r/offbroadwayNYC

Hi! I'm Amanda and I'm the Group Sales & Audience Development Manager at u/NewVictoryTheater in NYC, and a lifelong Muppet fan. I wanted to share with my fellow enthusiasts that the theater is presenting Jim Henson's Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock LIVE starting on May 30. It's a 90 minute musical based on the Apple TV+ series, with walk-around versions of the Fraggles, small puppet Doozers and a huge Gorg. We announced the show more than a year ago and I've been geeking out about it ever since. 

The theater is a family friendly venue, but we're also hosting two "Grown-Up Nights" in June that will have specialty cocktails and pre-show activities, plus pictures with the Fraggles after! Happy to answer any questions you have and hope to see you there.

Giulia The Poison Witch of Palermo is just WOW!! Blown away

Saw Giulia tonight and this show absolutely blew me away. The costumes , the staging, the vocals, the story all absolutely incredible. Such a beautiful show centered on female empowerment. I loved the first act and was even more impressed by the second. The ending/curtain call of was one of the best i have ever experienced. Nettles owned the stage.

The subject matter is a little dark but there is enough humor and great songs to keep the show from feeling too heavy. I definitely got some Hamilton and Sweeney Todd vibes from the style and tone The male leads who play the Governor and the Cardinal are sooo smarmy and salacious and are the perfect bad guys! The Governor And the actress who plays the Duchess steal every scene they are in. And The Duchess’ and the Cardinal’s second act songs were two of the standouts for me.

This show must find its way to Broadway. I will definitely see it again before it closes. I love going to theater alone and I saw this by myself, but I will say that this is one of the shows I regret seeing alone because I missed having someone to process it with once it was over. I would love to hear other people’s thoughts on it and if you loved it as much as I did or even if you didn’t , still would love to hear your take

Have you ever seen a sketch and thought, "Wow, that would be WAY better if it was just one person"? Neither have we! That's why we're bringing you Brooklyn's very best character or "solo sketch" comedians performing queer character pieces to close out Pride weekend.

6/28 at 7pm

Brooklyn Comedy Collective Pig Pen

144 Boerum St, Brooklyn, NY 11206

Tickets $10 in advance or $15 day of

https://www.brooklyncc.com/show-schedule/silly-geese-6-28

I’m being manic as per usual and ended up traveling all over to satisfy my theater itch.

Once (NextStop Theater, Herndon VA) - having seen the original production 3 times (lucky enough to have caught Cristin Milioti) and the tour another 3 times, I was worried this wouldn’t live up to my memories of the show. I’m happy to say it did (who knew there was this much talent just sitting around northern Virginia?). Even the kid actress who played Ivanka played violin! Is it too early for a Broadway revival??

Precarious (Mosaic Theater Company, DC) - this is a new play that aims to draw a parallel between a mother’s dwindling sense of purpose and ecological instability. The connection is a bit loose and really I was overall distracted about how unrealistically overbearing the mom is - in the first ten minutes of the play, she’s dropped in unannounced at her daughter’s NYC apartment, criticized every aspect of it (including her relationship), and thrown out things without permission while her daughter keeps her mouth shut.

Suffs (touring at The National, DC) - I was high up on the balcony, which wouldn’t have been my first choice for a seat with my subpar vision, but it was the first performance on this leg in the nation’s capital, the audience was 99% women and the vibe was electric. It was very educational for me (not having grown up in the US) and I enjoyed the music enough to listen to the cast recording after. Shaina Taub is crazy talented.

Sally & Tom (Round House Theater in Bethesda, MD) - I saw this a couple of days before Juneteenth and it was HBCU night. The story is really about a theater group putting together a show about the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, but when they’re in the play-within-a-play, I felt transported to the past and it’s clear that the author wanted those lines blurred. There’s at least a couple of awkward moments where someone has a monologue within the play that I wanted to applaud (and could see a few in the audience wanted to as well), but it wasn’t clear when the speech had ended for real, and before the beat is done, they’re suddenly back in the “real world” and it’s too late to applaud. Great performances all around, regardless.

