Tim Blake Nelson forecasts a grim future in his play, And Then We Were No More, which director Mark Wing-Davey opened last week at Off-Broadway’s La MaMa. Here is a world without judges or juries. Verdicts are reached by machines—non-negotiable machines. A machine also functions as the executioner. Anyone considered “beyond rehabilitation” is destined to perish in a newly developed machine designed to execute “without pain.” The lawyer representing the convicted must strive for justice in a system that is devoid of mercy.

Elizabeth Marvel plays the lawyer. “That’s literally the name of my character,” she tells Observer. “I think it’s a good indication of the nature of the play. We’re almost archetypes. It’s as if all the dross has been burned off these people. I represent the law and the function of the law.

“My position is that a painless execution is a lie. It cannot be proved. It’s only diagnostically proved by computers. Nobody has reported back from the other side as to the truth of it. In my opinion—not my character’s opinion—there’s no such thing as a painless execution. I don’t want to give too much away because part of the play is the argument of the case.”

Marvel has the rep and heft for this role. She put in time as the U.S. President on Homeland. Her usual playground is Off-Broadway (she has three Obies—for Therese Raquin, Misalliance and A Streetcar Named Desire). “I’ve never been invited to the Tony party,” she smiles.

Same for her equally gifted husband, Bill Camp. He recently brought off a sharp, persuasive portrait of that investment moneybags, J. P. Morgan, on The Gilded Age. Taken together, they qualify as the Lunts of Off-Broadway, although Marvel is quick to shoot down that kind of aggrandizement: “We’re just a couple of old hippies, who run around in our pajamas all day.”

She’s hopeful the play will land well with audiences. “Honestly, I just want it to be received. I hope people come to see it because it’s a play that’s going to demand a lot of attention from them. We’re going to have to pitch them how to listen because the language is very vigorous. It’s complicated, but it is also incredibly thought-provoking. Audiences are going to have to engage on a mental level that I believe will be very exciting and restorative for them.

“If people come and turn their phones off and give us their attention, we can actually help them improve their mental focus, their mental facility, when we engage them with this play.”

She already has another play lined up after Nelson’s. “Next, I’m doing a piece we did briefly at the Public and the Woolly Mammoth in D.C., called Ford/Hill. It’s based on the Anita Hill hearings and the Christine Blasey Ford hearings. That will happen sometime around January.”

Nelson and Marvel go back to Juilliard-classmate days, and their professional paths have crossed a lot in the past three decades. She has done a bunch of workshops and readings for him, and she’s in a film he just made, The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd. She even showed up for the first read-through of And Then We Were No More—but in a different part.

“At that point,” Nelson says, “I decided—along with the play’s director, Mark Wing-Davey—to put her in the lead role. And I can say Beth Marvel is going to be extraordinary in this play.

“This play is an allusion to our unique selves that modern technology poses. It refers to an imagined future in which individualism recedes in the interest of an algorithm collective.”

Even with the play done, Nelson still stays busy. “I’m editing a movie that I wrote and directed. And then, of course, I’m at the rehearsals for the play whenever I can be because it’s the world premiere and, therefore, I’m working on the writing. As the actors and the director begin to stage it, I learn more and more about the material. That’s a real privilege of having this level of director with this level of cast—the rigor with which they’re approaching some very difficult material. I get to be in the room where it’s happening and see clearly what’s working and what isn’t—and make changes. It’s actually my favorite part of the playwriting process because you can see the whole piece. It’s very exciting.”

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Mamma Mia, set to music by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, is a decidedly different kind of whodunit, drenched in a bombastic pop score that demands you dance in the aisles (“Honey, Honey,” “Money, Money, Money,” “Dancing Queen,” “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” et al.). More than 70 million people have seen the show, which has grossed $4.5 billion worldwide since its 1999 debut, and its revival, freshly installed in the Winter Garden, didn’t exactly tiptoe back into town. Its seven previews raked in more than $1.5 million, and, in its first week on Broadway, it placed fourth among the top five earners (just behind Wicked, The Lion King and Hamilton).

British writer Catherine Johnson concocted the plot that pops up periodically between songs. It’s about a 20-year-old bride-to-be, born out of wedlock, who wants a father to walk down the aisle with her for her nuptials. She wants it so much that she investigates her mother’s diary from two decades back and invites the candidates most likely. They stretch over three continents: an American architect named Sam Carmichael, an Australian writer-adventurer named Bill Austin and a British banker named Harry Bright. Which one will the fountain bless? We never find out. Upstaged by more pressing nuptials, the paternity mystery is shoved aside and never solved.

The current revival holds it to just two continents, dropping the Australian accent altogether—which is a blessing for a Birmingham boy like actor Jim Newman. “When I got the script, Bill Austin was born and raised in America,” he tells Observer. “They stopped making him Australian on tours, I think, because there were so many bad Australian accents and they got laughs.”

Which is just fine with Newman. “When we give up acting school and come to New York, we think we’re going to play this great range of characters—but why?” he wonders. “Over the years, we learn that it’s better not to think you’re a completely different person. It’s better to look at this character and find parts of him that are like you. Then, you can decide how to react as Jim Newman if you’re living the life of this character. I think that makes it a lot easier, and also, I think it makes the character seem more honest to the audience. It’s all an adventure.”

For Newman, this adventure began in 1997. “That’s when I started working professionally in New York, doing terrible plays and a lot of bad Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway. A few years ago, I took up national touring (Big, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Kiss Me, Kate), and my body feels every year of that, believe me. I knew at some point I would have to pay the piper. Doing eight shows a week—especially as a singer-dancer—I knew that my body was going to take a toll.”

One night, after an Off-Broadway show he was doing, the stage manager came up to Newman and said, “Liza is waiting for you in her limo.” Of course, he thought he was kidding, but when he put on his backpack and started to leave, the stage manager said, “I was serious. Liza Minnelli was at the show tonight, and she wants to see you. She’s in her limousine.” When he went out the stage door, the limousine door opened, and she said, “Jimmy! Jimmy! Take me to dinner.” She took him to Sardi’s and said, “Next year I’m doing a show on Broadway at the Palace, where my mother made her big comeback. It’s all about my dad’s movies.” And a year later, he was at the Palace, standing on stage with his arms around this person who had become his friend, setting the lights for their duet. “It was a great experience for me. People have said to me, ‘This show is only about Liza and her boys in the chorus. You’re sort of back in the ensemble,’ and I say to them, ‘Some jobs you take to further your career. Some jobs you take for the experience. Liza is—Liza. There is no one like her and never will be. She’s such a huge part of our entertainment fabric.’”

“During the run, whenever there’d be stars in the green room after the show, Liza would come into my dressing room and say, ‘Jimmy! Jimmy! There’s somebody I want you to meet,’ and she’d take me into her dressing room. The door would open, and it would be Gregory Peck, sitting there with a cane, or Debbie Reynolds—incredible icons. It was really, really a major experience, and I’m so glad that I didn’t let my ego make that decision for me.”

The thing that Newman says he’s proudest of is his relationship with John Kander and Fred Ebb. “I grew up singing their songs, and they became friends of mine. They were just the best.”

His first Kander and Ebb was 1997’s Steel Pier, about the 1930s dance marathons, with Karen Ziemba, Daniel McDonald and Gregory Harrison. “It was my first contract, and my first original Broadway cast. Debra Monk was my love interest, and Kristin Chenoweth—it was her first Broadway show, too—was my wife. It changed my career—but it didn’t last four months.”

He also caught them at the tail end of their collaborations—in Over and Over, a 1999 musical that never made it in, despite a cast that included Dorothy Loudon and Mario Cantone. It was a beautiful score, but musicalizing Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth proved heavy lifting.

Ebb had died by the time his last musical with Kander—2007’s equally star-stuffed Curtains—came to Broadway. “Not having Fred there was a little sad because there is so much of him in that show,” Newman said. “He would have been so happy that it didn’t lie there, and it got produced. The reason they were such a successful team is because John is this hopeless romantic and Fred was this acerbic, hilarious, go-for-the-jugular sort of guy.”

Newman’s a great believer in affixing one’s own personality to the role at hand. “I’m that happy-go-lucky guy—the one at the party who’s first to take over the dance floor. I think that was always in my nature, even as a kid. I used those qualities to connect with my character, Bill Austin. This show is really about the women, let’s not kid anybody, and the men are brought in for the conflict, but if you’re any kind of actor, you’ll be able to find your story in that world.

“Bill has come to this wedding just thinking it’s going to be a party, and he’ll see some old friends. Then, he discovers he may have an adult daughter! At first, he doesn’t know what to make of that. But by the end of the play, he’s thinking, ‘You know what? I haven’t left any roots on this earth. It might be nice to have this beautiful, cool kid as the roots I leave behind.’”

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After doing 600 plays over the past 53 years, Lynne Meadow is stepping down as artistic director of Manhattan Theatre Club, one of the city’s most prolific and productive nonprofits. Well, maybe not stepping down but certainly sideways. She is kicking herself upstairs to artistic advisor and will lend her wisdom and know-how to the person who inherits her job. “I feel like I’m just taking a curtsy and not a final bow,” is how she puts it to Observer.

Meadow and Manhattan Theatre Club go back to 1972, when it was the Bohemian National Hall at 321 East 73rd between First and Second Avenues. A cum laude alumna from Bryn Mawr, she was struggling to find work as a director in New York, having graduated from the Yale School of Drama and already spent a year in Paris founding an international theater company.

Despite those imposing credentials, the only job offer she got in New York came from the cheese department at Zabar’s. “I can’t recall who said it, either Brian Friel or Charles Busch: if I had taken Zabar’s up on it, I’d now be running the only dinner-and-snack theater in New York.”

Fortunately, the call of the Upper East Side proved stronger. A group of businessmen had purchased the five-story Bohemian National Hall and were renting out spaces, save for the bar, which took up much of the first floor. Waiting tables there was future Oscar winner Mary Steenburgen (then, “at liberty” from a comedy improv group called Cracked Tokens).

Three stories of the building—some twenty-three rooms—were being offered up, and that intrigued Meadow. “I was always interested in handling more than one thing,” she admits. “I considered this opportunity something akin to a three-ring circus—a play for every room.”

In her first year, she “did a festival of twenty-three plays in seven weeks in every room in the place! Terrence McNally’s play called Bad Habits went from there to Off-Broadway.”

The Fats Waller musical Ain’t Misbehavin’ was the big noise at Manhattan Theatre Club when Meadow clocked in there. Developed by director-bookwriter Richard Maltby and with soon-to-be stars like Nell Carter, André De Shields, Ken Page and Charlayne Woodard, it was extended extensively. Eventually, other producers took it to Broadway and got the Tony for Best Musical in 1978.

Over the years, Manhattan Theatre Club scored thirty-one wins in a variety of Tony categories. It got three Tonys for Best Play—in 1995 (Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!), in 2001 (David Auburn’s Proof) and in 2005 (John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt). Also, it won two Tonys for Best Revival—in 2017 (August Wilson’s Jitney) and in 2025 (Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day). Then, there were the seven Pulitzer Prizes, fifty-two Drama Desk Awards and forty-nine Obies in between.

“I got my wishes many, many times, thinking of the body of work so many wonderful playwrights let us premiere,” says Meadow, beaming and on the brink of counting her blessings. “I tend to think more passively. Are there other great playwrights? Sure. We’ve had an incredible Golden Age of Theater in New York and not just at Manhattan Theatre Club. A movement was just starting when I first came to New York to be interviewed about getting a directing job. I was the only woman director in my second year at Yale School of Drama.”

Holding Zabar’s at bay, she made the obvious stops and pleaded her case to the then-reigning theatrical kingpins—Marshall Mason at Circle Rep, Bob Moss at Playwrights Horizons and Joe Papp/Bernie Gersten at The Public. “Everybody said, ‘You want to stage manage.’ Well, that would have been a disaster because I would not be a good stage manager, so I ended up forming my own theater. What has been so great about that are the people who have come, whether it was John Patrick Shanley with his twelve plays or others who have come back so many times—Marsha Norman, Joe Orton, Richard Greenberg, Lynn Nottage, David Lindsay-Abaire, Donald Margulies, Theresa Rebeck, Beth Henley, Ruben Santiago-Hudson and Joshua Harmon.”

