#240620 ~ June in Review, Part 1.

Brian Eugenio Herrera's #TheatreClique Newsletter for June 20, 2024

Jun 20, 2024

WELCOME to #TheatreClique — my irregular newsletter dedicated to encouraging you to click out to some of the most interesting, intriguing & noteworthy writing about drama, theatre & performance (at least, so says me)…

This Week's #TheatreCliquery:

This installment of #TheatreClique brings the latest round of excerpts from my theatregoing diary but, first, this extended promotional Daily Show interview in anticipation of tonight’s HBOMax premiere of Jeremy O. Harris’s new neo-documentary film, Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play.

EDITOR’S NOTE: whenever possible, when linking to paywalled pieces, I “gift” the article to #TheatreClique readers. In other words, clicking out to articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Atlantic, and Wall Street Journal should neither present hassle nor burn through your monthly allotment of free views. Here’s hoping more outlets — hello LATimes! hi Philadelphia Inquirer! yo NewYorker! how’bout it Vulture!— adopt similar protocols soon...

In Review : May 29 - June 16, 2024.

Capturing brief-ish, lightly-edited excerpts from my theatregoing diary, followed by click-worthy links to others writing generatively about the same shows or the theatremakers involved. In this week’s installment…

Water for Elephants (Broadway/NYC) • The Outsiders (Broadway/NYC) • Choice (McCarter/NJ) • The Welkin (Atlantic/NYC) • Coach Coach (ClubbedThumb/NYC) • Molly Sweeney (IrishRep/NYC) • Siluetas (PowerStreet/PA) • The Opposite of Love (NewYorkRep/NYC) • Hilma (Wilma/PA).

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS

Book by Rick Elice • Music and Lyrics by Pigpen Theatre Co. • Circus Design by Shana Carroll • Choreography by Jesse Robb and Shana Carroll • Directed by Jessica Stone • Broadway • Imperial Theatre • May 2024.

An engaging enough theatrical elaboration of a familiar kind of 20th century tale: a young person adrift in the tumult of personal and/or societal upheaval happens to stumble into a wildly wondrous world to discover both their true calling and their life’s love… thereby spinning a twined tale of love, fate, and tragedy. As a show, Water for Elephants is a good one, with serviceable music and a thrillingly skilled ensemble of Broadway troupers and circus skill specialists. The show’s time-bending/layering framing device allows sentiment to flow happily when flashing back to what is actually a pretty brutal story. But, truly, the show’s plot (like its music) is mostly scaffolding for its more spectacular pleasures. Director Jessica Stone smartly deploys the circus skills (and the circus’s train cars) as devices to — literally — raise and lower the dramatic stakes, as she stirs ready sentiment with dynamic puppetry animating the circus menagerie. (As RuPaul is wont to say: "Everybody loves puppets!") Perhaps my favorite sequence — where all the elements come together — arrives early on in “Easy” when Marlena’s beloved horse lay dying, due to overwork. As Marlena (a dazzling Isabella McCalla) cradles a puppet version of the horse's head, an acrobat (the stunning Antoine Boissereau) is hoisted by silks to fly up and over the audience and dance in the sky, evoking both the horse's spirit in motion and the terror of his decline/descent. This combination of puppetry, circus skills, and McCalla’s vocals activate a visceral immediacy in this quietly spectacular moment and the production’s use of its bold theatricality to stoke the stakes of its plot-heavy story is perhaps its signal achievement. Which is also to say: I found myself dawdling along with the show unless/until the circus skills and puppetry were there to yank me fully into the scene. (For the most part, the production aptly tethers such moments to key plot points, using using the circus/puppet stuff as the standard musical theatre wisdom says you're supposed to use song/dance, though here it's less about a character expressing something and more about amplifying the emotional or narrative stakes of a particular plot pivot.) The supporting ensemble of tough-talking carnies, vaudeville era clowns, and hootchie-cootchie dancers are rock solid; Sara Gettelfinger brings a blast of mature stage presence to the crucial (yet somehow negligible) role of Barbara; and Wade McCollum deftly threads the needle of a very tricky character. And even though Water for Elephants will likely be one of those shows I liked a lot but barely remember, it’s also the current show I’d send my mom or sister to if they happened to come to town.

