Things to do near the Empire State Building

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Ver-sigh. The biggest new musical of the fall arrives on a wave of high hopes, thanks to its promising main assets: music and lyrics by the veteran hitmaker Stephen Schwartz, in his first original Broadway score since Wicked; a starring role for Kristin Chenoweth, one of musical theater’s great leading ladies, as the Florida socialite Jackie Siegel, a walking symbol of American excess; the creative talents of director Michael Arden and set designer Dane Laffrey, who have been on quite a roll; and, in Lauren Greenfield’s 2012 documentary about the Siegel family, a source with rich potential for adaptation. Like the 90,000–square-foot, $100-million palace that the Siegels are determined to build for themselves in Orlando, The Queen of Versailles is nothing if not ambitious. But like that same palace, it also feels misguided and very much still under construction. The Queen of Versailles | Photograph: Julieta Cervantes The underlying problem is that QOV doesn’t have a clear POV. Greenfield’s film is always alert to the grotesque disconnect between the Siegels’ lives of wasteful extravagance and the financial struggles of the employees in their orbit, including the nannies who care for their eight children. It is also a cautionary tale: Midway through the movie, the financial crisis of 2008 pulls the ornate rug out from under the Siegels’ empire and plunges Jackie’s future into uncertainty. What happens to a trophy wife when the shelf...

Theater review by Raven SnookIn a moment of gaping political wounds and sores, a high-spirited musical comedy about Barack Obama may sound like a balm. Sadly, the overlong and tonally befuddled 44—written, directed and produced by TV writer Eli Bauman, who campaigned for Obama in Las Vegas as a young man—is often as much of a slog as the partisan idiocy it mocks. Joe Biden (a broad Chad Doreck, milking every possible laugh) intermittently narrates this unsharp satire, which traces the ups and downs of the first Black first family from Obama's inspiring speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention to his second inauguration. As Barack and Michelle, T.J. Wilkins and the mononymous Shanice smartly avoid impersonation and instead raise the spoof with powerhouse pipes, belting the hell out of Bauman's pastiche R&B score. Most of the songs sound so familiar that you can essentially hum along, but a few are bangers; there's a reason "M.F.O." (short for "Mutherfukin' Obama") is reprised so frequently. 44—The Musical | Photograph: Jenny Anderson Considering Obama's enemies were obsessed with his race, perhaps it's fitting that, as a parody, 44 is only skin deep; "How Black Is Too Black?" is about as profound as the show’s questions get. Most of the humor is of the lazily outrageous variety: Obama's nemeses, in cahoots with a cabal called W.H.A.M.—an acronym for White Hetero Affluent Men—include a villainous Mitch McConnell (Larry Cedar, making the most of his rap song), an...

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  Vulnerability comes hard to Ethan (Micah Stock), a blocked gay writer in his 30s. He is a wounded soul, prickly and sour, with a defensive armor forged from serial abandonment: by his mother, who left when he was a child; by his father, a meth addict; and by his aunt, Sarah (Laurie Metcalf), whom he resents for not having done more to help. Sarah is a fortress unto her own: a gristly nurse at the end of her career who has moved to a very small town to be alone. (“Just—suits me better. Not being around—people.”) But when the two wind up sharing a home during the 2020 Covid shutdown, their mutual tenderness grows as they tough it out, filling time and space that otherwise feel emptier than ever.  Little Bear Ridge Road | Photograph: Julieta Cervantes This is the universe of Samuel D. Hunter’s Little Bear Ridge Road, a gorgeous new drama whose touching central relationship coexists with a larger exploration of the intimate and cosmic. Hunter's clear-eyed portraits of pain and grace—including Greater Clements, Grangeville, The Few, The Harvest and The Whale—have consistently brightened Off Broadway seasons for the past 15 years. This production, directed with superb acerbity by Joe Mantello, marks the playwright's overdue Broadway debut, and it doesn’t disappoint. The play is a multifaceted gem, exquisitely shaped and cut, that shines out from the simplest of settings (designed by Scott Pask): a large greige recliner couch, set on a disc...

