Things to do near the Empire State Building

The New Group's Scott Elliott directs a revival of Elmer Rice’s 1923 gimlet-eyed expressionist classic about the soul rot of conventionality, newly revised by the willfully perverse playwright-provocateur Thomas Bradshaw (Burning). Its antihero, Mr. Zero, is a craven, bigoted, sexually repressed number cruncher who is incapable of creative thought—a willing cog in the same social machinery that is grinding him to paste. The announced cast so far includes Jennifer Tilly, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Only Murders in the Building's Michael Cyril Creighton and And Just Like That… survivor Sarita Choudhury. 

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  [Note: Jinkx Monsoon plays the role of Mary Todd Lincoln through September 30, joined by new cast members Kumail Nanjiani, Michael Urie and Jenn Harris. Jane Krakowski assumes the central role on October 14.] Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! is not just funny: It is dizzyingly, breathtakingly funny, the kind of funny that ambushes your body into uncontained laughter. Stage comedies have become an endangered species in recent decades, and when they do pop up they tend to be the kind of funny that evokes smirks, chuckles or wry smiles of recognition. Not so here: I can’t remember the last time I saw a play that made me laugh, helplessly and loudly, as much as Oh, Mary! did—and my reaction was shared by the rest of the audience, which burst into applause at the end of every scene. Fasten your seatbelts: This 80-minute show is a fast and wild joy ride. Escola has earned a cult reputation as a sly comedic genius in their dazzling solo performances (Help! I’m Stuck!) and on TV shows like At Home with Amy Sedaris, Difficult People and Search Party. But Oh, Mary!, their first full-length play, may surprise even longtime fans. In this hilariously anachronistic historical burlesque, Escola plays—who else?—Mary Todd Lincoln, in the weeks leading up to her husband’s assassination. Boozy, vicious and miserable, the unstable and outrageously contrary Mary is oblivious to the Civil War and hell-bent on achieving stardom as—what else?—a cabaret singer.      Oh,...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant hits the current historical moment like a targeted strike. The play unfolds on a single afternoon, interrupted only by intermission, at the English country home of Roald Dahl. It is the summer of 1983, and the beloved children’s author has come under fire for his review of a book about Israel’s siege of West Beirut, in which Dahl opined of the Jews that “never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion.” Rosenblatt began writing his play in 2018, five years before the October 7 attacks that would prompt both a wave of Israeli military action and a spike in anti-Zionism that has often blurred with—or overtly embraced—antisemitism. Giant couldn’t be timelier: It arrives on Broadway in the same month as a new Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon.  The play’s topicality is only partially anesthetized by the historical distance that separates us from its story. Back at the Dahl house, the creator of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach—played superbly by master thespian John Lithgow—is examining the proofs of his latest project, The Witches, as those in his orbit try to convince him to apologize for his comments about the Jews or at least walk them back a bit. These include his flinty but gracious fiancée, Liccy (Rachael Stirling), and his accommodating British publisher,...

Manhattan Theatre Club continues its long and very fruitful relationship with the excellent playwright David Lindsay-Abaire (Kimberly Akimbo) by mounting the world premiere of his latest play: a comedy about a neighborhood association thrown into internecine turmoil when a newcomer suggests adding a stop sign to one of the local corners. The killer emsemble cast—directed by Kenny Leon (Purlie Victorious)—comprises Richard Thomas, Anika Noni Rose, Margaret Colin, Ricardo Chavira, Michael Esper, Maria-Christina Oliveras, Carl Clemons-Hopkins, Jeena Yi, Kayli Carter and the priceless Marylouise Burke. 

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The story of Chess dates back to the 1980s, and so do the efforts to fix it. This overheated Cold War musical, by lyricist Tim Rice and ABBA songsmiths Benny Anderson and Björn Ulvaeus, began as a 1984 concept album (which yielded the unlikely radio hit “One Night in Bangkok”). But its original London production was a mess, and its 1988 Broadway incarnation, which framed the songs in a completely new book, closed in under two months. The script has been reworked countless times since then, as different writers keep moving its pieces around, trying to solve the large set of Chess problems. None have cracked it yet, and the show’s latest revisal, with yet another completely new book, inspires little hope that anyone will.  Chess | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy “No one’s way of life is threatened by a flop,” sings the chorus in what is now the show’s opening number, and while that sentiment has a ring of wishful thinking here, it does speak to a certain strain of showtune culture. Many musicals that are not initially successful attract passionate fandoms—perhaps all the more passionate for their underdog spirit—and subsequent versions of such shows are sometimes markedly better (like the recent revival of Merrily We Roll Along or the charming current production of The Baker’s Wife). That is not the case with Chess. The production at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre, directed by Michael Mayer, has plenty of good moves. Memorable and tuneful...