THE OUTSIDERS

Book by Adam Rapp and Justin Levine • Music by Jamestown Revival (Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance) and Justin Levine • Directed by Danya Taymor. • Broadway • Bernard R. Jacobs Theatre • May 2024.

I know I read the book as a tween and I definitely saw the movie but it took this musical reimagining (which draws, apparently, as much from the Coppola film as it does from the Hinton novel) to truly hook me into The Outsiders. Indeed, alongside perhaps Teeth and Dead Outlaw, The Outsiders might stand as the most exciting new musical I've encountered this year. Danya Taymor — in deeply effective collaboration with the Kuperman Brothers, who choreographed both the fight and dance sequences — crafts a vivid sense of jubilant, masculine ensemble that truly turbo-charges The Outsiders’s world. Taymor's striking decision to have the cast move planks and boxes and tires to configure distinct playing spaces (occasionally yanking tables, chairs, and other objects from the perimeter) roots this story in the moving body of the ensemble. They sing, they dance, they yell, they fight, they cry — and they also make the space... By so using the sinewy muscularity of adolescent masculinity to literally build the onstage world, Taymor’s directorial conceit both amplifies the palpable sense that The Outsiders is about belonging while also creating a company that clearly adores working in deep synchronization with each other. (It will be interesting to see whether and how the production can sustain this vibe over a longer run, with replacements, or on tour.) The alt-country/pop/folk sensibility of the music sings directly to my musical sweetspots, especially how the songs exploit the cry of a soaring tenor line. The vocal blend among the young cast’s remarkable voices is often transcendent and the whole crew is uniformly charismatic, appealing, and ridiculously talented. I've seen some folks question the casting — having POC actors play Greasers, the uncertainty around the character of Ace (who is the Anybodys of this gang) — but it makes a kind of sense to reimagine a Tulsa where the wrong side of the tracks intersects with the Black and indigenous history of the region. (Notably, Sky Lakota-Lynch — in the pivotal role of Johnny Cade — is Afro-Indigenous.) But, honestly, that rumble at the end of Act1? GoodGAWD. The oscillation of theatrical style? The swirl of beauty and horror? The rain and the blood and the mud and the muscles? Just beautifully executed, integrating design and choreography and and narrative and performance, moving from realism to lyricism to expressionism and back to realism again — all while both staying rooted in and amplifying the dramatic moment. I'd seriously consider paying retail to see The Outsiders again for the rumble alone. A surprise peak Broadway experience for me.

CHOICE

Written by Winnie Holzman • Directed by.Sarah Rasmussen • Regional/LORT (Princeton, NJ) • McCarter Theatre Center: Berlind Theatre • May 2024.

A peculiar but captivating play that reckons with the question of choice, especially as one confronts the reality of mortality. Zippy is a middle-aged magazine writer, who is feeling the pinch from many sides. Her much older husband keeps mentioning that he will be gone soon. Her recent-college-grad daughter is isolating at home after the pandemic interrupted her launch into the world. Zippy’s work as a magazine feature writer is drying up, possibly due to her age, possibly due to the fact that the magazine industry is in freefall. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg just died, the 2020 presidential election is looming, and there's a mysterious pandemic (still) out there that makes every decision feel like it’s a matter of life and death. Plus the major magazine feature Zippy's currently working on is a weird one — something about women who believe themselves to be reunited with the souls of their aborted children, now inhabiting the bodies of people born exactly 9 months and 49 days after the termination of pregnancy — that is stirring Zippy’s discomiftingly unresolved feelings around her own abortion. Zippy remains resolutely convinced that her decision allowed her life to begin but, still, she feels — with all kinds of uncertainties — all kinds of ways about her choice. This is the propulsive mystery of the play. Zippy has feelings, memories, and experiences that she doesn't understand, let alone how to express — and they're all piling in on her at this moment. The play presents itself as being in some measure about the very human conversations about abortion that “we” simply cannot have because the political discourse around the procedure is so polarized around rightness and wrongness. But, Zippy asks, what about souls… and grief… and loss… and relief… and gratitude? Choice is a tender, sensitive, and often deeply engaging play — rich with real laughs, laden with human foible, and astute in its observations about how we ask big questions about life’s meaning even we as grapple with every day’s routine mundanities. Sarah Rasmussen’s production brings a stacked cast to Andrew Boyce's impressively detailed set, twirling as it does to reveal drastically different spaces. Still, the balance of realist detail with the deep, delicate abstractions embedded in the play sometimes sits uneasily. The play is knotty and unruly in a hauntingly relatable way, stirring me to wonder whether a simpler production in a smaller space might have allowed Choice’s many provocative soulful queries to truly soar.

