Theater Review: Off-Broadway Is Burning as “The Jellicle Ball” Celebrates a Jubilant Drag Ballroom Culture With “Cats” as its Jumping-Off Point

Cats: The Jellicle Ball (c) Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

Theater: Cats: The Jellicle Ball 
At PAC

Premise: Imagine, if you will, that your cool and artistic friends have invited you to the social event of the season at a big hotel ballroom, but there’s a P.S. It’s a themed party (like the Met Gala) and the theme is Cats. Not cats as in your pet, but specifically Andrew Lloyd Webber’s huge but derisible hit musical that has lived up to its tagline “Now and Forever” but maybe not in the way Lord Andrew envisioned it. A couple of years back, there was an unremarkable Broadway revival with Leona Lewis as Grizabella, and then, of course, there was the 2019 film version that is probably the biggest flop on Taylor Swift’s resume (she acted in the movie and co-wrote a song), where the CGI cats were rendered in such a poor “uncanny valley” way that Cats’ might have finally used its ninth life. But here we are in 2024 and we get the party invite to a new revisionist version of the musical in which directors Bill Rauch (PAC NYC’s Artistic Director) and Zhailon Levingston (Chicken and Biscuits) reimagine the term “ball.” In the original, it was a yearly gathering of cats competing to be reborn, but in this production, it’s the infamous Harlem ball in which groups (or houses) of LGBTQ+ Black and Latinx drag queens in the 70s and 80s would fabulously strut down the runway in various themed competitions. This niche, underground event became mainstream when Madonna introduced “Vogue” to America in 1990, which was then followed by Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris Is Burning and, most recently, re-popularized by the TV series, Pose. For “The Jellicle Ball,” each of the musical’s characters (with only the most cursory nod to the Cats theme) become houses, as in the House of Skimbleshanks, where their ALW songs become their signature theme. Along with all the young kids competing, we get respected figures of the past including head judge Old Deuteronomy (crowd favorite Andre DeShields, with a mane worthy of The Lion King); Gus, the Theater Cat, (played by the emcee from Paris Is Burning, Junior LaBeija from the House of LaBeija) and of course, the Glamour Cat (played by "Temptress" Chasity Moore as a faded Shirley Bassey), whose best days may be behind her, but maybe there’s still a flickering light in the House of Grizabella. 

Theater Reviews: Home Is an Elusive Thing for an Asian Trans Man (“Isabel”), a Black Farmer From North Carolina (“Home”) and a Female War Reporter (“Breaking the Story”)

Isabel (c) Marcus Middleton

Theater: Isabel 
Presented by NAATCO at Abron Arts Center 

In last year’s Japanese animated film, Suzume, directed by Makoto Shinkai, the lead character is a teenage girl who accidently opens a portal into another dimension, turning the handsome stranger she has a crush on into a chair. For the rest of the movie, Suzume and this chair have to work together to close this portal. I am reminded of this movie and that specific plot point while watching playwright reid tang's Isabel, which tries to replicate this sort of magical realism on stage, an especially tricky task for human actors, not two-dimensional drawings. I’m not saying that anyone is turned into a chair in tang’s play, but I’m also not not saying anyone is turned into an inanimate object either. In director Kedian Keohan’s sparse production, we are engulfed in a sort of a fairy tale world in which Matt (Sagan Chen) is living in an old decrepit, possibly haunted house in a small town called Hindsight, surrounded by a forest. Enter Matt’s brother, Harriet (Ni-Ni), who is backpacking through the woods with his girlfriend Isabel (Haruna Lee) and gets lost before finding the house. After a short visit and some family catch-up, Isabel and Harriet leave Hindsight and Matt’s home, and that’s when the play start to go sideways with things that would make sense in an animated film or manga, but on stage needs the audience to take a bigger leap, who, at my performance, seem tentative with every new plot turn. The recurring imagery of a staircase in the woods that lead to nowhere (or everywhere) is one element that intrigues without the need of explanation. The many plot threads do feel connected to the theme of trans-ness. Matt (like Chen himself) is a trans man, and Harriet, who appears as a cis man, also seems to be on the rainbow spectrum. There is an extended and satisfying flashback to Matt and Harriet’s family life when they were teens with their mother (represented offstage as a growling creature) that feels to be the lynchpin and heart of tang’s play. With an identity diverse cast and crew, and a play about a trans man’s search for their place in the world, Isabel is refreshingly odd and curiously riveting. But there’s a higher meaning to the play that tang leaves unexplored or purposefully omitted, like why Isabel is the titled character or how long Matt has been on this journey since leaving home. It’s always fun to try to crack a puzzle play (like say Equus), but Isabel, even with all the provocative elements, seems to be missing a few crucial facts that keep it elusively out of reach. 

