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1. A Streetcar Named Desire

March 19, 2025 at BAM with Paul Mescal -- sadly for him his costar Patsy Ferran ran away with the show. Damn this is a good play, but this particular production felt a little top-heavy under its own hype, always the peril with buzzy screen actors taking a turn on the stage. This play won awards when it ran in London, I do wonder if there's a bit of exoticism at play there. In America - well, I sometimes wondered if Paul Mescal understood the show. I think Stanley is supposed to be kind of hot in a brutish way, but Paul just played him as brutish. By contrast, you know the thing where someone can be so fucking annoying that it's almost hot? But still annoying? Patsy Ferran -- what a star.

2. Oh Mary

March 20, 2025, on Broadway with Titus Burgess

I cried laughing, again. Titus played Mary more black, giving the jokes a different shading no pun intended. It so worked. I love this play. i heard it was absolutely phenomenal with Jane Krakowski (no surprises there, she is hilarious)…and it has now opened in London -- 3peat??

3. The Marriage of Figaro

Saturday May 3, 2024 at Met Opera

This might not be the best version of MoF I've ever seen but it was still so fucking good because this is the best opera ever and anyone who doesn't think so is a boring edgelord about opera of all things. The last show I saw before leaving NYC, and a happy memory. (Not to sound dramatic, especially since I was back in NYC three months later and managed to see 3 shows...)

4. The Barber of Seville

April 15, 2025 at Met Opera -

Anchored by a fantastic Andrey Zhilikhovsky as Figaro with Aigul Akmetshina (<3) as Rosina. This was great, maybe most fun I had at the opera 24-25 season (though Die Frau Ohne Schatten was the best opera of the 24-25 season imo)

5. Shuck'd

Regent's Park Open Air Theater (London) in July 2025

This was hilarious, and kind of fascinating to see how well the jokes translated to the predominantly English audience. Yes, even the ones about Tampa being shitty. I guess some themes are universal.

6. ta-da by Josh Sharp

Greenwich House Theater on August 20, 2025.

This was not bad, but suffered by comparison to Can I Be Frank which I saw the very next day. Slightly gimmicky one-man show (is that redundant?? I think this proliferation of one person shows is Edinburgh Fringe's fault.) using a giant powerpoint slide and card trick as devices. I think the stuff about his *spoilers* sick mom felt manipulative, and like also in a way his coming out stuff. I think confessional theatre is supposed feel transgressive and intimate, or transgressively intimate. There's a bit of power transfer at play between the performer and the audience. Josh Sharp is no Marina Abramovic iykwis. I mean, i guess what i'm saying is this felt more like entertainment than art, sorry if that sounds insufferable.

[Speaking of Edinburgh Fringe I just remembered ANOTHER one man show i saw, at the Vineyard Theatre (erstwhile scene of theatre greatness Is this a Room/ Dana H playing back to back in the SAME YEAR) about a guy that absolutely lost it (?) and painted like 400 paintings or something. Kind of similar vibe to this powerpoint thing. I don't know, the one man show with digital deck is like maybe too similar to what I do at my Big Corporate Job during the day instead of working on my romance novel/theatre blog and I am predisposed to suspicion.]

7. Can I Be Frank

with Morgan Bassichis at the SOHO Playhouse on August 21, 2025

This was so good. NO DECK. It had some tech effects with a tv or something. Fine.

This was playing at the same place I saw the Latvian clown I think. Like the clown, this had moments of visceral comedy and danger. The clown maybe had more of them, but it is also easier for a clown to go there.

Be Frank was directed by Sam Pinkleton, the same guy who did Oh Mary, which is how I ended up seeing it (surfing the company's website). It's a one man play (wince) with a gimmick (wince) about a comedian who wants to be famous telling us about another comedian who SHOULD HAVE been famous, but died of AIDS before he could achieve crossover success. There are flashes of brilliance where Morgan Bassichi seemed to almost become Frank Maya, and other flashes of brilliance where Morgan's desire to be famous and willingness to exploit any subject, including himself, are played for laughs but are also dangerously honest and real. By contrast the parts about AIDS and how unfairly gay men were treated during the height of the epidemic, while an obviously moving subject, didn't always hit hard for me; it sometimes had the feeling of a lot of emotion and not so much excavation of new insight, like Bassichis could have maybe done a little more research, and spent more time considering how to weave this into the rest of the play. I think this is the problem with one-person shows, it's like someone is telling them they have to put some kind of pathos writ large part in the play for it to have heft. (That 400 paintings guy was like maybe experiencing bipolar, in retrospect the play was clearly describing a manic episode. He was also a comedian. I'm sorry, I'm recovering this in fragments.) I don't get it, because the parts about fame and about loving someone long dead were so beautifully jagged and moving and fucking funny. I wish I could see this again.

