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The scrunchies have been claimed for this summer’s off-broadway Heathers the Musical. Broadway stars McKenzie Kurtz, Olivia Hardy, and Elizabeth Teeter will take the stage as Heathers Chandler, Duke, and MacNamara, respectively.
“I couldn't be more thrilled about the powerhouse trio stepping into those iconic red, green, and yellow costumes,” director Andy Fickman said. “McKenzie Kurtz brings a ferocious authority to Heather Chandler that demands the spotlight. Olivia Hardy gloriously captures Heather Duke’s volcanic anger. And Elizabeth Teeter brings a heartbreaking vulnerability to Heather MacNamara that will surprise and move audiences. These Heathers are bold, brilliant, and absolutely deadly, in the best way possible.”
Heathers features book, music, and lyrics by Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe and is based on the 1988 film of the same name. The show’s return to off-broadway will be directed by Fickman, who staged the record-breaking UK production in 2018. It will start performances on June 22, 2025 and will play a limited engagement through September 28, 2025 at New World Stages, Stage I (340 West 50th Street).
Welcome to Westerberg High, where popularity is a matter of life and death, and Veronica Sawyer is just another nobody dreaming of a better day. But when she's unexpectedly taken under the wings of The Heathers – three beautiful and impossibly cruel classmates all named Heather – her dreams of popularity finally start to come true. That is until J.D. turns up, the mysterious teen rebel who teaches her that it might kill to be a nobody, but it is murder being a somebody…
Additionally, Tony Award nominee Lorna Courtney will star as Veronica Sawyer, and Casey Likes will star as J.D. Additional casting will be announced next week.
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Get that PowerPoint ready. Producers Mike Lavoie and Carlee Briglia recently announced that they are bringing Josh Sharp’s ta-da! Off-Broadway this summer directed by 2025 Tony Award nominee Sam Pinkleton. The new show will begin previews July 7, 2025 at the Greenwich House Theater, with an official opening night set for July 21. The limited engagement runs through August 23, 2025.
Josh Sharp’s ta-da! is a one-man comedy show inside of a manic 2,000 slide PowerPoint. Expect dumb but erudite jokes and sad but sweet stories alongside the Herculean feat of stupidity that is memorizing a slide every 2.1 seconds.
“As a gay comedian, I'm thrilled to finally fulfill my birthright: an off-Broadway run in the former home of Immersive Sweeney Todd in The Pie Shop,” said Josh Sharp. “But for real, this show and the stories in it are dear to me and I'm so excited to bring them to a wider, smarter, and hotter theater-going audience. Mostly, though, performing it every night will finally give me a chance to really nail the impossible task of this show, which is memorizing 2,000 stage cues. I promise to make you laugh, and to give you an air-conditioned spot to have 1-2 cocktails before you spend a night out in New York’s West Village (notably of ‘Sex and the City’ fame).”
“When I saw Josh Sharp do an earlier version of this show it was like nothing I've ever seen before: an utterly breathless, indescribable, idiotic feat of theatrical wizardry,” said director Sam Pinkleton. “If it is anything less this time around, I will be the one to blame.”
ta-da! will feature scenic design by Meredith Ries, lighting design by Cha See , co-video design by Stivo Arnoczy, and magic by Theatrely31 alum Skylar Fox.
Performances of ta-da! will be Mondays – Fridays at 7pm and Saturdays at 5pm & 8pm.
Tickets begin at $50 and are available now at JoshSharpTaDa.com.
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Senior Critic Joey Sims has been busy catching up on theatre around town. His latest roundup of productions:
LOBSTER
Among the sharpest and wittiest plays I’ve seen all year, Kallan Dana’s Lobster is an exhilarating treat. The premise is wonderful: self-serious high school student Nora (Cricket Brown, severely funny), in mourning following a break-up, recruits three unsuspecting students for a guerrilla production of Sam Shepard & Patti Smith’s coke-fueled absurdist work Cowboy Mouth.
Dana’s play owes a debt not only to Shepard & Smith, but also Chekhov, Beckett and Baker—certainly Lobster echoes Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation a bit too directly in its structure. But Dana also leans more surreal, peppering the high school action with monologues from the students’ adult selves, reflecting back; then sending the play haywire with a late-night lovers confrontation that may or may not be really happening.
Originality isn’t the thrill here, but rather execution—Dana’s text is packed with expert laughs and devastating blows, while Hanna Yurfest’s tight production finds the desperate longing behind every cruel barb. And the cast—rounded out by Coco McNeil, Sarina Freda, Felix Teich and Annie Fang—is beyond excellent, mining subtle poignancy from their adult reflections on the hazy, crazy confusion of teenage fear, lust and rage.
