Thom Geier — Theater Critic

The question is not whether these joke-laced routines work without Whoopi Goldberg. They do, especially performed here by a first-rate cast with an innate sense of comedic timing. Instead, the issue is how well these sketches hold up four (or two) decades after their creation. (Goldberg herself dropped two monologues from the original 1984 Broadway show for the last revival, and added the one that Lewis performs.) There’s a sketchiness that’s built into the format. But part of the initial appeal, that Goldberg was embodying this grab-bag of wildly different personalities, is lost in the new format. But as a showcase for a quintet of gifted comedic actresses, The Whoopi Monologues still delivers.

Date: July 10, 2026 Author: Thom Geier Jennifer Nettles, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter best known for her work with the alt-country duo Sugarland, is a one-woman force of nature. She not only wrote the score and book for the messy but memorable musical Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo but also stars as the title character: a real-life serial killer from 17th-century Italy with a protofeminist vigilante streak as wide as the Mediterranean. Nettles, who’s appeared in Broadway shows like Chicago and Waitress, showcases her musical gifts both as a writer and performer to astonishing effect. With her forthright bearing and flaxen hair hanging loose about her doll-like face, Nettles strikes and immediately sympathetic impression as Giulia Tofana, an apothecary in 17th-century Palermo who gained a reputation for dispensed vials of poison to women to kill men who abused or mistreated them. (Modern historians have only a sketchy understanding of Tofana, including her real surname and the exact date and manner of her death. Plus, she was one of many “black widows” operating at that time.) In Nettles’s heavily fictionalized account, Giulia is a healer, cosmetics saleswoman, and confidante who hands out potions for women’s troubles — including abortifacients for unwanted pregnancies. But when her brutish new husband (Matthew Amira) makes physical advances on her teenage daughter, Vitoria (Naomi Serrano), she impulsively dispatches him with a dose of cyanide later dubbed Aqua Tofana. That spontaneous act of defense — which a sympathetic local priest (Sam Simahk) tacitly endorses because “You were only protecting your sheep” — soon leads to a widespread killing spree of other abusive husbands around town. giuliia-2026 Christopher M Ramirez, Sam Simahk, Bre Jackson, Jennifer Nettles, and Quentin Earl Darrington in ‘Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo’ (Photo: Andy Henderson) Nettles introduces two rival antagonists, the Cardinale (Quentin Earl Darrington) who secretly seeks out Giulia for an ointment after contracting syphilis and the district’s new Governatore (Christopher M. Ramirez), an ambitious creep who soon makes advances toward Vitoria. The two, not based on any specific historical figure, form an uneasy alliance to appease a community reeling from a long-standing drought and ultimately hatch a plan to scapegoat Giulia as a “witch.” Even by the standards of musical villains, though, the two are barely two-dimensional. Ramirez’s Governatore serves mostly as a comic foil, an awkward mix of animated Disney villain and bitchy queen who seldom flashes anything close to genuine menace to help drive the plot. While the book and some of the lyrics can drift into cliché, Giulia really shines when the music kicks in. The score leans heavily on musical traditions — and not just Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd, which famously follows another murderous madman with ostensibly sympathetic motives (and a lower total body count). The songs carry echoes of everything from Beyoncé bangers to Fiddler on the Roof to (especially) Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton — which inspires both the rap-style banter in the often sung-through book scenes as well as multiple production numbers that blend spoken-word elements and sung refrains. (The boisterous Act 1 ensemble number “Cold” could benefit from dialing back all the direct references to its predecessors; it’s overripe with Hamiltonian phrases like “I could get it all done, one shot right here” and “Maybe I should wait for a while.”) There’s an admirable eclecticism to the tunes, which boast some memorable hooks and witty turns of phrase. They’re also more musically challenging than you might initially guess. Many, particularly Nettles’s own soaring, radio-ready solo ballads, require a broad vocal range and a seamless blend of both lower registers and head voice. Naturally, she nails them with aplomb. But the ensemble numbers also benefit from remarkable harmonies, amplified by Austin McCormick’s poetic choreography. I wish that Nettles would dial back on the pastiche as well as the many on-the-nose name drops. Darrington sings the hell out of his Act 2 solo “The Wolf,” which culminates in a full-throated howl at the moon, but does every gospel-inflected number need to include the line “Can I get a witness?” (Also, the predatory Governatore seems like a stronger candidate to be branded as a wolf.) giulia-jennifer-nettles Jennifer Nettles (center) in ‘Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo’ (Photo: Andy Henderson) Director Mary Zimmerman creates enchanting visuals, making the most of Ana Kuzmanić’s heavily embroidered period costumes. I especially appreciated the harlequin details on the bodice of the traveling player who occasionally serves as narrator (Bre Jackson, blessed with golden pipes). More problematic is Daniel Ostling’s set design, which efficiently renders multiple locations but also cuts off sight lines in many scenes. (Those seated on the far left of the auditorium are liable to miss action that occurs on a tall staircase situated upstage left — beside three arched entryways that open to reveal deep backdrops that may not always be visible to anyone seated too far from the center.) The show is very much a work in progress. With tinkering to the plot and design, and overall narrative tightening, Giulia is poised to join the ranks of truly great new stage musicals. Nettles is an absolute star, but she leads a cast of noteworthy depth. Didi Romero makes a feast out of her solos as the deliciously campy and spoiled Duchessa who turns on Giulia for refusing to supply her with Aqua to off her husband (Andrew Kober) who subjects her to boredom rather than outright abuse. (Despite her growing body count, Giulia has some scruples.) The Duke’s worst offense appears to be that he snores — which makes him one of only two male characters (Simakh’s Padre Paolo is the other) who is not an outright monster. It’s the padre who reminds Giulia that there are decent men in the world, a point she concedes in a perfunctory spoken response that’s unlikely to mitigate concerns about the show’s inescapable anti-male bias: “Yes, there are. And they are none of my business.” This is not a musical focused on a woman finding her perfect (male) match, or vice versa. Giulia’s business is focused on empowering women to confront the men who take advantage of them, a score-settling agenda that Nettles makes remarkably compelling. It’s unnerving how quickly we find ourselves rooting for this serial killer to mow down half of Palermo. Credit Nettles’s skills as an actress, toggling between impish and innocent while delivering some soaring and heartfelt vocals. She sends the audience out with the show’s hookiest number, a post-curtain-call barn-burner called “Higher” that summarizes the good will she has engendered for the last two and a half hours: “This is a moment you don’t want to forget,” she sings with goosebump-inducing intensity (before a chorus that tangentially repeats an old Duncan Sheik hit, “Barely Breathing”). Despite the show’s flaws, you can’t help but agree.

