5 Shows to See in New York This Month

1. Redwood
Redwood stars Idina Menzel as a tightly wound New Yorker reeling from an unfathomable personal tragedy. She drives across the country to Redwood National Park to escape the pain but instead discovers a new perspective from the treetops. It would be enough just to see Menzel, a living legend, rappelling from a tree trunk while performing her signature vocal gymnastics. But Tina Landau and Kate Diaz’s powerful score also benefits from spectacular performances by Khaila Wilcoxon and Zachary Noah Piser. Redwood is a soaring new musical drama, and your ticket if you’re looking for an immensely satisfying tearjerker.

2. A Streetcar Named Desire
One of my recommendations from last month, Kowalski, really got me in the mood to see a production of A Streetcar Named Desire, and by all accounts a great one is headed to BAM. Paul Mescal, the hunky lead from Gladiator II, will play the brutish Stanley in Tennessee Williams’s drama about a Southern flower wilting in the seedy steam of New Orleans (Patsy Ferran will play the role of Blanche, as she did in London). The production is helmed by Rebecca Frecknall, who has become one of the hottest young directors in the UK. I positively despise her Broadway revival of Cabaret, but I’m eager to be won over by a production that WhatsOnStage says, “dusts away layers of accumulated history to reveal the bare bones.”

3. Grangeville
Playwright Samuel D. Hunter has one of the most distinctive voices in the theater, having penned The Whale, Pocatello, Lewiston/Clarkston, and A Case for the Existence of God—all plays that take us under the surface of seemingly mundane situations to give us a peek at sprawling and complicated interior lives. Like many of his previous works, Hunter’s latest play, Grangeville, takes its name from a small Idaho town. Brian J. Smith and Paul Sparks play estranged half-brothers who reconnect over the care of their ailing mother. This world premiere is directed by Jack Serio, who has helmed some of the most exciting intimate theater in recent years, including the loft production of Uncle Vanya. If you love subtle writing and great acting, this is your ticket.

4. The Irrepressible Magic of the Tropics
If you’ve been enjoying the Netflix series One Hundred Years of Solitude, based on the eponymous novel by Gabriel García Márquez, you ought to check out The Irrepressible Magic of the Tropics, Julián Mesri’s send up of Latin American magical realism. It’s about the wife of an American executive who is left to oversee a factory in the jungle when her husband mysteriously goes missing. Mesri is the writer and composer of the hilarious Spanglish musical adaptation of The Comedy of Errors, which has toured New York with the Public Theater’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit for the last two summers. This new play is having its world premiere with INTAR, the mighty little company behind recently acclaimed productions Vámonos and The Hours are Feminine.

5. The Jonathan Larson Project
Finally, musical theater aficionados will want to check out The Jonathan Larson Project, which started as a 2018 concert at 54 Below and has since blossomed into a full musical. The show was conceived by producer and theater historian Jennifer Ashley Tepper, who uncovered a boatload of previously unheard songs while digging through the Rent composer’s archives at the Library of Congress. Tepper and director John Simpkins put them together in this new show that Tepper described in a recent interview as, “not exactly a song cycle, but it’s not a book musical either.” You can decide what it is for yourself. The show just started previews at the Orpheum Theatre, in the heart of Larson’s beloved East Village.