Beyond Broadway: A Mad King, A Spritz of Hairspray, A Lonesome Cowboy and More

This November and early December, as leather-jacket weather turns into puffer-jacket weather, New York’s most appealing non-Broadway offerings include a first-date comedy, a performance-art phantasmagoria, a double dose of Shakespeare, a Disney medley and plenty more. 

BAD KREYÒL
Pershing Square Signature Center, through Dec 1
Playwright Dominique Morisseau has made a name for herself on Broadway, collecting Tony nominations as librettist for the Temptations musical Ain’t Too Proud and for Skeleton Crew, a drama about Detroit auto factory workers (Phylicia Rashad won a Tony for her performance in 2022). A Detroit native, Morisseau’s work often takes her to her hometown, but her latest work, Bad Kreyòl (a Signature Theatre and Manhattan Theatre Club co-production directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene), digs into her Haitian roots. Kelly McCreary (best known for her years on the ABC drama Grey’s Anatomy) plays Simone, a Haitian-American who, after her grandmother’s death, decides to spend time in Haiti to reconnect with her cousin Gigi (played by Tony nominee Pascale Armand). It’s a play that asks big questions about identity, culture and the U.S.’s complicated role on the global stage. But it also tells an intimate family story that’s packed with heart and humor.

KING LEAR
The Shed, through December 15
Kenneth Branagh has been psyching himself up to peer into the howling abyss of the Bard’s late-career tragedy, about a leader who spectacularly loses the plot, for some time. Most poignantly, in this primal take on the material—which also de-emphasizes the play's political undercurrents—the awful events are set in motion by what feels like a familial misunderstanding. Condensing the text to two hours and surrounding himself with young and hungry recent graduates from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, all with a muscular grasp of the text, Branagh delivers a production that feels as wild and gamey as freshly butchered venison.

SHIT. MEET. FAN.
MCC Theater’s Newman Mills Theater, through December 15
How’s this for a backstory. The Italian comedy Perfect Strangers has been remade around 25 times around the world in multiple languages including Danish, Turkish, Hungarian and Chinese. Now it’s the basis of a new play by Robert O’Hara, with an all-star cast including Neil Patrick Harris, Jane Krakowski, Michael Oberholtzer, Constance Wu and Debra Messing. (Everybody goes on about the Succession diaspora on the New York stage. What about the Will & Grace diaspora?) The plot centers on a group of friends who play a game in which every text, every email and every call must be shared aloud. Hilarity ensues—and, judging by the play’s ancestry, deeply relatable, universal truths emerge.

GIVE ME CARMELITA TROPICANA
Soho Rep, through December 15
Earlier in the year, the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate won the Tony for Best Revival. His next move? Making trashy, trippy, frankly batshit-insane art downtown. In Give Me Carmelita Tropicana, an NYU student (Branden, played by Ugo Chukwu) offers to buy his teacher’s alter ego, then proceeds to plummet down a campy, avant-garde, theatrical rabbit hole. A goldfish puppet is involved. The show is co-written with and stars Alina Troyano, the outrageous Cuban-born performance artist who teaches under the stage name Carmelita Tropicana, and whose motto, tellingly, is “Your Kunst is your Waffen” (“your art is your weapon”).

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
Classic Stage Company, Nov 22-Dec 22
Back in September, we were singing the praises of Our Class, Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s historical play about a horrific 1941 massacre of Polish Jews that Igor Golyak directed to crushing effect at Classic Stage Company. Now, on the same stage, Golyak slots his Our Class actors into his adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice—a production that keeps the customary comedy but, mirroring modern times, puts some of its darker antisemitic hues in stark relief. Set in a world that looks and feels like a late-night comedy show, this Merchant has Richard Topol playing the typically villainized Jewish moneylender Shylock, with his classmate Alexandra Silber taking on the role of Portia and T.R. Knight joining the company as the titular merchant Antonio. Golyak promises the “romp” that fans of the play have come to expect. “But antisemitism is a light sleeper,” he says. “As the story plays out, it inevitably awakens and the result is devastating.”

HOLD ON TO ME DARLING
Lucille Lortel Theatre, through December 22
At the performance of Hold On To Me Darling this writer attended, there was a fly buzzing around the stage in the Lucille Lortel Theatre. Adam Driver responded to the intrusion by reaching out and trying to snatch the fly out of the air with his bare hand while the scene carried on. Point being, Driver is so mightily present as the troubled troubadour Strings McCrane in Kenneth Lonergan’s hilarious but deceptively poetic 2016 play—which elevates a sitcom premise with sensitively drawn characters and an overall emotional generosity worthy of Tennessee Williams. The rest of the cast is uniformly superb, too, and giving it their all under the direction of Neil Pepe.

MAMA, I’M A BIG GIRL NOW!
New World Stages, running through Dec 8
For anyone who saw the original Tony-winning Broadway production of Hairspray at the Neil Simon Theatre—or has spent the last 20 years listening to the cast album on a loop—you’re in for a night of nostalgia and female friendship with Mama, I’m a Big Girl Now. Marissa Jaret Winokur (Broadway’s Tony-winning Tracy Turnblad), Kerry Butler (Penny Pingleton) and Laura Bell Bundy (Amber Von Tussle) have turned their memories, careers and indelible bond into a one-act show that injects joy straight into your veins via deep-cut musical theater nerd-dom. And if you want to know what true love looks like, just watch Winokur look on tearfully as Butler sings a Disney medley.

STRATEGIC LOVE PLAY
Minetta Lane Theatre, running through Dec 7
If you’re looking for a date-night activity, consider watching Heléne Yorke (The Other Two) and Michael Zegen (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) perform the awkward ritual itself in Miriam Battye’s Strategic Love Play, a two-hander directed by Katie Posner at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre. They play a pair of nameless strangers brought together by the dating app algorithms and audiences watch as their first encounter “spirals into something unexpected.” Like any good (or bad) date, there’s an air of mystery, but the play comes to New York with raves from Edinburgh Fringe and London’s Soho Theatre—no surprise considering Battye’s Succession writing credentials, which promise sharp dialogue and maybe some scathing observations about the state of modern dating. And with a genius of musical comedy like Yorke (Bullets Over Broadway, American Psycho) and a veteran of dramatic classics like Zegen (A View From the Bridge, Trouble in Mind), we can already see the diverting mismatch taking shape.

THE BLOOD QUILT
Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, in previews, opens Nov 21
Katori Hall, the Tony-nominated book writer of Broadway’s Tina Turner musical Tina, brings her intimate family play The Blood Quilt to Lincoln Center Theater. Directed by LCT Resident Director Lileana Blain-Cruz, the piece shows four sisters (and one of their daughters) healing old wounds around a quilting circle after the death of their mother. Like any family gathering, the play promises a rollercoaster of emotions, delivered by a not-to-be-missed cast that includes Adrienne C. Moore of Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black and Susan Kelechi Watson of This Is Us tear-jerking renown.