Death Becomes Her (c) Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
Tuesday, May 13, 2025
Monday, May 5, 2025
Theater Reviews: “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” Is a Broadway Prequel-Thrill-Ride Through the Right-Side Up; Yes, “Real Women Have Curves,” but Also the Right Formula for a Musical Crowd-Pleaser; and “Five Models in Ruins, 1981” Provides an Amusing Glimpse Into the World of Fashion
Stranger Things: The First Shadow (c) Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
Broadway: Stranger Things: The First Shadow
Marquis Theatre
During the Act One finale of Stranger Things: The First Shadow, the audience is suddenly flooded with actors in hazmat suits, shining huge flashlights at us, when one of them (at my performance) stopped at the guy in an aisle seat who happened to be holding to his newly bought Mind-Flayer stuffie. The hazmat guy grabs and examines it, before giving it back to the giggling guy, does the two fingers to his eyes and then points them to his (the universal sign for “I’ll be watching you!”) before walking on stage, all to the cheers and laughter of the nearly sold-out crowd. And if there was any doubt that fans of the TV series Strangers Things would shell out Broadway-sized dollars to see a prequel, they vanished faster than Barb at the pool. And if you understood anything I wrote so far, this new play, backed by Netflix, will certainly be a fun time. I was certainly a fan of the show (it premiered in 2016) that focused on a group of kids in the early 1980s who come in contact with an evil supernatural force. It was a fun throwback to a time of Dungeons & Dragons, when the TV’s cable box was an antenna and video game arcades were the Friday night hangouts. Stranger Things: The First Shadow is an extension of a flashback from Season 4 in which the kids learn about a troubled young boy named Henry Creel (Louis McCartney, perpetually on edge) whose family, after moving into Hawkins, Indiana, was massacred in 1959. This tragedy now involves the younger versions of the adults from the show, who are all now high school teenagers, including Joyce (Alison Jaye), Hopper (Burke Swanson) and Bob Newby (Juan Carlos).
Theater: Recipients of The 79th Theatre World Awards
Here are recipients of 2025’s Theatre World Awards, which honors actors making Outstanding Broadway and Off-Broadway debuts. I am honored to have been on this committee again this year.
Congrats to all the winners. The awards will be handed out on Monday, June 2 at 7pm at The Hard Rock Café Times Square.
Thursday, May 1, 2025
Monday, April 28, 2025
Theater and Book Reviews: “Dead Outlaw” Is a Lively, New Broadway Musical; “Irishtown” Makes Fun of, but Is Also a Love Letter to, Irish Plays; and the Sincere “Theater Kid” Memoir Takes Us Into the Rooms Where Broadway History Happened
Dead Outlaw (c) Matthew Murphy
Broadway: Dead Outlaw
Longacre Theatre
When I heard the premise of the outrageously true story of Dead Outlaw, the new musical by the creative team behind the musical, The Band’s Visit, I was worried that the evening would be mostly about a singing corpse. Thankfully not. In fact, once the dead outlaw, Elmer McCurdy (Andrew Durand), dies in 1911, he mostly stays dead as his body and coffin become an after-death oddity sensation throughout most of the 20th century. Poor Durand stays in the upright coffin for the latter half of the show as Elmer’s mummified corpse (embalmed by arsenic) is the centerpiece of Hollywood movies, travelling circuses and beach boardwalk sideshows. Thankfully Durand has a lot more to do in the first half of the musical, as our narrator, played by Jeb Brown, tries to piece together as much of McCurdy’s life into a cohesive story as he can. Elmer, it seems, was a troubled alcoholic from Maine, who tried to lead an honest life, serving time in the army, finding love with a shopkeeper named Maggie (Julia Knitel) before getting involved with a family of bank and train robbers, ending in Elmer’s death in a shootout. At this point, the morbid part of Elmer’s cross-country journey starts, and it doesn’t end until his body is discovered in an old theater during the filming of a The Six Million Dollar Man TV episode in 1977. Book writer Itamar Moses and director David Cromer don’t sugarcoat McCurdy’s story, but instead utilize a distancing, Brechtian element to the narrative.
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