Theater Revue: Spring 2025 Edition

The best and worst of the New York theater scene, on and off Broadway

Jun 12, 2025

Welcome to the Spring 2025 Theater Revue! In the second edition of this new series, I review the shows I’ve seen in the last few months on and off Broadway.

It’s officially Tony Awards season! On May 1, the nominations were announced and on June 8, the winners were revealed at an awards ceremony held at Radio City. Last year, the awards show was hosted at Lincoln Center and my friend Alyssa and I attended the free watch party set up next to the ceremony in Damrosch Park. While I’m sure nothing compares to being inside the actual theater when the awards are announced, we had a great time watching on the simulcast amongst hundreds of other fellow theater-lovers, all of whom had strong opinions about what and who should win.

Just as some people try to see all the nominated movies before the Oscars, Alyssa and I try to see all the nominated shows, and obviously have opinions on what should win and what was snubbed. This year we saw the majority of the nominees, although there are of course a few shows where cheap tickets are hard to come by (I’m looking at you George Clooney and Sarah Snook).

Many of the nominated shows, plus some non-qualifying off-Broadway shows, are included in this season’s round-up and discussed below (if you need a reminder of how my rating system works, click here). I’m also saving a few of the nominees for my summer round-up to avoid stuffing this newsletter beyond it’s already stuffed capacity.

Until then, read on to see my thoughts on ten shows, including two of the musicals nominated for Best New Musical, Buena Vista Social Club and Dead Outlaw; one of the nominees for Best New Play, John Proctor is the Villain; and one of the nominees for best musical revival, Floyd Collins. In my Winter 2025 Theater Revue, I wrote about Sunset Boulevard, which won the award for Best Musical Revival, and Purpose, which won the award for Best New Play. And, if snubs are more your thing, you can read my review of Idina Menzel’s Redwood, which received a grand total of 0 nominations.

Seen any of the Tony nominees this season? Have any opinions on the winners or what should have won? Need advice on how to get affordable tickets? Feel free to reach out!

Buena Vista Social Club

Musical, Broadway (Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre), open run

Buena Vista Social Club is a quasi-jukebox musical about the real-life Buena Vista Social Club in Havana and their Grammy-winning 1997 album that spread Cuban music around the world. The show goes back and forth between the music scene of the early 1950s leading up to the Cuban Revolution and the 1997 effort to record the album that captured the essence of the previous era.

As with most jukebox musicals, the story itself was just fine. It included a few too many earnestly delivered lines in an effort to seamlessly link the past and present. The singing and dancing, however, were phenomenal. In many ways I would have preferred if the story had been cut altogether so that these elements could be the central focus. The band is also wonderful and featured prominently center stage throughout. And, best of all, the married duo Justin Peck and Patricia Delgado, both classically trained ballerinas, collaborate to create the beautiful choreography that was utterly deserving of its Tony for Best Choreography.

Rating: 4/5

Glengarry Glen Ross

Play, Broadway (Palace Theatre), limited run (closes June 28)

Glengarry Glen Ross follows a group of sketchy real estate agents in Chicago competing to be their office’s top seller for the quarter. In the first act, the audience is introduced to the sellers in ten minute vignettes, all of which take place at an otherwise empty restaurant near their office. In the first scene, a salesman tries to convince his boss that he’s deserving of better leads than what he has been given of late. The next scene features one salesman trying to convince another to steal the good leads from the office in attempt to get ahead in the leaderboard. The final scene of the first act shows the sleazy tactics used by a top salesman to convince an unsuspecting client to buy property in Florida.

Then, after about 35 minutes of fast talking and complaining, there’s an intermission. A long one. The curtain comes up on an entirely new set; this time, we’re looking inside of the recently-robbed real estate office. As a police officer takes people’s statements, the rest of the sellers argue with each other, cover up their schemes, and handle a client who wants his deposit back. Every single man, except maybe the police officer who doesn’t have a full character-arc, is depressing in one way or another: washed-up, too old for the cutthroat industry, or just generally desperate.

Glengarry Glen Ross sports a star-studded all-male cast, including Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr. The draw of these big names for ticket sales might explain why the show is being staged at the recently renovated Palace, an utterly massive space that feels too big for the emotional minutiae of the show. I thought the individual performances, especially that of Bob Odenkirk, Michael McKean and John Pirruccello, were excellent. The others were fine. Kieran Culkin largely plays a version of a character we’ve seen before in Succession and A Real Pain, which, while award-winning, isn’t anything new. A lot of this acting involves men shouting at each other, although less of this happens in the second act, which might be why I thought the second act was far better than the first.

