Things to do in New York this Saturday

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  This show is of a kind that I shall dub an operettical: A British-Broadway hybrid that is cleverly synthetical.It starts with operetta of the comical varietyThat Sullivan and Gilbert wrote to tickle high society.The Pirates of Penzance, a pageant witty and Victorian, Premiered in 1880 on our calendar Gregorian. It still is entertaining but perhaps not in a date-night way; It seems a bit too fusty for revival on the Great White Way. So Rupert Holmes has come along to pump some Broadway jazz in it:To add a little spice and put some Dixieland pizzazz in it.And thanks to these injections, neither rev’rent nor heretical,We now have Holmes’s model for a modern operettical.  Pirates! The Penzance Musical | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus Best known for Drood (and also for his hit “Piña Colada Song”), He hasn’t wrecked the story or egregiously forgot a song. But to ensure the whole endeavor’s jazzier and bluer leans, He takes the show from Cornwall and resets it down in New Orleans.The Crescent City’s sass and brass have quite rejuvenated it As Joe Joubert and Daryl Waters have reorchestrated it.(They’ve also added melodies that never here have been afore,On loan from Iolanthe, The Mikado and from Pinafore.) With silliness and energy the show is chockablock, well-set Amid the brightly colored NOLA streets of David Rockwell’s set. And now that we have looked at questions musico-aesthetical, We move on to the plot of this diverting operettical. ...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  More than a century has gone by since an unfortunate Kentucky spelunker named Floyd Collins, in search of money and glory, made national headlines by getting trapped in a subterranean cavern. “I just know it’s my lucky day!” sings Floyd—played by a hale and hearty Jeremy Jordan—irresistibly tempting the gods of dramatic irony as he grapples through the dark at the start of the musical bearing his name. “There’s a kind of awe / You can’t catch in a photograph,” he continues. “S’like a giant jaw / It’s calling me.” But when he heeds that call, the jaw snaps shut: A passageway collapses and he’s pinned there by debris, all but sealed in a cave of wonders where no amount of wishing can save him. From this point on, there is nowhere for Floyd Collins, or Floyd Collins, to go.  Floyd Collins | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus Musical theater tends to be dynamic, but Tina Landau, as a writer, seems more interested in stasis. In her new musical Redwood, which opened on Broadway in February, grief drives a woman up a tree; in Floyd Collins, which premiered in 1996, dreams strand a man underground. (Landau wrote the show’s book and additional lyrics, and directed its original production as well as its current one at Lincoln Center.) Both pieces examine a person fixed in place within a vast natural world, but in neither case is the central figure’s interior journey compelling enough to justify the lack of plot. What this one has that the other one...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  First things first: Just in Time is a helluva good time at the theater. It’s not just that, but that’s the baseline. Staged in a dazzling rush by Alex Timbers, the show summons the spirit of a 1960s concert at the Copacabana by the pop crooner Bobby Darin—as reincarnated by one of Broadway’s most winsome leading men, the radiant sweetie Jonathan Groff, who gives the performance his considerable all. You laugh, you smile, your heart breaks a little, you swing along with the brassy band, and you’re so well diverted and amused that you may not even notice when the ride you’re on takes a few unconventional turns.   Unlike most other jukebox-musical sources, Darin doesn’t come with a long catalogue of signature hits. If you know his work, it’s probably from four songs he released in 1958 and 1959: the novelty soap bubble “Splish Splash,” the doo-wop bop “Dream Lover” and two European cabaret songs translated into English, “Beyond the Sea” and “Mack the Knife.”  What he does have is a tragically foreshortened life. “Bobby wanted nothing more than to entertain, wherever he could, however he could, in whatever time he had, which it turns out was very little,” Groff tells us at the top of the show. “He died at 37.” Darin’s bum heart—so weak that doctors thought he wouldn’t survive his teens—is the musical’s countdown clock; it beats like a ticking time bomb.  Just in Time | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s agile...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Stranger Things is happening. Nearly three years after plans were announced for a theatrical prequel to Netflix’s hit nostalgia-horror series, and 18 months after the debut of that prequel in London, the show has finally arrived on Broadway. While it calls itself The First Shadow, there’s nothing dark or stealthy about the massive production that is now possessing the Marquis Theatre, a second-floor hotel auditorium built Poltergeist-style on the graves of five old venues that were razed to make way for the Marriott. There’s something apt, inevitable even, about Stranger Things taking over this accursed space. Like it or not: It’s heeeee-eeeere. Directed by Stephen Daldry and co-directed by Justin Martin, Stranger Things announces its maximalist style from the outset with an eye-popping interdimensional disaster. It is 1943, and the U.S.S. Eldridge—yes, a J.K. Rowling–level pun on eldritch—is the subject of a secret experiment by a government outpost that I regret to inform you is named “Project Rainbow base Marquis.” The goal is to make the Eldridge invisible, but instead it moves to a different plane, as though tearing through a timespace map of the known world. Here be dragons, or rather demogorgons: slinky monsters with faces that open like carnivorous flowers. The ship’s captain stares into the Abyss, and the Abyss stares back.  