Musical

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The Gospel According to Heather

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The Gospel According to Heather

The first thing to know about The Gospel According to Heather: It’s way out of author Paul Gordon’s wheelhouse. Gordon, the rare writer who creates book, music, and lyrics, specializes in adaptations of lofty classics, most prominently Jane Eyre. His  2009 version of Daddy Long Legs gets produced a lot (while convincing some of us that epistolary musicals aren’t a great idea). For The Gospel According to Heather he turns thoroughly contemporary, with an original story so current that there are jokes about drag storybook hour, Dylan Mulvaney’s Budweiser ad, and the congressional tussle over gas ovens. Heather, like its title character, isn’t perfect, but it has more on its mind than the average musical comedy, and it dispenses its outrage with verve and good humor.

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Days of Wine and Roses

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Days of Wine and Roses

In Days of Wine and Roses, the new musical based on JP Miller’s 1958 teleplay and Blake Edwards’s 1962 Warner Bros. film, the central characters introduce themselves in song as “two people stranded at sea.” Even when offered lifelines, as the boozy, destructive duo often are, they respond like drowning victims, clawing and scratching, threatening to bring their rescuers down with them. With a book by Craig Lucas and a score by Adam Guettel, Days of Wine and Roses presents a searing and sobering portrait of the devastating costs of addiction.

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Singfeld! A Musical Parody About Nothing

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Singfeld! A Musical Parody About Nothing

Brothers Bob and Tobly McSmith have created a cottage industry of musicals based—unauthorized, they always make it clear—on popular movies and TV shows of the past 30 years. They even have a cottage for their industry: the Theater Center at 50th and Broadway, where their new show Singfeld! A Musical Parody About Nothing has joined The Office! The Musical Parody and Friends: The Musical Parody in repertory.

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Lizard Boy

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Lizard Boy

Justin Huertas’s Lizard Boy, a queer pop-rock indie musical with a sci-fi vibe, is funny, poignant, and life-affirming. Huertas, as the titular character, is a sweet and likable protagonist in this coming-of-age love story even though he suffers from having green, scaly skin. Cleverly directed by Brandon Ivie, and under the aegis of Prospect Theater Company, this show is a terrific homage to—and satire of—comic-book mythology.

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Waiting in the Wings

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Waiting in the Wings

Waiting in the Wings is the sort of show that materializes every June with a gay-themed subject to celebrate Pride Month intentionally or obliquely. This adaptation of a 2014 movie, in which Sally Struthers, Christopher Atkins and Shirley Jones appeared, stars Jeffrey A. Johns, who wrote the screenplay and reprises his writing and acting roles for the stage.

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On the Right Track

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On the Right Track

Tony Sportiello and Albert M. Tapper’s new musical comedy On the Right Track invites audiences to ride the rails on a New Jersey Transit train carrying three couples who have three very different problems. Sensitively directed by Mauricio Cedeño, the show is not only entertaining but edifying. It also reminds folks that “sometimes the key to happiness is simply a matter of knowing which door you want to open . . . and which one you want to keep closed.”

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Walking with Bubbles

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Walking with Bubbles

Perhaps because one must dodge homeless people to get to the theater the time seems right for the new one-woman musical, Walking with Bubbles. Created, written and performed by Jessica Hendy, and based on her journey as a single mother rebuilding her life after her husband Adam’s mental illness and homelessness, this female-driven narrative is inspiring and may well impart hope to others in crisis.

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Vanities—The Musical

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Vanities—The Musical

Vanities—The Musical, featuring a book by Jack Heifner and music and lyrics by David Kirshenbaum, is a reworking of their 2006 effort, Vanities, A New Musical, which itself was based on Heifner’s 1976 straight play, Vanities. With Will Pomerantz along as director, the result is a decidedly male, and unfortunately stale, exploration of the lives of three imperfect women and the thinly drawn men in their orbit. The use of a talented, racially diverse cast calls attention to the work’s less-than-inclusive perspective rather than broadening it.

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I Love My Family But . . .

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I Love My Family But . . .

Parents who love their children often give them mixed messages, and children who get mixed messages often give their parents problems. Such is the case with Timmy, whose often rocky and self-centered relationship with his parents in the new musical comedy I Love My Family But… is followed from infancy through marriage, divorce—and the latter’s repercussions. This relationship most certainly qualifies as a I Love My Family But… situation.

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Mama I Want to Sing

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Mama I Want to Sing

There are music lovers who embrace jazz, some who adore R&B, and others with a penchant for soul. Yet even among these aficionados, how many know that each genre is heavily indebted to gospel music, and to black churches, where ministers and choirs rouse their congregants in praise and in prayer? Mama, I Want to Sing collectively celebrates legendary black singers whose musical roots were embedded in gospel music and who broke through color barriers as performers. It does so indirectly by tracing the life journey of Doris Winter—stage name Doris Troy—an aspiring singer in a gospel-rich choir. The guide through this journey is the DJ/Narrator, played by Vy Higginsen, the real-life younger sister of Doris Winter. She and her husband, Ken Wydro, co-created the script.