There’s been much discussion in the theater critic world about why it was necessary to revive this show now, which has appeared on Broadway 4 times since its debut in 1984. I think Helen Shaw of the New Yorker offers a fairly good explanation: “it offers male stars wonderful parts full of stunning, serrated language.” What could have been an excellent critique of capitalism and American masculinity instead turns into a comedian’s laugh-track. Personally, I found very little about the show funny, despite the constant audience laughter. On the one hand, maybe this said good things about the show: the actors lulled the audience into a false sense of complacency where it felt ok to laugh when the underlying layers were actually quite sad. On the other hand, maybe people weren’t paying close enough attention, distracted instead by the flash of celebrity. Even worse, maybe we’ve become immune to things that are subtly melancholic, opting for an easier emotional reaction.

Overall, I walked away from the performance thinking what I had just seen was generally good: good theater, good performances, nothing that made me go wow.

Rating: 3.5/5

Dead Outlaw

Musical, Broadway (Longacre Theatre), open run

Dead Outlaw is the true story of the short life of Elmer McCurdy, a outlaw bank and train robber who was killed by the Oklahoma police in a shootout in 1910. His body was taken to a morgue where it was preserved with arsenic while the medical examiner waited for family to claim him. When no one came, his perfectly preserved body became a sideshow at the morgue, then in a circus, and then in movies. The body was eventually stored in a closet in California where it sat for decades until its discovery, autopsy, and burial in the 1970s.

This is an extremely bizarre premise for a musical. I try not to know too much about a show before I see it, but in this instance, I probably would have benefited from a little background. The show was conceived and largely written by David Yazbek (A Band’s Visit) and originally played at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre, which means that the audio element of the show has to be emphasized above all else. As a result, there is minimal staging of the show, including minimal sets and dancing. The musical’s band, which sits on the stage for the entirety of the 100 minute performance, is the focal point. They’re excellent. They have some edgy songs, some rock-and-roll numbers, and some wistful ballads. Sometimes they’re part of the action and other times they cede the stage to Andrew Durand (Shucked), who originated the role of Elmer McCurdy off-Broadway and returns to the role here along with most of the original cast from the off-Broadway production. Some of the songs absolutely could have been cut, but that’s more owing to the length of the no-intermission show and their relevance to the overall story than to the quality of the performances.

I appreciated that the show was doing something different than the increasingly common Broadway formula. It caught me off guard, sure, but it also fully leaned into being weird, which I respect. It’s not traditional, but it was fun, if not also in need of a little trimming.

Rating: 3.5/5

Floyd Collins

Musical, Broadway (Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont), limited run (closes June 22, 2025)

Floyd Collins tells the true story of an eponymous young man who gets stuck in a cave in Kentucky in 1925 while exploring. Floyd (Jeremy Jordon) and his family live in what is now the Mammoth Cave National Park, which encompasses the largest known cave system in the world. Floyd is a frequent amateur explorer of the area, and when he discovers this cave, he envisions turning the area into an attraction that will make him rich.

A few hours into his adventure, however, he gets stuck under shifting rock. His family notices that he is missing longer than normal and enlist the help of their neighbors to get him out. A young reporter (Taylor Trensch) writes a story about Floyd’s plight, drawing in the national media eager for a salacious story, outsiders hoping to aid in the rescue (but making things worse), spectators coming from afar to participate in the makeshift carnival atmosphere that has sprung-up near the operation, and enterprising locals who take advantage of the tragedy to make a quick buck.

I was impressed by the staging of the show, which somehow successfully played with the giant proportions of the Lincoln Center Theater stage to evoke the small feeling of crawling through and being trapped in a cave. The drawback, however, is that Floyd ends up laying in what appears to be a giant rock recliner for most of the show, except for occasional breaks in reality where he sings and dances with one of his siblings. One of those siblings is portrayed by the singer Lizzy McAlpine, who is making her Broadway debut. McAlpine’s voice was perfectly matched for the beautiful and disjoined tenor of a score that tenderly evokes a specific time and place. The story itself might not always be the most engaging, but the performances certainly are.

Rating: 4/5

Five Models in Ruins, 1981

Play, Off-Broadway (Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center), limited run (closes June 1)

Roberta, one of the few female fashion photographers working in the early 1980s, gathers a group of models to shoot the cover of Vogue. The conditions onsite, a rundown country estate, are primitive: there is no indoor toilet, food, or running water; the electricity appears to be on the fritz; and the makeup artist was apparently out late partying and is now missing. Each of the models has horror stories from past gigs, are predisposed to hate one another, and talk vapidly while Roberta fiddles with lighting in the other room. After about an hour of this, the shoot finally and laboriously begins, culminating in everyone’s pent-up frustrations bursting to the surface.

