Thankful Thoughts for This Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving! 

It’s been a crazy month. An avalanche of shows have been opening both on and off Broadway. I’ve seen 20 of them over the past four weeks—some good, some just OK, a few actually great and, to be honest, at least one that was dreadful. But I’ve been so busy seeing them (and trying to tend to the other things in my life, including squeezing in a birthday celebration for my husband K who has very patiently put up with all this theatergoing) that I haven't had the chance to write here as much as I would have liked.

However I did manage to share some thoughts about a half dozen shows on Broadway & Me Quickies, my collection of short reviews that I hope give a sense of what’s good and not so good about the productions I’ve seen for folks who may not have time to get through longer reviews (you can check those quickies out by clicking here).

And last Sunday, I joined my BroadwayRadio pals James Marino, Peter Filichia and Michael Portantiere on the “This Week on Broadway” podcast to talk about a few of the season’s big shows, including Chess, Oedipus and the Tom Hanks’ play This World of Tomorrow (you can hear all of that by clicking here).

Finally, I do try to keep up with the news about what’s going on in the theatrical world and to share it in my Flipboard magazine, which you can read by clicking here. And I've created a Substack archive of all the episodes of "All the Drama," my podcast on Pulitzer Prize-winning plays and musicals (I’m really excited about the one for December that's going to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Hamilton and hope you’ll check that out)

So although I’m a bit tired—and despite the ongoing challenges in the world—I’ve a lot to be thankful for, including those of you who read this blog and listen to my podcasts. And I’m hoping that your holiday weekend is filled with loved ones, good food and drink, lots of laughter and maybe some theatergoing too.   

"Kyoto" is a Call to Action on Climate Change

The only thing small about Kyoto, the latest import from Britain that opened this week at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse theater, is its one-word title. Everything else is outsized: the show runs nearly three hours, it features a cast of 14, it has two authors (Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson) and two directors (Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin). And its subject is the 10-year struggle to get the nations of the world to come together on a plan to address the outsized issue of climate change. Those negotiations resulted in the titular Kyoto Protocol that was finally adopted in 1997 but which the U.S. Congress still has yet to ratify.

Now negotiations surrounding an international treaty would hardly seem to be compelling theater. And a lot of complicated information about climate science and bureaucratic procedures does get tossed around. Yet I found this to be a fascinating evening of theater. 

Murphy and Robertson, who a few years ago dramatized the international immigrant crisis with their much-acclaimed immersive piece The Jungle, have centered this story around Don Pearlman, the real-life American lawyer who became an oil industry lobbyist and the chief mastermind when it came to thwarting any efforts to address climate change (click here to read more about him). 

In the tradition of Shakespeare’s Richard III, Pearlman serves as the show’s narrator and its primary villain. The American actor Stephen Kunken portrayed Pearlman when this production played to sold-out audiences in London and he’s come home with it, offering the kind of seductively wily performance that makes you root for his character even though you know you shouldn’t.   

Most of the production takes a Brechtian approach to telling Pearlman’s story. Characters don’t have names but are identified by the countries they represent at the series of conferences held over the years to address the climate problem. 

And under Daldry and Martin's energizing direction both the delegates’ language and their movements are often highly stylized. Believe it or not, one of the most amusing scenes in the play is one in which the delegates debate grammar.

Video projections, aided by Aideen Malone's excellent lighting, help to establish the location of each meeting and provide context about what’s going on in the world at the time. The audience is pulled into playing a role too. When you enter the theater, you’re handed a badge that identifies you are as one of the groups attending the proceedings. I was an NGO. 

A few audience members are also seated at the big round table that is scenic designer Miriam Buether’s main set piece. At times they’re instructed to take an even more active part in what’s going on. The ones at my performance looked to be having a great time.

The actual actors also hand up a few cameo appearances of recognizable personalities who turn up at the various conferences: the German chancellor Angela Merkel, the film director Werner Herzog and the then-U.S. vice president Al Gore. 

But besides Pearlman the only characters we really get to know are Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, the amiable Argentinian diplomat who chairs the Kyoto meeting (Jorge Bosch reprises his Olivier-nominated performance) and Pearlman’s wife Shirley, who becomes increasingly horrified as she learns how far her husband will go to undermine any and all attempts to cut back on the damaging use of oil and other fossil fuels.

