Theater Reviews: “||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :||” Is an Enjoyable Night of All Three, “Small” Is One Man’s Quest of Being a Horse Jockey and “Celebrity Autobiography” Is Now on Broadway, Dropping the Tea

||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| (c) Carol Rosegg

Theater: ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| 
At Vineyard Theatre 

Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright Eisa Davis’ latest play with the unique title of ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| defies categorizing. It is definitely a play, but the four actresses that make up the cast all sing and/or play instruments for almost half the runtime. There is a narrative arc, but the production, as skillfully directed by Pam McKinnon, is more interested in moments rather than the whole. The play takes place at a summer music program in the San Francisco Bay Area in which we follow the ||: Girls :||:, who are all in high school focusing on their :||: Music :||. The most intense of them is singer Fax (Hillary Fisher). She loves the rules of classical music and is most lost when asked to improvise, or in the play’s lingo, allow :||: Chance :||: to take over. More adept at :||: Chance :||: is the school resident outsider and drummer, Margot (Naomi Latta), who is looking for meaning in her mostly unsupervised life, with music being her focus now. Pianist Rile (Yeena Sung) is the most typical teenager, sometimes acting like a mean girl, which may be her defense for wanting to find her tribe. Rounding out the cast is Clementine (Gianna DiGregorio Rivera), who plays a lot of instruments and doesn’t seem too bothered by the teenage angst around her. There are a lot of themes swirling around Davis’ play (lost and found parents, earth-shaking life changes, sexuality, eating disorders, suicidal thoughts), but they take a back seat to when the three elements of the title finally find its harmony in the play’s most satisfying scene. But this happens halfway through and nothing in its second half matches the synergy of that moment. All the actors feel natural and vulnerable, but how newcomer Latta exudes Margot’s open wound personality is astonishing and heartbreaking. Davis, whose next project is a musical with Lin-Manuel Miranda, throws a lot at us during the play’s runtime, giving the audience the choice of what is important to us in these character’s stories (with only a late play “father” subplot being the least earned and far-fetched). Still, this is a very special evening of story, song and humanity. 

The 79th Tony Award Predictions – May 2026

Ragtime (c) Matthew Murphy

The 79th Tony Awards will be handed out on Sunday, June 7. I will post my final predictions the Friday before the awards. But here are my thoughts of who are the front-runners of the major categories as of two weeks before the ceremony. 

Enjoy! 

Film Reviews: Need a Movie to Watch This Holiday? Some Thoughts on “Grogu” and Raiders of the Lost Hutt; “Tuner,” Which Makes Hyperacusis Sexy; an “Obsession” That’s a Straight White Boy’s Nightmare Comes True; and Other

The Mandalorian and Grogu (c) Walt Disney Studios

Film: The Mandalorian and Grogu 
In Cinemas 

Even though we haven’t gotten a theatrical Star Wars film in the cineplex since 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker (a number of disgruntled fans said it indirectly caused the pandemic … it didn’t), I can still tell you the many rules director Jon Favreau eschews in his big screen continuation of the Disney+ series he helped create, The Mandalorian, this time adding the real star of the show: Grogu. Although the film does start with a title card (but not a scroll), it is the first “Star Wars” with Main Title credits (faint!), which is why I knew Amy Sedaris’ TV character would not be in the film, although I was prepared for Sigourney Weaver being a rebel badass, and Jeremy Allen White … as a Hutt? Of course, if you have White voicing a CGI creature, you can’t have him speak Huttese, so for some reason, all the Hutts in this film speak English. The film has the photogenic Pedro Pascal as the titular Mandalorian bounty hunter, and like the show, we rarely see his face. Most kids (okay, and me) will want to see the movie for Grogu (aka Baby Yoda, aka The Child), and the dang puppet sure does deliver, although the inclusion of those Babu Fricks (Anzellans, if I must) makes me think they needed to up the cute quotient a bit (and have them speak the words Grogu, at 50 years old, still hasn’t mastered yet). My problem with the series was that it wanted to legitimize and canonize the animated “Clone Wars” series of yore by Dave Filoni, but thankfully, except for a few instances, including Filoni himself returning as a rebel pilot, a lot of that messy soap opera are not here. In fact, the Force are barely referenced at all, and when it is, I could tell composer Ludwig Göransson wanted to quote John Williams so badly in his exciting and fantastic score. The Lucasfilm franchise this film most resembles is not Star Wars, but Indiana Jones, with Mando’s helmet being as important as Indy’s hat. As a treat for the start of the summer season, it’s a pretty good ride. 

