#250615 ~ Some Highlights & High-Likes
Brian Eugenio Herrera's #TheatreClique Newsletter for June 15, 2025
WELCOME to #TheatreClique — my emphatically intermittent 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 a new banner and color scheme, along with your usual constellation of links to click. And for this week’s opener, I lift this moment from the “Act One” of the 2025 Tony Awards. In it actor/advocate Celia Keenan-Bolger accepts the Isabelle Stevenson Award in a way that has reverberated for me throughout this complicated and at times unsettling week. I find that I keep reminding myself of Keenan-Bolger’s words: “the work of community care matters…” May it be so.
EDITOR’S NOTE: whenever possible, whenever linking to paywalled pieces, I try to “gift” the article to #TheatreClique readers. In other words, clicking out to articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, and Wall Street Journal should neither present hassle nor burn through your current allotment of free views. Here’s hoping more outlets — hello LATimes! hi NewYorkMagazine! yo NewYorker!— adopt similar technologies for subscribers soon...— adopt similar technologies for subscribers soon...
#NowClickThis…
Wherein I highlight a handful of the most click-worthy links I’ve encountered in the last few…
Ankler’s Elaine Low and Natalie Jarvey dig deep to explain one of my latest obsessions: the booming business in “vertical microdramas”;
The New Yorker’s Jennifer Wilson reflects on her experience training to be an intimacy coordingar — “a curio of a career…on its way to becoming an industry standard”;
at BroadStreetReview, writer/critic Melissa Strong profiles how Philly’s trans and nonbinary artists are pushing the gendered boundaries of dance;
at American Theatre, freelance arts writer/critic Douglas Corzine profiles ClubbedThumb — the funny, strange, provocative hub of the downtown new play ecosystem;
at Town & Country, freelance arts writer/critic Douglas Corzine asks what’s behind the current surge of celeb-starring one-person shows;
TeenVogue’s editor-in-chief Versha Sharma digs in with actor Helen J. Shen for a richly faceted conversation about the unexpected journey Shen’s taken with Maybe Happy Ending;
at Town & Country, entertainment journalist Leigh Scheps explores the rapidly growing influence of “Broadway influencers” within the commercial theatre;
at TheaterWow, arts writer Jim McDermott offers his own tribute to Harvey Fierstein on the occasion of Fierstein’s Lifetime Achievement Tony Award (see Fierstein’s stirring acceptance speech here);
at The Hollywood Reporter, activist/writer Jose Antonio Vargas considers how David Henry Hwang’s Yellowface challenges its audience to ponder “who gets to define who is American, or American enough, for whom”;
Paper Magazine enlists legendary arts/culture writer Michael Musto to chat up fourteen of Broadway’s brightest (and most gorgeous) stars — Justina Machado! Andrew Durand! Kara Young! Natalie Venetia Belcon! Helen J. Shen! — as Timothy Greenfield-Sanders takes stunning photographs of them.
Thoughts from That One “Critic” Who Likes Everything:
Wherein I offer capsule reviews of what I liked best — my HIGH-LIKES if you will — about the shows I’ve recently engaged...
#74: Call Me Izzy
By Jamie Wax. Directed by Sarna Lapine. • Broadway • Studio54 • June 2025.
I confess. For the first fifteen minutes or so of Call Me Izzy, I just basked in the sound of Jean Smart’s voice lilting inside an accent not unlike Charlene Frazier-Stilfield’s. (Fun Fact: Smart’s Charlene is might well be my all-time favorite tv character/ization.) But somehow sometime somewhere along the way something remarkable happened: Smart’s voice plopped me right inside the harrowing (if familiar) story of Isabel, a luminously gifted wordsmith trapped in a life lived mostly inside a trailer at the edge of a small town in northern Louisiana. And throughout the 90minutes of Jamie Wax’s elliptically episodic script, it was that Smart voice — by turns lush and reedy, as deft with the wry one-liner as with the quiet hiccup of a cry held inside, yet always resonant with conviction… Smart’s voice just held my heart. The play is the play is the play but that Jean Smart? She is something else. Wow.1
see also…
at NewYorkTheatreGuide, writer/editor Gillian Russo talks to playwright Jamie Wax, director Sarna Lapine, and actor Jean Smart about how Call Me Izzy connects with its audiences;
on TikTok, TheaterPlanner ponders whether Call Me Izzy needs a more robust content/transparency advisory.
#76: Lights Out: Nat “King” Cole
By Colman Domingo & Patricia McGregor. Directed by Patricia McGregor. • Off-Broadway • New York Theatre Workshop • June 2025.
