What’s that smell? It’s corn pudding. 

True fans of the musical theatre genre are well aware of the glorious world of Schmigadoon!. From the mind of Cinco Paul, we had two seasons of musical theatre genius on Apple TV+ paying homage to our favorite musicals of yesteryear. Following a quick out-of-town tryout down in Washington DC, Schmigadoon! has landed at Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre and Theatrely was on the scene at first preview to capture it all. 

Alex Brightman and Sara Chase lead the show as Josh Skinner and Melissa Gimble, two doctors who accidentally wander into Schmigadoon, and it's pretty clear that escaping is going to be a bit harder than expected. 

As I joined the long line of patrons to enter the theatre last week down 41st Street, numerous costumes from the television show could be spotted down the block. I struck up a conversation with a twenty-something arts administrator named Ally who told me the day tickets went on sale, she ran over from her office in midtown to grab a single in the mezzanine. “I wasn’t waiting for my friends to make a plan. I love the television show so I wanted to be here tonight, but don’t worry, I already have tickets to come back next month,” she told me. 

As I took my seats and Cinco Paul and director/choreographer Chirstopher Gattelli came out to say hello, the screams were deafening. What followed was two and a half hours of pure musical theatre bliss. Gattelli, who directed Death Becomes Her a few blocks up, certainly cements himself as the king of Broadway musical theatre comedy right now, and as I was gazing around the auditorium throughout the evening, the smiles slapped across everyone’s faces were almost as bright as the lights above them. 

A slew of your favorite theatre actors star in the new musical including Ana Gasteyer, Ann Harada, Brad Oscar, Isabelle McCalla, Ivan Hernandez, Maulik Pancholy, Max Clayton, McKenzie Kurtz and Ayaan Diop who makes his Broadway debut as Carson. 

Rounding out the highly talented company is  Afra Hines, Becca Petersen, Brandon Block, Clyde Alves, Jess LeProtto, Joshua Burrage, Kaleigh Cronin, Keven Quillon, Kimberly Immanuel, Lauralyn McClelland, Lyrica Woodruff, Maria Briggs, Miles McNicoll, Nathan Lucrezio, Richard Riaz Yoder, Shina Ann Morris, and Zachary Downer.

‍Schmigadoon! is currently slated to open Monday, April 20th at the Nederlander Theatre and is on sale through September 6, 2026. If there is one show I suggest you see this season, it's Schmigadoon!

Where else can you find Deborah Cox belting for the gods, Jim Parsons having a full manic breakdown, and Frankie Grande being, well, Franke Grande? That would be the St. James Theatre. 

Let's rewind. The fact that Titaníque is currently on Broadway is cuckoo bananas. The silly little parody musical that tells the story of the world’s most famous maritime disaster set to the tracks of Céline Dion started as it should have: friends writing a comedic sketch musical to make themselves laugh. From their couches to small comedy clubs in Los Angeles, Titaníque turned into the little engine that could. 

I first came across the show via a livestream from the Green Room 42 back in early 2021 before live theatre was back in New York. What I could tell watching from my couch in Boston was this is a show that wears its heart on its sleeve, and boy is it funny. 

Cut to its New York premiere in the basement of a Gristedes that has since been demolished, a flashy transfer to the Daryl Roth in Union Square, numerous productions all over the world, and now Broadway, where it opened this evening at the St. James. 

Now, amped up about as high as it can go with an all-star cast, Titaníque is guaranteed to deliver the most fun night you will have at the theatre this year. A campy, pop-culture, queer night of musical theatre that is sure to bring a smile to even the most dour among us. Now I have had the privilege of seeing Marla Mindelle don that golden wig and play Celine countless times, but now uptown, she is taking no prisoners. Her comedy and vocals are in peak form, and boy what a thrill it is to see her shine. 

Co-written by Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli (also stars as Jack), and Tye Blue (who also directs), this new Broadway rendition takes the show we have adored for years and adds even more gags and laughs, if that could even be possible. 

Blue directs his coven of stars including Parsons, Cox, Grande, Melissa Barrera, John Riddle, Layton Williams, and many more with an intensity that allows the 90 minute comedy to fly by yet also breathe when necessary. Nicholas James Connell has taken his orchestrations and arrangements from a band of four to eighteen (!!!) for a bright and dazzling sound. 

Each star gets their moment to shine, but Layton Williams as the Iceberg not only steals the show, I have never witnessed audience members jump to their feet so quickly in any performance I’ve witnessed in a Broadway house. It's a performance for the history books. 

If you are still here, it should be pretty clear Titaníque is big gay fun. If you’ve never seen it or been countless times, do yourself a favor and board that ship of dreams while it's docked on 44th Street, you won’t regret it.

Titaníque is now in performance at the St. James Theatre on West 44th Street. For tickets and more information, visit here. 