Meadow’s voice quickens as she recalls past triumphs. “I’m not remotely tired,” she insists. “In fact, I’m more energized than ever. I’m so excited about what I’m calling Chapter Two. I’m just full of ideas and energy about getting back to things I have let slide over the years. I used to teach acting and directing at Yale and NYU and Circle in the Square. I can do that again, and I haven’t directed a show since COVID. It will be good to get back to that for a while, too.”

If Meadow has won big in her selection of plays, it’s because she risks big in picking them. “I hate to be told ‘No’” is her personal philosophy, and it keeps moving her forward.

Of the many Terrence McNally plays launched at Manhattan Theatre Club, the most controversial was Corpus Christi (named after his hometown) and depicted Jesus and the Apostles as gay men living in modern-day Texas. “It was a play he really wanted to work on, so we had a reading of it,” Meadow recalls, “but before we could even talk about the play, we got a phone call from the Catholic League saying ‘You can’t do the play.’ It was particularly stressful for Terrence because of all the scrutiny around it. Part of doing a new play, you know, is working on it and not working on it in a store window. We ended up prevailing, and there were some wonderful actors in it, and we took all the measures that needed to be taken. Of course, the irony was, within a few years, the changes that were happening made Terrence’s play seem tame.”

One of her Pulitzer Prize offerings, Cost of Living by Polish-born playwright Martyna Majok, was a penetrating portrait of two caregivers and the people with disabilities in their care. “It has been my hope that you could see things challenging and that, if we could open up our hearts and minds to certain situations, you’d want to know more about it. The theater is a place to have a great time but also to have new experiences. It’s a real learning time for everybody.

“If you tell a story with enough specificity about people, the work becomes universal. If you’re specific in delving into what it’s like to be such-and-such, the audience comes in. You can open up and find resonance in your own life, even if it’s a world or culture you’ve never known.

Case in point: Jocelyn Bioh’s Tony-contending Jaja’s African Hair Braiding. “The audience who came to see it consisted of many people who’d never been in a salon where women are getting their hair braided,” says Meadow. “For some, it was like going on a trip to somewhere that they didn’t know. Other people were so thrilled to see themselves on stage for the first time, so it became a glorious experience. Isn’t that what theater does, open our hearts and minds?

“For me, what’s kept me going are all the wonderful people in our community and in our city who are positive forces for theater. That’s why I’m not tired. I got a lot of gas in my tank.”

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The neurotic Larry Appleton of TV’s Perfect Strangers, starring Off-Broadway in a 400-year-old Molière farce? Can it be? Not only can it—it is, and the gifted Mark Linn-Baker says it’s his idea. “I had worked with Red Bull Theater in 2015 doing The School for Scandal, and I had a great time with them,” he told Observer, “so Jesse Berger, its artistic director, and I started talking about doing something else together. We settled on The Imaginary Invalid. Jeffrey Hatcher, who did zippy, witty condensations of Gogol (The Government Inspector) and Ben Jonson (The Alchemist) for Red Bull, was brought in to work his usual magic on it, and we were off.”

Condensation is the right word. When The Imaginary Invalid premiered at Paris’ Theatre du Palais-Royal in February of 1673, it was a three-act comédie-ballet with dance sequences, musical interludes and Molière in the title role. At his fourth performance, he suffered a stroke, collapsed on stage and died in a week, but the play he left behind has enjoyed a robust afterlife.

Linn-Baker read various versions of the play, “looking to see how other people interpreted it. There are several British and American translations out there. It may be 400 years old, but it lasts! It’s funny stuff, and Jeffrey got the three-hour running time down to 85 minutes. That’s really fast.”

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Argan, played by Linn-Baker, is centrally located on the stage in a throne-like examination chair with an assortment of positions from upright to prone and usually covered with a fleet of mystified medicos wondering what could be the matter. True to the title, Argan has a galloping case of unbridled hypochondria, undetected by professional eyes.

The malady is also centrally located—around Argan’s benumbed buttocks specifically, which inevitably leads to a motherlode of butt jokes and log-shaped enemas. The only person to puncture his illusion is his snippy, feisty maid, Toinette (played with proper snap and pop by Sarah Stiles). Underlining the redundancy of the medical prognosis is the fact that the very able Arnie Burton manfully plays three of those docs all by himself. So obsessed with his rumored “ailments,” Argan tries talking his daughter, Angelique (Emilie Kouatchou), into marrying a doctor to get 24/7 medical coverage. When she finds a suitor on her own, he threatens her with a convent.

The weekend The Imaginary Invalid opened at New World Stages, Turner Classic Movies aired Linn-Baker’s most fondly remembered film, 1982’s My Favorite Year. He was a young gopher in the early ‘50s who introduced the terror of live TV to a screen swashbuckler he idolized (Peter O’Toole’s Oscar-nominated facsimile of Errol Flynn: “I’m not an actor… I’m a Movie Star”).

By then, Linn-Baker had already launched his stage career with a two-man political comedy with fellow Yalie Lewis Black called The Laundry Room. In 1983, he was in a Broadway version of the Doonesbury comic strip and, a decade later, one of the wits-in-residence feeding the mind of a Sid Caesar-like comic in Neil Simon’s irreverent remembrance, Laughter on the 23rd Floor.

Four times, Linn-Baker has been elected mayor of River City, Iowa. “I did a concert version of The Music Man in New Haven, then I did it at the Kennedy Center for the Encores! series they have there, and I went back to the Muny in St. Louis to do it,” he says. Recently, he stepped into the Broadway production with Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster for the last two months of their run so Jefferson Mays, their Mayor Shinn, could do his solo show on Broadway, A Christmas Carol.

“When I did Shakespeare in the Park in 1978, Woody Allen shot a scene for Manhattan, using me in that footage. That was my first film job, and it’s how I got my Screen Actors Guild card. In 2011, I was on Broadway in a third of Relatively Speaking, an evening of one-act plays he did with Ethan Coen and Elaine May.” Off-Broadway, he did A Year with Frog and Toad, a series of plays based on the children’s books by his ex-father-in-law, Arnold Lobel. (Jay Goede was Frog to his Toad.)

Unlike the guy he’s playing, Linn-Baker finds himself sitting pretty, surrounded by a sparkling set of supporting players who return the serve. “We’re having a great time,” he beams. “I love this cast. Every one of them is a gem on stage. It’s fun to be up there with them doing this play.”

He gives himself points, too, adding that he’s “very happy to make it past the fourth performance.” Another lucky note: Molière passed when he was 51. Linn-Baker turned 71 this week.

Jennifer Simard is nominated for a Tony this season, as Best Actress in a Musical. So is her Death Becomes Her co-star, Megan Hilty. Playing frenemies whose fur-flying ferocity lasts more than a lifetime or two, theirs is, almost, a dueling performance. One character couldn’t exist without returning the serve of the other, which they do with such mastery that it’s been suggested that both of them should win the Tony, a scenario that Simard tells Observer would be a “dream come true.” After all, she adds, “we are functioning as partners with this show.”

The click-click-click of their chemistry was there from the beginning, she beams. “The first reading we did together was in April of 2023,” Simard says. “Then we did a workshop for about three weeks in August of 2023, and finally Chicago in the spring of 2024. In each incarnation, like any kind of relationship, it continued to grow and deepen. We wallowed and dealt with each other in kindness and respect. We took care of each another. We know, inherently, how important it is to protect our relationship, on stage and off. The off-stage relationship is palpable on stage.”

That’s perhaps a loaded statement, given the vicious hilarity of that onstage relationship. Hilty plays Madeline Ashton, a brassy, blonde theater star, and Simard plays struggling writer Helen Sharp. They’ve been rivals since childhood, and Madeline—feeling some career-slippage—invites Helen to view what’s left of her showbiz sparkle, stealing Helen’s straight-laced fiancé—plastic surgeon Ernest Menville (Christopher Sieber)—in the process.  When they cross paths again, Helen’s Godzilla side comes out, and bombastic bitchiness rules the show. Oh, and there’s a magic potion that will provide eternal beauty, so when things turn murderous the two come back to life.

A twin Tony win for these two would be, as Simarard says, a dream come true, but it is just a dream—this prize doesn’t split, and the competition—including Audra McDonald in Gypsy and Nicole Scherzinger in Sunset Boulevard—is fierce. Or, as Simard diplomatically puts it, “So many women could have been correctly nominated this year.”

A recurring Tony nominee, Simard is facing the fate of the super-gifted also-ran. Disappointment One: Disaster!, the 2016 jukebox musical in which she was Sister Mary Downey, a nun on a floating casino slap-happy over slot machines; Hamilton’s Renee Elise Goldsberry picked up that prize. Her next nomination, in 2022, was for playing Sarah in the gender-flipped Company. “I call that my pandemic show,” she says, “We did about 12 shows before everything shut down, but we came back and reopened. I was a cover for Patti LuPone, so, when she got COVID—as we all did in March of ’22—I did about ten days for her. She was my Tony competition, and, of course, she won—rightly. That’s how it’s been.”

But never mind. Nightly, on stage, both she and Hilty are winners—dual victory being part of the secret of this partnership. Simard follows some advice given her by Faith Prince, a co-star from Disaster currently in Boop! The Musical. “I knew this, but she affirmed it,” Simard says. “One of the worst things you can do on stage as a comedienne is die for laughs. You must throw the ball to your playing partner and let them win sometime. If they win, you win.”

What keeps Hilty and Simard’s comic engines charging away on all cylinders is that the audiences appreciate what they are doing up there. “Oh, yeah, you can feel it,” Simard insists. “The audience really is with us from the get-go. It just grows as the show goes. They’re not ahead of the jokes, but they’re right there because they know who we are as characters.”

If Simard had a bucket list of roles she would like to do, it would come from this bucket. “I don’t have an aversion to revivals, but I love originating new roles. I didn’t see this role coming at all. Originality is my dream. I really want to create something from the incubation.”

And next? “I do this next,” she says, confident and content. “After the Tony Awards on June 8, it’ll be nice to do this gig for a while. It’s a wonderful show. I’m in no hurry to spread my wings.”

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Almost four decades have slipped by, but people still recall the love and compassion Joanna Gleason poured generously into the Baker’s Wife in Sondheim’s first romp Into the Woods. It won her a 1988 Tony Award and a place of distinction in the theatrical community. 

Once witnessed, that Gleason glow is not forgotten. Thing is, it hasn’t been seen in some time—at least not on stage in New York. Her last appearance came in Stephen Karam’s 2012 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Sons of the Prophet. And while TV and film have kept her occupied, Joshua Harmon’s three-hander We Had a World at the Manhattan Theater Club seems to be just the ticket to bring back that warming glow. 

Gleason plays an Upper East Side matriarch named Renee, long estranged from her lawyer daughter, Ellen (Jeanie Serralles), but hopelessly devoted to Joshua, her 15-year-old gay grandson (Andrew Barth Feldman). A veritable Granny Mame, she loves to introduce the lad to all manner of age-inappropriate pleasures (Diana Riggs’ Medea on Broadway, R-rated movies like Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies and Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves and an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s graphic photographs). He grows up fast.

Gleason plays an Upper East Side matriarch named Renee, long estranged from her lawyer daughter, Ellen (Jeanie Serralles), but hopelessly devoted to Joshua, her 15-year-old gay grandson (Andrew Barth Feldman). A veritable Granny Mame, she loves to introduce the lad to all manner of age-inappropriate pleasures (Diana Riggs’ Medea on Broadway, R-rated movies like Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies and Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves and an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s graphic photographs). He grows up fast.

