July '26 Digital Week III

4K/UHD Releases of the Week 

The Crying Game 

(Criterion Collection)

Neil Jordan’s best film is brilliantly directed and written (he won the 1992 Oscar for best original screenplay), starting out as a thriller, then shifting gears into a tentative romance until becoming a quasi-mystery for its startling finish. All these disparate parts are melded into a seamless whole by Jordan, who combines standard plot elements with refreshing twists and psychologically acute characterizations and motivations as well as uncannily juggling disparate moods and rhythms. And let’s not forget the estimable acting by Stephen Rea, Forrest Whittaker, Natasha Richardson and Jaye Davidson, right down to the smallest parts. Criterion’s UHD transfer superbly accentuates Ian Watson’s tangy cinematography; extras are Jordan’s 2005 commentary, new interviews with Jordan and Rea, 2005 making-of documentary and an alternate ending with Jordan’s commentary.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy 

(Warner Bros)

For 135 messy minutes, writer-director Lee Cronin slogs through several excruciatingly insipid storylines that tie standard mummy legend to obscure Egyptian mythmaking and, of all things, demonic possession films, especially The Exorcist, which could sue for defamation. Sequence after limp sequence marches in front of the camera, and it’s all sadly risible—and the end threatens a sequel. Including his name in the title is quite the flex, as if anyone else would want to take credit. The film does look impressive in UHD; extras comprise Cronin’s commentary, deleted scenes and three making-of featurettes.

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

The Floaters 

(Brainstorm Media)

Director Rachel Israel and a cohort of writers concocted this genial comedy set in a Jewish summer camp that brings together former besties Nomi and Mara, who attended as kids; Nomi takes a job as a counselor from camp director Mara after being kicked out of her own rock band and is told to supervise the “floaters,” camp kids considered misfits. Those who are familiar with—or attended—summer camps might get more laughs and nods of recognition from this, but it is certainly likable, especially when the floaters unsurprisingly win over their critics, and nicely-acted by Jackie Tohn (Nomi), Sarah Podemski (Mara) and Judah Lewis, Nina Bloomgarden and Jake Ryan as the head floaters. 

Hadestown 

(Bleecker Street Media) 

Orpheus and Eurydice have been fodder for artists for centuries, but this musical—which opened on Broadway in 2019—by book writer-lyricist-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, isn’t a patch on Offenbach or Cocteau. Set in a Depression-era burg that recalls the French Quarter, the show at times spits out the swampy, jazzy Big Easy sounds; at its most original, Mitchell’s music grooves robustly. The men (Orpheus, Hades and Hermes) have more to work with vocally than the women (Eurydice and Persephone). That’s no slight on Eva Noblezada and Amber Gray, who sound comfortable in their middle range, but the male leads’ voices—Reeve Carney’s high tenor, Patrick Page’s rumblingly low bass and ageless Andre de Shields in between—go on a more satisfying vocal ride. Although Mitchell’s derivative music, lyrics and book don’t come close to their mythical forebears, director Rachel Chavkin makes the show move, literally—a trio of onstage turntables, combined with Rachel Hauck’s seedy set, Michael Krauss’s sober costumes and Bradley King’s savvy lighting, conjures a sweaty musical purgatory.  

Night Nurse 

(IFC Midnight)

Writer-director Georgia Bernstein’s glossy drama about Eleni, a young nurse at a retirement home who becomes entangled in a sordid emotional and criminal relationship with Douglas, one of her elderly patients, tries to be so many things at once—erotic thriller, crime drama, psychological character study—that it ends up flailing unsatisfactorily. As Bernstein loses control, the film’s moodiness becomes a liability, as scenes of Eleni and Douglas in various stages of their mutually harmful kinship start to become perfunctory and dull—even a surprising murder seems more a desperate way to end things. On the plus side, Cemre Paksoy gives a commanding performance as the needy Eleni and Bruce McKenzie is nearly as good as the dementia-addled but virile Douglas.

CD Releases of the Week

Ottorino Respighi—Chamber Music 

(Brilliant Classics)

Italian composer Ottorino Respighi’s prodigious and impressive output has been reduced over the decades to his best-known orchestral tone poems like Pines of Rome and Fountains of Rome; as this excellent disc shows, Respighi was much more than his most popular works. (He even composed several flavorful operas.) The DaVinci Ensemble plays two of Respighi’s string quartets and the masterly F-minor piano quintet—with an assurance that showcases the composer’s characteristic melodic sense and musical structure.

John Williams/Bernard Herrmann—Orchestral Works 

(Pentatone)

John Williams and Bernard Herrmann were two of the greatest film composers—Williams’ long collaboration with Steven Spielberg is equaled by Herrmann’s with Alfred Hitchcock—so this disc, comprising concert works by both composers, is an intriguing left turn. Williams’ Essay for Strings (1965) and Concerto for Flute, Strings and Percussion (1969) contain the attractive melodies and ear-catching rhythms associated with his later film scores. Herrmann’s 1967 Clarinet Quintet (subtitled Souvenirs de Voyage), adapted by Hans Sorensen for clarinet and string orchestra, is a pensive late work. The soloists (flutist Jin Ta and clarinetist Ma Yue) and Singapore Symphony Orchestra under conductors Darrell Ang and Joshua Tan play with sensitivity to both composers.

Broadway Play Review—David Auburn’s “Proof” with Ayo Edebiri and Don Cheadle

Proof

Written by David Auburn; directed by Thomas Kail

Performances through July 19, 2026

Majestic Theater, 245 West 44th Street, NYC

proofbroadway.com

Kara Young and Ayo Edebiri in Proof (photo: Matthew Murphy)

David Auburn’s Proof—which won pretty much every award after its 2000 premiere—is the rare play that tackles complex issues accessibly but intelligently. Very funny and profoundly moving in its examination of the fraught intersection between genius and mental imbalance, Proof centers on Catherine, who dropped out of college to care for her beloved father, the mathematical wizard and esteemed professor Robert. Auburn shrewdly opens his play with a witty but thoughtful scene between daughter and father, where we discover the layers of their knotty relationship as well as the fact that he has recently died. 

Catherine navigates complicated feelings about her father as Hal, a young professor whom Robert mentored, is in the house going through the voluminous papers Robert left behind; and Claire, her pragmatic older sister who wants to take Catherine back to New York to start a new life away from Chicago, has arrived for the funeral. Although Catherine has inherited her father’s math genius, when Hal discovers a brilliantly argued proof among the papers, he assumes it’s Robert’s and hesitates to believe Catherine when she says it’s hers. For her part, Claire tends to share Hal’s skepticism. 

