As the Broadway season begins its five final (and busiest) weeks, it’s bracing to learn that live events are booming nationally – all except theater. People “are spending real money to be in rooms together” for live comedy, concerts, sports. “The audience isn’t gone; it’s just going somewhere else,” Broadway playwright Ayad Akhtar said in a keynote speech at a national summit in Milwaukee. The summit focused on regional not-for-profit theaters, which have seen attendance fall by 20 percent and income by 40 percent from 2023 to 2024, but Akhtar’s remarks feel deeply relevant to New York theater of all kinds. “People want to belong to something, not just attend something,” Ayad said. “The audience can feel…when work has been assembled out of obligation and fear rather than conviction; out of caution rather than passion.”
Excerpts from his speech is in one of the videos below, which also include moments from the Encores concert of “The Wild Party,” Andrew Rannells singing “I Believe” in celebration of the 15th anniversary of “The Book of Mormon,” and Kristin Chenoweth talking to talk show host Seth Meyers about (among many other things) the effect of low rates of tourism, “which is disturbing, especially to those of us who love opera and ballet” (a dig at Timothee Chalamet’s comment.) “We want to still keep working the live theater.”
The Week in Reviews
By the time Jasmine Amy Rogers and Adrienne Warren trade affectionate insults in a lively, witty musical number, each of some dozen other spectacular performers have already introduced their dissipated Jazz Age characters with their own showstoppers. “Best Friend,” the Rogers-Warren duet, is at the halfway point, and turns out to be something of a turning point, in “The Wild Party,” a 2000 Broadway musical getting the Encores! concert treatment at New York City Center through March 29. The show, written by Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe based on a poem that Joseph Moncure March wrote exactly a century ago, makes debauchery seem almost delightful…until it doesn’t. After “Best Friend,” the decadence turns ugly and relentless, and, at the end of the two hours without an intermission, the show has become harder to find entertaining.
Antigone (This Play I Read in High School)
Celia Keenan-Bolger is the “I” in the title of Anna Ziegler’s provocative, contemporary retelling of the Greek tragedy, in which Antigone (Susannah Perkins) has an abortion, in defiance of her anti-choice uncle Creon (Tony Shalhoub), rather than (as in Sophocles’ original play) breaking the law by burying her brother. Identified in the program as “Chorus,” Keenan-Bolger serves as the narrator of the story, but on stage she tells us her name is Dicey, a single middle aged woman from Pittsburgh who has remained obsessed with Antigone – feels reproached by her – long past high school. “Antigone (This Play I Read in High School)” is framed as Dicey’s story almost as much as Antigone’s.
Anthony Rapp sits in a chair for ninety minutes as a miserable middle-aged gay man telling a story that goes from panic to frustration to betrayal, and yet “Touch” is among the most satisfying experiences I’ve had in the theater this year. Not coincidentally, it is also among the simplest and the most intimate, a solo play performed for forty people at a time in a year-old, venue called East Village Basement, which looks like a brick-walled living room, albeit one missing a couch and requiring wary descent down a rickety metal staircase.
Alexandrine von Taxis, one of the main characters in “Plan C,” is an actual historical figure whose portrait should probably be hanging in both the Smithsonian National Postal Museum and the International Spy Museum. She was General Postmaster of the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years’ War, taking over the complex network of couriers throughout Europe after the death of her husband. She also reportedly oversaw the systematic, secretive monitoring of private correspondence and official dispatches to ascertain troop movement and the like. If it seems inevitable that her story would be dramatized, “Plan C” is not a straightforward biographical drama. Devised, written and performed by the members of Hook & Eye theater company, the play alternates between two stories four hundred years apart….“Plan C” is well-meaning, and well-mounted, but too much of it is a muddle.
American Classic. A TV series for theater lovers
“American Classic,” featuring a starry cast of Tony winners led by Kevin Kline, is currently thrilling those of us who loved “Slings & Arrows,” the greatest-ever TV series about the theater, which it somewhat resembles — not surprising, since its co-creator is Bob Martin: The Tony winning librettist (The Drowsy Chaperone, Elf, Boop, Smash) also co-created that earlier show. “American Classic” is now halfway through its first season on MGM+. Having previewed all eight episodes, I consider the new series a good reason to sign up for this secondary streaming service (at least for the next four Saturdays.)
Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy
Stephen Sondheim, who would have turned 96 years old Sunday, was known as a genius to his schoolmates and an alcoholic to his collaborators; he was charming but a slob; he loved Lee Remick but late in life married Jeff Romley, 50 years his junior. He denied that any of the musicals he created (except “Merrily We Roll Along”) were at all autobiographical, but Judy Prince, Hal Prince’s wife and Sondheim’s most intimate friend and artistic muse, thought otherwise. She told him that “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” was actually “the story of your life.”
These are some of the more unfamiliar details about the musical theater composer and lyricist’s “textured, contradictory, troubling, and gratifying life” in “Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy (Yale University Press, 320 pages), Daniel Okrent’s newly published biography…largely well-trod territory I was happy to visit again.
The Week in New York Theater News
“WANTED” (formerly known as “Gun & Powder”) is coming to Broadway. Opening Nov 8 at James Earl Jones Theater, the new musical by Angelica Chéri & Ross Baum will star Solea Pfeiffer & Liisi LaFontaine,as Mary and Martha Clarke, Black twin sisters who passed as white in 1893 Texas.
Jocelyn Bioh’s “School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play” will open on Broadway in the Fall at the Samuel J Friedman Theater as part of MTC’s 2026-2027 season, which will also include “The Unbelievers” by Nick Payne Off-Broadway. (My review of the 2017 production of School Girls, from which the photograph above is taken.)
“Cats: The Jellicle Ball” Lottery: $49 Rush: $45
“The Fear of 13” Lottery and Rush: $45
“Titanique” Digital lottery and digital rush: $49. In person rush: $45
Details: Broadway Rush and Lottery Policies
Bubba Weiler’s “Well, I’ll Let You Go” will be revived with most of the cast intact at a new location, Studio Seaview April 30 – June 20, 2026, (opening May 14) This was one of my favorite productions last year. My review.
Michael James Scott, Aladdin’s longest-running Genie and an original cast member, will play his final performance Sunday, May 3.
Lea Michele will depart CHESS on Sunday, June 21, 2026
Tamara McCaw has been appointed President of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where she’s served as interim president since last June. “McCaw is BAM’s third president in the past decade; Gina Duncan left in June 2025 at the end of her three-year contract, and Katy Clark stepped down in 2021 after five years in the job. By contrast, Clark’s predecessor, Karen Brooks Hopkins, was president for 16 years.” (NY Times)
(Amy Cassello has been the artistic director of BAM since 2023, when David Binder left after just four years. By contrast, his predecessor, Joseph V. Melillo, served 35 years.)
Classical Theater of Harlem’s Literary Series – free readings March 23, March 30, April 6
