Things to do in New York this Friday

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. 

Broadway review by Raven Snook It is 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, and an 11th-grade honors English class in small-town Georgia is studying The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s classic drama about the Salem witch trials. Their popular and engaging teacher is Mr. Smith (Gabriel Ebert), who sparks many a teenage crush. Goofy, empathetic, devout and married with a baby on the way, he's supportive of the girls in his class; in fact, when they decide to start a feminist club, it's Mr. Smith—not their inexperienced and fainthearted female guidance counselor, Miss Gallagher (Molly Griggs)—who champions the idea. He’s an ally, a friend and a sounding board: in other words, a good guy.   But who gets to be called a good guy—and, conversely, who gets called a bad girl? That’s the subject of John Proctor Is the Villain, Kimberly Belflower’s explosive response to sexism on and beyond the stage. The play’s fuse is lit by Shelby (Sadie Sink), a student who returns to school after leaving it abruptly months earlier in a cloud of gossip and rumor. As the alleged sexual misconduct of multiple men in their rural community comes to light, Shelby encourages her peers to challenge the conventional view of The Crucible’s protagonist, John Proctor, as a hero. In Miller’s allegory of McCarthyism, Proctor stands for integrity and honor: "How may I live without my name?” he asks when refusing to give the false confession that could save his life. “I have given you my soul; leave me my name!"...

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.    

The Phantom of the Opera ended its 35-year Broadway run in 2023, but you can't keep a masked man down for long. The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical—adapted by the composer and Richard Stilgoe from Gaston Leroux's 1910 horror novel, and featuring lyrics mostly by Charles Hart—is already somehow here again, and in a surprising new form: an immersive experience, à la Sleep No More, in which audiences are led en masque through multiple locations in a complex designed to evoke the 19th-century Paris Opera House where soprano Christine Daaé is tutored and stalked by a serial killer who lives in the basement. Six groups of 60 spectators at a time enter at staggered 15-minute intervals; each group gets its own Phantom and Christine, but the other roles are played by one to four actors each; to help sustain the atmosphere, audience members must wear black, white or silver cocktail or formal attire—and, hopefully, comfortable shoes. (Masks are provided for those who do not bring their own.) Don't expect the same old Phantom: This version has been heavily streamlined and rearranged to fit its new form, and material about the Phantom's history has been added. Director Diane Paulus (Pippin), who kick-started the immersive-theater trend with 1999's The Donkey Show, oversees an extremely complicated system of simultaneous performances. The cast includes Hugh Panaro, Jeff Kready, Telly Leung, Nik Walker, Kyle Scatliffe, Clay Singer, Kaley Ann Voorhees, Anna Zavelson, Betsy Morgan, Raymond J....

Since the death of Don Rickles in 2017, Jeff Ross has been insult comedy’s top banana. His most famous running gig, throwing barbed one-liners as the host of celebrity roasts at the Friar’s Club and eventually on Comedy Central, has earned him the sobriquet “Roastmaster General.” He has even come to resemble Rickles a bit in recent years; his frame is thick, and a wide mouth dominates his thumblike head. (As a result of alopecia, he is bald as a ping-pong ball except for a scraggly mustache.) But a typical Rickles set found him humorously savaging his audience with brief interludes of sentimentality and an envoi to assure the crowd that it was all in loving fun and he was actually a mensch—whereas Ross, in his Broadway solo show Take a Banana for the Ride, turns that structure inside out. If you’ve come to be insulted, you’ll have to wait: The first 80 minutes are the sweetie part, and only at the end does he walk down the aisles to skewer volunteers on the fly.  Ross avoids the ethnic stereotyping typical of Rickles—and his contemporary Jackie Mason, whose shows were a staple of Broadway from the 1980s through the 2000s—except when it comes to himself. Take a Banana for the Ride is explicitly grounded in Ross’s Jewishness, which he credits in part with his penchant for jokes. (“My real last name is Lipshultz,” he says. “‘That’s an old Hebrew word that means, ‘Hey, you oughta change that.’”) He was a black-belt karate kid, but he quickly learned that humor could also be...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  [Note: Tituss Burgess takes over the role of Mary Todd Lincoln starting June 23, followed by Jinkx Monsoon starting August 4.] 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, Mary! | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid  Described by the long-suffering...

Start your weekend off right at Time Out Market New York’s stunning rooftop! Starting September 6, Friday Night Vibes gets the party going on the fifth floor at 7pm with tunes from DJ Stretch (on the first and third Friday of every month) and DJ Price Is Right (on the second and fourth Friday). Dance the night away with specialty cocktails from the Market’s awesome bar and grab bites from one of two dozen kitchens including, Jacob’s Pickles, Bark Barbecue and Wayla. Enjoy it all to the incredible views of the East River, the NYC skyline and the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.  We’ll see you there!

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  If last week’s box-office tallies are any indication, Broadway audiences really want their mommy. The national tour of Mamma Mia! has just set up camp (or at least kitsch) at the Winter Garden Theatre, where the show’s original production ran for 14 years, and in the first week of its scheduled sixth-month engagement it outgrossed every other show except fellow marathon runners The Lion King, Wicked and Hamilton. This show, the mother of all jukebox musicals, is nothing if not familiar—and in this case, familiarity breeds contentment. Comfort has always been central to this show’s appeal. Mamma Mia! is constructed around nearly two dozen 1970s Europop bops by the Swedish megagroup ABBA, including “Dancing Queen,” “Super Trouper” and “Take a Chance on Me”: all the ABBA songs you love plus a few others you probably don’t have strong feelings about one way or the other. (Of the 19 tracks on the greatest-hits album ABBA Gold, the only one missing here is “Fernando,” which was sliced from an early draft.) These songs—written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, sometimes with help from Stig Anderson—are easy to swallow and hard to resist, with infectious melodies and lyrics that are, shall we say, direct: Their titles include "Honey, Honey," "Money, Money, Money," "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" and "I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do."  Mamma Mia! | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus But while Mamma Mia! originally inspired warm fuzzies for its score, it now...

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...

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...