Spring Roundup 2026
- Jonathan Kalb
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 2 hours ago
Once again, the forsythias are in bloom, and that means new openings are arriving way too fast for me to write full reviews on everything I see. Here, then, are some shorter takes, euphoric, admiring, and otherwise.
Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence is an extraordinarily haunting experience—a stunningly composed and slyly written work about the disconcertingly newsy subject of mass school shootings. With an unusually tight, drama-like libretto by the Finnish novelist Sofi Oksanen, it depicts the aftermath of a fictional Helsinki shooting when, ten years after the crime, the mother of a victim, filling in for a colleague, discovers she is waitressing at a wedding for the shooter’s family. Flashbacks mix with party scenes as this woman asks what right the family has to celebrate, and dark secrets emerge as the bride learns of the crime and wonders why she was never told of it. Over an intense and eerie 90 minutes, the work never sensationalizes or trivializes the awful events. Instead, with Saariaho’s spectral and ominous score, it steadily builds in sensitivity and compassion for the living and the dead, presenting different operatic voices for each distinct psyche. The cast is first-rate, with director Simon Stone arranging the action in fascinating, constantly shifting tableaus on a slowly revolving, two-story set (designed by Chloe Lamford). The nonstop transformations of the rooms become a vivid and moving reminder of the everlasting injury of this sort of crime—an inescapable carousel of suffering.
Theatergoers of a certain age may remember how David Mamet ruffled liberal feathers back in 1993 with his play Oleanna, about a seemingly timid college student who boosts her confidence and status by deliberately destroying a professor with false claims of sexual harassment. The title character of Gina Gionfriddo’s 2008 Pulitzer finalist Becky Shaw might be described as a successor to that student, sympathetically reconceived by a female playwright in a postliberal age of smash-and-grab capitalism. Trip Cullman’s superb revival of this hilarious and sharp-edged play makes a case for it as a major statement about a quintessential American type: the ruthlessly transactional villain-hero. Becky (played with canny, doe-eyed innocence by Madeline Brewer) may be obviously unscrupulous, but so is her victim Max, a heartless money-manager she’s openly trying to entrap (played with dead-on Mametesque savagery by Alden Ehrenreich). There are no innocents in Gionfriddo’s cruel and cutting world, everyone who seems nice turns out to be an idiot, so why not root for pretty, perceptive and persistent Becky? All the actors on this stage are excellent—the other cast members are Linda Emond, Lauren Patten, and Patrick Ball—and it’s a particular treat to see Ball (the hottie drug-addict-doctor from The Pitt) playing a dishy pushover with a savior complex. Brewer’s Becky eats this do-gooder for breakfast.
Every Brilliant Thing is truly the Little Production That Could—a solo show from the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe that became a world-wide phenomenon, with more than 600 productions to date in 80 countries, plus an HBO film. This modest and charming piece about a small boy coping with his mother’s suicide attempt by compiling a list of things worth living for ran at the Barrow Street Theater in 2014, acted by its original co-writer Jonny Donahoe, and it has now opened on Broadway starring the “boy who lived” himself, Daniel Radcliffe. Radcliffe’s performance is remarkable for how effectively humble it is, given his star-wattage. The show relies on constant audience participation, with spectators playing the boy’s father, girlfriend, guidance counselor, and more, and also shouting out “brilliant things” from the list (“ice cream,” “the color yellow,” “people falling over”). Any hint of aloofness or star-cool in those interactions would ruin the everyman aura the work requires to convey its core messages that we all need relatedness, and that every life has value. Radcliffe seems to understand this instinctively. He radiates warmth and accessibility when singling people out, and even when addressing us as a group, and that surprisingly helps the play rise above its simple and sentimental material. The feelings it evokes are strong, and linger longer than you may anticipate.
Cats is the quintessence of theatrical junk food—an utterly incoherent, high-energy dance musical, with only one good song (“Memory”), that became a long-running hit because its slinky cats were sexy and ran around the theater touching people, spouting rhyming nonsense, and making tourists feel welcome. This Andrew Lloyd Webber candy bar finally ran out of calories and sputtered away a while back, but then two years ago, the directors Zhailon Levington and Bill Rauch repackaged it as a Harlem underground ballroom at the PAC Center and relabeled it Cats: The Jellicle Ball—to make it seem marginally more nourishing, I figured. Having now seen it after its move to Broadway, I concede there’s a bit more to it than that. The show is now as empty as a supermodel’s head, you might say, meaning its vacuity has become utterly unimportant because the clothes and bodies on the runway are THAT amazing. Webber’s cats have been reinvented as fiercely proud contestants for trophies in hyper-glamorous runway walks and realness competitions, and that gives the play a new sense of purpose as a flamboyant celebration of queer culture. It boasts dozens of over-the-top fabulous costumes by Qween Jean, an impressive raft of astonishingly fine dancers with unusual physiques, and a powerful through-line of community solidarity. Eighty-year-old Andre De Shields’s electrifying performance as Old Deuteronomy is alone worth the price of a ticket.
With vastly powerful mega-corporations reducing our lives to saleable data and AI poised to take our jobs, Elmer Rice’s 1923 expressionist play The Adding Machine seems like a no-brainer for revival. A dogsbody accountant named Mr. Zero learns he’s been replaced by an adding machine, murders his heartless boss, is executed after a perfunctory trial, and then, in the afterlife, turns down a chance at happiness to take up the same rote activity he performed in life. This cold-blooded story from the early days of office mechanization should grip us, so why is The New Group’s smartly conceived adaptation (called a “revision”) so persistently flat and aloof? The playwright Thomas Bradshaw, famous for his sexual provocations, has retained most of Rice’s language but also inserted a narrator and much more explicit sexual language. He and director Scott Elliott have reduced the cast from 20 to 4—with Mr. and Mrs. Zero and Zero’s crush Daisy individualized and everyone else played by the charismatic Michael Cyril Creighton (from “Only Murders in the Building”). The noirish set by Derek McLane—starkly lit filing cabinets and other rolling units dashing on and off before a grid of cheap fans and lamps—is admirably flexible, which helps the scenic movement stay brisk and efficient. The main source of inertia, for me, is the much-touted cross-gender casting of Daphne Rubin-Vega (the original sexy Mimi in Rent) as Mr. Zero. The point of this choice, I presume, is to present the supposedly manly lead character ironically as a short, charmless nebbish. But who wants to dwell on that for 2 ¼ hours? Rice’s play keeps its emotional cards close to its chest, but it does offer one all-in emotional bet—the attraction between Mr. Zero and Daisy. If there’s no sexual chemistry between these two (and there absolutely isn’t between Rubin-Vega and Sarita Choudhury’s Daisy), we’re just left holding a bag without real feeling, merely indicated, cipher-like emotion.
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