Ariana Grande (0:00)

Hi, I'm Ariana Grande. Hi, I'm Cynthia Erivo and you're listening to the Broadway Podcast Network. Visit BPM FM to discover more. Lowe's knows to bring your vision to life. It's important to find the right color. That's why Mylo's Rewards members get a free paint or exterior stain sample to test your look and find the perfect color to confidently refresh your space. Lows we help you save. Offer Valid in store only 58 through 5 14. Limit one per customer while supplies last. Discount taken at time of purchase. See Associate for details Program subject to terms and conditions. Details@lowes.com terms subject to change. McCrispy strips are now at McDonald's I hope you're ready for the most dippable chicken in McDonald's history. Dip it in all the sauces. Dip it in that hot sauce in your bag. Dip it in your McFlurry. Your dip is your business. McCrispy strips at McDonald's does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void? Well, with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision makers. You can even target buyers by job title, industry, company seniority, skills. Wait, did I say job title yet? Get started today and see how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started at LinkedIn.com results. Terms and conditions apply. Sam hello all you theater lovers both out and proud and on the DL. And welcome back to Broadway Breakdown, a podcast discussing the history legacy of American theater's most exclusive address, Broadway. I am your host, Matt Koplik, the least famous and most opinionated of all the Broadway podcast hosts. And this is the final countdown. It is the ultimate ranking of every show from this 2024, 2025 Broadway season. I guess it goes without saying, saying that this ranking is of personal opinion from me, he who saw absolutely everything this Broadway season. And if you recall from last year when we did the rankings, it goes on for a while and we actually have more Broadway shows this season. 42 to be exact. So how long this episode is? Who could say? Could be 42 minutes. Could be 42 hours. We'll find out. I won't know until I finish the fucker and I look at the ultimate running time. So just strap in and we'll see what kind of ride we all go on together. Right. Before we get to that, I just want to give a couple of flowers to some New reviews that we got. I'm gonna read two of them today and I'll read the third one for the next week's episode, which will be my recap of my London trip with my mom and my sister, which will be very exciting. I also just want to say that if you respond to the podcast on Spotify, yes, I do read all of the comments. I don't respond to all of them because some of them don't always require responding. It doesn't always feel like people who write comments on Spotify are eager for me to write back. They just want me to see what they had to say. And sometimes people write something and then delete it. But I still get the notification. And I have found that not all but a semi majority of Spotify comments tend to be rather mean, let's put it that way. And listen, I've made made it very clear, if you feel so compelled to write to me and you want your feelings known, I'm not gonna tell you not to write it. And sometimes there's merit to be found in even the meanest of comments, right? But just know that, like, I. Even if you delete it, I do get the notification. I do read what you say. So if you really, really, really want me to know how much you either hate my opinion, hate my voice, hate me, found an episode infuriating, then I apologize to you for that. But also, I am just doing this, right? It's sort of what I talked about last year when all the Lempicka backlash happened. The reviews came out and then the production team came out against the reviews. And then there was a fandom online that went against the reviews, and then there was a whole discussion about criticism in general and the culture. And I do think criticism is important. You know, professional critics, up and down, not everyone has super great taste, even though they have access to a wide audience. But it's important to have discernment, right? That's part of the reason why we all listen to this podcast, why I even fucking do this podcast. So if you are not, you know, super into what I do, totally fair. But also, you know, I. It's why I kind of have no problem stating my opinions on shows, because when I get my criticisms on the podcast, they tend to be about me as a person person. And that tends to be a little more vulnerable when people have issues with your actual personage and how you speak and how you choose to sort of form your episodes. So if you, especially a few people who really disliked last week's episode, I Will say I was kind of underwhelmed with what I put out for the review of Real Women have Curves and the rest of it myself, not my actual takes, but just sometimes I found that I was rambling or I felt that points I was making were not fully crystallized. And I apologize, but it was. I had to get that down. I had to get that in under the Wire. And sometimes when that happens, I get really good episodes. Sometimes they're kind of whatever. So if you liked it, I don't want to take that away from you if you didn't like it. I also felt I could have done a little bit better. But, yeah, I had one or two comments from Spotify that were extremely harsh in a way that wasn't conducive to progress. It was conducive to, oh, you want me to see this and feel bad about myself? And I feel bad about myself about other things, but not necessarily. If I do a mediocre