After an alarming vacation in Germany, British writer Sally Carson wrote “Crooked Cross” about the rise of Nazism as told through its effect on one ordinary German family.  It was published as a novel in 1934; the following year,  she adapted it into a play. Both versions were long forgotten until now. The novel was republished five months ago to great acclaim.  The play is opening tonight for the first time anywhere since 1937, in the latest of the Mint Theater Company’s sturdy restorations on a budget. It is, as usual for Mint productions, impressively performed and well designed.

“Art” is not about art, and it’s not really about friendship. If it’s about anything at all, the Broadway revival of Yasmina Reza’s 30-year-old play is about the celebrity of Bobby Cannavale, James Corden and Neil Patrick Harris, who star as longtime friends who come to blows over an expensive all-white painting. All three actors are familiar faces on TV, each with enough fans apparently willing to pay a top ticket price upwards of $500, judging by the box office grosses in the three weeks since the production opened at Broadway’s Music Box Theater, and by the deafening entrance applause that greeted each of them one by one at the matinee I attended. 

Dylan Mulvaney has chosen an obviously ironic title for her extravagantly staged solo show about her viral life story as a targeted trans social media celebrity. But she also exudes an innate sincerity. Beneath all the campy scenes and quirky original songs, she lets us know that all she ever wanted was for everybody to like her; she certainly never meant to become so notorious.  Having gained a massive following on TikTok with her “Days of Girlhood” series, a daily chronicle of her transgender transition over the course of a year,  Mulvaney became famous enough to interview President Biden in the White House and to promote several national products as a brand ambassador.  

Last week, four new Broadway shows announced their dates and venues for Spring 2026: Dog Day Afternoon, opening March 30. Fallen Angels, April 19. Schmigadoon, April 20. The Rocky Horror Show, April 23 – which makes 22 shows in total now for the Broadway 2025-2026 season. Over the past two weeks, three solo shows opened in New York that originated at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (Weather Girl, Weer, and one at Dixon Place I review below), with a fourth opening this coming week. The Fringe has become almost as palpable a presence in New York as New Yorkers are at the Fringe, the latter illustrated by my 

In her hour-long solo show, Abby Wambaugh both spoofs and nails a wide variety of comedy styles, from standup to slapstick to Moth-style storytelling to musical comedy. At various times, she wears a banana suit, portrays the number 9, and (my favorite) imitates a vacuum cleaner. She hands a mic to an audience member to produce the sounds of a dribbling basketball in a segment that, as we see on the mini marquee, is entitled “One on None,” and gives a gift of white wigs to two other theatergoers to join her in one entitled “Old Men Learn Parkour.”  …

In its thrilling opening rap, “Mexodus” gives an overview of the little-known history of Mexico as a refuge for thousands of escaping American slaves before the Civil War. Rhythmic, uncommonly melodic, densely informative, “Two Bodies” may remind you of another opening number, from a certain Broadway musical that’s also based on American history. Unlike “Hamilton,” though – or “1776” or “Suffs” or “Assassins” – “Mexodus” doesn’t keep strictly to the historical record after that. This is in part because so little of this particular history was recorded. But Brian Quijada and Nygel D.

Elizabeth Marvel has been summoned to an ominous-looking room by a uniformed official; she doesn’t know why, and the chatty official keeps her (and us) in suspense. She is the lawyer who will represent a woman who murdered her entire family, the official (Scott Shepherd) finally informs her, at the end of the first scene in Tim Blake Nelson’s play. “Find someone else,” she begs him.“We both know this must happen.” As cryptic futuristic dystopian procedurals go, “And Then We Were No More” has much to recommend it. The title is enough of a tip-off that things will not end well, but the downbeat journey is made worthwhile by a splendid cast, an impressive set,  and some provocative philosophical observations.

