Thom Geier — Theater Critic

Every now and then, an enchanting new musical classic comes along out of nowhere. Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York, which opened Thursday at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre, is a modern musical romance that has the feel of an old-fashioned movie but also the look and sound of a story that could only take place in 2025.

Director Kenny Leon does what he can to tighten the pacing, but the script needs significant work to trim unnecessary scenes and sharpen the focus. Despite the sci-fi trappings, This World of Tomorrow is stuck in the dusty past, a time dripping in sentimentality and the possibility of a whirlwind romance with a person you only just met.

Finn’s tunes remain toe-tapping treats, and the whole cast throws themselves into the numbers with a youthful energy that suits their characters’ ages. Spelling Bee is the perfect antidote to these dreary anxiety-ridden times, and it’s worth settling down for a long, laughter-induced spell.

Like Teiresias, Merope understands that Oedipus’ world is about to implode — though Ickes smartly insures that no one character has the full picture of the family history until the elements leak out bit by bit. By the time that countdown clock hits zero, and the penny drops for both Oedipus and Jocasta, there is no turning back. The final scenes, as Strong and Manville wrestle with the full ramifications of their unwitting actions, unspool with a furious inevitability that is difficult to watch and impossible to look away. Ickes and his cast have achieved something truly remarkable, producing a classic that doesn’t feel like a revival at all. Oedipus may be the best play of the decade, and also the most contemporary.

Date: November 12, 2025 Author: Thom Geier 0 Comments Rajiv Joseph’s Archduke, a comedic retelling of the recruitment of the anarchist whose 1913 assassination of Austro-Hungarian ruler Franz Ferdinand triggered World War I, is like a contemporary version of a Shakespearean history play as filtered through Comedy Central’s Drunk History. Through episodes of offbeat jokes and over-the-top slapstick, Joseph brings a darkly humorous sensibility to a chapter in world history that we all probably think we know better than we do. The story centers on Gavrilo Princip (Jake Berne, wide-eyed and charming), the young Slavic anarchist who fired the fatal shots at the archduke and his wife, Sophie, in an attempt to rid Bosnia of rule by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Joseph’s telling, though, Gavrilo and his two co-conspirators (Jason Sanchez and Adrien Rolet) are less true believers in the cause than accidental terrorists who are easy marks for recruitment to violence due to their less than flush circumstances. They’re unemployed, dim-witted virgins who feel hopeless in getting the attention of women, and they’ve all been given a fatal diagnosis of tuberculosis that spurs them to make a mark of any kind on the world while they still can. This makes them easy prey for a rogue military officer who needs some cannon fodder for his empire-toppling agenda. The brilliantly basso-voiced Patrick Page plays this svengali-like figure, nicknamed “Apis,” with a hilarious rhetorical flourish that’s equal parts drill sergeant, pompous professor, and cult leader. In many respects, Gavrilo and his comrades are not the best audience for Apis’ propaganda — more drawn to the prospect of a sumptuous meal (served by Kristine Nielsen with exaggerated gestures of domestic servitude) or even holding a gun or riding in a train to far-off cosmopolitan Sarajevo. archduke Patrick Page, Jason Sanchez, Adrien Rolet, Jake Berne, and Kristine Nielsen in ‘Archduke’ (Photo: Joan Marcus) Advertisement Joseph’s central insight is that the origins of terrorist cells — or even modern-day incels — can be located in the credulity of young men encountering persuasive older mentors blinding them to logic and offering a pathway to what they’ve long craved: acceptance, recognition, perhaps immortality. Or even just the prospect of a solid meal and the promise of long-overdue female companionship. When Sanchez’s Nedeljko first meets Gavrilo, he tellingly feigns knowledge of sex. “It’s like taking a bath with a bunch of rabbits,” he explains to his equally clueless new pal. “Feels soft and warm but also, ‘What am I doing here?'” In the drawn out second act, Nielsen’s Sladjana tones down the silliness to suggest to the young men that they need not actually go through with Apis’ plan to achieve their goals, that the comforts of their friendship and sense of mission may not outweigh the nagging questions they harbor about the violence of their assignment. Joining a group of terrorists may be soft and warm, but what are they actually doing here? By this point, Page has mostly disappeared and the comedic energy of the play dissipates as Joseph tries to corral his premise into a plausible if highly speculative ending. The script, reworked since its 2017 premiere in Los Angeles, still doesn’t entirely stick the landing. Director Darko Tresnjak, himself a native of Zemun, Serbia, where some of the action takes place, strikes a delicate balance between the absurdist humor and the play’s more philosophical ideas — and he deploys Alexander Dodge’s stylized turntable set, Linda Cho’s just-so costumes, and Matthew Richards’ lighting to excellent effect. Archduke is a diverting bit of alternate history, with some fine comic moments and an underlying message about how easy it can be to radicalize youth

But this Richard II emerges more as an exercise in style than substance, unable to justify why its 1980s glosses enhance our understanding of this story or these characters. “I have been studying how I may compare / This prison where I live unto the world,” Richard says in the opening and closing lines of the show. And Urie fills the lines with a kind of weary resignation that marks his approach to his drawn-out abdication in the second act. But this production fails to make clear how Richard himself is chiefly responsible for his incarcerated fate, the architect of his own misfortune. (And it has nothing to do with his prolonged smooches with a boy.)

