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It's time to teach the time Time Warp to a whole new generation. Today, Roundabout Theatre Company announced their plans for the 2025-2026 Broadway and Off-Broadway season. While the Todd Haimes undergoes a renovation, this fall Robert Icke’s Oedipus will head to Studio 54. In the spring, Sam Pinkleton will direct Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show at Studio 54. In addition, Scott Ellis will direct Kelli O’Hara and Rose Byrne in Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels at the Haimes next spring.
This fall, Icke’s stunning rendition of Oedipus will head to Broadway starring Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, both of whom are currently nominated for this production at the 2025 Olivier Awards.
The legendary rock-‘n’-roll musical The Rocky Horror Show takes on new life as a guaranteed party at the famous Studio 54, staged by Oh, Mary! director Sam Pinkleton in a new version. With 51 years of continuous global productions, seen by over 35 million people around the world, Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show features some of the most iconic musical show stopping classics of all time, including “Dammit Janet,” “Touch-a, Touch—a, Touch-a Touch Me, “Hot Patootie” and of course “Time Warp”, the party floor-filler.
Sparkling, dizzying, and deliciously potent, Noël Coward’s Champagne-fresh comedy of bad manners shocked and delighted audiences in its 1925 premiere. Now Emmy nominee Rose Byrne and Tony winner Kelli O’Hara join forces to bring Coward’s unmatched wit to life once again, under the direction of Roundabout Interim Artistic Director Scott Ellis.
Off-Broadway, Roundabout will bring Rajiv Joseph’s Archduke starring Patrick Page and directed by Darko Tresnjak to the Laura Pels Theater in the fall. And in the winter, Alex Lin’s Chinese Republicans will play the Pels directed by Chay Yew.
Further information including dates, casting, creative team, and single ticket on-sale dates for all the productions will also be announced soon.
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During previews, it is typical for a new play to undergo some cuts or revisions. But how often does a show’s narrator—and in this case, one half of a two-character work—completely transform following a show’s second performance?
That’s the surprising challenge that faced Abubakr Ali on Dakar 2000, a gripping world premiere thriller from Manhattan Theatre Club. It sounds, perhaps, like an actor’s nightmare. But for breakout star Ali, rethinking his whole character overnight was, actually, a thrill.
Ali stars opposite Obie Award-winner Mia Barron in Rajiv Joseph’s tense, witty and surprisingly sexy two-hander, now running at New York City Center through March 23. Tautly directed by May Adrales, Dakar 2000 follows Boubs (Ali), a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal who finds himself pulled into a shadowy operation by State Department operative Dina (Barron). Joseph, a Pulitzer finalist, drew inspiration from his own experience in the Peace Corps.
A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Ali starred in Billy Porter’s Anything’s Possible for Amazon. He also made history as the first Arab Muslim to lead a comic book adaptation in Netflix’s (later abandoned) series Grendel. On the New York stage, Ali most recently appeared in Toros at Second Stage Theatre.
Theatrely spoke with Ali about fast-changing scripts, re-focusing on theater, and the biggest question of all: is Rajiv Joseph actually a spy?
How did you first get involved in Dakar 2000?
Rajiv saw me in Toros and cast me in a one-day workshop of this play, last March. I freaked out, because I’ve looked up to Rajiv since I was in high school. In my brain, I bombed that workshop—no-one could have failed harder that day. Then, a couple weeks later, they asked me to do a second workshop and the production.
Were you always opposite Mia Barron?
Yeah. Before I was involved, there was a draft with a third character, who is now only mentioned in the play. A character played by Tony Award-winner Kara Young! And Rajiv had to go to her like, “You are amazing, but this is a two-person play.”
You are a theater guy originally, you studied at Yale, but film and TV snapped you up pretty quickly. How did you end up refocusing on stage work–first with Toros last year and now this play?
I got out of school and I got pretty lucky, I got sucked into the TV and film world, and that was the thing up until the pandemic. But when the strike happened, I jumped on it and said to my reps, “I really want to do a play.”
Going into Toros, I was super nervous, because you have to remind yourself: “I have a body.” Like, my whole body is being perceived, not just up here [indicates a camera frame over his face]. It’s a very different beast.
