Helen Shaw

I missed that the wonderful Billy McEntee is one of this year’s George Jean Nathan Award winners!!!! Bravo, Billy! english.cornell.edu/news/2024-25...

😍

Best thing I’ve seen this year, truly

Still floored by Kramer/Fauci at Skirball…grabbed random people today and insisted they see it. Daniel Fish directs Will Brill, Thomas Jay Ryan, Jenny Seastone Stern, Greig Sargent…as they repeat a Kramer/Fauci CSPAN appearance. Verbatim theatre vibrating at extraordinary emotional frequencies…💐💐💐💐💐

A man with a beard looks up at a light bulb

The middle goes astray...there's a song "hands" about "hands." But Pinto never met a doldrum he couldn't blow past, and, when he's deep in his performance trance, he points toward bardic ecstasy. The musicians around the room, playing sighing sax-drones and pounding metal drums, did the rest. HWAET!

A man with a grey beard stands in a theatrical space, pointing

The 1st song is my favorite: a motormouth splatter-chronicle of pre-Mod British history, acted out with toys (I thought of the old Micro Machines ads) including driveby references to Lud & (I think?) Edmund Ironside. Pinto chants faster than I can process; I heard him say "Lud" an hour past the show

A man in a white tshirt runs across a stage, holding (brandishing?) a microphone stand like it's a double-handed axe

And no, Beowulf's lore doesn't coincide with Camelot's. But very similar dragons do lurk in the subterranean spaces of English & Angle-ish & Scandinavian myth. Pinto thus decides his two warrior-bros, so distant in literature, can team up to fight a DREAD WYRM, rock-opera style (screaming into mics)

a man with black hair and a grey beard, wearing a white tshirt and long green gloves, drags on a rope

The audience sits at a huge round table (Kristin Marting directs), which Pinto races around on top of, sometimes chatting personably with us about "The 13th Warrior," sometimes plunging into Tuvan throat-singing. The song-cycle is strongest when Beowulf or Gawain, his two "hero" avatars, face off...

A man with a grey beard and goat horns sings what is obviously some very heavy metal

"Mano a Mano" at La Mama is what happens when too much knowledge about Middle English poetry achieves hyperdensity — then explodes out of composer/performer Paul Pinto's head as a one-man(o) opera. It's deranged (complimentary)...imagine King Arthur's court trapped in the Hellraiser dimension 🧵

The Best Parts of Period Dramas Are the Sheep If they aren’t featured in your movie set in the British countryside, I don’t want it.

absolutely incredible analysis of sheep-on-film here from Jackson McHenry, gets below the wool to the meat beneath www.vulture.com/article/shee...

Wow…a wonderful project and resource www.torchesnyc.org

📌

Man of Tomorrow Makes Lars Eidinger Its Brainiac James Gunn welcomes both Brainiac and Eidinger into the DCU.

rare overlap between "we watched this guy maybe possibly urinate onto the set in Richard III at BAM" and DCU news www.vulture.com/article/man-...

Masha Breeze as Mary, with sad bangs and a green dress, looking down a staircase full of concern. Is it possible that you might miss this show?

Masha Breeze, in the same green dress, but now smiling and lit with a deep rosy pink. Even the bangs are working! That optimism might be because you can still go to the show, for a few more days.

Breeze writes about sisters & FOR sisters (her sister Masha Breeze is the show-stealing Mary), & you can see how well it's working when other things break. When I saw it, a sound cue for the final dance number went *404*. These gals couldn't have cared less—they were dancing for one another anyway.

A moody picture of James Udom wearing a leather gorget and golden vambraces, one hand on his sword

(This one the gorgeous "Henry IV" down at TFANA. Pistol and Hotspur were double-cast with James Udom, and at one point we watched him stride across the tiny stage as the princely Hotspur and then transform into the common rogue just by changing his step and letting us see his gold tooth wink) (6/7)

Edoardo Benzoni as Darcy, looking earnestly at someone he loves, wearing fluffy white sleeves and a golden waistcoat that look like they've been spattered with claret. IT'S NOT CLARET.