Played in a finely understated performance by Natalie Gold, Shirley Pearlman serves as a stand-in for those of us who are too often willing to look the other way from the climate threat for the sake of personal convenience and she's a reminder that we should be paying better attention if we have any interest in keeping the planet habitable for future generations.

And here's where I should confess that I have a weak spot for big one-word, state-of-the-world plays like Oslo, Patriots, Ink and my personal favorite Enron, which ran for just 16 performances back in 2010. Even when flawed, these shows make me reckon with my own role in the world, which is what I think good theater should do. 

Still reviews for Kyoto have been mixed and the response from the audience the night I saw the show was muted. Which is ironic because that kind of apathy is the point of the play.

 

 

Going Solo: "The Least Problematic Woman in the World," "Other" and "Did You Eat?

One-person shows are popping up everywhere. And it makes sense that they should.  They’re comparatively cheap to put on since by definitiion there’s only one performer to pay and the costume and set—when there is a set—are usually simple, all of which matter in this high-cost theatrical environment. Plus as United Solo, the theater festival currently running at Theatre Row through Nov. 23, demonstrates, these shows come in lots of different forms: stand-up routines, formal recitations, full narratives in which the one actor plays many characters and, increasingly, confessional pieces in which the performer shares past trauma. 

The latter seem to be the one breaking out of the festival circuit and I recently saw three of those autobiographical works in well-established off-Broadway venues. As I watched those shows, I found myself wondering why the performers were telling me such intimate things, whether it was difficult for them to relive those painful experiences night after night and, finally, why I should care about any of it. Yet each audience was full and many people seemed moved by what they were seeing. You may be too so here’s a sneak peek at each of them:

The show: The Least Problematic Woman in the World @ the Lucille Lortel Theatre

The performer: The social media personality Dylan Mulvaney, who chronicled her gender transition on TikTok

What she shares: The 28-year-old recounts her full life as a trans woman, from her childhood days desperately wishing she could dress as a girl right up through the controversy when MAGA conservatives threatened to boycott Bud Light after the beer brand featured Mulvaney in a social media promotion. Her show works because Mulvaney is not only naturally engaging but also a trained musical-comedy performer who appeared in The Book of Mormon and she uses all of her skills to give her current audience a good time so that even before the show starts, she wanders around in an angel-winged costume to take selfies with fans. Tim Jackson has directed the show smartly and both the set (primarily a pink Barbie’s Dream House interior) and her costumes are just tacky enough to fit in with the sweetly campy vibe. Plus there are nifty original songs by such well known composers as Ingrid Michaelson and Six creators Toby Marlow & Lucy Moss. 

Did I care:  Yeah. Although with an official 75 minute run time—that can stretch past 90—the show is too long but trans people are under serious threat right now and having someone like Mulvaney standing centerstage and proudly telling her story is meaningful.

 

The show: Other @ Greenwich House Theatre

The performer: Tony winner Ari’el Stachel, who won a supporting actor award for his performance in The Band’s Visit

What he shares: Shame is the motivating factor driving Stachel’s show. It charts his struggle with severe anxiety, which he traces all the way back to when he was diagnosed at just five with obsessive-compulsive disorder and which now manifests itself in panic attacks that can cause sweat to literally drip off the actor whenever he’s feeling stressed, including when he's onstage (many hankies were soaked as he blotted off the perspiration at the performance I attended). But the show is also fueled by the lifelong uneasiness and shame Stachel has felt about his racial identity as the son of a light-skinned Ashkenazi Jewish-American mother and a darker-skinned Yemenite Jewish father who bore a resemblance to Osama bin Laden, the latter a real problem in the wake of 9/11 when schoolmates started calling young Ari a terrorist. And so over the years, Stachel has claimed at various times to be white or black and he has faced push back when he has been cast in roles that others considered to be rightfully theirs. This show, under the tight direction of Tony Taccone, is his declaration that he is no longer ashamed of who he is or how he presents and is now on his way to making peace with himself.

Did I care: Kind of. I wish Stachel had settled on one of his issues and really dug deep into it. Instead, right now the show seems more like a therapy session than a performance piece. And to my shame, I have to confess that I was put off by all the visible sweating.

 

The show: Did You Eat?