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FIVE MODELS IN RUINS, 1981
On Afsoon Pajoufar’s gorgeously surreal set, four models have gathered within the crumbling remains of a once opulent home. (The fifth never arrives.) Plants and shrubbery surround them, in place of walls; one room seems to bleed, strangely, into the next. It could be day or night, and while the play’s title tells us we’re in 1981, the present day feels just as plausible.
All of this strangeness is deliberate in Morgan Green’s dreamlike staging of Caitlin Saylor Stephens’s intriguing new play Five Models in Ruins, 1981. The play’s narrative center, to the extent that it has one, is Roberta (Elizabeth Marvel), the distracted photographer leading this shoot. But Roberta is a mess, and Marvel spends much of the play wandering in aimless circles.
The play does the same, which is not really an insult—the aimlessness is conscious. The models chat away, sharing war stories and reading each other for filth, and they are enjoyable company for a time. Maia Novi is especially hysterical as Tatiana, a sharp-tongued Russian firebrand. The lack of plot is fine, but without much tonal variation, the play grows very hazy.
Five Models jolts back to life once the source of Roberta’s malaise is finally revealed and Marvel gets to let loose. A dose of energy also arrives in the late arrival of Roberta’s make-up artist and confidante Sandy, imbued with wit and sharp discernment by Madeline Wise in a knockout off-Broadway debut.
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HOLD ME IN THE WATER
Gently tender but brutally honest, Ryan J. Haddad’s new solo work Hold Me In The Water feels like it has no right to land as powerfully as it does. On the surface, this is a modest tale, a chronicle of Haddad’s intense connection with a kind but elusive new man. Could this connection turn into something real? Or is this gorgeous, confusing creature simply too good to be true?
The magic of Water lies in the delivery. Haddad is a truthful, open-hearted storyteller, offering up his flaws and insecurities without hesitation. He pitches the humor with precision, dryly restrained but with occasional flurries of camp. Recollections of even a fairly standard date night become captivating reveries in Haddad’s hands.
Late in the play, Haddad steps outside of that story and underlines, a bit needlessly, his key points about dating and disability. The central question of whether we would date, fuck or love a disabled person with the passion here described is already put forward by the story itself.
But it’s a good question all the same, one that speaks not only to disability but essential questions of decency, empathy and simple kindness.
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I’M ASSUMING YOU KNOW DAVID GREENSPAN
“The reason people don’t come to theatre,” insists Sierra (David Greenspan), one of three women at the center of Mona Pirnoit’s ingenuous new work I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan, “is because theatre is annoying.”
Pirnoit’s play should, by all rights, be very annoying itself. A hilarious, expertly crafted one-person show about the wonders and pitfalls of a life in artmaking, this Atlantic Theater Company premiere (now closed and Atlantic Stage 2) chronicles three 30-something writers getting together for a play reading and debating their futures. All of them, of course, are played by David Greenspan.
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The genius of I’m Assuming You Know…lies in committing so thoroughly and completely to its inside baseball-ness that it somehow circles all the way back around to universality. Prinoit’s gags could not be more insidery—jokes about the Sloan commission and Lauren Gunderson abound. Yet at its core, the play strikes at deeply relatable questions: the lure of compromise, choosing comfort over toil, and how we live with ourselves.
Holding it all together is Greenspan, that marvel of a man, who is here at the height of his theatrical powers. Carefully calibrated to lean less mannered than some of his more pastiche-y work, his delivery here is effortlessly funny yet achingly sincere. Greenspan is never mocking or commenting upon these fully fleshed out women—he only communicates their truth.
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IRISHTOWN
The world premiere new play Irishtown features one truly great gag, a single hilarious extended sequence that nearly makes up for a plodding overall experience. Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s undercooked comedy starts off on a great premise: rehearsals at The Irishtown Players, an acclaimed Dublin-based company, descend into chaos after their resident playwright Aisling submits a dark, experimental legal drama that’s “not Irish enough.” Among the problems: the play is set in Hertfordshire, England; it features nothing in the way of poverty, starvation or rolling hills; and (gasp) it has a happy ending.
It’s a genius premise, but Smyth devotes much of the play to satirizing theater’s more general pretensions: self-serious artists, egotistical actors, passive-aggressive battles in the rehearsal room. That is all well-trodden territory, and Smyth doesn’t have much new to add.
Still, Smyth’s evident talent does come through in one riotously funny set of monologues, the highlight of the evening. Each performer takes turns improvising a more classically “Irish” speech for their alternate play—only to all find themselves, one by one, circling back to horribly intense tales of sexual assault that echo Aisling’s original submission. It’s a brutally macabre gag, performed to perfection.
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