Benzoni's ability to toggle between characters just with a sneer & a different shrug is both the warning (#yesallmen) and chief delight of the show. It reminded me of other showboat performances (e.g., Andrew Scott) & my favorite single gesture this year, ALSO in a play directed by Eric Tucker (5/7)

Shayvawn Webster in full expository mode as Jane Bennet, wearing a gold dress, elbow length gloves, and a gold diadem...as in the book, she's a still pool with depths

It's a valuable reading of prim, narcissist Jane, of Lizzie (her choice to marry reflects maturity, not just romance) & it's also a whopper of a farce, driven primarily by Edoardo Benzoni, who plays all the men. His Wickham's a f-boi menace, and he sort of almost seduces the whole family (4/7)

A woman in a spotlight, wearing black lace gloves and a red dress, eats cheese and delivers a hilarious, loquacious monologue. It's the kind of monologue that, in a just world, would catapult Zuzanna Szadkowski to the stardom that she deserves

And the amazing Szadkowski—Meryl Streep's profile & Martin Short's comic timing—aces that. But Breeze goes further: economic fear has made Mrs. B monstrous in other, secret ways. Jane (Shayvawn Webster) & Lizzie (Elyse Steingold) realize the mum they've been mocking is also a danger...and 🤯 (3/7)

Mrs. Bennet looks into her wineglass at a table draped in a white cloth; she looks like she's getting a headache or a presentiment of feminism

Execution is everything. Breeze first makes the expected choice—to deepen Austen's silly Mrs. Bennet (Zuzanna Szadkowski), the book's shrill embarrassment. Breeze explains and explores the way Mrs. B pushes her girls to marriage because only she can see their terrible precarity (2/7)

Lizzie (Elyse Steingold), wearing blue, and Kitty Bennet (Violeta Picayo), in mauve, sit by a staircase reading a letter that is about to disappoint them, perhaps because it says the remaining tickets to their show are one hundred and eighty nine dollars.

Much to my regret I only saw Emily Breeze's "Are the Bennet Girls OK" at Bedlam last night--they close on Sunday, and so the tickets are now TIGHT and also, lbr, pricy. But it's gorgeous! I had clocked it was an Austen-in-modern-idiom project and thought, oh, we've seen those already...(1/7)

& I was reminded all over again that she has one of the best ears for realism in the business. Gabo doesn't always give her believable stuff to play with—these were the sections which seemed less deft. But zoiks, put her in a room with a talent like Guevara and they're going to Burn It Down 🔥 (/end)

Guirgis, Gabo's model, writes for specific voices and Gabo is following in his footsteps. So, ok, those arias fit weirdly into the whole, but looked at as sort of mini-showcases, peacocky collaborations between Gabo and Marryshow, they make more sense. Also, Adrienne Campbell-Holt directs (6/7)

...but this interview in AT explains he's deliberately working in a form he calls "grounded soap." No wonder his NYC felt like the town on Guiding Light, where everyone's related or married. The interview also explains the odd, wildly out-of-place monologues by the superb actor Eden Marryshow (5/7)

The girls lose the argument & then they keep losing. Gabo likes to tear the heart from his characters: their hyper-eloquence increases as their happiness bleeds out. From here, I grew less persuaded; Gabo's world seems to only contain 6 people, all entangled. Coincidence becomes contrivance... (4/7)

...and her daughters, played by Yadira Guevara and Kana Seiki. It's a gorgeously spiky three-way fight, with Guevara landing most of the body blows (her character is revolted that her mom would put her body on the line for a corrupt military), but we can also tell she hates every word she says (3/7)

The play is a Colt Coeur joint, another way of saying there are several major performers working in a theatre the size of a postage stamp. It's performing through 12/20, and I did really admire one of its first act scenes, a confrontation between Liza Fernandez, playing a woman being deployed (2/7)

On the Real With Stephen Adly Guirgis and Chris Gabo The 2 playwrights compare notes on what they learned from TV writing, what they owe their community, and Gabo's new play 'The Surgeon and Her Daughters.'

I was fascinated to read this conversation between playwright Chris Gabo and Stephen Adly Guirgis since I saw Gabo's "The Surgeon and Her Daughters" at Theatre 154 last week and was having trouble placing some of its strategies... (1/7) www.americantheatre.org/2025/12/14/o...

Cherry Lane Theatre Partners With Annie Baker to Launch Playwrights Collective The Off-Broadway theatre and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright

I was just thinking how it was a bummer that the Cherry Lane Mentor Project was no more, and then This! Great! News! playbill.com/article/cher...

Memory Speaks in “Marjorie Prime” and “Anna Christie” June Squibb sparkles opposite Cynthia Nixon in a futuristic drama, and Michelle Williams loses her way in Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize winner.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

The Best Theatre of 2025 It was a banner year for generation-defining performance, both up- and downtown.

One of the things I love most about writing "top ten" lists is the absurdity. 1) you are constantly trying to sneak other shows in, because it's really more of a top 30, and comparison is invidious 2) your group chat thinks you're deranged 3) but you are 100% right www.newyorker.com/culture/2025...