When Proof premiered a quarter-century ago, Mary Louise Parker played Catherine with her usual effortless mastery, by turns depressed and buoyant, ironical and sentimental. Surprisingly—or maybe unsurprisingly, considering it’s Hollywood—in the 2005 screen adaptation, Parker was bypassed for Gwyneth Paltrow, whose paltry portrayal irrevocably damaged the film. 

In Thomas Kail’s absorbing new production, Ayo Edebiri plays Catherine quite differently than Parker and Paltrow but is happily closer to the former. Edebiri is less obviously assertive than Parker was, but her bemused, Zen-like calm is another valid way to show Catherine dealing with both her father’s legacy and the possibility that she may have inherited both his genius and his madness. Don Cheadle is a charmingly low-key Robert, Kara Young reins in her innate dazzlingness to make Claire a practical but smothering sister, and Jin Ha’s Hal amusingly fumbles about while revering Robert’s legacy and falling in love with Catherine. 

Kail’s sturdy direction is fortified by Amanda Zieve’s canny lighting, Justin Ellington and Connor Wang’s clever sound design and Theresa L. Williams’ colorful set design. But centering it all is David Auburn’s foolproof script, which is mathematical in design but humane in execution.

Broadway Musical Review—“Beaches” with Kelli Barrett and Jessica Vosk

Beaches

Book by Iris Rainer Dart and Thom Thomas

Music by Mike Stoller, lyrics by Iris Rainer Dart

Directed by Lonny Price, co-directed by Matt Cowart

Opened April 22, 2026

Majestic Theater, 245 West 44th Street, NYC

beachesthemusical.com

Kelli Barrett in Beaches (photo: Marc J. Franklin)

Most people remember Beaches as the aggressively sentimental 1988 movie starring Bette Midler. But it was originally a novel by Iris Rainer Dart, who cowrote the book and lyrics for the Broadway musical version based on her book, not the film. Whether this was to avoid comparisons with the beloved screen tearjerker or not, the result is stilted and mawkish.

Beaches follows the lifelong friendship of extroverted Cee Cee Bloom and introverted Bertie White (Hillary in the movie) from the time they meet cute as kids on an Atlantic City beach until the moment Cee Cee drops her show-biz career to look after Bertie when she falls deathly ill. If the movie relied on Midler’s charisma and Barbara Hershey’s weepiness, the musical doesn’t do enough with its two stars. Jessica Vosk plays Cee Cee to the hilt, but she’s been directed to storm around like Midler, even though in interviews she has said she’s definitely not doing that.  

Then there’s Kelli Barrett, one of our most winning and talented musical actresses, who plays Bertie. After making a superb Sherrie in the Off-Broadway musical Rock of Ages, Barrett was bypassed when the show first went to Broadway and then was made into a movie. Since then, she’s been in duds like Getting the Band Back Together and Doctor Zhivago. But Barrett is a trooper, and she makes Bertie a far more complete character than she deserves to be. The performers who play Cee Cee and Bertie as young girls (Samantha Schwartz and Zeya Grace) and teenagers (Bailey Ryon and Emma Ogea) are solid, and the number where all three pairs of friends are together onstage—“Show the World Who You Are”—is the most appealing in the entire show. Otherwise, the co-direction of Lonny Price and Matt Cowart is as uninspired as the lazily minimal sets by James Noone.

Beaches could have been a jukebox musical, since the movie was crammed with period-specific pop songs; instead, Dart has written lyrics for a bunch of unmemorable songs to which vet Mike Stoller has supplied routine melodies. The elephant in the theater is the soaring ballad “Wind Beneath My Wings,” which became a Midler concert staple after it went to number one on the charts in 1989. But it’s used here in the most middling (or Midlering) way: after Bertie’s offstage death (poor Barrett doesn’t even get a good dying scene!), it’s the obvious 11 o’clock number—but since it seems so obviously tacked on, it doesn’t have the emotional weight as it should. 

Botching its biggest hit is an “oof” moment for a show with more than a few of them. On that score, Beaches ends up out of tune.

Broadway Play Review—“Dog Day Afternoon”

Dog Day Afternoon

Written by Stephen Adly Guirgis

Directed by Rupert Goold

Performances through June 28, 2026

August Wilson Theatre, 245 West 52nd Street, New York, NY

dogdayafternoon.com

John Ortiz (center) in Dog Day Afternoon (photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

There are several problems with the stage adaptation of Dog Day Afternoon, the classic 1975 film directed by Sidney Lumet with Al Pacino as bungling bank robber Sonny centering a richly and blackly comic portrait of New York in 1972. The biggest flaw is that the flavorful New York atmosphere of which Lumet was a master is almost completely missing. 

Of course, that’s because the stage cannot replicate what Lumet could show: a Brooklyn neighborhood where dozens of police and reporters—including news helicopters—and hundreds of locals showed up. In the film, the crowd is another character, hooting and hollering, at first cheering on Sonny—who exhorts them to yell “Attica!” to mock the police (mere months after prisoners there were killed during rioting)—before turning on him as the day drags on and it comes out that he needs money for his partner Leon’s gender-reassignment surgery. The “Attica” moment becomes the big first-act finale, with the audience taking over as the Brooklyn crowd while Sonny yells out those three syllables, which isn’t a very compelling replacement.

Otherwise, the play is well-staged by Rupert Goold on David Korins’ terrific set of the bank’s interior and exterior, which swings adroitly back and forth depending on wherever we are in the scene. But aside from sound effects that blast “New York” to the audience, the authenticity of early ’70s Brooklyn is absent. Stephen Adly Guirgis has written plays that drip with the exciting if sordid atmosphere of New York City that’s not usually captured elsewhere, like his Pulitzer Prize-winning Between Riverside and Crazy, so he might have seemed a logical choice for Dog Day. 

His dialogue has the usual rat-a-tat of the city; even though large chunks come from Frank Pierson’s Oscar-winning screenplay, lots of other dialogue is new to the show. Guirgis even invents an amusing scene of a TV reporter talking to a gay-rights advocate after the disclosure of Sonny’s and Leon’s relationship, but this seems shoehorned in. But perhaps a few more such moments would have better taken the pulse of snarky local press coverage and local people’s reactions.

Guirgis too often coasts, though, as cheap humor prevails over incisive dialogue. Even outing Sonny to the others in the bank is played for laughs, which seems rather ironic in this context. Guirgis even changes the name of the cop in charge from Moretti (played so memorably by Charles Durning in the movie) to Fucco, which occasions repetitive mispronunciations of his name as Fucko. It’s to John Ortiz’s credit that, as Fucco, he gives the most sympathetic and well-rounded portrayal in the show. 