THE WELKIN

Written by Lucy Kirkwood • Directed by Sarah Benson • Off Broaday • Atlantic Theater Company: Linda Gross Theater • June 2024.

It’s mid1800s in Suffolk, England, and a youngish married woman named Sally Poppy (a vividly feral Haley Wong) has returned to her home and husband — naked, unkempt, and soaked in blood — having gone missing for some while. Sally Poppy’s unruliness soon sees her accused and convicted of witchcraft but, before she hangs, her claim of being pregnant must be adjudicated, for the town cannot hang a pregnant woman. So a cohort of dozen or so women from the town, including the town's main midwife Lizzy Luke (Sandra Oh, bringing her messily mercurial brilliance), gather in the courthouse's dank basement kitchen to determine Sally Poppy's fate. Kirkwood's play maps the social relations among her characters with an eye and ear to the roil of smalltown gossip and shenanigans (Elizabeth is having an affair with the jail guard; she delivered Sally; there are internal class and generational divides, and pretty much everyone has an opinion about everything, especially everyone else's business.) Yet the core thematic — and ultimately dramatic — query of the play is the challenge of understanding, assessing, explaining, or adjudicating the status of a pregnancy and, perhaps by extension, the value of a woman's life. Sarah Benson's inconspicuously precise direction allows the play to resonate simultaneously in multiple unfurling registers — as a courtroom drama, as a ghost story, as a history play, as a reckoning with contemporary politics, as a comedy of (bad) manners, etcetera. But most central to the intrigue and delight of this production (and this play, I suspect) is witnessing these wildly disparate (and kinda weird) women become embodied onstage, as they are her by an utterly stacked cast (basically a who's who of currently working new play actors). A very partial list: Susannah Perkins is Susannah Perkins in the best of ways; Dale Soules is gorgeous as the world-weary one whose borne 21 children; Emily Cass McConnell’s embodies the "barren" woman with searing sadness; Hannah Cabell haunts as the mute who finally — fatefully — speaks…and that’s barely one-third of the uniformly strong ensemble. Witnessing all these excellent actors just tear into the specifics of these characters, each vividly distinct from the other, resists the patriarchal (and ahistorical) inclinations to flatten differences among women in the past. And as with Usus, the sometimes dizzying oscillation between the historical and the contemporary in both design and diction serves to underscore both The Welkin's vivid theatricality and its contemporary relevance/resonance. A viscerally engaging play in an arresting production.

MOLLY SWEENEY

Written by Brian Friel • Directed by Charlotte Moore. • Off-Broadway • Irish Repertory Theatre : Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage • June 2024.