Director Sheryl Kaller creates some beautiful stage tableaux, deploying Tal Yarden’s brightly hued set and projection designs and Robert Wierzel’s lighting to good effect to re-create the magic of the moon landing and the psychedelic swirl of Woodstock. But there’s little that she or the talented Suskauer can to make Pearl a plausible heroine. By the end, we don’t comprehend why this woman embarked on a fling with a stranger, why she regretted it, or how that experience might have changed her, for good or otherwise. Her journey is neither a small step nor a giant leap, but occupies some blank space in between as yet uncharted by NASA.

The Loved Ones stands on more secure ground when the focus remains on Nell. Plunkett radiates an Earth mother rootedness that keeps drawing your focus even as she scrambles to process the news that Gabby delivers and to buy herself some time on what to do with it. Time is the one commodity that all four women seem eager to manipulate — to reverse, to slow down, to speed through. But managing time proves as daunting a challenge as navigating the jagged cliffs of mourning.=

Day also wraps things up by addressing each of his castmates by name (“I see you, Aaron”) in a ritual of inclusion that feels forced — especially since so many of his fellow performers never get a monologue of their own. That’s the problem with theater: It doesn’t lend itself to absolute togetherness, or to having 17 leads trying to carry a show. Leveling the playing field also means flattening it so that nothing stands out.

One of the reasons we return to the Bard — and to any classic work — is to find the thread that make a centuries-old story relevant to today’s audiences. Ali succeeds in crafting some memorable stage images, and of depicting the challenges for youthful love to survive the prejudices of families from different backgrounds. But he goes too far by taking sides between the rival clans, making the show’s ultimate reconciliation feel less like welcome detente and more like surrender. A hollow victory indeed.