Below is a calendar of New York theater opening* in October, including three opening on Broadway. “Ragtime” originated at the Encores concert series, “Liberation” had a brief run Off-Broadway; both are transferring with casts intact. “Little Bear Ride Road” starring Laurie Metcalf, marks the Broadway debut of an Off-Broadway favorite, playwright Samuel D. Hunter. (There’s a fourth Broadway show that’s not opening on Broadway; for explanation, see October 8th) Ostober 16 October 28 October 30 Beyond Broadway, Andre De Shields takes on Moliere, Stephen Rea does Beckett, Bedlam adapts Jane Austen, and Jordan E.

The first month of the Fall theater season is coming to an end with disparate worries – that “the Broadway musical is in trouble” and that there’s a “fascist takeover of the American theater industry” (to quote two headlines; see below.)  The presence of so many stars in the shows that have opened so far has delighted some fans, but some theater lovers are frankly frustrated at the title towards stars, revivals and screen adaptations. With a new generation of artistic directors now in place (see below), perhaps there will be a new approach.  

In one of the most moving scenes that I’ve ever witnessed in a theater, Jacob finally meets the parents of the young man whom he killed. Making an extraordinary Broadway debut, Will Harrison as Jacob stares at the floor, chokes on his breath, struggles to speak: “I didn’t want to say ‘sorry’,” he manages to get out, ”because it feels too small. I instead wanted do something. But I am sorry…” The memorable encounter between Jacob and the parents, Joan (Victoria Clark) and David (Sam Robards) comes in the final half hour of “Punch,” a play by James Graham based on Jacob Dunne’s 2022 memoir “Right from Wrong,” and it turns the true story into compelling drama.

“Back to back like in the good old days,” Keanu Reeves as Estragon says to Alex Winter as Vladimir; then they shout something together that makes the audience explode in cheers and laughter. Was this an ad-lib from “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure?” I’ve seen “Waiting for Godot” many times, but I’d never seen any of the Bill & Ted movies the two actors had done together, so when I got home, I rented the first one, which in 1989 helped launch Keanu Reeves as a movie star when barely in his twenties.

In the first play officially opened to the public at the Cherry Lane under the ownership of movie studio A24, Natalie Palamides portrays a man and a woman simultaneously,  an exercise in gender-switching slapstick that normally would last no longer than a Weekend Update guest spot on Saturday Night Live.  But “Weer” goes on for more than 80 minutes, and it goes where no one-man/woman clown act has ever gone before;  ever-escalating into both fake and actual nudity, simulated sex, simulated birth, bloody violence --  sometimes hilarious, occasionally shocking. It is a bravura/shameless performance and an exercise in anarchy and inventiveness, as much by the designers of the sets and props as by Palamides the actor/actress/writer/director who smashes them all up.

How well were you paying attention to the theater in September? Answer these ten questions, plus a bonus question, to find out.

“Sixties Surreal,” a just-opened exhibition at the Whitney Museum, offers some 150 works (paintings, sculptures, photographs, illustrations, films, collages, assemblages, an album cover, a newspaper cover, a fake toilet, an I'm-not-sure-what-you'd-call-it) created by 111 artists in the 1960s. Most of them were not the art stars of the decade, but the show's curators argue that they more directly reflected the times: “These artists from diverse backgrounds took license from the wildness of the Surrealist imagination to express the psychosexual, fantastical, spiritual, strange,and revolutionary qualities of their time.” Below, a sampling 

John Leguizamo’s new play is a sober family drama inspired by some of the same people and places from Leguizamo’s past that powered “Freak” and the five other solo stage comedies he has written and performed over the past 35 years. But those shows were marked by his off-the-wall energy and wildly comic impersonations. “The Other Americans” is an ambitious play more in the mold of Arthur Miller’s tragedies about the failure of the American Dream. If the script aspires to more than it ultimately achieves, the production is solid and satisfying even before any of the seven cast members step out on stage: Set designer Arnulfo Maldonado has recreated a traditional middle-class home, intricately detailed with polished wood floors, a working kitchen, fancy iron latticework, an elegant Tiffany-style window.