A solid but not especially noteworthy production of what might rightly be considered a "lesser" Friel play. Through three overlain monologues, the play tells the story of Molly Sweeney, a profoundly low-sighted woman born, raised, and living contentedly in a small Irish town. The central (and, here, center-stage) speaker is Molly herself, played by Sarah Street, who narrates Molly's unassuming yet open-hearted approach to experiencing her world. To the one side of Molly is her husband Frank (John Keating) and to the other is her ophthalmologist Mr. Rice (Rufus Collins). Frank is prone to ambitious/crackpot projects and, shortly after marrying Molly, he decides that — with some research and some medical support — Molly’s sight might be restored and wouldn't that be amazing? The Sweeneys approach Mr. Rice, a formerly prominent eye specialist now wallowing in both obscurity and a whiskey-fueled depressive dissipation. Together, Frank and Mr. Rice decide that Molly should undergo a series of eye surgeries to "restore" her vision and, for reasons that are left explained only by Molly's agreeable disposition, she does. The results of the surgery are, at first, wondrous and then devastating, as Molly's capacity to relearn the world proves to be more psychologically and emotionally demanding than anyone anticipated. Her prior contentedness gives way to disagreeability, disengagement, and depression — which instigates comparable responses from Frank and Mr. Rice. Ultimately, Molly is institutionalized, Frank pursues another big idea in Ethiopia, and Mr. Rice skulks deeper into obscurity. At its best, this production activates the pleasures of distinctively Irish storytelling, with each character's spin on the course of events becoming an at times compelling puzzle for the audience to piece together. The actors are emphatically able and each performance has moments of stirring clarity. Yet there's something about the play that feels deeply limiting. A note in the program acknowledges that the play's context (1990s Ireland) was a very different time in terms of rights for disabled people and for women within or beyond marriage. It also includes a quote from Friel, noting his indebtedness to a case history by Oliver Sacks. And that might be my biggest obstacle with regard to this play: it's very Awakenings, staging “miraculous” medical interventions into debility as a metaphor for the arrogance of paternalist medical power, underwritten by the inevitable subtext ("wouldn't ‘they’ have been happier if ‘they’ had been left alone to live their simpler happier disabled life"). So, yeah, the play made me cranky for its haphazardly paternalist/patriarchal ableism and the production — despite the excellently clarifying program notes — did little to help me find my way beyond the limits of the script.

COACH COACH

Written by Bailey Williams • Directed by. Sarah Blush • Off Off Broadway • ClubbedThumb: The Wild Project • Month 2024.

A hilariously unsettling work of trenchant social commentary — as uncanny as it is farcical — that retools the premise and promise of "self-help" as neogothic horror. Coach Coach happens at a retreat for an "elite" cohort of life-coaches enrolled in Dr. Meredith Martin’s Action Coach Academy for Thinking Coaches. Each coach might have a different specialization (finance, love/dating, health, death/dying) but they've all reached "Platinum Level" and this training promises to take them to an unspecified but hightly coveted “next” level. I loved Bailey Williams’s script when I saw its Winterworks 2023 reading (with nearly the exact same cast) and what I most remember loving about it then — aside from the activating premise — was the palpable balance of confidence and need manifested by each of these characters, how the drive toward self-awareness and self-improvement creates an irresolvable paradox that only a guru’s approval can resolve, even if only temporarily. (I also remember being particularly smitten by Zuzanna Szadkowski as Margo, the guru’s needy/greedy/grasping assistant.) What surprised me about Summerworks production was (a) that I didn't anticipate the setting in a rundown, antique-laden rental house and (b) that the paradox of self-confidence and self-abnegation would be amplified as a kind of terror. In Sarah Blush’s production (and with Colleen Murray’s sets and Masha Tsimring’s lighting), Coach Coach becomes a neo-gothic elaboration of the oscillating grandiosity — I'm the best! I'm a disaster! — underlying the whole “life coach” enterprise. Each character is haunted by their lesser/messier self and this doppelganger-factor shows up in extended sequences — sometimes in monologue, sometimes in full scenes — where the coaches become enmeshed in wild doubling scenarios wherein identities and truths fracture into two. These refracted doublings activate an existential dread: can either the self or the truth be knowable? And what about the distorting lens of late capitalism through which one's identity becomes one's brand (and one's value)? The performances by Purva Bedi, Cindy Cheung, Becca Lish, Kelly McAndrew, Susannah Millonzi and Szadkowski are gut-punchingly funny and scary and real, which earns the play's late (and surprising) turn to farcical horror. Coach Coach thus becomes a darkly comedic riff on the emotional, psychological, and existential terrors of living in a historical moment where "monetizing the self" has emerged as maybe the only available or viable path toward independent, self-determined "success." It seems also to stand as an allegory for the collapse/commodification of the self within the prestige economies of late capitalism. Which is a LOT, yes, but which is also really good. Even so, all of this alotness did make me wonder whether Coach Coach might be bridling against the 75-80 minute running-time constraints of the Summerworks format. Might Coach Coach need two acts? Act Act? Whether the answer is yes-yes or no-no, if such another iteration of Coach Coach does manifest, I’ll be signing up for my seat right away.