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,...

Rajiv Joseph, whose Guards at the Taj was a memorable exercise in historical gallows humor, takes an irreverent look at the short life of Gavrilo Princip, the teenage Serbian revolutionary whose 1914 assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand ignited the Balkan powder keg and triggered the first World War. >Darko Tresnjak (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder) directs the New York premiere for the Roundabout, with a cast that includes Jake Berne, Adrien Rolet, Jason Sanchez, the invaluable Kristine Nielsen and Broadway's favorite baddie, Patrick Page (Hadestown). 

[Note: The main review below is for the 2022 production of Oratorio for Living Things at Ars Nova. The update is for the show's 2025 encore run at the Signature Theatre.] Update:  I was nervous about revisiting Oratorio for Living Things, Heather Christian's singular and sonorous exploration of existence. What if Signature Theatre Company's remounting of Ars Nova's 2022 sensation didn't match my memories? I needn't have worried: This musical masterwork by the newly minted MacArthur genius is designed for repeated viewings. In sequences of meticulously curated cacophony that give way to glorious, enthralling harmonies, it offers a multitude of wonders and interpretations. You could see it again and again and again and come away with a different understanding at each performance. Aside from a few new singers and musicians, little beyond the venue has changed. A significant portion of the text is in Latin, and librettos are no longer handed out—audiences were absconding with them—so you can no longer follow along. But that's just as well, because Christian's creation demands full engagement. The more you let go of trying to make sense of it all, the more you'll be rewarded as the show grapples with unanswerable questions about how we spend our all-too-short time in the universe. Oratorio for Living Things remains a magnificent use of 90 minutes of that time. Original review:  Heather Christian's divine Oratorio for Living Things welcomes you to worship. To call this...

The Civilians, one of Off Broadway's most consistently searching and original troupes, joins forces with the Vineyard to present a new play written by Anne Washburn and directed by Steve Cosson. This duo's previous collaborations include 2013's mind-blowing Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play; this one, set in a self-isolated Northern California community, is tantalizingly described as a story about "a death, a pageant, a rescue, a resurrection, pigs, and the act of saying grace." Casting has not yet been announced.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Theater, they say, is the fabulous invalid, regaling visitors with tales of past glory as it sinks into its deathbed; conversation, they say, is another dying art. But don’t tell that to Bess Wohl’s Liberation, which has just moved to Broadway, with its exceptional cast intact, after a much-discussed run at the Roundabout earlier this year. A searching and revealing drama about the achievements and limits of 1970s feminism, Liberation weaves different kinds of conversation into a multilayered narrative—and, in doing so, serendipitously restores the very word conversation to its roots. As an adjective or noun, converse denotes opposition or reversal. As a verb, however, it stems from the Latin term conversare, which means “turning together.” In other words: Conversation may involve disagreement—and in Liberation, it often does—but it is not at its core adversarial. It’s literally about sharing a revolution.  Liberation | Photograph: Courtesy Little Fang The revolution in question here is second-wave feminism, the so-called “women’s lib” movement of the 1960s and 1970s that aimed to continue the advances toward sexual equality that had come earlier in the century. The play’s first level of conversation takes place over a period of years in the early 1970s in a smelly high school gym somewhere in the midwest. Lizzie (Susannah Flood)—a budding journalist whose editor won’t let her write anything but wedding announcements and obituaries, which...

The prolific David Cromer directs Talene Monahon's double-barreled satire, which looks at an Armenian-American family in two time periods: struggling to make it in the 1920s and then living in Kardashians-style hyperpublic luxury a century later. The cast of Second Stage's world premiere includes comic legend Andrea Martin, Susan Pourfar,Raffi Barsoumian, Nael Nacer, Tamara Sevunts and the frequent Cromer crony Will Brill (Stereophonic).