The performer: Korean-American actor and writer Zoë Kim

What she shares: Emotional hunger and how to survive an abusive childhood are the subject of this autobiographical piece by Kim who grew up in Korea as the only child of parents who desperately wanted a son. And then when she migrated to the U.S. to attend school in her teens, she continued to be plagued by the obligations and oppression of her home culture that prized male children. Director Chris Yejin and choreographer Iris McCloughan have put together a production that uses English, Korean (subtitles are projected on screens) and stylized movement to tell Kim’s often harrowing story, which includes a kidnapping and a murder attempt.

Did I care: Not enough. Kim is a lovely performer but her story seems too specific to her and at the same time she skips over too many important plot points (how did she survive so much physical abuse without people noticing? how did she meet the man who helped her to heal?) The result is that I spent more time wondering how things could have happened than I spent truly feeling for what had been done to her.

 

 

 

 

 

Wrestling with the Head Trips of "And Then We Were No More" and "This Much I Know"

Every once in a while I see a show that is filled with smart ideas, and that is interestingly directed and well-performed and yet still leaves me cold. Over the past week or so I saw two shows like that: the new play And Then We Were No More, which is scheduled to run at La MaMa through Nov. 2; and a remounted production of the 2023 drama This Much I Know, which opened this week at 59E59 Theaters. I suppose they were so disappointing to me because I had so been looking forward to seeing both of them. 

And Then We Were No More is a cautionary tale about a future in which everyone seems to have given up all their rights in exchange for being kept safe, which in this case means that people who commit crimes can be tortured and then executed by a pneumatic device that, after its victims are dressed in weird outfits, vaporizes them out of existence. 

This dystopian view of where we might be headed comes with an impressive pedigree: it’s written by the actor Tim Blake Nelson who so loves exploring ethical and philosophical issues that he actually wrote a whole play about Socrates and it’s directed by Mark Wing-Davey who has frequently collaborated with the always thought-proving playwright Caryl Churchill. But I wanted to see this show because it stars Elizabeth Marvel, an actor whose performances consistently live up to her surname.

And once again Marvel delivers, this time as a lawyer assigned to represent a young woman who has committed a heinous crime. The lawyer knows that verdicts are pre-determined but she is so moved by her client (portrayed with aching vulnerability by recent NYU grad Elizabeth Yeoman) that she attempts to make the case for a more just judicial system. Meanwhile, Scott Shepherd’s government official argues that the needs of the greater society should outweigh those of the individual.  

It's important stuff.  But here it’s never really turned into dramatic stuff. And over the course of the two plus hours of back and forth debate I found my mind wandering to where my theatergoing buddy Bill and I might eat after the show and whether it might be warm enough for us to eat outside. None of which is what I think a play with such heady prentions intended me to be thinking about. 

I didn’t fare much better with This Much I Know either. I’d want to see this one because it’s written by Jonathan Spector whose Tony-winning play Eureka Day not only found a way to look at both sides of the intense debate over vaccination requirements for school kids but also managed to do that in an engaging—and sometimes even amusing—way. 

But This Much I Know is way more ambitious and far less accessible. Inspired by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s bestselling book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” it’s a heady—and very talky—meditation on why people make the decisions they do and the moral implications that can accompany those choices. 

And Spector amps ups the complexities even more by exploring his theme through three storylines centered on different protagonists and set in different time periods: a present-day psychology professor who is trying to figure out why his wife recently left him, the college-aged son of a leading white supremacist who is trying to separate himself from his father’s beliefs and the young Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin who in 1967 would defect to the west.  

The three actors who play these roles—Firdous Bamji, Ethan J. Miller and Dani Stoller—also portray all the other people who interact with the main characters and under the nimble direction of Hayley Finn, they’re terrific as they switch from one to another simply by changing accents, gestures and maybe a hat or two. But I found it hard to care about any of them as the narrative hopped around from one storyline to the next and I grew tired of trying to figure out how each of those narratives connected to the other two.

And yet, I’m glad I saw both plays because they made me think really seriously about why I go to theater and what I’m looking for when the lights go down. It turns out that the priority for me is a visceral experience rather than a purely intellectual one. 

Now, I still like Big Idea shows. But watching these two made me realize that a show also needs to make me feel something. In other words to work for me, it needs to appeal to my heart as well as my head. And alas, neither of these did that.

"Mexodus": a Hip Mix of Hip-Hop and History

Theater lovers have been celebrating the 10th anniversary of Hamilton this year, and well we should. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical about the Founding Fathers made seeing musicals cool again, and judging by all the young people now mobbing stage doors that perception is still holding strong.  