While I wish that A Woman Among Women had embraced a single aesthetic approach and worn its inspiration more loosely, I admire how Jonas invites us to consider familiar conflicts in new ways. What are the challenges, both within our communities and our personal consciences, that would resonate with the mid-20th-century figures of Miller’s lifetime? And would female protagonists react any differently, with more nuance or less dogmatism? These are fascinating, even important questions — and Jonas poses them with considerable skill.

Girl, Interrupted is not a conventional musical. Despite the subject matter, it’s also not a total downer. Director Jo Bonney embraces its unorthodoxy in her understated staging, with a simple stylized set (by the collective dots) and lighting (by Heather Gilbert). Sarah Lux’s costumes and J. Jared Janas’s hair, wig and makeup design summon the fab look of the late ’60s while still connecting us to women who feel familiar even if circumstances have improved. Under Bonney’s direction, the cast conveys the stark reality of their characters without wallowing in their predicament. They seem as surprised as we are when things don’t turn out, when tragedy strikes, and that brings a deeper layer of authenticity to the story. Girl, Interrupted celebrates the strength in sisterhood, and the power of music and storytelling to find meaning in the darkest episodes of human experience.

Impressive stagecraft can’t make up for an unconvincing story or characters who seem unlikely to be friends, let alone passionate lovers. It doesn’t help that Barnett appears to be decades younger than the fiftysomething we eventually learn that he is — but we never really buy that he’s chosen this couple as anything but a way station as he hides out from the fraught life he left behind in the Bay Area.

But the show’s greatest resource is Montano, who exploits his physicality to great effect — whether straining to drop pounds, crossing himself as his devout mother in prayer, or hunched over a thoroughbred visibly struggling to maintain control. Small lifts you into the saddle and challenges you to hang on for a bumpy but exhilarating ride.

Not that I wanted a longer show. At its best, ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| nails something essential and true about kids in all those youth arts programs for the gifted and talented. The skills are real, but sometimes raw and in need of training. The emotions are big, but often expressed awkwardly or immaturely. Whether by chance or predetermination, though, you want them all to succeed and find their place in the melody. And in the world.

Without the threat of real violence, Williams’s The Maids gets stuck in its admittedly pretty surfaces. For a while, that’s more than enough to keep us engaged. Wilson and Saban maintain a laser focus through their ritualistic routines while adroitly recording their movements with iPhones (and adding filters in real time). By the end, Wilson’s Claire dons a designer gown and metallic wig while meeting her daily step-count goal on an offstage treadmill. I’m not sure what it has to do with Genet, but the commitment is admirable.

<em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(17, 17, 17); background-color: rgb(241, 241, 241);">Indian Princesses</em><span style="color: rgb(17, 17, 17); font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(241, 241, 241);">&nbsp;works best when the girls are interacting with each other. Growing up in a place where they don’t see many others like themselves, including within their own homes, they find a kind of sisterhood in shared outsiderness. It helps that the cast capture both preteen preococity, casual cruelty, and the impulse for reconciliation. And Rodriguez is generous enough to respect her characters’ individuality — particularly the grown-ups who often turn a blind eye to their daughters’ needs, sometimes unwittingly and with the best of intentions. Not all blundering fathers are built the same, or inflict the same kind of psychological damage.</span>

Miller is terrific, gently leading both her fellow musicians and the audience through some tricky pathways — and delivering powerful vocals with soulful runs and an easy command of many musical traditions. There’s a muchness to Animal Wisdom that is both admirable and daunting.

It also becomes clear why The Emporium was never completed or produced in Wilder’s lifetime — despite two announcements of a Broadway production (including one starring Montgomery Clift). Both Wilder and Lynn seem constrained by the structure of the piece, with nine scenes and nine goodbyes, which doesn’t allow the natural development of character or plot. Instead, we get repeated invocations of Big Picture conflicts — pleasure vs. delayed gratification, exacting standards vs. crass commercialism, risk-taking vs. security — that are never dramatized in any way that truly registers. (John at one point considers abandoning Laurencia for the daughter of his non-Emporium boss, but we know he doesn’t really mean it and the flirtation ends almost immediately after it’s introduced.)

Like the trees whose dead wood Jackman’s character diligently chainsaws, Hickson’s script could also use some pruning. She’s not averse to a narrative twist, but she never seems to want to linger for very long on what it might portend. That’s a shame, because at its best New Born captures familiar dynamics of human relationships — our addiction to scrolling on our phones, our willingness to turn a blind eye to the obvious in the name of self-preservation, our ability to allow Hugh Jackman’s charisma to distract us from his character’s shortcomings.