Lumet also had Al Pacino, John Cazale and Chris Sarandon to further make this tragicomic tale riveting and unforgettable. Onstage, Jon Bernthal tries so hard not to act like Pacino that he ends up doing it anyway as Sonny; as his partner in crime Sal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach is as effectively low-key as Cazale was, but in his own sardonic way. As head teller Colleen, Jessica Hecht is not as irritatingly mannered as she usually is, but I would have liked to have seen what Andrea Syglowski—a trenchant actress who plays one of the tellers—could have done with that part. Esteban Andres Cruz doesn’t have a chance to make Leon as believable in his brief appearance as Sarandon did in the film, since—again—Guirgis plays Leon’s stay at Bellevue for easy yucks. And the phone call between Leon and Sonny (one of the highlights of the film) doesn’t have the same heartbreaking weight.

It might seem unfair to compare the play to the film, but this production keeps inviting it, mostly to its detriment. The stage version even uses a snippet of Elton John’s “Amoreena,” a rollicking deep cut from Tumbleweed Connection that’s played over the film’s opening credits, to begin act two. My most pressing thought after seeing this was, now that three 1975 best picture Oscar nominees have had stage adaptations (also One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Jaws, by way of The Shark Is Broken), when will we get to see Nashville and Barry Lyndon onstage?

Broadway Play Review—Tracy Letts’ “Bug” with Carrie Coon

Bug

Written by Tracy Letts

Directed by David Cromer

Performances through March 8, 2026

Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY

manhattantheatreclub.com

Carrie Coon in Bug (photo: Matthew Murphy)

A smash off-Broadway hit more than two decades ago—then, a couple years after that, a chillingly effective William Friedkin film starring a fearless Ashley Judd—Tracy Letts’ exceptionally creepy play Bug can be looked at as a ruthless study of conspiracy theorists, a disturbing fable about post-9/11 paranoia (or post-Timothy McVeigh, who is namechecked in the play and who blew up the Oklahoma City federal building a year before Bug’s London premiere), or simply as a down and dirty glimpse at two people descending into their own personal hell. 

Agnes is a lonely divorcée, working as a cocktail waitress and living in a small room in an Oklahoma City fleabag motel, who—after finally letting go of her abusive ex Jerry, who reminds her of their young son, whom she lost in a supermarket 10 years ago and hasn’t seen since—finds an unlikely soul mate in the soft-spoken but unnerving Peter, an army veteran who convinces her that he was turned into an unwilling guinea pig for military experiments so unsavory that he—and, after they start having sex, Agnes—has become an incubator for a certain type of lethal weapon that’s barely visible to the human eye.

Agnes, who may not be our usual idea of a real heroine, garners sympathy as a gullible drug addict who wants desperately to be close to someone again, no matter what the cost is to her sanity—or possibly her life. Could Letts have also written a love story, however fatally obsessive? That’s how Friedkin approached his film adaptation, while in the original off-Broadway staging, director Dexter Bullard cannily used the tiny hotel room to heighten the sense of overwhelming claustrophobia surrounding Agnes and Peter.

David Cromer’s Manhattan Theater Club production is saddled with the large Friedman Theater stage, which isn’t easy to make claustrophobic. Although Takeshi Kata has cleverly designed Agnes’ messy room as a self-contained unit surrounded by black to make it appear smaller, Cromer is only intermittently able to focus on the core relationship, which makes this revival less memorable than either the off-Broadway staging or subsequent film. 

Although the actors are unafraid to take on such explosive material, the stakes seem less menacingly real. Off-Broadway, Michael Shannon played Peter with a scary ferocity that forced Agnes to share his crazy delusions, while Shannon Cochran was an astonishingly convincing Agnes, so compelling in her desperation that it was frightening to watch. Here, Carrie Coon (Agnes) and Namir Smallwood (Peter)—who both let it all hang out, literally, as their characters gradually strip themselves bare to show these emotionally flawed people fusing into one—give committed but somehow unmoving portrayals.

Bug remains vibrantly if disturbingly alive, but Cromer’s production softens its rough edges. 

Broadway Play Review—Jordan Harrison’s “Marjorie Prime” with June Squibb and Cynthia Nixon

Marjorie Prime

Written by Jordan Harrison

Directed by Anne Kauffman

Performances through February 15, 2026

Hayes Theatre, 240 West 44th Street, New York, NY

2st.com

June Squibb in Marjorie Prime (photo: Joan Marcus)

When Marjorie Prime premiered in 2014, A.I. was still in its speculative stage. But now, with A.I. quickly becoming an all-encompassing nightmare, the plot of Jordan Harrison’s play is now disturbingly prescient. It begins with Marjorie, an elderly widow, sitting in her modest living room talking with a friendly young man named Walter, who turns out to be Marjorie’s deceased—but AI-generated—husband, who is part of a new computer program comprising what are called Primes, developed to help grieving people remember loved ones as they once were, keeping their (and the survivors’) memory alive.

Marjorie’s daughter Tess, however, hasn’t completely bought into the new technology—it does have some bugs, like a Prime not having sufficient initial knowledge to have a substantive conversation—but hopes that her octogenarian mother’s failing memory is not rattled by a long-ago tragedy that happened to Marjorie and Walter’s beloved son (which has also affected Tess’ relationship with her mother). Tess’ supportive husband Jon, for his part, feels that there’s no harm in using a Prime and it might actually help if Marjorie hears about past events she may have forgotten, however painful. The intriguing first part of Marjorie Prime explores the ethics and morality of this new technology, which goes hand in hand with these characters’ feelings of guilt and grief. 

But Harrison short-circuits interest in this tantalizingly dramatic dilemma by repeating the plot device, to ever diminishing returns. Two more Primes appear following a couple of deaths; obviously, overwhelming grief makes the decisions to use Primes plausible, but since one of the deaths is so contrived—and the flimsy explanation so unpersuasive—it severely cuts into the rest of the play’s ability to insightfully explore its urgently thorny subject.

It’s also hamstrung by the shoehorning in of pop-culture touchstones from Rosemary’s Baby and My Best Friend’s Wedding to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” (along with a mention of the Central Park installation The Gates), which is more cutesy than cutting. And the final scene shares thematic DNA with the ending of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, to Marjorie Prime’s detriment. 

Still, there are moments that are both slyly humorous and touching, like this exchange between Marjorie and Tess, laying bare their volatile but mutually needy mother-daughter relationship:

MARJORIE Oh no.

TESS What is it? (Marjorie’s face crumples. She shakes her head.)

TESS Mom, what is it? Did you have an accident?

(Marjorie gives a small nod, eyes down, deeply ashamed.)

TESS Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up. 

MARJORIE I’m sorry.

