The Reviewers Are In
Mia Morrison Our two new drama critics share and compare their enthusiasms.
Nothing about anything right now feels traditional. Theater is struggling at every level, from red-cushioned halls to black-box basement cabarets. We’re sitting down to look ahead at this fall’s offerings, and we’re doing so in the midst of a national firestorm — every day more closings, more layoffs, more reductions in programming, more cries for help, more existential howls into the abyss. It’s brutal out there.
Still — in spite of everything, and giving us perhaps all the more reason to celebrate — here is some of the actual stuff that we’re excited and curious to see onstage. And there’s one extra little bright spot: New York, starting now, has two theater critics. Jackson McHenry has contributed reviews since last fall, and Sara Holdren returns after serving as the magazine’s theater critic from 2017 to 2019. They gathered to discuss what they’re looking forward to this season.
Jackson McHenry: So, Sara, first of all, welcome back. Things look a little different since you last wrote for us.
Sara Holdren: Honestly, this fall feels odd. In the past, we’d be swimming in season announcements at this point, and right now, the list still feels sparse — even on Broadway as well as Off. We’re seeing the results of this industrywide emergency that’s been unfolding for the past couple of years, and in plenty of ways, that’s pretty demoralizing. But it’s also made me want to kind of sound the horn of Gondor — you know, dig in deep to find out what is going on. What boats are out there in this tempest managing to hold fast?
J.M.: Yeah, weird vibes. Merrily We Roll Along is one of only a couple of things that feel like classic fall-season Broadway openings. I’m excited for that — last winter at New York Theatre Workshop, it was really moving. It’s got a wonderful central trio of actors in Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff, and Lindsay Mendez. The other show that fits that traditional fall starry, prestige-y vein is Purlie Victorious, which is both the first revival of Ossie Davis’s Jim Crow satire since its Broadway premiere in 1961 and Leslie Odom Jr.’s first time on Broadway since Hamilton. Then I’m curious to see Gutenberg! The Musical! — co-written, full disclosure, by our predecessor Scott Brown, who’s a hilarious guy. It’s much scrappier than your typical marquee musical, and this production seems to be taking advantage of this wild moment: “This theater was open, and Alex Timbers was game, and both stars of The Book of Mormon were available.”
Musical-wise, the Public Theater — after cutting the Under the Radar Festival, which is terrible news — is doing a big production ofHell’s Kitchen, about and with music from Alicia Keys. That’s surely aiming for a transfer. And then the revival of Spamalot popped up. That’s got a bunch of Broadway regulars in it: James Monroe Iglehart, Ethan Slater, Michael Urie … But it seems like we may be seeing more SAG actors onstage this season, too.
S.H.: Yeah, I’ve heard buzz about Hollywood agents’ being desperate to get their people back into theater because they’re convinced AI is going to replace all real people onscreen. Which is both revolting and also kind of hilarious, like, “Yay! Welcome back to our empty sandbox. Absolutely no resources for you, but come play!” We might have a collection of Hollywood-actor vehicles coming down the pike.
J.M.: Because big theater productions take so long to get onstage, we’re seeing only a couple of those so far, but I bet there will be more. Aubrey Plaza and Chris Abbott are doing Danny and the Deep Blue Sea Off Broadway, and Sarah Paulson is doing Second Stage’s Broadway revival of Appropriate.
S.H.: It’s exciting to have more Branden Jacobs-Jenkins playing.
J.M.: It’s a good time for him, after The Comeuppance, and somehow Appropriate is his Broadway debut (if you don’t count his light reworking of The Skin of Our Teeth). Like Gutenberg!, some of the shows premiering on Broadway are anomalies compared to what you might see in a busier fall, but they seem like a good use of the available houses. Whitney White, who’s done great work Off Broadway, is directing Jocelyn Bioh’s Jaja’s African Hair Braiding. And there’s How to Dance in Ohio, a musical about a group of young autistic people that’s cast with seven autistic actors in the lead roles.
S.H.: Relatedly, there’s a dance-theater piece I’m looking forward to in the inaugural season at the shiny new Perelman Performing Arts Center — it’s called Is It Thursday Yet?,and it’s a collaboration between two badass choreographers, Sonya Tayeh and Jenn Freeman. It’s about Freeman’s experience of receiving an autism-spectrum-disorder diagnosis at age 33.
J.M.: And Freeman is the only dancer onstage, right? There are solo shows all over the place this season. Probably a financial thing?
