Two more shows have been added to the Broadway season, both light fare meant to delight, while several of the plays I attended this past week were dark, their themes the threat of annihilation, the creep of autocracy – the same themes as in the non-fiction book I read, and the news I watched.
The Week in New York Reviews
Addressing the audience as his congregation, Jacob Ming-Trent tells us upfront that the story he is about to relate – how a Black, fat, unloved, homeless high school dropout stumbled onto the Bard and vowed to become a Shakespearean actor — is not autobiographical. “This show is testimony,” he says. (Huh?)…”How Shakespeare Saved My Life” offers more than a touch of whimsy as well as a dip into the surreal.
Turning Old Paintings into Live Theater: maedeup
Like the myth of Pygmalion, the kNOT theater company is bringing visual art to life, weaving together the centuries-old tableau vivant tradition with inventive 21st century approaches to create live theater out of a series of paintings by the 18th century Korean artist Shin Yun-bok. The process involves many strands, including live dancers, computer animation, shadow puppetry, digital puppetry, original music, live photo capture, enough sound effects to fill a radio drama — everything except spoken language. The effect is extraordinary, resulting in what feels like an exciting new form of theater.
When a hand grenade suddenly lands in their apartment, it’s just one more thing for the couple to bicker about in “Delirium,” director Igor Golyak’s explosive adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s 1962 absurdist play “Frenzy for Two, or More.” The Arlekin Players’ production at the Space at Irondale showcases the inexhaustible calisthenic clowning by Chulpan Khamatova and Andrey Burkovskiy, both celebrated Russian actors now in exile. At the same time, a play that is so devoted to nonsense in dialogue and action more or less forces the audience to look for the allegory that gives it purpose. I found two – one timely, one timeless; one bleak, the other hopeful.
Mrs. Stern Wanders The Prussian State Library
In 1933, the Gestapo arrested and imprisoned Hannah Arendt, a 26-year-old Jewish scholar, on a charge of treason, carrying a possible death sentence. This is the true story that inspired Jenny Lyn Bader to write “Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library,”…The way this play dramatizes the events that unfolded in her prison cell in Berlin in 1933 struck me as so far-fetched that I felt forced afterward to research what really happened.
Book: Profiles in Cowardice
Journalist Jacob Weisberg’s book presents portraits of eight prominent Americans who initially “recognized the danger Trump posed to American values” but in 2025 nevertheless capitulated to him: Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who led the court in issuing decisions that gave immunity — and in effect impunity — to Trump’s lawless behavior; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who voted to acquit Trump at his second impeachment trial, thus enabling him to run for another term. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who shut down the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, and in other ways knee-capping the paper after purchasing it with a promise to protect it. Former President George W. Bush, who refused to speak out against Trump. These and lesser-known figures either surrendered to his authoritarian demands directly, or in other ways contributed to the degradation of American democracy.
The Week in New York Theater News
The second-ever Broadway revival of the 1955 musical “Damn Yankees” will open at the Marquis Theater on April 20, starring Neil Patrick Harris, Julianne Hough (who made a splashy Broadway debut in POTUS) and Austin Scott (Hamilton, Girl From the North Country, & Juliet) , directed and choreographed by Sergio Trujillo
Blue Man Group is debuting on Broadway, not quite two years after the end of the blue-tinted, non-verbal troupe’s decades-long run at Astor Place Theater. “Blue Man Group: A New Holiday Surprise” , a touring show, lands at Lunt-Fontanne, November 2 – January 3, 2027, opening November 17
Twelve original cast members and three decades of alumni will be performing at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theater in “Rent, the 30th Anniversary Concert,”a benefit performance for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, on October 26. While in-person tickets are sold out, $30 livestream tickets are available through the League of Live Stream Theater
In celebration of the tenth anniversary this week of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, which is one of the museums of the Smithsonian targeted for an unprecedented ideological assault by the current administration, here is a sample of the theater-related objects and images (among the more than 45,000 objects in the permanent collection) as well as links to theater-related exhibitions, curator-written articles and news from the museum over the past decade.
More than 40 works of theater will be presented at 22nd Under the Radar festival, January 6-24, 2027, its largest-ever
T.R. Knight (“Grey’s Anatomy”, Stranger Things: The First Shadow) will join ‘Little Shop of Horrors,” as Seymour, alongside Hannah Cruz (Chess, Suffs) as Audrey, beginning October 27, 2026.
Rachel Dratch as Patty and Jeff Hiller as Schroeder complete the cast for Encores! concert version of the musical “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown,”which opens the 2027 Encores! series, February 3 through 14.. They join Danielle Brooks as Lucy, Ayo Edebiri as Snoopy, Jin Ha as Linus, and David Hyde Pierce as Charlie Brown.
Jessica Lange reprises her 2016 Tony winning role as Mary Tyrone in a new movie adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (with new co-stars). It is currently only being show in movie theaters in Los Angeles.