Stranger Things: The First Shadow | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman When this cold open ends,...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Elmer McCurdy wanted to be somebody. Born out of wedlock to a teenage mother in late-19th-century Maine, he grew up dreaming of infamy. (“I’m the outlaw Jesse James! Bang bang—!”) He got drunk, got in fights, moved out west; he joined a gang of Oklahoma train robbers, and he died in a shootout at the age 31. But that’s not where his story ended. McCurdy’s corpse got embalmed and wound up traveling the country as a ghoulish sideshow attraction. (“There’s something ‘bout a mummy that everybody needs.”) It changed hands for decades before landing in a California amusement-park ride, painted DayGlo red and hanging naked from a noose. In 1976, a crewman on TV’s The Six Million Dollar Man ripped an arm from it and only then discovered that this prop was once a man. Exactly which man it had been was by that point a mystery; by then it was just some body.  The weirder-than-fiction true story of McCurdy’s preservation and degradation is the subject of Dead Outlaw, a rowdy and darkly hilarious picaresque musical by the team behind 2016’s bittersweet The Band’s Visit: book writer Itamar Moses, songwriter David Yazbek (joined here by Erik Della Penna) and director David Cromer. These two shows couldn’t seem more different at first pass, but they share a deep curiosity and wry humanity; they embrace the complex and the unknown. “No one knows if it was cuz of that he started getting into trouble,” Dead Outlaw’s Bandleader (a perfectly gruff and rascally...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman Just when you think you’ve figured out what Broadway is throwing at you, along comes a late-breaking curveball. Real Women Have Curves is the final show of the 2024–25 season, and it really is a ball: a joyful night of music and celebration. In many ways, this is a traditional Broadway musical—energetic, melodious, familiarly constructed—that honors traditional American values like loving your family, helping your community and working tirelessly to succeed as an entrepreneur. But since most of its characters are undocumented Latina immigrants to Los Angeles, Real Women is also, unexpectedly, the most relevant musical of the year.  Inspired by Josefina López's 1990 play and its 2002 film adaptation, Real Women Have Curves is set in 1987, well before the recent anti-immigrant scourge of ICE storms. Ana (Tatianna Córdoba) is a bright young woman who has been accepted to Columbia University, but is afraid to tell that to her mother, Carmen (Justina Machado); as a natural born American citizen, Ana plays an essential role in navigating the law on behalf of the dressmaking business that her older sister, Estela (Florencia Cuenca), has started with the family’s life savings. Although she is confident about her brains, Ana is less secure about her heavyset body, and Carmen isn’t encouraging on either account. (“You know what your problem is? You’re too smart,” she says. “This is why she don’t got no boyfriend. This and maybe ten…fifteen pounds.”) ...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Smash, adapted from the non-hit TV series of the same name, begins with a canny feint. Its opening number is a fully staged song, “Let Me Be Your Star,” from Smash’s show-within-a-show, Bombshell, a Broadway biomusical about Marilyn Monroe. Robyn Hurder—as Ivy Lynn, the actress cast as Marilyn—sounds great singing it, and she hits all her marks as she rushes through the motions of the screen star’s best-known imagery: laying handprints at Grauman's, holding a white dress as it billows up around her, cooing “Happy Birthday” to JFK. Yet something is off; the number feels corny and busy. Doubts about Smash creep in: Is this supposed to be…good? But then the show’s focus pulls back, and we are in a fluorescent-lit studio where Bombshell is being rehearsed, and Bombshell’s director, Nigel—played, in full comic bloom, by Brooks Ashmanskas—has notes. “Is the tempo too bright?” (Yes.) “Are there too many bits?” (Yes.) Does our star have time to breathe?” (Not enough.) For a moment, you feel relief: Phew! They know. But knowingness, it turns out, is not the same as knowledge, and it certainly isn't power.  Smash | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy The TV version of Smash, which ran on NBC in 2012 and 2013, was a series that many theater fans loved to hate-watch. The same people who were grateful to see backstage-Broadway representation in mass culture at all were also highly sensitive to its potential for embarrassment, of which there was plenty....

There lived a certain man, in Russia long ago, who was big and strong (in his eyes, a flaming glow); most people looked at him with terror and with fear, but to Moscow chicks, he was such a lovely dear. We speak, of course, of the libertine faith healer Grigori "Rah Rah" Rasputin, the so-called mad monk who insinuated himself into the Romanov court in the waning years of imperial Russia until a conspiracy of aristocrats finally managed to have him killed. The female-led troupe Artemis Is Burning invites audiences—who are encouraged to wear black—to relive those heady days of decadence and treachery in an immersive performance in the atmospheric environs of Governors Island. Set Ashley Brett Chipman conceived the show and also directs it with former Sleep No More resident director Hope Youngblood, with assistance from Julia Sharpe; those three women also cowrote the script with David Campbell. James Finnemore is the choreographer. (The ticket price includes ferry trips to the island and back.) 

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  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 President Lincoln as “my foul and hateful wife,” this virago makes her entrance snarling and hunched with fury, desperate to find a...

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!"...