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She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind

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She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind

In the Roaring ’20s and Depression ’30s, women playwrights contributed substantively to the theater, but Black women playwrights’ work went largely unnoticed in the broader literary world. To counter this, Black magazine owners advertised contests to encourage new scripts. She’s Got Harlem on her Mind features three of Eulalie Spence’s four prizewinning scripts: The Starter (1923), Hot Stuff (1927), and The Hunch (1927). These one-act Harlem Renaissance vignettes reflect the everyday lives and cultures of its Black community. They provide a window into the hopes and shattered dreams of Harlem’s inhabitants.

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F*ck7thGrade

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F*ck7thGrade

Jill Sobule’s F*ck7thGrade, a queer musical-memoir that marries narrative and song, has returned to the Wild Project for a limited engagement. Directed by Lisa Peterson, Sobule (music, lyrics, and concept) shares her life story thus far, cleverly drawing upon her stultifying days in seventh grade as a jumping-off point to examine her life beyond middle school.

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Anthony Rapp’s Without You

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Anthony Rapp’s Without You

Jonathan Larson, author and composer of Rent, died of an aortic aneurism on Jan.25, 1996, the night before his magnum opus, an innovative rock opera inspired by Puccini’s La Bohème, was to play its first public performance in New York. At 35, Larson had been writing Rent for seven years and would soon be honored posthumously with a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Awards for best musical, lyrics, and original score of the 1995–96 theater season.

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Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust Road

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Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust Road

For four decades in the mid-twentieth century, Hoagy Carmichael’s melodies enchanted audiences around the world. Despite massive social upheavals, including the Great Depression and World War II, his songs endured. Many, like Stardust, Georgia on My Mind, and Heart and Soul, became classics. The co-creators of Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust Road lead the audience through those turbulent times as a group of gifted singers and dancers reprise a repertoire of hits that ultimately led to his induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1971.

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Fiddler on the Roof

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Fiddler on the Roof

Sholom Aleichem, the famous Yiddish writer, satirized and chronicled Jewish life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The story of Tevye the dairyman, perhaps the best remembered of Aleichem’s works, and on which the musical Fiddler on the Roof is largely based, is being reprised by the National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene in Yiddish—a production that premiered to acclaim before the pandemic and has now returned.

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Only Gold

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Only Gold

A cast of 20. An original story, not based on a book or movie. Plenty of dancing. Few modern musicals have all these things, and that Only Gold does indicates the breadth of its ambition. Set in Paris in 1928, the show features an ensemble in near-constant motion on an art deco–styled stage with a long, winding staircase whose banister extends into a circular fixture suspended above the stage amid a sky of globular lights. In design and concept it’s a very ambitious project indeed.

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A Man of No Importance

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A Man of No Importance

The tensions between life and art, and between experience and imagination, lie at the heart of the 2003 chamber musical A Man of No Importance. When it premiered, Roger Rees played the homosexual director of a Dublin theater company in the 1960s, suffering from period repression and bigotry. Classic Stage Company’s revival stars Jim Parsons, the Big Bang Theory actor who apparently wants to demonstrate his acting and singing abilities beyond his Sheldon character—and succeeds.

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Stranger Sings!

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Stranger Sings!

When the fourth season of the Netflix hit Stranger Things premiered this past summer, it seemed like the show’s popularity had reached its zenith. From pushing a certain decades-old Kate Bush song back onto the Billboard Hot 100 to causing fangirls to rave online about the magnetism of breakout star Jamie Campbell Bower as Stranger’s newest baddie, the show’s powerful reach could rival the telekinetic abilities of one of the series’ other iconic characters, Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown). So it’s only natural that a musical parody of the show about superpowered teens, demonic beings and alternate dimensions would be the next step—here called Stranger Sings!, of course.

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Kinky Boots

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Kinky Boots

Following in the footsteps of the 2013 Tony winner for Best Musical, this polished, Off-Broadway revival of Kinky Boots shines under the direction and choreography of Jerry Mitchell, who helmed that Broadway production, and stars Callum Francis, recreating the role of the drag queen, Lola, after having previously donned the titillating titular zip-ups on Broadway as well as in London and Australia.

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The Butcher Boy

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The Butcher Boy

Whoa! At the ends of both acts of The Butcher Boy, the Irish Rep’s new musical adapted from Patrick McCabe’s 1992 novel, such unsettling things happen that you’re forced to revisit everything that preceded them, assessing how much was fact, how much was fantasy, and whether or not we should trust our narrating protagonist, Francie Brady (Nicholas Barasch, and we shouldn’t). The Butcher Boy isn’t comforting or reassuring or lovable, and it won’t send you out whistling a happy tune. But, and this puts it ahead of much of the current pack, it isn’t stupid.

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