The 2025-2026 Broadway season started slowly then accelerated into its usual pileup, as a dozen or so shows jockeyed to open for awards consideration and summer dollars. My group, the Drama Desks, celebrated its 70th anniversary with nominations that saluted the best of everything where New York theater was concerned; the winners will be announced on May 17. And then, on June 7, it’s Tony time, with nominations revealed next week.
Excellent new plays like The Balusters and fine play and musical revivals picked up some of the slack but a standout season for new musicals it was not. I think what happened is that a backlog of shows caused by the pandemic has ended and the economics of producing big, splashy “tuners” that may never pay off in changed times has gripped investors…that is, until the next big thing comes along. But that wasn’t on the cards this season. Instead we got the Broadway debut of the well-traveled Celine Dion burlesque Titanique, which has had a few ports of call before berthing at the St. James. It’s a very…gay, evening, gay gay gay as it feasts on the movie and the earnest, tightly controlled persona of the singer (hilariously incarnated by co-author and Drama Desks host Marla Mindelle), who tells us what really went down (in every sense) the night Titanic went down and spoof-sings about a billion songs in between shtick from Jim Parsons (in full drag as Rose’s domineering mother, with dead birds stuck to his hair) and a cast of cut-ups (including Deborah Cox, a ribald Molly Brown and a former Dion backup singer). Some of the humor, improvised from the headlines (Bryon Noem jokes just as his colorful shenanigans emerged), went over the head of my 15-year-old son; some of the gayest stuff went over mine (Bowen Yang is aboard as a producer). But we intersected with the “Luigi” gags, laughed a lot, and learned a few things.
Speaking of gay (and L, B, T, and Q), The Rocky Horror Show is back, a half-century since the Picture Show and about 25 years after its last Broadway revival, when I was…well, younger. My theory about the movie’s cultdom is that the famed audience participation is a kind of tough love, whipped up by fans who revere the cast and songs to keep the pace from flagging amidst the slack direction and editing. My recollection of the last revival is that it could have used some ad-libbing despite best efforts by the performers; here it’s built in, with the audience directed to call out at certain moments. It’s fun (been a long time since I did that at the movie) but under the assured and inventive direction of Sam Pinkleton (of the comedy smash Oh, Mary!) it’s only really necessary during the draggy first half of the second act, before the “floor show” kicks the ghoulish mayhem back into high gear. I loved the bright, day-glo colors throughout the theater and scenic designer dots’ mix of Euro sci-fi, Flaming Creatures, and Pee-wee’s Playhouse for the overall aesthetic, delightfully different from the usual mock Goth. And the cast, sensational: Stephanie Hsu as “slut” Janet, Andrew Durand as “asshole” Brad, an unrecognizable Amber Gray as Riff Raff, Broadway debutante and always sui generis Juliette Lewis as you’ve somehow never seen her before as Magenta…not a weak link in the bunch, as narrator Rachel Dratch referees. Still, you don’t have a Rocky Horror unless you have a Frank-n-Furter, and in the sensational Luke Evans, you have one for the ages. Incredible. He parties like it’s 1977 at Studio 54 and I’ll retain happy memories until I time warp back to the next go-round, when I’m 85.
While on the subject of monsters, let me say that I never miss a vampire musical. Dance of the Vampires, Dracula: The Musical, Lestat–once upon a time Broadway was crawling with them, flops though they were. A modest theatrical hit in the summer of 1987 The Lost Boys doesn’t have much of a cult but it does have period hair, costumes, and attitude, and nostalgia for all that fuels this uneven but occasionally successful stage translation, mostly in its first act. Overall it’s as much indebted to Broadway’s Stranger Things: The First Shadow (family trauma, special effects) and The Outsiders (teens longing to fit in and belong, indie rock tunes by The Rescues) as it is to its source, a bloodsucking Peter Pan set on the California coast. Ali Louis Bourzgui, star of The Who’s Tommy, “does” Kiefer Sutherland but brings his own charisma to the part as he hexes new arrivals to the town and the vamp (not yet vampire) Star (Maria Wirries, much better than the movie’s wan Jami Gertz); the “lost boys” are sometimes a hair band, which works in the context. The motorcycle and bridge setpieces are cleverly transposed from the film and the flying sequences (pictured) are moodily spectacular, generating spooky enchantment throughout the cavernous Palace. A shame that the book follows the silly script into the second act (and adds a “post-credits scene” to boot). That’s enough, however, to make it the best of its kind, low bar though that it is. And the gifted Shoshana Bean, as the concerned mother of the two teens caught in the dark web of deceit, has some roof-raising songs–it’s not really her character’s show but her presence keeps this vampire musical from, umm, “sucking” too bad.
