Off-B'way Reviews: Prosperous Fools; The Imaginary Invalid

Jennifer Regan, Kaliswa Brewster, and
Taylor Mac in Prosperous Fools.
Credit: Travis Emery Hackett

Moliere is having a modern moment. Two adaptations of the 17th century French playwright’s comedies are now on display Off-Broadway. Both employ contemporary tropes to satirize issues afflicting 21st-century society with varying degrees of success. Multi-hyphenate artist Taylor Mac is starring in his own meta-madcap meditation on arts funding, Prosperous Fools, “loosely inspired” by Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (The Would-Be Gentleman) at Theater for a New Audience. While Jeffrey Hatcher has taken a more conventional route with a straightforward adaptation of The Imaginary Invalid, skewering modern medical practices at New World Stages in a production from Red Bull Theater. Both have plenty of laughs and ideas, but both have their drawbacks, delivering us two mixed bags.

Sierra Boggess and Aerina Park Deboer
in Prosperous Fools.
Credit: Travis Emery Hackett

Mac’s Fools is a cloud-cuckoo concoction veering wildly between broad farce and intelligent cultural commentary. It has a lot to say about the state of philanthropy and the arts in general and at times the play (if you can call it that) says it with intelligence and style. But too often the playwright-star has ignored Polonius’s dictum that brevity is the soul of wit and he and his director Darko Tresnjak allow their gags and monologues to go on too long. 

The premise takes off from Moliere considerably (Charles Ludlum wrote and starred in a more faithful version in his Le Bourgeois Avant-Garde in 1983.) The original focuses on the middle-class Monsieur Jourdain who aspires to the aristocracy by taking lessons in the arts but only succeeds in making an ass of himself. In Mac’s free adaptation, the focus shifts to the Artist (played by Mac in a fine comic turn) who worries that he is selling out by allowing his world-premiere ballet on the myth of Prometheus to be financed by a contemptible boor (the bourgeois figure). This character, combing the worst self-aggrandizing traits of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, is identified in the program as $#@%$ and his name is pronounced as the sound of a game-show buzzer when a contestant delivers the wrong answer. 

Off-B'way Update: Tartuffe, Spelling Bee

Brian Bedford and Henry Goodman in
Tartuffe (2003) from
Roundabout Theater Company.
Credit: Joan Marcus

Moliere is having a modern moment. In addition to contemporary updates of The Imaginary Invalid and The Would-Be Gentleman (new title: Prosperous Fools) currently presented by Red Bull Theater and Theater for a New Audience respectively, New York Theater Workshop will present a new adaptation of the French master's Tartuffe by NYTW Usual Suspect Lucas Hnath (A Doll's House: Part 2, Red Speedo) this late fall. The cast, which is full of Tony, Emmy, Obie and Drag Race winners and nominees, will include Tony Award winner Matthew Broderick (Plaza Suite, How to Succeed) as Tartuffe, Emmy Award winner David Cross (“Arrested Development”) as Orgon, Obie Award winner Emily Davis (Is This A Room) as Mariane, “RuPaul’s Drag Race” winner Bianca del Rio as Mme Pernelle, Tony Award nominee Amber Gray (Hadestown) as Elmire, Obie Award winner Ryan Haddad (Dark Disabled Stories) as Damis, Tony Award winner Francis Jue (Yellow Face) as Cleante, Tony Award winner Lisa Kron (Fun Home) as Dorine, and Emmy Award nominee Ike Ufomadu (“Ziwe”) as Valére.

A satire on pious hypocrites, Tartuffe has been seen on Broadway five times, most recently in 2003 from Roundabout Theater Company. Since it was written in 1664, the play has been in the repertory of France's Comedie-Francais.

