Things to do in New York this Friday

The unassuming-looking but keenly incisive playwright Wallace Shawn's on-again, off-again 50-year collaboration with the director André Gregory has yielded, among other things, the fascinatingly unconventional films My Dinner with André and Vanya on 42nd Street and the dystopian 2000 masterpiece The Designated Mourner. They reunite for Shawn's newest work: a sharp-elbowed look at a successful writer and the effects of his self-indulgent lifestyle on his wife, their son and the writer's longtime mistress—played, respectively, by the very auspicious quartet of Josh Hamilton, Maria Dizzia, John Early and Hope Davis. (On select Sunday and Monday nights throughout the run, Shawn performs his dark 1991 monologue The Fever.)

Theater review by Adam Feldman  In times of tyranny, there can also be resistance, and in times of resistance, there is always Antigone. The title character of Sophocles’s ancient tragedy refuses to accept a decree by her uncle Creon, the king of Thebes, that the corpse of her rebellious brother should be left unburied for beasts to devour; and the unbending Creon, who thinks the young lady protests too much, confines her to die in a cave. This mythic tale continues to resonate, and it has now inspired two concurrent Off Broadway adaptations. The first of them, imported by the Shed after premiering at London's National Theatre, is Alexander Zeldin's The Other Place; the other play is Anna Ziegler’s Antigone (This Play I Read in High School), which hits the Public later this month.  Like Robert Icke in Oedipus and Simon Stone in Medea, writer-director Zeldin squeezes the old story into a mold of contemporary psychodrama. Creon is now Chris (Tobias Menzies), who has been working with his new wife, Erica (Lorna Brown), to renovate his late brother’s house; they have opened up the living room by knocking down one wall and installing sliding glass doors in another, filling a symbolically dark and secretive space with equally symbolic sunlight. He also plans to disperse his brother’s crematory ashes outdoors—a plan that does not sit well with his niece Annie (House of the Dragon’s Emma D’Arcy), a bisexual drifter who has gone off the grid and, apparently, her meds. Although...

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...

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  “A paranoid might be defined as someone who has some idea as to what is actually going on,” said William S. Burroughs in a 1970 interview. Viewed from the outside, it might seem that Peter (Pass Over’s Namir Smallwood), an itinerant Army veteran, is out of his mind when he talks about the infinitesimal aphids hiding in his body and transmitting surveillance data to the government. But he knows what he knows. He can see the tiny insects. He can feel the hum of the machines at night. He has been through the sinister experiments; he has learned of the Oosterbeek consortium. And while most people don’t believe him, at least one does: Agnes (the riveting Carrie Coon), a fortysomething divorcée who lives in a seedy motel on the edge of Oklahoma City. Others may dismiss Peter’s knowledge as a disease, but not Agnes. Agnes gets it.  Bug | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Tracy Letts’s engrossing and unsettling 1996 psycho-thriller Bug—which ran Off Broadway in 2004 and has now returned at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre—puts social contagion under the microscope with a mounting sense of dread. The lonely and isolated Agnes is especially vulnerable to Peter’s totalizing suspicion. She has good reason to be afraid: Her violent ex-husband, Jerry (Steve Key), has just been sprung from prison, and has made it clear that intends to get her back. She spends her free time emptying bottles of wine and snorting or freebasing coke with...

Hamilton: Theater review by David Cote What is left to say? After Founding Father Alexander Hamilton’s prodigious quill scratched out 12 volumes of nation-building fiscal and military policy; after Lin-Manuel Miranda turned that titanic achievement (via Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography) into the greatest American musical in decades; after every critic in town (including me) praised the Public Theater world premiere to high heaven; and after seeing this language-drunk, rhyme-crazy dynamo a second time, I can only marvel: We've used up all the damn words. Wait, here are three stragglers, straight from the heart: I love Hamilton. I love it like I love New York, or Broadway when it gets it right. And this is so right. A sublime conjunction of radio-ready hip-hop (as well as R&B, Britpop and trad showstoppers), under-dramatized American history and Miranda’s uniquely personal focus as a first-generation Puerto Rican and inexhaustible wordsmith, Hamilton hits multilevel culture buttons, hard. No wonder the show was anointed a sensation before even opening. Assuming you don’t know the basics, ­Hamilton is a (mostly) rapped-through biomusical about an orphan immigrant from the Caribbean who came to New York, served as secretary to General Washington, fought against the redcoats, authored most of the Federalist Papers defending the Constitution, founded the Treasury and the New York Post and even made time for an extramarital affair that he damage-controlled in a scandal-stanching...