Classic dance numbers from Broadway history return to life in a revue conceived by American Dance Machine's Nikki Feirt Atkins, who co-directs the show with Randy Skinner (who also contributes text and additional choreography). The lineup includes showstopppers from West Side Story, A Chorus Line, Pippin, Singin’ in the Rain, White Christmas, Contact, Gypsy, An American in Paris, The Act, Bubbling Brown Sugar and more, by dance makers including Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, Susan Stroman, Stanley Donen, Christopher Wheeldon and Gene Kelly.    TIME OUT DISCOUNT TICKET OFFER:GOTTA DANCE!Celebrating the best of Broadway and Hollywood dance Save up to 35% on select tickets Promotional description: Riki Kane Larimer presents Gotta Dance!—the first dance production to capture the original choreography of classic musicals including West Side Story, Singin’ in the Rain, A Chorus Line, Pippin and others, all on one stage. This extraordinary musical, conceived by Nikki Feirt Atkins of American Dance Machine and originally produced at the York Theatre Company, pays tribute to the brilliant work of Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, Billy Wilson and others. Experience the movement, music and magic that has defined generations of Broadway and Hollywood dance and continues to inspire audiences today by preserving the work of some of our greatest choreographers. Gotta Dance! embodies true Broadway history. THREE WAYS TO BUY  TICKETS:1. Online: Click here (or visit Telecharge and...

Theater review by Adam Feldman  [Related: An in-depth discussion of Masquerade wth director Diane Paulus on Time Out's theater podcast, Sitting Ovations.] 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 altered 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,...

Review by Adam Feldman  The low-key dazzling Speakeasy Magick has been nestled in the atmospheric McKittrick Hotel for more than a year, and now it has moved up to the Lodge: a small wood-framed room at Gallow Green, which functions as a rooftop bar in the summer. The show’s dark and noisy new digs suit it well. Hosted by Todd Robbins (Play Dead), who specializes in mild carnival-sideshow shocks, Speakeasy Magick is a moveable feast of legerdemain; audience members, seated at seven tables, are visited by a series of performers in turn. Robbins describes this as “magic speed dating.” One might also think of it as tricking: an illusion of intimacy, a satisfying climax, and off they go into the night. The evening is punctuated with brief performances on a makeshift stage. When I attended, the hearty Matthew Holtzclaw kicked things off with sleight of hand involving cigarettes and booze; later, the delicate-featured Alex Boyce pulled doves from thin air. But it’s the highly skilled close-up magic that really leaves you gasping with wonder. Holtzclaw’s table act comes to fruition with a highly effective variation on the classic cups-and-balls routine; the elegant, Singapore-born Prakash and the dauntingly tattooed Mark Calabrese—a razor of a card sharp—both find clever ways to integrate cell phones into their acts. Each performer has a tight 10-minute act, and most of them are excellent, but that’s the nice thing about the way the show is structured: If one of them happens to...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The scrappy British musical Operation Mincemeat, the comic tale of a military spy plot in World War II, has arrived to storm the shores of Broadway with plenty of backup. Critics in the U.K. have loved it; it has been billed as “the best-reviewed show in West End history”—Time Out London’s own Andrzej Lukowski called it “a glorious spoof”—and it won the 2024 Olivier Award for Best New Musical. The show is the debut offering of a young comedy-theater troupe called SpitLip, which has been performing variations of it since 2019, and local critics were clearly rooting for it. (“It’s really hard to be anything but delighted for the company,” wrote Lukowski. “This is very much their triumph.”) Perhaps, in riding this wave of praise to Broadway, the production has lost some of what made the operation itself an unlikely success in 1943: the element of surprise.  Operation Mincemeat | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes Like Six, the show is an irreverent look at English history, devised by university chums, that worked its way up from the Edinburgh Fringe to the West End; like Dead Outlaw, which will also open on Broadway this season, it features a small cast playing multiple roles, and centers on the unusual use of a human corpse. In this case, the subject is the real-life Operation Mincemeat, which also inspired a 2022 film drama of the same name: a bold ruse, devised by the intelligence agency MI5, to plant false intelligence on the body of...

The formidable duo of Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I'd Kick You) and Kelli O'Hara (Days of Wine and Roses) play married ladies who booze it up as they await the arrival of a shared French paramour from their rather scandalous single days in a rare revival of this early comedy by the paradigmatic Brit wit Noël Coward. Roundabout Theatre Company's interim artistic director, Scott Ellis (Pirates!), oversees the naughty fun.