Top Plays of 2023

Once again, I'm compiling a list of the top ten plays I saw in New York City that opened in 2023.

Last year, the musical Paradise Square topped my list, though critics were mixed in their reviews of the show, and it ended up closing at a financial loss.

Alas, I can't claim that this is the year theatre came back in New York, but a number of good shows did open in 2023, a couple of which are still running, so see them while you can!

10. The Smuggler - Irish Rep had an ambitious season this year, but the best thing I saw there was a very small show, Ronán Noone's one-man verse drama about a Massachusetts bar tender who ends up getting involved in human trafficking.

9. The School for Scandal - Hudson Classical Theatre Company continued its tradition this year of bringing solid productions of classical plays to the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park. This year's staging of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal brought together delightful acting with a creative costume design.

8. The Mind Mangler - This year the team that brought us The Play That Goes Wrong opened a new show in their franchise featuring Henry Lewis as an inept mentalist. The show is funny, which I expected, but also successfully pulls off a couple of brilliant magic tricks, which I wasn't expecting. Best of all, though, it has a tremendous heart that is no illusion at all. (Still playing!)

7. Crumbs from the Table of Joy - Keen Company's revival of Lynn Nottage's break-out play from 1995 was another unexpected delight, in part due to the performance of Shanel Bailey as Ernestine, a young woman in 1950s New York struggling to deal with changes both in the world and in her own family. Bailey definitely had a good year in 2023, as she appeared in another great revival on my list as well.

6. The Knight of the Burning Pestle - I directed this Jacobean classic when I was in college, so I knew I'd have to see a co-production by Red Bull and Fiasco Theater. Paco Tolson led the cast as a grocer's apprentice who becomes the titular Knight of the Burning Pestle. What made the piece a sheer joy, however, was the interaction of the ensemble, including Ben Steinfeld, Royer Bokus, and Teresa Avia Lim.

5. Here We Are - Stephen Sondheim's collaboration with David Ives finally made it to the stage this year. Even with flawed direction, the piece soars with a cast that includes Jeremy Shamos, Amber Gray, Bobby Cannavale, Rachel Bay Jones, Steven Pasquale, Micaela Diamond, and David Hyde Pierce. Whether or not you've seen any of the surrealist films of Luis Buñuel that inspired the piece, you should be able to appreciate the play's existential musings on modern life. Hurry to see the show before it closes on January 21st.

4. Arms and the Man - Shanel Bailey came back to Theatre Row this fall to appear as Raina in Gingold Theatrical Group's magnificent production of Shaw's anti-war classic Arms and the Man. Director David Staller brought together a wonderful cast that also included Keshav Moodliar, Ben Davis, Delphi Borich, Thomas Jay Ryan, Evan Zes, and Karen Ziemba. As someone who is a fan of toy theatres, I also loved the set designed by Lindsay G. Fuori to resemble a paper stage from the Victorian era. I'm looking forward to seeing what GTG does next in 2024!

3. Hamlet - The Public Theater chose Kenny Leon to direct the last production of Shakespeare in the Park before the Delacorte Theatre is shut down for renovations. Beowulf Boritt's set playfully echoed the one he previously designed for Leon's Much Ado About Nothing. The biggest joy, though, was seeing famed Shakespearean actor John Douglas Thompson play the most engrossing Claudius I've ever seen. Ato Blankson-Wood was able to hold his own as young Prince Hamlet, and the cast also included Lorraine Toussaint as Gertrude, Daniel Pearce as Polonius, and Solea Pfeiffer as Ophelia.

2. The Great Gatsby - The immersive production of The Great Gatsby was criminally underrated. The piece contained a couple of more traditional scenes, such as the tea Jay Gatsby prepared for Daisy, where the entire audience was assembled in one place. What was most interesting, though, was the way we were all divided into small groups to wander through side scenes, having interactions with various characters, sometimes with other audience members, and sometimes one-on-one. The live music was an added bonus. Sadly, the show closed in New York, but there's a chance it might come back, if not here, in another city.

1. Becomes a Woman - My top choice this year is likely to surprise a lot of people, but the Mint Theater Company performed an immense service in bringing Betty Smith's long forgotten play to the stage at last. Before Smith penned her 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, she wrote Becomes a Woman, but this was 1931, and no theatre wanted to touch a play with a feminist bent so far ahead of its time. In the Mint's long overdue production, Emma Pfitzer Price starred as Francie Nolan, a character whose name Smith later used as the heroine of her classic novel. Other strong performances were delivered by Jeb Brown, Peterson Townsend, Gina Daniels, Jason O'Connell, and Duane Boutté.