TESS Don’t be sorry.

MARJORIE I’m so sorry.

TESS It’s okay—It’s Shower Day after all.

Although Michael Almereyda is far from my favorite director, his 2017 film adaptation of Marjorie Prime—starring Lois Smith, who originated the role of Marjorie in Los Angeles and Off-Broadway, along with Geena Davis, Tim Robbins and Jon Hamm—“opens up” the play in a few subtle ways, including the introduction of characters only mentioned in Harrison’s script, and ends up more memorably affecting. 

Onstage, the cast—under Anne Kauffman’s sharp direction on Lee Jellinek’s simultaneously realistic and symbolic set—can’t be faulted. Christopher Lowell makes an unnervingly gentle Walter and Danny Burstein is a sympathetic Jon. As Tess, Cynthia Nixon gives a devastating portrayal of a woman trying to bury long-held grievances, while 96-year-old June Squibb plays Marjorie with an oft-humorous bemusement that’s great fun to watch. Self-inflicted flaws abound, but Marjorie Prime still provides some needed theatrical food for thought.

Broadway Play Review—Bess Wohl’s “Liberation”

Liberation

Written by Bess Wohl

Directed by Whitney White

Performances through February 1, 2026

James Earl Jones Theatre, 138 West 48th Street, New York, NY

liberationbway.com

The cast of Liberation (photo: Little Fang)

Playwright Bess Wohl has a happy talent for astutely observing families and individuals that are either broken or whole; from Make Believe to Grand Horizons, Wohl’s plays understand the constantly shifting push and pull animating such relationships. Her latest, Liberation, continues that steak—to an extent. Based on her mother’s story and cheekily subtitled A Memory Play About Things I Don’t Remember, Liberation is a way for Wohl to work out what her mother and other women of that generation did on behalf of women’s equality a half-century ago and whether it was all for naught.

The women of Liberation are from a small town in Ohio and meet in a school gym once a week in the slowly changing 1970s. The lead character is Lizzie, Wohl’s mother’s—and Wohl’s—stand-in, who toggles between both women while breaking the fourth wall to address the audience; she starts a discussion group of local women, not knowing who might show up. But several respond to her flyer, across a convenient spectrum—several white women (one a foreigner) and two Black women—and the play follows their ill-fitting first steps while they slowly gain confidence to have their voices heard in a protest about equal pay for equal work.

Alongside the 30ish Lizzie, there’s Margie, in her 50s; Susan, in her early 20s; Celeste, a Black woman in her late 30s; Isidora, an Italian woman around 40; Dora, also in her 20s; and Joanne, a Black woman in her early 30’s. After an initial thawing-out period, they start trusting one another by nudging others to take control of their own situations, whether it’s Margie belatedly realizing her lengthy marriage to a typical caveman of the time has been a sham or Dora leaving her secretarial job after her sexist boss bypasses her for a promotion in order to elevate another “neanderthal,” in Dora’s words. 

Although the situations occasionally turn sitcomish or saccharine, Wohl’s truthful dialogue allows her women to speak frankly and with an incisive bite, including hilarious interactions like Margie bringing her husband’s beer to share with the others (”he’s not going to miss it,” she says) or Isidora’s frequent foul-mouthed outbursts. Only Lizzie seems more a symbol than an individual, and Wohl’s decision to include Bill (Lizzie’s future husband and the narrator’s future father) as the play’s lone male is ill-advised not only because the feminine/feminist dynamic is unbalanced whenever he appears but also because such a dramatic crutch is a contrived way to get Wohl’s parents onstage together.

There are other missteps, like Joanne standing in for Lizzie in scenes that explore more intimate moments in Wohl’s mother’s and father’s relationship but simultaneously keep them at a safe distance. And the humor can also get arch, as in the opening scene when the women wander into the gym and there’s an argument about whether the “B” that Lizzie wrote on the flyer to denote “basement” looks more like an “8,” causing Isidora to walk all the way upstairs looking for a non-existent high floor.

But the uniformly excellent performances of the entire cast—led by Susannah Flood as Lizzie, another in this terrifically personable actress’ series of thoughtful portrayals (including another in Make Believe)—coupled with Whitney White’s empathetic direction on David Zinn’s pinpoint unit set let Liberation be pretty satisfying as a personal and political memory play.

Broadway Musical Review—“The Queen of Versailles” with Kristin Chenoweth

The Queen of Versailles

Music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, book by Lindsey Terrentino

Directed by Michael Arden; choreographed by Lauren Yalango-Grant and Christopher Cree Grant

Performances through December 21, 2025

St. James Theater, 246 West 44th Street, NY

queenofversaillesmusical.com

Kristin Chenoweth in The Queen of Versailles (photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Proof that lightning does not strike twice, the latest Stephen Schwartz musical starring Kristen Chenoweth already posted its premature closing date on Broadway, while an earlier collaboration you might have heard about, Wicked, keeps going. But The Queen of Versailles is a cautionary tale for collaborators about what not to do when creating a Broadway musical.

It’s to Schwartz’s credit to try something original, and the story of Jackie Siegel, as seen in the eponymous 2012 documentary film directed by Lauren Greenfield, certainly qualifies. (Has there been another Broadway musical based on a documentary?) Greenfield’s film explores Jackie’s and ultra-rich husband David’s conspicuous consumption with both sympathy and bemusement, something difficult to finesse in a big-budget stage musical. 

So Lindsey Ferrentino’s book and Schwartz’s songs try and have it both ways. We root for Jackie as she lucks into getting rich after some bad decisions, but as she and David start to throw around their money on a mansion nicknamed Versailles, it becomes increasingly difficult to spend time with them, especially since David is so heartless a millionaire villain, and F. Murray Abraham plays him as a comic caricature.

Chenoweth, on the other hand, remains enjoyable and funny, which makes Jackie less nuanced and, when she’s in financial and personal doldrums—the 2008 recession brings mansion construction to a halt, then her teenage daughter Victoria commits suicide—there’s a gaping dramatic hole that no amount of teary songs—including the Act I finale, “This Is Not the Way,” which Chenoweth carries effortlessly—can fill.

This might have worked shorter, making Jackie’s roller-coaster ride faster. Instead, it lumbers around for a bloated 2-1/2 hours, with sympathy gone and dramatic comeuppance obvious. Even appearances Louis XIV to make explicit the parallels between the Versailles of the 17th and 21st centuries are less amusingly pointed as they recur.

Needless to say, director Michael Arden’s slick staging can’t reconcile the inherent messiness of the subject and Schwartz’s and Terrentino’s treatment, while the first-rate trappings—Dane Laffery’s clever sets and video design, Christian Cowan’s tongue-in-cheek costumes, Natasha Katz’s brilliant lighting—only obscure the dramatic emptiness.