S.H.: How can it not be a financial thing? People are desperate — plenty of places have cut down their seasons. I think that some places that are really trying not to chop their schedules down are turning to solo shows or performances in a more slimmed-down mode. Even before the pandemic, there was a tacit understanding that American theater loves the small-cast show. If you’re not Frozen, it’s always been hard to afford to go epic, and that problem is exacerbated now. On the other hand, solo performance can be a beautiful and complex medium — and really theatrical. It’s so exposed; there’s less inclination to go literal or “realistic” and so many opportunities to highlight the mechanics of the performance itself. I’m really interested in Sad Boys in Harpy Land, Alexandra Tatarsky’s solo show at Playwrights Horizons. The show description says, “Equal parts sad clown, demented cabaret, and extended crisis of meaning” — which sounds like a pretty accurate picture of theater in general right now.
J.M.: It’s one of those three solo shows at Playwrights that will be running in rep in November.
S.H.: Right, it will rotate with Ikechukwu Ufomadu’s Amusements and Milo Cramer’s School Pictures. The whole trio is exciting. It’s funny — I’m writing this from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and there’s a huge wealth of innovative, complicated, strange, funny, really interestingly constructed solo material here every year. I think of performers like Daniel Kitson and Casey Jay Andrews, and this year Amusements is playing the Fringe before it comes to Playwrights.
J.M.: There was that Liz Kingsman show here over the summer that played the Fringe last year, too, explicitly parodying the whole trend.
S.H.: And also totally embracing it. In a way, I think so much theater is going to be entering the Fringe mentality in the coming years: How can I use 60 to 90 minutes and a shoestring budget to do something astonishing? These kinds of shows can be absolutely incredible. At last year’s Fringe, Casey Jay Andrews made me weep uncontrollably for about ten minutes, in a tiny former-veterinary-surgery theater, with only a laptop, a toy boat, and a little cat figurine. There’s something about these very naked pieces that are part comedic, part storytelling, part messing around with form that feels like a very charged, compelling method of grappling with the question of What in God’s name is happening?! Not just in the field but in the world.
J.M.: They do feel like conduits for those questions right now. Like, How can I put this thing I experienced — whether it’s a pandemic, whether it’s about death, etc. — onstage in front of you, and quickly? Speaking of which, Death, Let Me Do My Show, by Rachel Bloom from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, is in the vein of comedy-theater solo performance that’s all over: Mike Birbiglia, Alex Edelman, Kate Berlant. Rachel Bloom’s already played around a lot with the space between comedy and musical theater in her sketches and TV writing.
S.H.: Yes! And Rachel Bloom’s show even shares a director with one of Mike Birbiglia’s.
J.M.: What about places across the East River? You’ve mentioned a number of Brooklyn venues that are programming off-the-wall ideas, even if we don’t know their full slates yet.
S.H.: I really think that the Brooklyn theater scene is popping off. There’s a site-specific play running right now in a Brooklyn supermarket near the Botanic Garden. Places like Jack and the Bushwick Starr along with the Chocolate Factory in Queens … Also, there’s a new place in Williamsburg called the Brooklyn Art Haus that looks pretty funky — they’ve got a big theater, and it looks like they do weekly cabarets and circus performances. And the Brick is doing a lot of really fascinating work. There’s a production coming up there called SchmidtSmithSchmidt, by Leonie Bell and her company, Local Grandma. To be honest, I have no idea what the show is about, but Bell looks like a wild performer. A colleague of mine called her “Pina Bausch meets Mr. Bean.” Then, after presenting the Brooklyn-grocery-store show, the Tank is premiering a solo show, by Jerry Lieblich, called Mahinerator. Lieblich does some really intriguing things with language — this show is written in “a quasi-English pseudolect.” It feels like audience members are going to get to learn a whole new patois, the way you adjust your ears to something like A Clockwork Orange.
Oh man, now I’m thinking of yet another solo show, also in Brooklyn: Annie Dorsen’s Prometheus Firebringer, which is coming to Theatre for a New Audience. It’s billed as a “hybrid performance-lecture” in which Dorsen uses AI to try to generate possible versions of the two plays that are missing from Aeschylus’s 2,500-year-old Prometheia trilogy. I’ve seen a couple of shows at TFANA, like The Art of Laughter and Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne’s Why?, that feel like they’re taking a step back to ask, “What is theater?” I like that they have a bit of a niche for that.
