Today’s Highlights:
someone spectacular, world premiere by Domenica Feraud, directed by Tatiana Pandiani, featuring Gamze Ceylan (Evelyn), Alison Cimmet (Nelle), Delia Cunningham (Jude), Marcus Gladney Jr. (Julian), Ana Cruz Kayne (Lily), and Damian Young (Thom), with Nicholas Delany, Domenica Feraud, and Rebecca Hirota, opens at Off-Broadway’s Signature Center.
Clue, by Sandy Rustin, Hunter Foster & Eric Price, directed by Foster, featuring Mariah Burks (The Cook), John Treacy Egan (Colonel Mustard), Michelle Elaine (Miss Scarlet), Joanna Glushak (Mrs. Peacock), Tari Kelly (Mrs. White), Mark Price (Wadsworth), John Startzer (Mr. Green), Jonathan Spivey (Professor Plum), Alex Syiek (Mr. Boddy), Teddie Trice (The Cop), and Elisabeth Yancy (Yvette), with Greg Balla, Alison Ewing, Mary McNulty, and James Taylor Odom, opens at LA’s Ahmanson Theatre.
Once Upon a Mattress, directed by Lear deBessonet, featuring Sutton Foster (Winnifred), Michael Urie (Prince Dauntless), Brooks Ashmanskas (The Wizard), Daniel Breaker (The Jester), Will Chase (Sir Harry), Nikki Renée Daniels (Lady Larken), David Patrick Kelly (King Sextimus), Ana Gasteyer (Queen Aggravain), and Kara Lindsay (Winnifred standby) with Daniel Beeman, Wendi Bergamini, Cicily Daniels, Taylor Marie Daniel, Ben Davis, Sheldon Henry, Oyoyo Joi, Amanda Lamotte, Sarah Michele Lindsey, Michael Olaribigbe, Adam Roberts, Jeffrey Schecter, Darius Wright and Richard Riaz Yoder, begins previews at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre.
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Reviews for JOB at Broadway’s Hayes Theatre:
New York Times (Jesse Green): How long would you like to spend with a psychopath? If 80 minutes sounds good, you can take my seat at the Helen Hayes Theater, where the extremely effective, often funny and quasi-sadistic Job opened on Tuesday. I’ll just tiptoe away. But if you’re not a fan of relentless thrillers, you’re likely to feel that the gun the psychopath is aiming at her shrink when the lights come up — and keeps handy for the entirety of their supersized session — is really aimed at you… Bringing a gun to a mandated therapy session does not seem like putting one’s best foot forward… The play…labors to make Jane, or at least her job, sympathetic. She works in “user care” — a euphemism for content moderation, itself a euphemism for the removal of violent, disgusting and often criminal material from the internet… Friedlich frames this work as a chance for Jane (Sydney Lemmon) to do more than talk about helping people, as others do, but to help the world concretely: to “extract the darkness” from the online hellscape by absorbing it herself. No wonder she’s messed up.
Theatermania (David Gordon): …the tension of Job, a psychological thriller about a crisis therapist and his unstable millennial client, is diminished on a larger canvas… From the get-go, the stakes of Job are life and death, but it never really feels that way… Lemmon and Friedman benefit from having rehearsed and performed these roles on and off for about a year now.. To Friedlich’s credit, Job clearly speaks to the now in ways that most commercially produced plays don’t. worthwhile to say… Honestly, that’s how I felt about Job itself, a play that thinks its espousing big ideas about the perils of technology and the dangers of the 24/7 social media cycle but isn’t really saying anything new.
Talkin’ Broadway (Kimberly Ramírez): Job is just a two-hander, but it feels populated by a crowd of characters who haunt the mind of the play’s desperate protagonist. This makes for 80 minutes of intense, gripping action as a high-stakes psychotherapy session unfolds in real time. The provocative production now playing at the Hayes Theater offers audiences a raw and unflinching look at human interaction in the hyperdigital age, exposing a reality so unsettling that we are horrified to recognize it as our own.