Off-Broadway Reviews: The Past Is Not Full of Rosy Memories in a Rediscovered “Thornton Wilder’s The Emporium,” A British Real Crime Import, “Kenrex” or “Broken Snow,” a Play About a Family Without Pity

Thornton Wilder's The Emporium (c) Marc J. Franklin

Theater: Thornton Wilder’s The Emporium 
At Classic Stage Company 

Some plays need to be seen for the novelty of it all, and that is certainly the case for Thornton Wilder’s The Emporium, the never-performed (in his lifetime) full-length play by Thornton Wilder (1897-1975), whose two most well-known plays, Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) won Pulitzer Prizes and are still widely produced (the former was on Broadway last season and the latter was just adapted into a musical). Even the prologue to its New York premiere at CSC, written by Kirk Lynn, who was the one who pieced together the hundreds of pages of Wilder’s many drafts into what we’re seeing now, seems mostly to play into the audience’s curiosity of what this play could be about and whether it should have stayed in the proverbial desk drawer. The answer to the last question is unfortunately more yes than no. Like Stephen Sondheim’s underwhelming Here We Are, sometimes the writer knows the quality of their work better than their admirers who understandably are hungry for any morsel of artistic output (this theme is explored in Steven Soderburgh’s recent film, The Christophers). Unlike posthumous masterpieces like Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night or E.M. Forester’s Maurice, The Emporium was never finished, and although there are plenty of interesting ideas floating around the story of an orphan whose American dream is to work for the nebulous and mysterious titled, big city department store, it never coalesces into a workable metaphor. The Emporium is the almost unattainable dream of the few willing to achieve it, while everyone else with no such ambitions, can be sated by the other department store, the popular but less refined Craigie’s, the name of which is uttered more times in the play than the name Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth.

‘Schmigadoon!’ and “Prince Faggot” Lead LGBTQ Critics’ Dorian Theater Award Nominations for 2026

Schmigadoon! (c) Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

Here are the nominees of the 2025-2026 Broadway and Off-Broadway season for GALECA's Dorian Theater Awards. A note on eligibility: Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Liberation, and Titaníque were recognized by the Dorian Theater awards for their original Off-Broadway productions. As such, only “new elements” of their Broadway transfers were eligible for consideration this year. 

Winners of the 2026 Dorian Theater Awards will be announced on Monday, June 1, 2026. 

Theater: Recipients of The 80th Theatre World Awards

(c) Theatre World Awards

The 80th Theatre World Award Honorees for Outstanding Broadway or Off-Broadway Debut Performance have been announced for the 2025-2026 season.   The Awards witll be presented at a ceremony on Tuesday, June 2 at the Longacre Theatre.

Again, I am honored to be on the selection committee, and this is a great Class of 2026

Film Reviews: “Blue Film” Is a Sweet, Gay Drama With a Vibe of Salaciousness; “The Sheep Detective” Is a Pretty Good Benoit Baaaaa Mystery; “The Wizard of the Kremlin” Is a Dry Tale of Putin’s Ascent in Russia

Blue Film (c) Strand Releasing

Review: Blue Film 
In Cinemas 

Ever since Elliot Tuttle’s Blue Film opened at the Edinburgh Film Festival last summer, it has carried an aura of naughty gay sexual content, sharing the same trajectory as the BDSM-themed “Pillion” during the same time frame. Pillion opened earlier this year and got decent reviews—now it’s time to see if Blue Film will get a similar reception or better. Aaron Eagle (Kieron Moore, from Boots) is an L.A. sex worker who, at the start of the film, is livestreaming (a la OnlyFans) to his many followers, receiving their adulation while verbally degrading them for it. He boasts that he is seeing one of them tonight for a date for a crazy amount of money. That date/hookup turns out to be with Hank (Reed Birney, of The Humans), an older man who insists on keeping a ski mask on. But as the evening proceeds, the two wear each other’s defenses down, and when the masks are (literally and metaphorically) finally taken off, they soon realize that both are using fake names and they actually know each other from a long-ago chapter in their lives. While the promised blueness of sex and sexual acts are indeed peppered throughout the movie, I was more disturbed by the excessive amount of a casual vaping (which, unlike gay sex, is totally unhealthy). If you’ve seen any episode of Heated Rivalry, you’ve seen more than what’s shown here. But what’s dangerous is the circumstances that the two men find themselves in, making the sex a bit more taboo or psychologically fraught. That the story becomes an understanding (maybe even love) between the two men is thanks to the two actors, the only people in the film. Moore is very charismatic once the rent boy persona is done away with (although there is a moment of Aaron metaphorically shedding his past that is unnecessarily on-the-nose) as his swagger turns to empathy. Birney has the harder role as Hank is (whether self-admitted or not) a sexual predator whose shame has led him to this odd redemption arc; the veteran stage actor is able to find shades of grace in this broken man. Blue Film is a more modest film than Pillion, but its sexual nature, when it arrives, is not sugar-coated for straight audience members, and rather par-for-the-course for gay ones. Ultimately, it is a nicely told character study that will be remembered more than just the physical acts depicted. 

The 79th Tony Award Nominations

Schmigadoon (c) Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

Here are the nominations for the 79th Tony Award, which will be handed out on Sunday, June 7, 2026. The host is P!nk. 

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

The Lost Boys (c) Matthew Murphy

Most of the precursors have been announced. The Tony committee made their final rulings on category eligibility. It’s time for my final predictions for the 79th Tony Award Nominations, which will announced on Tuesday, May 5. There are questions in some categories as to how many nominees will be allowed, but I will make my best educated guess. 

Enjoy.