Mexodus and Prince Faggot Top Lortel List

Nygel D. Robinson and Brian Quijada  in Mexodus. 

Credit: Curtis Brown

Theater award season has officially begun with the announcement of the 41st annual Lucille Lortel Awards for excellence in Off and Off-Off-Broadway theater on April 1. Amber Gray and Harvey Guillén currently starring in The Rocky Horror Show made the announcement from Sardi's. The awards will be presented on May 3 at NYU Skirball. The musical Mexodus, which opened at the Minetta Lane earlier this season and is now playing a second engagement at the Daryl Roth Theater, lead the nominations with nine including for Outstanding Musical. Prince Faggot by Jordan Tannahill, which opened at Playwrights Horizons and later played the Seaview Studio, received the most nominations for a play with six. The Lortel  nominating committee saw 98 Off-Broadway shows in the 2025–2026 season, with 41 receiving nominations. The Outer Critics, Drama League, Drama Desk and Tonys nominations will soon follow.

A complete list of Lortel nominees follows:

Outstanding Play

Cold War Choir Practice, by Ro Reddick
Kyoto, by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson
THE MONSTERS, by Ngozi Anyanwu
Mother Russia,by Lauren Yee
Prince Faggot, by Jordan Tannahill

Outstanding Musical
BIGFOOT!, book by Amber Ruffin and Kevin Sciretta, lyrics by Amber Ruffin, music by David Schmoll and Amber Ruffin
Mexodus, by Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson
My Joy Is Heavy, by The Bengsons
Night Side Songs, words and music by The Lazours
Saturday Church, book and additional Lyrics by Damon Cardasis and James Ijames, music by Sia, additional music by Honey Dijon

Book Review: Severance

(Bought at Barnes and Noble full price): Ling Ma must be psychic or something. Her novel Severance was published in 2018, two years before the COVID pandemic and three years before the Apple TV series (unrelated) of the same name aired. Yet, she accurately predicted a worldwide wave of disease would originate in China and the spread and disrupt life as we know it. The consequences of Ma's fictional plague are much worse than the actual COVID disaster. As in many previous post-apocalyptic novels, only a few survive and band together. But what differentiates Severance from most other end-of-the-world works is it compares the pre and post catastrophe worlds. The main character is Candace Chen, a Chinese-American office worker drifting through her life. Chapters on her world before and after the pandemic alternate. But in both she has to deal with office-like hierarchies. In her job as a publishing production manager in charge of bibles, she comes up against patriarchal bosses and soul-crushing routines. In the after times, she submits to an oppressive male leader who guides their group of survivors through a dangerous nightmarescape full of zombie-like victims of the fever. Well, they're not brain-eaters like in the Walking Dead.

Anyway, Ma masterfully depicts Candace's two realities and her struggles to realize her full potential. The scenes describing New York as the fever takes over were strikingly real, reminding me of what Gotham was like during COVID--an empty Times Square, shuttered Broadway theaters, deserted office buildings. There are also insights into the immigrant experience and searching for your vocation. Candace emerges as a confused heroine always unsure of her next step, until she is forced to make a choice. As in The Secret History which I finished just before this one, I could not put the book down because I had to find out what happens next.

B'way Review: Dog Day Afternoon, Giant

Jon Bernthal, Danny Johnson, and 
Jessica Hecht in Dog Day Afternoon.
Credit: Matthew Muprhy, Evan Zimmerman

Two new Broadway plays are set in the last decades of the 20th century and based on real events. Both are startlingly relevant, foretelling fissures and fractious issues in our current era. Stephen Aldy Guirgis’s adaptation of Dog Day Afternoon, based on the cult-hit 1975 film about a botched bank robbery, exposes the sharp divide between those in and out of power. Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant, a transfer from London, raises the ever-present specter of anti-Semitism and the seemingly unresolvable, perpetual Middle-East War which has gone by many different names over the years (as well as issues such as censorship, cancel culture, and separating the art from the artist). Both productions are powerful theater and feature blockbuster performances not just from the above-the-title leads but from their entire ensembles.