Titanique (St. James, NYC) - I was debating on whether to see this at all because I’d already seen it at Daryl Roth, but it was the only matinee I was even slightly interested in seeing on a Thursday afternoon, so I thought I’d at least have the pleasure of seeing Layton Williams and Jim Parsons perform (the iceberg off-Broadway when I went was Kyle Ramar Freeman, who was phenomenal as well). That was worth the price of admission, but also with the added treat of John Riddle looking like a vision - I’d followed him on instagram but never seen him perform. The improv was about the Gazillion Bubble Show closing, which was.. eh

La Cage Aux Folles (New York City Center) - I quite enjoyed this and I thought the criticisms about Billy not being off-book were unfair given that it was already part of the premise and I didn’t hear a PEEP about Philippa Soo, Andrea Martin, and Steven Pasquale doing the same (and Andrea Martin and Steven Pasqual, funny as they were, not doing it quite so smoothly) for High Spirits. I thought Billy and Wayne had great chemistry. I’d never seen Wayne Brady on stage before and he is quite a pro, I was impressed. Billy hit the emotional notes well but it’s evident that his recent health scare (it’s very likely that he was intubated) damaged his voice significantly. The high notes were not hitting and he knew it. Billy was SO SWEET at the stage door and spent a lot of time with everyone when I thought he probably could use the vocal rest!

I’m Almost There (Brooklyn Academy of Music) - is the story of performer Todd Almond meeting his husband Mark Subias for the first time told as a loose adaptation of The Odyssey and if it sounds crazy on paper, wait till you hear it! It was sweet and quirky and made me realize I totally don’t have the energy to date any more lol. After the show I talked to Todd a little bit about Girlfriend (the show he wrote with Matthew Sweet’s songs) and how it should be playing all over the country for Pride month, heh.

A Walk on the Moon (Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater) - I hadn’t seen the original movie so this was an unexpected treat (the ending, I gather, is a little different). Everyone looked and sounded amazing. This is also my first time seeing Sam Gravitte on stage, who looks insanely good with hippie hair, as if he didn’t look amazing enough already. My only critique is that some songs sounded half-written - like they couldn’t think of any lyrics at all, so they just inserted whatever, haha.

Jerome (Playwrights Horizons) - I read about this play that centers around an elderly gay couple forming a throuple in a ghost town in Arizona in the background of the AIDS crisis in the early 90s and I thought, okay, how disparate are those narrative threads?? But the story was actually woven together really well. The passionate scenes were really intense and all three leads had crazy chemistry. I couldn’t help but gush to Stephen Spinella after and I probably shouldn’t have said that he was legendary, but he self-deprecatingly replied with, “well, to some people!”

Brokeback Mountain (Chicago Shakespeare Theater) - I didn’t have a chance to see this on the West End and I’m not even sure how it randomly entered my radar when it wasn’t advertised all that well (at least, to this non-Chicagoan) but I’m glad it did because this was phenomenal! And there’s only one week left! The chemistry between leads Harrison Ball and Jack Cameron Kay (by the way, I didn’t watch Boots so I didn’t even know this celebrity part of the draw) was so electric that AI erroneously told me (via Google, I avoid AI if I can) that they were a couple and I fully believed it. To fit 90 minutes, the show primarily centered around Ennis; you don’t see any of Jack’s life with Lureen and such. The set was amazing as well - I felt transported to the desolate wilderness of Wyoming. It didn’t have one of my favorite lines, though (not spoiling an old movie too much, but Ennis doesn’t have a response to Jack’s “quit you” speech).

Iceboy! (Goodman Theater, Chicago) - initially I was going to see this in mid-July as I wanted to see Megan Mullaly and Nick Offerman perform, but when I saw Grey Henson was cast, it sealed the deal. I realized that night I didn’t have anything to do so I decided to buy a ticket to this preview on a whim. Nick Offerman is away till 6/14 so the role of Eugene O’Neill was played by Shawn Pfautsch. This was stupid and hilarious (I think Bigfoot would be a close comparison) with plenty of slapstick elements that I’m curious to see how Offerman plays with it. Grey looked and sounded amazing (let’s face it, I’d pay to watch him read the terms and conditions) and of course I got tongue-tied telling him so after the show. Megan never fails to give me a stomachache with laughter. (don’t want to spoil any of the very fact-based and verifiably real plot!)