Happy Halloween, and boy do we have a special treat for you. The new musical comedy Fowl Play is releasing their newest single and Theatrely has your first listen. 

Featuring Broadway favorites Jayke Workman (Chicago) and Daniel Quadrino (Wicked, Newsies), Bad People’s Money is a sharp, satirical anthem that dives into the story of two queer friends commissioned to write an "apology musical" for a homophobic fried chicken chain.

Directed by Tye Blue (Titanique), the show brilliantly skewers rainbow capitalism and had New York audiences hooked with its irreverent humor and poignant themes when it had its sold-out run at AMT Theater this past summer. Fowl Play features music and lyrics by Billy Recce, and a book by Recce and Yoni Weiss. 

The single official drops on streaming platforms tomorrow, November 1st, 2024. 

Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold On To Me Darling is a peculiar work—something closer to a ramble than a play. So it is perhaps fitting that Lonergan’s odd and meandering tale is now receiving an equally peculiar revival.  

I say peculiar because this off-Broadway staging of Darling, running through December 22 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, is a near-exact recreation of the play’s 2016 world premiere at Atlantic Theater Company. Neil Pepe again directs; design elements appear unchanged, mostly credited to the same team; and half the cast reprise their original roles. Even the wonderful Keith Nobbs, who quit acting right after closing Darling the first time, is right back on stage as though no time passed at all. 

So what is behind this odd little resurrection? Our raison d’etre is Tony Award nominee Adam Driver, taking over the meaty lead role of temperamental country music star Strings McCrane (memorably originated by Timothy Olyphant). It’s a decent rationale, given that Driver is quite possibly the greatest actor of his generation—if he wants to do a play, that’s a pretty solid reason to do it. 

And it’s easy to see the role’s appeal. Strings is a mess of contradictions, a vain manchild who is somehow also an intellectual heavyweight. He’s sweet, but often cruel; wise, yet deeply stupid. Driver tears into Lonergan’s typically crackling monologues, each one veering unpredictably from topic to topic, as profoundly inconstant as the man delivering them. Driver’s comic timing is flawless, while he wisely underplays the character’s more vulnerable moments. Olyphant leaned most heavily into Strings’ childlike nature, but Driver finds equal fun in the contradictions of his philosophical sophistication. 

But what of the play itself? Like The Starry Messenger before it (another late Lonergan), Darling is meandering and overlong, packed with ideas but without any focus or clear narrative drive. Obviously, Lonergan is incapable of writing bad dialogue. Sometimes it does feel like we’re in the safe hands of a master, as in Strings’ insane quarreling with his brother Duke (C.J. Wilson, unearthing comic gold where he can) or Strings’ bizarre meet-cute with his hotel masseuse and future wife Nancy (Heather Burns, straining to find depth in a narrow stereotype). 

Yet for all the play’s comic highlights, Darling grows increasingly frustrating as the story stretches on. It is amusing, certainly, to watch Strings dig himself deeper and deeper holes with each disastrous life decision. But to what end? Strings keeps complaining about the stresses of fame, but Lonergan never digs deep into the pressures and challenges of life in the public eye. Certainly grief at his mother’s loss is a central theme, particularly since she never spoke a supportive word to Strings while alive. But Lonergan loses that thread until, abruptly, circling back to it in a jarringly sentimental final scene. And though Lonergan has written many great roles for actresses over his career, in the world of Darling women exist in one of two modes: either kindly little innocent, or manipulative golddigger. 

Any lesser Lonergan work is still a damn sight better than most plays, and Driver nearly makes the evening worthwhile with a powerhouse performance. But Darling is a long ride, and ultimately a grueling one. 

‍Hold On To Me Darling is now in performance through December 22, 2024 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

Kafka is having a moment. (Is he ever not?) TikTok fancams pine after the long-deceased Czech novelist, mourning in the comments: “'I won’t date a man until he is Kafka.” Viral tweets announce the poster’s decision to “transform suddenly and unexpectedly into a giant insect much to the horror of my loved ones.”

Big mood. Or, as a thinkpiece on the author surmised, in explaining the renewed relevance of Kafka’s darkly absurdist work: “The hundred-year gap between Kafka’s experience and our own functions as its own commentary on the fundamental dehumanization of modern life.” Day-to-day life is more Kafkaesque than ever.

The musical theater developmental pipeline was also feeling increasingly Kafkaesque for writer, composer and comedian James Harvey. Best known for his one-man show The Bald Faced Truth and his award-winning original work The Crack in the Ceiling, Harvey had spent six years reworking a new musical through multiple readings and workshops, but a full production proved elusive.