Chenoweth, of course, dominates any show she’s in, but that only shows up the rest of the cast. Abraham’s David has a few amusingly nasty moments and Nina White’s Victoria has the needed pathos, but they are shunted aside by the hurricane at the center. Even though Chenoweth gives it her all, she can’t save The Queen of Versailles from being guillotined.

Broadway Review—James Graham’s New Play, “Punch”

Punch

Written by James Graham

Directed by Adam Penford

Through November 2, 2025

Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY

manhattantheatreclub.com/Livestream available

Will Harrison in James Graham’s play Punch (photo: Matthew Murphy)

Based on the true story of Jacob Dunne—who spent 14 months in prison for manslaughter after punching a stranger in a fit of anger—James Graham’s Punch is the kind of visceral, emotionally satisfying play we need more of on Broadway. 

In 2011, Jacob was a feisty 19-year-old living with his single Mum and younger brother Sam in a working-class Nottingham neighborhood. Hating school, Jacob spent time with his buddies, drinking away the afternoons. One day, after celebrating a pal’s birthday, Jacob was informed about an altercation; without thinking, he jumped into the fracas and coldcocked James, a man he didn’t know. Running away, Jacob didn’t realize that a single punch made James crumple to the ground, hit his head and never regain consciousness in the hospital, where his grieving, stunned parents, David and Joan, sadly watched him fade away.

After Jacob’s release from jail, his sympathetic probation officer Wendy is contacted by Nicola from the charity Remedi, whose goal is restorative justice, trying to give victims’ families some sense of closure. Jacob ends up corresponding and—in a tense but unforgettably realistic scene—with David and Joan, who try to understand why their beloved and only son had to die so meaninglessly. 

Jacob’s story is a rich ore for any playwright, and Graham makes few missteps dramatizing this stirring story of redemption. Although the play’s arc is familiar, as Jacob narrates his long and winding journey (he becomes a new man after prison, gaining unlikely allies in James’ parents), Graham’s savvy writing and Adam Penford’s resourceful staging turn what could have been a sentimental tale into something generous and humane. The first-rate production features Robbie Butler’s illuminating lighting design, Anna Fleische’s versatile set and evocative costumes, Leanne Pinder’s precise movement and Alexandra Faye Braithwaite’s atmospheric music/sound design.

Will Harrison is a perfectly pitched Jacob, effortlessly doing the heavy lifting of making seamless transitions as the story toggles between the hotheaded teenager and the mature adult atoning for his sin. Members of the flawless supporting cast—all of whom play multiple characters marvelously—include by the redoubtable Victoria Clark, who’s heartbreaking as Joan and hilarious as Jacob’s Nan, and Sam Robards, whose conflicted David is beautifully complex. Punch is a play that pointedly provokes.

September '25 Digital Week II

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Bang Bang 

(Vertigo Releasing)

Tim Blake Nelson’s ferocious portrayal of Bernard “Bang Bang” Rozyski, a washed-up boxer beset by personal foibles and tragedies—his twin brother was brain-damaged after a fight years ago—who has redemption and revenge on his mind in director Vincent Grashaw and writer Will Janowitz’s gritty but ragged character study. Although the relationships (with his daughter, grandson, etc.) don’t always parse plausibly, the acting of Nelson, Nina Arianda (estranged daughter Jen), Andrew Liner (teenage grandson Justin), Glenn Plummer (former ring foe turned politician Darnell) and others is compelling enough to keep one watching.

Dreams 

(Strand Releasing)

The other films in director-writer Dag Johan Haugerud’s trilogy about nontraditional sexual relationships were better in theory than execution, but this final entry is an intelligent depiction of the confusion of high school student Johanne, whose crush on Johanna, her French teacher, is the trigger for a knotty study of morality and agency when Johanne writes a book about en evening in Joahanna’s apartment when Johanne was a minor. Unlike Sex and Love, Dreams has an urgency thanks to a  lively script that’s populated by authentically believable people like Johanne (Ella Øverbye), her mother Kristin (Ane Dahl Torp) and grandmother Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen) as well as Johanna (Selome Emnetu), who is given space to breathe as an individual. The exemplary acting is led by Øverbye, whose Johanne is wondrously alive and complex.

Naked Ambition 

(Music Box Films)

She looked like a pinup (and was, actually, winning several beauty pageants), but photographer Bunny Yeager had a fascinating career arc that is only touched upon by Dennis Scholl and Kareem Tabsch’s documentary, which dutifully follows her pathbreaking trajectory amid interviews with friends, family members and colleagues alongside copious archival footage and, of course, photographs. At a fleet 73 minutes, the portrait seems more superficial than it should—after all, Yeager made Bettie Page famous in the ‘50s with her nude photographs of her for Playboy—but if you don’t know Yeager’s story, then this is a decent primer.

Triumph of the Heart 

(Outsider Pictures)

The tragic true story of Maximillian Kolbe, a Polish Catholic priest whom the Nazis put in Auschwitz, where he tended to his fellow prisoners’ spiritual needs before taking the place of another who was sentenced to the gas chamber, was the basis of a shattering 1991 dramatization by the great Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi, Life for Life. In this new biopic by writer-director Anthony D’Ambrosio, the sad but uplifting story is retold effectively, although the director’s wallowing in the camp misery mutes some of the power of the martyred Kolbe’s story. (The priest was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1982). Still, this story needs telling, and with the inexplicable unavailability of the Zanussi film, D’Ambrosio’s version is an adequate replacement.

Streaming Release of the Week 

Hidden Face 

(Well Go USA)

In this fervid remake of a sordid 2011 thriller by Colombian director Andrés Baiz, the lives of three people—a charismatic young conductor; his wife, the orchestra’s cellist, who goes missing; and a younger woman, who soon takes her spot in the orchestra and the conductor’s bed—are tracked by writer-director Kim Dae-woo. Unfortunately, after an hour confidently setting up the various relationships and the characters’ secrets, he lets the second hour badly get away from him, as the plotting gets more cartoonish. Still, the strong acting from the central trio and an erotic atmosphere keep this watchable right up until the doozy of a denouement. 

DVD Release of the Week

Spenser: For Hire—The Complete Series 

(Warner Bros)

This popular nighttime drama was centered on crime novelist Robert B. Parker’s iconic renegade detective, the mononymously named Spenser, and followed Robert Urich’s earlier television hits—SWAT and Vegas—to last three seasons (1985-87) on ABC. Urich’s charismatic presence was perfect for this Boston-based private detective who marched to his own drum. Alongside Urich and the Beantown setting, the series’ 65 episodes also included a terrific supporting cast led by Avery Brooks, Ron McLarty, Richard Jaeckel, Barbara Stock, and Carolyn McCormick.

