Articles by Dan Rubins
‘Wanted’ Review: A Broadway Musical About Outlaw Sisters Can’t Live Up to Its Bold Premise
Check out the Clarke family’s Kinfolk, ghostly ancestors cloaked in flowing white robes who show up at the start of Wanted with a story to sing. There are six of them, each with a vibrantly distinctive look, and they roll across the stage like fog, both a unified collective and a compelling collection of individual personalities. They’re led by the phenomenal Melody A. Betts, who opens Wanted’s second act with a jaw-droppingly prolonged belted note.
Review: The Blue Violinist Over West End Avenue , Shouting About Israel on the Upper West Side
Rory Kulz, Ali Axelrad, Adam Heller, and Barbara Walsh appear in Debbie Goodstein’s The Blue Violinist Over West End Avenue, directed by Jonathan Silverstein, at Theatre Row. (© Jeremy Daniel) A 13-year-old student once told me that when she can’t choose between two options, she makes the decision by having a thumb war with herself. Writing a debate play, the kind where characters are positioned oppositionally across a social or political issue, is kind of like having a thumb war with yourself.
Review: Lauren Yee's King of the Yees , an Exploration of What It Means to Be a Yee
Maureen Sebastian, David Shih, Francis Jue, and Kelly Marie Tran in King of the Yees (© HanJie Chow) There are two characters named Lauren Yee in Yee’s play King of the Yees, having its New York premiere at the Pershing Square Signature Center. One Lauren (Kelly Marie Tran) has written a play about “Lauren” (Maureen Sebastian) and her father “Larry.” Meanwhile, Francis Jue, endearing as ever, plays real-life Lauren’s father Larry, while David Shih portrays the version of him in “Lauren”’s play.
Review: Two Girls , an Interrogation of a Memory of a Brazilian Porno
Chloe Claudel appears in Eliya Smith’s Two Girls, directed by Claudel and Mitchell Polonsky, at the Cherry Lane Theatre. (© Cherry Lane Theatre) Where were you when you first heard about 2 Girls 1 Cup? “It’s kind of like 9/11 for me,” one interview subject tells the playwright Eliya Smith in her documentary theater work Two Girls. For millennials who were middle schoolers in 2007 when the Brazilian video debuted online, rumors of its pornographic, scatological content remain hauntingly legendary.
‘Other Desert Cities’ Review: A Starry Broadway Revival Argues Itself in Circles
In Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, whose revival is now running at the Hudson Theatre, Polly (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Lyman (Ed Harris) Wyeth have retired to Palm Springs after a long reign in Washington, where she became bosom buddies with Nancy Reagan and he leveraged a film career into an ambassadorship and an appointment as a GOP chair. When we meet Polly, she’s just come home from dominating her daughter, Brooke (Lily Rabe), on the tennis court.
‘Midnight’ Review: Todrick Hall’s Musical Takes a Daring Detour Into Alternate History
Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the music, lyrics, and book for Hamilton—and starred in the title role. Now imagine if he’d also directed, choreographed, and served as lead producer, and you get a sense of the multi-hyphenate ambition of Todrick Hall, the man behind the euphorically maximalist and refreshingly innovative musical Midnight. The Hamilton comparisons, as with most new historical musicals featuring R&B-inflected music and nonstop singing, are inevitable.
Review: Daniel Fish Turns an AIDS-Era Clash Into Gripping Theater in Kramer/Fauci
Will Brill and Thomas Jay Ryan star in Kramer/Fauci, conceived and directed by Daniel Fish, at St. Ann’s Warehouse. (© Maria Baranova) It’s not hard to imagine what sparked director Daniel Fish’s interest in dramatizing the transcript of a C-SPAN segment, the 1993 face-off between Dr. Anthony Fauci (Will Brill), the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, and Larry Kramer (Thomas Jay Ryan), the AIDS activist and playwright of The Normal Heart.