SILUETAS

Book and Lyrics by Elrina Ortiz • Music and Lyrics by Robi Hager • Directed by Rebecca Aparicio. • Regional: Philadelphia • Power Street Theatre: Randall Theatre at Temple University • June 2024.

Siluetas (by Erlina Ortiz and Robi Hager) is an impressive new musical, with lots of great songs, compelling characters, and a constellation of witty and insightful scenes. Set in 2016, this trilingual musical (songs are in English, Spanish, and Arabic) tells the story of two unlikely roommates, Dinora and Khalilah. Dinora — probably barely into her 40s — is Cuban, in exile since adolescence and recently escaped from a controlling, possibly abusive long-term marriage. Khalilah — probably barely into her 20s — is Syrian, in the US studying art at university but thrilled to soon return to her home and her homeland. Khalilah's politically inclined, an observant Muslim, passionately connected to Syrian culture, and a total slob. Dinora isn't registered to vote, seems ungrounded by faith, remains painfully estranged from Cuba, and is kind of a control freak. The musical tracks how Dinora's and Khalilah's lives are forever changed by the geopolitical events of 2016 and how each learns to open to new forms of family, community, and home. The (still somewhat blurry) theatrical conceit surrounding this odd couple is that "the siluetas" — or the spirit presence — of Dinora's and Khalilah's ancestors have guided them to one another, because they will need each other to withstand the challenges soon to come. Around the principals, a four person ensemble slides in and out of various other roles, while also holding space as the siluetas. (One particularly rich use of this device is when Johanna Carlisle-Zepeda, who recurs as the silueta of Dinora's mother, slides between Mama and some hardass Philly bartender on a night when Dinora is drinking her unresolved sorrows away. Carlisle-Zepeda nails the specificity of both characters, amplifying the silueta conceit's potential to anchor the musical’s narrative and emotional texture.) Rebecca Aparicio's skillful production was built with the Tony-winning KO (formerly known professionally as Karen Olivo) in the role of Dinora. Unfortunately, injury forced KO to leave the production the day before I attended so, in the performance I saw, understudy/swing Vanessa Gomez took her first full run in the role. Though I did long to see how KO’s presence might have mapped the generational contrast betwen Khalilah and Dinora, Gomez sang Dinora beautifully and marked the story’s key emotional beats with clarity. As Khalilah, Angel Alzeidan carries the role of Khalilah with great voice and compelling charisma and the open question of her burgeoning romance with Ian (an appealing Garrick Vaughan) deftly illuminates the particulars of Khalilah's identity as an observant Muslim young woman living independently in the US. The production's pacing suffers a bit from the limits of the venue. Tracked curtains are essential to Chris Haig's set design, both in terms of marking space and creating surfaces for Taj Rauch's lovely projections but, unfortunately, the narrowness of curtain tracks cramps the playing space, causing strangely unnecessary delays and disrupting the script’s seamless flow between worlds, spaces, and realities. The dazzlingly gifted cast sings Hager's music beautifully, confirming that Hager is a composer to listen for, while also underscoring Siluetas as an impressive original musical that emphatically deserves further development and future productions.

THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE

Written by Ashley Griffin • Directed by Rachel Klein • Off Broadway • New York Rep: Royal Family Performing Arts Space • June 2024.An exceedingly blah blah 200-300 words.

