Wonderful Town (Encores!) (2025)

Wonderful Town is a lesser known Bernstein musical. It's no West Side Story.  It's no Candide. Or even On the Town. The music is fine. It's sort of all over the place. It spans multiple genres. It's not just the music, but the whole show that is sort of incoherent. And frankly, the show is kind of boring. It put me to sleep. Kind of like On the Town, it's a show about New York. Two sisters move to Greenwich Village from Ohio to live a "Bohemian" life and strike it big in the big city as an actress and writer. The plot doesn't really go anywhere though. Nothing special.

Once Upon a Mattress (Encores!) (2024)

What a cast they've assembled for Encores! now in its 30th year. Honestly, it's a shame it's only going to run for two weeks, though even that is long by City Center (beautiful ornate theater) standards. Everyone is perfectly cast to type. I'd say special standouts are J Harrison Ghee whose beautiful singing voice and singular stage presence is readily apparent, Sutton Foster good as always, Harriet Harris as the overbearing mother/queen with a regal British accent, Michael Urie as the naive princeling, and Cheyenne Jackson as the dimwitted knight really into his spurs. Sutton Foster's entrance about thirty minutes in is greeted with a huge applause and her big number Shy is a showstopper. I didn't really have any familiarity with the show but I was pleasantly surprised to find a very funny script and catchy songs. There is a lot of physical comedy too, probably not written in, such as Foster re-adjusting atop the mattresses and Urie rolling up the stairs. It's a fun show I recommend, a steal really for $28. The balcony is super far and high (at 5 flights up), but you can still pretty much see everything save for the back of the orchestra (and one scene of smaller physical comedy that I couldn't make out what Foster was doing).

The Wife of Willesden (2023)

The Wife of Willesden is being staged at BAM Strong in collaboration with American Repertory Theater. It runs just an hour and forty minutes but it feels very long. That's because the prologue runs about an hour itself. And the prologue is almost straight monologue masquerading as open mic. Clare Perkins plays the titular wife with gusto but she can only do so much with what amounts to a rather boring play. It's all very one-note. I fell asleep in the second act. And I think it's not as shocking as it intends to be. It's 2023 after all. It's very frank. And it chastises the audience for slut shaming but who's saying anything? The best part is the sumptuous set, an upscale North London pub spanning the length of the entire stage and even spilling over to the audience who sits at tables, joining the action. I'm not entirely sure why Zadie Smith puts herself in the play. It creates a meta storytelling device, but it's unnecessary and there's a weird apology from Smith over her ability.

White Girl in Danger (Off-Broadway) (2023)

I've never had this experience before but we got free tickets from Culture Pass and got "General Admission" tickets". What that meant was that we got whatever empty seats were left right before curtain. Somehow there are empty seats, at what I think is an otherwise sold out performance. But here's the tricky part, if the ticketholder with your seat shows up, then they can kick you out at intermission, at which point you'll get "refunded". But that means this person who showed up late has to wait an hour and a half for intermission--who's going to wait that long? Anyways, we're lucky we got seats in the front row and got to stay the whole show. 

Michael R Jackson's new musical is a lot. It's a satire on classic white people soap operas. It's imaginatively about a "blackground" character trying to make it in an "all-white" show--Jackson sticks with the meta concept. It was over 3 hours. The first act, a full hour and 40 minutes. And the 15 minute intermission also has content playing on the projector. And there's content playing before curtain. They film these hilarious cheesy, bad green screen, commercials. It felt like watching Atlanta spoof public access TV. He also kind of leans into the Tyler Perry-esque mannerisms that he berates in A Strange Loop (Atlanta does it too). But it's really long. Especially compared to the tight A Strange Loop. They probably need to cut a full half hour at least. It's funny but it kind of rambles. The songs are pretty hit or miss--the highlight is the opening title song. A few of them kind of lack melody. They're not really Sondheim-esque but y'know they also don't have a hummable tune. It's also very profane. A Strange Loop was too, but I feel like this was even more extreme. The gay sex scene in this one is a lesbian sex scene and there are multiple sex toy props. Definitely not family friendly. 

Tarra Conner Jones steals the show as Nell. This is her Off Broadway debut. She literally has a showstopper. There was a standing ovation for her in the middle of the show for her big number. Those are always cool moments.

