Margin Notes 2026, W34: Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody, The Winter's Tale, A Walk on the Moon, Paranormal Activity

8/17/26: Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody

What: Exactly what it says on the tin. An unauthorized musical parody of the hit Canadian TV series about rival hockey players who fall in love.

And? So very stupid and so very fun. The songs were, by and large, enjoyable. As with Titanique, some fatigue did set in for me as things went on, but I still had a good time. It was fantastic to see Ryann Redmond and Jay Armstrong Johnson again, and standby Shelby Acosta was fan-flipping-tastic as Shane's Mom and others.

And now I have to go off-topic because I had no idea that "The Culture Club" is in the McKittrick's old space (home for over a decade to Sleep No More). So imagine my surprise when I climbed the stairs to the second floor lobby and found myself in what every cell in my body remembers as the hotel lobby floor. My memory filled in the blanks: there were the phone booths; there was the piano where Boy Witch sang "If That's All There Is;" there's the lobby desk where the Boy Witch cried on my shoulder; down that curtained-off hallway is the dressing room where the Bald Witch put on her wig, or where the Porter put on lipstick while staring at me through a mirror. Here I saw so many encounters, here I was swept away, again and again. Of course, the phone booths and piano are gone. The lobby counter remains but it is now a bar for patrons. There are more places to sit: squashy velvet chairs and couches. Periodically a host will approach guests in the lobby and invite them upstairs. We ride the elevator up to the sixth floor (!) but there is no old-fashioned wicker wheelchair, no upside-down model of the Manderley estate. The actual performance space is the old Club Car, which hosted the wonderful chamber production of The Woman in Black both before and after the pandemic lockdown; I saw that production four times, so even this brought back memories. Parts of the space have been redressed; parts have not -- I grabbed a quick photo of a wall covered in chalk tally marks, which confused the other patrons as we left the sixth floor via the long set of stairs. And one last remnant of the Sleep No More experience: a staff member at each open door as we took the stairs down, to make sure we did not wander away.

Sorry, I did enjoy the show, but the sense memory of being in that space again was a lot. Sleep No More meant so much to me in 2011 and 2012, when I kept going back again and again.

Jay Armstrong Johnson as Ilya and Jimin
Moon as Shane. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

8/19/26: The Winter's Tale

What: Shakespeare in the Park presents one of the weird ones: the first half of Winter's Tale plays like a tragedy, where (spoilers) King Leontes's tragic flaw of overwhelming jealousy leads to the estrangement from his lifelong friend Polixenes, the banishment of his newborn infant Perdita, and the death of both wife Hermione and son Mamillius. The second half jumps forward sixteen years and plays like a light romance: Perdita is a sweet young shepherdess in love with Florizel, son of Polixenes; Leontes has been mourning faithfully the past sixteen years for his wronged wife. Also, this play features the famous stage direction "Exit, pursued by a bear."

And? The tonal reversal between the first half and the second is not managed as smoothly as I would like. By which I mean: the tragedy of the first half is performed heartbreakingly by Lily Rabe (Hermione), my beloved Raúl Esparza (Leontes), and Marsha Stephanie Blake (Paulina, the wisest character in the play). It's powerful and devastating and delicately crafted by director Daniel Sullivan, a SitP regular. The second half of the play is too bogged down in the clowns (no doubt meant to alleviate the heaviness of the first half) and I found all three of them profoundly tiresome. Perhaps in stronger comedic hands it would be less so (I recall Jesse Tyler Ferguson making a delicious feast out of the Young Shepherd's first monologue). So I did get impatient for things to wrap up, as we ventured into hour three, but I still consider the show worth seeing, if only for Lily Rabe's incredible performance in the trial scene. 

Marsha Stephanie Blake as Paulina, Lily Rabe as Hermione,
and Raúl Esparza as Leontes. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Weekly Margin 2026, W33: An American Daughter

8/15/26: An American Daughter

What: La Femme Theatre Productions presents Wendy Wasserstein's play about the maelstrom incited by some candid remarks by Dr. Lyssa Dent Hughes, the 1997 nominee for Attorney General. Inspired in part by Hillary Clinton's comments about not just being a homemaker, the play is an examination of acceptable female roles and the toxic and proscriptive discourse surrounding them.

