Book Review: I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

(Bought at the Strand Book Store for $10): Pulitzer Prize winning critic Emily Nussbaum's collection of reviews and profiles from the New Yorker forms a fascinating history of the evolution of TV in the early 21st century. From the rise of cable to the current state of streaming, Nussbaum digs deep into the meaning of such cult and pop hits as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Americans, Law and Order: SVU, Jane the Virgin, and many others. Her take on David Chase's love-hate relationship with his audience in The Sopranos brings up several interesting points like the moral ambiguity of Dr. Melfi helping Tony not to be a better man but a more efficient gangster. She says Chase makes us love Tony but then makes us hate ourselves for loving him and watching him every week.  I haven't watched ALL of these shows, but Nussbaum makes me want to. 

Her extended profiles of prolific show-runners Kenya Barris (black-ish), Jenji Kohan (Weeds, Orange Is the New Black) and Ryan Murphy (Glee, Pose, Feud, etc.) offer a glimpse into the shifting power struggle in entertainment as these black, female and gay voices become more powerful. There are also views of the past with ruminations on Norman Lear, Joan Rivers, and Sex and the City.

Nussbaum recently was reassigned to cover theater for the New Yorker and I'm looking forward to her perspectives.

Bowl EP and David Greenspan Among Obie Winners

Oghenero Gbaje and Essence Lotus in Bowl EP,
Obie Award winner for Best New Play.
Credit: Carol Rosegg

Bowl EP, Nazareth Hassan's play about two wanna-be rappers set in an empty swimming pool made into a skateboarding park, and performer-playwright David Greenspan were among the winners of the 69th annual Obie Awards, announced on NY-1 by Frank DiLella and Michael Urie on Jan. 31. Bowl EP was named Outstanding New Play and won for its three-person Ensemble Cast and Greenspan won two awards--for his performance as part of the ensemble of Prince Faggot and for the solo show I'm Assuming You Know David Greenspan. He previously won six Obies.

Originally presented by the Village Voice newspaper, the Obies are now presented by the American Theater Wing who also co-presents the Tonys. The Obies honor excellence in Off and Off-Off-Broadway theater. Instead of a ceremony, the Wing presents winners with cash grants totaling more than $250,000. A private reception for the winners will be held on Feb. 23. 

David Greenspan in I'm Assuming You Know
David Greenspan.
Credit: Ahron R. Foster

This year's judging panel comprised Stephanie Berry, Modesto "Flako" Jimenez, Jonathan McCrory, Santiago Orjuela-Laverde, Aya Ogawa, Barbara Samuels, and Whitney White, led by co-chairs Wilson Chin and Ryan J. Haddad. More than 300 productions were evaluated.

Drama Desk and Outer Critics Announce 2026 Dates

Two major theater award dispensing groups, the Drama Desk and the Outer Critics Circle, have announced their dates for nominations and ceremonies. The 70th annual Drama Desk Awards will be held on Sun. May 17 at Town Hall. The ceremony will celebrate the organiztion's 70-year history. This marks a return to the venue for the first time since the 2020 theater shutdown. The DDs had been presented at NYU's Skirball in recent years. The nominations will be announced on April 29. This year’s awards will be produced by Drama Desk Awards Productions, a venture of Scene Partners in partnership with the Season. Chaired by the Martha Wade Steketee (UrbanExcavations.com), the 2026 nominating committee includes Linda Armstrong (Amsterdam News), Daniel Dinero (Theater Is Easy), Peter Filichia (Broadway Radio), Kenji Fujishima (freelance, Theatermania), Margaret Hall (Playbill.com) and Raven Snook (TDF).  Charles Wright and David Barbour are co-presidents. The Drama Desk considers Broadway, Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway in each of its multiple categories. The acting categories are not gender-specific and the top two vote-getters are the winners. Multiple awards may be presented in the case of ties. The awards are voted on by about 100 DD members who are NY-based theater critics, reporters, and editors.

Nominations for the Outer Critics Circle Awards will be announced on April 21. The winners will be made public by press release on May 11 with a ceremony to be held on May 21 at a venue yet to be announced. Previous OCC presentations have been held at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts' Bruno Walter auditorium and before that at Sardi's restaurant where a meal was included. The OCCs honor on and Off-Broadway. Some of their categories are divided between Broadway and Off-Broadway while others put them together. Like the DDs, the OCCs have eliminated gender-specific acting categories. The Outer Critics Circle is an organization of writers on New York theatre for out-of-town, national, and digital publications. Led by President David Gordon (Theatermania), the OCC Board of Directors which is also the Nominating Committee includes Vice President Richard Ridge, Recording Secretary Joseph Cervelli, Corresponding Secretary Patrick Hoffman, Treasurer David Roberts, Cynthia Allen, Harry Haun, Dan Rubins, Janice Simpson and Doug Strassler. Simon Saltzman is president emeritus and a non-nominating board member, and Stanley L. Cohen serves as financial consultant and a non-nominating board member.