Review: Abigail Onwunali Triumphs in Mfoniso Udofia’s Complex Creation Stories
Abigail Onwunali plays thegrownwoman in Mfoniso Udofia’s creation stories and all the important importants, directed by Tamilla Woodard, at LCT3. On her new album, Sara Bareilles writes in “Ladies in a Line” of the special, silent grief of the women “waiting for the fine-tipped needles / Craving just a tiny piece of good news” as they undergo IVF treatment. “I’m just swimming where they tell me to / Till I can’t swim no more,” she sings.
Review: Lost in Del Valle Gets Lost in Its Own Storytelling
Ned Van Zandt wrote and stars in Lost in Del Valle, directed by Amir Arison, at SoHo Playhouse. (© Lucas Noonan) Ned Van Zandt, a featured actor in a slew of mainly single-episode appearances from Spin City to Lost, did a short prison stint in 2006 after becoming a drug dealer to support his heroin addiction. In Lost in Del Valle, which mainly takes a crudely comic tone, Van Zandt catalogs the eccentric cast of characters he met along the way.
Review: Garry Starr: Classic Penguins , a Naked Clown Show About Great Literature
Damien Warren-Smith wrote and stars in Garry Starr: Classic Penguins, directed by Cal McCrystal, at Studio Seaview.
Review: Dukes , Jane Wickline and Liva Pierce's Codependent Comedy Show
Jane Wickline and Liva Pierce wrote and star in Dukes, directed by Mabel Lewis and Henry Hornbuckle, at SoHo Playhouse. (© Dev Bowman) Along with the regular pre-show announcements at the SoHo Playhouse, the house manager has a particular warning at the start of Dukes: the show can’t begin until the two friends in the sixth row stop watching porn on their phones. The offenders stand, irate.
Review: Dealing With Jewish Grief in Matthew Leavitt's Sukkot
Natalie Lander, Jonathan Slavin, Andy Robinson, and Liza Seneca star in Matthew Leavitt’s Sukkot, directed by Joel Zwick, for the 6th Act at 59E59 Theaters. (© Carol Rosegg) A year after his wife’s passing, Patrick (Andy Robinson) is at a loss. How can he make the unveiling of her headstone a meaningful turning point when his grief has stagnated before he can reach acceptance?
Clubbed Thumb Summerworks 2026 Review: Three Bold New Plays Take Big Swings
In a recent interview, Clubbed Thumb’s artistic director Maria Striar said, “We try to model not caring … that something gets good reviews” in the company’s annual Summerworks series. The “high-ambition, low-stakes” Summerworks structure crash-lands three very new plays in development in front of Clubbed Thumb’s eager audiences for fully staged, two-week runs. “There’s a little bit of, like, who cares?
Review: Free Shakespeare in the Park's Romeo and Juliet , on ICE!
Daniel Bravo Hernandez and Ra’Mya Latiah Aikens as Romeo and Juliet (© Joan Marcus) In 2017, the Public Theater detonated a polarizing Julius Caesar at the Delacorte Theater, featuring a Caesar dressed as Donald Trump. When word got out, sponsors jumped ship and protesters, including right wing activist Laura Loomer, stormed the stage to protest the character’s stabbing.
Review: Ophelia Steals the Show in the National Theatre’s Out-of-Joint Hamlet
Francesca Mills plays Ophelia, and Hiran Abeysekera plays Hamlet in the National Theatre’s production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, directed by Robert Hastie, at BAM. (© Julieta Cervantes) “Only you possess the key,” Taylor Swift sings in her dubious Shakespearean analysis of “The Fate of Ophelia,” but if she were to address those words to Francesca Mills, making Ophelia the lifeblood of Robert Hastie’s sleek, muddled Hamlet, she’d be absolutely right.
Review: In Joe Turner's Come and Gone , Ruben Santiago-Hudson Casts His Eternal Spell
Cedric the Entertainer and Taraji P.