episode, I. I just go, okay, well, I'll have the next one and I'll just do better on that one. So just keep that in mind. Moving on the two reviews I'm going to read. Cue the Light and the Piazza ooverture. Music, please. Five stars. A double whammy of insight and enjoyment that has made me a better version of myself. Written by Nadine from Poughkeepsie. After enjoying Matt's reviews on Instagram, I decided to start listening to this podcast. And I have been for just about a year. I am so happy I did. The amount of laughter and joy that I've gotten from this podcast is unparalleled. Even though I don't always get the jokes, believe me, I don't always get the jokes that I make. I still feel like I'm in on them and enjoy it regardless. But when I do get them, it's chaotic. Euphoria. Euphoria, the TV show, pretty chaotic show. The other main thing I've gotten from this podcast is every education and understanding. I'm a college student from the west coast, so my scope of theater was and is very limited. This podcast has really expanded my mind and allowed me to evolve in how I analyze the theater I see and the theater outside of that. Because of how Matt talked about it, I decided to listen to the lachiusa Wild Party, hence your name here. And I've grown obsessed. So thank you. You're welcome. That score slaps. My high school experience was halted by the lockdown. Oh, I'm sorry. And that was a big turning point for me as a theater fan, I discovered and grew to love different shows, and I truly think I evolved in that way. That's great to hear. If high School Me was one evolution, I think College me has evolved yet again. But this time, one of the big factors has been this podcast. I can't imagine my current theatrical experience without it. I am truly so grateful I decided to start listening, and I hope others do too. Whether they'll be as impacted by it as me is anyone's guess, but I think what we have here is something truly special. Thank you, Matt. Thank you so much. You're welcome, Nadine from Poughkeepsie. There's nothing wrong with Poughkeepsie that living in Manhattan couldn't fix. And if you don't know that reference, it's Willow Q's wild party. Okay, here's another long one. Five stars. Addicted by me. We and that other guy SoCal fan here. Oh, another West Coast. SoCal is West coast, right? Southern California. That's what SoCal means. Okay, SoCal fan of the podcast Broadway Lovers out there need Matt Koplik's honest, informed, and enthusiastic criticisms of new and old shows. What I love most about his reviews is that he spends time explaining the reasons why a show does or doesn't work. His analyses are detailed, witty, fun, razor sharp. And you know that he, whether you agree with him or not, will give you well thought out arguments. Kotlik handles his critiques with care and fairness, which is what discerning fans of the deserve. I don't think his episodes are too long or rambling. Oh, thank you. If anything, I wish they were longer. Oh boy, don't give me that kind of leeway. And I wish he would revisit shows after having seen them a second or third time and compare his first critique with subsequent one subsequent ones. I have done that. I did that with Gypsy, I did that with Death Becomes her and sort of my Real Women have curse review. But yes, I hear what you mean. Also. Also, fans will appreciate comments, public's honesty. We need honest critic. Honest critics like him. And I'm glad he is out there for us to learn from. What a resource. We need critics like him to keep putting pressure on Broadway producers, creatives and performers and fans to create and appreciate excellence and to distinguish the excellent from the mediocre. Okay, enough heavy breathing. Love your hard work, Matt. Thank you so much. Me, we and the other guy. I honestly don't really think of myself as a critic. Even when I do my reviews, like, I don't do it As a critic, I genuinely do it as a fan of the art form and try to approach it from all different angles. And just someone who has done it sometimes still does it and just loved it. So it's. It's less of me. I don't know. I guess that is criticism in a way. In the way that, like, anything that you see and have an. Have an opinion of is a review. Right. But I don't know. Even when I'm doing my episodes like Matt reviews such and such, I don't even think of it as literally me being a critic. Just us talking about the show and the overall landscape of a season. And then especially when we do our deep dives. And I'm looking forward to getting back to those because we've had such a long stretch of reviews. I feel like sometimes listeners forget that we do these super long deep dives into shows. And that'll be coming back in the summer. So I'm excited to do those again. But, yeah, thank you guys so much for those wonderful words. Really balances out when someone says that an episode is awful or that I'm a condescending ass or anything like that. So thank you so much. And of course, I say I don't think of myself as a critic and reviews whatever as we're about to do a whole episode of fucking long ass talks about of every show this season. So buckle up once Again, these are 42 Broadway shows this season. I am going from the lowest ranking to the highest ranking. Some of these rankings have changed since the last time I did this because I did a sort of up until the end of the calendar year for the season. So end of December, I did a ranking of all the shows on Broadway so far that I had seen. And some of those rankings have changed. Some shows I saw again, like Gypsy and Sunset Boulevard and Death