Dog Day is a rarity on Broadway for many reasons. It’s based on a popular film and sports a cast of 20, but it’s not a musical. Guirgis’ stage version follows the Oscar-winning original screenplay and fleshes out many of the characters. The story’s strongly anti-authoritarian themes emerges with power but also becomes an electrifying crowd-pleaser. 

Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Jon Bernthal
in Dog Day Afternoon.
Credit: Matthew Murphy, Evan Zimmerman

This dark comedy was inspired by an actual ill-planned bank job which unexpectedly morphed into a media circus. On a broiling summer day in 1972, inept hold-up men Sonny and Sal stumble and fumble their way into a disastrous hostage situation. In a city reeling from near bankruptcy, the twin terrors of Vietnam and Watergate, not to mention the Attica prison riots, the debacle briefly grabbed the public imagination and Sonny emerged as a short-term folk hero. The fact that he was bisexual and his motive for the robbery was to raise the funds for gender-reassignment surgery for his lover added to the quirkiness of the story. (Guirgis downplays the homophobia of the era and makes Sonny more openly gay and proud.) After career-making turns in both Godfather films, Al Pacino cemented his star status as Sonny in the movie version.

Off-B'way Review: Public Charge

Zabryna Guevara in Public Charge.
Credit: Joan Marcus

Though Julissa Reynoso and Michael J. Chepiga’s Public Charge (fittingly at the Public Theater) takes place only a few years ago, this fast-paced docu-play feels like a relic from another era. Based on Reynoso’s experiences as a diplomat under Hillary Clinton’s State Department and as Barack Obama’s Ambassador to Uruguay, Public Charge follows the intricacies and infighting to accomplish meaningful and constructive foreign policy changes through persuasion rather than violence. In our current political moment, the administration blunders into war and bombs targets indiscriminately, eschewing diplomacy or even civility. 

Focusing on the herculean task of Reynoso, Obama and Clinton to reform the US’s entrenched no-contact policy toward Cuba, the play is a primer on how government at the highest level works or doesn’t. We open with an ironic prologue. Eight-year-old Julissa is attempting to emigrate from her native Dominican Republic to join her mother in the US. In an embarrassing interview with immigration officials, her request is delayed for fear she will become a “public charge” or a burden on the state by depending on welfare. We jump ahead several years to see Julissa become an official in Obama’s administration, helping to determine our policy towards Latin America. 

Smoothly and swiftly staged by Doug Hughes, the play shifts around the globe on Arnulfo Maldonado’s versatile set, transformed by Ben Stanton’s lighting, and Lucy MacKinnon’s video design into a plethora of settings from a bodega in the Bronx to the corridors of power in Washington, Havana, and Montevideo.  

Reynoso and Chepiga’s script is short on characterization but long on fast-paced action. Apart from the layered portrayal of Julissa herself (brought to vivid life by Zabryna Guevara), the other personae are given only one or two traits. Career State Dept. official Cheryl Mills is brusque and no-nonsense, constantly telling those under her to “Pause,” dispense with chit-chat, and deliver results. Julissa’s initial superior and later subordinate Ricardo Zuniga, a hard-line anti-Communist conservative from Honduras, exists to represent opposition to her attempts to knock the walls between the US and Cuba. Marinda Anderson and Dan Domingues do their best to bring extra dimension to these roles. Al Rodrigo is more successful as Julissa’s uncle and the pragmatic president of Uruguay. 

Zabryna Guevara, Marinda Anderson,
Armando Riesco and Maggie Bofill
in Public Charge.
Credit: Joan Marcus

Yes, the characters are thin, but the plotting takes up the slack with more twists and turns than an espionage thriller. Just as a breakthrough appears possible, an American aide worker is imprisoned and held hostage by Castro’s government (After five years in captivity, he is finally released.) The roller-coaster ride continues until Obama’s famous declaration of plans to normalize relations with Cuba. Jules celebrates and predicts years of progress under a Hillary Clinton presidency. We all know how that turned out. Despite the downer ending, Public Charge is a vital reminder of the difficult but necessary struggle to make the world a safer place.  

