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.
Death of a Salesman (c) Emilio Madrid
Laurie Metcalf, who seems too strong-willed to play Willy’s passive housewife, Linda, turns out to be a revelation. She is both a supportive but deferential cheerleader of Willy (Linda knows he is struggling) as well as a reprimanding matriarch of their two sons, Biff (Christopher Abbot) and Happy (Ben Ahlers). Abbot is agonizing as the aimless son, who wanders the West, barely holding any jobs and always at odds with Willy over his lost potential as the big football star in high school. Ahlers, making his major New York stage debut (he is most known for playing Jack, the servant with higher ambitions in the HBO series The Gilded Age), is fine as Happy, bearing the weight of his nickname as the only optimistic character on stage. Other notable actors in the cast are Jonathan Cake as Willy’s more successful brother and K. Todd Freeman as Willy’s more successful neighbor. The huge cast is committed, especially the actors playing young Biff (Joaquin Consuelos) and Happy (Jake Termine), roles usually played by their older counterparts. I just wish there was more to this interpretation than the unrelenting doom and gloom, with Jack Knowles’ lightning and Mikaal Sulaiman’s sound designs accentuating the dystopian mind of Willy Loman. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter wandered in from their Beckett play earlier in the season. The audience was with the actors at every plot turn and heartbreak, but with comic actors like Lane and Metcalf, I was hoping Mantello would find some humor in the heartbreak in the same way Jack Lemmon did in Long Day’s Journey into Night decades ago. Still, attention certainly must be paid to this production with audiences getting another chance to see one of the most celebrated plays of the American canon.
Dog Day Afternoon (c) Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
Broadway: Dog Day Afternoon
At the August Wilson Theatre
In one of the oddest moments of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s otherwise enjoyable and crowd-hyping stage adaptation of the film, Dog Day Afternoon, Sonny (Jon Bernthal), a bank robber who comes out of a heist to negotiate with the police, instead rouses up the gathered crowd with his little man vs Goliath narrative. Sensing the momentum of this, Bernthal is directed (by Rupert Goold) to play to the theater audience, hyping them up with “Power to the people, Fucco! Fuck the mayor, fuck the Rockefellers, fuck Nixon—and fuck the NYPD!” I get it, the play (based on a real-life event) takes place on August 22, 1972, and John Lindsay was the mayor. But it’s (at least of this writing) April 2026, and the 112th mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, is seemingly still well-liked, so the audience wasn’t stirred enough to cheer the first fuck. Nixon, on the other hand? No problem. And the audience was more than happy to do the film’s iconic “Attica!” chant. But, in the world of the play, during one of the hottest dog days of August, it’s no wonder the working-class citizens of NYC found a hero on the TV news in this kindred spirit. Working-class Sonny and his partners-in-crime, Sal (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Ray Ray (Christopher Sears), planned to enter a Chase Manhattan bank in Gravesend, Brooklyn, as it was closing to take the tellers (Jessica Hecht, Elizabeth Canavan, Paola Lázaro, Wilemina Olivia-Garcia, Andrea Syglowski) and the bank manager (Michael Kostroff) as hostages. Things go off the rails from the start, including Ray Ray, who leaves after bringing a guitar instead of a rifle, and the guard (Danny Johnson) having a severe medical attack once the robbery commences. Sonny tries to accommodate everyone, convincing them that he and Sal aren’t bad guys and that no one is going to get hurt, but once the NYPD, led by Detective Fucco (John Ortiz) and the FBI show up, the robbers seem like they are in a no win-situation.
