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It’s that time of year! Over the past 365 days, the team here at Theatrely has traveled far (Brooklyn) and wide (London) to cover hundreds of productions and as always, Editor-in-Chief Kobi Kassal and Chief Critic Juan A Ramírez sat down to decide their favorites. From Midtown Manhattan to theatres across the country, there have been many incredible productions during 2024. Here’s are our favorites:
Broadway:
Juan: Maybe Happy Ending, Death Becomes Her, The Who’s Tommy, Stereophonic, Gypsy
Kobi: Sunset Blvd, The Outsiders, Appropriate
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Off-Broadway:
Juan: Oh, Mary!, Gatz, Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!, Buena Vista Social Club
Kobi: The Connector, Inspired By True Events, Three Houses, The Seven Year Disappear
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Regional:
Juan: Gun & Powder, Paper Mill Playhouse
Kobi: La Cage aux Folles, Pasadena Playhouse
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Cabaret:
Juan: Mama, I’m A Big Girl Now
Kobi: Michelle Collins (54 Below), Lady of the Lake: The Farewell Tour (Joe's Pub)
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Solo Show:
Juan: Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age, John C. Reilly as Mister Romantic
Kobi: Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares, Jack Tucker: Comedy Standup Hour
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Unexpected Fav:
Juan: The Who’s Tommy
Kobi: Burnout Paradise, The Voices In Your Head, The Jordans
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Best Number:
Juan: Madeline’s Fall (Death Becomes Her); Overture (The Who’s Tommy); Put On Your Sunday Clothes (Hello, Dolly!)
Kobi: For The Gaze (Death Becomes Her); A Real Woman (Gun & Powder); My Days (The Notebook)
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Most Obsessed Moment:
Juan: Cynthia Nixon as a horny priest huffing poppers in The Seven Year Disappear
Kobi: Susan Sarandon shucking an oyster on Little Island
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Movie Musical:
Juan: Chuck Chuck Baby
Kobi: Wicked
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Television Series:
Juan: my first-time Smash viewing
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Standout Stars:
Juan: Ali Louis Bourzgui (The Who’s Tommy), Ciara Renée (Gun & Powder), Moses Ingram (Sunset Baby), Emma Sofia (Cats: The Jellicle Ball), Natalie Walker (The Big Gay Jamboree)
Kobi: Nicholas Christopher (Jelly’s Last Jam), Amber Iman (Lempicka), Madison Ferris (All of Me), Jennifer Simard (Death Becomes Her), Taylor Trensch (The Seven Year Disappear & Safety Not Guaranteed), Female Ensemble (Big Gay Jamboree)
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See you next year!
P.S. - Thanks to all of the wonderful photographers for capturing the magic on stage this year
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There’s a game I play with myself whenever my mind starts to wander while at a play, movie, funeral, etc. “Would I rather be watching Gypsy?” The 1959 musical, with its glorious music and lyrics by Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim and arguably the greatest book in musical theatre, by Arthur Laurents, is far and away my favorite – not an uncommon opinion. The plot moves with uncommon vigor and manages to touch upon themes of family, fate, and fortune with Classical profundity, all while delivering classic showtune after showtune from well-realized characters.
People bring a lot of baggage into Gypsy, as do I, which is why I was hesitant when it was announced Audra McDonald would take on its behemoth lead role of Momma Rose. Her inarguable talents seem to lie in more beautiful characters, not the monstrous belter I’ve previously seen incarnated by Patti LuPone and Imelda Staunton. Witnessing McDonald’s take on the character in a new production, directed by George C. Wolfe, which opened tonight at the newly renovated Majestic Theatre, I did not stop to ask myself if I’d rather be doing anything else. More than meriting a renewal of the opinion that Gypsy is the greatest musical of all time, this production is undoubtedly the greatest musical of the season.