What was the preview process like for Dakar 2000?
I have never been part of a process where so much of it was finding and developing the play as we’re doing it. Rajiv has an incredible mind. He’s constantly changing things. Sometimes we’d show up the next day and he’s like, “Here’s forty new pages, let’s try it out.”
Oh, God.
Well, it’s funny—saying it out loud, that sounds like a miserable ordeal. But it wasn’t, it was so much fun to be part of that and to have our input be so readily welcomed. For the first two previews, I was playing a different character. Like, literally a different human being, almost. Boubs was a loud, boisterous, obnoxious, very arrogant guy, a guy who knows that he’s right and is fucking with Mia’s character the whole time.
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By the time I saw it, Boubs was a bit more naively optimistic. He does manipulate Dina at points, for sure, but he’s not wise to the world. So what changed?
The thing that we clocked is that in order for the audience to believe him and fall for him, he has to be this person who you believe can never do wrong in this world. An angelic being who would not hurt a fly, but who gets caught up in some things, and then you see what he becomes at the end of the play. He turns into a very different person, someone who weaponizes that charm to survive.
It was a really fun shift. The first show we tried that, we just jumped in. Like, we’re just going to try him as this totally different person in front of an audience. It shifted the audience’s relationship to everything going on in a really beautiful way.
That’s a big shift. Did you have a moment of, “What the hell, I’ve been developing this guy as one thing and now you’re telling me he’s another?”
You know…my New Year’s resolution this year was, “Work on something where you let the story be the most important thing.” So for me this was kind of a blessing, because it was a way to practice that. To just say: whatever we’re done up until now, the way we’ve rehearsed it, none of that matters. Let’s just see if this serves the story.
Boubs and Dina end up developing a friendship…with potential to grow into something more. But there’s always this uncertainty about how genuine it is from either side, about who’s playing who, or what’s really going on. How much are you thinking about that?
Not at all thinking about it. The second we start playing into it, the audience gets ahead of it. But Rajiv has that hovering, and that tension is really helpful in this play. You need this constant question of, “What is actually happening here? Who is holding the power?”
The play is also set on the eve of Y2K, and the characters are grappling with this impending feeling of doom or apocalypse.
Most people would say that feeling is incredibly present right now. There’s this palpable feeling of: “Is this it, is this the end of the timeline?” So the play is looking at how we as people deal with that. Is it through lying to ourselves about what’s happening? Or is it through accepting what’s happening, and then dealing with our own complicity in it?
You said Rajiv Joseph is an idol of yours. What has it been like to work with him, and also to maybe, sort of play him?
He’s so collaborative, so open, so interested in what you have to say. He’s just a really cool guy. I’m just like, “I want to be cool like you, my man.” Even just as a brown person in the world, his work was something that I’d always seek out, because it represented aspects of my experience.
I didn’t stress about whether I was playing him. If I’d gotten too heady about that, I would have imploded. But that low-key worked out, because his piano teacher, from when he was like seven, came up to me teary-eyed after a show and was like, “You reminded me so much of little Rajiv!” Which was lovely to hear, though I genuinely made no attempt to play Rajiv.
Right, you just played Boubs.
Who incidentally, I guess happens to be little Rajiv.
Except for the part about being a spy. Or who knows, maybe Rajiv Joseph is a spy?
That’s the question we all are asking right now. We’re like, “Hey Rajiv…are you a spy? Bro, be real for a second…we know you spend a lot of time in Eastern Europe. Let us know?”
DAKAR 2000 continues at New York City Center through March 23rd. Find tickets here.
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“This is a story within a story, about a person within a person, in a time within another time…All of it…is true. Or most of it, anyway,” begins Manhattan Theatre Club’s production of Rajiv Joseph’s predictable and tonally incoherent new play Dakar 2000, currently playing at New York City Center Stage I, directed by May Adrales. Right away, we know we’ve been saddled with an unreliable narrator, whose version of the truth we’re about to see play out on stage.