At the same time Hamilton also made hip-hop a viable sound for the musical and so I thought rap lyrics and hip-hop beats would infiltrate subsequent musicals the way that jazz did in the 1920s after Shuffle Along or rock did a half century later after Hair. But, except for a novelty song here or there, that hasn’t happened.  

So it was a delight for me to discover the terrifically entertaining new show Mexodus that is now scheduled to run through Oct. 18 at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre, where it is billing itself as “a two-person live-looped new musical.”

The two persons are Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson, who wrote the show, are its only performers and its sole musicians (click here to read more about them). Although their show's impressive aural achievement owes a huge debt to the looping technique constructed by Mikhail Fiksel, the audio wiz behind the sound design for Dana H.  that helped Deidre O’Connell lip sync her way to a Tony back in 2022.  

The story Mexodus tells is as fresh as its format. It centers around the little-known history of the underground railroad's southern route that allowed slaves to escape into Mexico, which abolished slavery in 1829, more than three decades before Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. 

This version of that history, inspired by Robinson’s own family lore, focuses on the relationship between a black man named Henry who flees across the Rio Grande after accidentally killing the white man who owned him; and a Mexican man named Carlos, a former army medic whose bitterness about the way the U.S. confiscated so much of his country's land after the Mexican-American War makes him willing to take the risk of providing a refuge for Henry. 

In turn, Henry shares his farming know-how with Carlos, who's been having trouble bringing in his crops. The subtext about the way black and brown people can mutually benefit by uniting against "The Man" in the present day is clearly intentional.

Now these are admittedly heavy topics for a feel-good show (and this show is that) but Robinson, tall and almost majestic, and Quijada, more compact and mischievous, are equally engaging performers and they’ve laced their tale with the kind of sly humor and strategic fourth-wall breaking that allow them to sidestep pedantry. They’re also wonderfully versatile musicians. 

Between them, they play piano, drums, double bass, guitar, harmonica, accordion, trumpet and a washer board. The looping technique allows them to record live a few phrases or riffs on one of those instruments and then play it back as they overlay another track and another until a satisfying melody has been created. 

Plus they sing. Really well. And the resulting songs, which include blues ballads, canciónes rancheras and straight-ahead rap, are shoulder-bouncing good. They also serve the story, additional proof, if still needed, that this kind of music can bring a contemporary vitality to the standard musical vocabulary.

The entire creative team—including director and costume designer David Mendizábal, choreographer Tony Thomas, lighting designer Mextly Couzin, projection designer Johnny Moreno and scenic designer Riw Rakkulchon who has devised all sorts of clever places for the instruments to be stored when they’re not being played—is just as inventive. 

Throughout the show Quijada shifts back and forth between English and Spanish, with a little Spanglish thrown in for good measure. But there’s never a need for translation. The whole thing is simplemente fantástico.

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The 4 Shows I Most Want to See in Fall 2025

Once again I seem to be late to the party. Other bloggers, critics and influencers have been putting out lists of the things they most want to see in this new theater season since mid-August. And I can understand why they've been so eager to share their thoughts because this is shaping up to be the most promising fall season in years. There is so much I want to see but I’m limiting this list to just four shows, more or less.  It wasn’t easy but here goes:

BROADWAY PLAY: OEPDIPUS  @ the Roundabout Theatre’s Studio 54: This was the easiest choice for me because this is the single show I’m most looking forward to seeing this fall. Why? Well, I’m intrigued whenever there’s a major production of one of the great Greek plays because, unlike Shakespeare or Chekhov, they don’t get done a lot and almost never on Broadway; I just checked and over the last 80 years, there have been five productions of Oedipus that ran for a combined 32 performances (that was not a typo; really just 32 performances). I’m betting that director Robert Ickes’ update of Sophocles' tragedy about—two millennia spoiler alert—a man who unknowingly murders his father and marries his own mother will run longer. The production drew raves when it played in London and won the Olivier Award for Best Revival of a Play. But what has me most stoked is that Oedipus is being played by Mark Strong and his mother Jocasta by the can-do-for-me-no-wrong Lesley Manville, finally making her Broadway debut. 

Runner-Up: Little Bear Ridge Road Because this play about a gay man and his aunt—played by Laurie Metcalf—sheltering togetherr through the Covid shut-down is the Broadway debut of playwright Samuel D. Hunter, who has seldom let me down.