Becomes her, and then other things, because new shows came in and I sort of in comparison, when a new show came in and I placed it above or below a previous show that I looked at, whatever show was nearby that I previously ranked, I was like, so, yeah, some things got moved around a little bit. Just so you know, if you're like, oh, Matt, you had this much lower last time, or this was much higher last time. Yeah. And now that I'm looking at the overall season, things have changed. And once again, I cannot emphasize this enough. This is my personal ranking. This is not. I do not come out and go the official ranking. And anyone who disagrees can go suck a pickle. You know, just listen if you want. And if you. And if you don't like it, you can always stop. This will be forever minutes long, I'm sure. And that's all I got to say. I'm going to do a quick overview of the ranking and make sure it's exactly how I want it to be. And once I do that, we will begin. So with that in mind, 42. I'm disgusting. Left on 10th. What is there to say about left on 10th that I didn't already say in my review and in my ranking at the end of December? For those of you who don't recall, left on 10th is the Broadway play based on the book by Delia Ephron, based on her own true story. And it's a good story of how she met her husband later in life. And just as they meet and fall in love, that is when she is diagnosed with cancer and they get married because, you know, life is short and she ends up beating the cancer and they're happily married. And, you know, she found her Stella Groove back in her mid to late 50s and it's right after she lost her sister, Oscar nominee Nora Ephron. And again, as I said, good story. And it's clear that Delia Efron knows how to write for, you know, articles, maybe even books. She does not know how to write for the stage. And on top of this, everyone involved in this production, some of whom have done wonderful work in the past, do not do well here. Now for the sake of equilibrium and because we try to, you know, lead with empathy and kindness, I think it's good that we talk about the things in each show, no matter how low they rank that work. So with that in mind for left on 10th, I will say that there are two supporting performances that I did not mind that worked decently for me. One is Kate McCullidge. McCluggage. Kate McCluggage, I think is how you say her name. And then Peter Francis James. They play multiple characters. They play friends, they play doctors, they play neighbors, they play, you know, a whole bunch of other folks. And they do, in my opinion, the best work in the show. It's not that what they do is necessarily Tony worthy, but they create distinct characters each time. They are very comfortable on stage, which seems like a low bar for being on a Broadway stage, but we'll get to that in a second with other people. But, you know, they were committed, they were defined, and they were memorable and they did the best they could considering the circumstances that they were in. And. And I want to give Them, those props. Just about everything else here for me was pretty low. Susan Stroman, who is a director that I've admired in the past, just. I don't know if she didn't know what to do with it, if she didn't care what she did with it, it did not feel like she gave two cents about this. And it's a shame, because the one thing I'll give Strowman is that she usually knows how to move bodies on stage and, you know, have transitions and have solid stage pictures. And she also tends to understand pacing. If that's one thing about potus, I'll say is that she kept things moving with that show and left on 10th. It was sluggish, and everything just felt like first draft, and everything felt like first idea wins and we don't have to follow through on anything else. The central performances by Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher. Peter Gallagher is a very charismatic dude. He still looks great. And with that, he did his best, but his part just had absolutely no material. And Juliana Margulies, God bless her, I love her on the Good Wife, but this is my second time seeing her on a Broadway stage. Last time was in Feston in, I think, 2006. And I just don't think she gets stage work. I don't think she understands how to make herself big enough to fill a theater. Her body language is awkward. Her the way she recites the text is awkward. She has no chemistry with anyone on stage. Again, it doesn't help that the material is bad. It doesn't help that the design looked like AI generated, like an AI generated apartment of Upper west side. It was just. This was. It's truly one of the worst things I've ever seen on Broadway anywhere. And the fact that it was on Broadway for so long is, I think, quite insulting to people who have been struggling and struggling to make art and to try to get it seen and really refine their work and keep pounding the pavement. And this gets produced in a heartbeat and runs for four months. And it had no reason to. It had no need to. Everyone involved has done so much better work. There was no need for this to happen. And if it was gonna happen, they should have worked harder to make it better. Because you cannot tell me that everyone sat around for months and really thought through every element of this show. You just can't convince me of that. And everyone I know who's seen it agrees with me. You know, I'm not the lone asshole wet blanket here. Everyone, literally every theater critic, every actor, every writer, every director I know who's gone to see it, whether they paid or didn't