At the center of director Joe Mantello’s crisply staged yet emotionally distancing revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, one particular scene stands out. It is a scene that might not typically be considered the play’s most memorable—or at least, would not commonly feel like its narrative peak. 

Titular salesman Willy Loman, a mammoth role here tackled by three-time Tony Award winner Nathan Lane, pays a visit to his obnoxiously youthful boss Howard Wagner. Howard inherited the company from his father, Frank, who made Willy certain promises prior to his death. Now 63-years old, deep in debt and exhausted by life on the road, Willy asks—or, eventually, begs—young Howard for a position in the company’s New York office. A desk job. (The American dream, right?)

As played by a perfectly icy John Drea, Howard is an unfeeling man. He is not cruel, exactly. But certainly Howard is more engaged with his fancy new wire-recording contraption than the desperate Willy. Designer Rudy Mance costumes Drea in a suspiciously Patagonia-adjacent vest, starkly contrasting with Lane’s overworn beige suit—an outfit almost as wearily ragged as the man. Drea is not tall, but standing over the defeated Lane, his dominance is without question. Howard is the future: impersonal, driven by innovation, uninterested in history. Sitting opposite, Willy looks small and irrelevant, like a visitor from another time. 

In other words, Willy looks like he just stumbled in from a little play called Death of a Salesman. And that feeling of temporal displacement is present elsewhere in this spare, abstract mounting by Mantello and a distinguished creative team. Chloe Lamford’s vaguely dystopian set, somewhere between a decaying ‘40s garage and a modern crumbling warehouse, feels both contemporary and ancient. Mance’s other costumes have a similarly displaced quality—Linda Loman’s bathrobe wouldn’t look out of place in a suburban household of today. 

I locked in on Salesman during this scene, stirred up by that feeling of then-and-now colliding in an uncertain and purgatorial theatrical space. But for too much of this spare staging on a grand scale, now open at Broadway’s none-too-intimate Winter Garden Theatre, the same clarity of purpose was not present. Most of Mantello’s gorgeous staging is more impressive than moving, a thing to be admired more than fully engaged with.

Does the fault lie in the play? Hardly. While pockets of Miller’s language do resist efforts to pull this story out of time, the form of Salesman is near-experimental in its structural boldness. Willy’s tragic descent into depression and (maybe) senility is rendered as an unsettling waking nightmare, with figures from his past slipping in and out unsettlingly, like haunting specters pushing him towards doom. Reality is a loose thing in this text, and Mantello embraces that boldness. Voices from past and present meld together confusingly in Sasha Milavic Davies’s destabilizing movement work and Mikaal Sulaiman’s eerie sound design. 

Not everything about Salesman blends perfectly with today. The play’s bucketloads of dramatic irony can feel, in certain moments, just a little suffocating. Perhaps this is not a critique of the play so much as an unavoidable reality of our times: that capitalism and the “American Dream” are cruel, destructive lies is, at this point, a truism. Few writers have deconstructed the American fiction as devastatingly as Miller, but one still inevitably grows fatigued as Willy’s decent unfolds.

I think that Mantello’s goal, in this stripped-down Salesman, is to offset that familiarity by honing in on a certain emotional immediacy. Mantello is looking to make the story feel alive, not a museum piece but present and urgently felt. In this way, Mantello’s vision feels reminiscent of Sam Gold’s genius 2017 revival of Tennesse Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, which pulled away all the ornamentation and got down to the heart of the thing. 

But Mantello is fundamentally a showman, in a way that Gold is not. He can’t fully commit to his own concept, instead allowing a number of grand gestures to seep in. The most fatal is Mantello’s decision to cast the younger versions of Willy’s sons, Biff and Happy, with a separate set of baby-faced performers. As Willy unfolds the exaggerated fantasies of his children’s absurdly hopeful youthful days, these actors (Joaquin Consuelos and Jake Termine, performing the task assigned) leap and bound on-and-off like youthful cubs. Lighting designer Jack Knowles floods the stage with bright sepia tones for these fanciful flashbacks. It's a concept that feels like a concept, constantly yanking this production out of its supposed commitment to simplicity. 

No similar fault can be found in the leading performers, who are superb. Ben Ahlers is a perfect Happy, foolish, flawed but essentially kind; Christopher Abbott commits fully to Biff’s profound disillusionment in both his father and, most tragically, himself in a sincere and heartbreaking performance. 

While Metcalf and Lane cannot fully shake certain familiar mannerisms, both ultimately find an unshowy ordinariness that could, in another production, truly overwhelm. Lane plays Willy’s acceptance of his fate with an unnatural, devastating smallness: in Metcalf’s hands, Linda’s final lines are almost tossed off, as she scarcely herself even has energy left to care.

And yet, I was ultimately unmoved. Why? In sitting uncertainly between total adornment and its weighted ideas of temporal displacement, the production had never quite gotten me there. This Salesman tries to be a few too many things, and.  the intended emotional clarity proves just out of its reach.

Death of a Salesman is now in performance at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.