This coming week promises horror and politics (with some overlap), and two grand concerts of beloved Broadway shows: The 30th anniversary of “Rent” tonight only, and the New York City Center revival of “In The Heights” which begins Wednesday for a two-week run that is nearly sold out, with remaining tickets bracingly expensive. “Rent” in person is completely sold out, but available as digital theater for $30. Also coming this week, the Broadway opening of “A Few Good Men.” (Watch Bradley Whitford below talk about his returning to the same play in which he made his Broadway debut more than three decades ago.)
This week past week saw the opening of three other Broadway shows, and much beyond Broadway. Excerpts from my five reviews, below.
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
860
The title of Billy Crystal’s solo show is the address of his house on Chautauqua Boulevard in the L.A. neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, which burned to the ground along with thousands of others in the Palisades Fire of January, 2025. He had lived there with his family for 46 years. Only about a third of “860” is directly about the fire and its aftermath…Most of “860” is a memoir, primarily highlights from Crystal’s career as an actor and comedian. It is studded with stars…there is a reason Crystal became a celebrity; he is good at what he does; a practiced storyteller, a funny man.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
In this musical about a man who is born old and grows younger with each passing year, a company of 15 actor-musicians seemed to be having a stomping good time playing the lively Celtic-flavored folk-rock score and singing the clever lyrics – but in an accent coached to be a challenge for Americans to decipher….if New York theatergoers might not be able to make sense of every line and lyric, it’s easy to get into the spirit of the show.
The Imaginary Invalid
“Health is laughter,” a character says in Moliere’s 353-year-old comedy, which America’s foremost stage clown Bill Irwin has brought back to Broadway for the first time in six decades, in a starry, gorgeously designed production… If Irwin’s adaptation of “The Imaginary Invalid,” directed by Brandon J. Dirden, is too stylized for many of the laughs to have landed for me, Moliere’s excoriating satire about doctors and the medical profession still resonates.
Aftermath
In this play about a freelance journalist who has survived a kidnapping by the Taliban in Afghanistan, David Zax, a former freelance journalist making his Off-Broadway playwriting debut, uses this shockingly common practice by the Taliban as background for a family drama that attempts to address some of the same moral issues that Arthur Miller explored in his 1947 Broadway play “All My Sons.” But “Aftermath,” opening tonight at A.R.T./NY, is too flawed a play for the issues to hit home anywhere near as effectively.
The Dog Show
If your dog knew English, according to “The Dog Show,” they would have some choice words for you about playing fetch (“if you want the ball so much, why do you keep throwing it?”)… They would explain to you why they peed on your carpet (“I had a very good reason, which was that I had to pee and happened to be on the carpet at the time.”)In “The Dog Show,” four human performers read monologues from music stands written by David Javerbaum (writer for “The Daily Show,” “Act of God” on Broadway) that purport to give the perspective of a wide variety of canines, with wildly uneven results – some funny, some sweet, some cloying.
The Week in New York Theater News
Tom Hanks and Kelli O’Hara will star on Broadway in“This World of Tomorrow” in Fall 2027. My review when it was at The Shed: Hanks co-wrote this quaint, unremarkable time-traveling play adapted from his book of short stories, and stars as Bert Allenberry, a tech entrepreneur from the year 2089, who travels back to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where he spots Carmen Perry (Kelli O’Hara) and becomes besotted with her, returning again and again to June 8, 1939 to spend time with her.
Jonathan Groff will portray an entire community on Broadway in Jessica Dickey’s The Amish Project, beginning February 10 at the Broadhurst Theater (no opening date yet.) The play is an intimate portrait of a place and a community channeled through a single performer, inspired by the true story of a mass shooting in a one room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 2006. The play was first produced at the (late, lamented) New York International Fringe Festival almost two decades ago, and since has been produced in regional theaters around the country. This is yet another new turn for a versatile actor who just finished playing Bobby Darin in Just In Time, and is currently performing as Rosalind in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of As You Like It.”
“Triumph” by Caryl Churchill has been extended through Nov. 3 (appropriately Election Day.) See it! It’s brief. It’s free. It’s funny. It compares Trump — convincingly! — to Nero and Caligula
The impossibly starry production of Bess Wohl’s Small Mouth Sounds will begin performances on Wednesday, February 10, 2027, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, with opening night set for Thursday, March 11. My review of the 2016 Ars Nova production about six characters who are attending a silent retreat , which contains almost no dialogue. I called it a remarkable work of theater.
Zoom conversation: October 27 3 pm ET. Click here to register for free.
Broadway contributed $21 billion to New York City economy last season even as production costs soared, according to new Broadway League report. The greater share of that, $12 billion, was from tourists. (Broadway League, Deadline)
4 Objects That Measure the Life of ‘Rent’ from the Jonathan Larson Archives. (NYTimes)
The Week’s Theater Video
Bradley Whitford: “It’s a very strange time machine” to be performing in “A Few Good Men” more than three decades after making his Broadway debut in the original production of Aaron Sorkin’s play. “It was a huge break. My dressing room was larger than my apartment.”
Sherri Shepherd on being the first Black female Genie in “Aladdin”