Theater review by Adam Feldman Red alert! Red alert! If you’re the kind of person who frets that jukebox musicals are taking over Broadway, prepare to tilt at the windmill that is the gorgeous, gaudy, spectacularly overstuffed Moulin Rouge! The Musical. Directed with opulent showmanship by Alex Timbers, this adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 movie may be costume jewelry, but its shine is dazzling.  The place is the legendary Paris nightclub of the title, and the year is ostensibly 1899. Yet the songs—like Catherine Zuber’s eye-popping costumes—span some 150 years of styles. Moulin Rouge! begins with a generous slathering of “Lady Marmalade,” belted to the skies by four women in sexy black lingerie, long velvet gloves and feathered headdresses. Soon they yield the stage to the beautiful courtesan Satine (a sublimely troubled Karen Olivo), who makes her grand entrance descending from the ceiling on a swing, singing “Diamonds Are Forever.” She is the Moulin Rouge’s principal songbird, and Derek McLane’s sumptuous gold-and-red set looms around her like a gilded cage. After falling in with a bohemian crowd, Christian (the boyish Aaron Tveit), a budding songwriter from small-town Ohio, wanders into the Moulin Rouge like Orpheus in the demimonde, his cheeks as rosy with innocence as the showgirls’ are blushed with maquillage. As cruel fate would have it, he instantly falls in love with Satine, and she with him—but she has been promised, alas, to the wicked Duke of Monroth (Tam...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman [Related: An in-depth discussion of Ragtime with director Lear deBessonet on Time Out's theater podcast, Sitting Ovations.] A little-known fact about the anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman is that she dabbled in theater criticism. In a series of 1914 lectures, collected in book form as The Social Significance of Modern Drama, she assessed such writers as Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and Shaw through the lens of their revolutionary potential. Modern drama, she opined, “mirrors every phase of life and embraces every strata of society, showing each and all caught in the throes of the tremendous changes going on, and forced either to become part of the process or be left behind.” That is a good description, as it happens, of the 1998 musical Ragtime, which is being revived on Broadway by Lincoln Center Theater in a first-class production directed by Lear deBessonet and anchored by the superb actor-singer Joshua Henry. The show is a vast panorama of American life in the turbulent early years of the 20th century, as illustrated by the intersecting stories of three fictional families—those of a moneyed white businessman, a Jewish immigrant and a successful Black pianist—as well as a clutch of real-life figures from the period, including Goldman herself. It is hard to know what she would make of this grand musical pageant. Perhaps she would admire the production’s epic sweep, stirring score and excellent cast; perhaps she might shudder at the lavish...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Oliver (Darren Criss) is a Helperbot, and he can’t help himself. A shut-in at his residence for retired androids in a near-future Korea, he functions in a chipper loop of programmatic behavior; every day, he brushes his teeth and eyes, tends to his plant and listens to the retro jazz favored by his former owner, James (Marcus Choi), who he is confident will someday arrive to take him back. More than a decade goes by before his solitary routine is disrupted by Claire (Helen J Shen), a fellow Helperbot from across the hall, who is looking to literally connect and recharge. Will these two droids somehow make a Seoul connection? Can they feel their hearts beep? That is the premise of Will Aronson and Hue Park’s new musical Maybe Happy Ending, and it’s a risky one. The notion of robots discovering love—in a world where nothing lasts forever, including their own obsolescent technologies—could easily fall into preciousness or tweedom. Instead, it is utterly enchanting. As staged by Michael Arden (Parade), Maybe Happy Ending is an adorable and bittersweet exploration of what it is to be human, cleverly channeled through characters who are only just learning what that entails. Maybe Happy Ending | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman In a Broadway landscape dominated by loud adaptations of pre-existing IP, Maybe Happy Ending stands out for both its intimacy and its originality. Arden and his actors approach the material with a delicate touch; they...

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...