[One more thing about that paintings play: that guy was not as good a painter as he thought he was and he stuck around after the show to meet the audience and it made me feel awful in a way I have trouble parsing. I ran out of the theatre avoiding eye contact. Perhaps THAT is the real theatre.]

8. Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night

at the Delacorte Theatre (NYC) -- August 23, 2025 with Lupita Nyongo (!), Sandra Oh (!), Peter Dinklage.

Ecstatic, and Peter Dinklage was a revelation of physical comedy; we already know he can do gravitas/pathos, the revelation was his ability to do BOTH comedy and pathos in the role of Malvolio, which of course a successful Twelfth Night demands. (Richard Burbage played this role at the Globe! This is The Theatre.) And AND -- I have to mention Moses Sumney as Feste. He was incredible, and I thought managed to bring a little bit of the darkness that role, and the play, requires.

And yet....and yet. I don't doubt the people who produced the play understand it, but the end result makes you ponder that question, because it doesn't feel they were even trying to convey any of its nuance to the audience. This is comedy as in Shakespeare (starts with a journey and ends in marriage) and not comedy as in LOL, after all. 2025 was a garbage can fire, so I guess I'm glad that the production led with joy; but the source material is far more ambivalent and, yes, dark. In another post I will write about RSC Twelfth Night December 2025 at the Barbican, imo a far more successful production of this play. (nb these quibbles aside the Duke Orsino and court of gymbro yes men were utterly hilarious.)

I saw The Minutes by Tracy Letts on Broadway a couple of years ago and I remember thinking "wow. Finally. The theatre is back." It was the first play I saw after the pandemic that seemed important to me, accomplished, Broadway-worthy. I had much the same feeling about Mary Page Marlowe at the Old Vic; since moving here I have seen one musical, one ballet and one opera in London and this was the first stage work that gave me that feeling that attending the performing arts is somehow vital. Caveat, Tracy Letts and Susan Sarandon are American, but the rest I think are English, and this production, while maybe not perfect, was simply great (I took a friend who is a relative theatre naif who told me this is the best experience he's had at the theatre.)

Susan Sarandon plays the oldest version of Mary Page, and she was wonderful, but probably only the third best actor in the play, BUT that's only because the other two adult Mary Pages were so freaking good, in particular Andrea Riseborough who plays the second oldest Mary and Rosy McEwen as the third oldest. And! Special shout out to Kingsley Morton who was absolutely hysterical as Mary Page's school friend, Connie. I will be looking for her in other productions.

Lately I often find myself wondering if the thing of every work seeming to be about me now that I'm middle aged is wonderful or just utterly claustrophobic, but this was a case of wonderful or at least supremely engaging and relatable. The thing about Tracy Letts plays is that the play is somehow "about you" no matter who you are, I wish I had a less trite-sounding way of saying that. But It's true: how should I have anything in common with Mary Page [****SPOILERS****] a thrice married midwestern white alcoholic who is twice my age? But god was this play about me.

How is it Tracy Letts understands the thing about women and why we f*ck and why it's almost never about physical desire? How is the play about women's lives and how we get old too fast but it lasts forever and how little time you have and how you're running the whole time and you never get anywhere, and how you do so much to become yourself but you never feel yourself, and about quilts and how they came to be the critical american female art form/form of cultural chronicle (I am a hobbyist quilter, so yes, that hit.)

Actually, among my minor quibbles is the quilt, which descended at the end a little too neatly and with very little preamble like a deux ex metaphor to stitch it all together, no pun intended; how necessary or successful was this device? Did it even resonate to people who ARENT middle aged American women who quilt? I can't really say because to me, it sang, even though the thing of all the Marys walking to the quilt at the end left me a little meh.

Well, a few things happened in the last several months, making them almost too hectic to see any shows but definitely too hectic to write about them *rationalizing*

Chiefly among these i no longer live in new york (!) and will be writing about, mostly, London shows now. (sean carroll voice) sooo....let's go!

(1) NYCB : New Combinations: From You Within Me, Variations Pour Une Porte et Un Soupir, Mystic Familiar (new Peck), David Koch Theatre Friday Jan 31st, 2025. I thought this was sensational, loved the new Peck and LOVED Un Porte/Un Soupir which I had never seen, Sarah Mearns, what can I gush that I haven't gushed before. The Peck gave a whiff of Twylla Tharp (in a good way). I liked the music and liked the ballet. All in all fantastic entry into NYCB's season.