CD Release of the Week 

Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady

(Chandos)

One of the all-time classic musicals, My Fair Lady set Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion—a still-relevant exploration of class and gender differences—to equally memorable music, as Lerner and Loewe’s sharp and witty songs bump up against Shaw’s brilliant characters, the low-class Eliza Doolittle and the arrogant Professor Henry Higgins, whose showdown is hilarious, dramatic and thrilling. In this excellent recording—the latest in Chandos’ traversal of legendary Broadway musicals—Scarlett Strallen makes a feisty, powerhouse-voiced Eliza, and she’s matched perfectly by Jamie Parker’s droll Higgins. Eliza’s transformation from guttersnipe to princess is handled beautifully by Strallen, and the sumptuous music is given a wonderful spin by the Sinfonia of London under the sure baton of conductor John Wilson.

Broadway Review—Jeff Ross in “Take a Banana for the Ride”

Take a Banana for the Ride

Written and performed by Jeff Ross

Directed by Stephen Kessler

Performances through September 28, 2025

Nederlander Theatre, 208 West 41st Street, NYC

jeffrossbroadway.com

Jeff Ross in Take a Banana for the Ride (photo: Emilio Madrid)

If you thought comic Jeff Ross, best known as the Roastmaster General who’s made brutal fun of celebrities for years on Comedy Central roasts, would come to Broadway with his insult flag flying, you might be surprised by Take a Banana for the Ride (yes, he explains the offbeat title). Sure, Ross spits out some blisteringly nasty remarks—and even shows an over-the-top putdown of both Sandra Bernhard and Bea Arthur, from a long-ago televised roast, before he takes the stage—but keeps them to a minimum, considering his reputation. Banana instead is an autobiographical tale of how his family life in Newark put him on the path to standup comedy.

Ross grew up as Jeffrey Lifschultz, saying that his last name “is an old Hebrew word. It means, ‘Hey, you ought to change that’.” Working in his dad’s restaurant, Ross says that he got his work ethic from both parents. For 90 minutes, Ross spins an entertaining yarn that’s often hilarious and even, at times, poignant. But for such a tart-tongued performer, Ross often gets sentimental discussing his family, close friends and even the German Shepherds he adopted during the pandemic—and whom he jokingly named Ausch and Schwitz—even getting the audience to bark a collective “Aw!” when he brings one of his pups onstage.

There are sharp jokes scattered throughout as Ross reminisces about his mother, dad and grandfather, “Pop Jack,” with whom Jeff lived while trying to break into the comedy world. The show’s title comes from Pop Jack, who, Ross says, would give him a banana when Ross went into the city to perform at clubs, saying, “You never know when you’ll need one, so take the banana for a ride. You never know what’s going to happen: you might get stuck in traffic, you might need some potassium, you might need it for low blood sugar—and in a pinch you could use it as a dildo or if you get sad, turn it sideways: it’ll remind you to smile.” 

He candidly admits that bananas can get mushy inside, and a few times during a show where Ross skirts sappiness, I admit I wanted to hear him go off on a roasting tangent. But that’s not what he’s going for with this performance—he had a close call when he was recently diagnosed with cancer, and he also lost several close comedy friends: namely, Norm McDonald, Gilbert Gottfried and Bob Saget. Director Stephen Kessler helps pace what is essentially a long monologue adroitly—photos and videos are displayed on the screen behind Ross, while pianist Asher Denburg and violinist Felix Herbst accompany Ross with well-chosen musical selections and often amusing song interludes.

Ross does provide a bit of his penchant for insult comedy at the end, when he roams up and down the aisles chatting with audience members, giving them a cutting comment or two and handing them a banana for being good sports. Take a Banana for the Ride might not convert non-fans, but Ross’ observational comedy does successfully transfer to Broadway.

Broadway Play Review—“Call Me Izzy” with Jean Smart

Call Me Izzy

Written by Jamie Max; directed by Sarnia Lapine

Performances through August 17, 2025

Studio 54; 254 West 54th Street, NYC

callmeizzyplay.com

Jean Smart in Call Me Izzy (photo: Marc J. Franklin)

First, the good news: Jean Smart is killing it on Broadway. Now, the not-so-good news: the play she’s in, Call Me Izzy, is a creaky solo vehicle.

Call Me Izzy is narrated by the chipper and chatty Isabelle, a middle-aged wife living in a trailer park with her longtime husband Ferd, who—we come to discover—has been abusing her for years, physically and emotionally. Izzy was a smart student who loved to write; indeed, she could have attended college but since she—like so many other Southern belles of her generation—married immediately after high school, she had no choice but to be a stay-at-home wife and, soon, mother…although her son tragically died shortly after birth, further alienating Ferd from Izzy.

As the above shows, Max’s play follows a typical—even stereotypical—trajectory, as Izzy narrates a life that unfolds promisingly but is ultimately shut down by a dominating husband. Izzy gets another chance later in her marriage when she joins a free night writing class at the community college and her stories are entered in a contest to spend time at a New England writing retreat. She wins but realizes she’ll never convince Ferd to let her go, so she never mentions it. But soon the couple running the retreat comes to rural Louisiana to meet them for dinner and, they hope, convince her to join them. Unsurprisingly, Izzy pays dearly for that evening, despite Ferd and the husband and Izzy and the wife bonding for a moment. 

Will Izzy break free of Ferd or will she stay, petrified of his drunken rages? It’s all so predictably, sentimentally sketched out by Max, who is not above (or below) relying on such contrivances as Izzy locking herself in the bathroom to secretly write after Ferd destroys decades’ worth of her journals—she uses toilet paper and hides the contraband in a box she hides from Ferd. But would he really not find her latest musings after what he did earlier? And Izzy implausibly has an affair with her writing teacher in her own home, where they carry on merrily without getting caught. 

Call Me Izzy is rife with such inconsistencies, yet Max has written a juicy titular role that Smart dazzlingly makes her own, bringing the audience into her confidence and making us care about as well as laugh and cry along with her. Smart brings haunting heartbreak to the (unfortunately clichéd) final scene, which finds Izzy trapped between confinement and freedom. 

Despite Smart’s acting tour de force and Sarnia Lapine’s understated direction, Call Me Izzy never feels like a fully-formed play. Here’s hoping Smart will return to Broadway in a meatier role, something like Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days.

