Today’s Highlights:
New York City Center Encores! Once Upon a Mattress, directed by Lear deBessonet, featuring Sutton Foster (Princess Winnifred), Michael Urie (Prince Dauntless), Harriet Sanson Harris (Queen Agravain), Nikki Renée Daniels (Lady Larken), J. Harrison Ghee (Jester), Cheyenne Jackson (Sir Harry), Francis Jue (Wizard), and David Patrick Kelly (King Sextimus the Silent), with Shavey Brown, DeMarius R. Copes, Kaleigh Cronin, Cicily Daniels, Ben Davis, Ta’Nika Gibson, Gaelen Gilliland, Jaquez, Paul Kreppel, Morgan Marcell, Abby Matsusaka, Adam Roberts, Ryan Worsing, and Richard Riaz Yoder, opens.
Fiddler on the Roof, directed by Elizabeth Margolis, featuring Mark David Kaplan (Tevye), Janna Cardia (Golde), Emma Rosenthal (Tzeitel), Yael Chanukov (Hodel), Abby Goldberg (Chava), Lea Grace Biwer (Schprintze), Estella Mccarthy Schultz (Bielke), Michael Kurowski (Motel), Zach Sorrow (Perchik), Grant Kilian (Fyedka), Molly Dibble (alternate Schprintze/Bielke), Janet Ulrich Brooks (Yenta), Joel Gelman (Lazar Wolf), Jeff Parker (Constable), with Dara Cameron (Fruma-Sarah), Thom Cox (Nachum/Yussel), Bill Mcgough (Rabbi), Karl Hamilton (Mordcha), Susan Hofflander (Grandma Tzeitel), Nathan Kabara (Avram), and Sam Shankman (Mendel), with Mack Alexander, Jenessa Altvater, Jessica Deahr, Daniel Hurst, Dani Johns, Will Leonard, Jordan Radis, Elizabeth Romero, Jacob Simon, Mitzi Smith, and Jodi Snyder, opens at Chicago’s Drury Lane Theatre.
Dial M for Murder, by Frederick Knott, directed by Mark Shanahan, featuring Michelle Liu Coughlin (Margot Wendice), Joe Delafield (Max Halliday), Daniel Domingues, Jr. (Tony Wendice), Steve Pacek (Captain Lesgate), and Jan Neuberger (Inspector Hubbard), opens at Virginia Stage Company.
Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill, directed by Wren T. Brown, featuring Karole Forman, with Damon Carter, opens at San Diego’s Cygnet Theatre.
Ain’t Misbehavin, directed by Yvette Freeman Hartley, featuring Dedrick Bonner (Ken), Summer Nicole Greer (Armelia), jenelle Lynn Randall (Nell), James Tolbert (Andre), Amber Diane Wright (Charlaine), with TJ Wilkins, Jodi, Marks, and Samantha M. Lawrence, begins previews at Laguna Playhouse.
Cabaret, directed by Adam Karsten, featuring Kristen Howe (Emcee), Cecily Dowd (Sally Bowles), Marrick Smith (Cliff), Leslie Tinnaro (Fraulein Schneider), Fred Frabotta (Herr Schultz), Erin Stlddard (Fraulein Kost), Erin Stoddard (Fraulein Kost/Baden), and Ben Sears (Ernst Ludwig), with Amber Lux Archer, Alli Bossart, Charlie Bostick, Beverly Durand, Gabriellea Garcia, Rachel Kay, Erik Scott Rommney, Ali Simon, J Pablo Stewart, Erin Stoddard, and Emily Unnasch, previews at CA’s Coachella Valley Rep.
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Broadway Grosses for the week ending Jan. 21.
Click here for the complete analysis.
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Falsettos will run Feb. 29 – Mar. 17 at San Francisco’s 42nd Street Moon, directed by Dennis Lickteig, with choreography by Leslie Waggoner, and music direction by Dave Dobrusky.
Casting TBA.
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CT’s Goodspeed Musicals has announced it 2024 season at the Terris Theatre. Creative teams and casting TBA.
A Complicated Woman (May 10 – June 2), by Ianne Fields, Jonathan Brielle & Sam Salmond, directed by Jeff Calhoun. 
The piece explores the double life of noted summer stock impresario John Kenley.
Ask for the Moon! (July 19 – Aug. 11), by Darko Tresnjak & Oran Eldor, directed by Tresnjak. The comedy is set aboard the Jewel of the Sea ocean liner, following the wacky passengers on its manifest.
TBA (Sept. 27 – Oct. 27).
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Winners of the 2022-23 Joe A. Callaway Awards
Pam MacKinnon (directing) for Downstage at Playwrights Horizons
Pabotoy (choreography) for The Half-God of Rainfall at NY Theatre Workshop
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Off-Broadway’s Labyrinth Theatre will present its annual Barn Series, offering reading of new works, to run Feb. 6-13, at 59E59 Theaters.
