Things to do in New York this Friday

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Ever since the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical The Phantom of the Opera hung up its mask in 2023, after a record 35-year run on Broadway, the show’s ardent admirers (there are packs of them) have been wishing it were somehow here again. And now it is—with an emphasis on somehow. The revisal of Phantom now playing Off Broadway as Masquerade has been significantly revised to fit a very different form: an immersive experience, à la Sleep No More, in which audiences are led en masque through multiple locations in a midtown complex designed to evoke the 19th-century Paris Opera House where soprano Christine Daaé is tutored and stalked by the facially misshapen serial killer who lives in the basement. The very notion of this reimagining—created by Lloyd Webber and director Diane Paulus, from a concept by Randy Weiner—is surprising; perhaps even more surprising is that, somehow, they pull it off.  Masquerade | Photograph: Courtesy Oscar Ouk The complexity of the enterprise is staggering. Six groups of 60 spectators at a time enter the building at 15-minute intervals; each group gets its own Phantom and Christine, but the other actors repeat their roles multiple times a night. The spectators are guided by the stern ballet mistress Madame Giry through a multitude of discrete playing spaces on floors throughout the complex, including the roof. To help sustain the atmosphere and the sense of event, audience members must wear black, white or silver...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  In the 1989 movie Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter played a pair of dim teenage rockers who traveled through centuries and around the world and even—in the film’s 1991 sequel, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey—beyond this mortal coil. So there’s a satisfying snap to the joke of casting them, in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, as the long-suffering tramps Estragon and Vladimir, two of the most immobile characters in world drama. Eternally, it seems, they await a mystery man who never appears, and yet they never learn; they are locked in a cycle of forgetting and resetting. “Well, shall we go?” says Reeves’s Estragon. “Yes, let’s go,” replies Winter’s Vladimir. But Beckett’s famous stage direction keeps them in their place: “They do not move.”  This casting is more than just a stunt, though; the nostalgic affection that the audience holds for Reeves and Winter has certain salutary effects. “Together again at last! We have to celebrate this,” says Vladimir at the top of the play; the audience is there for the reunion party, and it arrives with the gift of a prior sense of these two men as friends. When they mention having known each other “a million years ago, in the nineties,” the line hits differently than it did when the play made its Broadway debut in 1956; when they embrace, it has an extra level of sweetness. They have history with each other, and with us.  Waiting for Godot |...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Playing a British hooligan who doesn’t know his own strength in the new drama Punch, Will Harrison is a knockout. James Graham’s play is inspired by the real story of Jacob Dunne, as laid out in his 2022 memoir, Right from Wrong: How he fell into drug use and gang culture as a youth; how, while spoiling for a fight with some mates after a cricket match, he took a single jab at a stranger named James that wound up killing the man; and how he found redemption and got his life on a new, better track. It’s a demanding journey, and Harrison meets it every step of the way. Punch | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy The actor comes out swinging in a super-energetic opening monologue that situates the teenage Jacob in 2011, rough and unready for the pain he is about to inflict. “A fight’s coming tonight,” he promises on what will prove to be the fatal night. “Gonna be throwing some hands, tonight… And I can’t wait.” Harrison spends much of the first act narrating Jacob’s experience directly to the audience in sequences that double as confessions to his group-therapy circle; this device could easily prove static, but he sustains a sense of urgency throughout. And he’s thoroughly convincing as a Nottingham tough: His accent work is excellent, and his milky features can harden into menace when he’s fronting or soften into blankness when he’s troubled or confused.   Punch | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy “I’m just kind of hyper, you know,”...

And Then We Were No More, a new play set in a future that feels a bit too near, includes a scene in which a Lawyer (Elizabeth Marvel) attempts to persuade a large jury to spare her client’s life. The Official (Scott Shepherd) in charge protests: The only purpose of this proceeding is to determine the method by which the condemned woman, known as the Inmate (Elizabeth Yeoman), will eventually be put to death. The Lawyer perseveres, questioning the court’s logic and the state’s motives, but when she requests permission to refer to the Inmate by her actual name, she is sharply rebuked for trying to sway the jury with irrelevant emotions like empathy and compassion. As stand-ins for the jury, the audience is likewise barred from knowing not only the convict’s name, but also those of the Lawyer, the Official or anyone else. And Then We Were No More | Photograph: Courtesy Bronwen Sharp Playwright Tim Blake Nelson—who is also a novelist, a filmmaker and one of the Coen brothers’ favorite actors—has synthesized more than a century’s worth of ideas from dystopian fiction into a chilly, talky two hours of nameless people in a soulless system. Directed by Mark Wing-Davey, it wears its influences on its sleeve: Kafka, Orwell, Philip K. Dick (Nelson appeared in the film Minority Report, which was based on one of Dick’s stories) and Caryl Churchill, whose work Wing-Davey has directed on several occasions. Marvel’s Lawyer has grudgingly come to terms with her irrelevance in this world,...

