Hello, theater lovers! It’s Helen Shaw, your theater critic, writing to you this week. I hope you are recovering post-Tony Awards. If you missed our special Tonys-themed newsletter on Monday, you can read all our coverage here. I, for one, am still quietly humming Pink’s opening number, murmuring “Gitchie, gitchie, Laurie Metcalf” to myself on the subway and chuckling. The 2025-26 Broadway season has now had its biggest night, which means it’s the perfect time to go and see everything else. You could go to see Maya Rudolph in “Oh, Mary!” before she leaves on July 5; Alexandra Alter has a grand interview with her, in which Rudolph speaks about the surprising strain of seriousness inside Cole Escola’s farce. Or there’s Sting and Shaggy, starring at the Metropolitan Opera in a weeklong run of the new version of Sting’s ode to a dying shipyard, “The Last Ship.” The iteration I saw in 2014 was troubled, but the music has always been lovely; I wonder how it will sound under those chandeliers. June has also quietly been serving a smorgasbord of gorgeous Off and Off-Off Broadway shows, many of them returning works; our critics can vouch for many of them. My favorite — and the one I am harassing my friends to see — is Nadja Leonhard-Hooper’s incredible, sort-of-’80s comedy “Derangements,” a zany adventure about, among other things, a natural-childbirth cult. Annie Tippe directs a typically superb Clubbed Thumb Summerworks cast, including Danny Wolohan, playing a trenchcoat-wearing flasher interested in (heh heh) exposure therapy, and Hannah Cabell, who makes the single greatest mid-show stage entrance I have seen this season. (I will reveal that it involves a tube.) Red alert: “Derangements” only plays through this Friday. One of my top shows of the season, Eliya Smith’s “Dad Don’t Read This,” will transfer to the Greenwich House Theater starting next Wednesday; Julia May Jonas’s tart rebuke to Arthur Miller, “A Woman Among Women,” has returned after its well-received 2024 run and is now at LCT3 until June 28; Todd Almond’s elliptical “I’m Almost There,” which we called “a sneakily, formally daring experiment in pared-down musical theater” in 2024, is at the Brooklyn Academy of Music until June 28; and Peter Zinn’s country musical (using songs from JT Harding’s catalog) “Music City,” which our critic Elisabeth Vincentelli loved, returns as well. It starts a new Off Broadway run at St. Luke’s Theater on June 15. (Full disclosure: My sister did the sound design, so I will not weigh in on whether or not it is loud.) You only have until this Sunday to catch “The Peculiar Patriot,” Liza Jessie Peterson’s riveting one-woman show about incarceration; I saw it way back in 2018, when I was writing at Time Out and thought it was one of the best shows I saw that year. “The best way to care about a nation is to heal it,” I wrote at the time, and I still think Peterson’s cry-for-action would be a strong choice for your semiquincentennial summer. I’ve already kvelled about Morgan Bassichis’s “Can I Be Frank?” a great deal, but it’s still my most recommended show this year, and so I’d be remiss not to bug you to see it. And I also adored Billy McEntee’s “Slanted Floors,” an ultra-intimate, site-specific apartment play, in which six audience members join a couple (Adam Chanler-Berat and Kyle Beltran) for dinner and listen to them dream aloud about utopia. Unsurprisingly, the whole run of micro-performances is sold out, but there’s a raffle for last-minute tickets, if you’re feeling lucky. And of course we are lucky to have you reading us each week! Tell us if you’ve seen something great. Please reach out to us at theaterfeedback@nytimes.com with suggestions for articles or to offer your thoughts about our coverage. And urge your friends to subscribe to this newsletter. Have a wonderful week, Like this email?Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up here.
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