And? Not your perfect play, but it's still worthwhile to see a Wasserstein play onstage. The cast is generally great, especially Mary Beth Peil and Dakin Matthews, who remain superb in everything they do. Unfortunately the weakest link is Jean Lichty in the lead role, who doesn't know how to throw away her lines or allow for a variety of flavors and levels in her delivery. Around her, Robert Sean Leonard and Montego Glover try their best as her husband and lifelong best friend, but they can do only so much.

Dakin Matthews as Alan Hughes, Jean Lichty as Lyssa Dent
Hughes, and Robert Sean Leonard as Walter Abrahmson.
Photo by Joan Marcus.

Weekly Margin 2026, W30: Birthright, Belly

7/23/26: Birthright

What: MCC presents Jonathan Spector's new play spanning eighteen years in the lives of six friends in the aftermath of their Birthright trip to Israel (2006, 2006, and 2024). Over the years the characters go through changes big and small: marriage, divorce, children, career reevaluations, substance abuse, and an ever-widening gulf among perspectives on the Jewish state.

And? I love Spector's writing -- he has a real ear for dialogue and conversational rhythm, including and especially how quickly things can spiral out of control -- but this play is weaker story-wise than Eureka Day and This Much I Know, both of which I saw last season. Though each act features a time jump from the previous, it thankfully doesn't take too much of a lift to catch the audience up on what we missed, especially if we managed to catch key details from the projected montage of emails, texts, and social media posts that starts both Acts Two and Three. That out of the way, the individual arc of each act feels a bit thin -- more a drop-in than a story -- and Act Two especially feels more like the audience is being talked at than hearing true interaction between lifelong friends. What can be amazing with works that discuss big ideas and complicated questions is bringing the audience (or reader, when it comes to fiction and poetry) into a place of active listening and empathy, to put a human behind whom we've told ourselves is a monster. And while the characters are well-sketched, there's not quite a story here. I think this play wants to be Heroes of the Fourth Turning but doesn't quite achieve it (interestingly one of the performers here, Zoë Winters, starred in that as well).

This goal is eventually achieved, to a degree, in the third act. Though the audience is yet again subjected to an extended sequence of being talked at, at least in this case it's to a deliberate point. The two women at the extreme ends of the divide among Jewish people in the wake of October 7, 2023, Chaya and Izzy, reach critical mass without fully listening to each other, instead turning to their phones to quickly google other people's essays or Wikipedia articles to prove their point. Both women are talking at each other, not to each other, and both have lost the ability to listen. No longer a conversation, it is now a spoken version of the online screeds yelling into the void at strawman enemies. Mercifully, this explosion finally breaks as we see the very real damage and fallout both Izzy and Chaya have experienced in the wake of the pogrom. To be fully honest, I don't believe that this play will change anyone's mind about the conflict or the talking point "conversation" happening online, but perhaps some will sit with what's said and consider that we're dealing with people who are not trying to be enemies.

Act Three does also bring us an arc we didn't realize was happening, perhaps too subtle to be the A plot, but there all the same: five of the six friends are gathered after shiva for their sixth friend, and as the scene progresses each character speaks of the last time they saw their friend in the months before. Each memory reveals a profound level of connection that showed this person had such a deep well of empathy that none of them saw their friend as the enemy, but someone to whom they could speak openly. This slow reveal is powerful and heartbreaking, and much-needed as a salve after so much anger and bitter hurt. And as they all stand together in a minyan to speak the Kaddish for their friend, their deep connection to this part of themselves is shown, too: deep in their bodies, no matter how nonpracticing they may be, these words are known, are said, without hesitation.

From a design perspective, absolutely genius choices by director Teddy Bergman and the collaboration between projection designer David Bengali and sound designer Lee Kinney. During the climactic argument, as the two women keep diving into their phones to find "evidence," the sound turns unintelligible as if the characters are speaking through water, and the walls behind them are filled with their phone screen searching: an artistic illustration that no one is actually listening to each other. It is only when they are told to put down their phones that they begin to hear.

Final thoughts: great cast, great pacing. Each act runs an hour or a little less, and for all that the evening is three and a half hours, the play never drags, and the show seems to go by fairly quickly: it's a little like A Prayer for the French Republic in that regard, though as mentioned above, not as compelling a narrative as one could wish.

Molly Ranson as Alona, Nate Mann as Emerson, Liz Larsen
as Deborah, Eli Gelb as Noah, Molly Bernard as Izzy, Zoë
Winters as Chaya, and Hale Appleman as Lev.
Photo by Emilio Madrid.

