Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Marc J. Franklin, Emilio Madrid, Sõren Meisnerv, Ahron R.Foster
Summer tends to be the quiet season for theater in New York, and this year it’s especially quiet on Broadway. (As well as at the Delacorte, which is under renovation, Shakespeare in the Park is mostly off.) In the aftermath of a choked-to-the-gills spring of Tony Award-targeted openings — and a few sudden closings — only three productions have announced summer plans so far, and a lot of August programming is still unclear. But there’s still plenty to explore, whether at the festivals, programming from new and old nonprofits (including one wildly remixed musical revival), or trips just outside the five boroughs.
Second Stage; in previews now for a June 4 opening; through June 23
Maggie Siff, who can summon a fearsome stage presence, plays a war correspondent who has come back home but finds herself still addicted to the rush — and planning an elopement with her cameraman, played by Louis Ozawa — in a new play by Alexis Scheer (Our Dear Dead Drug Lord). —Jackson McHenry
Three shows: Usus, Coach Coach, and Find Me Here
The Wild Project, May 16–June 29
Quick! Summerworks is happening now — that’s right, right now! Clubbed Thumb’s always-exciting annual festival of new plays is already in full swing at the tiny and mighty Wild Project in the East Village, and this year, you can catch T. Adamson’s Usus, Bailey Williams’s Coach Coach, and Find Me Here by Crystal Finn. The first is a comedy about (what else?) six Franciscan friars in 1318 with a cast featuring Ugo Chukwu and David Greenspan. Coach Coach follows the drama at a weekend retreat where attendees are scrapping for accreditation as “Platinum Practitioner Life Coaches,” and Find Me Here (featuring Tony-winner Miriam Silverman) tells the story of three sisters opening the will of their recently deceased 100-year-old father. Past years of Summerworks have given rise to the likes of What the Constitution Means to Me and Grief Hotel, and this year’s trio of plays looks likely to reproduce Clubbed Thumb’s signature blend of wily weirdness, curiosity, and heart. —Sara Holdren
Atlantic Theater; in previews now for a June 12 opening; through June 30
Sarah Benson directs Lucy Kirkwood’s striking play about a community of women in rural England in 1759. Halley’s comet is approaching overhead, and down below, a young woman has been sentenced to hang for the murder of a child. When the condemned girl claims that she’s pregnant, a jury of women is gathered together to determine the truth. Benson has an absolutely stacked cast — with Sandra Oh as the midwife at the center of the tense proceedings — and Kirkwood compellingly turns Twelve Angry Men on its head to examine thorny questions of domestic labor and justice. —S.H.
Atlantic Theater,; in previews now for a June 4 opening; through June 29
Playwright Shayan Lotfi is making an Off Broadway debut with a two-hander about a pair of siblings, one who leaves the old country and one who stays, that will, intriguingly, star two pairs of very good actors. Rosalind Chao and BD Wong will do the first half of the run, followed by Shohreh Aghdashloo and Tony Shalhoub for the second. They’ll overlap for four performances from June 11 to 13, when the Atlantic is running doubleheaders. —J.M
Todd Haimes Theatre; in previews now for a June 5 opening
The ever-busy Kenny Leon, who directed last season’s revival of Purlie Victorious, brings back another somewhat underappreciated Black Broadway classic: Home, by Samm-Art Williams and originally produced by the Negro Ensemble Company in 1979, is a coming-of-age story about a young man in the late 20th century that winds from the rural South through college and Vietnam protesting and back. —J.M
St. Ann’s Warehouse, June 7–July 7
A collaboration between the Danish director Tue Biering and South African choreographer Nhlanhla Mahlangu and a hit at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe, Dark Noon looks at American westward expansion through the fractured prism of Hollywood Westerns. Reenacting this brutal slice of the U.S. history textbook is a cast of South African actors, often decked in blonde wigs and white face paint. Guns will be slung, squares will be danced, and the bright golden haze on the meadow will surely turn ominous before midday. —S.H.
New York City Center, June 11–23
In the late 1990s, Broadway experienced a mini-boom of historical pageant musicals with shows like Ragtime, Parade, and Titanic — that last one being a sung-through take on the fate of the “ship of dreams,” as characters constantly refer to it. In the original, spectacle was very much at the forefront, as were the accompanying technical issues, all thoroughly covered in the press, though the show rebounded from mixed skeptical-to-positive reviews to win Best Musical. (This all preceded James Cameron’s movie, by the way.) Encores!’s revival, pared down as usual, promises to showcase its strongest element, Maury Yeston’s sweeping Celtic score, borne on a collection of great Broadway voices that includes Judy Kuhn, Bonnie Milligan, and Ramin Karimloo. —J.M
Perelman Performing Arts Center, June 13–July 14
When Andrew Lloyd Webber first played his score for Cats to the director Hal Prince, the story goes (according to Prince) that Prince tried to figure out what the show was a metaphor for. Was it British politics? “Hal,” the composer told the director, “this is just about cats.” After decades on Broadway and in London, an endless tour, and the baffling — and, already, cult classic — CGI movie adaptation, Lloyd Webber seems open to the idea that maybe Cats is, in fact, not just about cats. The Financial District’s new Perelman Arts Center is taking a big swing, ending its inaugural season with an unorthodox version of the musical, from directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, that sets it all within the world of New York’s ballroom culture. (Those cats, in the original, are all competing at the Jellicle Ball.) According to PAC, the show will now have club beats in the score, both ballroom and theatrical royalty (André De Shields plays Old Deuteronomy) in the cast, and runway choreography. Maybe it’ll revitalize a tired show; maybe it’s too clever by half. We’ll have to see for ourselves whether it’s good enough to reach the Heaviside Layer. —J.M
Bard Summerscape, June 20–July 18
Elevator Repair Service performed every word in The Great Gatsby in its phenomenal six-hour epic Gatz and also not quite every word of The Sound and the Fury and The Sun Also Rises in equally ambitious theatrical adaptations. Now they’re climbing 20th-century literature’s Mount Everest in a brand new, daring and debauched attempt on James Joyce’s Ulysses. Don’t worry — it’s not the whole thing, but whatever it is will surely be worth a trip up the Hudson. —S.H.
Lyceum Theatre; in previews June 26 for a July 11 opening
Cole Escola’s berserkly ahistorical vision of Mary Todd Lincoln — a drunk former cabaret star who resents that her husband won’t let her go back to the stage, even in the middle of the Civil War — was the toast of Off Broadway this spring, so naturally Mary’s moving into a larger venue, presumably still intent on those cabaret dreams. Oh, Mary!’s supporting cast (including the essential Conrad Ricamora, credited as “Mary’s Husband”) is coming along for the transfer, so the hope is primarily that Escola and Sam Pinkelton can preserve all the weirdo magic they found Off Broadway. Also, fingers crossed that there’s an even bigger gown budget. —J.M
Hudson Theatre; in previews July 31 for an August 12 opening; through November 30
New York City Center’s Encores! series of musical revivals, under Lear deBessonet’s new leadership, has served as the launchpad for a streak of Broadway transfers in recent years: Parade, Into the Woods, and now this classic 1959 fantasy farce with music by Mary Rogers. The indefatigable Sutton Foster, who went in quick succession from the City Center run of Mattress to Sweeney Todd, is back to lead this production, which is directed by deBessonet herself and comes with punch-up work by Gilmore Girls’s Amy Sherman-Palladino. ”Rogers and company dreamed up Mattress at the Tamiment adult summer camp in the Poconos in the 1950s, which makes it a fitting choice for August programming: When this production opened at Encores! earlier this year, we called it “the work of adults on theatrical vacation.” —J.M.