Original cast of The 25th Annual Putnam
County Spelling Bee.
Credit: Joan Marcus

Also Off-Broadway this fall, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee will return for its 20th anniversary in a new production at New World Stages. Performances begin Nov. 7 before a Nov. 17 opening. Danny Mefford directs. The musical with a score by William Finn (Falsettos) opened Off-Broadway in 2005 at Second Stage and moved to Broadway's Circle In the Square, winning two Tony Awards for Rachel Sheinkin's book and Dan Fogler as Best Featured Actor in a Musical.

Broadway Review: Call Me Izzy

Jean Smart in Call Me Izzy.
Credit: Marc J. Franklin

Even though there is much that is familiar in Call Me Izzy, Jamie Wax’s new solo play at Studio 54, its star Jean Smart gives it a unique individual life. The storyline is nothing new and reeks of Lifetime TV movie tropes (Smart has lent her detailed and dazzling talent to a few of those). A repressed housewife in a Louisiana trailer park finds solace from her dead-end life in writing. Once her poems have been published and embarrassed her brutal spouse, he beats her and forbids her from committing pen to paper. So she is reduced to hiding in the bathroom in the middle of the night and scribbling her works onto toilet paper with an eyebrow pencil. We first meet Izzy as she rhapsodizes on the shades of blue provided by her toilet bowl cleanser and she relates her tale of blighted artistic expression. She begins with an allusion to Melville’s famous start for Moby-Dick, asking the audience to call her Izzy rather than Isabel. Eager school girl is succeeded by teenage bride and artistic promise is replaced with marital disappointment.

Jean Smart in Call Me Izzy.
Credit: Marc J. Franklin

Of course, there are the requisite eccentric neighbor and sympathetic teachers to support Izzy’s dream of becoming an author as well as a philanthropic couple from New York who swoop in to the rescue. The intervention of the latter characters is a tad credulity-stretching. Izzy’s husband is a stereotypical thuggish Neanderthal, but Wax does provide some unexpected plot twists and characterizations. The playwright also supplies reasonably complex and richly-described poems for Izzy to write so it’s somewhat believable she has a gift and would be recognized by her instructors.

Jean Smart in Call Me Izzy.
Credit: Emilio Madrid

Fortunately, Smart endows Izzy with a galaxy of actions and objectives. What could have been a routine feel-good story of cliches is lent a degree of depth thanks to the actress’ investment in creating a full physical and emotional life as she has with her TV characters on Designing Women and Hacks. Watch as she recreates a day at the beach and transforms her observations of a group of young girls next to a pair of elderly gentlemen into a beautiful ode to time and memory. She seems to inhabit the people Izzy is writing about, evoking youthful joy and middle-aged melancholy. She’s also screamingly funny as Izzy sarcastically recounts her drab routine of housework and the contents of the bathroom which has become her sanctuary. She also gives vibrant life to Ferd, Izzy’s volcano of a husband, her kooky neighbor, and the surprisingly complex couple of literary patrons.

Sarna Lapine’s direction flows seamlessly and is varied enough to keep this one-woman show from becoming monotonous. Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’ suggestive sets and Donald Holder’s soft, ephemeral lighting evoke the confided environment of Izzy’s reality and the expansive spaces of her imagination. 

June 12—Aug. 17. Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St., NYC. Running time: 85 mins. with no intermission. callmeizzyplay.com.

Off-B'way Update: CSC Season

Patti LuPone and Kurt
Petersen in The Baker's Wife
(1976)

Classic Stage Company has announced its 2025-26 season which will include two rare productions and a new play. The season opens in October 2025 with the musical The Baker’s Wife, featuring a book by Tony Award winner Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof), music & lyrics by Oscar, Grammy, and Tony Award winner Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, The Queen of Versailles), based on the 1938 film La Femme du Boulanger by Marcel Pagnol and Jean Gionoand, and direction by Gordon Greenberg (The Heart of Rock and Roll). 