The set-up for this two-hander is as simple as it is provocative. A trust-funded grad student Eloise (Ashley Griffin) books an escort to come to her place on Friday night. Will (Danny Gardner) arrives as ready and as willing as he might for any such appointment. The two meet at Eloise's door and Eloise's anxiety and hesitance quickly reveals itself to be something deeper than first time jitters but, despite Eloise throwing out lots of extra cash to make him go away, Will promises to return the following Friday to try again. So begins a cycle of regular Friday night "dates" for Eloise and Will, as they loosen up physically with one another and open up about their pasts, their imagined futures, and their beliefs about trust, sexuality, and intimacy. The final minutes of the play's roughly 80-minute running time serves a major surprise — is it a revelation? is it a reversal? is it a cruel twist? — that shakes most of what we thought we understood about Eloise and Danny in unexpected and unsettling ways. Throughout, Danny Gardner brings a barely guarded vulnerability to Will (particularly his ever-shifting levels of confidence) while Ashley Griffin (who wrote the play) captures Eloise's peculiar balance of skittishness and certitude. Director Rachel Klein elicits grounded, skillful performances from both actors and the play's captivatingly digressive monologues (as in Eloise's story of her childhood speculations about she thought an "adult movie" actually was) suggest the playwright's gifts. Yet it is Crista Marie Jackson's electrifying intimacy choreography that most distills the emotional intricacies of whatever it is that is actually going on between Will and Eloise. Indeed, these intimate scenes are among the production's most compelling, not necessarily because they’re "hot" but because of the vivid purposefulness of the actors in them (a clarity not always matched in the looping patter of Will and Eloise’s many less physical scenes). As an "idea play" in which big ideas are animated by characters in dialogue and interaction with each other, The Opposite of Love's genuinely intriguing explication of the hidden costs of transactional intimacy doesn't always balance with its less clear consideration of positional power (wealth, gender, educational access, street smarts, etcetera) and this imbalance did blunt the emotional impact of its ostensibly shocking conclusion. For me. But, all told, an emphatically capable staging of a promising play that also underscores the dramaturgical potency of skillful intimacy choreography.

HILMA

Words by Kate Scelsa • Music by Robert M. Johanson • Directed by Morgan Green • Regional/LORT (Philadelphia) • Wilma Theater: Mainstage • June 2024.

A wild, weird, wondrous, and totally Wilma production. Hilma is a boldly theatrical yet deeply ruminative musical account of the early 20th century artist Hilma af Klint. Billed as a "contemporary opera," Hilma leans into a nearly recitative musical mode — eschewing both the declamatory, emotion-centered storytelling of the conventional musical and the "character arc" presumptions of most dramatic literature. Instead, Hilma works in "movements" if you will. The first and longest (which makes up the first act) is perhaps the most straightforward in its exploration of Hilma af Klint’s social and historical context, as a fiercely independent, woman-loving-woman deeply engaged in theosophical mysticism, who is yet bound by the aesthetic and patriarchal structures of her time. Indeed, aside from Hilma's delightfully odd encounter with one of her otherworldly spirit guides Amaliel (played vividly here by Evan Spigelman), Hilma's first act generally inclines one to think that this is yet another musical biographical portrait of someone from a more corseted time, akin perhaps to Sunday in the Park with George... or Suffs... or Sunday in the Park with Suffs. But then the second act comes along, which begins with a visual and musical spectacular (think “70s variety show hosted by Sun Ra”) which dissolves/devolves through some jazzy contact improv into the banal simplicity of a post-show talkback. Throughout, the recitative music — a little bit of Eno and Glass, a touch of acid jazz, a dash of Broadway/R&B/cabaret belt —charts the constancy both of Hilma's queries into relation of the individual/artist to the universe and of the Scelsa/Johanson's own inquisitive curiosity about Hilma af Klint. And if this description makes no sense, that's fine. Neither does Hilma. Which might just be the point of the entire bold experiment of this production. Performed by a charismatic cast of six singing actors and an eight-member musical combo, Morgan Green's production is perhaps best received as an offering — an invitation to respond to the work of Hilma, yes, but also to the work of these theatre artists as they respond to Hilma af Klint. And, boy howdy, did the audience I saw it with respond. One well-heeled woman in front of me would — repeatedly — would watch for a few minutes, before almost imperceptibly shuddering and then calming herself by engaging in some way with her phone. (She fled at intermission.) Meanwhile, the person next to me sighed, squirmed, and groaned for the entirety of both acts until ultimately exclaiming, barely under her breath, "Finally!" as the curtain call began. As for me, I kinda totally loved it. Yes, the music was repetitive and the percussion-forward orchestrations were definitely a tedious strain. The sound mixing was muddy, as was some of the dramaturgy. And pretty much every section did seem to go on a few (or five…or maybe ten) minutes too long. But in its bones, Hilma struck me not so much as an experimental feminist bio-musical (ala Lempicka) but as a profoundly theatrical and deeply felt rumination on how to make sense of whether, why, and how a particular artist changes our experience of the world. (My unsolicited “notes” are that Hilma might make better sense as a constellation of four stylistically-distinct one acts — or “movements” — the first being the artist's life story, the second the artist's inspiration/process, the third being the work itself, and the fourth being about the afterlives/effects of the work. This would simply mean trimming the current first act and expanding the Amaliel sequence to stand on its own as a second movement. I can pull dramaturgical justifications for this move from Hilma af Klint’s ouevre via this brilliant documentary. But nobody's asking me to bossily rework the show, so I'll stop.) I will instead close by noting that, about halfway through, I wondered: "will I be at all inclined to revisit this production when the streamed recording of Hilma launches on June 24?" I wasn't sure. And then the final talkback section happened. Which moved me more deeply than I might care to admit, so — yeah — I’ll be back. If only to walk myself through the profoundly funny existential crisis stirred by that last section...but I wouldn’t mind reexperiencing that stunning variety show at the start of Act2…and that visit from Amaliel in Act1…so, well, yeah, I guess pretty much the whole of Hilma. One of the weirdest, most imperfect, yet compellingly fabulous works of contemporary music theatre I've encountered in some while.