Review: Hamlet in Spanish, Starring Actors with Down Syndrome
Octavio Bernaza, Jaime Cruz, Cristina León Barandiarán, Diana Gutiérrez, Lucas Demarchi, Álvaro Toledo, Manuel García, and Ximena Rodríguez star in Teatro La Plaza’s Hamlet, directed by Chela De Ferrari, at Theatre for a New Audience. (© Julieta Cervantes) Hamlet has Down Syndrome.
Review: Matthew Broderick Brings a Reserved Malevolence to Ulster American
Matthew Broderick stars in David Ireland’s Ulster American, directed by Ciarán O’Reilly, at Irish Rep. (© Carol Rosegg) “I find it really hard to end plays without violence,” Belfast-born playwright David Ireland told The Guardian in 2019, after Ulster American premiered in Edinburgh.
Review: Distant Echoes of Wilde in Harold Brighouse’s Quirky Romantic Comedy Zack
Grace Guichard, Jordan Matthew Brown, and Caroline Festa star in Harold Brighouse’s Zack, directed by Britt Berke, for the Mint Theater Company at Theatre Row. (© Todd Cerveris) Nearing 30, Zack (Jordan Matthew Brown) still has his head in the clouds. Though his mother and brother Paul “can’t do the wrong thing if they tried,” he says, “it’s just the other way with me.” When he helps at the weddings his family caters, he gets so overcome with emotion that he drops the plates.
Review: Spread, a Play about the Laddies Who Lunch
Jaden Perez, Daniel Bravo Hernández, Danny Gómez, and Ishmael Gonzalez star in Jesús I. Valles’s Spread, directed by Tatyana-Marie Carlo, at INTAR. (© Julieta Cervantes) A brightly colored poster in Mr. R’s high school classroom acronymically commands its students to THINK before they contribute to a conversation: Is what they’re about to say True? Helpful? Inspiring? Necessary? Kind?
Review: The Dinosaurs, a Time-Jumping Recovery Meeting With Kathleen Chalfant and Elizabeth Marvel
April Matthis, Kathleen Chalfant, and Elizabeth Marvel in The Dinosaurs at Playwrights Horizons (© Julieta Cervantes) The Dinosaurs joins an off-Broadway roster of very recent plays that take place in support group meetings (The Fears, someone spectacular, and The Voices in Your Head come to mind). In this case, Jacob Perkins’s group of choice is Saturday Survivors, a community of female recovering alcoholics, who recently voted to eliminate men from their ranks.
Gooey’s Toxic Aquatic Adventure
La Daniella as the title role in Gooey’s Toxic Aquatic Adventure at the Bushwick Starr (© Maria Baranova) Ah, the magic of theater: finding yourself deeply moved as you watch a mermaid born from the toxic sludge of the Gowanus Canal caressing her mother’s severed hand while she’s being serenaded by “an anthromorphized collection of chemical runoff and human waste.” Follow the flow of the sewage in Gooey’s Toxic Aquatic Adventure, the lovely, lunatic new musical at the Bushwick Starr, and...
Review: Power Slips Away, One Lear at a Time, in King Lear at La MaMa
Multiple actors play the title role in Compagnia de’ Colombari’s production of Shakespeare’s King Lear, directed by Karin Coonrod, at La MaMa. (© Marina Levitskaya) King Lear can’t believe his ears when his daughters, having been gifted large chunks of his realm, decide to strip away his retinue of 50 knights, too: “What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five?” the scheming Goneril (Abigail Killeen) demands. “O, reason not the need!” her unthroned father snarls back.
Review: Every Step Has Meaning in Anne Gridley’s Watch Me Walk
Anne Gridley in Watch Me Walk, a Soho Rep production at Playwrights Horizons (© Maria Baranova) “I’m climbing on a ladder and it’s making you feel nervous,” sings Anne Gridley, “and, yes, that is the point.” Gridley, a performance artist with a long history of experimental theater, isn’t hiding her disability in Watch Me Walk. She’s not interested, as she calls it, in “pulling an FDR.” But she’s asking audiences not to hide their anxiety or discomfort about her body, either.
