Weekly Margin 2026, W9: Cold War Choir Practice, Marcel on the Train, Antigone (This Play I Read in High School), Hate Radio, Bug, The Other Place, Operation Mincemeat (Blizzard livestream)

2/25/26: Cold War Choir Practice

What: MCC, Clubbed Thumb, and Page 73 present Ro Reddick's play about Meek, a young Black girl in her local Cold War Choir (apparently this is a real thing), who gets caught up, along with her aunt, in intrigues involving the Soviet Union and a cult.

And? So there's a lot going on. It's a strange but interesting show with engaging performances, especially Alana Raquel Bowers's straightforward and sweet Meek, and Grace McLean's sly and purring Choir slash cult member. I don't quite know what to take away from the show, but it was a fun ride along the way.

Alana Raquel Bowers, center, as Meek, with Suzzy Roche,
Grace McLean, and Nina Ross as the Choir. Photo from the
Summerworks production by Maria Baranova.

2/26/26: Marcel on the Train

What: Ethan Slater co-writes (with director Marshall Pailet) and stars in bioplay about a young Marcel Marceau's role in the French Resistance during the German occupation of France during WW2, as he helped Jewish children escape Nazi capture.

And? It's really quite an extraordinary piece of history on its own, and one I hadn't heard. Scenic Designer Scott Davis evokes the train car in which Marcel escorts the four orphan children with a wooden platform and benches, and a curved metal scaffolding overhead to represent the train's roof. This is where we are for the whole show (with a few flashbacks and flashforwards): a place with no apparent escape but also no evident protection. The ceiling is an illusion, the walls invisible. Studio Luna's lighting design plays dramatically with light and shadow, creating a world where darkness is safer than the threat of light. Against this, director Marshall Pailet crafts a taut 100-minute production, with each raised voice a potential siren to bring on capture and execution, while also teetering over a future uncertain enough that--even knowing Marcel Marceau goes to become a world-renowned mime--survival does not feel guaranteed. And indeed, with the flashforwards we see that no one escapes this time unscathed or free from trauma. Are these flashforwards the truth, or only what the children hope for--what Marcel hopes for?

The four children we see Marcel ushering are fictionalized but each serves as an interesting foil to the twenty-year-old man (in addition to being fully realized characters on their own): Henri (the sweet and funny Alex Wyse), whose gift for blather and determination to survive inspires a self-doubting Marcel to keep moving forward with his mission; Adolphe (my favorite, Max Gordon Moore), a preteen with a strong sense of right and wrong, and a distaste for lying, who holds Marcel accountable for his responsibility to four vulnerable children; Etiennette (a mute but expressive Maddie Corman), terror-struck but drawn out of her shell by mirroring Marcel's playful impulses and clown work; and Berthe (the always wonderful Tedra Millan, here bringing a brittle brine to her performance), whose blend of pessimistic and realistic perspective force Marcel to extend himself beyond gentle play into action and decision. Aaron Serotsky, who plays Everyone Else, brings an especially terrifying energy to the Nazi search of the train car, delicately tip-toing along the line between a benevolent authority figure performing an unfortunate necessity, and a snake waiting patiently for his prey to stumble in biting range. As the titular Marcel, Slater beautifully embodies the charisma and showmanship, while also delving into the vulnerability of a young man only just out of his teens, risking not only his life but the lives of children unable to protect themselves.

Tedra Millan as Berthe and Max Gordon Moore as Adolphe.
Photo by Emilio Madrid.

Weekly Margin 2026, W8: Bigfoot!, Chinese Republicans, An Ark, Poor Judge

2/17/26: Bigfoot!

What: New York City Center presents Amber Ruffin, Kevin Sciretta, and David A. Schmoll's new musical about Bigfoot.

And? It's very uneven. Amber Ruffin and Kevin Sciretta's book is full of some really funny one-liners, but the pastiche of the scenes feels more like sketches rather than pieces of a larger story. By contrast, the score by Ruffin and David Schmoll is nowhere near the level of humor, nor the level of pastiche, needed to really make a show like this soar (and the music just sits there, rather than pushing forward momentum or leaning in harder to the comedy). The show owes a heavy debt to late nineties/early aught musicals Bat Boy and Urinetown, but it hasn't paid off its arrears yet. The cast, though, is excellent. I saw it in the first week of previews so they're still working out some of the kinks with line delivery and timing, but when they nail a line it's nailed. It's a treat to see Crystal Lucas-Perry onstage again, and to see Katerina McCrimmon for the first time (the voice coming out of that tiny frame!). And of course the standout is Grey Henson as Bigfoot himself. Henson has an uncanny knack for delivering any line, no matter how ridiculous or dad-joke-groan-worthy, earnestly and almost thrown-away, that will never not be hilarious to me (he was distinctly my favorite part of Shucked). He's absolutely delightful and as immediately likeable as a fluffy puppy bounding onstage. The show is worth it for him, honestly, though I'm glad it's only ninety minutes.

Grey Henson as Bigfoot. Photo by Marc J. Franklin.

2/18/26: Chinese Republicans

What: Roundabout presents Alex Lin's play about four Chinese American women in the corporate world and the question whether assimilation will ever be allowed for them in that environment (and if they want it to be).

And? It's fine. The arguments are interesting, and the cast is strong, particularly Jodi Long as the groundbreaker of the group, the first Asian woman to be a Managing Director in New York, and Jully Lee as a snarky Iris, the only one among them to have actually been born in China. 

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.