#240620 ~ June in Review, Part 1.

Brian Eugenio Herrera's #TheatreClique Newsletter for June 20, 2024

This Week's #TheatreCliquery:

In Review : May 29 - June 16, 2024.

Capturing brief-ish, lightly-edited excerpts from my theatregoing diary, followed by click-worthy links to others writing generatively about the same shows or the theatremakers involved. In this week’s installment…

Book by Rick Elice • Music and Lyrics by Pigpen Theatre Co. • Circus Design by Shana Carroll • Choreography by Jesse Robb and Shana Carroll • Directed by Jessica Stone • Broadway • Imperial Theatre • May 2024.

see also…

Book by Adam Rapp and Justin Levine • Music by Jamestown Revival (Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance) and Justin Levine • Directed by Danya Taymor. • Broadway • Bernard R. Jacobs Theatre • May 2024.

see also…

Written by Winnie Holzman • Directed by.Sarah Rasmussen • Regional/LORT (Princeton, NJ) • McCarter Theatre Center: Berlind Theatre • May 2024.

see also…

Written by Lucy Kirkwood • Directed by Sarah Benson • Off Broaday • Atlantic Theater Company: Linda Gross Theater • June 2024.

see also…

Written by Brian Friel • Directed by Charlotte Moore. • Off-Broadway • Irish Repertory Theatre : Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage • June 2024.

see also…

Written by Bailey Williams • Directed by. Sarah Blush • Off Off Broadway • ClubbedThumb: The Wild Project • Month 2024.

see also…

Book and Lyrics by Elrina Ortiz • Music and Lyrics by Robi Hager • Directed by Rebecca Aparicio. • Regional: Philadelphia • Power Street Theatre: Randall Theatre at Temple University • June 2024.

see also…

Written by Ashley Griffin • Directed by Rachel Klein • Off Broadway • New York Rep: Royal Family Performing Arts Space • June 2024.An exceedingly blah blah 200-300 words.

see also…

Words by Kate Scelsa • Music by Robert M. Johanson • Directed by Morgan Green • Regional/LORT (Philadelphia) • Wilma Theater: Mainstage • June 2024.

see also…