Theater Reviews: “Midnight” Is a Unique and Visionary Musical About Slavery; “School Girls” Is An Enjoyable Broadway Romp; “Slam Frank” Invents a Hip-Hop Anne Frank; and What Is “The Ask” Actually Asking?

Midnight (c) Valerie Terranova

Theater: Midnight 
At the Daryl Roth Theatre 

There are some shows that make so much noise before it opens that I know the show’s whole history and paper trail reviews before the first note is played. I can’t say this is the case with Midnight, the exciting, daring and unwieldy new musical by internet and reality show personality Todrick Hall, whose previous projects missed me completely. But when I hear one person wrote the book, songs, choreographed and directed his first ever musical, my first instinct is skepticism. Stephen Sondheim had Hal Prince and Michael Bennett. Lin-Manuel Miranda had Thomas Kail and Andy Blankenbuehler. But as they say, confidence is half the battle, and whoever Hall convinced to help him produced a show that is truly his vision, the gamble paid off. Midnight takes its cue from Hamilton as it takes place in America’s past and creates a contemporary, all-sung-through score with an ensemble of actors hopped up on adrenaline and sheer will, who are shot out of a cannon from minute one and don’t land until almost three hours later. The play starts with the birth of Rail (Hall), whose parents are two slaves on the plantation of Sylvester (Ciarán Mccarthy), who immediately separates them, giving his mother to another house, leaving Rail to be mostly raised by the eternal mother figure Ethel (Ayana George). Although persued by the eternally optimistic Lily Rose (Charlotte Odusanya), Rail just wants to keep his head low and survive each day. That is until he meets the charming Richard (Jeremy Beloate), the possible fiancé to Scarlet (Kennedy Caughell), the daughter of Sylvester’s scheming sister Charlotte’ (Autumn Hurlbert). Richard, who was essentially raised by his family slave, has become a closet abolitionist and hires Rail to help him build a house for him and his future bride. They also secretly meet every night at midnight so Richard can teach Rail how to read and write before an impulsive kiss sets the story on an inevitable conflict between black and white, slave and master and gay and straight. 

Film Reviews: New York Film Festival Snapshots Include the Scariest Film of the Year, “Artificial,” About the Rise of OpenAI; Mike Leigh’s Touching Last Film, “Tender Loving Care;” Lee Chang-dong’s Continued Look at Class—"Possible Love” and More

Artificial (c) NEON

The New York Film Festival ended yesterday, and if we judge it as a preview of what might get Academy Award nominations, this year’s edition seems to be a success as almost every film I saw was good enough to get nominations. Here are some quick reviews and the hopefuls’ Oscar chances.

Film: Reviews and Previews of Some of the Films at the 64th Annual New York Film Festival, Which Starts This Weekend

(c) The Interested Bystander 

Do you smell it? It’s in the air. New York City intelligentsia are descending on the Upper West Side to see all the buzzy films from auteur directors or some projected Oscar nominees for later this year. It’s always fun to be in the lobby of the many theaters in the Film at Lincoln Center complex (as well as select theaters in the other boroughs, like at BAM and MoMI) hearing people’s reaction to films they’ve already seen and the ones they’re looking forward to. 

Like most film festivals, New York screenings always have long lines of people either seeing a film or hoping to get the seat of a ticket holder who cancels. The films chosen by the FLC crew, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim this year include many of the top titles shown at other festivals, and a couple of world premieres like the Centerpiece Film, Behemoth, directed by Tony Gilroy and starring Pedro Pascal, and Closing Night Film’s 14th, the documentary follow-up to 13th by Ava DuVernay, about how the 14th Amendment affects African-Americans. 

Theater Reviews: David Greenspan Shines in a Revival of Tom Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love”; Sarah Jones Expertly Examines “Who Hurt You, America?”; and a Fearless (and Naked) Actor Tackles the “Classic Penguin” Oeuvre of Books

The Invention of Love (c) Paul Lutvak

Theater: The Invention of Love 
At TheaterLab 

The Invention of Love is the late Tom Stoppard’s only play with a gay theme, and when it opened on Broadway in 2001, it got a respectable run as well as Tony Awards for the actors (Richard Easton and Robert Sean Leonard) playing the younger and older versions of its main character, poet A. E. Housman. When the play begins, Housman has died, and befitting a classicist scholar, he is traveling the river Styx towards Hades. Stoppard’s play lost the Tony Award that year to David Auburn’s Proof, which coincidentally was revived this year. So, having the chance to revisit both plays, I came to the same conclusion I had 25 years ago: The Invention of Love is the better written play while Proof is more emotionally resonant. Invention has Stoppard’s typical intellectually elliptical dialogue and themes, but it would have benefited from a demonstration of the love in its title and less of the theoretical, poetic analysis of it. In the new barebones, but very intimate, production at TheaterLab, enjoyably directed by Zachary Elkind, Stoppard’s witty conversations really take center stage, making the audience swim in early 19th century British discourse on classic literature with a good five-minutes spent on the placement of a comma. 

The Interested Bystander’s Oscar Predictions: September 2026

La Bola Negra (c) Netflix

As we head out of the Fall Film Festivals, the awards chatter has begun, and the big question is if Christopher Nolan and repeat his success with Oppenheimer with his box office champ, The Odyssey. As of right now, there is no film as big as that summer hit coming for the rest of the year (I don’t think Avengers: Doomsday will make it to Best Picture), but there’s a chance for Dune: Part Three, the conclusion to Denis Villeneuve’s successful trilogy. Or will a smaller movie take Oscar glory, like Festival hits like All of a Sudden, La Bola Negra and Being Heumann (whose director Siân Heder’s last film, CODA was one of those smaller films that captured Oscars’ heart). The only sure thing is John Williams will be nominated for his last score for a Steven Spielberg movie, Disclosure Day. After that, anything goes. 

Here are my early predictions of who I think might have a chance for Oscars next year. A third of these will be gone from my list come December when the frontrunners start to pull ahead. Enjoy.