Happy Pride! New York audiences get to celebrate in a big way. Rob Madge is bringing their original solo show My Son’s a Queer (But What Can You Do?) to New York City Center, making the show’s New York premiere after an almost-Broadway run last season. It runs June 12 to 15.

The show was nominated for an Olivier Award in 2023 after premiering at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2022. The comedy tells the story of Madge’s family as they explore their child’s love for all things Disney — down to a parade they staged in their basement — theatre, and their Queer identity. It is as much a hilarious ode to theatre and VHS as it is about the power of a family’s acceptance. 

Theatrely sat down with Madge to talk about the show’s opening at City Center Thursday night, what they hope young people will take away from it, and what it means to them to perform it during Pride in New York. 

Let's start with how are you feeling? Opening night tonight! What's going through your head?

I am feeling mostly grateful to be here, and I'm thinking back on the journey that it's taken to get the show here and feeling overwhelmed and proud and rejuvenated and ready to share it finally with the New York crowd.

It’s been quite a journey to get here. How has the show changed over time, and how has it changed for this City Center production?

It's ever-evolving, and it will probably evolve tonight and then tomorrow night, because in a solo show, the audience do become your scene partners. They are the other characters in the show, and based on their response, well, their responses will inform mine, so it's constantly growing on that level. 

Of course, for New York City Center, we have upped the sparkle, and the razzmatazz. There are a few more strands of glitter than there were at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. But it's gone on such a journey that I can't quite process it all. I sort of have to take it day by day and not think too much about what it used to be and where it is now, because the concept is too overwhelming to even contemplate. I just have to turn up, do the job and hope that the message still hits the way it always did. 

At Theatrely, our audience is very Gen Z. What are you hoping that young people take away when they see your show?

That there's a place for them, and always has been and always will be, no matter who you are, how you identify, whether or not you're part of the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. We are all unique. We are that there can be no other version of yourself, whatever that might entail or encompass for you and embrace that, embrace that there is no other you. And love one another. We need each other more than ever. Gen Z, we need you more than ever now. I believe that children are the future. I say that as though I'm not a Gen Z, I'm sort of on the cusp. I'm like a Genelial, a mille-X, I don't know I'm sort of in between, 1996. But we need you, and we'll all be right by your side, and we will be fighting for you hard, so join us.

Talk me through some of your favorite parts about performing this and some of the most challenging. What are the highlights and lowlights?

Highlights are having a platform to celebrate my amazing family, to show them off, to share them and to hear people laughing with them, crying with them, night after night. It just reaffirms how blessed and fortunate I've been. It validates my opinion that they are some of the most brilliant parents and grandparents in the world. I've always felt that, and now it's being externally validated by people applauding them. So that's always the most fulfilling. 

The most challenging, on a very basic level, is the stamina required to helm a solo show night after night. We've got all of the tips and tricks. We've got all of the manuka honey. We've got all of the steamers, the nebulizers. Something that I find interesting I've learned is, I was trained as a singer, not necessarily trained as a speaker. And when you're talking non-stop for an hour plus, you have to use the same techniques as you're using when for your singing voice. 

The other challenge is, as rewarding and as fulfilling as it is, sharing my grandparents. They're no longer with me, and so hearing them, it can hit me sometimes. They are on the stage with me, and I feel like I'm resurrecting them in a way, and that can be difficult, but also immensely cathartic. When people compliment my grandparents after the show and say how amazing they are, they always refer to them in the present tense, because I never dwell on the fact that they're no longer with me. I think that is really beautiful, that they are with me, I feel them with me. That’s a really beautiful thing as well.

When you think about this production overall, what does it mean to you to be doing this show now? In New York during Pride? 

The layers are so never ending, really, first and foremost, doing a show about queer joy is vital in any year, because history has taught us that queer stories are so often rooted in shame, and I want to demystify that. Doing a show about queer joy in 2025 is even more urgent and necessary because we are rapidly moving backwards, and if theatre and entertainment and art doesn't push back against that narrative, we're in deep trouble. I believe that art can be the greatest form of activism, and this is when we need to to get to work. Billy Porter says that, “this is when we get to work.” 