(2) Alvin Ailey exhibit at the Whitney 8 February 2025-- I don't usually review museum shows but I just wanted to take the opportunity to once again shit on the Whitney for being a soulless corporatized instagram trap incapable of curating a show about ALVIN AILEY ffs that doesn't make your eyes roll right out of your skull. At once too full and mostly lacking in substance, confusingly produced, way too crowded and in the end alienating you from experiencing the vitality and enduring relevance of one of the all time greats. Just. Honestly.

After writing this I was tempted to review other stuff -- vacations i went on this year (Katmai National Park undefeated, Mykonos: Also Not Bad)...but fr I WILL review a weekend trip to Paris I took recently, and to be exact a particular museum show I specifically traveled to see that was Not. Good. More on that later.)

(3) New York City Ballet: Paquita, In the Night, Symphony in Three Movements, February 8, 2025 at David H Koch Theatre – sad to admit I have few memories of this show. I think I found the Robbins pleasing if a little bland, while the Ratmansky Paquita was surprising, and so was the Balanchine –classical but fresh. NYC is spoiled with two superlative ballet companies and this evening reminded me of the fact because they shine even in ballets I find a tiny bit dull.

(4) The Antiquities, by Jordan Harrison, February 9, 2025 at Playwrights Horizon -- this play is about AI ughhhh. No, actually, the play started and I was feeling my hater juices flowing, but in reality, it's been 7 months since I saw it and I still recall with crystalline dread Kristen Sieh calling [****SPOILERS***] humankind a "transitional species" in her chipper bland voice and affectless face, at least once a week.

(5) Sunset Boulevard on Broadway with Nicole Scherzinger, February 25, 2025 -- I told my one theatre friend I would under NO circumstances go see this play because Nicole S was MAGA and then our other friends asked us to go and I caved. Y'all, it was so good. I'm ashamed of having no principles, but only a little. Scherzinger was amazing, and the gimmick where they film outside the theater was also amazing. Loved it

(6) English by Sanaz Toossi February 26, 2025 at Todd Haines Theatre -- this is another one I found a little slight at first, but then thought about for a long, long time. A play about cultural hegemony and its commodification, and how commodities simultaneously trap us and act as a currency (free us to exchange); about language as a literal currency, about the subtle power structures inherent in pedagogy. It also included some rather moving moments of nostalgia of places, both familiar (the schoolroom) and not (Iran for most Americans), which then causes you to consider how place and time are bound together (the same thing?)

Very oddly there was a technical malfunction with a set in the middle of the play that occasioned a 6 minute delay; the cast gamely carried on but it does rather take you out of the moment.

(7) Henry IV at Theatre for a New Audience February 28, 2025  -- this was deeply forgettable. Too bad bc I think there’s a lot you can do with this play (duh, Falstaff).

The Roommate on broadway, 9/25/24 -- a woman in front of me complained that the woman sitting in front of her was "too tall" (she wasn't!) and reached out to pat down the woman's hair. I would have decked her! That whole thing was more memorable than the play, even though (unsurprisingly) Mia Farrow and Patty Lupone were great.

Grounded at the Met Opera, 9/27/24 -- perhaps a controversial opinion, I didn't think this was that bad. Maybe reaching for something cinematic when it should be doing opera, yet the ending is pure opera (a fiery final act of defiance that burnishes an anti-hero against the backdrop of a totalizing capitalist hellscape). With better music this could be great, which, yeah, kind of a huge problem for an opera.

Joni Mitchell 10/20/2024 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles -- what can I say, unforgettable for any Joni fan, hard to rate objectively.

ABT's Crime & Punishment 10/30/24 at David H. Koch Theatre -- woof. World premier of quite a miss, unforch.

Rigoletto at the Met Opera, Nov. 1. 2024. Good to very good. The plot feels more chilling every time I watch this opera.

Die Frau Ohne Schatten at the Met Opera, Dec 14, 2024 -- this was amazing. Like 2.5 hours of wtf am I watching and 20 minutes of experiencing the sublime. It's not really 2.5 hours of wtf, a lot of it is interesting and clever even before the musically mind-blowing ending. And what a cast! An opera about reproductive anxiety...there really is never a wrong moment for great art.

Tosca at the Met Opera, Jan 17 2025 -- Sandra Radvanovsky comprehensively owns the part of Tosca in our times. She sang all her costars right off stage.