When I’m watching a show, I try to be aware of how many people contribute unique elements to the resulting production - from the script to the staging to the acting - and thus, it is rare that I struggle to find a redeeming quality in a performance. Not a single of the six actresses gave a good performance, instead opting to perform caricatures of people. The writing contributed to the element of caricature, but it also came up short on key elements like plot, storyline, and setting. There were no themes to pull the show together other than, possibly, the challenges of being a beautiful woman in the world, which, frankly, is not particularly sympathetic. The directing was forced and the bizarre transition scenes where the actors pretended to be models were uncomfortable to watch. Even the makeup was bad, including one scene in which a woman shows up after having been abducted (a plot-line that is never fully addressed) with “blood” on her arm that was clearly just smeared lipstick.

If there had been an intermission, I would have left. However there was not and I was stuck in my seat for ninety unending, tedious minutes. This did not stop the man behind me, who confidently left with about ten minutes left in the performance. He made the right choice. He saved himself from the baffling final scene, in which everyone inexplicably screams and writhes on the floor for five minutes.

Rating: 1/5

John Proctor is the Villain

Play, Broadway (Booth Theatre), limited run (closes August 31)

In a small Georgia town with just one stoplight, a junior honors English class is beginning its drama unit by reading Arthur Miller’s classic, The Crucible. As Mr. Smith (Gabriel Ebert) tells his class, The Crucible, set amid the Salem witch trials, is an allegory for McCarthyism, mob mentality, and the dangers of falsely accusing people of bad acts. It feels like a particularly relevant time to be teaching this play to his class. The year is 2018, and despite the town’s size, it will not be immune to accusations arising out of the #MeToo movement.

What makes this show genius is that it doesn’t take the easy road by making the play a modern version of the Salem witch trials or the McCarthy Era. It certainly plays on the same themes, but it’s also decidedly not a morality play about the #MeToo era. Instead, it takes the moment of accusation and revelation, places it side by side with the hysteria presented in The Crucible, and then twists and bends The Crucible, making the audience question right and wrong, heroes and villains, power and subversion.

I don’t want to share too much more about the story, because so much of the show’s dramatic success hinges on a shocking twist. Instead, it’s worth focusing on the incredible talent that fills this cast. Sadie Sink (Stranger Things) is advertised as the show’s lead, but it’s really an ensemble cast of young people putting on affecting, all-encompassing performances, from nineteen-year-old Fina Strazza to Amalia Yoo making her Broadway debut. This show also marks playwright Kimberly Bellflower’s Broadway debut, and she is paired with a young directing star in Danya Taymor (winner of last year’s Tony for direction of The Outsiders). Taymor has made a name for herself directing shows that feature honest portrayals of youth and yearning, and I can’t imagine a better canvas for that skill than this funny and raw show.

I saw this play twice, and both times I left the theater in tears. I wasn’t alone. Something about this show not just evokes, but demands, a visceral response. I think this reaction comes even more naturally if you were a teenager around the time of this particular era, experiencing those cultural references, listening to these songs. I can’t think of the last show I gave a perfect rating, but I know that this show is deserving of it. There’s not a single element that is lacking.

Rating: 5/5

Wonderful Town

Musical, NY City Center Encores!, limited run (April 30 - May 11)

The original Broadway production of Wonderful Town, with music by Leonard Bernstein, won the Tony for Best Musical when it made its debut in 1953. This two-week revival, put on by New York City Center as part of its Encores! series likely wouldn’t win any Tony awards, even if it was eligible (it wasn’t, due to its short run). Set in 1935, Wonderful Town tells the stories of the bohemians of Greenwich Village, particularly two sisters who have recently moved to the city from Ohio with dreams of making it as a writer and a performer respectively. Other than this loose plot framework, there isn’t much of a cohesive story, which was fairly obvious during some random songs that felt totally out of place with the rest of the musical.

Unfortunately, at my performance, one of the actresses playing a sister from Ohio was not present and a member of the ensemble had to fill in despite never having done a dress rehearsal for the role. As a result, she carried a script for most of the show, which was understandable if not a little off-putting. More off-putting was the decision of the other sister to also carry a script, which distracted from the overall performance.