J.M.: They’re following that up with more standard star-driven nonprofit-theater-company programming: Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks in Waiting for Godot!
S.H.: I feel like that’s going to be the most aggressive Waiting for Godot I’ve ever seen. “Shall we go?” “Yeah, let’s fucking go.”
J.M.: Very gruff, very American.
S.H.: Oh! Also, before we leave Brooklyn, even though BAM has really scaled back its Next Wave Festival, at least we’re gettingFood. It’s Geoff Sobelle’s new piece, following up on The Object Lesson and Home, which was astounding — he’s so meticulous and caring as a theater-maker and such a magician of stagecraft. I think about that show all the time. The new one is staged as if the audience is invited to a giant banquet.
J.M.: It really is sad that Next Wave has so few productions this year.
S.H.: Everyone’s hurting. And with smaller-scale theater, there’s often the added challenge of it being quite tricky to find out what’s happening and when and to miss things because the runs are short. (This was true before the pandemic: How can you afford to run a show long enough to actually achieve any word of mouth?) It’s worth following the venues closely, getting on their websites and their social media to see what’s coming up.
J.M.: That’s a good point; follow their Instagram Stories.
We mentioned the trio of solo shows at Playwrights Horizons — I’m also curious about Stereophonic, which is Will Butler of Arcade Fire and David Adjmi doing a musical about a band in the ’70s. Lincoln Center Theater has a new Michael John LaChiusa musical,The Gardens of Anuncia, about the director Graciela Daniele, set in her childhood in Juan Perón’s Argentina. He crafts stuff that’s always ambitious conceptually but also densely intricate. There are so many revivals, especially of musicals, coming up that you just want to see something new. On that note, whatever Here We Are is, in terms of its completeness, it’s the last new Stephen Sondheim work.
S.H.: Right, that’s the Shed’s big-ticket item this fall.
Oh! A few more things. First, I always look forward to what Soho Rep is doing, and they’ve got a wild-looking show coming up called Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month. It’s got Amanda Duarte and the fantastic Becca Blackwell, and it looks to be a crazy talk show hosted by a six-foot-tall talking vagina? And then I’m psyched that there’s a new Annie Baker play coming. It’s been too long. HerInfinite Lifewill be at Atlantic Theater Company, and the cast is wonderful: Kristine Nielsen, Mia Katigbak, Pete Simpson … The description of the play reminds me a bit of Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone — women outdoors philosophizing together, deceptive lightness on the edge of the abyss. The director, James Macdonald, is a frequent Churchill collaborator too.
There’s also DruidO’Casey, which is NYU Skirball Center and the Public teaming up to bring the great Irish theater ensemble Druid over to do the whole of Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy. You can watch the three plays on consecutive nights or see them Gatz style: all three in one day, back-to-back, for about six hours. I mean, I love a marathon.
J.M.: Speaking of classics, Classic Stage Company is doingI Can Get It for You Wholesale, famous in part for including Barbra Streisand’s first role in 1962 when she was 19. It’ll be taken by Julia Lester, who was Little Red in the Encores! production of Into the Woods and was in the Disney+ High School Musical series. After the infamous Funny Girl casting switcheroo, I’m especially curious about that. Then City Center is also doing Pal Joey with Savion Glover co-directing and choreographing. They’ve been leaning into more elaborate staging and choreographing there lately — see Parade, Into the Woods, and The Light in the Piazza.
S.H.: There are also some new-play premieres downtown that look fascinating. Caitlin George’s Helen., which is a deconstructed, feminist retelling of the Helen of Troy myth, is being produced at La MaMa by En Garde Arts. And at the Connelly, there’s going to be a show calledSalesman之死, meaning “Salesman Death,” which is based on the wild true story of Arthur Miller — who very much did not speak Mandarin — going to Beijing in 1983 to direct an all-Chinese cast in a production of Death of a Salesman.
J.M.: That’s an incredible concept.
S.H.: And I just really love the Connelly as a venue. It feels so romantic — like, crusty and gilded at the same time.
J.M.: Makes me think of Kate Berlant in her one-woman show, Kate,playing this character who was supposed to be this haggard old janitor monologuing to the audience and then throwing glitter out of her pocket to represent the magic of theater. I guess I’m looking at this fall that way — there’s a lot of cleaning up for the theater to do but also, I hope, some glitter.
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