“This play’s so beautifully written, so true and raw,” Gleason tells Observer. “Josh Harmon was very brave to dramatize, right out of his own  life, what his relationships were growing up.”

Gleason connected with her character on first reading. “It was a part like I’d never had an opportunity to play before,” she says. “It’s my first grandmother role. I am a grandmother. I have nine grandchildren.”

But Gleason liked that Renee is not just a grandmother. “She’s so colorful,” she says. “So there’s not just one thing to play. The whole cast—Jeanine and Andrew and I—realized that we’re three protagonists in this play, but we’re also antagonists as well. Back and forth, back and forth.”

Did I mention Renee is an alkie granny? Her lifelong alcoholism is the source of almost all the family conflict. Her daughter keeps this as best she can from her son, who obviously adores granny, but it’s a secret harder to keep when Renee is 93 (about two decades older than Gleason herself) and battling pancreatic cancer.

Even in this state, Renee prevails on her playwriting grandson for one final favor—to turn their immediate family history into a play—“and make it as bitter and vitriolic as possible.”

The prospect of Renee’s death hovers heavily over the final third of the play. “I watched my own parents die,” Gleason says. “They died several months apart. They were 96 and 90, and so what I watched the two of them go through, I recalled—but, in a way, I believe that I understand the world that they were going through better now than I did at the time.”

Gleason owes her love of theater to her dad, Let’s Make a Deal host Monty Hall, who sent her, at an impressionable age, to shows like Bye Bye Birdie and the Robert Morse-Rudy Vallee How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Proof she was susceptible to this: when Morse and Vallee opted to revive that show years later, she found a place in that company.

A musical-theater orientation led her to the stage. She made her professional debut in Burt Bacharach-Hal David’s Promises, Promises and, five years later, she braved Broadway with Cy Coleman-Michael Stewart’s I Love My Wife, waltzing off with a Theatre World Award.

What dramas or comedies that punctuate the music have been well-chosen: Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, for starters. Peter Nichols’ A Day in the Death of Joe Egg put her in the Tony running, as did David Yazbek’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. On TV, she’s been everything from Leo McGarry’s lawyer on The West Wing to Bette Milder’s mother on the short-lived sitcom Bette, and her film work—from Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights—has been equally eclectic. In Boogie Nights she played the mother of burgeoning porn star Dirk Diggler. “Again, something I’ve really never been asked to play before,” she says. “I’ve been lucky the plays and pictures I’ve done have come my way, and I’ve been lucky that I have followed my instincts as to what I’ve done before. But what’s going to be something that I haven’t done before?”

Even when Gleason makes poor choices, she tends to win anyway. Case-in-point: the 1991 musical Nick & Nora which put in nine performances before crumbling into dust. Barry Bostwick and she headed a very starry cast as Dashiell Hammett’s domestic detectives, Nick & Nora (Charles). The good news is that she found a husband among the usual suspects—Oscar nominee Chris Sarandon. They’ve settled into New England, not far from roles and work.

After several extensions, We Had a World will call it a run on May 11, and Gleason admits to mixed emotions about this. “I’m both sorry and grateful, like the song says. I don’t live in New York. Chris and I live in Connecticut, so it’s been a little logistically challenging for us.”  

Gleason has filled the potentially idle time ahead by switching mediums and professions. She’s written and directed a film called The Grotto.  A story where grief, laughter and music combine to bring about small miracles, it focuses on Alice, a 40-something woman who uncovers the secret past of her recently deceased lover when she inherits part ownership of a forgotten nightclub in the Mojave Desert. It’s about loss, betrayal and recovery, and who are the people in your life who’ll tell you the truth and who won’t. A host of New York actors ponder that problem.

The Grotto has been screened at several film festivals and even won Best Premier Picture at the Heartland Film Festival. Its first screenings outside a festival come May 16 in Los Angeles and May 19 in New York, when it will be shown at the Union Square Regal Cinemas. Gleason is planning a talkback at Union Square before the showing. “I’d love for people to come out. It’s what a distributor wants to see: Are people going to the movie? Will they fill the seats? Can they be relied on for word of mouth.”

These are new concerns for an actress conditioned to acting the heart and soul out of a play.

Nellie Forbush, Dolly Levi, Anna Leonowens, Marian Paroo—and now, finally, Susan Cooper.

On Broadway, Kate Baldwin has done a modest handful of roles—like a Tony-nominated turn as Sharon McLonergan in the 2009 revival of Finian’s Rainbow—but she is best known as the go-to singer for a gargantuan gallery of musical theater heroines. How many that could be, she hasn’t a clue. 

“I turned 50 this year,” she tells Observer, “and I’ve been doing them for 28 years. I lost count a long time ago.” One role, however, she is positive she has never performed is Susan Cooper. 

That chore awaits her March 26-30 when she and Brian Stokes Mitchell co-star in the next Encores! offering at New York City Center, Love Life, often cited as one of the first concept musicals.

“I was overwhelmed by the scope of what the plot was attempting to cover,” Baldwin admits. “In 1948 when the show was first done on Broadway, it went back 150 years. Our version takes it up to present time, and that makes it 250 years. We start in 1791 with the birth of the nation and the start of the marriage of Sam and Susan Cooper, who struggle to cope with the changing social mores of the times. They never age as a couple from all of this, but the country does.”

Baldwin is comfortable within the confines of her character. “Susan starts out very peppy in her own little cocoon of marriage and family life,” she says. “Then, the outside world—the shifting landscape of American society—starts to tear her family apart. She responds to this by reaching out and questioning. She doesn’t shrink from changes. She embraces them. She wants what she wants, all of it—a job and a loving relationship with her husband. This is the modern woman of 1948.”

In this role, Nanette Fabray won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical (the second ever presented, after Mary Martin’s Nellie Forbush), but in her later years she had no memory of the award or the role—the result of a severe concussion she suffered when she was knocked to the ground by a spooked elephant during the filming of 1978’s Harper Valley PTA.

Love Life, a love story played against churning historical events, is the one and only teaming of Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner. Producer Cheryl Crawford suggested this unexpected pairing to give Lerner a break from his sputtering early collaboration with lifelong partner Frederick Loewe (they created at different speeds). Working with Weill helped remedy that situation.

Love Life opened during a period when a musicians’ union strike led to disputes in the recording industry. As a result, Love Life—as well as Frank Loesser’s Where’s Charley?—received no official cast album. But a couple of Weill’s numbers (“Here I’ll Stay,” “Mr. Right”) did manage to penetrate the hit parade, and Lerner reworked one set of lyrics (“I Remember It Well”) for Gigi.

“The score is full of exciting variety,” says Baldwin. “There’s a ballet in it, there’s an aria in it, there’s beautiful madrigal singing and incredible vaudeville numbers. Weill’s melodies are outstanding. They’ve lived five years in my subconscious, since we first looked at them in 2020.”

Lerner once told Weill’s widow, the singer Lotte Lenya, that he wished he loved his book and lyrics as much as he loved Weill’s music. “He was only about 27 years old when he did Love Life,” Baldwin points out. “And Weill was not young at all. He’d already done Lady in the Dark and Street Scene. He died a year after Love Life in 1949. His last score was Lost in the Stars.

“According to Weill Foundation officials, Love Life was beloved by both authors. They wanted to continue to work on it and figure it out. Lerner said toward the end of his days that he wanted to rewrite and do it again. I feel like we’re giving them the opportunity now with this Encores!”

The director of this edition is Victoria Clark, who usually wins Tony Awards as an actress (The Light in the Piazza, Kimberly Akimbo). “I trust no one more,” Baldwin says. “She comes from a performance background and thinks first as an actor. She has a holistic approach to the piece.”

Originally, Love Life was scheduled as part of the 2020 season of Encores! but the performances were cancelled as a result of the pandemic shutdown. “When we rehearsed it five years ago, we had one run-through on the City Center stage—that was March 12, 2020,” Baldwin recalls. 

“What was exciting about that day was that one got to see the disparate parts of the show, all the big production numbers that didn’t involve Sam and Susan Cooper. I got to see all these numbers for the first time. Theater scenes were being rehearsed in one corner, the vaudeville numbers were rehearsed in another room, and the ballet was being rehearsed downstairs.

“Finally, we got to see the whole show put together. If you think about it, we didn’t now at the time when we’d perform it. We thought we were going on a hiatus for maybe two weeks, maybe a month, at the time. We had no idea how long it would be. When we finished that one run-through, we crossed the street for pizza and wine. And now, here we are five years later.”

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The stage comeback of brassy media wit Joy Behar has pretty much come and gone, but the happy remnants of it are still at the MMAC Theater, an out-of-the-way theater at 248 W 60th.

Behar—one of founding voices of the long running ABC talk show The View (28 years and counting)—spent most of February polishing a play of eight monologues she crafted from interviews with a diverse group of divorcees. Then she performed it with Tovah Feldshuh, Susie Essman and Adrienne C. Moore.

Her second husband, Steve Janowitz, christened the show My First Ex-Husband. “I’ve only had two,” Behar tells Observer. “This one, I guess we’ll keep, so he won’t be my second ex-husband.”

Tony winner Tonya Pinkins, Oscar nominee Cathy Moriarty and Emmy winners Susan Lucci and Judy Gold are currently holding forth with the same material through March 23. Then Talia Balsam, Veanne Cox, Jackie Hoffman and Andrea Navedo will get their shots March 26-April 20. 

Behar knew the rotating cast format from her turns in The Vagina Monologues and Love, Loss, and What I Wore — “back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth,” she quips. “I thought it great: You just keep  changing the cast,” Behar says. “You don’t have to memorize anything because you’re reading other people’s stories. It just seemed like a good idea we could, and should, try again.”

The play started small, like a conversation. “Ten or so years ago—maybe more—one of my close friends gave me her time and told me what led to her divorce,” Behar recalled. 

“I kept interviewing other women because I thought it was so human and so interesting. I would take hours of material and add some jokes here and there and turn that into a piece of theater. Beyond those eight monologues, I have in my stash four other ones I have to work on because they didn’t give me enough the first time around. I still have to add, subtract and fix.”

Although the subject matter remains the same—how one careens toward divorce—getting there varies quite a bit. “Each one of these monologues is different,” Behar beams. “They do not overlap. Of course, there’s always adultery in a divorce so that kinda overlaps, but you also get someone who’s married to the mob, or another one who has an oversexed husband. Every one of them has a husband who has a fetish. Each one of them is different. Show me something that’s different, and I’d be interested in putting it in the show.”

Every once in a while, there are shouts at the stage from members of the audience. “Most people are used to the fourth wall so they don’t usually choose to speak out,” Behar notes. “When I was on stage—because I have 30 or 40 years under my belt as a stand-up comic—it was easy for me to engage the audience. I encourage them to interact with me. I like that a lot.”

Behar doesn’t waste any time getting the ball rolling. Her first question to the audience is “How many of you have been divorced?” Her next is “How many of you would like to be divorced?”

Often, to the audience’s amusement, there are more hands showing in the second question than the first. This is followed by the sobering statistic of how many marriages end in divorce.

My First Ex-Husband is, yes, slanted toward the female—but that’s not exactly Behar’s fault. She did try to interview men on the subject. “But they gave me nothing,” she says. “They would have one-word answers or something like ‘She was crazy.’ They didn’t give me a story. Half these guys didn’t have a cue why they got divorced. Women loved to give me their stories.”

Nevertheless, the male of the species seems to be pretty thick-skinned about her findings. “I did make it a point sometimes to ask the men after the show, ‘Did you feel this was male-bashing?” And not one of them said it was. They said, ‘I don’t think so. I’m not like that.”

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Playwright Matthew Lombardo has often built shows around strong women, some of them real-life figures. In 2002’s Tea at Five it was Katharine Hepburn, played by a Grade-A Kate Mulgrew. And in 2010’s Looped, it was Tallulah Bankhead, played by Valerie Harper in her last  great performance—a Tony-nominated one at that. 

