With Election Day tomorrow, it was hard to avoid registering the politics in even the most entertaining theater I reviewed this past week. The insistence on body autonomy was a theme in both Broadway plays that opened, “Liberation” and “Little Bear Ridge Road.” The politics of religion and prejudice was explored both in Jen Tullock’s Off-Broadway “Nothing Can Take You From The Hand of God” and in Off-Off Broadway’s “Jewish Plot” by Torrey Townsend, who seems to reflect the confusion and ambivalence that many Jews feel in the current political landscape.
“Art, to me, is a weapon against oppression and erasure,” John Leguizamo says in an article about Broadway stars who give back that is published in, um , Town & Country. “Going back to the Greeks, the whole point of coming into an amphitheater was to gather communally,” says the actor and singer Celia Keenan-Bolger.
The theater during the month of November is replete with politics, but also Tom Hanks and the Muppets.
November 2025 New York Theater Openings:
Laurie Metcalf as Sarah in rubber gloves and Micah Stock as Ethan in a face mask stand in front of a lone couch, making awkward chit-chat…Aunt and nephew, reuniting during the peak of the pandemic, haven’t seen each other in years. It’s one of the many small, revealing moments in “Little Bear Ridge Road,” the latest quietly amusing and powerfully affecting drama by Samuel D. Hunter, a playwright making his long-deserved Broadway debut. Like the many excellent plays I’ve seen Off-Broadway written by Hunter over the past dozen years, all of which are set in Hunter’s native state of Idaho….” Little Bear Ridge Road” somehow transforms what seems to be a simple story about ordinary people into a cosmic contemplation of loss and hope.
Playwright Bess Wohl wants us to know about the time before she was born when “women’s lib” was neither pejorative nor ironic. In “Liberation,” her warm, funny play opening…on Broadway about a group of feminists meeting weekly in 1970, she looks back without polemics, without parody; just with lots of questions. The real-life gathering that inspired the consciousness-raising group in the play was led by her mother.
“My devoted, dutiful mom who sewed the costumes for every school play and cooked every family dinner and did all the dishes and took me to every piano lesson and sat through it even though I was definitely not a musician, she was actually… a radical?”
“Jewish Plot” starts as an entertaining resurrection of a (fictitious) 19th century play about antisemitism written by an obscure British playwright, and descends into a kind of mad poetry about current-day Jewish identity by the actual playwright, Torrey Townsend, the grandson of a leading Zionist who wrote speeches for Golda Meir. It’s a meta-theatrical experiment, an expression of ambivalence and horror, an exercise in indulgence, and (for the actors and the audience) a test of endurance.
Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God
This solo play co-written and starring “Severance” actress Jen Tullock is on one level the story of lesbian author Frances Reinhardt, who has written a new book about her abusive childhood in an evangelical household in Kentucky, which has led to national TV interviews but also legal threats by the church that her family attends. It is on another level a multimedia show directed by pioneering projection designer Jared Mezzocchi that incorporates live video in multiple and multiplying angles…Many theatergoers, forced to sort through this virtuosic display in order just to figure out what’s going on, might feel that the stagecraft overcomplicates the story. But that may be the point. The complicated storytelling mirrors how much more complicated the story is than it may initially seem…
Theater on Audiobook: 10 from Minetta Lane or Broadway.
The Week in New York Theater News
Actors’ Equity Association members ratified a new three-year labor contract with the Broadway League, which includes three percent annual raises, with the Broadway minimum salary immediately increasing to $2,717 a week.
The contract now allows the producers of most shows to use a QR code to announce an understudy in a performance instead of putting paper inserts (known as stuffers) in a Playbill. The Broadway League reportedly also sought permission to allow a fully digital Playbill. (Broadway Journal) (NY Times) (Playbill)
The Broadway Spring 2026 season is shaping up in earnest, just as the Fall 2025 has revved up. Check out my Broadway 2025 2026 Season Preview Guide for details.
Daniel Radcliffe will be back on Broadway in the solo play “Every Brilliant Thing” opening March 12, at Hudson Theater. My 2014 Off-Broadway review (with a different performer) found it “funny, fun and moving show about a boy who begins writing a list of ‘everything worth living for’ to cheer up his suicidal mom.” (Will there be as much audience interaction given the larger theater.)
The revival of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” starring Taraji Henson and Cedric The Entertainer will open at Broadway’s Barrymore Theater on April 25.
UK stage star Luke Evans will lead the cast and make his Broadway debut in the role of “Frank-N-Furter” in the upcoming production of Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show, with direction by Tony Award-winner Sam Pinkleton (Oh, Mary!). Previews will begin on Thursday, March 26, 2026, ahead of an opening on Thursday, April 23, 2026 at Studio 54 on Broadway (254 West 54th Street). This is a limited engagement through Sunday, June 21, 2026.
The Week’s Theater Video
Christiani Pitts & Sam Tutty perform “American Express” from “Two Strangers (Carry A Cake Across New York)”
Kelly Clarkson sings the Sondheim song ‘Sooner or Later” from Dick Tracy
A different kind of New York theater — Saturday Night Live’s Cold Open about the NYC Mayoral Debate (Also: It ends with a song from a Broadway musical.)
Ramy Youssef as Zohran Mamdani: “I know some of you out there are scared of the idea of a young socialist Muslim mayor, so allow me to put you at ease by smiling after every answer in a way that physically hurts my face”
(Note to Errol Louis, NY-1 moderator: You ARE famous, to me)
