B'way Update: Annie; Princess Bride

Reid Shelton and Andrea McArdle 
in the original Broadway production on
Annie.
Credit: Martha Swope

The sun will come out tomorrow...or next fall. Tony-winning director Sam Pinkleton (Oh Mary!) will direct a 50th anniversary production of Annie, the beloved musical based on the long-running comic strip about the spunky, red-headed orphan who gets adopted by multi-millionaire Daddy Warbucks. 

“If you ask any of my closest friends what I love more than anything on the planet, everyone will have the same answer: Annie,” says Pinkleton in a statement. “Annie is everything I love about New York City: gutsy, fearless, and funny as hell. It’s a perfectly constructed musical comedy that my collaborators and I will run toward with joy and abandon—with open hearts and total adoration for this legendary show that has made generations fall in love with musicals.”

Annie opened on Broadway in 1977, won seven Tony Awards, and ran for 2, 377 performances. There have been Broadway revivals in 1997 and 2012 and a touring production played Madison Square Garden in 2024. Film versions were produced in 1982, 1999, and 2014, and a live TV version aired on NBC in 2021. No word on casting, but there is already speculation on who will play Miss Hannigan, the deliciously evil mistress of the orphanage. Some on social media predict Jinx Monsoon of RuPaul's Drag Race and the recent Pirates of Penzance revival. Others vote for Cole Escola, star and author of Oh Mary!

Off-B'way Review: The Ford/Hill Project

Elizabeth Marvel and Gabby Beans in
The Ford/Hill Project,
Credit: Rebecca Smeyne

A docu-play made up of verbatim Senate testimony? Doesn’t exactly sound riveting. Yet The Ford/Hill Project, now at BAM’s Fishman Space after regional productions and a run at the Under the Radar Festival, provides a searing portrait of the workings of government power and its failure to deal with violence and harassment against women. Elizabeth Marvel (one of four cast members) and Lee Sunday Evans (who directs) have stitched together the most dramatic excerpts of testimony and questions from the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominees Clarence Thomas in 1991 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. Both high-profile events were rocked by the respective eyewitness accounts of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford, both of whom claimed the nominees mistreated them. 

Hill testified Thomas pressured her to date him and then, when she refused, used lewd, pornographic language and innuendo in front of her when they worked together at the US Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Ford claimed Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party when they were in high school. At the time of both hearings, the accusations made headlines and threatened the Republican nominees’ appointment to the highest court in the land. Both vehemently denied the allegations and were eventually successfully confirmed. With the passage of time, the impact of these events has faded, but this intense distillation of Hill and Ford’s stories and Thomas and Kavanuagh’s insistent denials bring them vividly into focus.

Book Reviews: Still More Christopher Durang Plays

(Taken out of the Lincoln Center Library): Christopher Durang had the same sense of humor as me. Wild, wacky, and full of pop cultural references. I've read or seen most of his plays, but I wanted to go back and re-experience them. Some of them have dated allusions and I don't know if they'd play today. (Leona and Harry Hemsley, Bush's war on terror, Jesse Helms, Bill Clinton, etc.) But we are still dealing with the forces of racism and homophobia that Durang railed against. His forwards and afterwards are also fascinating to read. In the commentary on Laughing Wild and Baby with the Bathwater, he recounts the then-seemingly insurmountable problem of the NY Times theater critic (Frank Rich at the time) having too much power. 

Volumes read: Laughing Wild and Baby with the Bathwater.

Miss Witherspoon and Mrs. Bob Crachit's Wild Christmas Binge are collected in one volume. I saw the former at Playwrights Horizons. The latter debuted regionally but has yet to appear in NYC. It imagines Mrs. Crachit getting sick and tired of the poverty and misery that surrounds her and she goes off a tear. I wish I had seen Kristin Nielsen do this role. 

The Idiots Karamatzov (co-written with Albert Innaurto)

Durang Durang, six one-acts performed together Off-Broadway including parodies of Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard. 

3 Short Plays: The Nature and Purpose of the Universe, Death Comes to Us All, Mary Agnes (a satire of "well-made" plays where a family gathers as the old cruel patriarch is dying and regrets are expressed), and 'dentity Crisis.

B'way Update: Julia Roberts and Paul Rudd in Small Mouth Sounds

Julia Roberts, Paul Rudd, and 
Sarah Paulson will star in
Small Mouth Sounds on Broadway.