Tea at Five was based on Hepburn’s memoir, Me: Stories of My Life, and Looped was based on a real-life event, a tanked-up Bankhead, trying (for eight hours!) to redub one line of dialogue in her final film—a 1965 horrorshow titled, Tallelulah-esque, Die! Die! My Darling! 

But the ultimate source material for these women rising triumphantly from the ashes is Lombardo’s own mother, who finally rates her place on stage via his latest opus, the semi-autobiographical Conversations with Mother. It will play Theater 555 from February 26 to March 31.

“My father died when I was 33 and I think, in a way, I became my mother’s husband,” Lombardo tells Observer. “I was always there. She’s still telling me what to do at age 60, but it’s wonderful to have someone who is so hands-on in your life. People forget that. I wouldn’t be where I am today without my mother because she believed in me when I didn’t necessarily believe in myself.” 

This is the play Lombardo claims he never had any intention of writing. Then, about 10 years ago, he had one of those conversations with Mother, and, when he got off the phone, he realized most people would not believe the dialogue that passed between them. To test it out, he wrote it all up and posted it on Facebook. People responded to it, and every so often he’d post another conversation. They kept responding, and he kept resisting. Finally, one night at three in the morning, it just clicked: He saw a play made up of snapshots across 60 years.

Caroline Aaron of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel plays Maria Collavechio, the matriarchal role, and even Lombardo considers her a “scary” facsimile of the genuine article. Matt Doyle (who recently got a Tony for supporting Company) is Maria’s son, Bobby, aka Lombardo himself,  some 30 years younger. Basically, they play back-and-forth verbal tennis that’s frequently funny and often with poignant underpinnings.

 “All of my actresses have been very collaborative,” he says. “Now, working with Caroline, it’s fantastic. We’re at the point in our process where she knows the character of Maria Collavechio more than I do. That is kind of a bittersweet moment for a playwright, but it’s very exciting.

 “My mother has a much longer fuse than Maria. When my boyfriend first met my family, after I walked him out to his car, he said, ‘Why are you guys always yelling at each other?’ I said, ‘We weren’t yelling.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you guys were very loud and passionate.’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s just Italian. What seems to be yelling in other families is just our way of showing affection.’

“There’s a special relationship between a mother and son, a very special relationship between a mother and a gay son and an extremely special relationship between a mother and a gay Italian son,” Lombardo points out. “There’s this co-dependency that happens—at least it did with me.”

Lombardo texts his mother first thing in the morning, and she’s the last call he makes at night. “Even before my father died, my mother and I had just been each other’s person. People might think it’s unhealthy, but with us it works,” he says. “Sometimes at night, we talk for about 45 minutes to an hour. My older brother says, ‘What do you guys talk about that long?’ I say, ‘I don’t know. We just talk and gossip and share and exchange feelings.’ It’s the most beautiful relationship I’ve ever known.”

Lombardo’s mom is 95 and lives with his sister. She saw a reading of Conversations years ago and was touched by the way the plot points and banter mirrored her own with her son. Now there are plans afoot afoot to get her to see the finished production, and Lombardo thinks Theater 555 is a setting that fits the show itself. “The audience is right there, and they’re experiencing the intimacy,” he says. “We’ll get her to come to a matinee where we can watch it together.”

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Melissa Gilbert is an actress who has at least tried to go through life acting her age. She debuted at two, doing Alpo dog food commercials with Lorne Greene, and landed her first TV series at nine, playing the subteen-and-beyond Laura Ingalls Wilder, the little Minnesota farm girl who grew up in your living room from 1974 to 1984 on NBC’s Little House on the Prairie.

That’s the role that made an indelible impression on the minds of most people, and it’s the one with the strongest staying-power, hardest to shake. It’s with her still in Still, Lia Romeo’s domestic drama which begins its Off-Broadway run Feb. 5 at The Sheen Center.

But Little Laura from long ago is now 60, and not only that, in Still she’s passing for 65. “One of the things that drew me to this play,” Glibert tells Observer, “is the idea of having a romance at this age. Just because we’ve gotten older doesn’t mean we don’t fall in love and have passionate, physical relationships.  I think older people have more value. They have lived more and experienced more, they’re wiser, they are the ones you should look to.”

The play is, basically, a marital battle to communicate—a taut two-hander. Her co-star is Mark Moses, a veteran campaigner from Desperate Housewives and Mad Men. “Working with him is a real joy,” Gilbert says before she starts rattling off his virtues: “A wonderful actor, an incredible creative partner, just a real gentleman and a hilariously human person.”

That’s quite the opposite kind of person he plays in this funny but heart-wrenching dramedy. There is a lot of political head-butting in this play, and it causes an engaged couple to disengage for three decades. Still single and despairing of dating apps, they decide to give it another go.

But the old problem is still there, and they hope that love can overcome it and they can survive as marrieds, for better or for worse. Playwright Romeo found herself in just such a relationship. “I wondered what to do when you love someone, but you hate some of the things that person believes,” she tells Observer. “So I wrote the play to figure it out. I didn’t figure it out—but I did realize it’s a question that resonates with a lot of people. Instead of responding with contempt when we disagree, why can’t we engage? Conversation is the only way to change minds.”

It wasn’t a stretch for Melissa to represent her side of the political fence in this play. In 2015, she was the presumptive Democratic nominee to the US House of Representatives for Michigan’s 8th congressional district, but bowed out because of a spinal injury that she discovered she had at the end of a lengthy play tour.  

Melissa’s own method of picking spouses was, initially, simple. She only wedded actors that she had co-starred with, but this didn’t get her beyond the B’s: Bo Brinkman (1988-1992) and Bruce Boxleitner (1995-2001); the latter produced a son, who subsequently produced her first grandson, named Michael after the late Michael Landon, who played her dad on Little House on the Prairie.

At least her third and current husband, also an actor—a redheaded, Emmy-winning Thirtysomething named Timothy Busfield—broke the alliteration curse for her. “We work together as much as possible, and we really love it,” she says. “We are constantly creating.” And they’ve created from Hollywood to Michigan to (for the past eight years) New York.

But the L.A. gal is very much with her now, grieving about the wildfires that ravaged that area.
“It’s my hometown,” she laments. “The things that burned are all places where I grew up. My favorite restaurants in Malibu are all gone. Every day I hear from a friend who has lost absolutely everything. It’s horrific.” 

When you’ve been in show business for 58 years, you look like the girl who’s had everything. She did two terms as President of the Screen Actors Guild, and, though decidedly unpresidential, she has also been Dancing with the Stars. She voiced Batgirl in Batman: The Animated Series. She’s written a cookbook (My Prairie Cookbook: Memories and Frontier Food), a children’s book (Daisy and Josephine) and Prairie Tale: A Memoir. Her years on Little House on the Prairie got her into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

The one thing these 58 years haven’t brought her is Broadway. She came closest in 200 when she was elevated to the role of her own mother, Caroline “Ma” Ingalls, in a musical rendering of Little House on the Prairie. They workshopped the show in 2007 in New York with Patrick Swayze, but by early 2008 he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (the same malady that claimed Landon) and was replaced by Steve Blanchard. Instead of Broadway, the show opened at the Guthrie in Minneapolis and went on that aforementioned lengthy tour. But the dream remains. 

“I haven’t auditioned for a Broadway musical for quite a while,” Gilbert says. “But I would love to do one. Right now, there’s nothing out there that anybody is chomping at the bit for me to do, but, at some point, I would love to do a Broadway show. It is still my favorite dream.” 

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Mike Leigh’s first movie in six years finds the writer-director back together with one of the stars of 1996 breakthrough, Secrets & Lies, Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Both Leigh and Jean-Baptiste earned Oscar nominations for Secrets & Lies (Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for him, and Best Supporting Actress for her), and smart money has them in contention for more of the same for Leigh’s latest. That would be Hard Truths, which emphatically elevates Jean-Baptiste to dazzling star status.

A nostalgic tug got this particular film rolling. Almost three decades had elapsed since Leigh made Secrets & Lies, and Jean-Baptiste popped into his head. “We haven’t been able to get together since then,” Leigh tells Observer. “So I thought, ‘Let’s get Marianne, and see what’s she is up to now.’” 

The people that Leigh picks for his pictures largely determine the film’s setting and the story he wants to tell. Because of Jean-Baptiste, Hard Truths focuses on an extended Black family in North London. Jean-Baptiste is Pansy Deacon, a premenopausal naysayer who lashes out at family and strangers alike; also recruited from Secrets & Lies was Michele Austin, who plays Pansy’s sister Chantelle, a relative sunbeam compared to Pansy. 

Pansy takes all manner of exception to life’s little flaws and imperfections. Delivering hard truths is a full-time job with her. Whether it’s a dental assistant or grocery-cashier, she wields a scorching blow-torch. Her day begins when she awakes with a blood-curdling yelp and ponders what’s ahead. This she reviews at the breakfast table, uninterrupted by her plumber husband (David Webber) and her slacker son (Tumaine Barrett). Long ago hammered into silence, they let her rant and rail to her mind’s discontent, then turn her loose on a poor, unsuspecting world. 

“We live in a difficult society with all kinds of people,” reasons Leigh. “Nobody can say they can’t relate to somebody who’s a Pansy of some sort. The truth is that people don’t go around objectively analyzing each other. People live with what’s going on. They don’t criticize or question. It’s part of the condition of life. People are putting up with things and surviving and getting on with their own thing. Not everyone questions everything the way they do in movies.”

If Leigh’s characters don’t act the way people usually do in movies, that’s because Leigh builds his films around them, rather than dictate to them. “Truth is, I work the way bankers bank and novelists write novels and poets write poetry,” he says. “I interact with the material and discover what the film is through the process of making it.” Though he describes his work as “tightly scripted” (and certainly that’s how it plays) his movies aren’t scripted in the conventional sense. The scripts arise out of a rehearsal process that involves improvisation. “We arrived at what you see,” he says. “Everything was created on set. When we get to the shoot, we’ve worked it out through improvisations and converted that material from me and from the actors into action.” The improvisation sets the stage, but it’s not what’s filmed. “There’s not a single moment in this film that’s ad-libbed when we finally arrive on the set to shoot scenes,” says Leigh. “The crew comes and shoots the thing in a classical way in terms of film discipline.” 

This process brings a sense of life as it’s lived to the screen. “I pull together a group of actors and work individually with each of them to find and create a character,” explains Leigh. “The characters are always pinned on real people the actors know personally. Then, together, we invent the characters’ personal history, their personalities, even some sense of how they move and think. The main thing that happens in the long period before we get to the shoot is that we bring into existence the world of the characters.”

Two-thirds of the way through Hard Truths, Pansy tips her vulnerability to the audience. “I just want it to stop,” she mutters more than once. Leigh ends the film ambiguously, without an answer to her plight. “She hands it over to me. I’ve done that quite often. It’s not a cop-out. It is important to me to leave a doorway with stuff to work on and to savor and to argue about.”

All of Leigh’s films are written and directed by him. He leaves the producing to others, gladly. “I can’t really talk in Hollywood-pitch language about where the idea of a movie comes,” he says. “Basically, it’s a straightforward thing. I’d say, ‘Give us the money to make the film. I can’t tell you what it’s about. We don’t know what it’ll be. I can’t discuss costumes. And please don’t interfere with us while we’re doing it.’” Amazingly enough this works, though it’s harder than it once was. “I’ve made 28 films, so I got away with it a lot—but, recently, it’s got tougher because there are all kinds of reasons that may or may not have to do with the story. I hear, ‘We really like what you’re doing, and we appreciate the way you work, but it’s not for us.’ ‘We’re not going to back a film if we don’t know what it is,’ ‘And we’re sure as hell not going to do a film where we can’t interfere with it and fuck it up.’”

At 81, Leigh still deals with hard truths. But he plans to be back before the cameras by year’s end.