Doing it in New York City during Pride Month in 2025 feels like the most perfect time for it. New York City and its queer history is so rich and you can sense the shared queer history running through the veins of the sidewalk when you walk down it. There's just something about it. It's freeing. It's liberating. I'm not from anywhere near here. I'm from the tiniest little town in the middle of England that no one's ever heard of, but because of the people that fought for us in New York City “back in the day,” that little kid in that tiny town far, far away from here is able to live their life happily and proudly. We owe a lot to this city and to be doing it in 2025 and at the heart of queer culture, feels like the biggest “f you” to anyone who tries to quash us.

My Son's a Queer (But What Can You Do?) runs at New York City Center from June 12 to 15. For tickets and more information, visit here.

It started with an idea so crazy it just might work. 

Joe Iconis has woken up every day obsessed with the thought of Hunter S. Thompson — the infamous American journalist who is known as the father of “gonzo journalism” — for around 18 years. Since he started working on the musical about his life (but more so about how art changes the world, politics, and truth), he has started dating his now-wife, broken up, gotten back together, gotten married, and had a kid. 

He was inspired by the film adaptation of Thompson’s novel Fear and Loathing, which came out when he was in high school. When Thompson died in 2005, articles about his life flooded the media. The more Iconis dove into the story, the more he realized how complicated and “unwieldy” Thompson’s life was. Coupled with Thompson’s drug use, “bizarre speech patterns,” and the ugliness and violence in Thompson’s story, writing a musical about his life seemed like “a terrible idea.” 

So terrible, that Iconis knew he had to be the one to write it. 

“When I first started working on it, people would always assume that it was like a corporate job that I got hired for, because the idea of a Hunter S. Thompson musical seems so silly,” Iconis told Theatrely on Zoom. “Over 10 years ago, when I first told my friend Will Rowland I was writing it, he was like, ‘wow, what idiot producer paid you to do that?’ And I was like, ‘No, it's me. It's my fault. I'm the idiot producer.’”

The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical opened Tuesday night at the MAX Theatre in Arlington, Virginia. It’s a full circle moment for Iconis, who is best known, perhaps, for his musical Be More Chill.   

Key word: unauthorized. When Iconis first started working on the show, he baked in some quotes from Thompson’s writing under the assumption that he’d get the rights to Thompson’s work. Quickly, Thompson’s estate told him he’d never be able to afford the rights, but he could write the show “unauthorized.” That is, in no way, shape or form does the musical quote Thompson, nor can it dramatize anything that only exists in one of Thompson’s books. 

“I couldn't fall back on Hunter's words,” Iconis said. “I couldn't use his beautiful writing about America and about civil rights and about all of these huge issues. I couldn't use his actual words as a crutch. I had to actually figure out a way to say it in my own way, which I think makes it more universal and more both timely and timeless.”

In all the years of working on the musical, Iconis has only met a member of Thompson’s family once. While he and some cast members performed a concert version of the show in Aspen, Colorado, Thompson’s widow, Anita, invited them to visit Owl Farm — where the show is set, and Thompson lived. 

Iconis spent much of the last decade envisioning that house. When he sat down at the out-of-tune piano in the living room to play the show’s finale for Anita, it felt like he was stepping into his own mind, as he put it. 

“I keep saying if you'd see it in a movie, you wouldn't believe it. It was that kind of thing,” Iconis said. “It felt so special. It was just perfect, and to be able to share it with 15 of my closest friends and collaborators, many of whom are in the actual musical, and some of whom have been with the musical and with me for 10, 15, 20 years, I mean I get choked up even talking about it.” 

While it was initially “scary” to not be able to pull from Thompson’s own words, Iconis said it forced him to be intentional about his words and find what he was really trying to say in the piece.

“Hunter S. Thompson was the writer who put himself in the center of the story, who was famous for fabricating everything,” Iconis said. “Having to figure out what he made up and what was actually true has also been a part of this whole process.” 

That research has led Iconis to a somewhat meta conversation about truth. Yes, it’s a musical about Hunter S. Thompson (he’d hope so if his name is in the title). But now, Iconis sees it as a musical about America in the 60s and 70s, and how it relates to contemporary politics. Mostly, he sees it as a show about art and how it changes us. 