After surviving a car accident, in which he may have been illegally re-allocating government-issued resources, Boubs (short for Boubacar), a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal for the last 3 years, meets with steely State Department operative Dina Stevens in the final week of 1999. (An interesting side note: Rajiv Joseph himself spent 3 years in the Peace Corps in Senegal after college.) It’s the beginning of what’s meant to be a cat-and-mouse game, yet the actors lack the chemistry to make the relationship sexy or compelling and the power never really slips from Dina’s calculating hands to ever mark a real shift in their dynamic.
As Boubs, Abubakr Ali is charming, charismatic, and extremely watchable. He demonstrates an innate talent to shoulder the narrative of a play. Not only that, he embodies the character’s youthful naivety and desire to be useful and make a difference in a corrupt world. He may have a shaky relationship with the truth, but that’s only because he’s governed by his ideals, willing to stretch the truth in order to gain resources for the villagers he has grown close to over the last three years…or, at the very least, to make his stories more interesting. Boubs’ belief in the truth’s malleability is exactly what catches Dina’s eye.
Mia Barron is stilted and serviceable as the cold and manipulative Dina. Joseph gives us a glimpse into Dina’s vulnerabilities, making her less of a stone cold operator and more human, but he does so in the most inconceivable ways. Dina makes it known that she’s very good at her job, someone who dots their i’s and crosses their t’s, yet in the next breath she’s providing loopholes for Boubs to skirt trouble (charmed by his innocence, I guess?), then getting drunk with him a few days later and accepting a flirtatious advance to look at the stars from his roof.
Joseph may want us to think that it’s all part of her grand plan but it’s not convincing. Even if we are to believe every move of hers is a calculation, each vulnerable confession another layer of manipulation, it strips Dina of any humanity.
A week before Boubs flipped the car he was driving, Dina was relocated from Tanzania after the U.S. embassy there was bombed. All of the people she’d come to love died in that attack. As the sole survivor, she has a personal stake in seeing whoever’s responsible brought to justice.
“Except it’s not justice,” says Dina. “If I’m being honest with myself, it’s vengeance.”
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If there’s one thing this play does successfully, it’s to zoom in on the individual working in an opaque apparatus such as the U.S. State Department. Dina may be a hard worker but her personal drive for vengeance is bloodthirsty and cruel and colored by bias. This becomes especially clear after hearing her point to “the growing trend of Islamo-Fascism” and refer to the places she’s been on assignment in Africa as “backwater stinkbomb slums.” It would be nice to think that the people tasked with enacting U.S. foreign policy were doing so at an emotional remove. The truth, I have to imagine, would probably make us all queasy.
As Dina puts it: “Until a stranger murders someone you love, you will never understand what I’m talking about, because it is like...The people who did this must die. It is normal to feel this way. Historically, it’s been the guiding principle of most foreign policy.”
Billed as a thriller, one might expect twists or even an unexpected secret or two. Unfortunately, this is not the case here. When Dina unofficially enlists Boubs in what she generously refers to as “field work,” the audience is already miles ahead of the play. Adrales keeps the pace quick, perhaps hoping the faster the play moves, the less time the audience will have to reflect on its vexing implausibility.
Would it confuse things further if I were to mention that most of it is played for laughs? Boubs and Dina are an unexpected duo and there’s plenty of comedy to mine there, but neither Joseph nor Adrales can quite square it with the play’s cynicism. However, it’s a feat we all know Joseph to be capable of: his play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is a bold and harrowing look at the Iraq War that still manages to be quite funny.
Tim Mackabee’s rotating set skillfully evokes the Senegal of Kaolack, the small city where Boubs has been stationed, and Dakar, the capital. A corrugated metal wall surrounds the rounded stage and transforms beneath Shawn Duan’s projections.
Dakar 2000 takes place on the precipice of a new millennium, in the shadow of Y2K—a time when experts thought we could be hurtling toward the end of the world. In the play’s final moments, Joseph tries to draw a line from there to our present moment but then waffles on it.
“Maybe everything is gonna be okay,” says Boubs, “and this is just the normal sense of apocalyptic fear that has hovered over every moment in human history. Or...maybe it IS the end of the world.”
Maybe, maybe not. I don’t expect Joseph, or anyone, to have the answer to such a question, but after an evening of half-hearted attempts to parse out what it means to have purpose in what feels like a meaningless world, the ending is just another letdown.
Dakar 2000 runs through March 23rd at City Center Stage I.