Theatrely (Nolan Boggess): If there is one universal truth, bringing a gun to a therapy session is a bad idea. It is especially a bad idea if that therapy session is a psych evaluation. And, for the record, It’s a very very bad idea to point said gun at a therapist who is conducting said psych evaluation. Bad ideas aside, it’s a great start to Job, a thrilling, pressure-cooker new Broadway play by Max Wolf Friedlich… Job, simply put, is a play about generational differences and technology… Lemmon’s portrayal of Jane is thrilling…
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Broadway Grosses for the week ending July 28, 2024.
Click here for the complete analysis.
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Video: Highlights from Sunset Boulevard at Sacramento Music Circus, starring Ellen Harvey and Jason Gotay.
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Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years will begin previews Mar. 18, 2025 and open Apr. 6 at the Hudson Theatre, directed by Whitney White.
Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren.
Video: Trailer
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Off-Broadway’s York Theatre Company has announced its 2024 Fall Season, all performed at Theater at St. Jean’s.
New2NY: Now Comes the Fun Part (The How-the-f#-did-I-get-this-old-Musical (Aug. 28 – Sept. 1), by James Hindman, Lynne Halliday, Mark Waldrop, and Jeffrey Lodin. 
An hilarious look at the appalling indignities and rude awakenings that await anyone lucky enough to make it past that dreaded AARP birthday. From the first colonoscopy to early retirement (the pros and the cons!), from empty nesting to wading back into the dating scene, it’s a musical celebration of life’s third trimester. You’ll laugh…You’ll cry…You’ll throw out your back laughing and crying!
Twist of Fate (Sept. 7-15), by Lissa Levin & by Ron Abel, ad directed by Bill Castellino. A fortuneteller is arrested in 1970’s Los Angeles, and to win the respect of her teenage daughter, fights the law instead of running from it. But first, she needs the respect of her court-appointed attorney. Based on an actual first amendment case.
Monte Cristo (Sept. 23 – Oct. 1), by Peter Kellogg & Stephen Weiner. 1815 France. Hours before his wedding, the first mate of the ship Pharaon, Edmund Dantes, is falsely accused of conspiring to help Napoleon return to power. Unknown to his fiancé, Mercedes, Edmund is arrested and consigned to the dungeons of the Chateau d’If. When he finally escapes 18 years later, Edmund learns that Mercedes has long ago married one of the very men responsible for his imprisonment.
Welcome to the Big Dipper (Nov. 19 – Dec. 29), byJimmy Roberts, Catherine Filloux & John Daggett. An historic inn nestled in Bigelow, New York, near Niagara Falls, has been in Joan Wilkes’s family for decades and is on the brink of closure when a monster blizzard forces two wildly disparate groups of travelers to shelter in place. For three days and nights, within the walls of this sprawling house, secrets are revealed, young love ignites, and lives are changed forever.
The season also features four new musicals, previously unseen in New York, lovingly and minimally staged in the Musicals in Mufti style. Additional information TBA.
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In the Heights will run Aug. 9-15 at the St. Louis Muny, directed & choreographed by William Carlos Angulo, with music direction by Roberto Sinha.
Benji Santiago (Usnavi), Ariana Burks (Nina), Alex Joseph Grayson (Benny), Alysia Velez (Vanessa), Nancy Ticotin (Abuela Claudia), Miguel Gil (Sonny), Martín Solá (Kevin), Karmine Alers (Camila), Darilyn Castillo (Daniela) Marlene Fernandez (Carla), U.J. Mangune (Graffiti Pete) and Ángel Lozada (Standby for Usnavi), with Marissa Barragán, Angelica Maria Beliard, Ixchel Cuellar, Ralphie Rivera De Jesús, Adriel Flete, Reyna Guerra, Emily Madigan, Sebastian Martinez, Eddie Martin Morales, José J. Muñoz, Matthew Rivera, Kiana Coryn Rodriguez, Francisco Javier Thurston and Alora Tonielle.
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Alaska Thunderfuck, Tomas Costanza & Ashley Gordon’s Drag: The Musical will begin previews Sept. 30 and open Oct. 21 at New World Stages, directed & choreographed by Spencer Liff.
