Broadway Reviews: IPs on Broadway Get Made Over With an Even More Hopeless “Death of Salesman,” an Engaging “Dog Day Afternoon,” Now Through the Lens of a Mamdani New York and “The Jellicle Ball”—a Fantastic Version of “Cats”

Death of a Salesman (c) Emilio Madrid

Broadway: Death of a Salesman 
At the Winter Garden Theatre 

Ten years ago, I saw my first stage production of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh at BAM with Nathan Lane as Hickey, and for over four hours, Lane embodied the optimistic salesman’s decline into hopeless pipeless dreamer. Now, on Broadway, Lane has taken on another iconic American salesman, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, director Joe Mantello’s excellent, if dour, portrayal of a man looking back on his life and seeing all the mistakes that led him to where he is now. Lane is simply astonishing as Loman, who has started to hate going on the road to make sales in the New England territory, with his mind wandering and his driving erratic. If you’ve seen the poster of the current revival at the Winter Garden, there’s a Chevy, which seems to be the centerpiece metaphor for Mantello’s production, as literally represented by Chloe Lamford’s cavernous haunted warehouse set when, as the play begins, that red car enters the stage and stays there as a reminder of Willy’s successful past and failures in the present. Like Iceman, this revival is actually my first time seeing Salesman, although I have seen plenty of TV incarnations: the 1966 version with original 1949 Broadway stars Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock, and the 1985 version with the celebrated Broadway revival cast that included Dustin Hoffman. Recent Broadway revivals delivered Philip Seymour Hoffman and Wendell Pierce. Lane certainly will be remembered in this pantheon of impressive actors. 

The Interested Bystander: Early 2025-26 Tony Award Nomination Predictions

Every Brilliant Thing (c) Matthew Murphy

It’s the last day of March, and Broadway has started to stir after a rather uneventful early 2026. But there are a dozen shows opening before the Tony Awards cut-off, most of which have started previews or will do so in the next couple of days. 

What better time to make so early (and blind) Tony predictions based on what has opened so far and making assumptions based on reputation of the creators or actors of the show we haven’t seen yet. And there’s the issue of the Tony Awards Committee to set who is eligible for what award, which doesn’t get announced until a couple of days before nominations are voted on. 

So, this is just fun. No disrespect to the shows that I left out. I probably wouldn’t have thought The Outsiders or John Proctor is the Villain was going to be the hits they turned out to be before they opened.   The cutoff date is April 28.  The nominations will be announced on May 5.

Enjoy. 

Harry Potter-Adjacent Broadway Reviews: In “Giant,” a Future Dumbledore Plays a Beloved Children’s Book Author With Troublesome Political Views (Sound Familiar?), While a Former Harry Potter Demonstrates Empathy and Grace in “Every Brilliant Thing”

Giant (c) Joan Marcus

Broadway: Giant 
At the Music Box Theatre

The first thing the audience sees when they walk into the Music Box Theatre for Giant is a broken house, and with all due respect to set designer Bob Crowley, it hits the nail on the design head, but for British playwright Mark Rosenblatt (his first play), it may be too much of an apt metaphor. This is the Gipsy House of Roald Dahl (John Lithgow), and in 1983, he and his fiancée, Liccy (Rachael Stirling), short for Felicity, are renovating it for a fresh start after Dahl’s divorce from actress Patricia Neal. As the play starts, there are construction sounds, and tarp instead of walls, which adds to Dahl’s stress, as he edits his new book, The Witches with his British publisher Tom (Elliot Levey). On top of that, a representative from Farrar Strauss Giroux, Dahl’s American publisher, is set to arrive to discuss the fallout of a book review he wrote where he disparages all Jews for supporting the death and destruction of the 1982 Lebanon War. Both publishing houses want the outspoken author to do an interview where he would apologize for the perceived antisemitic opinions, which they think will affect sales of The Witches. The American arrives (“The eaglet has landed,” Dahl notes) and it’s Jessie Stone (Aya Cash), a young woman who professes her love for Dahl’s book and even has a copy of The Twits for him to sign for her son. Once pleasantries are done with, the real meat of the meeting (and the play) occurs: What to do to smooth over the offensive language in Dahl’s review? Dahl doesn’t see why it’s so imperative, but he does acquiesce for Liccy’s safety as he has received death threats, which is why a policeman is guarding the house. Dahl is rightly suspicious of why Jessie was chosen to represent FSG, and when it’s revealed that she, like Tom, is Jewish, Rosenblatt gets to dig into the knotty geopolitical question of Israel, especially to those people who are watching all of this from outside the Middle East. 