Dark Noon (sometime in summer 2024?) at St. Ann's Warehouse -- ughhhh...the play that finally, definitively dispensed with my tolerance for S.A.W.? Has St Anns ever staged anything not apparently calculated to earn my loathing? A play celebrated for its "South African" take on American racism and violence (lol like seriously? what a glass house to aim a stone from), and sure the actors were all black South Africans, but the playwright is...Danish. Not surprisingly the play exploited them. Unpleasant, at times grotesque, entirely devoid of even a moment of original aesthetic beauty, the only tolerable parts being samples of (American) music. I even hated the sets, which I guess were supposed to look like South African shanty towns (way to subversively showcase the beauty of South Africa I guess). Incoherent underdeveloped message about the exportation of violent culture via American popular media, a clear example of "when a good idea lands in the hands of someone too literal, simple and self-satisfied to develop it."

We Are Your Robots (Theatre for a New Audience 11/12/2024) -- also underdeveloped (arguably), but this was merely mediocre and corny, maybe a little disappointing because it's an interesting and timely idea: a musical about robots gaining sentience. The music was...clever, I guess, but only ever that. This is the kind of content that tickles your whimsy until you feel dead inside. There was a woman/twee monster next to me (on a date?) who (literally) snorted with laughter, so loudly and frequently, that she may have shaded my interpretation of this performance. A true artifact of painfully white culture (there were other non-white people in the audience though, something I genuinely love about TFANA).

Job at the Helen Hayes Theater, August 5, 2024

Cats: The Jellicle Ball at Perelman Performing Arts Center, July 19, 2024

Stereophonic at Golden Theater, July 23, 2024

Not sure I have anything new or different to say about three of the best received shows in another big season for NY theatre, but I'll settle on deep, humbing gratitude to have access to these and so many others.

ABT Summer Season

Onegin - June 18, 2024

Woolf Works - June 28, 2024

Swan Lake - July 6, 2024

I go to so much NYCB (ugh what a boring brag, I'm sorry) that I sometimes forget ABT is our premier ballet company on this side of the Atlantic.

Soho Playhouse - June 3, 2024

This is the kind of show I normally love to hate/avoid like the plague. This was how I ended up going to it:

It's like absurdist humor with an uncanny clown (redundant?) from Baltics and was a big hit at the Edinburgh Fringe (very not my scene). Most of it was only sorta funny and a lot of the laughs come from sadistic audience manipulation. I don't find the idea of a show about an Estonian clown that did well at a Scottish festival and is buzzed about in NY arts-careerist circles, like, inherently compelling. Wackiness isn't enough, you know?

Oh my god, what to say about this one. Remember my theatre rating system (how many times I cried, over 5?) By the system, this show is...what percentage is infinity out of 5?

Oh dear, not me reviewing a show a month a half later...argh....

Nabucco at Metropolitan Opera 1/13/24 (great)

Turandot at the Met Opera 4/14/24 (good)

La Forza del Destino at the Met Opera 3/29/24 (very good; edited 1/25/25 -- actually, great; I have thought about this opera continuously since seeing it)

Carmen at Met Opera 1/19/24 (very good) -- Aigul Akhmetshina was absolutely amazing, and I think she's like, 23. Most feminist staging of this opera I have seen (i.e. most actually faithful to the source material)

El Niño at Met Opera 4/23/24 (omg what can I say...the worst opera I've ever seen but maybe it's advanced)

Madame Butterfly at Met Opera 4/26/24 (very good, so sue me for liking cheesy shit. edit 1/25/25: I used to think "America Par Sempre!" and crack up and now I feel near tears...)

Appropriate on Broadway with Sarah Paulsen (great. Edited 1/25/25: this is the second time I'd seen the play, I also saw the first version that was staged)

Public Obscenities at BAM 2/24/24 (very good? Still processing 3 months later...)

A Mirror (in London; this was ok)

Exterminating Angel (at Opera Bastille in Paris; incredible, breathtaking, life altering art)

Matthew Bournes Romeo & Juliet (laughable...possibly advanced)

Innovators & Icons 2023-24 at NYCB (very good)

Balanchine & Ratmansky at Miami City Ballet (good)

Wheeldon Martins & Peck 2024 at NYCB (mixed...overall good)

Rite of Spring at Park Avenue Armory (very good)

A play about ghosts and a guitar player whose name I can't remember (edit: Covenant...was ok)

This thing about Joni Mitchell that was ok

The movie Zone of Interest (good, thought provoking, huge bummer)

Saturday Night Live with Kristen Wiig dress rehearsal (great)

December 15 @ Luciclle Lortel Theatre

My celebrity doppelgänger was in town for this play last month, which made money despite being at a tiny venue, the Lucille Lortel Theatre in the Village. I think maybe I thought I had lost the capacity to be shocked by dialogue, but this play did it.

December 9 (matinee) -- Metropolitan Opera

According to the program this is only the third Spanish-language opera the Met has ever staged, which seems....like, crazy but also not totally unexpected? Well, they're really trying this season.