Under the Radar 2026
“Everything is intricately wrapped in simplicity,” sings performance trio HawtPlates over and over again in Dream Feed, a ravishingly lyrical music theater piece at HERE Arts Center. That sentiment, its slight inscrutability included, could be the mantra of this year’s Under the Radar, which co-produced Dream Feed, along with more than two dozen other experimental and international theater works across New York venues this month.
Review: ICE Cream and Epstein in a Chaotic Reimagining of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera
Barbara Walsh and George Abud star in Bertolt Brecht’s 3Penny Opera, adapted and directed by Abud, for Off-Brand Opera at the Theatre at St. Jean’s. (© Marc J. Franklin) “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it,” Bertolt Brecht allegedly wrote.
The Best Theater of 2025
The surefire celebrity-stocked hits like Art and Othello might suggest that producers are trending toward what’s safest these days, but outside of the glaring lights of Broadway, theatermakers—and especially the nonprofits that platform them—are meeting the moment with refreshing derring-do.
Review: Oklahoma Samovar Never Quite Reaches a Boil
Sarah Chalfie and Seren Kaiser star in Alice Eve Cohen’s Oklahoma Samovar, directed by Eric Nightengale, at La MaMa. (© Marina Levitskaya Khaldey) What makes a story worth telling? That’s the question bothering Emily (Nadia Diamond), a grieving college student who shows up in Oklahoma in 1987, torn over whether to honor her mother’s final request to have her ashes scattered on a mysterious farm.
Review: Broadway Transfer of West End Hit
When Dougal disembarks at JFK, he’s carrying a jar of Marmite, a wedding gift for the father he’s never met. Marmite is England’s most controversial condiment, with a salty taste so polarizing that it’s become a common metaphor for something people will either love or hate. Either way, Marmite makes you feel something. But it’s hard to imagine the UK-to-Broadway transfer Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) inspiring Marmite-like reactions of either ecstasy or agony.
A Stretched-Out Second Act
Glinda (Ariana Grande) may be Oz’s Good Witch, but she harbors a secret from her adoring citizens: She can’t do magic. At least the conniving Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) has custom-designed a “Vehicular Spherical Globule”—a bubble—that will make Glinda look like she’s generating her own magical flight, much like her estranged bestie Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), the Wicked Witch of the West, who defies gravity on her broomstick.
Review: Michael Urie in a Clear and Queer Richard II Off-Broadway
Few moments feel as electric as when a Shakespeare scene lands as clear as day. Those complicated family trees don’t matter when there’s such rich specificity in how the actors interact. All that early modern poetry? You don’t have to worry about it when every iamb lands with contemporary glister. Such an event occurs in Craig Baldwin’s 1980s resetting of Richard II for Red Bull Theater, in the play’s pivotal deposition scene.
An Unfinished Musical About an Unfinished House
In 2004, socialite Jackie Siegel and her husband, billionaire timeshare king David Siegel, began building a 90,000-square-foot home in the outskirts of Orlando, the largest private residence in the United States. Twenty-one years later, it’s still not quite done. And The Queen of Versailles, starring Kristin Chenoweth as Jackie in her first role in a new Broadway musical since Wicked, often feels like a 90,000-square-foot musical under construction itself.
Review: There’s Blood, Sweat, and Tears in the Fabric in Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s Lacrima
“When you look at it, you see a beautiful veil,” says one of the lacemakers of Alençon. “But we see blood and sweat and tears.” The painstaking labor that goes into the making of one wedding dress ties together three communities of artists in Lacrima, the kaleidoscopically multilingual tapestry of a drama from French playwright-director Caroline Guiela Nguyen. It’s early 2025 and the Princess of England has a vision for the dress she’ll wear at her summer royal wedding.
