Beyond Broadway: Sandra Oh Leads a Jury, Marin Ireland Debuts a Play and Cats Gets a Makeover

There’s more to New York theater than Broadway—particularly right now, in the collective exhalation of the post-Tonys period. In our new column, Broadway.com will highlight the extraordinary and worthy work happening in the other theaters and venues around the city. As June turns into July, expect sweet sounds, scintillating performances and some cool (but not literal) cats.

12 ANGRY WOMEN
From her geopolitical drama Chimerica to her apocalyptic (but not unthinkably far-fetched) The Children, British playwright Lucy Kirkwood likes to unsettle with her subtly distorted renderings of the world. She continues apace with The Welkin, a play that premiered in London in 2020 and is now running at the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater, directed by Sarah Benson.

“I’d been wanting to write a play about housework for ages,” said Kirkwood in a 2020 interview with the Financial Times. “But I also wanted to make it really thrilling.” She strikes that oddball balance in her ensemble play about a “jury of matrons” in 18th-century rural England—12 women tasked with deciding whether Sally Poppy (Haley Wong), an accused murderer, is pregnant (the only way to stave off the death penalty). TV and film star Sandra Oh leads the powerhouse cast of theater stalwarts whose deliberations fluctuate between hilarious and grotesque. Performances run through July 7.

ISN'T IT RICH?
On Tonys night, the orchestrator Jonathan Tunick won his second-ever Tony for his work on Merrily We Roll Along; it was his first Tony recognizing his collaboration with Stephen Sondheim. Appropriately, the Broadway community has been enjoying a veritable Jonathan Tunick festival of late, with the EGOT orchestrator’s work heard at the Encores! Titanic and the one-night-only Follies concert at Carnegie Hall. This week sees the unveiling of Tunick’s supersized orchestrations for Sondeim’s lush A Little Night Music, with a stellar cast and Tunick himself conducting a 53-piece orchestra at Lincoln Center's David Geffen Hall from June 27 through 29.

“There’s no hiding in this one,” Ruthie Ann Miles told Broadway.com during a rehearsal visit. “I really enjoyed hiding in dark cubbyhole places in Sweeney Todd, behind the wig and behind just the darkness of the story. In this one, it really is about peacocks. Everyone's a peacock.”

WHEN LOVE HURTS
Speaking of nowhere to hide, the 60-seat Connelly Theatre Upstairs is one of the most intimate spaces in the city, and the appropriate venue for a work of such daring, aching honesty as Pre-Existing Condition, a play about the slow work of healing.

Following one woman as she navigates the indignities and confusions of life after a traumatic event, the play features a rotation of actors in the central role—Tatiana Maslany was quietly devastating in the first week of performances—beautifully and very ably supported by a small cast juggling multiple roles.

Making her playwriting debut, the actress Marin Ireland proves that she can be as captivating on the page as she is on stage (Spain, Uncle Vanya in a loft) and on screen (Eileen). The show runs through August 3.

A HOUSE DIVIDED
Politics buffs can live out a congressional fantasy in Mario Correa’s N/A—an old guard vs. new guard play about the two most notorious women in the House of Representatives. Unnamed but loyal renderings of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and rising star of the Internet age Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are played by Emmy winner and Tony nominee Holland Taylor and Ana Villafañe (an uncanny doppelgänger), who go head-to-head for 80 minutes at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater.

It’s a timely debate between rival philosophies on activism and political maneuvering. Plus, with simple direction from Diane Paulus, N/A offers a blank slate for its two actors to do what they do best #nofilter. Tickets are on sale through September 1. 

MORE THAN ONE WAY TO SKIN CATS
When Trevor Nunn, the vaunted British stage director and artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, was being courted to direct what would become the musical Cats, he was clear on one thing: “I believe all the characters MUST BE CATS,” he wrote.

The show currently getting downtown audiences purring, then, is not Cats. Cats: The Jellicle Ball trades the magic and mystery of the original for the bawdy, outrageous, riotous energy of a Bushwick drag show, using T.S. Eliot’s poetry and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s trippiest score as, basically, an excuse for a whole lot of pose-striking, shade-throwing and butt-jiggling. What’s perhaps surprising is how well the material lends itself to the treatment. It’s a fun and crazy time! (But it’s not Cats—not really.)

Following two extensions, the production will run at the Perelman Performing Arts Center through August 11.