What McDonald and Wolfe have done is bring forth the play that pulses beneath the music. Possibly never before have I been so invested in the story of a stage mother in the 1920s whose daughters grew up to become the successful actress June Havoc and the legendary stripper Gypsy Rose Lee at the cost of their family ties, and her own humanity. This Rose is not a musical comedy steamroller but a woman driven to extremes by the existential triple-bind of being a (Black) mother with dreams in America. Not as obviously monstrous, her prioritizing one daughter over another – and each one’s possible stardom over their own happiness – is less about ruthless momaging than about grasping at a ticket out. There’s still humor and terror in her scheming, but it feels freshly human.
As does McDonald’s vocal performance, which is not to say you’re being sold short of a powerhouse Rose . She is still an electrifying singer, here challenged perhaps like never before into a mix of belting and her classical soprano. Far from the brass associated with the role, she wields her abilities wisely and unforgettably. If you thought the final chorus of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” could only be done as an all-out belt, as I did, and as the stubborn purists among us still might, there is a pulverizing thrill in hearing McDonald mix her styles to convey the pain in her delusion, not the force of her will, as she prepares to upend her life yet again. My only possible request would be to hold the house lights down for a beat so I could catch my breath afterward.
Race is woven elegantly into this production, informing certain performance beats to mostly interrogate why blondeness (ie whiteness) is held up as the gold standard in entertainment. The star child June (played as an adult by Jordan Tyson, and as her younger self by the phenomenal Marley Gomes or Jade Smith) is here lighter-skinned than her homelier sister, Louise (Joy Woods; Summer Rae Daney or Kyleigh Vickers). A sense of Imitation of Life is thus brought about in the production’s second act, with its backstage melodrama about a mother discarded by a daughter in thrall to the blinding white light of success. And the “Uncle Sam” dance montage that sees the kids’ evolution into overgrown teens performing the same old act, typically staged as a sort of strobe-lit magic trick, is gone, slowed down to show Rose’s gradual whitening of her daughters’ dancers.
Camille A. Brown has devised terrific new choreography for the family’s act, peaking with Kevin Csolak’s “All I Need Is the Girl” and a Josephine Baker inspired strip for Louise. Santo Loquasto’s set and Toni-Leslie James’ costumes are evocative without taking attention from the unfolding first-rate drama and, starting from the overture, Andy Einhorn’s music direction brings the musical’s original orchestrations back to recreate the effect of its momentous first premiere. (There are also a few lines returned to “Small World,” for those who care to hear it.)
Wolfe draws strong thespian performances from each supporting player, especially from Brittney Johnson as Agnes, and Jacob Ming-Trent as Uncle Jocko and the hotel manager Kringelein. Danny Burstein is reliably and heartbreakingly human as Rose’s long-suffering lover and the second-act strippers, fronted by Lesli Margherita’s scene-stealing Tessie Tura and backed by Mylinda Hull and Lili Thomas, bring down the house.
I thought I was a Gypsy purist, ready to disavow a new take on the show and cross my arms at McDonald’s attempts. But maybe to be a purist here is not to hold onto individual entry points into a long-beloved show, but to trust the material, trust the talent, and let the fabulous story – it’s not subtitled A Musical Fable for nothing – do its thing. McDonald’s monumental performance and Wolfe’s intelligent staging make this an essential entry into the revival canon, and a production not to be missed.
Gypsy is in performance at the Majestic Theatre on West 44th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.
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Three shows dealing with parents – one on, one off-, and one off-off-Broadway – opened this past week. There’s no right way to bring up a child, or way of knowing how it’ll turn out.
Eureka Day - Manhattan Theatre Club at the Friedman Theatre
“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster” is advice playwrights looking to critique Millennial Liberalism would do well to heed, as evidenced by the two beasts to which Jonathan Spector’s 2018 comedy Eureka Day mostly loses in its bright and bubbly Broadway premiere.
The first monster it encounters is thematic. As with last season’s The Thanksgiving Play, which mocked a well-meaning elementary school drama teacher’s attempt to mount an even-handed history of the holiday, there are only so many laughs you can wring out of liberal cluelessness. Here, it’s the board members of a bougie California day school when faced with a mumps outbreak among its students. They’re the sort of people for whom things like “holding space” and “feeling seen” are paralyzing conundrums instead of useful frameworks in the fight for equity. The jokes at their expense start off strong but lose steam quickly, despite strong performances from a cast including Jessica Hecht and Thomas Middleditch.