Review: Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! Gets a Fresh, Riveting Revival
Over the past decade, we’ve seen avant-garde, minimalist revivals of classic plays produced on big stages with A-list celebrities and high ticket prices, thanks to starry reimaginings from the likes of Ivo van Hove and Jamie Lloyd. But Sea Dog Theater’s classy, intimate production of Clifford Odets’s Depression-era drama Awake and Sing! proves that you don’t need a Broadway budget to strip a show down to its bare essentials.
Review: André De Shields Is Tartuffe—Enough Said - TheaterMania.com
André De Shields loves an entrance. He made a name for himself in the title role of The Wiz, bursting onto the stage with “So You Wanted to See the Wizard.” Then, just about 45 years later, he launched the opening moments of Hadestown with a resounding call-and-response as the messenger god Hermes. Last summer, in Cats: The Jellicle Ball, he earned a standing ovation just for standing there, his Old Deuteronomy majestic in an extraordinary long white wig at the head of a runway.
Review: Chloë Grace Moretz and River Lipe-Smith Play a Family in Transition in Caroline
Some kids just get it. Caroline (River Lipe-Smith) may be 9, but she’s a droll old soul. “I want you to decompress,” she tells her mother Maddie (Chloë Grace Moretz), passing the aux to let her mom play her own favorite music. Caroline’s figured herself out too. At the start of Preston Max Allen’s new play Caroline, she’s just begun living publicly as a girl. In the first scene, she tells her mom the new name she’s chosen and buys a whole new wardrobe, adorable Lilo and Stitch sweater included.
An Immersive Reimagining of 'The Phantom of the Opera'
When I revisited The Phantom of the Opera, the longest running show in Broadway history, in its final months at the Majestic Theatre in early 2023, I was surprised how musty the production had become. Twenty years after I’d last seen it, the staging seemed stilted, the acting felt like something out of an early 20th-century operetta, and even the special effects had been dwarfed by decades of technical advancement elsewhere.
Vladimir and Estragon Face the Music
“As for wanting to find in all that a broader, loftier meaning to carry away from the performance, along with the program,” Samuel Beckett wrote of his 1952 play Waiting for Godot, “I cannot see the point of it.” The challenge, then, for any director approaching Beckett’s landmark work—in which two woebegone men pass the time while waiting for the arrival of a man they’ve never met—is to release us from the expectation that they must locate that “broader, loftier meaning” somewhere in this...
Review: Sunny With a Chance of Apocalypse in Weather Girl at St. Ann’s Warehouse
How strange it must be to be a weather forecaster these days, cheerily delivering reports on rain and sun and snow without allusion to the underlying reality of a climate crisis that predicting the daily temperature does nothing to address. “I can’t hold this smile much longer and the flames are melting my makeup,” confesses the ever-chipper Stacey (Julia McDermott), the magnetic sole character in Brian Watkins’s Weather Girl, now running at St. Ann’s Warehouse, in Brooklyn.
The Fragile Bonds of Friendship
“Do you have any idea what binds you to me?” Serge (Neil Patrick Harris) asks Marc (Bobby Cannavale) at one point in Art. Serge has spent $300K on an avant-garde work of art, a canvas painted entirely white, and the expenditure so enrages Marc that he detonates a quarter-century of goodwill, dragging would-be peacemaker pal Yvan (James Corden) into a three-sided melee of brutal insults and, eventually, physical blows.
Review: Sulfur Bottom Buries a Good Message With Complicated Storytelling
The Jerry Orbach Theater at the Theater Center provides a very particular flavor of NYC venue: musical parodies of Friends, The Office, and Seinfeld each offer three or four performances a week within the same space. So, Rishi Varma’s cerebral, structurally complex Sulfur Bottom, about the devastating impact of a factory’s toxic waste on a local Black family, seems like an unlikely addition to the weekly roster.
Here We Go Again!
