B'way Review: Schmigadoon!

Sara Chase, Alex Brightman, and cast in
Schmigadoon!
Credit: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman 
for MurphyMade

You don’t have to have seen Schmigadoon!, the Apple TV + series, or even any musicals at all in order to enjoy—or be totally enraptured by, as I was—Schmigadoon!, the Broadway show. In fact, it helps if you haven’t seen the series because you’ll be surprised by songwriter-librettist Cinco Paul’s magnificent wit and deep affection for the genre he’s parodying. Paul has pared down the six episodes of the first season, keeping the majority of songs and plot elements while adding a few new ones. All of his changes and reserves work. So does the expert, integrated direction and choreography of Christopher Gattelli. The team has created a smart, hilariously funny masterpiece which simultaneously satirizes and pays tribute to the conventions and values of the major midcentury musicals we’ve seen on stages from the Main Stem to our high schools. You don’t even have to like musicals to love this show, because that viewpoint—musicals are artificial, nobody sings and dances out of the blue—is also represented.

Sara Chase and Max Clayton in
Schmigadoon!
Credit: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
for MurphyMade 

The ingenious premise from the series remains basically the same. Dating doctors Josh and Melissa have relationship issues—not just that she loves tuners and he hates them. She’s ready to take their live-in, unmarried status to the next level and he’s happy with things as they are. On a couples retreat, they get lost in the woods and happen upon the titular, secluded burg (first musical reference: Brigadoon) where the rustic citizens launch into a production number at the drop of a hat. The wrinkle is Josh and Melissa are prevented from leaving by magical forces until they discover “true love.” It seems they don’t have it together—yet. 

Drama League Nominations

Natalie Venetia Belcon and Corbin Bleu
announced the 2026 Drama League nominees

The nominations for the 2026 Drama League Awards were announced on April 20 by Tony winner Natalie Venetia Belcon (Buena Vista Social Club) and Corbin Bleu (The Great Gatsby) at Lincoln Center's NY Public Library for the Performing Arts. The awards will be presented on May 15 at the Ziegfeld Ballroom in a ceremony hosted by NY-1's Frank DiLella. Tickets and tables to the star-studded luncheon are available for purchase at dramaleague.org/2026awards or by calling The Drama League event office at 212.625.1025.First awarded in 1922 and formalized in 1935, The Drama League Awards are the oldest theatrical honors in America. They are the only major theater awards chosen by a cross-section of the theater community — the industry professionals, producers, artists, audiences, and critics who are Drama League members nationwide.

OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION OF A PLAY

THE BALUSTERS
CAROLINE
COLD WAR CHOIR PRACTICE
DOG DAY AFTERNOON
GIANT

KYOTO

LIBERATION

MARCEL ON THE TRAIN
THE MONSTERS

PRINCE FAGGOT

RHEOLOGY

SPREAD

OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION OF A MUSICAL

BEACHES, A NEW MUSICAL

BEAU THE MUSICAL

BIGFOOT

THE LOST BOYS
MEXODUS

MY JOY IS HEAVY

NIGHT SIDE SONGS

SATURDAY CHURCH

SCHMIDGADOON!

THE SEAT OF OUR PANTS

TITANIQUE

TWO STRANGERS (CARRY A CAKE ACROSS NEW YORK)

OUTSTANDING REVIVAL OF A PLAY
ANNA CHRISTIE

BECKY SHAW

THE BROTHERS SIZE
BUG

DEATH OF A SALESMAN

EVERY BRILLIANT THING

FALLEN ANGELS

GRUESOME PLAYGROUND INJURIES
JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE

PROOF

TWELFTH NIGHT

YOU GOT OLDER

OUTSTANDING REVIVAL OF A MUSICAL

THE 25th ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLNG BEE
BAT BOY THE MUSICAL

CATS: THE JELLICLE BALL

CHESS
THE GOSPEL AT COLONUS

HEATHERS THE MUSICAL:

MASQUERADE

ORATORIO FOR LIVING THINGS

RAGTIME

THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW

THE WILD PARTY

B'way/Off-Bway Update: Roundabout 2026-27 Season

Bill Irwin will star
in The Imaginary Invalid for
Roundabout.

Under the new leadership of incoming artistic director Christopher Ashley, Roundabout Theater Company has announced its schedule for the 2026-27 season. The productions will include revivals of classics and musicals as well as new plays.

“As we welcome Christopher Ashley into artistic leadership, this season is a bridge, grounded in what [the late] Todd [Haimes, previous artistic director] built, and intentionally making space for Chris to shape what’s next,” said Scott Ellis, Interim Artistic Director.   
 