Dog Day Afternoon (c) Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
The play is, of course, based on the wildly beloved Sidney Lumet film from 1975 with Al Pacino as Sonny and John Cazale as Sal. This was odd to me as there’s a whole gay subplot that I thought would have put off filmgoers of the time. Still, in the 1970s, this would have been groundbreaking but now might seem cringy? Sonny, like the real-life John Wojtowicz he is based on, was married and had children before coming out as gay and having a relationship with Leon (Esteban Andres Cruz), who dreams about getting a gender reassignment surgery (or in the language of the play, a sex change). According to the film and play, Sonny was robbing the bank to make Leon’s dream a reality (there are conflicting theories as to Wojtowicz’s real motive). Guirgis leaves most of this subplot for the second act (except for a casual name drop of Julius’, a gay bar for those in the know, early in the play), which begs the question, would the audience (and the New Yorkers) have admired Sonny’s plight if this fact came out earlier. Guirgis doesn’t sensationalize this moment, and Sonny and Leon’s interactions feel genuine (although in a very Brooklyn way). Bernthal, who is most known for The Walking Dead and as The Punisher for Marvel, is making his Broadway debut, and while he leans heavily on the Pacino of it all, that’s what fans of the film came for, so I understand the tendency. The Emmy Award-winning Moss-Bachrach (for The Bear) is also making his debut, has less to do but is convincing as the ticking bomb that could go off at any time. The incredibly large supporting cast is believably Nuu Yawk, with the always reliable John Ortiz and Jessica Hecht being the standouts. The trickiest part belongs to Cruz as Sonny’s wife, who is caught in a strange quagmire not of their own doing. Cruz keeps Leon grounded while also trying to make sense of their feelings. The play sort of ends as it began. Something happens, it feels important and then New Yorkers go about their lives until the next hiccup.
Cats: The Jellicle Ball (c) Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade
Broadway: Cats: The Jellicle Ball
At the Broadhurst Theatre
Always and Forever. That was the tagline for the original 1982 production of Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s inexplicably popular musical that ran for 18 years on Broadway. And while this immersive world of dancing cats was the start of the spectaclization of theater (with helicopters, chandeliers and even King Kong himself to come), by the time the Broadway run ended in 2000 (not forever, apparently), Cats lost most its luster and soon became a punchline, not helped by the truly cringy movie version in 2019. Enter directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, who in 2024, reinvented the musical by not focusing on the cats, but the ball at the center of the show, transforming the action into the glittering and competitive balls of Harlem in which queer men and women walked and danced the runway in outrageously fierce outfits (if Madonna’s Vogue music video is the only ballroom culture you know, you haven’t seen nothing yet). And hands down, Cats: The Jellicle Ball is the most exciting, the most immersive and the most fun you will have on Broadway. The seemingly endless cast (I lost count at 20) are all so talented and committed to the bit, which is ballroom competitions between houses, trying to outdo, outdid and outeverything everyone to win the trophy of the Heaviside Layer. Say what now? As much as I love the whole re-conception of the show, and how there’s a lot of easy correlation between the two Jellicle Balls, the reasons why the show drags (no pun intended) are the stuff that don’t fit that well and feels oddly Jenga’d in, glossed over fast enough to get to the next runway battle.
Cats: The Jellicle Ball (c) Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade
While the creators certainly had some leeway to change and add stuff to show, mostly for the masters of ceremony, Munkustrap (Dudney Joseph Jr.), the Cats-ness of it all could have been pruned to be less early 20th Century British children’s lit. Yes, I am blaming first and foremost T.S. Eliot and his 1939 book of children poems Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, which make up most of the lyrics in the show. Eliot’s portrait of the different personalities of cats being superimposed on those of the ballroom participants work only so far as I can convince myself that they would eat grouse or go to Victoria Station or Dumfries. Despite my wish that the songs could have been edited or rephrased to ballroom vernacular, overall, this is the best version of Cats I have ever seen. I can’t imagine ever going back to the junkyard of olde. In my review of the off-Broadway version, I found that there was a stretch of the first half hour that felt underdeveloped. That is no longer the case as there is now nonstop activity throughout the stage thanks to the MVPs of the production: the choreography of Omari Wiles (House of NiNa Oricci) and Arturo Lyons (House of Miyake-Mugler), with their acrobatic and couture moves never ceasing to impress. The cast is simply the hardest working ensemble on Broadway right now. I have praised the leads in my first review, so this time, let me highlight Sydney James Harcourt as the sexy Rum Tum Tugger, Emma Sofia as a winsome Shimbleshanks and Nora Schell as the commanding Bustopher Jones. Our guest judges the night I attended were Tony Award-winner J. Harrison Ghee (Some Like it Hot) and Dominique Jackson from the TV show Pose, and both were game for the fun. Qween Jean’s costumes continue to impress, Adam Honoré’s lighting is energetic and Rachel Hauck’s redesign runway for a proscenium stage makes the experience feel even more intimate. If you’re lucky, you can grab one of the free black fans that the production hands out for you to participate in during the more ecstatic moments of the show overflowing with them. The euphoria after the exciting curtain call struts is palpable, as you flip that fan and sashay away.
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