Great Gatsby, Mother Play, Illinoise, Uncle Vanya, Mary Jane, Patriots, The Heart of Rock and Roll. Awards season begins! Stage-ready news of the week.

Three plays and four musicals opened on Broadway last week, the last of 39 shows to open in the 2023-2024 season. Awards season has already begun in earnest: nominations for two major theater awards were announced last week (see below), two more later today (Drama Desk and Chita Rivera), and the Tony Award nominations were announced tomorrow (which is a birthday present for … is). I) by Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Renée Elise Goldsberry at 8:30 a.m. on CBS Mornings.

Broadway Season End Quiz 2024

Check out videos below from the Tony Awards (looking at the entire season), Sondheim's “Here We Are,” “The Great Gatsby,” “The Heart of Rock and Roll” and “Illinoise.”

The Week in New York theater reviews

The Great Gatsby

A musical about the Jazz Age with almost no jazz? A mysterious man who tells us everything in his first song? A critique of wealth in a show whose main pleasure is how expensive it looks? These are lessons that high school students assigned to read F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel might learn by attending “The Great Gatsby” at the Broadway Theater – lessons in irony… The “Gatsby” on stage is not reliable adaptation of the book…this The last Broadway musical to open this season is also just not very satisfying to me as a musical,…The only exception is its extraordinary visual splendor. Full review.

Mother game

Jessica Lange is unforgettable in Paula Vogel's unforgiving portrait of the title character in “Mother Play,” her semi-autobiographical new play… a role so demanding it amounts to actorly abuse. … “Mother Play” is not as great as the plays Paula Vogel has written in the past – perhaps not as great as she could manage with time – but, directed by Tina Landau, it is a fascinating production, although not always easy to look at. Full review

Illinois

“Illinoise” is extraordinary, it is queer, it is often exciting. But it could probably use a warning label. One might mistakenly assume that this stage interpretation of Sufjan Stevens' album “Illinois” is a Broadway jukebox musical, given Stevens' already popular score and the notable names involved in the stage adaptation were… But “Illinoise” isn’t a traditional Broadway musical . It is a dance theater piece and yet unconventional. Full review.

Uncle Vanya

Lincoln Center's “Uncle Vanya,” the 11th production of the play on Broadway, does not fully resolve the production's central difficulties. Production still requires patience; There is no concession to the Tik Tok generation. And while Heidi Schreck's translation highlights the humor and eliminates the stuffiness, it also brings potential problems of its own. Still, the performances of the nine-member cast, led by Lila Neugebauer, often click enough to reward those of us who are patient. Full review

Mary Jane

Rachel McAdams initially seems miscast in her first role on Broadway. She portrays the title character in Amy Herzog's deceptively casual play about the mother of a severely disabled son… fresh-faced and cheerful… McAdams is surprisingly effective in a play whose weight and power creeps up on her. Full review

The heart of rock and roll

“Very poppy,” a character says to Bobby (Corey Cott), the lead actor, shortly after he performs “Do You Believe in Love,” one of more than two dozen songs by the 1980s band Huey Lewis and the News this new play jukebox musical opens on Broadway tonight. I knew “Poppy” was just supposed to be an insult because the character saying it is the villain… Okay, so I'm not going to call “The Heart of Rock and Roll” Poppy. If not poppy, it's certainly predictable, a touch of 1980s nostalgia with a by-the-numbers plot that wouldn't be out of place in a traditional 1950s musical comedy. But as it is, the show has its moments. Cott delivers another reliable central performance, surrounded by outstanding supporting players. Lorin Latarro's choreography rocks and bounces and sometimes goes completely crazy (there are acrobatic dancers in the ensemble). Between the catchy melodies, eye-rolling ingenuity competes with cleverness; Sometimes clever wins. Full review.

Patriots

a smart and entertaining historical drama, if oddly suited to Broadway at the moment. “Patriots” focuses on the man from whom Vladimir Putin sought a favor: Boris Berezovsky, a math prodigy and doctor of medicine who became a billionaire businessman and something of a political boss shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 at least became imperious – the They are the most prominent of the so-called oligarchs, the term used for Russian entrepreneurs who exploited the privatization of state-owned industries to become both insanely rich and frighteningly influential.

The Week in New York Theater News

2024 Outer Critics Circle Award Nominations

Drama League Awards 2024 nominations

I suppose this was inevitable: “Oh, Mary,” Cole Escola's cheesy off-Broadway hit that makes things laugh out loud about First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, opens July 11 at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway. (limited run from June 26th to September 15th) My (outlier) review

What began as a war against theater will not end there
An essay in the New York Times by acclaimed Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro (author of one of my favorite books on theater and the forthcoming The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture) ) War.”)
“…in the most recent Educational Theater Association survey, 85 percent of American theater teachers expressed concern about censorship. Even Shakespeare is at risk: In Florida, new laws meant that “A Midsummer Night's Dream” was limited to grades 10-12 and “Romeo and Juliet” could not be taught in its entirety to avoid running afoul of “sexual conduct” legislation devices. ” If you kill young people’s exposure to the theater, you kill an entire generation of theatergoers, along with the empathy and camaraderie (which are already in short supply) that are inherent in theater.

Robert O'Hara will direct a film adaptation of his play Barbecue, which will star Colman Domingo, Marisa Tomei and Danai Gurira. The satirical racial comedy with a breathtaking twist premiered at the Public Theater in 2015. (My review.)

Photo Call: The Theater Photos of Joan Marcus and Carol Rosegg is on view at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts from May 1 to September 28. The exhibition “presents an extensive selection of the many theater productions that Marcus and Rosegg have photographed over the past four decades, telling some of their fascinating and unique stories about their experiences capturing some of Broadway’s most iconic images.”