As I sat enthralled by this remarkable work of music theatre — note how I didn’t call it “a musical” — it put me in mind of other works (like Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, like Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz) where we see an artist, at the peak of their powers, confront a crisis of conscience that stokes a life-flashing-before-your-eyes moment of being. Lights Out demands that we stay in this razzle dazzle of artistic/political self-reckoning to watch two midcentury icons play it through. And both Dulé Hill (as Nat “King” Cole) and Daniel J. Watts (as Sammy Davis Jr.) are breathtaking. Hill’s vocality stirs the resonance of Cole’s distinctive sound with marvelous, almost eerie precision and Watts’s tricksterish charisma evinces the oft-forgotten sharper edges of Davis’s persona. In tandem, with Hill’s Cole often at the stage’s ceneter as Watts’s Davis teases its edges, these two artists chart the limits of the possible and when they meet centerstage for a tap battle, the artistry conjures something vast. (I couldn’t not think of that sequence in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.) A vivid, prickly, complex work of music theatre that reaches back to what might be forgotten about the 1950s to think forward from today…
see also…
at Ebony, artist/writer Ashley J. Hobbs assesses Lights Out: Nat ‘King’ Cole as “an offering [that] celebrates Black artistry and confronts the compromises we’ve been forced to make”;
at Interview, co-creators Patricia McGregor and Colman Domingo reflect on how their collaboration demands that audiences to walk away with “a complicated, knowledgeable feeling” about the ways notable Black artists “dissec[t] America.”
#77: Not Not Jane’s
By Mara Nelson-Greenberg. Directed by Joan Sergay. • Off-Broadway • ClubbedThumb @ TheWildProject • June 2025.
A giddy, lightly surreal riff on how the culture of corporate capitalism (and the distortions of oligarchic authoritarianism) infuse our everyday sense of possibility. Playwright Mara Nelson-Greenberg assembles a gaggle of characters, each caught in their own late-capitalist snarl — including but not limited to — the existential dreads of GenZers failing to launch; the panics of house-rich-but-cash-poor aging helicopter-parents; the rages of corporater droners; the peripatetic urgencies of gig-working hustlers; the collateral damages of those who “win” the insurance settlement lottery; and so on. But thanks to deft contributions by a charismatic ensemble and design team — special high-likes to Joan Sergay’s vividly precise direction, hilarious sound by Johnny Gasper, and Yonatan Gebeyehu’s delightful present-ness — the thread of tenderness that Nelson-Greenberg strings through each scene pulls it all together for a gratifyingly not not surprising finish.
see also…
at the ClubbedThumb website, writer/performer Milo Cramer ponders how the play’s “blistering ‘word jazz’ [is] an intense and hungry but deliberate and careful reaching towards some sublime and heretofore unimaginable healing space” and writer/performer/producer Bailey Williams considers the “mother wound” at the grieving center of Not Not Jane’s;
at Exeunt, arts writer/editor Loren Noveck contemplates how Not Not Jane’s layers the “delightfully silly over a core of deep anxiety.”
#NowReadThis
Wherein I briefly boost some of the new and/or recently-read books I’m most excited about…
This week, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) announced the “Long Shortlist” for the 2025 ATHE Outstanding Book Award that annually recognizes works that “demonstrate complex and critical engagement with dramatic texts, performances, histories, theories, practices, and/or pedagogies.” And the finalists are…
Andy Head & Jill Marie Bradbury, Staging Deaf and Hearing Theatre Productions: A Practical Guide (Palgrave Macmillan)
Patrick Anderson, The Lamentations: A Requiem for Queer Suicide (Fordham)
Patrick McKelvey, Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation (NYU)
Bethany Hughes, Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity (NYU)
Jon D. Rossini, Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama (Michigan)
Tarryn Li-Min Chun, Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China (Michigan)
Paulette Richards, Object Performance in the Black Atlantic: The United States (Routledge)
Sarah Saddler, Performing Corporate Bodies: Multinational Theatre in Global India (Routledge)
Masi Asare, Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters: Black Women, Voice, and the Musical Stage (Duke)
Broderick D.V. Chow, Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity (Northwestern)
Naomi Bragin, Kinethic California: Dancing Funk and Disco Era Kinships (Michigan)
It’s a thrilling list that demonstrates both the topical breadth and scholarly innovation that defines contemporary Theatre & Performance Studies. (And I am exceedingly proud that two of the finalists are part of NYU Press’s Performance and American Cultures Series, which I co-edit with Robin Bernstein and Stephanie Batiste.) Winners and honorable mentions for all ATHE Awards will be announced on July 21, 2025. Congratulations to all.
ENCOURAGE YOUR INSTITUTIONAL LIBRARY TO BUY THESE BOOKS! Book recommendations from students, staff, faculty and alumni can have a major impact on institutional purchasing priorities, especially at college/university libraries, especially in times of financial uncertainty. Visit the library page at your school/s and click around to figure out how to recommend a title for purchase…
An editorial aside: My commentary on Call Me Izzy appears out of numerical sequence because I attended at the invitation of the production, with the request that I respect the press embargo and not publish any reviews before a designated date.