The cult-status tuner was the last show presented by legendary producer David Merrick. It played out-of-town in Los Angeles and Washington, DC in 1976. Topol and Carol Demas started the tour as the leads and were eventually replaced by Paul Sorvino and a pre-Evita Patti LuPone. But the show closed out of town. LuPone's rendition of the song "Meadowlark" became a favorite of musical theater fans and a standard choice for auditions. A 1989 London production had a brief run, and was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best Musical.

In February 2026, CSC will present the World Premiere of Marcel on the Train, co-written by Tony Award nominee Ethan Slater (Spongebob Squarepants, Wicked) & Marshall Pailet (Who’s Your Baghdaddy, Private Jones), directed by Pailet, and starring Slater as legendary mime artist “Marcel Marceau.” The play chronicles Marceau's days as a young man in Nazi-occupied France, guiding Jewish children to safety.

Marcel Marceau

CSC’s season will conclude in May 2026 with the New York Premiere of master American dramatist Thornton Wilder’s final play, The Emporium, adapted and completed by Kirk Lynn (Lipstick Traces) and directed by Rob Melrose (Born with Teeth).

 

“Launched in 1947 amid a storm of rising acclaim and honorable artistic duties and distractions here and abroad, Thornton Wilder (who appeared on the cover of Time in January 1953) struggled unsuccessfully for a decade to complete a major new drama. Thanks to enticing and regular press coverage, its title was known far and wide: The Emporium,” said Tappan Wilder, nephew to Thornton Wilder.

 

“The Wilder family can’t be too grateful to Kirk Lynn for exploring the known published and little-known vast unpublished archival record of this work, grounded in Wilder’s passionate post-WWII encounter with existentialism, and then agreeing to complete a play exploring the loneliness of the American experience in all its humor, sadness, hope--and freedom. With a deep bow of thanks to Classic Stage Company, it is no small benefit of this unusual artistic collaboration across the decades that it celebrates the life, times and creativity of two distinguished artists, then and now.” 

Tony Thoughts

Cynthia Erivo closes the Tonys.
Producers of Maybe Happy Ending in the
background.

This year's Tonys were a ratings high with a 38 percent increase in viewership from last year. That's a great sign. When I was working at Back Stage from the 1990s into the early 2010s, the ratings would drop every year. Cynthia Erivo did a great job as hostess, delivering a socko opening and closing specialty number. Including the pre-show on Pluto TV, the ceremony clocked in at just under four and a half hours, and they STILL didn't include the recipients of the Tony Honors (Great Performances, the New York Library for the Performing Arts, New 42 and Michael P. Price, executive director of Goodspeed Musicals) or two special Tonys (the band for Buena Vista Social Club and the special effects team for Stranger Things: The First Shadow). They could have at least mentioned them, it would only taken a few seconds. Also, apart from Edwin Robinson of Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn, the winner of the Theater Educator Tony, they didn't mention the winners from the Pluto TV segment for those who couldn't find it on their Smart TVs.  

I did pretty well with my predictions, getting 19 out of 26 right. The biggest surprise was Nicole Scherzinger winning for Best Musical Actress over Audra McDonald for Gypsy. Though I voted for Scherzinger, I expected McDonald to win her record-breaking 7th Tony because she was served a side of shade by Patti LuPone in a New Yorker interview which set the Internet afire. (LuPone said McDonald was "not a friend" and remained silent when asked about her performance as Mama Rose. LuPone has since apologized profusely to McDonald and Kecia Lewis who accused LuPone of "microaggressions" when the former complained Lewis' show Hell's Kitchen was too loud.) Scherzinger is now next in line to play Rose in about ten years, maybe after Lady Gaga.

Some All That Chat posters were upset that Scherzinger won because she is allegedly a Trump supporter. This accusation surfaced when the former Pussycat Doll liked a picture of Russell Brand wearing a red hat resembling Trump's MAGA logo. Even if she did vote for Trump and supports him, that has nothing to do with her outstanding performance as Norma Desmond. Those who would deny her recognition because of her political beliefs are no better than Trumpers who would punish anti-Trumpers for their views.