Straight Line Crazy (The Shed) (2022)

It's my first time to The Shed. Aglaia had the foresight to get Culture Pass tickets for a Wednesday matinee. Tickets sold out fast, even when they released a new block, and they were going for hundreds of dollars. It's a decent sized theater on the sixth floor. The stage juts out into the audience, three-quarters in the round. It's interesting (in that you're really close to the action) but it's sort of unnecessary. It requires them to block the scenes in an awkward way. They move around in circles constantly as they converse so that they're sometimes facing you and sometimes facing away. At the back of the stage, there are some extras that don't really have lines.

There are also some weird narrative choices. Act I centers on Robert Moses's early career building the Northern and Southern State Parkways on Long Island, challenging the unsympathetic landed gentry. Act II focuses on his failed attempt to build a highway through Washington Square Park toward the end of his career. We have Jane Jacobs to thank for his defeat, and she shows up in the play as a rather major character, despite them never having met. In Act I, she interjects with totally unnecessary narration. I actually think all the narration is kind of cheesy. The play would have benefited from ending Act I and Act II at the end of the scene, at the height of the drama, instead of closing with narration. Honestly, we could do without Jane Jacobs altogether. The scenes in Washington Square Park are awkward. The peanut gallery reacts to the protests and public hearings by looking straight at the audience and exclaiming pointlessly. And the play loses momentum whenever Ralph Fiennes isn't on stage. Fiennes is phenomenal as always. His repartee is quick and his posture impeccable. His accent was a little difficult to understand at first but I got used it.

What I do like is that Act I build Moses up. And Act II takes him down. He accomplished a lot in his long career. The play just focuses in on these two key moments and gives the audience both sides of the coin. We are allowed to make our own judgments. What's kind of ironic is that the times have shifted. It has been nearly a hundred years since the events of Act I. Moses believed that cars were the future, and he was right, partially because he built New York that way, and the rest of the country followed suit. But we've now come all the way around to where Manhattan is about to institute congestion pricing. Cars are the enemy now. Unfortunately, thanks to Moses, we're already all-in on cars.

Camp Siegfried (Second Stage) (2022)

We got free tickets to Camp Siegfried through Culture Card. I probably wouldn't have paid money to see this. It's only 90 minutes without intermission but it felt longer. It's about two teenagers at a pro-Nazi camp on Long Island in 1938. It's a love story. And that kind of obscures the whole Nazi thing. I thought it would be a lot more explicitly anti-Nazi than it was. The setting isn't really all that important to the main plot, but as an audience member it's impossible to look past. Just start with the description of the play in the playbill...it doesn't even mention the Nazi sympathies. It implicitly condones it by not explicitly condemning it. And it's pretty boring overall.

The best part by far is the set. It felt like being outside. There isn't quite a stage, it's a hill built into the theater. And there are branches hanging from the ceiling to simulate trees. There is one mesmerizing scene in which they construct a platform in the side of the hill with planks and mallets. They they use the platform in a few different ways. But later in the play the reveal another platform on the left side of the stage, which comes down like a murphy bed and acts as a pier/dock. The lighting is maybe too good that the darkness put me to sleep. I kind of dozed off after the platform scene. The seats in the theater were nice leather.

Intimate Apparel (2022) (Off-Broadway)

I've never been to the theater downstairs at Lincoln Center Theater. It's very small, 75% in the round; with a turntable for a stage, every seat in full view and we were in the second row. This co-production with the Metropolitan Opera of Intimate Apparel is an operatic adaptation of Lynn Nottage's play. The score is sparse, just two pianos, elevated on both sides of the stage. The music is not particularly memorable. It was a bit too contemporary for me, lacking in melody and harmony. George maybe gets a bit of melody but not much. The music meanders, going nowhere, as opera often does. The plot recalls Cyrano de Bergerac, in which love letters are ghostwritten by someone else. The plot sort of skips over how George comes to know Esther. In 1905, you don't exactly have catfishing through the psot, but that's kind of the idea. It's a sumptuous production nonetheless for such a small theater. The period costumes are really great.

Little Shop of Horrors (Off-Broadway) (2022)

Aglaia and Rachel both won lottery tickets to the same performance of Little Shop of Horrors at the Westside Theater Upstairs. Did not realize until we got there that both Seymour and Audrey were being played by understudies in their Off-Broadway debuts. I guess that's why they both won. Josh Daniel stepped in for Conrad Ricamora and did admirably. Chelsea Turbin was a little weaker for Tammy Blanchard. She usually plays the puppet, which is not a singing role, so this is a pretty major step up. Her accent for Audrey is very thick, which Aglaia said was typical for Audrey. Christian Borle plays multiple roles (Orin and others), and he is very funny and versatile. He's probably the biggest name in the cast, even when Ricamora is there, so I was surprised it wasn't the lead. 

