I’ll start with the two shows about gay royals, both featuring unmentionable titles and intimate kisses. One, by Jordan Tannahill, ended its run at Playwrights Horizons over the weekend, but announced today it will be transferring to Studio Seaview for a run from September 11 to October 26. The other began its run over the weekend as part of the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, written and performed by Linus Karp and Joseph Martin (best known in New York for Gwyneth Goes Skiing); the couple announced they will be married on stage later this month, which they believe “will be the first legal wedding with a paying audience in the festival’s 78-year history.”
One play last week announced that it will transfer to Broadway — “Liberation,” by Beth Wohl, will open at James Earl Jones Theater on October 28 and run through January 11, telling the story of a group of women in 1970s Ohio who gather in the basement of the local Y for a weekly consciousness-raising group, while half a century later a present-day narrator discovers her mother’s radical past before marriage and motherhood. This brings to fifteen the number of shows with confirmed venues and dates in Broadway’s 2025-2026 Broadway season
The same day as the “Liberation” announcement, the Edinburgh Fringe Society announced the launching of the 2025 festival featuring 54,474 performances from 3,853 shows. This explains why every available surface in the city of Edinburgh is covered with posters — every single one of which is for a show you can actually see this summer. In New York, the posters can be for shows years in the past.
August 2025 New York Theater Openings — a calendar of New York theater opening* in August, including two shows on Broadway, both overshadowed by a 400-year-old play presented for free in a park.
The Week in Previews and Reviews
Note: Each of the major venue-operators in Edinburgh present hundreds of shows, but choose about a dozen to showcase in a presentation for the press. Here are posts full of videos and photographs of the individual performances at three of the four of these events that I attended.
Edinburgh Fringe Week Zero at Underbelly
Edinburgh Fringe Week Zero at Gilded Balloon
Edinburgh Fringe at Pleasance Opening Gala
Another note: In keep in the Fringe practice, I’ve assigned stars to individual reviews.
The Marriage of Alice B Toklas by Gertrude Stein *****
Smile, The Story of Charlie Chaplin ****
Shake It Away, The Ann Miller Story *****
The Fit Prince ***
Lovett ***
The Week in New York Theater News
The Balusters, the play by David Lindsay-Abaire about neighbor-versus-neighbor battle royale over a stop sign, still has no specific dates, ibut t now has a cast, and what a cast! Marylouise Burke Carl Clemons-Hopkins, Margaret Colin, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Richard Thomas
Off-Broadway’s Public Theater will host the New York debut of Kyiv-based theatre company Theater on Podil with a limited run of its When the Hurlyburly’s Done, a new play written and directed by Tony winner Richard Nelson, translated by Yulia Sosnovska. The production will play the company’s Shiva Theater September 16-21 in Ukrainian, with English supertitles. Set in 1920, the work follows six women who have stayed behind with their children while everyone else is out seeing a play in the Ukrainian countryside. Yulia Brusentseva, Kateryna Chikina, Mariia Demenko, Natalka Kobizka, Olena Korzeniuk, and Maria Kos will star.
“And Then We Were No More,” a new play by Tim Blake Nelson and starring Elizabeth Marvel at LaMaMa..perfs begin 9/19…opening 9/28
In the not-too-distant future a lawyer is forced to represent a prisoner deemed ‘beyond rehabilitation’ and destined to perish in a newly developed machine designed to execute ‘without pain.’ The attorney must strive for justice in a system devoid of mercy.