Broadway Musical Review—Revival of Adam Guettel’s “Floyd Collins”

Floyd Collins

Music and lyrics by Adam Guettel; book and additional lyrics by Tina Landau

Directed by Tina Landau

Performances through June 29, 2025

Vivian Beaumont Theatre, 150 West 65th Street, NYC

lct.org

Lizzy McAlpine and Jeremy Jordan in Floyd Collins (photo: Joan Marcus)

Daringly downbeat, Floyd Collins is the rare musical that takes chances musically and dramatically. When it premiered off-Broadway in 1996, the show got some raves but nobody was lining up to bring it to Broadway. Based on the one-third empty house the afternoon I saw it at Lincoln Center Theater, maybe they were right. The atypical musical plot is based on a real-life incident in Kentucky in 1925: our eponymous hero, a reckless spelunker, gets trapped in a mine while hoping to carve out a future tourist attraction (which it eventually became, as Mammoth Cave National Park).

Soon the locals hoping to rescue him are overtaken by outsiders who treat the entire tragic episode as a spectacular, media-driven nationwide circus with people hanging on every new development. Indeed, one of the reporters present, Skeets Miller of the Louisville Courier, begins by chasing a good story but finds himself getting personally involved in rescuing Floyd.

Composer Adam Guettel and book writer Tina Landau transform this flavorful bit of Americana into one of our most original musicals. Guettel’s music, powered by bluegrass, folk and Tin Pan Alley, is always in character, so to speak—like the thrilling chorus that opens the show, Floyd’s powerful laments, or his younger sister Nellie’s emotional solo. Landau’s book could be performed as a play without Guettel’s music, so intense is its drama and incisive its characterizations. That they meld together so persuasively is what makes the show a singular achievement. 

Landau directs this revival with a beautifully wrought elegance; she uses the Beaumont’s large stage to her advantage, creating a nearly cinematic dramatization of a story that always seems to have several events happening simultaneously. Landau is greatly assisted by the collective dots’ inventively abstract sets, Scott Zielinski’s subtle lighting, Anita Yavich’s on-target costumes, Dan Moses Schreier’s startling sound design and Ruey Horng Sun’s savvy projections. 

The cast is splendid. Taylor Trensch makes an engaging Skeets, Marc Kudisch is stentorian as Floyd’s father Lee, and Lizzy McAlpine—in a marvelous Broadway debut—is a heartbreaking Nellie whose second-act solo turn, “Through the Mountain,” is as understated a showstopper as you’ll ever hear. At the center of it all is Jeremy Jordan as Floyd, who is not only in imposingly great voice but is physically impressive—terrifically agile while sperlunking and spellbindingly dramatic even as he’s trapped in the cave. Jordan and company make the tragedy of Floyd Collins exhilarating. 

Broadway Play Review—“The Picture of Dorian Gray” with Sarah Snook

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Based on the novel by Oscar Wilde

Adapted and directed by Kip Williams 

Performances through June 29, 2025

Music Box Theatre, 239 West 45th Street, New York, NY

doriangrayplay.com

Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray (photo: Marc Brenner)

Sarah Snook gives an impressive tour de force of a performance in Kip Williams’ busy and basically anti-Wilde adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Williams has 26 characters in his script and Snook plays them all, many through technological tricks that allow her to play off herself in several roles, as screens show her pre-filmed portrayals of peripheral characters in the familiar story of a young man who wishes for his own portrait to age while he remains young—which happens to his initial enjoyment but later madness.

Using onstage cameras and onscreen video has been on our stages for awhile now, with varying degrees of success or irritation by the likes of Ivan van Hove. Williams joins the fray with his willing and able accomplice—for nearly two hours, Snook jumps in and out of various clothes, shoes, facial hair, wigs, accents. Williams’ staging would seem to be the perfect way to visualize Wilde’s themes of the meaning of art and beauty as well as the perils of vanity and narcissism. 

Indeed, it’s initially great fun to watch Snook morph into the selfish young Dorian, the principled painter Basil Hallward and the pleasure-seeking Lord Henry, among many others. It’s also entertaining to watch the behind-the-scenes quick changes occur right onstage with the agile assistance of a half-dozen crew members who brandish cameras as well as paraphernalia Snook uses onstage like a cigarette or drink. 

But that fun soon wears out its welcome and the show becomes trying, even enervating at times, as Williams favors cleverness and technology over the elegance and terrifying clarity of Wilde’s story. As bodies start piling up while Dorian indulges in every manner of hedonism and his portrait grows progressively more hideous to mirror his lifestyle, there’s very little of Wilde’s thematic cohesiveness that culminates in a perfectly pitched ironic ending. Instead, we watch Snook alternately overact and underplay several characters as crew members run around the stage with their cameras.

The opening shows Snook quickly becoming several characters in front of our eyes—and the cameras—but that’s merely a tease as the rest of the play pairs the onstage performer with her onscreen image, reaching its apex (or nadir) when several onscreen Snooks attend a dinner party alongside the stage performer. Williams and his talented crew have turned a classic piece of 19th-century Gothic horror into a buzzy 21st-century event, where everything that still makes Wilde’s story hauntingly relevant has been replaced by the superficial pleasures that are Dorian’s downfall.

Broadway Play Review—“English” by Sanaz Toossi

English

Written by Sanaz Toossi

Directed by Knud Adams 

Performances through March 2, 2025

Todd Haimes Theatre, 227 West 42nd Street, New York, NY

roundabout.org

The cast of Sanaz Toossi's English (photo: Joan Marcus)

Set in the Iranian city of Karaj in 2008, Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer-winning English follows four students with varying degrees of proficiency in the eponymous language and how they interact with their teacher as well as one another. Structured as several episodes that play off the characters’ shifting dynamics, English has moments of ringing insight but is hampered by the very constraints it’s made for itself inside the four walls of an English as a Foreign Language classroom. 

The students range from idealistic 18-year-old Goli; 28-year-old Elham, frustrated at already failing the test; 29-year-old Omid, surprisingly fluent already; and 54-year-old Roya, desperate to learn English so she can converse with her American grandchildren. Marjan, their 40ish teacher, spent nine years living in the U.K. after learning American English at home. 

Toossi throws this quintet together for a clever 90-minute sitcom with humor stemming from basic misunderstandings as well as malapropisms of tentative speakers. The play shrewdly works in two languages and cultures side by side, as the actors speak both Farsi and English, but with a twist: when they converse in their native language, they speak perfect, unaccented English; when they speak English, it’s with various accents. The terrific cast of five expertly masters the linguistic back and forth so that, even early on, it’s easy to follow what language they’re supposed to be speaking. 

