Weekly Margin 2026, W7: Kramer/Fauci

2/11/26: Kramer/Fauci

What: Skirball Theater presents the Daniel Fish-directed verbatim play depicting a contentious televised confrontation on CSPAN between legendary (and incendiary) gay rights activist Larry Kramer (author of The Normal Heart) and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading AIDS researcher.

And? Daniel Fish is such a strange combination of being able to draw out interesting, understated performances and just throwing things at the wall and saying "fuck it." Will Brill as Fauci and Thomas Jay Ryan as Kramer are wonderful. Kramer is the juicier role in many ways, with his incendiary rants, his penchant for taking over the conversation, and his bone-deep passion for his cause; Ryan captures all of that perfectly, showing us a man whom is simultaneously impossible to hate but very possible to want to slug. As to the design, well, the preshow lighting by Scott Zielinski feels like an assault: a grid of lights on the back wall shining aggressively at the audience with no softer overhead light to balance it. Why? To annoy Zelda? Who knows. Tei Blow's sound design, however, is perfectly intimate, letting us hear the slight tinniness of voices in microphones while also feeling like those voices are speaking directly in our ears. Fish's staging is deliberately abstract, which is fine: it gives us something dynamic to look at for what would otherwise just be talking heads, if we went literal. But then there are just some weirdass choices that to me never end up connecting to the story being told: Jennifer Seastone, who plays all the call-ins during the televised sequence, begins the show watching patiently in roller blades and a neon pink windbreaker: once she starts to call in she skates her way around the space. I was fine with this, as it shows the more infantile approach by the laypeople to the arguments raised by the experts, but then later she dons an inflatable chicken costume. Sure, why not, right? Oh and there's a tower that starts gouting out giant clouds of bubbles, forming a mountainous blanket for the stage that will slowly melt over the rest of the hour-long performance, while Kramer sits calmly in a chair and lets it engulf him.

I ... listen, I like unusual staging, I like when we engage with the metaphor that is live performance, when we depart from the literal to see what additional stories we can tell with the texts we have. But I also like for those choices to contribute to story, character, or theme. These just felt like weirdness for the sake of weirdness. It's either too deep for me or too silly for me. I bet I know which one Daniel Fish thinks it is.

Weekly Margin 2026, W6: The Porch on Windy Hill, Hans Litten: The Jew Who Cross-Examined Hitler, Mother Russia, High Spirits

2/02/26: The Porch on Windy Hill

What: Urban Stages presents the return of "a new play with old music," about Mira, who inadvertently reunites with her estranged grandfather while on a hootenanny-hunting road trip with her enthusiastic grad school boyfriend.

And? This is a rare special piece that is perfectly tailored to the three performers at its center (which makes sense as two of them are also cowriters on the piece): each adept at a variety of stringed instruments, from banjo and dulcimer to guitar and mandolin to violin (or fiddle, depending on the song) and urhu (a two-stringed Chinese instrument with a long narrow neck and a small wooden soundbox). As the three characters trade stories and song across the porch of Edgar (Mira's grandfather)'s porch, the timbre varies: when they play together in traded melody lines, singing along in a joyous shifting harmony, everything seems easy. But between the songs the unhealed wounds reopen, confronting unresolved tensions and heartbreak. Music may be Mira and Edgar's connector, but it's not the thing that can actually mend what's broken. Words spoken a cappella are the only road to reconciliation. The dialogue sections themselves are uneven, pace-wise, and need to be sharpened and tightened. But the emotional beats are still there and hit well, especially as performed by Tora Nogami Alexander as the closed-off but hopeful Mira, and David M. Lutken as a beautifully understated--and also a bit closed-off--and homespun pure Edgar (the third voice in their trio, Morgan Morse, plays Beckett, who keeps verging over into annoying and intrusive. But he does it so well, I have to think it's deliberate). But oh, when the three of them play--when they're playing, harmonizing, improvising--the joy of it, the beauty of the sound. When they play, none of the rest of it seems to matter, if we can just be here and listen to them go.

Tora Nagomi Alexander (Mira), Morgan Morse (Beckett), and
David M. Lutken (Edgar). Photo by Ben Hider.

2/04/26: Hans Litten: The Jew Who Cross-Examined Hitler

What: Douglas Lackey's new bioplay about the attorney, Hans Litten, who in his capacity as private prosecutor questioned Hitler on the stand to answer for the violence of his storm troopers. Later, when Hitler assumes the role of Chancellor, Litten is specifically targeted for imprisonment, interrogation, and torture. Though his family and allies campaign for his release, he ultimately dies in Dachau by suicide.

And? Having appreciated him in a number of supporting roles over the past few years, I'm pleased to see Daniel Yaiullo step into a leading role. He leads the cast with gentleness and intelligence, tracing Litten's arc from a confident young man of conviction, to a battered and beaten-down shell still determined to hold onto his honor as well as his love for music and the written word. The ensemble is a bit uneven under him, but Zack Calhoon's turn as Hitler is strikingly understated, and Dave Stishan makes an affably practical Barbasch (a colleague of Litten's), contrasted with the glowering visage when he plays a stormtrooper. The design is in large part utilitarian if unremarkable, except for a transformative and stomach-dropping moment that closes out the first act. The script itself is clunky and overlong with a bit of a dragging pace right now--issues that could be fixed with a tightening and focus to a theme, rather than a strict adherence to the facts as they happened. I'm not saying make things up; I'm saying make it a story rather than a biography. It's a story worth telling.