“The season Scott and I have shaped builds on what Roundabout has always believed: that theatre can hold the classic and the urgent side by side. We’re proud to have new work anchoring our season, even as we revisit a landmark comedy with fresh eyes and make room for a big, unabashedly entertaining musical,” added Christopher Ashley, Incoming Artistic Director. 

The line-up begins with Tony winner Bill Irwin (Largely New York, Fool Moon) returning to Broadway starring in his own adaptation of Moliere's The Imaginary Invalid, directed by Brandon J. Dirden (Waiting for Godot). Irwin plays Argon, a wealthy hypochondriac who schemes to marry off his daughter to a doctor to save on medical bills. Performance begin in the fall at the Todd Haimes Theater. 

Also in the fall, The Heart, a new musical, will premiere at the Off-Broadway Laura Pels. A young surfer’s life is cut short. A stranger suddenly has a second chance. And the life-force of one beating heart drives two families and a medical team through 24 hours that couldn’t matter more. Playwright Kait Kerrigan (The Great Gatsby) and Anne Eisendrath and Ian Eisendrath (of KPop Demon Hunters) join forces with Tony Award-winning director Christopher Ashley (Roundabout’s incoming artistic director) and choreographer Mandy Moore (Taylor Swift’s Eras tour) to adapt Maylis de Kerangal's 2014 novel Réparer les vivants, in the company's first new Off Broadway musical in years. 

B'way/Off-B'way Reviews: The Fear of 13; Becky Shaw; You Got Older; My Joy Is Heavy

Adrien Brody and Tessa Thompson in
The Fear of 13.
Credit: Emilio Madrid

The fear of the number 13 is triskaidekaphobia. But you wouldn’t learn that from Lindsey Ferrentino’s play The Fear of 13 now at the James Earl Jones after a London run. That’s because the definition is brought up in the documentary film directed by David Sington but not in the play which is based on the doc. Both works focus on Nick Yarris, wrongfully accused of murder. While awaiting execution in a Pennsylvania prison, Yarris labored to improve his vocabulary. The rare fear of the unlucky number was one of the many new definitions he acquired. In her otherwise moving and proficient adaptation, the playwright omits this detail leaving playgoers who have not seen the doc, now airing on Netflix, scratching their heads as to the title’s meaning. Perhaps the irrational phobia has to do with hero’s fear of being fated to wind up on Death Row with no hope of reprieve?

Apart from this annoying omission, some overlong speeches and sequences, Fear is a powerful indictment of our justice system and a chilling examination of one prisoner caught up in it. Ferrentino adapted another documentary earlier this season, the musical The Queen of Versailles. In that misguided effort, it wasn’t clear how we were supposed to feel about the protagonist, Jackie Siegel. Did Ferrentino want us to admire Jackie for her determination to rise from her middle-class origins and attempt to build the largest private home in the USA or should we have disdained her for her materialistic values? 

Adrien Brody in The Fear of 13.
Credit: Emilio Madrid

Yarris (a multileveled, appealing Adrien Brody) is a stronger, clearer central figure. The playwright reveals his character and backstory slowly through his jailhouse romance with prisoner-rights advocate Jacki Miles (compassionate Tessa Thompson). At first Nick comes across as a fabulist spinning incredible tales of petty crimes and outwitting the law. But we gradually learn his complete story though flashbacks, fluidly staged by David Cromer, aided by Arnulfo Maldonado’s ingenious set and Heather Gilbert’s scene-shifting lighting.

A few words on Moldanado’s versatile set: At first it appears to be just a dark, forbidding, multi-storied prison, but other environments magically emerge as in a pop-up book. Suddenly we’re in a Florida pawnshop or a cozy suburban living room with Cheers on the TV. The setting facilitates the flow of the narrative.

Oscar winner Brody makes an auspicious Broadway debut. He presents Nick as a charmer who could be a lying con man or an incredibly unlucky schlub. As his layers of cockiness are peeled away, he reveals the suffering, wounded child at Nick’s core. It’s entirely believable that the empathetic Jacki (played with warmth and tenderness and just the slightest bit of neurotic self-doubt by Thompson) would fall in love with him. A large, mostly male supporting cast ably fills in the remainder of the roles, with Ephraim Sykes standing out as a lovesick gay inmate and Nick’s crafty accomplice in a series of teen heists. 

B'way Update: Billy Crystal in 860

Billy Crystal

Tony and Emmy winner Billy Crystal will return to Broadway in 860, a new solo show which he also wrote. Olivier Award winner Scott Ellis directs. Performance begin in the fall at a Shubert theater to be announced. 