An enduring benefit of any Encores! performance is the prominence of the orchestra. In this production, the orchestra was seated in full view of the audience on a center-stage platform, which feels fitting for listening to any of Bernstein’s work. Other than the orchestra, however, there wasn’t much about this production that excited me (or the cranky elderly lady who left at intermission after the usher told her there was still another hour in the second act). The dancing was good and so were most of the performances, especially that of Javier Munoz (Hamilton in Hamilton after the departure of Lin Manuel Miranda), who has a beautiful voice.

Rating: 2.5/5

All Nighter

Play, Off-Broadway (MCC Theater Space), limited run (February 25 - May 18)

All Nighter is set over the course of one all-night study session on the last night of finals for a group of five college seniors. Four of the seniors live together in a house and purport to be best friends who are nostalgic for the life they are about to leave behind. As the play goes on, however, secrets and interpersonal problems are revealed. Julia Lester (Into the Woods) provides excellent comic relief as the interloping fifth friend, who’s larger than life personality is initially dismissed as dramatic but later becomes the central voice of reason that cuts through the tension descending on the study room.

All Nighter marks Ben Platt’s (Dear Evan Hansen, Pitch Perfect, Theater Camp) producing debut, and I think he chose a good show to work with. The right level of drama was carefully doled out over the course of the show so that I was never bored and always eager to figure out each character’s underlying motivations. I do think that the writing didn’t quite stick the landing when the show ended on an overstretched analogy comparing the rising sun to the students’ nascent futures. I also felt that some of the character development was lacking, although this was more the fault of the writing than any decisions made by the actors themselves.

Rating: 3.5/5

Sondheim’s Old Friends

Musical/Revue, Broadway (Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre), limited run (closes June 29)

Stephen Sondheim, the late, great Broadway composer and lyricist, died at the end of 2021. He left behind an incredible, decades-spanning oeuvre, which is explored in Old Friends, a musical revue and tribute led by Sondheim’s longtime muses, Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga. While Sondheim has an extensive collection of work to choose from, the show focuses rightfully on his hits. A stellar company composed of Broadway veterans sings through about thirty of these songs, with staging and costumes to match. It was clear that a lot of thought and attention to detail were put into the costuming and sets, and each performance was spectacular.

This revue is very much a treat for any big Broadway fan, especially people who appreciate Sondheim and/or the work of Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga. I consider myself an appreciator of all these categories, but even I did not recognize every song or show that was included in the revue (and, notably, while the program lists the name of the song, it does not list what show the song appears in). I recommend seeing this before it closes in a few weeks if you are a Broadway person with general Sondheim knowledge; you’ll be in good company with an appreciative and laudatory crowd.

Rating: 4/5

Eurydice

Play, Off-Broadway (Signature Theatre), limited run (closes June 27)

Theater fans are most likely to recognize the story of Orpheus and Eurydice from the hit Tony-award winning musical Hadestown, in which Orpheus, a famous musician, goes to the underworld to bring back his wife, Eurydice, from the dead. Personally, however, I prefer this adaptation of the Greek myth, written by Sarah Ruhl in 2003 and currently running off-Broadway at Signature Theatre.

This production features Maya Hawke (Stranger Things) as the eponymous Eurydice, and it is through her eyes that we view the story of her love, marriage, death, and near-resurrection. Brian D’Arcy James (Into the Woods, Days of Wine and Roses) plays a moving version of Eurydice’s father and T. Ryder Smith (Oslo, War Horse) gives a truly stunning performance as A Nasty Interesting Man/Lord of the Underworld (Hades). I saw the show on the very first night of previews and happened to be seated in the second row, which gave me a wonderful view of the actors’ facial expressions, tears, and, in the case of Hades, physically terrifying performance.

No review of this play would be complete without commentary on the fabulous set and staging. Eurydice arrives in the underworld via a “rain elevator,” which is depicted in this performance with buckets of water falling on the stage. Having been to this theater space for past performances and seen the stage and seats set up completely differently, I was amazed at the engineering that must have gone into dumping such a sheer volume of water into the elevator. The quantity alone achieved a perfect, dramatic effect. I was also moved by the scene in which the father builds his daughter a house out of string in the underworld, which was constructed and staged in front of the audience at a mesmerizing pace.

I’ve never been particularly in love with the underlying Greek myth because I’ve never been able to bring myself to care enough about the relationship between Orpheus and Eurydice. In this production, I couldn’t have asked for a better adaptation, performances and staging, which was enough to overcome any faults I have with this classic story.

Rating: 4.5/5

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