You don’t have to build a musical around characters that the audience wants to root for, but it certainly helps. The most human-shaped figure on stage is Sofia, the devoted servant who keeps the household running and spends a lot of her free time in the luxurious playhouse that the Siegel offspring stopped using years ago. Butiu gives Sofia some genuine dimensions as a woman who backburnered her own family to raise other people’s kids, but she never gets a song of her own to make her more than an accessory. (Stephen DeRosa and Isabel Keating, meanwhile, are wasted as Jackie’s salt-of-the-earth parents.)

But aside from Milo’s off-handed confession there are no other hints that this is in any way a sex cult, and Thomas is easily shut down by others when he veers off into lecture mode. Mostly, this seems to be a group of well-meaning hippies muddling through life together. But muddling is not the stuff of most dramas — nor a sufficient reason to spend so much time with these well-intentioned strangers, especially after the play establishes some lofty stakes that wind up being squandered rather than fully developed.

Kim is a deceptively captivating actor: friendly and chipper one moment, calm and reserved the next. You can see how she managed to endure the hardships that her family hurled at her, maintaining a brave face of composure through even the most brutal acts of cruelty. Her writing, too, is marked by a similar restraint. Time and again, she lets the words and actions of others speak for themselves rather than raise her voice or add rhetorical flourishes. She prefers to embrace the euphemisms that can convey a dictionary of subtext. Hers is a story that would rightly prompt many to scream in anger; she chooses to whisper and carry on with an admirably steely resolve.

I suspect there’s a really tight 90-minute show buried in here, one with a razor-sharp focus on what modern audiences should take away from SNL‘s origin story. (Personally, I’d watch an entire show about Garrett Morris, especially with Grimes proving such a riveting portrayal of a hyper-talented man who seemed forever just ahead of his time.) In addition to that revealing blow-up doll sketch, I admit that the show did have a second laugh-out-loud scene — but this one was entirely unscripted, when Proctor’s Chase pratfalls into the table where Michaels is sitting during auditions and breaks the tabletop loose from its central stand, forcing Bouillion and Nate Janis (who doubles as NBC exec Dick Ebersol) to prop it up with their knees for the remaining auditions. It’s a reminder of the antic mayhem that exemplifies SNL at its best, a willingness to just roll with it that’s only fitfully captured in Not Ready for Prime Time.

But this is no lumbering pageant. Despite the overstuffed plot, you find yourself getting caught up in the plight of characters whose efforts to get ahead in life are thwarted by prejudice and whose response to the obstacles they face varies from quiet persistence to anger to vengeance. DeBessonet’s thoughtful staging underscores why Ragtime is still worth revisiting. As we approach the country’s 250th anniversary, it’s good to remember that harmony can only happen when we bring disparate voices together, and that doing so is a public act worth cherishing. And preserving. Great music can grease the wheels of the American Dream.

There’s so much to admire about Caroline and how it skillfully raises issues about whether we can truly make amends for our past mistakes — or rebuild our trust in those who have betrayed it. In the end, it’s the precocious title character who has the most insightful read on the situation. Sometimes it takes a child to lead us.

Hayden is mesmerizing as Dave, confident and combative one moment and then gradually revealing hidden depths of remorse and resignation as the story unfolds. Sharing his story — or as Emily would put it, “his truth” — really does seem to have a cathartic effect on the man. The Irish have always had a gift for spinning yarns, after all, and The Honey Trap underscores how hard it is to pin down something as subjectively elusive as the truth.

Like many a writer who’s built a world on abstract ideas, Nelson doesn’t quite know where to take his fascinating premise — which leads to a short coda of a second act that’s puzzling, perfunctory, and largely unsatisfying. What’s worse, it represents a betrayal of Marvel’s heroine, the reluctant advocate for old-fashioned values of justice and logic who’s so suspicious of surrendering to technology that she wields a pen and paper notepad throughout the first act, unlike the tablet-wielding bureaucrats she’s challenging. While Nelson doesn’t stick the landing, And Then We Were No More spotlights the dangers that our justice system faces from new technologies, corporate interests, and our own passivity.

Tyne Rafaeli’s brisk direction helps disguise the infelicities of the script, particularly a descent into magic realism that seems too convenient. McDermott’s performance is so fluid it could snap years of drought with torrential downpours. She’s a beguiling motormouth who responds to doubts about her chosen career with a steady drizzle of words: “I’m a fluffer, I’m a hype man, I’m a used car salesman selling a world we can’t even have.” We could all use a deliciously messed-up Weather Girl to deliver some hard truths and perhaps the hint of a miracle.