Theater review by Marcus Scott History is never inert, as the Belfast playwright Leo McGann reminds us in The Honey Trap: It metastasizes across decades, reshaping itself through recollection, omission and remorse. In McGann’s unnerving and meticulously crafted political thriller, what begins as a deceptively simple interview between a graduate student and a veteran soldier unfolds into a labyrinthine meditation on the perilous seductions of remembrance.  Emily (Molly Ranson), an Irish-American PhD candidate compiling oral histories of the Troubles, meets Dave (Michael Hayden), a British military veteran formerly stationed in Northern Ireland. With academic equanimity, dictaphone in hand, Emily is intent on recording his story in pursuit of truth and reconciliation—which, she argues, Northern Ireland has never fully embraced, leaving old wounds to fester. Dave, gruff and cagey, counters that only his account is the truth, because the IRA is incapable of it.  The Honey Trap | Photograph: Courtesy Carol Rosegg Flashback to Belfast, 1979: Young Dave (Daniel Marconi), brimming with mercurial mischief, stumbles through boisterous drinking games with his affable comrade Bobby (Harrison Tipping). Two local women—Kirsty (Doireann Mac Mahon) and Lisa (Annabelle Zasowski)—enter the bar, the young men dial up the flirtation and a night of bawdy comedy spirals into catastrophe: Bobby is lured away and murdered, leaving Dave seared with lifelong guilt. More than three decades later,...

Theater review by Raven Snook Everywhere in Brian Watkins’s Weather Girl, the heat is on: Temperatures are rising, fire is spreading and local meteorologist Stacey Gross is the hottest mess on TV. The camera-ready California blonde, played rivetingly by Julia McDermott, spirals downward as the news gets worse, evolving from perky prognosticator to inconvenient-truth teller and crying in vain for help as she swigs Prosecco on air, shares a disturbingly despondent take on "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)" and grapples with her mommy issues after a childhood spent in foster care. She’s a disaster, and you can’t look away.  Weather Girl | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid Netflix has optioned this solo show for development, and it’s easy to see why. As a character study, Weather Girl sizzles. Watkins wrote the role of Stacey for McDermott, his offstage partner, and she is blazing in it: scary in her self-destructiveness but always sympathetic as she cracks up and cracks down. Director Tyne Rafaeli injects a sense of action by having McDermott—costumed by Rachel Dainer-Best in an appropriately pink and red ensemble—move around the spare set like a trapped animal, speaking into different mics as she channels various people she encounters in her long day's journey into blight. Kieran Lucas's heart-thumping sound design and Isabella Byrd's evocative lighting suggest the horrors inside Stacey’s head as well as those in the world outside. As an allegory of environmental apocalypse,...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  But is it art? That is the question, familiar to students of 20th-century aesthetics, that hangs at the center of the French playwright Yasmina Reza’s 1994 comedy of manners and men. Serge (Neil Patrick Harris) has paid a fortune for a large painting, by a celebrated artist named Antrios, that is almost totally white. His old friend Marc (Bobby Cannavale) is outraged by this purchase, which he considers a grave insult to common sense and, by extension, to his own good influence. Their perpetually flustered common pal Yvan (James Corden), caught in the middle, tries in vain to accommodate them both while retaining their love, as though mommy and daddy were getting a divorce.  Even in 1998, when Art debuted on Broadway, this framework was more than a little passé, rehearsing arguments about modern art that probably peaked around 1965. In the play’s current Broadway mounting, directed by Scott Ellis, those discussions seem even quainter—and all but irrelevant to the seismic gaps that have opened up in recent years. This iteration is ostensibly set in the U.S., so the francs of the original have been exchanged for dollars, but the names and the overall sensibility remain quite French (with a twist of British via Christopher Hampton’s translation). If you squint very hard, you may make out faint suggestions of contemporary American resonance—in Marc’s blustering contempt for elite tastes, for example, or Serge’s dismissal of him as a “nostalgia...

The British conjurer Jamie Allan (iMagician), a Houdini aficionado who has made his reputation by infusing newfangled technology and emotionally charged storyelling into old-school tricks, appears at New World Stages for a limited run. This latest showcase is directed by Jonathan Goodwin and co-created with Allan's longtime partner in illusions, Tommy Bond.    

Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More gave up the ghost last fall after 14 years, but fans of that immersive theatrical experience have a new show to tide them over: a smaller-scale work by Punchdrunk founder Felix Barrett that invites audience members to move barefoot through a labyrinthine installation inspired by Barry Pain’s 1901 gothic short story “The Moon-Slave," as adapted by the acclaimed British writer Daisy Johnson. Participants wear headphones and are guided through the 50-minute experience at the Shed via narration in the voice of Helena Bonham Carter. 

The boundary-busting comedian Natalie Palamides loves a high concept: She dressed as an egg for her first solo show, Laid, and donned hirsute dudebro drag for her astonishing follow-up, the toxic-masculinity lampoon Nate (which was filmed for a 2020 Netflix special). In Weer, which was a hit in Edinburgh last year, she takes he-said-she-said comedy to new extremes: Dividing herself down the middle through makeup and costume, she simultaneously plays both parts of the kind of young couple you might find in a 1990s romcom. The cherry on top: This production marks the official reopening of the Cherry Lane Theatre, a century-old Off Broadway landmark that has been closed for renovation since it was purchased by the film studio A24 in 2023.