The scrim that drapes the stage when you enter the Hayes Theater has a frosty effect—you don’t have to consult your Playbill to know the setting is Christmas Eve. Scenic designer John Lee Beatty has presented his favorite battlefield—the great American living room—and lighting designer Heather Gilbert has cheered the place up with colored lights decorating various nooks, crannies and borders about the house, as well as the Christmas tree. You almost want to break into “Silent Night.”

The 100-minute one-act that follows, Leslye Headland’s Cult of Love (running through February 2nd), is no silent night. A bombastic outburst of grudges and resentments that have been accumulating all year long and are now ripe for unloading. The stockings have indeed been hung by the chimney with care, but they’re for children who are now grown and couldn’t care less.

Four siblings have dutifully returned—as in years past—to the scene of last year’s anguish: their parents’ Connecticut farmhouse. The head of the household, Bill Dahl (David Rasche) has pretty much checked out, treating outbursts of genuine hatred with love hugs. Wife Ginny (Mare Winningham) is conspicuously in the driver’s seat and flooring it. 

At her very first reading, Winningham realized she was the nightmare before Christmas—and loved it! “I thought, ‘This is going to be fun,’” she tells Observer. “My first response to the play was that this playwright is really getting a lot of laughter out of serious dysfunction problems. I thought, ‘Well, it’s called Cult of Love, so there has to be a leader—and it seems to be me.’”

This little cult leader makes things difficult for everyone in the play, using what Winningham calls “the tool kit of a narcissist” to accomplish her goals. “Anyone looking for unconditional love will recognize how conditional Ginny’s version of it is. It’s about her. Every parent should want their child to go off and get free and be themselves and find their way. Ginny is trying to keep them close and keep them attached, under the guise of love—and it’s not, I think, a healthy love.”

She pulls her “four babies” back every year for an annual photograph, and she is not above legislating their behavior, calling a loudmouth to help her in the kitchen when the conversation heads in the wrong direction. “That’s one of the tools of a cult leader to control,” says Winningham. “Another is infantilizing—keeping them babies—using anger and an overemotional response to things.”

Inevitably, it’s a home of broken Dahls. The oldest, Mark (Zachary Quinto), can’t find his niche in this world, failing first as a priest, then as a lawyer; his wife blames their miscarriages on his false starts. Evie (Rebecca Henderson), child number two, brings her pregnant lesbian wife home and resents the homophobic vibes she gets from her sister, Diana (Shailene Woodley), and her Episcopal priest husband; she has caught too much of his religion and has short-circuited on it, fancying herself a prophet, talking in tongues, getting them both kicked out of the church. That’s another unemployment.

While all this sound and fury are being displayed, Ginny brings out a punchbowl of Manhattans for additional fuel and urges everyone to drink up—before Johnny (Christopher Sears), the youngest, arrives. “He’s the one who got away,” Winningham says. “But look at the cost: he tried to kill himself, he did heroin. Now, he’s recovering and knows enough to have parameters, enough to stay away.” When the chronically late Johnny does arrive, he’s with a girl he found in recovery and is sponsoring. Then, the musical merriment and verbal mayhem resume like new.

That mayhem presented its challenges. “It’s a difficult play to memorize,” Winningham admits. “Lots of dialogue overlaps. You can’t really settle into acting because you’re also listening to another conversation that has your cue. You’re having a conversation, but you’re not really dealing with your scene partner. They told us at the beginning, ‘You’re going to find this very tricky. You wonder how you’ll ever get comfortable, but it’s almost like playing in the orchestra. You learn your part. You hear the other parts, and, at some point, it will jell. You’ll become part of a beautiful symphony.’”

Winningham has never been shy about accepting difficult or different roles. Her first Tony-nominated performance was for playing the lone female among male transvestites in Harvey Fierstein’s 2014 Casa Valentina, the supportive wife of a cross-dressing Patrick Page. She gave her second Tony-nominated performance in 2020, in Conor McPherson’s dramatic setting of Bob Dylan songs, Girl from the North Country. She was wife to the proprietor of a dreary guesthouse in Duluth, MN, suffering from a form of dementia which propels her from catatonic detachment to uninhibited outbursts that were difficult to maintain. “We worked on this thing for four years,” she says, “but I loved every minute of it and was sad when it ended.”

Film-wise, she was one of the Georgetown grads in 1985’s St. Elmo’s Fire, a film that launched a galaxy of stars still with us (Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, et al). A New York Magazine cover story identified those actors as The Brat Pack. The label stuck and stymied them. 

“I never felt the sting of that,” Winningham claims, “but I know it did affect their lives and careers. They talk about it in Andrew McCarthy’s book.” (That would beMcCarthy’s memoir, Brat: An ‘80s Story, which he turned into a documentary you may have seen on Hulu this summer.) “They felt it damaged their reputations. They had every right to feel upset about that article. It painted a picture of them that wasn’t true—that they were some entitled bratty people, and they weren’t. They really cared about their work. I escaped all that. I was in a different world. I was a little older and had children.”

She also had a TV career. In 1980, she won a Best Supporting Actress Emmy for the Amber Waves TV movie and three years later was part of the epic miniseries The Thorn Birds. She collected another Best Supporting Actress Emmy in 1998 for the biopic George Wallace (beating out Angelina Jolie, also nominated for her part in the same TV movie). 

At the end of 2021, she struck up a romance with a friend of 35 years, fellow actor Anthony Edwards—and that led to the altar during the pandemic. “Tony always likes to say that we got married between ‘the insurrection and the inauguration,’” Winningham says.

A happy consequence of this union is what Winningham calls “a beautiful blending of families. Tony’s four children are in their late 20’s-early 30’s. My four are in their late ‘30’s-early 40’s.” All are expected over for Christmas—plus spouses and friends. That’s twice the number onstage for Cut of Love, though doubtless with a more happy outcome.

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Considering that Jonathan Spector started writing Eureka Day in 2016, it’s a little surprising that the play’s arrival December 16 at Manhattan Theater Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater is as topically hot as it is. But it is—so hot, in fact, that it’s hard to imagine any show this season more politically charged. Why? It asks a much-batted-about question nowadays: to vaccinate or not to vaccinate?

Spector’s daughter was not even a year old when he began this play, which concerns an outbreak of mumps in a private school named Eureka Day. Now she’s a third-grader, and he finds himself an active participant in colloquies that he had only imagined eight years ago. “When I wrote the play,” he tells Observer, “I was not at this phase in my life, but I had had experiences that led to this—a few moments of conversations with friends or people I knew. They were very smart and very well-educated. Some had the same politics I had and the same kind of basic worldview. Then, I discovered they didn’t vaccinate their kids—and that was always a shock. It was very curious to me how it was we could agree on everything, except for this one thing. It meant we occupied a different reality.”

Spector was struck by this: similar people living in the same place but occupying different realities. And he responded by writing about it. “Quite often, plays come to me from having some sort of strange experience,” he says. “I wonder about it a while, and then I follow it down the rabbit hole to whatever it leads me to.”

Spector was living in Berkeley, California, and had a commission with a theater company there—the Aurora—to write a Berkeley play for that Berkeley audience. Eureka Day is what he came up with.

“Really, I had no ambitions or idea it would necessarily resonate for people outside of Berkeley,” he admits. “So it’s wonderful to see it now on Broadway, which I never could have anticipated or imagined. It’s certainly not the kind of relevancy I was hoping for. I’m still trying to understand what the play means in this moment. This is a very different time.”

Specifically, it’s a time when the President-elect has picked Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—who can charitably be described as a vaccine skeptic, and less charitably as anti-vax—to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and encouraged him to “to go wild on health.” 

“It remains to be seen how successful he’ll be, but at a minimum it’s going to be bad for public health,” Spector says of RFK Jr. “Even if all they do is change the public guidance from ‘You really should get childhood vaccinations’ to ‘Only if you want to’—a shift in the public stance and public messaging would be enough to do some real harm.” 

Enter Eureka Day, which Spector says started out a serious drama and acquired a lot of humor along the way: “I think of it as a funny play about serious things.” Basically, it’s not so much a play about vaccines as it is a comedy about a community craving a consensus. When there’s an outbreak of mumps at Eureka Day, the county health department issues an edict demanding quarantine for the unvaccinated. An emergency meeting of the school’s Board of Directors is held in Eureka Day’s child-friendly library. Mealy-mouthed but well-meaning, the board is super-sensitive to others, given to using gender-neutral pronouns. Round and round they go, pursuing a goal of inclusion they’ll tragically never achieve.

When this becomes abundantly clear, they turn to “Community Activated Conversation,” opening the crisis management meeting to all parents via the school’s Facebook page. Suddenly, the screen on the library wall is alive with irrelevant, hilarious, extraneous remarks. And the five poor actors on stage have to play through the laughter that was not of their doing.

Anna D. Shapiro, the Tony-winning director of August: Osage County, have gotten some fine performances from the flinty five: Hadestown’s Amber Gray, A View From the Bridge’s Jessica Hecht (an actress who’s not afraid to let her harridan out), Old Hat’s Bill Irwin, Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch and How the Light Gets In’s Chelsea Yakuta-Kurtz. Plus 40 Facebook nuts.

Though Eureka Day finds some comedy in the vaccination debate, it’s clear Spector thinks the subject is no laughing matter. “You’re already seeing in red states the rates of people getting their kids vaccinated for measles and mumps going down,” he says of the current moment. “It’s quite scary. If you talk to any doctor or any public health official, they’re very, very anxious about it.”

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Yellow Face, which wraps a successful revival run at Roundabout’s Haines Theater today, is a semi-autobiographical play written by David Henry Hwang. How semi-autobiographical? The main character, DHH, is a playwright trying to stage a production of David Henry Hwang’s own 1993 play Face Value, a notorious flop from the author of M. Butterfly, which had made Hwang the first Asian American playwright to win a Tony Award for Best Play in 1988.

But Yellow Face also concerns the U.S. government’s fear of Chinese interference in American elections, and the suspicion that fell on Chinese churches, Chinese scientists and Chinese businessmen, including David’s own father, Henry Yuan Hwang. If all this sounds au courant, consider that Yellow Face was first produced nearly 20 years ago, in 2007, first in Los Angeles and then in New York at the Public Theater.

“It’s amazing,” Francis Jue tells Observer. Jue plays HYH, the character based on Henry Yuan Hwang, having first played the role at the Public. “David wrote Yellow Face 20 years ago when it was happening, but it feels like it’s a play of today. We’re still talking about the same questions. What do we believe America is? Who should be able to decide who we are? Why can’t we decide for ourselves? I feel grateful to be doing this show right now because it feels like I am not just sitting at home screaming at my TV. I can do his play and talk to people about how we’re all in this together.”

In the ‘90s, David Henry Hwang wrote Face Value to address issues of representation, after the furor that erupted when he criticized the casting of an Englishman, Jonathan Pryce, as an Asian in Miss Saigon. One part of Yellow Face is a farce about who gets to play who and the frustrations that DHH endures while staging Face Value (which folded fast after its eighth preview). But the other part involves the crushing of HYH’s immigrant dreams. The first part gets laughs; the second part draws tears.

Henry Yuan Hwang started out a laundryman, took a sharp right turn and became a successful banker who founded the Far East National Bank. In the 1990s—during government investigations into supposed Chinese involvement into money-laundering and campaign interference—the U.S. stripped the Far East National Bank of its charter. Henry was a true-blue believer in the American way of life; he saw himself as something of a James Stewart doing good for others. The government’s devaluing of Chinese citizens was a bruising betrayal of his beliefs, and the threat of prison time further deepened his bitterness.

Like M. Butterfly, Yellow Face was a Pulitzer Prize finalist when it was first presented in 2007. Francis Jue’s performance as HYH at The Public won him both the Obie Award and the Lucille Lortel Award. Now, 17 years later, he’s on Broadway going for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor. Considering how perfectly Jue fits the part, it’s hard to imagine that he wasn’t first choice for it. But when Yellow Face premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, David had another actor in mind for the father role, Tzi Ma, an actor he had grown up with and who had done a lot of his original plays at The Public. When Ma couldn’t do workshops and readings at Stanford before the L.A. gig, director Leigh Silverman brought Jue aboard but promised he’d never get to play the part—words she subsequently ate when Tzi Ma couldn’t come to do the Public run.