Theater Review: Off-Broadway’s Fascinating “The Fires” Burns Intensely; “What Became of Us” Is a Universal, Immigration Story as Told by Second Generation Siblings; and “Titanic” Sails Magnificently With Its Cast of Dreams

The Fire (c) Julieta Cervantes

Theater: The Fires 
At Soho Rep 

Celebrated choreographer and director Raja Feather Kelly (A Strange Loop, Teeth) has written an engrossing and structurally complicated first play that seems to be inspired by The Hours, both Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and the Oscar-winning movie adaptation, but with a decidedly black and queer perspective. The Fires takes place in three time periods: 1974, 1998 and 2021, and they all occupy the same New York City railroad apartment simultaneously for the almost two intermission-less hour runtime. In 1974, the apartment is a black gay couple’s summer refuge from the straight world in which one is a tortured writer (Phillip James Brannon) working on debunking the Aphrodite myth leading to suicidal thoughts that scare the other (Ronald Peet). In 1998, a confused young gay man (Sheldon Best) related to one of the 1974 men, holes up in the pied-à-terre and pours over the journals of the writer in hopes of finding the truth of what happened that summer with such obsessive veracity it scares his mother (Michelle Wilson) and sister (Janelle McDermoth). And in 2021, a hookup obsessed young man (Beau Badu), who is subletting the apartment, is planning a party (although he doesn’t buy the flowers himself) while also reading the journals and hyper-fixating on a friend (Jon-Michael Reese) who may-or-may-not come to the party and who may-or-may-not be the love of his life. All three men are also literally stuck in the apartment: the first two in variations of agoraphobic tendencies while the third is self-isolating in the middle of the pandemic. It is fascinating to see the three men, who almost never leave the stage (the bathroom is their only escape), at various moments writing or reading the journal while also dealing with various family members (brothers, mothers and sisters) as well as found family (best friends and lovers). It is all well-conceived by Kelly and deliciously acted by the cast with a non-self-conscious queer sensibility. As a first-time playwright, Kelly makes some rookie mistakes, including sacrificing some of the individual character threads of each time period to make the overall theme fit together. But Kelly’s ambition is admirable and thrilling, especially in his directing choices when things start falling into place for the audience, if not for the characters. Raphael Mishler’s red-dominated set is so accurate in that it’s both comfortable and NYC-cramped that I’m surprised there’s no bathtub in the middle of the kitchen. Even in a play filled with painful truths, the joy and energy of Kelly’s writing is evident and infectious. It’s an impressive debut. 

The Interested Bystander's Final 2023-24 Tony Awards Predictions

Stereophonic (c) Julieta Cervantes

Here are The Interested Bystander’s Final 77th Annual Tony Award Predictions.  I've adopted my percentage formula that I use for the Oscars here as well, just in case you have a Tony Awards Pool in your office.

The Tony Awards will be presented on Sunday, June 16 coming from Lincoln Center and telecast on CBS. Ariana DeBose will be the host. 

Enjoy! 

Broadway Rewind: Looking Back at Some of Last Season’s Shows, Including the Sufjan Stevens’ Dance Musical, “Illinoise” and Cinderella, by way of Britney Spears, in “Once Upon a One More Time”

Illinoise (c) Matthew Murphy

Leading up to the Tony Awards on Sunday, June 16, I will look back on some of the shows that have made this season such a rousing success. Interestingly enough, two of the shows I saw had understudies in roles that are Tony-nominated for the original actresses. Both shows, in turn, started with the disappointment of not seeing their much-talked about performances but soon brought a different, vibrant energy because of it. 

Enjoy! 

‘Illinoise,’ ‘Merrily We Roll Along,’ and ‘Oh, Mary!’ Rule The Second Annual Dorian Theater Awards

Merrily We Roll Along (c) Matthew Murphy

New York, N.Y. (June 3, 2024): GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics’ 39 theater wing members gave Illinoise, Merrily We Roll Along and Oh, Mary! top honors in the group’s second annual Dorian Theater Awards, honoring the best of 2023-24’s Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, mainstream to LGBTQ+.