Julia Roberts and Paul Rudd will return to Broadway in an all-star production of Bess Wohl's Small Mouth Sounds which previously played Off-Broadway in 2015. Roberts and Rudd co-starred in a staging of Three Days of Rain in 2006 (which is also returning to Broadway this season.) Small Mouth will be directed by three-time Tony winner Joe Mantello who will also be directing a new production of Downstate on Broadway. This production is another in a growing trend of Broadway transfers of recent Off-Broadway critical success. (There are now 13 play revivals scheduled for Broadway this season and only four new plays.) Wohl is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Liberation which had a similar Off-to-on Main Stem trajectory. Small Mouth won the John Gassner Award for Outstanding Play by a new American author from the Outer Critics Circle. Previews for Small Mouth Sounds begin on Feb. 18, 2027 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in advance of a March 18 opening. 

Also starring are Martin Freeman (The Hobbit), Greta Lee (The Morning Show), Tony and Drama Desk winner Sarah Paulson (Appropriate), and Isaac Powell (Once on This Island). The play concerns six strangers meeting at a spiritual retreat and trying to keep a vow of silence. Scott Rudin and Barry Diller are the producers.

Dr. Who Out to Tender

Ncuti Gatwa and Jodie Whittaker

After over six decades, the BBC has put Doctor Who "out to tender," meaning they are accepting proposals for an outside producer to take up the reigns while the program has been suspended. This hiatus has happened once before when the Doctor was in limbo from 1989 to 2005. I can't be too upset because 63 years is a remarkable run for any TV program and there is plenty to rewatch and read in past episodes, countless books and comics. 

What does gall me is the carping from fans who claim the show's downfall in ratings was due to its "woke" attitude and the recasting the Doctor as a woman and then a black gay man. There was even a comment on FB that Peter Capaldi was the last "good" Doctor, i.e., the last white male Doctor. He went on to say that Jodie Whitaker should have been a companion like Romana, and Missy, the female version of the Master, should have been the Rani, another renegade Time Lord who happened to be a woman. This fan was saying the Doctor should only be a white British dude. This attitude springs from not wanting to see women or other minorities in traditional white straight white male roles. This poster evidently has a problem with women being the central figure, rescuing the guys instead of the other way around. This Doctor is an alien and this whole show is a fantasy, so what's the big deal about a woman or a black man assuming the role?

The other main complaint is the Whitaker and Gatwa episodes seemed to be pushing a liberal "Woke" agenda. As if the Doctor was never about inclusiveness and diversity before. I will agree that many of the Whitaker stories were hitting us over the head with their messages on racism, homophobia, climate change, and autocracy. The writing wasn't particularly strong. During the whole "Flux" season I had no idea what the hell was going on. 

But the Gatwa episodes were much better overall. I think because Russell T Davies took over as the show runner from Chris Chibnall. His sense of story structure was much stronger. There was still a social consciousness but it did not overwhelm the plots. In Dot and Bubble, the fact that the Doctor is black  and the racism of the people he's trying to save is subtly brought up and not explicitly stated until the very end.  Boom was my favorite episode of these seasons. The Doctor is confined to a single spot--a landmine on a war-torn planet which will explode if he moves off it--for nearly the entire segment. It was a clever, tight script.

The future of Doctor Who is in doubt now. But I have confidence it will live on in some form and continue to fascinate millions of Whovians. 

Off-B'way Review: The Real Ivanov

Sam Adegoke and Sam Underwood in
The Real Ivanov.
Credit: Russ Rowland

Beware of director-adaptors who use the word “real” in their versions of a classic script. Laura Strausfeld has chosen to employ the adjective to describe her edition of Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov and subtitled it “A Comedy about Despair.” It’s currently playing at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater and not a production of the CSC. While her staging does have some innovative moments and there are a few glints of pathos and humor, this Ivanov is not particularly “real” since much of the direction is stylized and most of the acting is either overblown or shallow.