“I had hopes of doing it,” Jue admits, “but it wasn’t mine. I learned very early on that my job was not to take possession of a role. It’s to serve the role. It’s to serve the playwright, what the playwright wants to say, what the director wants to say—and this is a role that I really enjoy because I’ve given the opportunity to work on shows where I agree with what they’re saying.”

The Bay Area native adds, “The brilliance of David and Leigh in this play is that they’re saying, ‘We’re all ridiculous talking ourselves in circles about these issues when they’re very simple. If David’s father believed that he could be Jimmy Stewart, why aren’t we all seen as human beings with the same human potential—without all the fog of seeing people based on where they came from, what class they are, what gender they all are? Why is it so hard for us just to see that? We don’t live in that ideal world yet. We don’t live in a world where it’s okay for white people to play Asians.”

Jue worked hard to develop a father-son rapport with Daniel Dae Kim, who stars as DHH. “There was a moment in rehearsal where, instead of talking to each other on the phone, we face it out toward the audience,” Jue remembers. “We decided we would rehearse it just looking at each other. I recall distinctly being in that rehearsal, just looking at him and suddenly glowing with such pride and admiration for this man as though he really was my son.”

HYH is spared prison but not cancer, which metastasizes as the investigations come up empty-handed. Jue does an elegantly understated job of reciting the obit David actually wrote for Henry. Then he moves into a mist-heavy background uncertain where to turn.

“It took time to figure out what we wanted to say in that moment, how it should be realized,” Jue notes. “Leigh, to her credit, gives all of us—actors and designers alike—room to try things. She wants to see it all. She says, ‘Try this,’ and we come to the same conclusions together.

“I think that anyone who has a parent, anyone who has a kid, will get something from this play. Although it starts as this big farce, it then becomes very serious and very political. It just narrows down to this beautiful relationship between a father and his son, what parents want for their kids that they don’t allow for themselves, what responsibilities kids feel for parents.”

If you were not lucky enough to see Yellow Face on Broadway, despair not. The show will be taped later this week for PBS. “I don’t know when it’s going to air, but they’re hoping that it comes out sometime in the spring,” Jue says. “I’m really happy that this play—this production—is going to have a wider audience. For the next few years, I hope that PBS plays it over and over and over because it’s a great reminder of the hopes that we have for this country and the dreams that we have for the best values of America.”

Chances are the multi-talented Darren Criss is as cross-eyed as the rest of us are with the twists and turns his career has taken over the past 13 years. In 2009, he began in television with six years of Glee, playing the lead singer of the Warblers, and helping power a Warblers focused soundtrack album to Number 2 on the Billboard album chart. Then in 2018 he switched from singing to spree killing, giving a stunning, steel-plated performance as Andrew Cunanan in Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. That got him a Golden Globe and a Primetime Emmy and set people to thinking there might be a serious actor lurking inside that singer.

Before that could be settled, the singer reemerged, as a replacement in a Broadway revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, raking in $4 million during his three weeks. That was followed with an Off-Broadway revival of Little Shop of Horrors at the Westside Theater and a stint in Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the Belasco Theater.

Two years ago, the actor was back when producer Jeffrey Richards hired him for some deep-dish David Mamet drama, American Buffalo. Now Richards has returned Criss to the Belasco, and singing, for an original Broadway musical, Maybe Happy Ending—a very original musical, in that it’s about the love life of robots in Seoul circa 2064.

You’ll not find much of that Glee guy you know and love in the character Criss plays in Maybe Happy Ending, a lonely Helperbot robot who putters aimlessly about his tiny apartment, listens to jazz and devotes all his TLC to a favorite pot plant. That changes swiftly when a female form of Helperbot, Claire (Helen J Shen), drops by to borrow his charger. Sparks fly, then conversation, and inevitably a kind of amorous connection.

Despite the nuts and bolts, what we have here is basically a rom-com, with a charming book and score by a couple of NYU classmates.

Actually, there are two books and two scores, one in English, one in Korean. Will Aronson, 43, of New Haven, composed the music, and Hue Park, 41 of South Korea wrote the lyrics. Once they did that, they put their heads together and wrote “connecting tissue”—a play in praise of love’s rejuvenating effects. Even robots at the end of their warranty are susceptible.

Evidently, Hue won the toss because the Korean version premiered first—in Seoul, where the story is set—and proved to be such a success that stateside productions were put together. The English edition made its first U.S. appearance two years ago at Atlanta’s Alliance Theater, where The New York Times’ Jesse Green deemed it “Broadway-ready.” Thus, we now have a live-action robot show going strong on West 44^th.

The terror of doing this kind of production, Criss confesses, is that actors are afraid they’ll look like cartoons of their character, taking big, blocky robot steps around the stage. “The show has no listed choreographer,” he tells Observer. But he feels he has that situation well in hand. He and director Michael Arden “have taken a particular interest in making sure the physicality is distinct,” he says. “And I’d be remiss not to mention  a teacher at Juilliard, Moni Yakim, who had some Zoom discussion with us about this.

“It’s kind of a cocktail of those three things: Moni’s suggestions, Michael’s pursuit of perfection and my own interest in physical theater. It’s a skill set that I’ve never been able to utilize—at least to this level. When I was in college, I took a semester off so that I could study physical theater at the Accademia dell’Arte, the performing arts school in Arezzo, Italy.”

A cast of four inhabit the show: Dez Duron, Marcus Choi, Criss, and Shen. You may detect a little kinetic energy between Criss and Shen. That’s because they both attended the University of Michigan—albeit, not at the same time. “She graduated about two seconds ago, and I may have graduated a little longer ago than that,” concedes Criss.

“She graduated two years ago, and 10 years ago my name was up on the marquee at the Belasco Theater. And to be able to come back to the Belasco—but this time to share that billing with a fellow Michigan grad—is a very special moment for me. I’m now the upper-class man to the freshman of Helen J Shen. This is her Broadway debut. It’s a big moment for her, and getting to see her through that on stage—to call that a job is really a special thing for me.”

The enthusiasm Criss brings to the stage is practically palpable—and he still remembers where it came from: encountering Robin Williams at an impressionably early age in the 1992 animated Disney flick, Aladdin, in which his outrageous Genie-jiving was almost heart-stoppingly hilarious.

“I was probably six or seven—and I noticed how this audience connected with each other and with this Genie on the screen. I was very taken with that idea, and I wanted to give people what this Genie was giving them. Then, I found out the voice of that Genie was Robin Williams, who was such a prominent figure out in San Francisco, where I grew up. That made it an accessible concept: ’Oh, Mr. Williams is an actor. I’d like to be an actor, too.’ So I hopped right on it.”

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Director Sam Mendes and playwright Jez Butterworth were friends for 30 years before they got around to collaborating. The result, The Ferryman, won them both 2017 Olivier Awards in England and 2018 Tony Awards here. Their sequel, The Hills of California, bodes even better.

“I do, unconditionally, love Jez’s writing—even in his minor plays,” Mendes tells Observer. “I love the worlds that he inhabits, the way he tells stories. We had a great experience doing The Ferryman, and I told him, ‘Listen, when you write your next play, please send it to me.”

Butterworth did just that—in installments. “He sent me Act I,” says Mendes, who suggested a reading of the work in progress. “Because I know his hearing the readings gets him to carrying on with the writing. Straightaway, it was just magic.” The story was set in Blackpool, England, where four teenaged sisters are pushed by their mother to replicate the sound of the Andrews Sisters, and that first act unfolded in both 1955 and 1976, so some of the same characters appeared as their younger and older selves. “I liked the fact that, for the first time, he was making a play that existed on two timescales and not just in one room,” says Mendes. “It was two parts of the play, talking to each other.” 

Mendes liked it so much, in fact, that he was on board as director from the moment of the reading of that first act. “I said, ‘Yeah, I’m in. I’d like to direct this when you finish it,’” he remembers. “I think that—plus the readings—got him going. He wrote the second act, and we did another reading, then another act and another reading.” He and Butterworth cast the play as they went, so by the time they’d finished the third reading, most of the roles were set. “We did that with The Ferryman, too. It’s a great way to cast a show because you can see the chemistry between people. You’re not just casting individuals. You’re casting a group, a family.”

The Hills of California opened first in London earlier this year, in January. A few of the original cast members were unable to be in the Broadway production, but those who play the four sisters—both as teenagers and adults—were. “So the core of eight women is the same,” says Mendes. “And that’s the center of the play.” 

Seventeen actors are required to cover the 18 characters in Hills. The star—Laura Donnelly, whose true family story inspired Butterworth to write The Ferryman and who is now Mrs. Butterworth—drew the double duty. Though more than that, actually: Butterworth decided, before he brought the play to Broadway, he would do a major rewrite on one of the two characters she plays, revising and (all say) “improving” what London’s West End saw. Which meant his wife had quite a lot of heavy-duty memorization to do in all of 10 days.

“Laura’s a supreme interpreter of Jez’s work,” Mendes says. “It’s a lovely thing to watch. They don’t talk about it much. They just say, ‘Let’s get on with it.’ Jez trusts Laura, and she rarely challenges and doesn’t question. She wants to bring the text to life and trusts we will tell the story. She’s a remarkable actress, so economical and so uninterested in courting the audience.”

Here, Donnelly plays Veronica Webb, a single mom who operates the run-down Sea View Guest House in Blackpool, England, and uses the wait-staff (her four teenage daughters) to entertain what guests happen by with an assortment of somewhat tarnished Golden Oldies. “A song is a place to be,” she tells them. “Somewhere where you can live and where you can go anywhere.”

The girls’ repertoire centers on standards, some of which would have been relatively new in 1955 (“When I Fall In Love” was just three years old at the point) and others of which (like  “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B,” introduced  in 1941 by the Andrews Sisters, a model for the sister act) were already beginning to gather dust. The obvious flaw with these selections is apparent to an American talent scout who’s inveigled into catching the act, and he levels with their mother. For Mendes, his truth unravels Veronica’s out-of-touch ambitions. “The agent says, ‘Have you heard of Elvis Presley?’ and she says, ‘I don’t know what that is.’ It is a moment where the world has turned, and she’s missed it. Then, he flatly tells her, ‘This is not popular music. It’s not what people want anymore.’”

His darker motives start to emerge when he spots potential in the oldest daughter, 15-year-old Joan, and negotiates with Veronica for a private guest-room to audition. This earns her a shot at genuine stardom as well as an easy exit from a dead, eventless life by the English seashore.

Two decades later, a grown-up, hardened Joan (now Donnelly, in her overhauled role) returns to her roots—to a mother dying upstairs in the now-ghostly, four-story hotel and to three sisters full of festering regrets and flat notes; two of them married, and one never left home. Joan’s place in the Hollywood sun came and went, she tells her sisters, and once, reduced to pizza-delivery during “a slow period,” she came into actual contact with two surviving Andrews Sisters.

There’s a scene when the adult Joan starts up those stairs to her mother—and stops, frozen by the sight of the adolescent Joan.  “That was me,” Mendes confesses. “I needed to animate that moment, and it was difficult. It’s a moment when the idea of two actors playing the same role—one a teenager and the other in her 30s—can pay off, something you can do on stage that you can never do in any other form. You’ve got one part of the play speaking to the other.

“This is one of the hardest plays that I have ever directed. It’s both big in scale and seemingly robust, but it’s also delicate and needs so much precision and a kind of gentle hand. And still, you must keep this big sweep, keep the thing moving and evolving in a kind of space and time.”