Bubba Weiler’s transcendent one-act drama Well, I’ll Let You Go, which debuted last summer at Brooklyn’s The Space at Irondale, was my pick as the best New York theater production of last year. The show now makes a triumphant reappearance at Manhattan’s Studio Seaview with all but one of its pitch-perfect original cast members reprising their roles. Anyone who cares about theater, or deeply human storytelling, should run to see this show — which is boosted by a riveting performance by Quincy Tyler Bernstine as a new widow whose fundamental kindness forces her to manage other people’s reaction to her grief as well as her own feelings of loss and confusion. That, and the lingering suspicion that her late husband may have been harboring a dark secret.

Andron’s plot isn’t so much twisty as it is a tangled jumble of clichés, leading to a series of reveals that will leave you scratching your head not in surprise but in befuddlement. The program says the action takes place in the present day, but Danza doesn’t seem old enough to be a WWII survivor with a twentysomething son — let alone a morally compromised thug for reasons that strain credulity when he finally coughs them up, again in flashback. (Think Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man.)

In the end, I wish Tucker had gone further to streamline the text and make it resonate more clearly to modern audiences, or to provide a consistent framework (like that Baldwin quote) that carried through the whole show. With so few actors playing so many roles, it’s harder to identify with any one of them for very long, to put ourselves in their shoes and imagine how we too might become that monster.

Sarah Benson directs the show efficiently, but there’s no escaping how slight The Receptionist feels, like a drawn-out episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror with an overlong, gently comedic windup. Once we get to the big reveal — and the fallout from a failed client visit that went horribly, unforgivably sideways — The Receptionist hurriedly wraps everything up. Rather than grappling with the serious issues that are raised, or the repercussions for characters we’ve gotten to know (if only a bit), The Receptionist leaves the equivalent of a call-be-back-later Post-it note on our monitor.

Abeysekera seems intent on shaving a full hour off the play single-handedly, even barreling through his “To be or not to be” soliloquy with such haste that it’s hard to believe he’s really reckoning with serious questions of mortality at all. The words rush by, and so does the sentiment and the sense of a connection to a character whose eventual downfall lands like anticlimax. This Hamlet doesn’t need vengeance. He needs Ritalin.

It’s a remarkable performance, goosed by Giles Thomas’s 360-degree sound design, Joshua Pharo’s lighting, and Anisha Fields’s versatile costume and sets — including a prominent reel-to-reel tape recorder that allows Holden to engage in real-time conversations with prerecorded versions of himself (and a handful of others). He’s also backed by the glaring guitar riffs and banjo-inflected country score of onstage musician John Patrick Elliott, which literally underscore the atmosphere of a place that seems both familiar and remote.

The show looks spectacular — though it’s far less graphic in both its gore and sexiness than Joel Schumacher’s R-rated movie, which generated many of its cheap thrills from closeups of its dewy young stars. In another nod to the material’s multiplex origins, Arden has devised a Broadway first: a post-credit scene that begins after the final curtain call, a sequence involving a minor character that serves as both a callback and teaser for a possible sequel. It’s one of many final gambits that elevate The Lost Boys into something special.

Director Debbie Allen’s starry new revival, headlined by Cedric the Entertainer and Taraji P. Henson as the proprietors of the boarding house where the action takes place, is an admirable production that hits the major dramatic notes and occasionally hints at the sublime transcendence of the material. The chief draw here is Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who brings grounded authority to the role of “conjure man” Bynum Walker — a practitioner of folk magic whose particular gift is binding people together.

Speaking of personality, Evans makes a striking impression as Frank — towering over the cast in his four-inch heels while delivering a performance that is in turns seductive, off-putting, and out of this world. Which is entirely apt for a sweet transvestite from the Transylvania galaxy who after wreaking so much havoc yearns to return home, like an outré Dorothy Gale in Oz. And Frank really does seem sweet — not the walking provocateur that Tim Curry embodied a half century ago. Doing the Time Warp, again, is more an act of nostalgia than defiance, and the show’s pelvic thrusts seem more like exercise than something that will drive us insane.