This opera had a lot I liked -- creative staging, though at times sorta cutesy and less grand than you expect at the opera; beautiful costumes, wonderful performances, especially Aylin Perez in the title role; a speedy (even breezy) and accessible story.... but first and foremost, IMO, the libretto, which, for me, often elevated the music.

My old friend ZW at the NYT (sidebar: I actually knew him in another life...) predictably did not like this opera, finding it "saccharine," "inelegant," "homogenous, interchangeable, anesthetized..." Woof.

For us less experienced (less tasteful?) opera-goers, this feels like the perfect afternoon opera, short, light, and concise, born aloft by the pleasing music and the poetry of the libretto. I understand that doesn't carry through in the translated titles....I mean is it the most original or modern music I've ever heard? Like, no, there's no 12 tone serialism or whatever, but isn't that, rather, the point? This is an opera in part about the love of old-timey opera....a lot of the music sounds like overt, intentional homage to Puccini to me, and I'm ok with that??

I think there's something fundamentally inaccessible to many (to white people) about Spanish/Hispanic culture; it's one of the central questions of Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman. It has to do with our openness to melodrama and sentimentality in "serious" art works (I mean works trying to be art and not merely entertainment).

The librettist (a woman!) was a student of Garcia Marquez and much has been made of the "magical realism" of the plot. I think this is nonsense. There's no magical realism. [SPOILERS] At the end of the opera, she disappears into the jungle, dead from cholera (I'm pretty sure). What's magical about that? It is super sad though. Where I see the mark of Marquez is in the poetry of the words.

You don't need to speak Spanish to hear musicality of a line like "Te arrebato otra vez la selva voraz" and just a little later: "en otra ribera detenerse a escuchar su propio rumor de agua enamorada..."

Is it corny? Sure. It is moving? Heck yeah. I'm still enough of an opera naif that I really thought [SPOILERS] Florencia was going to find Cristobal at the end, and the last song is so muted and so sad, when the butterfly wings spring out I was like...devastated. And that only comes when everything before is the magic of opera. I'm sure Theodor Adorno would have hated it, but I loved this one.

This movie is THREE HOURS and TWENTY FIVE MINUTES long.

Whew ok that's out of the way....this movie is like....pretty great?? I saw this so long ago, and then had to go on a million work trips, but I saved a draft of my immediate reaction, here goes:

Spoilers--

This isn't a movie about Native Americans, which I think is ok. (There has been noise about that.) This is a movie with Native American characters who are also like just people and just Americans. This is mostly a movie about movies, which is how you announce art cinema, and this movie is, frankly, great, and -- amazingly, given that running time -- NOT boring.

It's also a movie about Western Civilization and about the banality of evil, about power running rampant away from scrutiny (external or internal), about casual every-day hegemony. And also it's now how I explain criminal ignorance. Like, Leo's character really doesn't know on some level that he was slowly murdering his wife, who he actually loves...and that's so American. Trenchant!

But first it's a movie about art movies, and specifically about how you make a movie about bad people without glamorizing them; it's a feat. And what timing, for Scorsese to make iit at this point in his career. It's inspiring.

Nov 11 - Metropolitan Opera

This opera(?) was...OK. I'm not sure it qualifies as an opera, honestly, it's more like a collection of sung-through vignettes. I'm almost loath to admit it but I thought this was more visually interesting than musically or story-wise. I think Malcolm X is almost unbearably cool and the look of this show is consistent to that (staging, sets, costumes, dance performances were all superlative), but I think it could have added something in depth, or ambiguity, or resonance, to his story. And like doesn't the historical moment allow for that?

Also I feel Malcolm X was miscast, the performer didn't have the "rizz" to pull it off, imo.

My favorite was the singer who played X's mother, and the Greek chorus (and the Greek chorus's costumes and hair!)

So I know I just got done being all dark about Balanchine/the ballet in general, but this was great!

Concerto Barocco was wonderful, and in particular Mira Nadon was breathtakingly graceful, her small gestures and extensions...just gorgeous. Loved the music as well -- Bach concert for 2 violins -- and I thought the dancers expressed it beautifully.

Prodigal Son -- one of the oddest things I've seen at the ballet, but our queen Sarah Mearns rarely disappoints (though I must say I found myself a little concerned she would fall off/over during some of the truly odd lifts in this ballet). The corps, a hulking gang of bald-headed brutes in white make up gave a real Mad Max: Fury Road vibe, down to their head gestures. Weird, acrobatic, and fun, well matched to the Prokofiev score. A little too odd to express pathos, if that was the intent at any point.