Broadway

“WAITING FOR GODOT IS A RUBBISH PLAY.” So declared Keith McNally in an Instagram post that caught my eye. “I urge you not to see Waiting for Godot.” Accompanying the statement was an image of the two stars who headlined this fall’s production at Broadway’s Hudson Theater, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. The play is the latest in what regular theatergoers and visiting tourists may have started to recognize as a recurring theme in New York’s theater scene: an overwhelming number of big-name Hollywood screen actors dotting their playbills. These players are here to make their bones and increase their prestige as “true” thespians, often by attaching themselves to tired and familiar productions. This has certainly not been lost on McNally.

In the second act of Liberation the main cast quietly, and without fuss, starts to undress. By the time the lights go up, all six women are naked. In this masterful play by Bess Wohl, the moment does not feel shocking or gratuitous but somehow comforting. In 1970s Ohio, a group of women meet weekly to fight for equality through “consciousness-raising.” Mostly that consists of free-ranging conversation, of which the women have a lot and which is always smart, funny, vulnerable and eye-opening. But after reading an article about body positivity in Ms. magazine, they meet in the nude.

Around midway through Masquerade – the new immersive adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, which sees a small audience whirled through a labyrinth of rooms and sets – I feel a hand on my shoulder. Smiling, I turn, expecting to see my friend – and immediately recoil. A tiny circus freak grins at me, revealing teeth like sharpened screwdrivers and a painted face lifted straight from Día de los Muertos. Later, in a carnival scene, that same freak hammers three nails into her face and an ice-pick up her nose. The carnival sequence is not in the original Phantom. It is one of the largest and perhaps most important of Masquerade’s additions.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, Daisy Fay is a mercurial character. The popular rich girl from Louisiana — married to Tom Buchanan, an adulterous brute — is ravishing and entrancing and, at times, cruel. It is her voice that most draws Jay Gatsby to her years after their initial fling when he was a poor officer, as he longs for her across the bay. As Fitzgerald describes it, Daisy’s is a voice that rises in dramatic swells and falls to intimate murmurs, coaxing its listeners to draw closer. Gatsby, the nouveau-riche rumored bootlegger from an impoverished farming family, is obsessed with Daisy: her class, her beauty, her unattainability, her voice. It is a voice, he tells the book’s narrator Nick Carraway, that is “full of money.

When The Wiz first graced Broadway in 1975 it positioned itself as a gutsy ode to black culture. The adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with a book by William F. Brown and music and lyrics by Charlie Smalls, not only featured songs infused with R&B, gospel and soul but a fully black cast.It became a long-running hit, won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and inspired a 1978 movie of the same name, starring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. The Wiz’s storied beginning and genre-busting premise only makes this revival feel more deficient. Directed by Schele Williams, with updated writing by comedian Amber Ruffin, The Wiz comes to the money-spinning Marquis Theatre following a national tour which visited thirteen cities.

As I entered the lobby of Circle in the Square Theatre, now showing Broadway’s hottest ticket, An Enemy of the People, staff were upselling booze. “Do you want to buy a shot?” offered one enthusiastic barman, waving a bottle of bracing Linie aquavit. He added, grinning: “It’s what the actors drink on stage.” Sam Gold’s revival of Henrik Ibsen’s didactic and stuffy morality play aims to draw direct comparisons between past and present, including what alcohol we consume (more on that later). In late nineteenth-century Norway, a town finds itself prosperous by selling access to the local spa baths, which supposedly have curative properties. When Dr.

Merrily We Roll Along starts in 1976, at a party held by big-shot Hollywood producer Franklin Shepard, who is surrounded by stars (not least his second wife, a veteran Broadway siren, and his young lover, the nubile leading actress of his latest hit movie). It ends in 1957, with stars of a different kind: constellations in an inky sky that provoke awe and inspiration for a younger, more naive Frank, as he sits on a rooftop with friends Mary and Charlie, dreaming about their future. The juxtaposition — of celestial bodies with shiny, obnoxious celebrity — helps to frame this musical about the loss of innocence.

Since closing its doors during the pandemic in 2020, Broadway has struggled. The Phantom of the Opera lowered the curtain in April last year after more than thirty-five years. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new musical, Bad Cinderella, shut in June, less than three months after it opened, and other musicals, such as the tortuously-named Britney Spears-inspired Once Upon a One More Time, have fared little better. Meanwhile, productions are still scrambling to get butts on seats: audience numbers are down 17 percent from their pre-pandemic highs. And yet, for theater aficionados, there is hope.

American Psycho was never supposed to be a hit. Bret Easton Ellis thought Glamorama would be his big seller, and Psycho was just an odd interlude; an experiment with form that mocked the disconnection, inanity and opulent obliviousness of America’s new, young, hyper-materialist upper crust. It was also a cloaked reflection of repressed homosexuality, written by a gay author who once dated a closeted financier. It’s not even that violent. Most of it is just the interior monologue of this cold man listing the clothes and food and bad music that occupies his hollow mind. And it was intensely funny, but dryly, darkly so. In short, it wasn’t an obvious literary smash.

Imelda Marcos allegedly wants three words inscribed on her tombstone: Here Lies Love. It’s a poetic expression made grimly baleful by the reality of the Marcos regime: Imelda and her husband Ferdinand ruled the Philippines with an increasingly iron fist from 1965-86, committing countless human rights abuses as they robbed the country’s coffers. Yet the phrase has been borrowed by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim as the title of their musical about the Marcoses, Here Lies Love, now playing on Broadway (it premiered off-Broadway in 2013). Whether the phrase is used in earnest or irony is never quite clear in a show that apparently positions itself as a fun and fabulous karaoke dance party.