So that's my list! I'm looking forward to more great theatre in 2024.

The End of the World

Whether or not the end of the world really does come in Stephen Sondheim and David Ives's musical Here We Are, a feeling of impending doom permeates the play, which is perhaps fitting since it was the last piece Sondheim worked on before he died.

Currently, the show is playing in an ambitious but imperfect production at The Shed, the ambitious but rather imperfect arts monstrosity erected at Hudson Yards, not far from the Vessel. (At least The Shed hasn't induced anyone to commit suicide... yet.)

It would be a shame to dwell on Joe Mantello's uneven direction of the piece, as the play itself really is quite good, and deserves to have a great future. Inspired by the films of surrealist director Luis Buñuel, Here We Are uses the dream-like qualities of surrealism to explore the unsettling nature of human existence.

And what humans the play gives us! Plastic surgeon Paul Zimmer (played by Jeremy Shamos) and his wife Claudia (played by Amber Gray) arrive at the home of the wealthy and glamorous Leo and Marianne Brink (Bobby Cannavale and Rachel Bay Jones). They bring with them the flamboyant ambassador Raffael Santello Di Santicci (Steven Pasquale) and the gender-ambiguous radical Fritz (Micaela Diamond).

Everyone is expecting brunch, but no brunch has been prepared. Fortunately, money is no object to this class of people, so they decide to go out for brunch, only to find a succession of absurd situations preventing them from eating. They encounter a variety of servants and waiters, all played by the hysterical Tracie Bennett and Denis O'Hare. They eventually make their way to Raffael's embassy, picking up along the way a Colonel (Francois Battiste), a Soldier (Jin Ha), and a Bishop (David Hyde Pierce).

While the first act of the play roughly mirrors Buñuel's 1972 film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, the second act is inspired by an earlier piece, The Exterminating Angel, which has also been made into an opera by composer Thomas Adès. I'm not familiar with Adès's music, but I am with that of Sondheim. This score is unmistakably his, particularly reminiscent of Sunday in the Park with George, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1985.

Unfortunately, this production pipes the music in from an orchestra playing offstage. The volume of the music coming through the speakers sometimes overwhelms the actors, which is surprising given how strong some of the singers are. Amber Gray has already made a name for herself with Great Comet and Hadestown, but future audiences will want to keep an ear out for the amazing voice of Jin Ha.

Here We Are is only scheduled to run through January 21st, so see it while you can!

Dear Mr. President and Madam Vice President

The Dramatists Guild today delivered to the incoming President and Vice President of the United States letters written by playwrights, lyricists, and composers from across the country.

Our message is clear. The arts are vital to our country, both economically and spiritually. With the country facing so many challenges, the arts have got to be part of the solution, and we are asking the new administration to think big.

You can read a selection of letters here, including my own. Other dramatists who contributed letters include David Ives, Ken Ludwig, Theresa Rebeck, and John Weidman, to name just a few.

In the wake of COVID-19 and the economic devastation it has caused, some dramatists have suggested that we could revive the Federal Theatre Project, which in the 1930s paved the way for the golden ages of both Broadway and Hollywood. This could potentially help to knit back together our frayed body politic, as well as provide relief to arts workers who have been made unemployed through no fault of their own.

Alternatively, we could do what the great American playwright Arthur Miller urged us to do, and create a national theatre. While the Kennedy Center provides a home for arts organizations, our nation still has no official national theatre with funding from the government, a situation lamented not just by Democrats like President Kennedy, but by Republicans like President Eisenhower as well. We could at long last rectify that situation, perhaps naming the new national theatre for Arthur Miller.

Whatever we do, however, we must do it now. America does not have a moment to lose.

Best Plays of 2017

It's that time again when I look back on the best new productions that opened in New York City over the past year.

This list is only for plays in the five boroughs, so great productions farther afield like The Secret Theatre and Romeo and Juliet as well as the productions at the Shaw Festival are ineligible. My own play Capital which opened in Detroit this year doesn't qualify either, even though it was named one of the Best of the Season for southeastern Michigan.

Also not included are shows that opened in 2016 but that I didn't get to see until this year, like Dear Evan Hansen and the Broadway production of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812. Last year, A Doll's House, Butler, and Hadestown topped the list. But what were the best productions of 2017? Read on to find out!

10. The Liar - Truth is, this adaptation by David Ives of the classic comedy by Pierre Corneille was one of the best (and first) plays I saw in 2017.

9. Fucking A - Of the three Suzan-Lori Parks plays the Signature Theatre Company produced this year, this was by far the best. A riff off of The Scarlet Letter, the play had its first off-broadway run back in 2003, but its dystopian view of a society where abortion is legal but practitioners are literally branded seems all-too prescient.

