My New York Theater 2024.

Theater has gotten so much more expensive that I think we saw less this year than in previous years. Still, we saw a lot. These were my favorites:

Musicals:

Titanic (Encores! staged reading at City Center). I didn’t know this show at all, and I was enthralled. The production was huge, huge cast, huge orchestra, lots of huge choral ensemble singing. It’s an odd show, the main character is kind of the ship, and it’s unabashedly a history lesson kind of play, but the music is so stirring, so gorgeous. I fell in love.

And then Titanique, same ship, very different show. It’s a parody of sorts of the James Cameron film, but also a parody of Celine Dion and a hundred other things.  It’s crazy funny, a wild ride.

Death Becomes Her. Go see this. In a year of very funny theater, this is one of the funniest and best and most entertaining. The songs are so packed with jokes sometimes I could hardly catch my breath. Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard should both get that Tony.

My favorite new musical this year was Dead Outlaw, by David Yazbek and Itamar Moses, who wrote The Band’s Visit. Very presentational, a band plays songs that tell the story, which at times bursts out into more conventional book scenes. Odd, full of surprises, great tunes.

And my favorite plays:

Oh Mary! is the funniest play I’ve ever seen, very gay, very camp, sort of but not really in the style of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Genius.

The new Jez Butterworth play, The Hills Of California, a big old-school family reunion drama, gripping, beautifully written and acted. It’s not a musical but there’s lots of music in it. (Incidentally, it’s nearly the same story as Gypsy, but in England.)

Our Class, by Polish playwright Tadeusz Sł0bodzianek, directed by Ukrainian Jewish director Igor Golyak, experimental in style, a story of five classmates and a pogrom in a Polish village in 1941. Devastating and legitimately shocking. Great theater.

Also among my favorites this year were This Is My Favorite Song (Francesa D’Uva) and Magnificent Bird (Gabriel Kahane), both at Playwrights Horizons, both solo shows with songs, both emanating from events occurring during the pandemic, and both wonderful.

And I guess I have to say something about Gypsy. This production was the first time I’ve seen this musical on stage—but I’ve seen lots of video of previous Broadway revivals as well as clips of Ethel Merman singing the songs. I resist weighing in on the great debate about Audra McDonald’s voice, mostly because she’s so good and is delivering a powerfully moving performance, and who am I to say what’s right or wrong? My opinion regarding “to belt or not to belt” is that, aside from the fact that the songs were written for ur-Broadway belter Ethel Merman, they are meant to evoke the vaudeville tunes from the era in which the show is set. Those performers shouted those tunes. The setting is not the only dramaturgical reason for the style of singing. That gale-force voice is the embodiment of Rose’s personality, the charisma, the authority that makes her not only intensely compelling to everyone around her, but also terrifying.  Aside from the technical question, though, I couldn’t stop thinking that this Rose was soft, compared to, Merman, or, say, Tyne Daly, or Lupone. I saw a short interview clip with McDonald’s husband, Will Swenson, where he was saying that everything Rose does is motivated by her love for her children, which is sweet because they are parents themselves, but I think wrong and crucially so for the story, which doesn’t, to my mind, turn on whether or not Rose loves her children. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t, but I don’t think Rose shows even a hint of vulnerability until the final song, Rose’s Turn, which reveals her motivation (and it isn’t love), where the armor cracks and you see her pain, but not for long and she barrels right through it. A loving Rose throws the story out of balance. That’s my opinion, anyway. Please go see it for yourself. It’s a great production of a great musical, very moving and immensely entertaining. It looks and sounds amazing. The cast is across the board stellar, especially all those kids. I criticize because this stuff is really important to me. But, ultimately, I loved it.

And finally: probably the less I say about this new revival of Cabaret the better. It’s a crime against art and humanity. This is the first production of the stage musical I’ve seen, and I regret that. I wish I didn’t have it in my head. I hated it a lot.

Here's the whole list (as near as I can reconstruct) of plays and musicals my husband and I saw this year: 

Jonah (Roundabout)
Prayer for the French Republic (MTC)
Oh Mary!
Doubt (Roundabout)
Job
Dead Outlaw
Tommy
Mother Play (2nd Stage)
Home (Roundabout)
Cabaret
Our Class (CSC)
In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot (Playwrights Horizons)
The Counter (Roundabout)
Titanic (City Center, Encores)
Titanique
Death Becomes Her
The Hills Of California
Yellowface (Roundabout)
Walden (2nd Stage)
This Is My Favorite Song (Playwrights Horizons)
Magnificent Bird (Playwrights Horizons)
Gypsy