One of Life’s Little Ironies is that, next month, Veronica Webb at the Broadhurst will be rubbing elbows with Audra McDonald at the Majestic, playing the definitive Pushy Stage Mom, Gypsy’s Mama Rose. Mendes, who directed Bernadette Peters’ Tony-winning Mama Rose 20 years ago, allows there’s a connection. “But no one in the U.K. mentions it. Gypsy is so much the main artery of show business in New York. I didn’t read The Hills of California so much like that. I don’t feel it’s a stage mother thrusting her daughters into show business. Yes, that’s what happens in the narrative, but the play at its roots is about something completely different.

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The title of N/A—the slight but sprightly two-hander that Congressional aide-turned-playwright Mario Correa has concocted out of thin D.C. air and director Diane Paulus has delivered to Off-Broadway’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater—is very shorthand for Nancy Pelosi, the first woman Speaker of the House, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever to be elected to Congress. 

These two Congresswomen are never named (or initialed, for that matter), and the verbal exchanges that pass between them are entirely imagined (though completely convincing). Still, the models are clear, the time frame runs from the 2018 midterms (when AOC was elected) to the 2022 midterms (when Pelosi ended her time as Speaker of the House), and the parts are cast so perfectly it all plays as real. 

The temptation is great to say Pelosi is Taylor-made for Holland Taylor since it’s hard to imagine anyone—anyone—who better embodies N’s special brand of power, class, humor and dignity. Similarly, Ana Villafañe (who got a Theatre World Award for playing Gloria Esteban in 2015’s On Your Feet) is very much a ringer for Ocasio-Cortez, Beso red lipstick and all. In 80 minutes—five scenes spanning four years—they do their ideological head-butting in Pelosi’s office.

When Taylor got her first whiff of this script, she was on the mend from shoulder surgery. “I didn’t know if I should do a play or not,” she tells Observer. “That’s when they told me they were sending me the script. I didn’t even finish reading it before I called up my agent and said, ‘Tell them yes. Tell them I want to do it as quickly as possible.’”

Because of her surgery, she was corseted in a very comely, pink bodysuit top. “The battery packs are right on my ribcage,” she says. “I’m all trussed up in that thing, but I’m used to performing high-stress situations in, you know, wigs, bodysuits and God knows what else. I just tone it up.”

Her on-stage sparring partner has been a big help. “Ana is remarkable,” Taylor says. “She’s very different from me as a performer, and we enjoy our differences because it leads to something that completes the picture. She has an intellectual understanding of the dynamic of these two better than me. She sees the whole picture.”

The “enemy” is the legalistic language they’re required to fling blithely about the stage. “We’re both sub-talents by the nature of this dialogue,” Taylor admits. “It’s all mental and intellectual. In a way, it’s abstract, and yet there’s a lot of passion involved. But it’s not girl-speak. It’s not the vernacular. It’s not human conversation. It’s full of ideas and mental challenges. I was very late being off-book, which I never am—as in never—but wow: this was something! In this past month, both of us have really got it integrated in our systems. I remember once coming off stage and saying to her, ‘I actually enjoyed that,’ and she told me, ‘So did I!’ Finally, we’re playing!”

Director Paulus, who staged 1776 with an all-female cast, maneuvers this Democratic duo smartly and swiftly through key historical moments. Taylor, being the go-to gal for the acerbic quip or the deadpan insult, starts off with a full round of zingers that put the upstart newcomer in her place. She has been at it so long, Jesse Green suggested in his Times review, her technique has dissolved: “She no longer seems to be delivering the lines but letting them deliver her.”

Taylor established her Broadway beachhead 41 years ago in a roundabout way, first by co-starring with Keith Charles in Breakfast with Les and Bess, an amiable little comedy about a celebrity couple who ran a radio morning show out of their apartment. It was a big success Off-Broadway at the Hudson Guild and kept getting held over month after month. “Our pay to do that play was, basically, car fare—$35 a week,” Taylor remembers. “I was eating at Joe Allen on the tab.” 

But then came a Broadway role, with a few hitches. “I got this offer to take over for Eve Arden in Moose Murders—with a week’s notice—basically, just to get it to opening night. I knew it’d close quickly, so I wouldn’t have to do it for a long time.”

It would turn out to be one of the most notorious flops in Broadway history, so joining the cast on short notice brought its advantages. “The cast members who had gone through the anguish of the rehearsal period were so beaten down and upset and confused,” Taylor says. “The director was the boyfriend of the producer’s daughter, and he didn’t know what to do. It was a shambles. It was like being in a farm house and having the house just literally fall into timber all around you.”

Down it came, but it didn’t take Taylor with it. She emerged better off than before. “I got a Broadway salary for a couple of weeks and went back to work, transferring Les and Bess further uptown to the Lamb’s Club.”

Twenty years passed before Taylor ventured back to Broadway, and this time she wrote her own ticket—Ann: An Affectionate Portrait of Ann Richards, a 2013 solo show saluting the Texas governor. It earned her a Tony nomination for Best Actress. “I researched that play for two long years before I started writing it,” she says. “People sometimes think that I created Ann to give myself a job when nothing could be farther from the truth. If I were going to create a one-woman show, I would have done it before I was 70. It’s not funny at that age to do something on the New York stage. This particular show was two hours, and there was only one pause in the entire play.”

When Richards died in 2006 Taylor found she couldn’t stop thinking about her. “I couldn’t even understand why,” she says. “I met her a few times, but I didn’t know her.” But then a few months after her death Taylor was struck by the idea of a play about Richards (“not a movie of the week or some such thing”) and when she began work on it she was on fire. “I was writing not about a politician and not about anything to do with politics, really. I was writing about the essence of this purpose-driven woman because there was something about her persona that inspired people at a profound level. She was just the be-all and end-all for a lot of people. I wanted to capture that because I thought that some of that inspiration, which she always produced whenever she went, would come across in the play—and I think that it did.”

Meanwhile, her current project—N/A—winds down at the Newhouse on September 1. Taylor believes the show has now entered its best phase: “We’re starting to get diverse audiences,” she says. “It feels like we’re really communicating with a large swath of people.”

Once the run is through, she returns to the West Coast where in mid-September she and a co-star on The Morning Show, Nicole Beharie, are Emmy-contending for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. Taylor plays Cybil Richards, a television exec so far up the corporate ladder she could get nosebleeds, and this crucial episode with Beharie may be the last we ever see of her.

“Cybil is the sort of standard character that I would be offered,” she explained. “She is patrician, she is very powerful, and she’s passionate about the network she owns—very much a legacy person. Why it got really interesting was that they decided to have her get caught in a racially insensitive faux pas and have it exposed by an on-air reporter at her station”—that would be Beharie—“a new hire and a Black woman. It’s blown up into a scandalous story that is wildly out of proportion to what was actually said. The Black reporter asks Cybil to explain her remarks on air. Beharie, who’s a marvelous actress, is coming on like Spartacus into the ring, and Cybil is petrified she will make another misstep. That was the scene. It was electrifying, and it was electrifying for us to do.”

Taylor has won in an Emmy for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, before, in 1999 for her role as  Judge Roberta Kittleson on The Practice (a one-time appearance that proved so powerful it reoccured across five years and 29 episodes). Then there are her five Emmy noms for her roles as the overbearing mom of Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer on Two and a Half Men. Authoritarian females—whether they’re Speaker of the House, governor, judge, network exec or mom—have always been a specialty for Holland Taylor, who has also specialized in finding ways to make them moving, human and accessible.

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Hours after Kamala Harris emerged as a presidential contender, Shaina Taub realized that Suffs—her new Tony-winning musical about pioneering suffragists in the early 1900s—was suddenly playing to a different crowd. 

“The energy and joy in the audience that got released—it was like a balloon,” Taub tells Observer. “People are so ready to feel some sense of hope, and we celebrate that. There’s a lot of work to do, a lot of organizing and campaigning, but I think there’s a new light under everyone to get it done.”

One of the people to thank for Suffs is the last female Democratic nominee to run for President of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who, impressed with Taub and the show, came aboard late as a lead producer. You can’t make this stuff up. Taub’s word for this message-laden connection is “surreal.”

The idea of doing a musical based on the suffragists—from their 1913 march on Washington the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration to the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920 giving women the right to vote—did not originate with Taub. Producer Rachel Sussman had dreamed about it since she was 12 and suggested it to Taub over dinner in 2014. She also gave her a copy of Doris Stevens’s 1920 book, Jailed for Freedom, a firsthand account of the movement. Taub read it in one night and signed up immediately, shocked that it was all news to her. To say she was inspired would be an understatement: she wrote the book, lyrics and music for Suffs. The plan was to do a show celebrating the centennial of the 19th amendment, but Covid-19 took care of that.

Suffs tried to world-premiere Off-Broadway on April 6, 2020, and closed quickly for two weeks because of the number of Covid cases among the cast. “I got Covid on what would have been our opening night,” Taub remembers. “We never got to have an opening night at The Public. It was a really low moment of having that ritual taken away from us by the circumstances of the world.”

The show weaved through its initial engagement under the cloud of Covid, nursing some critical body-blows which Taub translated into learning experiences. “The work never stopped,” she noted. “There was no reset. Some people say, ‘Oh, did you go back to the drawing board after The Public?’—but I felt that we never left the drawing board. We—my wonderful collaborator, director Leigh Silverman, and I—knew we weren’t done. We were just excited to keep going.”

Mostly, Taub followed the advice of Lin-Manuel Miranda. “There’s so much you can learn about a musical once it gets in front of an audience. You can do workshops and readings for years, but the audience will tell you real fast. I was so energized to use the intellect from the audience.” 

Taub tapped into the audience’s intellect not from the wings, but from the stage—in addition to creating the show, she stars as Alice Paul, a key figure in the movement. “Performing in the show helps because you get their data pool,” she says. The audience became her guide when it came to revising the show before it’s Broadway debut. “I know what always works. I know what never works. I know what works sometimes, and I can make the necessary adjustments based on that.” 

By the time Suffs got to Broadway and the Music Box Theater last April, Taub had added dialogue scenes to the originally sung-though musical. She is the first woman to ever independently win Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Score in the same season—and the second woman to write the book, lyrics and music for a show and act a leading role; the last (and only other) person to accomplish this was Micki Grant for 1972’s Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope.

It took Taub a decade to create Suffs—and two more years to overhaul it. Depending on how you count it (which is difficult), Broadway is getting 17 new, or relatively new, songs. “Basically, I’m not sure,” she admits of the count. “Some songs the music completely changes. Some songs, I change the lyric. Some songs, I kept the lyric but added a new melody. It’s hard to quantify.”

One new addition gets the show off to a bouncy, ingratiating start—a marked improvement over the Brechtian Off-Broadway opener “Watch Out for the Suffragette,” in which the ensemble of revolutionary women (made up of female and nonbinary actors) sock it to their male detractors and threaten “to scold you for three hours.” That opener played for years in development before Taub realized how off-putting it was for audiences who knew nothing of what they were getting into, so she lightened the lecture-to-come with a sprightly bit of vaudeville, “Let Mother Vote.”

“Those three words were like a campaign slogan for the suffrage movement of that era,” Taub explains. “There were buttons that said ‘Let Mother Vote.’” Taub says she “palmed that” and thought, “Why not have a fun, upbeat ditty that would convey that message?”

The number clarifies what’s to come for the uninitiated much like the way the late addition of “Comedy Tonight” told people what to expect from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Almost all the cast show up for it, including some name-brand performers parading as vintage suffragists: Jenn Colella as Carrie Chapman Catt, Emily Skinner as Alva Belmont, Nikki M. James as Ida B. Wells, Hannah Cruz as Inez Milholland. These characters are old and young, moderate and radical, Black and white—they don’t mix well, but, despite the clashes, their eyes are on the prize.

Once these ladies sing their say, Taub makes her entrance—16th in a cast of 17—as the young and impatient Alice Paul, singing the firebrand’s anthem, “Finish the Fight.” In her mind, Taub says she was thinking of her own fight: “I’ve been trying to finish the show all these years.”

The song is reprised at the very end of the show, followed by another late addition number that literally gives the audience its marching orders, a rousing closer called “Keep Marching.”