The second is structural. About halfway through the play, the group hosts a live-streamed town hall to discuss options with the other parents, whose comments appear on a wall behind the cast (projected by David Bengali). The parents’ increasingly unhinged online behavior is wildly funny; Anna D. Shapiro’s staging receiving its biggest and most constant laughs as the audience waited for a new bubble to pop up. But though the onstage dialogue is largely irrelevant – they might as well be saying “rhubarb rhubarb,” I confirmed with the script later – I still felt I was robbed of a live experience. My mind also began to wander: How have parent-teacher relations shifted in the online age? Are parents acting out against educators, the way people might do anonymously on Twitter, and then still leaving their very real children in their care? Will we ever get a grip on our online actions?
It’s not that the play, which is set pre-Covid, fails to address this so much as it cannot bear its weight, and so bringing in that scene feels detrimental to both its experience and its message. I couldn’t bring myself to care much about the onstage antics after this, nor were any laughs fresher or louder. Parents will likely have greater laughs of recognition, but I found myself skimming over other tabs left open in my mind.
Annie - The Theater at Madison Square Garden
Whoopi Goldberg as Miss Hannigan! The beloved musical (book by Thomas Meehan, music and lyrics by Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin) is in fine shape in this touring production currently stationed at the gargantuan theater inside MSG. Though the space means the staging, directed by Jenn Thompson, must sacrifice some intimacy, Wilson Chin’s set and the to-the-rafters performances ensure the material gets its proper dues. (Ken Travis’ sound design, though, at least from where I was seated, amplified the orphans’ chorus to a level of shrillness I cannot recommend to the Uncle Jockos among us.)
Hazel Vogel is an unusually soulfully voiced Annie, who finds a sweet counterpart in Christopher Swan’s Daddy Warbucks and especially Julia Nicole Hunter’s sensational Grace. Savannah Fisher more than earned the applause she received throughout her terrific turn as Star-to-Be.
Despite underselling her own performance while promoting it on The View, Goldberg sang and sold her comic lines with much more gusto than I’d anticipated. She also offers a curious take on Hannigan, adopting a servile tone when speaking to those who held power over her character. It’s a curious (and, for a production otherwise unconcerned with matters of class and race, appropriate) choice that beefs up her involvement from stunt casting to star turn. If that View non-endorsement came from a place of shyness, then her performance here points at a promising future run of delightfully assured featured roles onstage.
Racecar Racecar Racecar – The Hearth at A.R.T./New York Theatres
A casualty of the Connelly Theatre shutting its doors to provocative plays, Kallan Dana’s reversible new play follows a daughter and father (Julia Greer and Bruce McKenzie) on a cross-country road trip from New York City to their native Sacramento. It’s a trip they’d done years before, and the play relishes in the palindromic: the two pass the time listing off examples and noting the things they’d experienced before that might be coming back to haunt them, like their at-times tense relationship to each other, and to alcohol. The reverse bits get increasingly more Lynchian, with backwards-playing music and surreal interactions with a ragged drifter (Ryan King), a pigtailed little girl (Camila Canó-Flaviá), and a Wendy’s employee named Wendy (Jessica Frey, absolutely scene-stealing).
Brittany Vasta’s set is an enviable conversation pit around which characters walk and, against the upstage wall, cleverly flash lights through paper cutouts with city names (by Normandy Sherwood) to signpost the duo’s location. The road trip reaches an absurdist peak when Dana’s language leans hardest into word association to refract the daughter’s fractured mental state, which slowly reveals a more vulnerable core. The specificity of her trauma becomes a bit too confessionally therapeutic, bordering on therapy art, but Sarah Blush’s direction is brisk without undermining character or intention.
Eureka Day is in performance through January 19, 2025 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on West 47th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.
Annie is in performance through January 5, 2025 at the Theater at Madison Square Garden at Pennsylvania Plaza in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.
Racecar Racecar Racecar is in performance through December 22, 2024 at A.R.T./New York Theatres on West 53rd Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.
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