Feeling disillusioned and ready to quit theater, Harvey poured his frustrations into a new idea: Kafkaesque, a genre-bending musical layering predicaments drawn from multiple Kafka stories onto one contemporary American family. Eager to move quickly, Harvey gathered some friends for a barebones staging at the 2023 New York Theater Festival, where Kafkaesque proved an immediate hit with audiences.

Harvey’s madcap musical theater fever dream is now back for a fully-staged run at Theatre 154, where it continues through November 10. Theatrely spoke with Harvey about cockroaches, despair, and hosting his new musical himself as “Franz Kafka.”

Theatrely: Tell me about your work as a musical theater writer and performer, and the path that led you to Kafkaesque.

Harvey: As a musical theater writer, I had spent five or six years writing this one show that I just could not get anything to happen with. I was really depressed, and kept telling myself I was going to quit theater forever. And then one night I had the notion for this show, and it just poured out of me so quickly—in three months, I had a draft. I could immediately see how all these different stories by Franz Kafka could connect to each other, how they could speak to our current times and how I would host the show as “Franz Kafka.” It all just kind of spewed out of me.

I’m guessing you were already a fan of Kafka, and knowledgeable about his work? 

I had read most of his major stuff maybe five or six years ago. There was one story in particular that had always stuck with me, called “The Hunger Artist,” about a circus performer who sits in a cage fasting. For a while he’s a huge attraction, until the public loses interest. But he keeps starving himself to death, because this is his artistic calling. I would always think about that story in those dark moments of feeling like a failure, feeling like I should quit, just have a normal life and go work in software sales—but I just couldn’t stop doing this crazy thing that made no sense to anyone watching.

In our version, that’s represented by a young woman who Twitch streams herself not eating. First I just thought I could turn that story into a 10 minute piece. But then as soon as I had that idea, everything else started filling in. So many of Kafka’s stories just fit so perfectly into our current age. 

What are some of the other Kafka stories you are transposing into the modern age? 

The whole show takes place among one family. So I’ve connected all these Kafka stories into one big story, the way Into the Woods does with fairy tales. Probably the most literal adaptation is The Metamorphosis, which is still a young man waking up as a cockroach. Then that young man’s mother finds out that she’s been canceled, but doesn’t know for what, and is subjected to this insane legal process—which is a riff on Kafka’s The Trial. And then the father of the family attempts to rescue the mother when she is locked away in a castle, which is based on Kafka’s The Castle. 

It’s all happening at once, and I guide you through all these stories as “Kafka.” There’s some elements of sketch comedy and some ad-libbing, but it is really a traditional book musical following the bizarre travails of this one family.

Why did you decide to include Kafka himself, who you play, as the show’s host? 

Well, there’s a lot of meta layers to that. There is an awareness running through it that I am myself, James Harvey, the writer of the show, “playing” Kafka, and that Kafka is the puppetmaster of these characters. There are certain things I say in character as Franz Kafka that sound more like me. It’s my way of expressing certain things that I related to in Kafka—like his artistic struggles, and also his daddy issues. 

Where this characterization of Kafka differs is that in reality, Kafka was an extremely shy, neurotic person. But in this version he’s gotten a little cocky. Because in the intervening years—since his death—he’s become an adjective, and now he is owning that power.

How did the first production at New York Theatre Festival come together? 

The process was unusual because we did not do a million workshops and readings. I’ve done tons of that in my life, and I’ve soured on it as a real way to learn anything about a show. Instead, I got together some friends who are all musical theater performers, comedians and improvisers with our director Ashley Brooke Monroe, and we threw it together really quickly and totally barebones. And the show right away, crushed, I would say. And then we’ve had the opportunity to perform it several times since at different comedy clubs and cabaret venues, to continue developing the show.

What kind of musical styles can audiences expect? 

I’m such a kleptomaniac, musically, because I love playing with genre as a storytelling tool. So there’s everything in there. There’s piano pop-rock stuff, like Ben Folds or Billy Joel. There’s some R&B. There’s some Green Day-style rock when the boy turns into a cockroach. Then you’ve got little moments of crunchy Sondheim-esque dissonance peppered in there. So it’s a real pot pourri. But it is really structured like a classic book musical. The songs are catchy, but also propel the story forward.

Why does Kafka still resonate today, and how does this show draw on that continued resonance? 

Everyone feels horrible, everyone’s depressed, everyone’s scared at what’s going on in the world. In addition to just the inherent loneliness of the human condition. And this show just empowers you to laugh at all of that. The show has a really bleak ending, and yet people leave in a great mood. It’s just what the world needs today. 

Kafkaesque continues at Theatre 154 through November 10th