Timbuktu, USA at The New Marigny Theatre through February 3
A full review will follow in my next column, but if you want to see a show about some wild and wacky goings-on in Washington, D.C.–though not as wild and wacky as what’s currently going on there–head to The New Marigny Theatre for Intramural Theater’s outstanding production of Timbuktu, USA.
Ken Prestininzi’s absurdist comedy winds up being a bit of a mishigas, but Elizabeth Frenchie Faith’s direction gets every morsel of insanity out of the script and the cast, led by Mary Langley & Lauren Wells and featuring Becca Chapman, Benjamin Dougherty, Jon Greene, Emily Laychak, C.A. Munn, & Joshua Tierney, all give madly inspired performances of the highest caliber.
Lauren Wells, Benjamin Dougherty, and Mary Langley in Timbuktu, USA (photo by Leah Floyd)
As bizarre a tale as it is, one wishes today’s real-life headlines didn’t make it look tame by comparison. Still, you should find it much easier to laugh at this fictional craziness than its non-fiction counterpart.
[For tickets and more information, go to https://www.intramuraltheater.org/timbuktu]
New in New York
Two of the four shows I recently saw in New York are set in schools, so let me give these prosuctions grades and we’ll see which ones pass.
First up, DRAG: The Musical (New World Stages)–
At the risk of having to turn in my Gay Card, I’ll admit that the only season of RuPaul’s Drag Race I watched entirely and whose Queens I have more then a passing knowledge of was the one that our own Bianca Del Rio was on. So the fact that Alaska Thunderf*ck had just sashayed away as one of the leads in DRAG: The Musical and been replaced by Jimbo didn’t make a whole lot of difference to me. And it shouldn’t to you as this new musical seems to be a thoroughly entertaining delight no matter who’s in the cast.
With book, music, and lyrics by Tomas Costanza, Justin Andrew Honard (Alaska’s “government name”), and Ashley Gordon, DRAG stirs together rival clubs (if it was set in NOLA, The Pub and Oz could stand in for the two venues), two strong-willed drag queens who happen to be exes, the IRS, a real estate developer, and a large dollop of family dysfunction. The plot may be rather traditional (I think some of its elements can be found in an old Busby Berkeley film or two and even I, who ain’t usually good at such things, could figure out how it would all end), but the authors have juiced it up with snappy dialog, memorable characters, and, most importantly, a pop/rock songlist that eclipses more Broadway scores than I care to remember.
As it’s not clear who did what, I’ll just credit the whole Costanza/Honard/Gordon team with witty lyrics and tunes that I actually look forward to hearing again, including such especially delicious numbers as Drag Is Expensive, Wigs, One of the Boys, and Gay as Hell. Trust me, it’s been a loooong time since I’ve felt this way about a new musical (2016, to be precise, about The Band’s Visit).
Spencer Liff’s fast-paced direction keeps the action flowing so two hours with no intermission doesn’t drag at all. Jason Sherwood’s multi-doored set accommodates lotsa locales despite the small confines of an off-Broadway theater. Marco Marco’s costumes, Adam Honoré’s lighting, and Aaron Rhyne’s projections are all fabulous and combine to create a just-right fizzy atmosphere for the show.
Nick Adams as Alexis, one of the rival Queens, has the most stage time and flawlessly holds the show together with his effortless talents as well as biceps to die for. Everyone else in the cast gets a chance to shine including Lagoona Bloo, Liisi LaFontane (as a female drag queen), Jan Sport, Nick Laughlin, and Jujubee (as terrific as she was at last August’s Cancer’s a Drag benefit here) as the Queens’ ladies-in-waiting; Broadway veteran Eddie Korbich as Drunk Jerry, a soubriquet he beautifully lives up to; J. Elaine Marcos, who embodies three different roles with equal panache; and Jimbo, who after only a week in the show, delivered a performance polished to a high gloss sheen.
Nick Adams in DRAG: The Musical (photo by Matthew Murphy)
Special mention must be made of two understudies who went on the night I saw DRAG. If I was disappointed I didn’t get to see Adam (Rent) Pascal as Alexis’ straight brother, Nicholas Kraft nicely commingled emotional constipation with underlying decency, sang well, and was cute to boot. Teddy Wilson, Jr. filled in as Popcorn, one of Alexis’ ladies-in-waiting, and his talents popped; I hope to one day be able to say “I saw him when…” (just as my Mom would go on to say about an understudy she once saw, Shirley MacLaine).
And it takes a lot to steal a show from eight drag queens, but Remi Tuckman as Brendan, Alexis’ 10-year-old nephew, pulls it off with his solo number, I’m Just Brendan, the most emotionally moving moment in the show.
DRAG: The Musical may not have the galvanic resonance of last summer’s Cats: The Jellicle Ball or be as hysterically funny as the long-running Titaníque, but, ultimately, it’s very sweet and an immensely enjoyable evening. I’d give it an A.
Leslye Headland’s dramedy Cult of Love plays at The Helen Hayes Theater through February 2, and takes place on Christmas Eve in the Dahl Family’s Connecticut farmhouse. In this ultimately tedious portrait of a dysfunctional family where “Christian values” supposedly reign, we get four siblings, each defined by one character trait: recovering drug addict, lesbian with wife, religious crazy, and crisis of faith (which is never fully explained). There’s lotsa singing of Christmas carols & other tunes, and we get the point of the ridiculousness of religion. However, I just didn’t care about this extended family as the drama seemed to come about through authorial manipulation rather than from these characters organically.