What’s unusual about The Brothers Size, and what has enabled it to endure in multiple productions since its premiere, is that it combines the flashy showmanship of a young artist with an unexpectedly polished maturity. There’s a simple elegance to the storytelling, enhanced by shifts into poetic language heightened by Spencer Doughtie’s lighting cues. It’s a work of ambition but also of modesty, willing to explore masculine vulnerability as well as braggadocio. Perhaps that’s the truest reflection of the experience of Black men, whose very bodies have been placed in jeopardy (and behind bars) with such frequency. In the face of such systemic brutality, why not try a little tenderness?

Not that Twelfth Night needs to wave a rainbow flag to succeed. But this production departs from other recent revivals in taking a humbler, less transgressive approach to the various romantic entanglements. Even in the curtain call, when the cast reassembles in colorful new outfits as part of a drag-ball sendoff, the show seems to be conjuring a party atmosphere for which there’s no overarching agenda. The message seems to be: Come as you are, love what you will. And to rechristen a venue that’s both fresh and familiar, a welcome beacon of summer fun, perhaps that’s enough.

He typically punctuates his death-focused anecdotes with punchlines, but there’s an overriding melancholy here that dampens the overall mood. The writing is not as strong as Crystal’s, alas, and the jokes don’t land with the frequency you’d expect. (He scores some of his biggest laughs early on when poking fun at his own alopecia-induced baldness, comparing himself to a “Jeff Bezos blow-up doll” or “Pitbull if he was attacked by a pit bull.”)

Nobody could mistake Mamma Mia! for high art. Cardboard-cutout characters vamp through a ridiculous romantic plot, while beloved disco-era ABBA hits are shoehorned in often as clumsily as Cinderella’s prince struggling to find the perfect fit for the lost slipper of his royal-ball dancing partner. But audiences still thrill to dancing queens. And Mamma Mia!, returning to Broadway nearly a quarter century after it began a long and glorious run at the Winter Garden Theatre (and later the Broadhurst), has an infectious, high-energy showmanship that’s almost irrepressible.

Ever since its 1997 debut in London (followed by a successful Broadway run two years later), Conor McPherson’s intimate drama The Weir has been hailed as a modern masterpiece. And rightly so. The play, now getting a pitch-perfect revival at the Irish Repertory Theatre under Ciarán O’Reilly’s direction, celebrates the elemental pleasures of storytelling.

Fickman’s familiarity with the material really pays off, because the production has a polish that belies its Off Broadway setting. He laces scenes with wonderful moments in the margins too, as when Ostermeyer’s dim-bulb quarterback has to be prompted to make an exit or when Teeter’s cheerleader Heather delivers a series of defiant high kicks upstage as a wall closes and casts her into darkness. (The choreography is by Gary Lloyd.) The cast also hits the perfect notes to blend believability with exaggerated cartoonishness demanded of any sendup of high school social dynamics

In the end, Tannahill is less concerned with gossip about a gay royal than in the isolation that any LGBTQ+ person faces in carving a space for themselves after growing up in the constraining embrace of a straight (and straitlaced) family. While Prince Faggot spends most of its time as a kind of speculative work of royal fan fiction, Tannahill cunningly gives the last word to Stewart — who shares a version of her personal story while questioning the very foundations of the drama in which she’s featured. Why should we care about some far-off prince and his supposedly divine claim to the throne? Isn’t the fundamental truth of queer lives the ability to shed the costumes that our parents have given us, and sometimes even the bodies, and to forge a life for ourselves that reflects our true identities?

The main draw here is Smart, and she does not disappoint. The Emmy-winning actress has an easy command of the stage and at 73 convincingly plays a much younger woman, with frizzy ginger hair sweeping down past her shoulders on a series of slightly oversized Walmart-ready outfits (deisgned by Tom Broecker) that underscore her lower-middle-class status. From the outset, Smart uses her down-home chatterbox delivery and upright stature to draw us into her confidence, smoothing over the many contradictions and inconsistencies in the script.

The biggest scene-stealer is Watts, who so dominates whenever he takes the stage that you may wish that Sammy Davis Jr.’s name was in the title. Watts flashes a feral energy that’s truly magnetic, and he moves with a catlike grace around the stage — and occasionally the auditorium. His tap duet with Hill on “Me and My Shadow” (tap choreography by Jared Grimes) is a burst of percussive performance art. Lights Out is a showcase for some wonderful song and dance, but the luster dims whenever the band stops playing.

While the cast delivers these lines at a rapid clip under Morgan Green’s direction, Five Models seems content to skim the surface of fashion-world satire without going either very deep or broad — or committing to whether it wants to be a drama or a comedy. One moment, Roberta is earnestly teaching Grace how to adjust the aperture of the lens to achieve a perfect balance between light and shadow. The next, Tatiana is revealing that a photographer raped her at age 14 and Alex describes a plane crash in the Brazilian rain forest that forced her “to survive off the condensation of airplane windows” until the shoot itself was canceled because of a local coup.