Foreground: Daniel Yaiullo as Hans Litten.
Background: Zack Calhoon as Adolf Hitler.
Photo by Nejamin Rivera.

Weekly Margin 2026, W5: The Disappear, Data

1/27/26: The Disappear

What: Audible's Minetta Lane Theatre presents Eric Schmidt's new play about an insufferable and  narcissistic screenwriter/director and his long-suffering (and more prolific) wife who are pressured into adapting one of her novels into a film, amidst his chronic infidelities.

And? Honestly this one never quite gelled for me. There's talent onstage, for sure, but the story and characters are just kind of there without surprises or much inspiration.

Anna Mirodin, Madeline Brewer, and Hamish Linklater as
Dolly Blair-Braxton, Julie Wells, and Benjamin Braxton.
Photo by Jeremy Daniel.

1/28/26: Data

What: The Lucille Lortel Theatre hosts Matthew Libby's play about a coder who realizes his new predictive algorithm is primed for use by a government overreach that could endanger many people including his family. 

And? This was profoundly by the books, with each story beat entirely predictable (#irony) and therefore unsurprising. We've seen this story before, many times; just this time it involves AI.

Sophia Lillis, Karan Brar, and Justin H. Min as Riley, Maneesh,
and Alex. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Weekly Margin 2026, W4: Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Murder at Midnight

1/21/26: Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)

What: The Broadway transfer of the West End two-hander musical about a young British man visiting New York for the first time to attend the wedding of a father he's never met, and his antics with the sister of the (much younger than the groom) bride.

And? It's cute. It's definitely cute. Both actors are doing good work (nice to see Christiani Pitts again). I like Soutra Gilmour's seemingly simple but magic box surprise of a scenic design. Several of the songs in the second half are clever. But I was not in a good headspace when I saw this--which is not the show's fault--so I found a lot of the humor unimpressive, the plot turns predictable, the first half of the score unsurprising, and the piece as a whole not unusual enough to transcend any of that. Someone said to me it's being described as this season's Maybe Happy Ending, and I can see that, in terms of a small-cast chamber musical telling a sweet story of two polar opposite people on a quest learning to appreciate each other. But Two Strangers slides closer to a number of movies I've already seen, whereas MHE surprises in staging, scenic and projection design, clever lyrics and earned character arcs, and ultimately managing to skirt a number of predictable archetypes of this type of story to show us something new.

Two Strangers doesn't show us something new, even if it is charming enough at what it's showing us. I don't want to come down to hard on it. But I think it got overhyped for me, and then with my brain being what it was when I saw the show, I was underwhelmed.

Christiani Pitts and Sam Tutty as Robin and Dougal.
Photo by Matthew Murphy.

1/22/26: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

What: The Off-Broadway revival of Rachel Sheinkin and William Finn's adorable musical about, well, what the title says, and the oddball kids who compete.

And? A perfectly fine and fun revival, if not particularly transformative. The sweet and tart nature of the show remains intact, as well as the humor. And it's good to hear this score live again. I had hoped to catch Justin Cooley, a delight in Kimberly Akimbo, but he was out; luckily, his understudy Jahbril Cook did excellent and endearing work. The contemporary script updates were mostly fun, and a good way to keep surprising people who already know the show well from its original run. I particularly enjoyed a number of the women in the cast: Jasmine Amy Rogers (Miss Betty Boop herself!) is an endearingly earnest Olive without being cloying, Leana Rae Concepcion's Marcy is a hilarious taut wire until her euphoric explosion in my favorite song in the show, "I Speak Six Languages," and the always excellent Lilli Cooper is polished, wryly funny, and in excellent voice as the bee's emcee Rona Lisa Peretti. My one real beef with this production is the missed opportunity seized by the original production. When this show first arrived on Broadway back in the aughts, it featured three principal roles played by larger bodied actors. It was great representation of three talented performers (and their talented understudies and replacements--I got to see Josh Gad), and there were no jokes made about their size. With this revival cast, there is none of that, and it's a damn shame.

The company of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.
Photo by Joan Marcus.

Streaming Theater

• Original Theatre's Murder at Midnight.

Weekly Margin 2026, W3: Try/Step/Trip, The Great Escape, Fiddler on the Roof

1/12/26: Try/Step/Trip

What: The Living Word Project presents Dahlak Braithwaite's non-linear interrogation of a young Black man's experience within a court-mandated rehab program, utilizing the the language of hip hop, step, and spoken word.

And? full review here.

Dahlak Brathwaite, center-ish, and the Los Angeles cast of
Try/Step/Trip. Photo by MarKing IV Photography.

1/16/26: The Great Escape

What: Ruthie Scarpino brings her clown, four-year-old Apfel Tucas, to New York with the story of her daring escape from Rosh Hashanah services to find the snack stash at her synagogue.

And? Pretty freaking adorable. Scarpino's well-gifted in the body- and gesture-isolation needed to do effective mime work, and her guileless persona as young Apfel endears her to the audience even as she continually drafts them into helping her physicalize her imaginings and enact the story of her great escape.

Ruthie Scarpino as Apfel Tucas. Photo source.