Public Charge: March 25—April 12. Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St., NYC. Running time: 100 minutes with no intermission. publictheater.org.

Book Review: The Space Merchants

(Bought from Amazon) Recommended on a Sci-Fi Literature course on Amazon Prime. It sounded interesting. Somewhat dated but still relevant futuristic adventure where corporations and advertising have taken over all forms of government. The world is divided into execs who sell shit and consumers who mindlessly buy it. Ad exec Mitch MacCauley is charged with snookering the hoi polloi into signing up to colonize the hostile environment of Venus. Fascinating dystopian futurescape devolves into a conventional thriller with our hero triumphing in the end, after numerous assassination attempts and double crosses, but it's not clear if he has learned a lesson about the evils of rampant capitalism. Conversationists are cast as "commies" or evil fanatics. The corporations have drained the planet dry so consumers have to take pedicabs instead of autos. But wait a minute, we can still board rockets to distant cities, arriving within minutes and to the moon within hours. I liked the last scenes where the president is a powerless figurehead and Congress is run by the businessmen. A fast, fun read.

 

Off-B'way Review: What We Did Before Our Moth Days

Hope Davis, Josh Hamilton, Maria Dizzia,
and John Early in What We Did
Before Our Moth Days.
Credit: Julieta Cervantes

Wallace Shawn continues to explore themes of morality and familial influence with his latest work What We Did Before Our Moth Days, a series of interrelated monologues running three hours, yet mesmerizing us with its staggering details and insight into human behavior. The intense performances of a sharp quartet of actors and the sensitive, subtle direction of Shawn’s longtime collaborator Andre Gregory perfectly complement the playwright’s unsparing portrait of interpersonal dynamics.

As in his Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Fever, The Designated Mourner, and Evening at the Talk House, Shawn displays how morally careless actions can lead to devastating consequences a generation later. Aunt Dan’s unquestioning fascistic support of Henry Kissinger causes her niece Lemon’s bigoted, Nazi-like attitudes and emotionally stunted lifestyle. Fever and Mourner are cautionary tales against government oppression and overreach. In Evening at the Talk House casual acceptance of repugnant political practices inspires societal breakdown and the spread of torture. Moth Days focuses on personal conduct rather than political, but the choices the characters make still cause devastating consequences.

Off-B'way Reviews: Cold War Choir Practice; Bigfoot!, A New Musical; Chinese Republicans

Alana Raquel Bowers, Andy Lucien, and
Crystal Finn in Cold War Choir Practice.
Credit: Maria Baranova

That distinctly weird, transitional decade, the 1980s, provides the time frame for two wildly funny Off-Broadway productions. This was a time when America was rejecting the liberal ideals of the hippie-Vietnam era and moving into the narcissistic, ego-driven period of “Me first and the rest of you be damned.” Both shows use parody to lampoon the excesses of the time. One examines serious conflicts while the other is a silly spoof. The more complex work is Cold War Choir Practice, Ro Reddick’s imaginative, surprisingly riotous take on Reaganomics, nuclear threats, and race relations co-presented by MCC Theater, Clubbed Thumb and Page 73. Set in 1987 and written with a sharp satiric edge, this insightful and mercilessly dark comedy focuses on African-American adolescent Meek (intense and winning Alana Raquel Bowers) who becomes embroiled in international espionage when she corresponds with a Russian pen pal.

Will Cobbs, Lizan Mitchell, and 
Alana Raquel Bowers in
Cold War Choir Practice.
Credit: Maria Baranova

Matters get complicated when Meek’s estranged uncle Clay (solid Andy Lucien), a prominent black conservative, brings his mysteriously ill white wife Virgie (appropriately shattered Crystal Finn) home to the family’s Syracuse, NY, roller-skating rink for the holidays. Meek’s choir Seedlings of Peace and Virgie’s cultish women’s affinity group are involved in attempting to steal Clay’s state secrets. Meek’s dad Smooch (fiery Will Cobbs) and grandma Puddin (fun and feisty Lizan Mitchell) clash with Clay and Virgie, trying to fathom their family member’s transformation from radical Black Panther follower to Reagan White House advisor.