But even more impressive is how the entire cast—Tala Ashe (Elham), Ava Lalezarzadeh (Goli), Pooya Mohseni (Roya), Marjan Neshat (Marjan) and Hadi Tabbal (Omid)—meshes with remarkable skill and humanity. Knud Adams directs resourcefully for the most part, although the choppiness stemming from English’s episodic nature—putting a drag on its dramatic momentum—isn’t completely solved. 

Finally, there’s the issue of some of the blocking: there are several chairs strewn about Marsha Ginsberg’s revolving classroom set that block some audience members’ view (including mine) of the actors at times. Perhaps it worked better on the small Atlantic Theater stage, where English debuted in 2022.

Broadway Musical Review—“Death Becomes Her” with Megan Hilty, Jennifer Simard and Christopher Sieber

Death Becomes Her

Book by Marco Pennette; music and lyrics by Julia Mattison & Noel Carey

Directed and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli

Opened November 21, 2024

Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 205 West 46th Street, NYC

deathbecomesher.com

Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard in Death Becomes Her (photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

In the far too crowded field of movies turned into Broadway musicals—something going on for decades to diminishing returns—Death Becomes Her is a piece of frivolous fun that neither slavishly imitates the original nor strays too far from the beaten path. If it’s not as outrageously sly as it could be, it does provide consistent entertainment, which is nothing to sneeze at.

I barely remember Robert Zemeckis’ black comedy, which I saw way back in 1992. All I remember is the indelible image of Meryl Streep, as bitchy movie star Madeline Ashton, having her head spun around, Exorcist-style, while catfighting with her nemesis, longtime friend Helen Sharp, played by Goldie Hawn. Bruce Willis was also on hand as Ernest Menville, the nerdy plastic surgeon who leaves Helen for Madeline and becomes the vessel for their attempts at immortality.

The musical follows that plotline, with a few detours that give Broadway audiences what they came to see, like the big, campy opening number, “For the Gaze” (get it?), in which Madeline—now a musical theater star who’s on the road, touring middle America—and her dancers demonstrate how campiness is a huge draw onstage. 

Here and elsewhere, the music-and-lyrics team of Julia Mattison and Noel Carey admit they’re aiming at the lowest common denominator; the laughs are plentiful throughout if hardly gutbusting. The amusement scale fluctuates between the genuinely tart dialogue between the two friends as Madeline is in the process of stealing Ernest from Helen and the ridiculous scene where a nervous Ernest, plied by drink pre-immortal op, is serenaded by his entire basement study in the dopey number, “The Plan.”

The original film introduced the immortality subplot through an enigmatic socialite, Lisle von Rhuman, played by Isabella Rossellini; for the stage musical, Lisle has become a more shadowy figure, Viola Van Horn, played by Michelle Williams, who alternates between stiffness and sultriness. Another difference from the movie is that, onstage, Madeline has an assistant, Stefon, who, as played by Josh Lamon, gets many big laughs with his continued carping commentary on what’s happening.

Mattison and Carey’s serviceable songs get us from scene to scene without unduly overstaying their welcome; likewise Marco Pennette’s book, even if there’s an inevitable letdown when the show drags at the end, tacking on a couple of superfluous numbers. But it’s all been cleverly directed and choreographed by Christopher Gatelli, and the physical production—Justin Townsend’s savvy lighting, Paul Tazewell’s sparkling costumes, Derek McLane’s sharp sets and Peter Hylenski’s skillful sound design—is impressive. 

It goes without saying that the two leads give master classes in how to overact and oversing perfectly in character: Jennifer Simard (Helen) and Megan Hilty (Madeline), pros at being divas, have such a grand time that their battle royale is infectious. Christopher Sieber makes Ernest more sympathetic and funnier than Bruce Willis was in the movie, so much so that Death Becomes Her becomes as much a vehicle for the stalwart Sieber as for the scintillating Simard and hilarious Hilty.

Broadway Play Review—“Eureka Day” with Bill Irwin and Amber Gray

Eureka Day

Written by Jonathan Spector

Directed by Anna D. Shapiro

Through February 2, 2025

Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY

manhattantheatreclub.com

The cast of Eureka Day (photo: Jeremy Daniel)

Homing in on California antivax parents isn’t Swiftian satire, Jonathan Spector’s play Eureka Day proves despite moments of inspired hilarity. 

The setting is the Eureka Day private school in Berkeley, where the school board is dealing with a student’s case of the mumps. The meeting is led by the 60ish Don and includes 30ish parents Eli and Meiko—who are having an affair they think is masked by their children’s playdates—along with longtime board member Suzanne and the newest member, Carina, whose son attends the school.

As the group’s discussions start civilly but turn more argumentative, Spector raises the specter of ultraliberal parents acting selfishly under the guise of “protecting the kids” as well as dangling the threat of fascism due to stringent school rules. While funny, the play often resorts to obviousness, underlined in its most celebrated scene, an online town hall meeting in which the board members—and especially the bumbling Don—try but fail to preserve decorum as comments from parents keep popping up, exploding from mild disagreement to nastiness and conspiracy theories, even dropping the “n” word (Nazi) amid pointing out others’ ignorance.

In Anna D. Shapiro’s lively production, set on Todd Rosenthal’s skillfully decorated school library set, we read the comments scrolling by on a large screen above the five board members, who talk among themselves. It’s certainly amusing, like a decent Saturday Night Live sketch, but goes on too long as Spector tries to one up himself to diminishing returns. (Audiences don’t agree—they were practically falling out of their seats, as if the ushers had passed out laughing gas.) It also points up the fact that these five characters are bland stereotypes who literally fade into the background during this sequence. 

A couple of scenes do help humanize them. The first has Eli and Meiko at his son’s hospital room after contracting a severe case of the mumps, likely from Meiko’s daughter, which lays bare the adults’ tangled relationship, as when Meiko shows Eli texts his wife sent her: the word “whore,” over and over. (“She probably just like cut and pasted,” he weakly retorts.) In the second, Suzanne tells Carina about a long-ago family tragedy that forever colored her view of vaccines. It’s a commendable attempt by Spector to give Suzanne—fast becoming the play’s villain—a reason for her rejection of science, but it comes off as too neat and pat.

Shapiro’s savvy direction couches the increasingly surreal lunacy over vaccines in a much needed reality, and she stages Spector’s final, easy jokes—one visual, one verbal—with an economy that helps them land effectively. Too bad the overacting of Bill Irwin (Don), Thomas Middleditch (Eli) and especially Jessica Hecht (Suzanne) undermines the jokes, although it’s always fun seeing Irwin’s physical adroitness get a laugh when Don hesitantly follows Meiko after she storms out of a meeting. 

Happily, Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz (Meiko) and especially Amber Gray (Carina) give focused, grounded performances that serve the comedy instead of themselves, keeping Eureka Day afloat.