Off-B'way Review: Ulysses

The company of Ulysses.
Credit: Joan Marcus

The innovative theater collective Elevator Repair Service has tackled such literary giants as Fitzgerald (Gatz, its day-long version of The Great Gatsby), Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury) and Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises). The 35-year-old company is now taking on the greatest challenge in its history by brining to the stage what is generally regarded as one of the most confounding literary masterpieces, James Joyce’ Ulysses. The 1922 massive tome chronicles a single day—June 16, 1904—in Dublin, following the wanderings of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly and the young Stephen Dedalus, paralleling Homer’s epic The Odyssey. Joyce experiments with style and form, switches genres with each chapter and has the characters express their inner thoughts. We are told in an onstage intro that one critic famously said that not much happens in Ulysses, apart from everything you can possibly imagine. 

Is it even possible to stage such a work which relies so heavily on interior monologues and so little on plot in theatrical terms? Burgess Meredith directed an adaptation of the phantasmagoric Nightgown section (Bloom venturing into Dublin’s red-light district and his own imagination) Off-Broadway in 1958 starring Zero Mostel which was revived on Broadway in 1974. Here director John Collins and co-director Scott Shepherd are taking on the work as a whole, or at least an edited version. While some of the sections are bogged down in attempts to dramatize Joyce’s literary excesses and tend to drag, this adaptation does capture the vital energy of the author’s vivid characters, his deep themes of sexuality, religion and literature, and the emergence of Dublin itself as a life force.    

Off-B'way Review: Data

Sophia Lillis, Karan Brar, and Justin H. Min
in Data.
Credit: T. Charles Erickson

Matthew Libby’s Data could have easily become like one of those made-for-streaming spy thrillers in which attractive young techies steal vital software and wind up running through the streets of LA or London after bedding each other. But what the playwright delivers is a thoughtful, complex work exploring scary issues of government overreach and technological eradication of human rights. With the inflammatory national debate over immigration raging on our streets, Data is an important and gripping indictment of the Trump administration’s authoritarian policies and the digital industry’s complicity.

We begin innocently and almost comically with low-level programmers Maneesh and Jonah playing ping pong in the break room of the giant programming corporation Athena. They are interrupted by Riley who works on the higher-up Data Analytics team. At first Libby seems to be steering us into rom-com territory with the alpha-dog Jonah moving in on the aloof Riley—who isn’t interested—and Maneesh attempting to minimize his college relationship with her. (Libby confounds our expectations with dexterity, casually revealing Maneesh is gay and treating this information as a detail and not a vital plot development.) But as we learn more about the secret project Riley is working on and for which she wants to recruit Maneesh, the play takes on dark and dangerous dimensions. 

Book Review: Self-Help

(Borrowed from the NYPL on 40th St.): Lorrie Moore's early collection of short stories follows confused and unhappy women in frayed relationships. I liked the first one, How to Be an Other Woman best. Written in the second person, it follows a single woman navigating an affair with a married man as she tries to value herself and not sell herself so cheaply. The prose is fragmentary in places with short sections of no more than a paragraph, like a tightly edited indie film. The Kid's Guide to Divorce is brief and shattering as a young girl recounts a night with her mom, watching old movies and dancing. The final story, To Fill, is longer and almost a novella. Another depressed woman deals with an unfaithful husband, her ailing mother, and the urge to steal from her department-store sales job. Quirky and compassionate. I liked these better than the one in Bark, a later collection.

Batman Humor That Went Over My Head as a Kid, Part 4

Catwoman is about to steal Chad and Jeremy's
voices. Notice how they could just walk right
on stage with no one to to stop them.

The Cat's Meow/The Bats Kow Tow--This second season episode was chock full of real-life celebrities and 1960s cultural references. The main plot involves delicious Julie Newmar as the Catwoman stealing the voices of pop duo Chad and Jeremy who also appeared as essentially themselves on The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Patty Duke Show. They broke up only two years later and Jeremy Clyde pursued an acting career. (He appeared on Broadway in A Patriot for Me, The Importance of Being Earnest opposite Wendy Hiller, and in the Downton Abbey movie.) Also appearing are comedian/talk show host Steve Allen as Allen Stevens, Hawaiian singer Don Ho in the window cameo, and celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring as Jay Oceanbring (get it?) Catwoman and her crew are hiding out in Oceanbring's salon. The Dynamic Duo arrive and are attacked by Catwoman's henchman. Sebring delivers his only line, "Watch the antiques" as the combatants threaten to destroy his expensive furnishings. 

Sebring was a top hairstylist for Hollywood stars including Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra, Warren Beatty and Steve McQueen. He dated Sharon Tate. They remained friends after breaking up and Tate married Roman Polanski. He was murdered along with Tate by the followers of Charles Manson and was a character in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Ho appears in the window as Batman and Robin are climbing down from the British Ambassador's office. (BTW, the British Ambassador's dialogue references both My Fair Lady and Winston Churchill.) Also appearing in this episode is Joe Flynn, best known as the petty, incompetent Capt. Binghampton on McHale's Navy, as the manager of a dance instruction studio, again a front for Catwoman's nefarious operations. For some reason, Flynn and Allen were unbilled.