Click the link above for the full roster of plays.
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Tadeuz Slobozianek’s Our Class, currently running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, has been extended through Feb. 11, directed by Igor Golyak.
Gus Birney (Dora), Andrey Burkovskiy (Menachem), Jack DiFalco (Zygmunt), José Espinosa (Rysiek), Tess Goldwyn (Zocha,) Will Manning (Heniek), Stephen Ochsner (Jakub Katz), Alexandra Silber (Rachelka/Marianna), Richard Topol (Abram), and Ilia Volok (Władek).
Ten Polish classmates — five Jewish and five Catholic — grow up as friends and neighbors, then turn on one another with LIFE AND DEATH CONSEQUENCES. Inspired by real life events surrounding a horrific 1941 pogrom in a small Polish village, this shocking, timely story follows their lives from childhood through eight decades.
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The world premiere of Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone will run Mar. 8-30 (opening Mar. 14) at CT’s Yale Rep, directed by Liz Diamond.
LaTonya Borsay, Mary Lou Rosato, Sandra Shipley, and Rita Wolf.
Three old friends and a neighbor. A verdant backyard on a summer afternoon. Tea and catastrophe. Caryl Churchill’s convention-defying play sets in comic and devastating counterpoint the consolations of a good chat and the looming weight of disasters both intimate and global.
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Musical Theatre Guild will present Matthew Sklar, Chad Beguelin & Tim Herlihy’s The Wedding Singer on Sun. Mar. 10 at 7 PM at the Santa Monica College PAC, directed by TBA.
Casting TBA.
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Miriam Battye’s Scenes With Girls will run Jan. 25-28 at Off-Broadway’s Theaterlab (357 West 36th St.) and Feb. 3-4 at Hollywood’s Hudson Theatres, directed by Britt Berke. Click here for information & tickets at both locations.
Michaela Boutros-Ghali (Lou), Kitty Hawthorne (Tosh), and Lily Lester (Fran).
The play explores the complexities of love and friendship through the lens of two 24-year-old best friends, Lou and Tosh, as they investigate the power of their genuine connection. Other friend have come, got boyfriends, and gone. So what? Tosh and Lous have each other. They’re not interested in becoming clichés. They’ll never be like other girls. This is love. This is enough.
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The 2024 Chita Rivera Awards will take place Sun. May 20 at NYC’s NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.
Nominations will be announced Fri. Apr. 26.
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Where We Belong, written & performed by Madeline Sayet, will run Feb. 15 – Mar. 10 at DC’s Folger Theatre, directed by Mei Ann Teo.
In 2015, Mohegan theater-maker Madeline Sayet traveled to England to pursue a PhD in Shakespeare. There, she found a country that refused to acknowledge its ongoing role in
colonialism, just as the Brexit vote threatened to further disengage the UK from the wider world.
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Jesús I. Valles’s BATHOUSE.PPTX will run Mar. 19 – Apr. 22 at The Flea Theater, directed by Chay Yew.
TBA.
The play follows Presenter, a gay Latiné student, whose PowerPoint presentation on the history of cleanliness and bathing quickly starts to burst at the seams with appearances from the ghosts of a bathhouse at the end of the world, A Conquistador! Wearing One of Those Hats!, A Very Real Twink, and even Laura Linney. Valles describes it as, “a group project for perverts. Somewhere between lecture, re-enactment, and cruising ground. A meditation on queer longing, queer grief, and all our queer worlds that will come to pass, that will come to be.”
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Boston’s Huntington Theatre will present Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor is the Villain Feb. 8 – Mar. 10 at the Calderwood Pavilion, directed by Margot Bordelon.
Japhet Balaban (Carter Smith) and Maanav Aryan Goyal (Mason Adams), Olivia Hebert (Bailey Gallagher), Benjamin Izaak (Lee Turner), Brianna Martinez (Ivy Watkins), Victoria Omoregie (Nell Shaw), Jules Talbot (Beth Powell), Isabel Van Natta (Shelby Holcomb), and Haley Wong (Raelynn Nix), with Katherine Callaway, Jessica Golden, Jack Greenberg, Jaime José Hernandez, Patrick O’Konis, Valyn Lyric Turner, and Zehava Younger.
At a rural high school in Georgia, a group of lively teens explore Arthur Miller’s The Crucible while navigating young love, sex ed, and a few school scandals. With a contemporary lens on the American classic, the young women begin to discover their power and agency, finding a way to hold both the classic text and their community to account – with a profound sense of rage, authenticity, and hope. Alternately touching and bitingly funny, this new comedy captures a generation in mid-transformation, running on pop music, optimism, and fury, writing their own coming of age story.