Changing gears! Emmy-winning stars of The Bear are on spring break in Broadway and not having an easy time of it. David Auburn’s Proof won all the prizes when it premiered and with its twists and insights into damaged souls is a quintessential Well-Made Play, at least the first time you see it. But it hasn’t aged well, and needs a performer with the stage skills and enigma of original lead Mary-Louise Parker to pull it off. Ayo Edebiri will improve during the run but she isn’t there yet, more depressed and irritable than fascinatingly off-center. (It’s her Broadway debut, along with Don Cheadle’s as her father, a mathematician fallen into schizophrenia whose absence the apparently underachieving Edebiri can’t handle in their fading Chicago home.) Maybe it’s the age thing again but I felt more sympathy for Cheadle’s concerned elder daughter, forcefully portrayed by Kara Young; I realize now she’s right on a lot of things, pushiness aside. (And maybe because she’s more comfortable up there at the Booth; I’d like to see her as the unbalanced Catherine.)
Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (pictured) shout their way through the screen-to-stage Dog Day Afternoon, which gives you nothing you can’t get from Sidney Lumet’s classic 1975 movie, the story of a Brooklyn bank robbery that spirals into a hostage situation. Nothing, that is, unless you’ve yearned for some backstory about John Cazale’s scarily quiet Sal (to share the billing and satisfy TV viewers Moss-Bachrach yaps away) or wanted more from the head teller, who as played by Jessica Hecht is practically a co-lead, hectoring the guys then offering her support. Adaptor Stephen Adly Guirgis is a brilliant playwright but he’s banging his typewriter against a brick wall here, only finding new insight into the material in the second act, when Leon (Esteban Andres Cruz, excellent here and in the playwright’s Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven), the trans lover of Bernthal’s Sonny and the reason for all the hurlyburly, pipes up. A ‘bro show” suddenly acquires a different, more intriguing flavor, if only for a few minutes. (Note, though, that for all my gripes the production, from which Guirgis was barred from the August Wilson for three days as it was locked, is a hit. Go figure.)
The documentary-to-stage The Fear of 13 spotlights a more riveting star turn by another Broadway neophyte, two-time Oscar winner Adrien Brody, as death row inmate Nick Yarris, fighting for his freedom after a lifetime of bad choices and inept schemes with the help of prisoner aid volunteer Tessa Thompson (fine in a more reactive part, and also new to Broadway, though in some ways this is more of a one-person show with other people). For knockabout farce Rose Byrne and Kelli O’Hara AbFab their way through Noel Coward’s slight, sleek and stylish Fallen Angels, superb entertainment. But I leave you with Death of a Salesman. It’s not that long ago that I saw Philip Seymour Hoffman, then Wendell Pierce, in Arthur Miller’s masterpiece. I wasn’t keen on seeing Nathan Lane, Laurie Metcalf, Christopher Abbott, and Ben Ahlers in Joe Mantello’s latest staging. It wasn’t them; their work is brilliant, as are the supporting performances (K. Todd Freeman is a standout as Charley, Willie Loman’s friend) and the gray, industrial, timeless design by all the artisans, with that insinuating car representing all of Willy Loman’s battered dreams and forebodings. It’s just that, at Willy’s age (again!), I was reluctant to scale the mountaintop of 20th century American playwriting one more time. It’s a hazardous climb into our collective psyche–but if they’re going to do it seven times a week at the Winter Garden, I should at least make the voyage once. Off I went, and it was brutal; Miller spares us nothing. You should leave feeling shattered, your senses dynamited. I did.
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