Summer is a time for Fall season announcements – Under the Radar, Atlantic, Bushwick Starr, below – and for travel: I went to Malta, and wrote Toward A New Understanding of Immersive Theatre After Three Days in Malta, posted this past week in HowlRound; I am going this week to Edinburgh and will be posting about the 2025 fringe festival. I’ve already previewed New York-based artists who are taking their shows there for the first time, and I reviewed a new novel that’s set at the festival, and takes shots at theater (or, rather, theatre) critics.
Clockwise from upper left: Deaf Broadway’s “Waitress,” new Orpheus in Hadestown, from Bushwick Starr’s new season, going to Edinburgh, Maybe Happy Ending replacement, going to Edinburgh, top choice on Broadway poll, cast from Malta play, Broadway in Bryant Park
The Week in Previews and Reviews
New York in Edinburgh: A Drag Is Born
“A Drag Is Born’ [is] a wordless, um…drag act, I guess, although nothing like you’ve seen on RuPaul’s Drag Race or Kinky Boots or at Lips or…anywhere. Mute vignettes meant to embody self-discovery and the struggle toward self-acceptance are paired with labyrinthine costume changes and reveals: Over the course of the hour, Diaz peels off an elegant pair of arm-length silver gloves to reveal a similar pair of black gloves underneath, then peels to a red pair below that, then to green, then finally to his hairy arms… Whether or not the show finds its audience in Scotland, thanks to “A Drag Is Born,” Edu Diaz has been reborn: “I feel like I’m doing an exorcism. I’m exhausted but I’m also liberated.”
New York in Edinburgh: Lizzy Sunshine
Lis Coin’s approach to her first-ever Edinburgh Fringe Festival will be “half spontaneous and half supportive.” She means as a theatergoer. But that’s also not a bad description of “Lizzy Sunshine,” her solo show which includes lots of improvised audience interaction (that’s the spontaneous) while telling a sad, relatable story underlying the comedy (that’s the supportive.)
Book: Bring the House Down
It was only after I started this novel about an acerbic and soon-to-be reviled theater critic — which its publisher had discouraged me from reading — when I learned that the book is set in Edinburgh, Scotland during the fringe festival, which is where I happen to be headed next week; my first visit to the world’s biggest arts festival….
“Bring the House Down” (Doubleday, 297 pages) is largely a knowing and funny read – until it’s not – with the added advantage for me of serving as a kind of preview of both the festival and the city…[The book] reflects a kind of exhaustion not just with theater criticism but with theater…
The Week in Theater News
Free Shakespeare’s Central Park Home Gets an $85 Million Glow Up. Architecture critic Michael Kimmelman assesses the renovated Delacorte, which reopens next month with a starry Twelfth Night: “I’m happy to report, in the meantime, hat the renovation deftly fixes much of what ailed the city’s beloved home of free Shakespeare in Central Park.” One lovely detail: “The theater is reshaped and reclad now, in repurposed redwood from decommissioned city water towers.” The architect “left some of the old water stains to give the new facade an instant patina.”
Broadway Poll: Your Favorite Fall 2025 Show?
Top responses so far:
36 percent are most looking forward to Chess;32 percent to Ragtime.
28 percent most want to learn about Chess; 17 percent most want to learn about Queen of Versailles
Darren Criss is leaving his Tony-winning role in “Maybe Happy Ending” on Aug. 31. Replacing him in the role of “Oliver” from Sept 2 – Nov 1: Andrew Barth Feldman, returning to Broadway five years after he played title role of Dear Evan Hansen when an actual teenager. Feldman will co-star in this enduring robot-romantic comedy with the current Claire, Helen J. Shen, who is reportedly his off-stage girlfriend.
Hadestown will welcome a new principal cast to Broadway on Tuesday, September 2nd. The company will feature (clockwise from top left): Disney star Morgan Dudley as Eurydice, Grammy Award-winner Kurt Elling as ‘Hermes,’ Broadway veteran Rebecca Naomi Jones as ‘Persephone,’ Tony Award-winner Paulo Szot as ‘Hades,’ and West End star Jack Wolfe as ‘Orpheus.’ This will mark the first time the full principal cast has changed over at once since the show opened in 2019.
Hadestown currently stars Ali Louis Bourzgui as ‘Orpheus,’ Phillip Boykin as ‘Hades,’ Daniel Breaker as ‘Hermes,’ Lana Gordon as ‘Persephone,’ and Myra Molloy as ‘Eurydice,’ who will all take their final bow in the production on Sunday, August 31.
Atlantic Theater Company’s 40th anniversary season features:
Let’s Love
September 25 – November 9, 2025
Ethan Coen’s trio of one act comedies explores love in all its miserable glory. Coen is best known as a filmmaker (with his brother Joel) but he started writing plays for Atlantic more than a decade ago
Elephant and Piggy’s ‘We are in a play’
December 13, 2025 – February 1, 2026
A musical for young children based on the children’s books by Mo Willem, with music by Deborah Wicks La Puma
The Reservoir
February – March 2026
In this play by Jack Brasch, Josh moves home to Denver to get sober, but the effect of years of drinking, makes him feel strangely in step with his four aging grandparents. A co-production with Ensemble Studio Theatre & The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Indian Princesses. May – June 2026
In this satire by Eliana Theologides Rodriguez inspired by personal experience, ifve young girls of color and their white fathers attend a program designed to bond families through camp-like adventures. But where can these girls turn when the program sparks questions that their fathers are unable – or unwilling – to answer?