“It becomes less about what did Hunter S. Thompson do? And more about who did Hunter S. Thompson Inspire?” Iconis said. “And it's about letting art inspire you to do something. Whether that's create more art yourself, whether that’s going and bring down Mar-a-Lago, whether that's going to a protest, it’s about respecting the power of art, which is something that felt very personal to me for the last few years.” 

The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical is in performances at MAX Theatre in Arlington, Virginia through July 13. For tickets and more information, visit here. 

With his immediately affable, borderline derpy demeanor, John Krasinski is the ideal Roger, the disaffected, suburban nice-guy who finds his own ideal in the play Angry Alan’s eponymous online personality. Though slowly spinning out following the loss of his job, and increasingly emasculated after his ex-wife’s walking out, he registers as harmless, even friendly. Roger’s smiley facade rarely slips, even as playwright Penelope Skinner, with co-creator Don Mackay, reveal the depths of the darkness behind it. Directed by Sam Gold for the one-act’s New York debut, and almost entirely alone onstage, Krasinski expertly exposes the dangerous underbelly of the characters, and persona, on which he’s built his career.

Roger is introduced mid-discovery – or is it after? Before? Skinner’s sense of time is shrewdly askew, representing the displacement of her subject’s mindset as he describes his first encounter with Angry Alan. It began as mindless hyperlink-hopping, clicking from one article to the next until reaching the titular account: one of those vaguely Classicist sites whose articles are just flimsy fronts for rampant misogyny and racism. Quietly seeing himself reflected in (actual) statistics about men’s suicide rates, he finds himself uplifted by Alan’s video on history’s great men (and, later, those “explaining” how women’s liberation has relegated men to society’s bottom rungs) and shares it with his extended circle.

This includes his current girlfriend, whose lefty art class friends he blames for their widening divide, and his one remaining close friend, who moved (ominously) to a shed after a workplace incident upended his life. Everyone else, it can be gleaned from between Roger’s lines, has been pushed away by the curdling of his sad-sack energy into bitterness. So this “red pill moment” (his words) becomes a lifesaver, and he takes to it feverishly, and takes it offline.

Roger’s experience of the failures of strictly enforced gender roles is valid, and Skinner traces the warped path from discontent to interior self-destruction. That journey is cleverly refracted by the introduction of his estranged kid, Joe (Ryan Colone), who offers an alternative Gen Z cope late in the play, long after Roger’s receptivity has been shot.

Having premiered in 2018, the play’s insights feel less incisive than they might have in the wake of Trump’s first election. But with meninism hitting the mainstream head-on in the intervening years, and thanks to the production’s hyperrealistic scenic design (by dots, whose sets chillingly evoke the pseudo-soothing, uncanny valley soullessness of recent AI slop), it catches up to the present day.

Likewise, while the rabbit hole into which Roger falls is a foregone conclusion, Krasinski plays the descent with understated acuity, leveraging his charm to remain mostly intact as the events he narrates begin to sharply counteract it. That placid, everyday Jim Halpert smile takes on the unnameable discomfort many experience when seeing that one photo of the 2019 Lincoln Memorial confrontation, of the twisted calm achieved through cultism.

A slight crevasse appears, around the two-thirds mark, when Roger stands awkwardly to the side at one of Alan’s IRL conventions he attends, between this supposed ‘beta’ and the six-foot-three, reigning Sexiest Man Alive playing him. But Krasinski deftly fills that gap with a crescendo of aggression that suggests Tom Cruise’s character in the film Magnolia; the perfect storm of sexual charisma and purely toxic ideology. Roger is able to inhabit that same keynote-address charlatanism, manifesting his online world on a number of screens which flank the stage. (Isabella Byrd did lighting; Mikaal Sulaiman, sound; and Lucy Mackinnon, video design.)

Its megastar lead hopefully draws in the exact crowd which might most urgently need to see this, but Angry Alan offers plenty of troubling treasures for those on, or off, any particular pill.

Angry Alan is in performance through August 3, 2025 at Studio Seaview on West 43rd Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.