"I am thrilled to return to Broadway this fall with this challenging new show," says Crystal in a statement. "860 was the address of the home we lost in the Palisades fires. We lived there for 46 years. I invite you to come inside 860 and I’ll tell you all the funny and touching things that happened there, not only in my career but to our family. It’s a joyous and heartfelt visit, about how with the love of family and friends and your inner strength, you can get through tough times. I look forward to returning to Broadway and welcoming audiences to 860."

Crystal previously appeared on Broadway in 700 Sundays in which he recounted stories of his childhood and his relationship with his father. He won a Tony Award for the show for Best Special Theatrical Event as well as the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for Outstanding Solo Performance. In 2022, he starred in a musical version of Mr. Saturday Night, based on the 1992 film in which he starred. Crystal also co-authored the book with Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel.

B'way Review: Titanique; Cats: The Jellicle Ball

The cast of Titanique.
Credit: Evan Zimmerman for
MurphyMade.

“This is where the story gets kooky crazy,” announces Marla Mindelle as a kooky crazy version of Canadian songstress and power-ballad queen Celine Dion halfway through Titanique, the zany and wildly entertaining parody musical now at the St. James after long runs Off-Broadway and around the world. The show has been pretty nuts up to the point when Mindelle, who also collaborated on the book with co-star Constantine Rousouli and director Tye Blue, issues that warning and it gets even nuttier from then on. It’s a fun, wacky ride stuffed with enough pop-culture references to keep a crowd full of Broadway, TV and movie fans howling. The question is can this niche show fill a large Main Stem house for a profitable run? Well, it kept me guffawing for most of its 100 minutes. There were only a few lulls (indicated later in the review) amid a tidal wave of hilarity. 

The premise is Cuckoo-for-Coco-Coco-Puffs and ingenious. It’s like an extended SNL sketch. Fortunately, just when you think Mindelle, Rousouli and Blue have run out of ideas, they tap another vein of goofiness and comic gold pours out. The terrifically inventive authors imagine what would happen if Dion actually were on the Titanic just because she sang the theme song from James Cameron’s 1997 Oscar-winning film about the fatal shipwreck. Mindelle as a mindlessly manic version of the singer inserts herself into the story which also includes meta allusions to Broadway musicals, reality TV and pop music. Even the purposely tacky set by Gabriel Hainer Evansohn and Grace Launcher for Iron Bloom Creative Production is a tribute to flashy game shows and TV specials.

Constantine Rousouli and Melissa Barrera
in Titanique.
Credit: Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

Employing Dion’s top hits as the score (Nicholas James Connell expertly provides music supervision, orchestrations and arrangements), this satiric looney tune retells Cameron’s screenplay through a show-biz-queer-angle lens. Rose and Jack (delightfully dopey Melissa Barrera and Rousoluli, parodying Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio) are still star-crossed lovers from radically different social strata, but there are significant alterations elsewhere. Rose’s domineering mother is played in drag by an outrageously outraged Jim Parsons who appears to be having the time of his life stepping out of the Sheldon Cooper persona from The Big Bang Theory. (Watch him go to town in a diva fit, threatening the orchestra and kicking cut-outs of Patti LuPone and Carol Channing.) 

Book Review: The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir; The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper

(Borrowed from a friend): Griffin Dunne's memoir of his storied family is a fast, fascinating read. Everyone from Sean Connery to Buddy Hackett makes an appearance. Dunne's father Dominick was a TV and movie producer who reveled in friendships with big Hollywood names, throwing parties and dropping names. But it all came crashing down when his alcoholism, drug abuse, and closeted homosexuality caught up with him and destroyed his marriage and his career. The family was further devastated when Griffin's sister Dominique was strangled by her boyfriend. This launched Dominick's second career as a novelist and crime reporter for Vanity Fair. Griffin grew up amid movie stars and studio execs. HIs aunt and uncle were the screenwriting team John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion who also became one of the country's foremost essayists and cultural observers. Griffin recounts his roller-coaster ride as actor and producer with wit and compassionate. The anecdotes of his friendship with Carrie Fisher are riotous and his recount of the ordeal of Dominique's murder are gut-wrenching. I had a hard time reading that section because I knew the unjust outcome.

After reading Griffin's memoir, I dug out Dunne's earlier book The Way We Lived Then. I had bought it several years ago for the pictures of movie stars enjoying themselves at Dunne family gatherings and soirees but never read the text. The son's work is more revealing. Dominick's subtitle Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper is accurate. The emphasis is on Dunne Sr.'s acquittances with the rich and famous and his Hollywood days before he was booted out of the industry. He does not even mention his gay connections. Dominique's death is included in an afterword. Perhaps it was too painful for him to fully recount. The pictures are fun to look at.