A co-production with Rattlestick Theater & The Terrence McNally Foundation
The Bushwick Starr’s new season (the second in its lovely new space, which is still in Bushwick), features;
Blue Cowboy. Opens October 18.
In this solo work written and performed by David Cale, a New York writer has a chance encounter with a ranch hand in Ketchum, Idaho that blossoms into a sexually explicit story.
The Starr Reading Series. December 1 – 12. Free.
Gooey’s Toxic Exotic Adventure. Opens February 7.
La Daniella’s new puppet musical follows the journey of Gooey, an orphan from near apocalyptic Brooklyn to a tech giant’s theme park, meeting such characters along the way as a smart-mouthed streetwise rat named Scabby, an animated suitcase, and a radical socialist parakeet.
Have You Ever Thought About? Opens May 2
Michael Oluokun portrays a mad scientist who enlists the audience as co-conspirators in the creation of comedic chaos.
Theater at Irish Arts Center
Endgame by Samuel Beckett, Oct 22 – 23; Good Sex by Dead Centre with Emilie Pine Nov 5 -8
The 21st annual Under the Radar, the nation’s largest performance festival, will take place from January 7 to 25, 2026, and feature, for starters (clockwise from top left):
DARKMATTER:
Performance Space New York
Cherish Menzo and her onstage partner Camilo Mejía Cortés aim to create a new way of looking at our body, , applying the Chopped and Screwed hip-hop method to their movement language.
Dream Feed
HERE Arts Center
Bronx-based family trio The HawtPlates break down vernacular music styles into multiple modes of vocalizing
Data Room
The Performing Garage
Kaneza Schaal serves as host for a series of conversations focused on how we share ideas in the world we live in today.”
Voyage Into Infinity
NYU Skirball
Narcissister, the Brooklyn-based performance artist, offers a feminist homage to the short 1987 film The Way Things Go that explores states of impending collapse,
Mami
NYU Skirball
Mario Banushi crafts a hymn to the mother-child bond
Friday Night Rat Catchers
New York Live Arts
Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein bring their signature blend of dance-adjacent physicality and theatrical disorientation to a story of a disco-drenched 1976 game show that spirals from glittering spectacle to surreal collapse
(You know this is experimental theater when you the description of the piece doesn’t give a clear picture of what you’ll experience.)
This is just a teaser. In the coming weeks, Under the Radar will announce programming presented in partnership with more than 20 New York City cultural organizations, including La MaMa and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
Women Playwrights Lose the Limelight (the New Yorker)
Why are there so few women playwrights in so many NYC theaters’ new season lineups? “Are we seeing a reflection of the country’s increasingly misogynist politics? Is there a kind of moral fatigue at play? ” Helen Shaw reports.
In Defense of the Traditional Review (the New Yorker)
“I cited this essay in my review of “Bring The House Down” as a counterargument to the one made in the novel. Brody sees a critic’s review of individual works of art as “consumer protection,” quoting Pauline Kael that without critics “there’s nothing between the public and the advertisers.” Without an informed critic’s “confrontation with individual works,” there is only “a nonaesthetic approach that puts art before readers as a curiosity, as a set of talking points rather than as a form of personal experience.”
Will Masquerade revive immersive theater in New York?
In Memoriam
Tom Lehrer, 97, satirical songwriter and professor of mathematics. “He took piano lessons from an early age, but balked at learning classical music and insisted on switching to a teacher who emphasized the Broadway show tunes he loved. He also developed a fondness for Gilbert and Sullivan; one of his early songs, “The Elements,” was a list of the chemical elements set to the tune of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” from “The Pirates of Penzance.’…A new generation was introduced to the Lehrer songbook in 1980 when the British impresario Cameron Mackintosh presented “Tomfoolery,” a revue of his songs, in London. The show was a hit there and was later produced in New York, Washington, Dublin and elsewhere….With characteristic self-deprecation, Mr. Lehrer attributed the show’s success to a shortage of new songwriters. “It was inevitable,” he said, “that someone would peer into the almost empty barrel and notice me down there.”
Alan Bergman, 99, who with his wife Marilyn was a prolific lyricist, including for such hits as The Way We Were. “They also collaborated on two Broadway shows, “Something More!” (with music by Sammy Fain) in 1964 and “Ballroom (with music by Billy Goldenberg) in 1978, although neither was a hit.”
Cleo Laine, 97, English jazz singe and an actress who was Tony nominated for her performance in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
The Week’s Theater Videos
Watch #Hamilten at Broadway in Bryant Park
Watch 7 Shows at Broadway in Bryant Park