Theater Reviews: “Jesa” Uniquely Focuses on First-Generation Korean Sisters, Now Orphans; “Monte Cristo” Is a Throwback Musical That Slowly Wins the Audience Over; “The Wild Party” Brings Up Memories of its First Production While Forging its Own Identity

Jesa (c) Joan Marcus

Theater: Jesa 
At the Public Theater 

The most impressive element of Jeena Yi’s Jesa, a Public Theater and Ma-Yi Theater Company co-production, is that it takes a well-worn theatrical staple (the family drama) and makes it believably modern. Like the recent plays The Hills of California and The Blood Quilt, Jesa deals with a family of sisters, after the death of their parents, but they’re Korean American (as opposed to Irish or African American as they are in the other plays, respectively). We are at the Southern Californian house of Grace (Shannon Tyo), the second oldest, where she took care of her mother while raising her daughter with her husband. Grace and her sisters are performing a Jesa, a ceremony of remembrance and honor, in which food is placed at the altar dedicated to their parents, as their mother (referred to as Umma) recently passed. Two sisters live nearby: Elizabeth (Laura Sohn), the youngest who is a no-nonsense businesswoman, and Tina (Tina Chilip), the eldest who is a chef. Flying in from New York is third-in-line Brenda (Christine Heesun Hwang), a struggling theater director. Because the ceremony is usually performed by the male members of the family, it’s sort of a hodgepodge evening, with the sisters arguing about the order of events and how things are supposed to be laid out, but refusing to call their male cousins for help. 

Reviews: My Take on the Enjoyable Ryan Gosling Sci-Fi Film, “Project Hail Mary;” a Curious, if Oblique, “Bughouse,” a Play About the Artist Henry Darger; and the Indescribable Aussie Evening at a “Burnout Paradise”

Project Hail Mary (c) Amazon MGM Studios

Film: Project Hail Mary 
In Cinemas 

Even if you didn’t know that the new Ryan Gosling astronaut film, Project Hail Mary, was based on a book by the same author who wrote The Martian, it would become clear soon enough. Like Matt Damon’s botanist character, Mark Watney, stuck on Mars trying to survive on his own, Gosling’s Ryland Grace is a molecular biologist working as a high school science teacher who finds himself alone on a spaceship called the Hail Mary in a different solar system. And like Watney, Grace has to science the crap out his situation. It turns out that our sun is slowly dying, as are most suns in the Milky Way, except the one Grace is there to research to see why it’s immune to the solar disease. Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller have envisioned a beautiful and engaging screen adaptation, but it would not be as successful without a charismatic lead, with Gosling finally getting to shed the wordless loner persona of his characters in Drive and The Place Beyond the Pines to become the relatable charmer that was hinted at in The Nice Guys and La La Land. This is also not Gosling’s first time in space either, as he played Neil Armstrong in the underrated First Man. But here, Gosling’s is so relatable and charming as Grace that the audience I was with at an IMAX 70mm screening was on his side from the beginning. When Grace has to do a spacewalk for the first time, the doors open, the score (excellent, by Daniel Pemberton) and sound effects disappear, and it was only then that I realized how quiet the theater was: no popcorn eating, no talking, no texting. That’s how invested we all were in this poor man’s hopeless situation.