8. Once on This Island - This beloved Ahrens-Flaherty musical is currently getting an amazing production, so get your tickets now. Lea Salonga is excellent as Erzulie, the goddess of love and beauty, but the rest of the cast is strong as well, and Dane Laffrey's set makes the most of Circle in the Square's intimate space. If you're concerned about seeing a play in the round, don't worry. Director Michael Arden makes sure there isn't a bad seat in the house.

7. The Government Inspector - The Red Bull Theater Company is dedicated to the aesthetic of Jacobean drama, but this year they put on Nikolai Gogol's nineteenth-century farce about a minor bureaucrat mistaken for the Inspector General from the capital. The split-level set was best viewed from further back in the audience, but even if you sat up front like I did, you got to see some amazing performances from the likes of Michael Urie, Mary Testa, Michael McGrath, and Talene Monahon.

6. A Midsummer Night's Dream - It wasn't too long ago (ten years) that The Public Theater previously did Shakespeare's supernatural romantic comedy in Central Park, but the 2017 production was indeed a dream. Annaleigh Ashford gave a stand-out performance as Helena, which is saying a lot, considering that the show's headliner was Phylicia Rashad as a queenly Titania. The most memorable aspect of this production was having the attendant fairies played by older actors wandering around the forest in what looked like their pajamas. It was creepy in all the right ways.

5. Ernest Shackleton Loves Me - Two-person musicals are hard to pull off, and it's difficult to imagine this one with anyone else in the lead but Val Vigoda, the show's lyricist who also acts, sings, and plays the drums, keyboard, banjo, and electric violin! The book by Joe DiPietro tells the story of a sleep-deprived single mom composing music for video games who tries Internet dating and ends up being matched with the early-twentieth-century explorer Ernest Shackleton. Who cares that they're 100 years apart and he's currently in Antarctica? This witty and wonderful piece was a ray of sunshine in a dark year.

4. Desperate Measures - Speaking of witty and wonderful new musicals, the surprise hit of 2017 was Peter Kellogg and David Friedman's Desperate Measures, which sadly closes today at the the York Theatre Company. Based very loosely on Shakespeare's problem comedy Measure for Measure, the play is reset in the Old American West, where an un-elected governor is able to abuse his power and try to force a virtuous young woman about to enter a convent to sleep with him. If she refuses, her brother will hang. That might not seem like the stuff of musical comedy, but joyous music and dialogue in perfect rhyming couplets keep the laughs coming even through bleak material.

3. Julius Caesar - No doubt the most controversial production in New York this year was also one of the best. Conservative snowflakes cried foul over a play showing a Trump-like figure being assassinated. (Never mind the numerous past productions of Julius Caesar with Clinton and Obama stand-ins as Caesar.) Few--if any of them--actually saw the production. Had they gotten off of their hypocritical high horses long enough to actually see the show, they would have witnessed a biting critique of the left, and a warning that political violence, as tempting as it may seem, only leads to more violence, and ultimately despotism. The brutal assassination scene left some audience members physically sick to their stomachs. Julius Caesar was truly visceral theatre.

2. HOME/SICK - This collaborative project by The Assembly has been around for a while. (The group first workshopped it in 2010.) However, the production that opened this year at JACK in Brooklyn benefited from a long incubation process and past exploratory runs across the country. The story it tells of the Weather Underground in no way romanticizes the movement. Instead, much like the Public's Julius Caesar, HOME/SICK presents a cautionary tale of what happens when well meaning people turn to violence. During intermission, the audience watched a recreation of an event members of the Weather Underground had planned to bomb. It was chilling. Director Jess Chayes deftly led her cast to explore the complexities of taking on the injustices of the world when you yourself might through your own strident militancy become part of the problem.

1. Sweeney Todd - While Ernest Shackleton Loves Me and Desperate Measures were massively entertaining, and Julius Caesar and HOME/SICK were deeply disturbing, the Tooting Arts Club production of Sweeney Todd at the Barrow Street Theatre managed to be both. The show is still playing through the end of May, though sadly not with Norm Lewis, who opened this New York production as Sweeney. Fortunately, you can still catch Carolee Carmello as a hilarious and horrifying Mrs. Lovett. The Stephen Sondheim musical has a brilliant score, and you might think a stripped-down version in a reproduction of an actual London pie shop would lose something. Instead, this intimate production allows you to appreciate the music in a deeply personal way. Having the actors literally leap up onto tables right in front of you is shocking, but no more so than some of the acting choices, which remind you of the true trauma some of the characters suffer in this story.