7/24/26: Belly

What: In advance of its run in Edinburgh, Reilly O'Shaughnessy's one woman show Belly runs briefly at 59E59. Belly tells the interwoven narratives of Ellie, a teenager on the swim team whose coach advises her to follow a strict (starvation) diet and exercise routine in order to win a scholarship; Katie, Ellie's aunt, currently expecting her first child and worried she will somehow ruin her fetus's health by eating the wrong food or gaining too much weight; and Susan, Katie's mother and Ellie's grandmother, a grieving widow who keeps to a very strict diet and unconsciously reinforces unhealthy attitudes toward body size and dieting on her descendants. Playwright/performer O'Shaughnessy periodically breaks the fourth wall as herself throughout the narrative of these three women as they struggle with body image issues, grief, and eating disorders, to discuss her own personal experience with them herself.

And? full review here.

Margin Notes: Belly

Belly

Seen on: Friday, 7/24/26.

Plot and Background

In advance of its run in Edinburgh, Reilly O'Shaughnessy's one woman show Belly runs briefly at 59E59. Belly tells the interwoven narratives of Ellie, a teenager on the swim team whose coach advises her to follow a strict (starvation) diet and exercise routine in order to win a scholarship; Katie, Ellie's aunt, currently expecting her first child and worried she will somehow ruin her fetus's health by eating the wrong food or gaining too much weight; and Susan, Katie's mother and Ellie's grandmother, a grieving widow who keeps to a very strict diet and unconsciously reinforces unhealthy attitudes toward body size and dieting on her descendants. Playwright/performer O'Shaughnessy periodically breaks the fourth wall as herself throughout the narrative of these three women as they struggle with body image issues, grief, and eating disorders, to discuss her own personal experience with them herself.

Thoughts:

"Is there a food that makes you feel safe?" Reilly asks the audience and answers for herself: while in recovery for her eating disorder, Honey Nut Cheerios felt safe to eat. Even as O'Shaughnessy's play tells three specific stories -- and a bit of her own -- it also easily opens the door for the audience to contemplate their own history with body dysmorphia, fear of weight gain, fear of failure, fatphobia in the medical field and in schools, generational diet culture, and the overwhelming sensation in society that one must make oneself as small as possible in order to be considered worthy. It's all profoundly relatable. The euphoria of seeing the number on the scale go down, of feeling proud of sticking to a diet, but always chased so quickly by intrusive thoughts of being "bad" for craving or even consuming sugar, of failure when the number on the scale goes up. Throughout the seventy-minute show I could hear people crying and sniffling, not only for the grief of the characters onstage but also for their own history. While Ellie struggles with her declining health, she remembers "I used to be able to feel my edges in the pool. Like, be able to feel where I was, where I started, where I stopped ... And now? I can't feel anything."

Weekly Margin 2026, W29: The Scarlet Pimpernel

7/14/26: The Scarlet Pimpernel

What: In honor of Bastille Day, 54 Below presents a concert of the score from the cult hit/commercial flop (and the first show I saw on Broadway), The Scarlet Pimpernel: a tale of derring-do, disguise, and romance set against the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.

And? Our host of the evening began with "This show opened on Broadway in 1997. And 1998. And 1999." The crowd laughed knowingly, for many of us were members of The League: the fandom for the show during its initial run, and a big reason why the producers kept trying to rescue the show with new director/choreographer and updated script. The feat of a Broadway show closing and reopening twice, each time in a slightly different version, is, I believe, unprecedented and unrepeated. It really was a wild moment to be a part of. Anyway, the evening was fun, with strong voices. The score really holds up. "Into the Fire" will always be one of my favorite musical theater songs; "Prayer" really is an excellent soliloquy; "Falcon in the Dive" is thrilling and feral. The big excitement for me was getting to see William Michals reprise his performance as Chauvelin -- he originally played the role in the first national tour, which I saw twice in LA. His voice is even better now, and it was a real treat to hear him sing the score in such an intimate setting. Afterwards, I got a chance to speak to him briefly, to tell him that I'd seen him in the tour 26 years ago, and how much it meant to hear him tonight. He correctly identified me as a member of The League and offered to take a photo. It was a great night, and I was so happy to share it with my friend Beth, a fellow longtime fan of the show.

Zelda Knapp and William Michals. 2000 photo by Raymond
Knapp. 2026 photo by William Michals.