BROADWAY MUSICAL: THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES @ the St. James Theatre: Who wouldn’t want to see the first new musical that Stephen Schwartz has brought to Broadway since Wicked back in 2003, especially since he and his original Glinda, Kristin Chenoweth, have teamed up again to tell the true-life story of a rich couple’s foolish attempt to build the largest home in America. But what has really got me wanting to see this one is that the production is being directed by Michael Arden who over the past decade—and especially with last season’s Tony-winning surprise Maybe Happy Ending—has shown that he has one of the most inventive minds around when it comes to making musicals so I can hardly wait to see what he does with this one.

Runner-Up: Chess  Because although the ABBA duo Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus’s musical about a Cold War-era championship match has been revised over and over again, I’ve never seen it so I want to know what all the fuss has been about. 

OFF-BROADWAY PLAY: ANNA CHRISTIE @ St. Anne’s Warehouse: There were so many contenders for this slot that I almost lined them up and threw darts to decide which to choose but I have a soft spot for Eugene O’Neill and so this revival of his Pulitzer-winner about a prostitute seeking to reunite with the father who abandoned her as a child and to start a new life with a young sailor who doesn’t know about her past won out because the title role is being played by Michelle Williams, who is almost unrivaled at playing tough and tender women. She’s being joined by the equally gifted Brian D’Arcy James as the father and Tom Sturridge as the sailor and they’re all being directed by Williams’ real-life husband Thomas Kail, who in addition to being the director of Hamilton also seems to have written his college senior thesis on O’Neill.

Runners-Up (sorry but I just couldn’t keep it to one): Archduke, Rajiv Joseph’s political thriller about the start of World War I because it’s starring my will-see-him-in-anything fave Patrick Page; and And Then We Were No More, Tim Blake Nelson’s drama about capital punishment because it’s starring my will-see-her-in-anything fave Elizabeth Marvel.

OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL: THE BAKER’S WIFE @ Classic Stage Company: It probably isn’t fair to choose two Stephen Schwartz shows but this one, with a book by Joseph Stein about French villagers who unite to bring back the young wife of their local baker after she runs off with a lover, has become a cult favorite among the musicals cognoscenti despite being rarely done—or ever seen by me—and this revival will feature Ariana DeBose, who will appear in a show on a New York stage—and a small and intimate stage at that—for the first time since winning an Oscar for her turn as Anita in Stephen Spielberg’s “West Side Story” and becoming everyone’s favorite awards show host.

Runner-Up: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee Because I’m really looking forward to seeing Jasmine Amy Rogers, who was so sensational as the animated-in-every-way Betty Boop in last season’s short-lived Boop!, put her spin on the very different shy bee contestant Olive Ostrovsky.

A Labor Day Salute to the Back Office Folks

Well, here we are: it’s Labor Day Weekend already.  And every year since I started writing here, I’ve marked this unofficial end of summer—and the real start of the fall theater season—with a tribute to the various folks who work so hard to make the theater so many of us love. I’ve shouted out actors, playwrights, musicians, stage managers, set designers, drama teachers and even unions. 

But to be honest I thought I might take a break this year because I’ve got a lot of other stuff I need to do. But then this morning I read my latest copy of “Nothing for the Group,” the terrific weekly newsletter that the dramaturg Lauren Halvorsen sends out each week (click here to learn more about it) and one off her entries in this recent issue made me rethink taking a hiatus.

Tucked in among Halvorsen’s usual roundup of premieres and other productions opening around the country was a feature she calls “not a living wage,” which lists jobs in the industry and compares their salaries to what it actually cost to live in the city where the theater offering that position is located. None of the jobs paid a living wage. And yet, I’m pretty sure that all of them are going to be filled, mostly by people who not only love the theater but who rarely get a chance to share fully in the glamor of it.  

The folks who plan the budgets, clean the theaters, work in the box office, order the supplies, manage the marketing campaigns and coordinate the educational programs don’t walk red carpets, get Tony, OCC or Drama Desk awards or have TikTok followings. And they don’t make a lot of money. Those who work in the increasingly financially-squeezed regional theaters make even less money. 

But the theater doesn’t work without them. And so the least I can do is to take this time to acknowledge all the marketing associates, literary managers, outreach coordinators, casting directors, props supervisors, logistics technicians and the scores of others who work in the back offices but whose labor plays an important role in producing the pleasure I get each time I walk into a theater. To all of them I say: Bravo—and thanks.