Joey McIntyre. Alsaka Thunderfuck, Jujubee, Jan Sport, Lagoona Bloo, J. Elaine Marcos, and more TBA.
Two Drag Houses, both alike in indignity, vie for supremacy in a wig-snatching, diva-licious musical journey of fashion, family, and forgiveness. Leave the lip syncs at the door, darling. After a bitter split, fishy queen Alexis Gilmore opened her club, The Fishtank, while glamourpuss Miss Kitty established The Cathouse. Heels click and tensions rise as old wounds are opened up and the two clubs fight to survive.
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Tituss Burgess: The Indecisive Warrior will run Sept. 30 – Oct. 13 at London’s Phoenix Arts Club.
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The world premiere of Chicken Stories, written & directed by Marcus Folmar, will run Aug. 1-18 at the Broadwater Mainstage (1076 Lillian Way).
Lavel Schley, Darien Sills-Evans, Cosby), Maurice G. Smith, Lanett Tachel, Colin McGurk, JP Payton, and LaVonna Miller, with Alexis Underwood, and Tagger Skomsky, with guest star John Marshall Jones.
Chicken brings people together: families, friends, neighbors, schoolmates, coworkers. It is comforting, nourishing, and delicious. It can also spark tensions (e.g., my mother’s chicken recipe is better than your mother’s chicken. Which local establishment makes the better wings?
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A U.K. tour of Bruce Joel Rubin, Dave Stewart & Glen Ballard’s Ghost the Musical will open Aug. 22 at Aylesbury Waterside Theatre, directed by Bob Tomson, choreography by Alistair David, and music direction by Jordan Alexander. Click here for the tour schedule.
Rebekah Lowings (Molly Johnson), Jacqui Dubois (Oda Mae Brown), Josh St. Clair (Sam Wheat), James Mateo-Salt (Carl Bruner), Les Dennis (Hospital Ghost) Lionel Ferguson, Jules Brown (Willie Lopez), Garry Lee (Subway Ghost), Tanisha Butterfield (Clara), Keiahna Jackson-Jones (Louise), Molly Cleere (Mrs. Santiago/Bank Officer), Gabrielle Cummins (Officer Wallace), Olivia-Rose Deer (Susan/Ortisha), Wade Lewin (Orlando), and Jamie Pritchard (Detective Biederman), with Joe Readman.
Molly, who, walking back to her apartment one night, sees her boyfriend Sam murdered. With the help of a phony storefront psychic, Sam, trapped between this world and the next, tries to communicate with Molly in the hope of saving her from grave danger.
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Michael R. Jackson & Anna J. Jacob’s Teeth will begin previews Oct. 16 and open Oct. 31 at New World Stages, directed by Sarah Benson, with choreography by Raja Feather Kelly.
Alan Louis (Dawn O’Keefe), Andy Karl (Pastor Bill O’Keefe), Will Connolly (Brad O’Keefe), Jason Gotay (Tober), Jared Loftin (Ryan), and more TBA.
Evangelical Christian teenager Dawn O’Keefe has a powerful secret not even she understands, whose body bites back when men try to violate her. That’s not a metaphor.
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The world premiere ofBen Decter & Kristin Hanggi’s It’s All Your Fault, Tyler Price! will run Nov. 7 – Dec. 15 (opening Nov. 14) at the Hudson Theatre, directed by Hanggi.
Casting TBA.
Jackson is a middle school boy with big feelings who’s in big trouble after punching his bullying classmate, Tyler Price, for mocking Jackson’s sister, Lucy. Lucy, who attends the same school’s special day class, has epilepsy and related learning challenges. To avoid expulsion, Jackson’s principal insists he explain himself to the entire school. In response, Jackson stages a scrappy, heartfelt musical using music he “borrows” from his composer dad. Through each family member’s bravery, we watch healing begin for all.
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An Intimate Evening with Jennifer Holliday concert will run Aug. 30 – Sept. 1 at Hollywood’s Catalina Jazz Club.