The musical numbers were mostly entertaining but the sound was awful, garbling the lyrics. Death Becomes Her and Just in Time probably came off the best, while the numbers from Operation Mincemeat and Dead Outlaw didn't work well out of context. (I still don't understand why Just in Time and Real Women Have Curves were given numbers since neither was nominated for Best Musical.) The first casualty of the Tony aftermath has announced its imminent closing. Smash which only received one nomination for Brooks Ashmankas' featured performance (he won a Drama Desk in a three-way tie with Tony and OCC winner Jak Malone of Mincemeat and Michael Urie for Once Upon a Mattress), will close on June 22. 

Book Review: America Fantastica

(Bought with the remains of a gift card at Barnes and Noble): I needed a thick novel to read on my cruise to Bermuda and this dark satire from Tim O'Brien caught my eye. I have never read him before, but I'd heard a lot about The Things They Carried, his Vietnam novel which was taught at the high school where I worked a few years ago. This sharp-edged comedy has a farcical sheen, sort of in the Myra Breckenridge and Dr. Strangelove mode--cataloging the ills of contemporary America through a skewed lens. Lies and deceit permeate every transaction between the many nefarious characters, none of whom of are strictly sympathetic. I really disliked the protagonist, Boyd Halveston, compulsive liar, former fake-news journalist, and JC Penny manager who impulsively robs a bank and kidnaps motor-mouthed teller Angie Bing for a cross-country spree. Double-crosses multiply as Boyd's crazed felony ripples across the lives of his ex-wife Evelyn, her new husband, her billionaire father and his male lover, Angie's murderous ex, the corrupt couple running the bank Boyd stole from, the crooked cop the bank president's wife is having an affair with, etc., etc. Everyone is a liar. O'Brien indicts the national craze for falsehood started by you know who (POTUS, a minor character here but a distinct influence.) Funny and dark, but too long at 449 pages. I felt that the story ended at about page 300 and the rest was tying up loose ends. I finally wound up actually feeling sorry for Boyd at the end.

Off-B'way Reviews: Lunar Eclipse; Bus Stop

Lisa Emery and Reed Birney in
Lunar Eclipse.
Credit: Joan Marcus

Donald Margulies’ tender and moving new play Lunar Eclipse from Second Stage at the Signature Theater Center, is a simple, direct depiction of a long marriage, the elusiveness of memory, and the endurance of love. George and Em, an elderly couple, are sitting up in a field in the middle of the night on their farm in Western Kentucky, to obverse the titular astronomical event. As the seven stages of the eclipse progress, we gradually learn the intricacies, compromises, joys and pitfalls of their decades-long union. George is going through a deep depression after the loss of his beloved dog (the last in a long line of cherished canines) and his growing frustration with the futility of life in general. “We’re taught that good triumphs over evil. Right? And love and generosity triumph over hate and greed. But, what if it turns out we’re wrong. The bad guys won the battle?,” he moans, without specifically naming any political figures or movements. Even Em’s cheerfulness drives him to distraction. 

Em attempts to lighten the mood, but, after a couple of shots of bourbon, she lets her smiley-face mask slip and reveals a long-term sadness, largely over the death of their adopted son Tim from a drug overdose. (We eventually learn Tim’s birth mother was an addict.) Margulies subtly reveals the couple’s inner conflicts through realistic details such as the fate of a telescope and attempts to bring failing crops to fruition.

At times, his language is bit too writerly and on-the-nose as when Em compares her melancholy to an eclipse or when George contrasts his blighted efforts at connecting with Tim with raising a non-productive batch of sugar beets. But this is a minor flaw in an otherwise endearing and heartbreaking play with a physically beautiful production under Kate Whoriskey’s sensitive, nearly invisible direction and a pair of veterans actors bringing two everyday people to vibrant life.