So those are my picks for this year. Honorable mentions go to The Tempest at St. Ann's Warehouse, Everybody at the Signature, and the Metropolitan Opera's production of Fidelio. Hopefully 2018 will be an even better year for theatre in New York City!

The Liar

Last night, I saw Classic Stage Company's production of The Liar, David Ives's adaptation of Corneille's 17th-century French comedy.

Carson Elrod, a veteran of Ives's work having appeared in Lives of the Saints and other comedies, begins the show with a curtain speech in rhymed iambic pentameter, warning the audience that the whole play will be... in rhymed iambic pentameter. That's not quite true, as at one point, Ives switches to prose, and with quite a lovely effect.

The plot follows the titular character of Dorante, played by Christian Conn. Though he has just arrived in Paris, the compulsive liar tells amazing stories of his extensive adventures there. Encountering a pair of women, Dorante convinces himself he's in love with one of them, though the audience wonders if this, too, is a lie. Ultimately, self-delusion can be one of the greatest dangers of games of deception.

Frequently, the play drops in references to lying politicians. This makes Dorante's pathological lying seem far from harmless. Recent events make Ives's light touch feel incongruous with the times, though few can dispute that the playwright has a wonderful way with wordplay. In spite of brightly colored period costumes, the play makes frequent anachronistic allusions, for instance referencing the Eiffel Tower though it won't be built for hundreds of years. In Ives's hands, these small twists can be rendered hysterically funny.

The stand-out performance in this production comes from Kelly Hutchinson, who was also in last year's The Crucible on Broadway. Playing the double role of the twin sisters Isabelle and Sabine, Hutchinson transforms herself from a bubbly sexpot to a humorless grouch and back again. Watching her switch between the two roles is itself worth the trip to the theater.

This delightful comedy is playing until February 26th. For more information and tickets, visit:

Classic Stage Company

Lives of the Saints

I just got back from seeing Lives of the Saints, the latest David Ives play to be produced by Primary Stages. The collection of seven short playlets is a bit of a mixed bag, as one might expect, but at its best, the piece is highly affecting.

The first playlet, Babel's in Arms, takes place at the building of the legendary Tower of Babel, with two slaves throwing the f-word around and an uppity business woman ordering them both about. The combination of ancient history, casual swearing, and jokes that are smart but don't necessarily lead anywhere reminded me a bit of David Mamet's Keep Your Pantheon. Though not the greatest piece of the evening, the Biblical theme and setting did tie in with some of the other playlets.

Following this came Soap Opera, a hymn to the Maytag Repairman of the commercials of yesteryear. Re-dubbed the "Maypole Repairman" the protagonist falls in love with a perfect washing machine, only to discover that what he really needs is a human being with all her imperfections. The absurdity of the piece actually helped it to resonate emotionally, which was less true of The Goodness of Your Heart, which followed it. In that playlet, two men watch their friendship unravel over the most ridiculous of issues. Though written and performed with greater realism, that story seemed less real to me than the absurd Soap Opera.

The best piece of the first act, however, was Enigma Variations. A classic piece of Ives, the play introduces two Bill's and two Bebe's, a double set of doppelgangers who look and dress alike and might even be the same person. Several times the play resets and begins again with slight variations. Though such repetitions might sound boring, in the hands of Ives they are variety itself. The audience waits on the edges of their seats to hear how the same lines will be played again and to experience the same words in completely new ways. The addition of a fifth character, who might be either a nurse or a swim coach, adds icing to the cake.

This production saves the best playlets for last, though. The second act opens with Life Signs, about a man whose mother has just died. Unexpectedly, the dead woman starts to speak, much like the title character in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar." Hilariously, the corpse reveals way too much information, embarrassing both her son and his wife. The ridiculous absurdity of her life, however, leads her to the conclusion that she has never truly lived. Her son, traumatized by the situation, tries to remind her of the good parts of her life, attempting to ease the conscience of a woman who is not just at death's door, but has already passed through it.

Ives grew up a Polish kid in Chicago, and the last two playlets reflect his background. It's All Good imagines the return of a successful New York writer to the neighborhood where he grew up. On the L train, he meets an alternate version of himself as he might have been had he stayed. This doppelganger (quite different from the ones in Enigma Variations) invites him home for dinner, where he meets his first love, the woman he might have married had he stayed behind.

The final play, which provides the title for the whole evening, also involves Polish Americans in Chicago. This time, instead of exploring lost possibilities and regret, the piece reflects on how the simple faith of ordinary people might indeed be the secret to becoming a true saint.

If you're interested in catching the play, which runs until March 27, check out the company's website:

Primary Stages