The rarely-performed play was Chekhov’s first produced work (in 1887) and has not been seen in a major NYC production in almost 30 years. (The last staging was Gerald Gutierrez’s moving 1997 edition for Lincoln Center starring Kevin Kline, Marian Seldes and a brilliantly funny Max Wright.) Ivanov is not seen as frequently as Chekhov’s four other major plays because of its unrelentingly melancholy story. The title character is a depressed Russian landowner managing a bankrupt estate and his terminally ill wife Anna with whom he has fallen out of love. Nikolai Ivanov is surrounded by comically covetous buffoons and rascals including his ever-scheming estate manager Borkin, his pompous uncle Count Shabyelski, and the frivolous, mercenary Lebedev family to whom he owes a huge debt. In addition to his perpetual sadness, he is also racked with guilt because his spouse left her Jewish religion and her parents to marry him and he is now attracted to Sasha, the Lebedevs’ foolishly idealistic young daughter. 

Soph Metcalf,William DeMeritt,Kimberlee Walker,
Sam Adegoke,Jordan Lage,Sarah Long,
Sam Underwood,Spencer Aste, and Amelia Mason
in The Real Ivanov.
Credit: Russ Rowland

Bringing off the play’s delicate balance between tragedy and comedy is a difficult challenge. Strausfeld attempts to make the case that the protagonist is a victim of clinical depression and would benefit from therapy and medication if he were born about 120 years later (at least that what is claimed in program notes and advertising for the production.) 

She stages much of the action in interesting patterns, reflecting Ivanov’s confined psyche. For the group scenes at the Lebedevs’ soiree, the characters move as if at an uncomfortable, awkward dance. In the scenes at Ivanov’s gloomy house, all action revolves around a simple bench or a table with only one chair. In the fourth act, she places them on a narrow strip of light and the actors tightly maneuver around each other like passengers on a crowded subway—again symbolizing the psychological oppression they feel. Jiyoun Chang’s lighting helps out here, defining the cage-like spaces of Ivanov’s neuroses. While the direction can be innovative, Stausfeld has neglected to emphasize the human dimension of the characters. They are either mopey victims or broad clowns.

B'way Update: Downstate and Blueberries

Francis Guinan and K. Todd Freeman
in Downstate at Playwrights Horizons.
Credit: Joan Marcus

Two plays which had critically acclaimed Off-Broadway runs, Bruce Norris' Downstate and Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich's Here There Are Blueberries, have announced Broadway engagements. Downstate will play the Booth Theater this fall (no specific dates have been posted), according to the Chicago Tribune, while Blueberries will start previews at the Barrymore Theater on Nov. 2 and open on Nov. 9. 

Downstate, Norris' play about four men convicted of sexual offenses living in a group home, opened at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater in 2018, played London in 2019, then opened Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2022, and Washington DC in 2025. The New York Drama Critics Circle voted it the Best Play of the 2022-23 season. This Broadway edition will be a new staging, directed by Tony winner Joe Mantello. (The previous productions were directed by Pam McKinnon.) The Tribune also reports that Francis Guinan and K. Todd Freeman, veterans of the Chicago, London, and NYC versions, will repeat their roles. 

During Downstate's DC run, conservative politicians slammed the play for its humanistic portrayal of sex offenders. Norris stated before the NYC run, “A depiction of something is not an endorsement. But, I do think that witnessing the lives of characters on stage encourages identification, and if you spend two hours in the company of a group of sex offenders, do you emerge from the experience with your certainty about them momentarily disrupted? The goal is not to forgive, but rather to complicate an easy and casually cruel response.”

Kathleen Chalfant, Nemuna Ceesay,
Jonathan Raviv, and Elizabeth Stahlmann in
Here There Are Blueberries at NYTW.
Credit: Matthew Murphy

Blueberries is Tectonic Theater Project's documentary dramatization of the discovery of a book of photographs of Nazi officials and staff of a concentration camp enjoying themselves in leisure activities. The play opened at La Jolla Playhouse in 2022 and played Off-Broadway at the New York Theater Workshop in 2024. It subsequently was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won a Lortel Award for Best New Play. 

Says Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project Executive Director Matt Joslyn in a statement: “For Tectonic Theater Project, bringing Here There Are Blueberries to Broadway is the culmination of a remarkable journey. These photographs hold a mirror up to our humanity in the most intimate and unsettling way. We have to look at them—not to understand the people in the pictures, but to better understand ourselves.” 

Both shows deal with facing uncomfortable figures and show a trend towards mining Off-Broadway for Broadway dramatic productions. There are only four totally new plays planned for the Main Stem this season and 12 play revivals.