When Mamma Mia! arrived on Broadway in 2001, the only other jukebox musical in town was a revival of 42nd Street, a throwback to a 1930s songbook. For Mamma Mia!’s 2025 return to New York, it’s one of seven jukebox shows on Broadway. Two of those, & Juliet and Moulin Rouge, follow Mamma Mia!’s lead in sculpting a fictional plot around the song catalog, while the other four tell the stories of the featured artists in the mode of Jersey Boys.
Review: Off-Broadway’s Gene and Gilda Charts the Romance of Wilder and Radner
Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner were daring comic performers, who took big risks and swings in their scenery-chewing characterizations. In bringing their love story to life onstage, playwright Cary Gitter, in contrast, plays it safe. But if Gene and Gilda at 59E59 offers a predictable sturdiness that Wilder and Radner might have preferred to upend, it’s still a sweet and persuasive depiction of a tragically short-lived Hollywood romance.
Review: Ginger Twinsies Spoofs The Parent Trap Without Much of a Payoff - TheaterMania.com
There was once a deliriously funny off-Broadway parody of a beloved film from the late ‘90s, stuffed to the brim with queer comedy and topped with abundant pop culture references. But, alas, Titanique closed earlier this summer, and there just isn’t room on the door for the chaotic Ginger Twinsies, as much an imitative homage to that now-shuttered show’s success as it is a send-up of Nancy Meyers’ remake of The Parent Trap. If you’ve never seen the 1998 The Parent Trap, what are you waiting for?
Review: A History of Hip-Hop Dance in
Is it a good sign when an audience member can steal the show from the onstage performers? Well, that’s partly by design at Breakin’ NYC, the endearingly good-natured if somewhat unshaped hip-hop dance history lesson at Theater 555. Audience member Larry initially announced himself when MC Ajalé Olaseni Coard opened the show by soliciting dance moves. Larry, declaring he was 73, immediately obliged from the back row.
Review: Bear Grease Reimagines Danny and Sandy as Indigenous
Imagine an alternate history in which Indigenous peoples successfully beat back the intruding colonizers in 1492. What would the world be like five hundred years later? And, more specifically, how would this seismic shift in events transform the musical Grease? That’s the initially provocative but instantly abandoned premise of Bear Grease, the totally bewildering though good-natured parody musical that often feels like a low-grade fever dream currently playing at St. Luke’s Theatre.
A Giddily Warm Celebration of a Queer Royalty
A controversial PinkNews article in 2017 declared, “People think Prince George looks fabulous in this new photo,” before highlighting dozens of tweets from people celebrating the queerness of William and Kate’s eldest son. George was four at the time. Too young for such speculation? Too disgusting for anyone to project sexual identities on a child, no matter how famous and no matter how, per playwright Jordan Tannahill, “adorably fey” the pose?
Jean Smart Is Tender in Stormy Solo Play
“Call me Isabelle,” the title character of Jamie Wax’s Call Me Izzy instructs the audience when she first meets us, while sneaking into the bathroom late at night to write her story on a roll of toilet paper with an eyebrow pencil.
Into the Manosphere with John Krasinski
Roger’s ex-wife had a bad case of postpartum depression. “That was very challenging for me,” he says. And, speaking of his ex, Roger has just had a big realization: “The system is now so rigged in women’s favor.” To him, not only do women have it all these days, they also hypocritically want it all. “She wants to be president,” Roger explains, speaking incredulously of a general she, “but she also wants to be spanked on the bottom.” In other words, Roger sucks.
Review: Aishah Rahman’s Chiaroscuro Looks at Colorism on a Singles Cruise
The National Black Theatre launched in 1968 and became one of the leading artistic institutions to emerge that era. It’s apt, then, that NBT’s directing resident abigail jean-bapiste would stage an unproduced piece from a playwright who came of age in the in the early 1970s, Aishah Rahman’s Chiaroscuro: A Light and Dark Skin Comedy. Rahman published Chiaroscuro, a nautical No Exit set on a “Chocolate Singles” cruise, in 2010, four years before her death.
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