Will Taub be leaving Suffs to play the anarchist revolutionary, Emma Goldman when City Center’s Encores! stages Ragtime from October 30th to November 10th? “Yes and no,” she answers. “I’ll be out for most of those two weeks, yes. But I’m excited that on election night and on the Wednesday matinee the day after the election, they’re not having Ragtime performances—so I can do Suffs those 24 hours. No matter what happens, it will be quite an intense and emotional place to be.”

Being able to perform in both Ragtime and Suffs is particularly exciting for Taub, since Ragtime is her favorite show. “That’s what I grew up listening to,” she says. “It was such an inspiration for me.” In fact, the Ragtime song “He Wanted to Say”—which has Emma Goldman narrating the thoughts of another character—inspired a song in Suffs, “She and I,” a duet between Alice Paul and  Carrie Chapman Catt. “I use a similar form where you get to hear Carrie’s inner life, which she can’t express too well,” says Taub. “That’s my homage to ‘He Wanted to Say.’”

There’s a certain casting logic that would turn Taub from Alice Paul into Emma Goldman. 

“I love getting to play a fiery activist—especially Emma,” she admits, “I grew up in rural Vermont, where there was no Jewish community per se, but I became so obsessed with Ragtime that it made me look up Emma Goldman. She is the first model of a Jewish activist I ever had as a kid.” 

Goldman shows up in several musicals—not just Ragtime but in Assassins and Tintypes. That last one, Taub says with pride, “I actually did at summer camp. Emma’s winding in and out of American-history musicals. I hope eventually that someone writes an Emma Goldman musical, full stop.”

Whatever, it won’t be her, she promises. “I may take a break from historical musicals.”

Evidently so: She spent the summer of ‘22 in Chicago, supplying lyrics to Elton John’s music for The Devil Wears Prada. More work is needed. “When it became clear the schedules were going to overlap, I wanted to make sure that Prada would have someone who would be there to meet in the room and collaborate when I’m bound to the Music Box Theater for God knows how long.”

Will she be leaving Suffs to go to London to work on Prada? The answer to that, she’s happy to say, is an emphatic no. “I actually brought on an additional lyricist, Mark Sonnenblick, who will do additional lyrics and revisions because I can’t be there. I’m in touch with him every day, weighing in from afar, but there’s only so much you can do when you don’t have eyes and ears on it.”

With projects that take years from start to stage, such an arrangement makes sense. “I think we should normalize that kind of collaboration in musical theater,” Taub says. “Given our schedules and our lives, it’s not always realistic to be fully there.”

Meanwhile, crowds keep coming to the Music Box. “Our audiences have blown me away. To look out there at a full house or meet people at the stage door is wonderful. They’re of all ages and genders—but especially mothers and daughters and grandmothers.” Return visits are common, she adds. 

“The hunger, I think, that people have for a story like this—a feeling of possibilities in these hard times—I hope we’re lucky enough to get to continue providing that for them as long as we can.” 

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The Tony-winning Best Musical of 1997 and the Oscar-winning Best Picture of 1997 were both titled Titanic and told the same tale: the disastrous maiden voyage of a supposedly indestructible “Ship of Dreams,” which struck an iceberg 95 miles from land and took 1,517 souls to watery graves. It remains the most famous maritime tragedy of the last century.

Hardly an apt notion for a musical, you’d think, but that’s seriously underestimating the stirring melodies and heartfelt lyrics which Maury Yeston pinned to the project. One of his greatest and most complex scores is filled with music that is majestic, then somber, loving in its ballads, hymn-like on occasion and more-often-than-not soaring.

Problematic reviews came close to scuttering the show the first time around, but the public came to its rescue. Titanic ran 804 performances on Broadway and won all five of its Tony nominations: Best Musical, Best Score (Yeston), Best Book (Peter Stone), Best Orchestrations (Jonathan Tunick) and Best Scenic Design (Stewart Laing). The only thing that was missing after that was to have The Times’ Ben Brantley eat his mean-spirited original review in public. 

Titanic is currently making its first appearance in New York in this century as one of New York City Center’s Encores! (running through June 23). Certainly, the June 11th opening-night crowd reacted accordingly, enthusiastically embracing its return with ovations.

Encores! has spared us the technically cumbersome illusion of a ship—hell, there’s not even a life-jacket around—but it does maintain the impression of a three-tier vessel. Raised to the upper-most level is the captain’s brig, containing 30 musicians led by the brilliant Rob Berman.

Director Anne Kauffman has beautifully arranged her cast of 32 in groups of threes across the main stage, each according to its class status. In third class are the poor, immigrants in search of a new beginning in the new land. Above them are the second class chafing a bit from being in middle; one lass in particular (Bonnie Milligan inheriting the role done originally by her Kimberly Akimbo co-star, Victoria Clark) wants to mingle with an eligible millionaire.

Traveling first class (as well they should) are the owner (Brandon Uranowitz), designer (Jose Llana) and captain (Chuck Cooper) of “The Largest Moving Object” in the world. Uranowitz, as the director of the White Star Line, is the show’s major irritant, needling the captain for more speed. Also comfortably ensconced here: monied titans like John Jacob Astor (Evan Harrington) and Isidor Straus of Macy’s (Chip Zien) and his wife of 40 years, Ida (Judy Kuhn); the latter has a heart-swelling moment realizing, “As we have lived together, so we shall die together.” 

Chuck Cooper, who looks quite spiffy in his Navy whites and is very much the booming voice of authority as the ship’s captain, has a couple of real-life offspring on board: his daughter Lilli Cooper is a decorative addition to the trio of Three Kates, all dreaming of jobs and love in America, and his son Eddie Cooper plays the head of the wait staff who proves to be proficient at removing champagne corks with the swing of a sword.

A lovely scene evolves among the ship staff when a stoker (Ramin Karimloo) talks the radioman (Alex Joseph Grayson) into tapping out a marriage proposal to the girl he had left behind. Other notable contributions are made by Adam Chanler-Berat, A.J. Shively and Andrew Durand.

Act One pretty much ends with the sighting of the iceberg, in a sudden white tower of light. Act Two is primarily about how humanity comes to grips with the dire circumstances. Instead of having a whole ship that tilts, the point is made when a tea cart rolls of its own volition to the other side of the stage. Encores! has done itself proud on all levels here.

By all means, get those tickets. Here’s hoping you’re not the guy rushing on stage, bags in hand, as the Titanic has left Southampton, railing that he will be “the laughingstock of Poughkeepsie. If that isn’t the story of my entire goddamn life!”

Titanic | 2hrs 40mins. One intermission. | New York City Center | 131 West 55th Street | 212-581-1212 | Buy Tickets Here 

Like June, André De Shields is bustin’ out all over these days, busily negotiating a variety of ups, downs and all-arounds. Where once you could find him in the hellish underworld of Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown you’ll soon be able to see him in Heaviside Layer of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s iconic Cats.  

But the evening of Tuesday, June 4th, will find him at The Lighthouse on the Chelsea Piers, where he’ll be honored as Storyteller of the Year at the Moth Ball, a gala to benefit the Moth, the nonprofit that has been staging storytelling events since 1997. Past Storyteller of the Year recipients include Martin Scorsese, Salman Rushdie, Anna Deavere Smith and David Byrne.

Then from the Moth Ball to the Jellicle Ball. Starting June 13th, De Shields will rule the roost when Cats: The Jellicle Ball—a reimagining of Lord Lloyd Webber’s 1981 musical of T.S Eliot’s 1939 collection of poems, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats—opens at PAC NYC for a projected one-month-run that may make its way Broadway. Inspired by the ballroom culture that crossed NYC a half-century ago and was documented in the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, it’s staged as an immersive competition by both Zhailon Levingston (who directed Adrienne Warren’s Tony-winning performance as Tina Turner) and Bill Rauch (who directed Bryan Cranston’s Tony-winning as LBJ in All The Way). To maintain the Ballroom sweep, two different choreographers—Arturo Lyons and Omari Wiles—are also being pressed into service.

De Shields now describes himself as “a student of the Moth tradition,” having been recruited by the Moth’s former artistic director, Catherine Burns, after she caught him in Hadestown. De Shields won a Tony in 2019 for his Hermes, and his narration of the tragic, don’t-look-back love story of Orpheus and Eurydice made it clear he would be good at Moth matters.

“That’s a concept that every individual is on a journey, living a story,” De Shields tells Observer. “Not many of us know how to relate this to the other demographics, but Mrs. Burns has developed a system that allows and encourages the individual to reveal how he is doing on his journey. The Moth brings us to the humanistic conclusion that we’re all more alike than we care to admit.”

The Moth has had an NPR show, The Moth Radio Hour, since 2009, and in addition to live shows at venues both national and international it has a weekly podcast as well. But it wasn’t till April of 2022 that The Moth did an evening of storytelling—featuring one told by De Shields—at a legitimate house: the Walter Kerr Theatre where Hadestown is ensconced. 

“When Iris’ Eyes Were Smiling” was the title of De Shields’ offering. “Iris was my third eldest sister, who died of cervical cancer in 1977,” he explains. “We were spiritual twins. She wanted to be a performer almost as much as I did. I became a performer, and she lived her life vicariously through me, choosing to marry and have children instead of performing. But she would take me out to the neighborhood parties, and we would do all the late ’50s-early ‘60s dances—the chicken, the locomotion, the watusi. I would be her partner, and we would win contests. The beauty of the story is that she was my greatest supporter and she never saw me perform.” 

De Shields has been spending most of June rehearsing for the strange second-coming of Cats with two directors and two choreographers. “For this particular production,” he notes, “that’s exactly what we need. We need different perspectives because the story now is so intergenerational. In the ballroom culture, each person comes from a house, like the House of La Beija that Crystal LaBeija founded.” The House of LaBeija, like the houses in Paris is Burning, provided a sense of belonging and community to Black and Latinx queer and trans people who fought to reinvent and celebrate themselves after being systematically excluded from society.

The House of LaBeija was founded in 1968, but Cats: The Jellicle Ball is “solidly in the 21st century,” says De Shields. “That’s the only reason why we can superimpose the ballroom culture on top of it because of what we know about the nature of cats. We love them because they are so inscrutable. They can be from heaven, or they can be from hell. They’re independent, and they’re sexy. All of that is what this community claims.”

Unsurprisingly, De Shields makes a majestic old mentor of Old Deuteronomy, searching through the feral cats who live in the alleys for one worthy enough to ascend to the Heaviside Layer. He descends to the earthbound ballroom houses in order to choose the individual who deserves the redemption the Heaviside Layer represents. (Don’t they make Betty Buckleys anymore?)

In that role in the original production, Ken Page returned to earth to investigate in a massive Mack Truck tire. He and De Shields were the male contingent in two Broadway productions (1978 and 1988) of the Fats Waller revue, Ain’t Misbehavin’. They also co-starred in the original 1975 Broadway production of The Wiz—Page playing The Lion and De Shields playing The Wiz.

“I haven’t had that conversation with Ken about my stepping into his very large shoes as Old Deuteronomy, but we’ve been friends for many years,” De Shields says. “I feel his blessing on me, and one of my inspirations is to make him proud of having passed this role on to me—especially now that the entire process is being claimed by a different generation and a community of performers who can take it beyond its traditional T.S. Eliot starting point.

“Not only is this new production going to be animated and frenzied and busy with ballroom choreography,” he adds, “it’s going to be beautiful. That’s the most important ingredient.” 

After a four-year tour-of-duty, does he miss being in hell—er, Hadestown—anymore? Some people don’t even know he’s left and consorting with cats. He’s the one who leads off the television ad with an expansively welcome to Hadestown flourish. “Which is lovely,” he allows, “because I get shekels for that. It’s the only annuity I have from Hadestown. The other problem that creates: People come up to me—often!—and say, ‘Oh, I love you in Hadestown.’ When I say, ‘Oh, when did you see it?’, they said, ‘Oh, I didn’t see it. I saw you—in the television ad.’”

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