The puppet is scary as hell. In the medium Audrey II puppet, you can see the legs in the vines, but only one pair. In the program, there are three names for the puppet, including Turbin. At the bows, only two people came out of the large puppet. So maybe the third person is optional? Or maybe the two of them need to operate with more limbs. The plot is way out there. I didn't really know what to expect, but man-eating plant is wild. And the ending is very bleak. 

Maybe we were sitting too close to the stage, or too close to the wall (second row, far right) or underneath the speaker but I had a hard time understanding most of the actors, with the notable exception of Christian Borle who enunciates clearly. Was it the way they were mic-ed?  So I felt like I was missing jokes. Even though the rest of the audience was laughing really hard. I like the Motown sound Alan Menken was going for. Skid Row is pretty great, but the rest of the music is just ok.

Soft Power (Off-Broadway) (2018)

Soft Power is a musical within a play written by David Henry Hwang after a traumatic experience (or rather two related ones). He is actually a character in this semi-autobiographical piece. It is a satire, an inverted retelling of The King and I set in 2016 America, a strange and tumultuous land. Hillary Clinton plays the inverted would-be king, and Xing Xue is a Chinese expat who plays "I", the protagonist in a yellow savior love story (would love for Hillary to see this). It is so much funnier than I expected. And the music and choreography are actually pretty good. Hwang turns his anger into an intelligent story about Chinese and American culture. It is full of sharp observations about us. Some of the punch lines hurt a little considering we're still in the mess of 2016 but that only makes the themes more relevant.  I don't know how the production has changed since the middling reviews from its premiere in California but I thoroughly enjoyed the show.  The predominantly Asian cast is delightful.

Coriolanus (2019) (The Public Theater)

I was not familiar with Coriolanus. It is not one of Shakespeare's more often performed plays. One of his later tragedies, Coriolanus takes place in ancient Rome. It features a war hero on the verge of being named consul if he could just get over his contempt for the plebians that make up the majority of the city. And when the people finally reject him, he takes vengeance on the city. He's not the most sympathetic hero. He's actually extremely unsympathetic. Jonathan Cake plays Coriolanus with a very deep, almost Bane-like voice. It's hard to take him seriously because he screams so many of his lines. I feel like we never get an adequate explanation for why he has so much contempt for the regular people except for class hierarchy. It seems unfounded, too extreme. Maybe that played better in hierarchical Elizabethan England. And then, when the patricians blame the plebian tribunes for exiling Coriolanus and making him mad, I lost it. It's as if Coriolanus is put up on a Superman-like pedestal. Who is this guy that he can do no wrong in their eyes? Because he is so obviously wrong. The problem wasn't the exile. It was that they didn't execute him in Act I.

Let's just also put it out there that the Public spent up all its budget on the amazing production of Much Ado About Nothing earlier this summer. The costumes here looked like something out of The Walking Dead. They're dirty and torn. The set looks like a slum. And yes, the set moves, but it's not as expensive looking as the beautiful estate from Much Ado About Nothing. The soundtrack also pales in comparison. And it drizzled for about a half hour of the performance. They valiantly performed through it, but it would've been nice if we had stayed dry.

Merrily We Roll Along (Off-Broadway) (2019)

I didn't really like it while I was sitting in the Laura Pels Theater, but Merrily We Roll Along has grown on me as time has passed the more I think about it. The story is beautifully bittersweet. It makes you wonder what was going on in Sondheim's life at the height of his career that he wrote such a downer. He claims that Opening Doors was the only autobiographical song he ever wrote, but are we really to believe that a musical about composers isn't personal? Maybe he was longing for a collaborator. The music is very Sondheim and quite beautiful: Merrily We Roll Along, Opening Doors, Old Friends, Like It Was, Not a Day Goes By...but I hate the ending. Our Time is awfully cheesy.

This off-broadway production features just six actors in what appears to be a prop warehouse of a set. The small cast makes things a little confusing as all the actors play multiple roles, and sometimes you can't quite tell if they're playing the main character or a supporting character. The whole backwards structure can be a little difficult to follow but it is an innovative way to tell a story. If I had known from the beginning that that was how it was going to be, I might've paid closer attention to the opening scene, because by the time we got to the end I forgot what they had said.