(Could we please retire the homophobic conservative family trope? I’d be much more interested in seeing a homophobic liberal family depicted instead; don’t laugh–I know one such family, victims of a “good” Catholic upbringing.)
Among the cast, Zachary Quinto and Shailene Woodley, making her Broadway debut, never quite rise above the script’s one-note delineation of brother (the one with a faith crisis) and sister (the religious wackadoodle). On the other hand, Mare Winningham, as the family’s uptight mother, and David Rasche, as the paterfamilias slowly fading into dementia, give marvelously detailed performances that hint at a haunting subtext in a way that escapes their colleagues, the one exception being Barbie Ferreira as an outsider (the girlfriend of the addict who’s also in recovery) who enters the Dahl world and has her own droll take on it. Alas, I didn’t love Love and can only give it a C.
Mare Winningham and Shailene Woodley in Cult of Love (photo by Joan Marcus)
I wanted to love English, Sanaz Toossi’s play about four students and their teacher at an English language school in a large city in Iran, but I merely liked it (at the Todd Haimes Theatre thru March 2). The entire cast (Tala Ashe, Ava Lalezarzadeh, Pooya Mohseni, Marjan Neshat, Hadi Tabbal) is excellent, and I appreciated how they each changed their accent to convey whether they are speaking in Farsi (none) or English (various degrees). In terms of the plot, its most intriguing aspect is when one of the characters somewhat mysteriously no longer appears.
(l. to r.) Tala Ashe, Hadi Tabbal, Ava Lalezarzadeh, Marjan Neshat, and Pooya Mohseni in English (photo by Joan Marcus)
Otherwise, the humor is obvious, the tension is contrived, and I didn’t buy its soap opera-y tendencies. The contemporary classical music that is heard between scenes is pretty, but why not something more Persian or Iranian that better evokes the play’s setting? Interesting, yes, but the script seemed more watercolor when I would’ve preferred the richness of an oil painting or, perhaps more appropriately, of the Iranian cuisine I’ve enjoyed at the now-shuttered Taste of Persia restaurant in Manhattan.
I certainly empathized with the characters in their quest to conquer English, but too often there was a sense of their looking at the cup half empty which Toossi never explores as fully as she could. For, unlike the characters in English, my sense has always been no matter how proficient (or not) you are in a foreign language, what a thrill to be able to communicate to any degree in a language not your own; sure it can be tiring, but mostly I’ve found it to be empowering.
Having won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2023, perhaps my expectations for English were too high, but I can only give it a B.
And then there’s Eureka Day at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. For some reason, I had gotten the impression that Jonathan Spector’s play about “woke-ness” among board members and parents at a private school in Berkeley in 2018 (note the pre-pandemic date, when the play premiered; its script has since been slightly tweaked) would be overly broad and merely silly. Boy, was I wrong.
Set in the school’s library, filled with bold colors and child-sized furniture, Eureka Day starts off with the school’s headmaster (a hilariously logorrheic Bill Irwin) leading a discussion about a proposed addition (“transracial adoptee”) to the drop-down menu on the prospective parent application. Every side gets considered from every angle until a consensus is reached by the board which includes three veterans and one parent new to school, all well-meaning but with varying agendas. Funny, yes, but just a warm-up for the main course.
That arrives in the next scene when we learn that there’s been an outbreak of mumps in the school and the board must deal with how to balance the vaccines that are mandated by law with parental choice. Things do not get settled as easily, or amicably, as in the first scene.
That leads to the play’s third scene which features a livestream (projected on a large screen behind the five actors who view it on a laptop) in which a multitude of parents chime in, one loaded comment at a time, and things go from cordial to nasty with hysterical results. How hysterical? Suffice to say, at points I was laughing so hard I was afraid I might choke.
Eureka Day continues in its brilliant manner until its final sentence, one of the all-time great curtain lines. Alternating between supremely funny and moments of heartbreak, some passages may be a little talky, but Spector layers in the necessary exposition organically so it’s never heavy-handed. Even more importantly, unlike Headland and Toossi, he tailors his dialog in bespoke fashion for each of the five people in his play, making each one’s words and manner of speaking (sentence structure, phrasing, word choice, etc.) highly individualistic and character-defining, no small achievement.
Anna D. Shapiro has directed with impeccable clarity, wisely having her cast lean in and play their all too fallible characters for real rather than making them at all cartoonish. Jessica Hecht, as a school founder and inveterate chatterbox, magnificently evokes humor and pathos. As the new board member, Amber Gray, who wowed me as Persephone in the musical Hadestown, proves she’s just as formidable an actress in straight plays and conveys as much with a one-word line such as “Well…” as many thespians do in an entire monolog. Thomas Middleditch, as a billionaire tech bro, and Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz, as a single mom, who are in the midst of an affair when the play begins, both contribute peerless performances.
(l. to r.) Bill Irwin, Thomas Middleditch, Amber Gray, Jessica Hecht, and Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz in Eureka Day (photo by Jeremy Danie)
In a perfect world, Eureka Day would play on Broadway for a very long time. Alas, it must close on February 16. Do try to see this A+ production before it does.
[For more info and tix, go to–
DRAG: The Musical: https://dragthemusical.com/
Cult of Love: https://2st.com/shows/cult-of-love
Eureka Day: https://www.manhattantheatreclub.com/shows/24-25-season/eureka-day/]
