he would die. So he created a score card to figure out whether he would wind up in Heaven or Hell — whether he had been a good Muslim, faithfully following each of the five pillars of Islam. That’s the premise of “Bad Muslim,” which is structured around five elaborate anecdotes from his life, one for each pillar. Several of the stories are charming; the best feel instructive….
Preview: Summer Theater 2025 At Lincoln Center and Little Island
The Week in New York Theater News
“Life and Trust” has closed. The elaborate site-specific immersive theater piece opened on August 1, 2024, initially scheduled for just two months. Its final performance was on Saturday, April 19, 2025. Ticketholders for future performances were notified via email that they would be refunded “due to unforeseen circumstances.”
Begun just as “Sleep No More” was ending its 14-year run in New York, “Life and Trust,” which riffed on the legend of Faust, was in most ways a worthy follow-up to that Macbeth adaptation, which began the genre in New York in 2011. My review and guide to Life and Trust
There was no press announcement of the show closing. I have made an inquiry to their publicist, and will report back if and when there is any further information.
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, starring Keanu Reeves making his Broadway debut, and his Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure co-star Alex Winter, has been scheduled to open on September 28 at Broadway’s Hudson theater, running from September 13 to January 4, 2026.
Andrew Lloyd Webber Teases ‘Phantom Of The Opera’ New York Return In “Better Area” Than Broadway. (Deadline.)
Lloyd Webber posted an Instagram on Thursday the day after the second anniversary of the closing of Phantom on Broadway after 35 years. He read a letter from the Phantom outside what looks to be the now-closed Lee’s Art Shop on West 57th St. not far from Carnegie Hall: “My Dear Manager, Did you think I had left you for good? Your Obedient Servant.”
Broadway aims for a younger crowd (The Guardian)
Romeo + Juliet, starring Kit Connor and Rachel Ziegler “managed to hit the youngest Broadway audience in recorded history, with 14% of ticket buyers in the 18 to 25 demographic, as opposed to an industry average of 3%.. That may not sound like a record-torching number, but 18 to 25 is a narrow demo… This season has seen a surge in material seemingly aimed at that younger-adult crowd. Recent openers include a Stranger Things prequel, akin to the Harry Potter play only somewhat less kid-friendly and the less spectacle-minded John Proctor Is the Villain, a play about teenage girls reading The Crucible, starring … Sadie Sink from Stranger Things. Even the Stranger Things-free and more traditional-sounding Smash, based on a flop NBC TV series chronicling the making of a musical, appears to skew younger and fresher..”
Can theater save democracy? It’s not an idle question — it’s happened before (Salon)
“Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides illuminated how pride, injustice and failed leadership could threaten a community. Aeschylus’ dictum from “Agamemnon” that “through suffering comes learning” captured a key lesson in cultivating empathy and communal judgment….It is important to distinguish the active engagement with theater suggested by the Athenian examples from the passive consumption of news or social media. Theater offers a vivid platform where audiences can witness potential outcomes of different political choices. Through characters and plot, viewers see how policies, leadership decisions and collective actions might unfold. In this way, theater facilitates a careful weighing of what might happen if a society remains on its current trajectory or, conversely, if it chooses another path.”
This Week’s Theater Video
In 2013, Sadie Sink sings (appropriately) “Tomorrow”
