Weekly Margin 2025, W15: The Devil's Due, Smash: The Musical, Humpty Dumpty, Real Women Have Curves

4/07/25: The Devil's Due

What: The Tank presents a new play by Meron Langsner about Johanna, a young physicist, who conjures Doctor Faustus and Mephistophilis in her quest for knowledge, and must face the question of whether scientific discovery can be "pure" when in the hands of those who would corrupt its intentions.

And? Due to a few behind-the-scenes challenges, the performance I saw was a semi-staged reading, though in full costume and still utilizing key props. While the first act had a bit of unevenness as a result of this, the cast found their stride, and act two was fantastic. Doctor Faustus's curse after death is to corrupt the brilliant scientific discoveries that have come since his life, and he fears that his influence here under Johanna's summoning will finally bring about the end of life on earth (a valid concern for us here in 2025). I found myself thinking about the development of AI, and the wonders that it could achieve, but how often it is corrupted to replace thinking and processing in people ourselves. Are we drifting ever closer to energy sources kept in gooey pods? Were the Wachowski sisters right? Or is there still a chance for us to redeem ourselves? Without giving too much away, I will say that this play discusses the idea of hope quite a bit--the last thing in Pandora's Box, the thing that keeps Faustus going even as he is wracked with pain, the thing that drives Johanna to keep tempting fate (and the devil) to keep seeking knowledge and discovery. Hope that there is a better we can be, a better we can do. It's hard to choose hope right now, has been hard for years. But I'm grateful playwright Langsner chose hope here. Also marshmallows.

4/08/25: Smash: The Musical

What: A new stage adaptation of the cult favorite TV show, a backstage musical about trying to adapt Marilyn Monroe's life into the musical Bombshell.

And? It's pretty strange, actually. It's not until the finale that Smash itself becomes a musical. It would probably call itself a backstage musical, but I'd be more inclined to call it a play with music--every song (except the finale) is diegetic, and nearly all of them are from the show-within-the-show Bombshell. As such, while some of them have some emotional resonance for the meta-character singing them, they're all still tied to the bombastic musical comedy energy of a show we only ever see pieces of. Sure, the songs are fun, but they're also a bit emotionally inert as a result. They do get to show off Stro doing what she does best though. And while I did miss getting to hear Brooks Ashmanskas sing, his comedic timing is unparalleled, and he earned some huge laughs.

It is interesting to see how the soapy hijinks and backstabbing viciousness of the TV series are adapted for this musical adaptation: dynamics are changed, with characters becoming different archetypes, and new elements introduced (I say archetypes because they don't bother to make Karen a real character so much as the sweet and wholesome perpetual understudy waiting for her Sutton Foster moment). It took until near the end of the first act for the show to actually surprise me, but I enjoyed that surprise very much.

tl;dr the show's kind of a mess, but it's a benevolent mess, and there's a lot of real talent onstage.

Robyn Hurder, Caroline Bowman, and Bella Coppola as Ivy, Karen, and Chloe.
Photo by Matthew Murphy.

Margin Notes: Humpty Dumpty

Christina Elise Perry, Gabriel Rysdahl, Marie Dinolan,
and Kirk Gostkowski as Nicole, Troy, Spoon, and Max.
Photo by Matt Wells.

Humpty Dumpty

Seen on: Wednesday, 4/09/25.

Plot and Background

The Chain Theatre presents the New York premiere of Eric Bogosian's 2002 play about a vacation "off the grid" is thrown fully off the grid when there is a mass power outage, the range of duration of which is unknown.

What I Knew Beforehand

I have seen and reviewed a number of Chain productions over the years; and I knew some of Bogosian's work.

Thoughts:

Play: It's chilling how current a play from over twenty years ago feels, particularly one so fixated on the technology available at that time: Palm Pilots, cell phones with patchy signals (that were not yet smartphones), and wall-mounted landlines and fax machines. As the characters, in the wake of both Y2K and 9/11, get distracted by cell phone calls, crab about increased TSA guidelines, and idly discuss the chances of another plague wiping out millions, there's a certain grimness to the Greek Tragedy of it all. We in the audience know the distant future, even as we don't know the immediate future awaiting these characters. What caused this blackout? How long will it last? And, even more grimly for us city-dwellers watching, the keen awareness that while out in nature these characters have some access to fresh food, those in the city would be cut off from supplies much more immediately. We remember the short-supply panic of March 2020.

So all this feels both prescient and immediate, and brings back memories of that isolation and uncertainty. Director Ella Jane New crafts the dynamics of the group with agility, maintaining the lines of tension as the dangers, both outside and in, increase.

Weekly Margin 2025, W14: John Proctor is the Villain, Vanya, Iolanthe, The Threepenny Opera, Pirates! The Penzance Musical

4/01/25: John Proctor is the Villain

What: A new play by Kimberly Belflower, about the high school English class of a small Georgia community in 2018, currently rocked by a recent #MeToo revelation about one of the student's parents, the return of another student after an unexplained six-month absence, and the reading of Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

And? Parts of it are perhaps a bit on the nose (the title does rather give the game away, considering the payoff for it doesn't hit until two-thirds in), but perhaps that's appropriate for a play set entirely in a high school classroom. It still packs a hell of a punch, helped largely by a rudely talented ensemble (able to authentically bring back what it was like to be a teen girl who just wanted to have her inside jokes with her friends), and an epic climactic sequence. It was a great modern read on what is a standard high school text (raise your hand if you were also in your high school's production of it?). Is it an overly simplified read of Proctor? Probably, but that's also a very teenage thing, that absolutism. In any case, the larger sentence should be "John Proctor is the villain in Abigail's story." My friend that I saw it with remarked as we were leaving that the people who needed to see this play probably wouldn't (she made a similar remark when we left Prayer for the French Republic, and she was right). But in this case, I replied, "I needed to see it." Today, now, this year, I needed to see it.

What is true that the primary audience will probably be there for Sadie Sink, star of Stranger Things. Good news, she's fantastic, as is the rest of the less-famous cast. 

4/03/25: Vanya

What: The Lucille Lortel hosts the New York transfer of the London hit, Simon Stephens' one-person adaptation of  the Chekhov classic, starring Andrew Scott.

And? I forget sometimes how terrible most of the sightlines are at the Lortel. Oh well. Andrew Scott is heartbreaking and funny and astonishing and wonderful, and the adaptation is interesting, but it is still Chekhov, who's not my favorite. Still glad I saw it, as Andrew Scott is always worth seeing live.

Andrew Scott. Photo by Marc Brenner.