pay. We're like, the fuck did I look at? Why? Why did this happen? And this isn't even hysterical bad. This isn't trainwreck bad. It's just insulting bad, which is the worst kind of bad. It's one thing if you are lazy but competent. This was lazy and incompetent. And I'll usually rank you up a couple of notches if you're one but not the other. To be both is just. No, no, no, no, ma' am. That is all I really can say about left on 10th. Couple of lines in the show that are burned in my brain forever. And if you want to know what those are, you can check out my Instagram. It is one of the Tony categories that doesn't exist yet. And some of them, I'm sure, read pretty hilariously awful. And some you might be like, why is that burning your brain? And I'm like, you just had to be there. You had to be there to understand the insanity of. When Juliana Margulies kicks cancer the first time and comes back to her apartment and goes and plays fetch with her dog Honey. And when she throws the ball off stage and Honey goes to grab it off stage and then doesn't come back, you're like, oh, honey's dead now. And Juliana Margulies turns to the audience and she goes, did Honey take on my cancer? Very earnestly. Like, she. She had a. It was the most. It was the most stirring thought she'd ever had. If my little dog took on the cancer that I just got rid of, it's like, girl, girl. And then there are other lines too, but that one was rough. On the bright side, the James Earl Jones Theater still looks beautiful. So well done, Shubertz for that. And yeah, that's all I can really say. On Lept on 10th. Moving on, number 41. Ah, I'm disgusting. McNeil, Lincoln Center Theaters. McNeil, starring Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. Tony denied. Robert Downey Jr. Oh, God. What is there to say about McNeil? There's nothing. There's nothing to be said about McNeil. It is. I was forgetting that play while I was watching it. And there have been a few shows since we came back from COVID where I felt like that McNeil just was egregious. And is it part of. Is part of its low ranking over other things that might have been just as forgettable due to the fact that it was such a high priced Ticket event that it was deemed such an event because Robert Downey Jr. Was making his Broadway debut in it. That Bart La Cher, who had given us South Pacific and lighting the piazza and Golden Boy and Joe Turner's Come and Gone, even, you know, To Kill a Mockingbird, gave us this little bit. Little bit that we had two Tony winners, Andre Martin and Ruthie Ann Miles in it. And this was what we got. Little bit that. That this is the play from Pulitzer winner Eyad Akhtar, who wrote Disgraced and Junk. That this was something that he'd been working on and that got sort of produced straight to Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater with all of the resources in the world. Yeah, I was a little disgruntled, a little bit. McNeil. It's about an author played by Robert Downey Jr. Who becomes obsessed with AI and that's really all I can tell you. He's sort of. He's also finally won an award for one of his works. And it's sort of been spoken about of how much of it is him, how much of it is AI or possibly somebody else working on the manuscript that he's getting recognized for and surrounded by all of these women in his life and then also as well as his son, but his agent, his doctor, a news reporter, his ex, all these people all sort of giving him grief in different respects of his life as a man, as an artist, as just a human being in the world. And so it's sort of like Nine meets AI Right. But not interesting in any way. The best thing I'll say about it is that it had a really cool design, very cool sound effects, very cool lighting design. Set was pretty solid. Good projections. I did think it was going to get some technical nominations at the Tony Awards because it was such an obvious design y show. And that's something that the Tonys usually go for. But it's clear that the Tony nominators hated it as much as I do and didn't want to give it any grace, any McGrace. And I could not be more pleased with that. If you recall, in the review, I also talked about how I went to a friend's place for drinks before the show. It was like the week after the election results. And so we all were just sort of together on the roof, drinking and commiserating. And I'd had two margaritas and I was feeling myself. But I walked to the theater and I sat down during the show and I was a little buzzed, but I was not drunk. And as I said in that review, my Lack of ability to remember much of McNeil or hold onto any of it wasn't because of the McMargheritas, it was because of the McNeil. I'm sorry, this was just a bad play. And I think if this and mother play has taught us anything, you can be a brilliant Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and still write a bad play. It is possible. It is very possible. And that's okay. It doesn't take away from the great work you've done in the past. It doesn't mean you can't do great work in the future. And I actually think it's really enlightening for many people to know, oh, I can be good at what I do and still do a bad job every now and then. And a keeps you on your toes, it keeps you from getting lazy. But also it means that you are actually taking risks, you are taking big old swings. And when it works out, it's super exciting. And when it doesn't, it's something you can learn from. And I think it also gives confidence to those who are rising up, who are learning and trying to get better at what they do, who maybe feel intimidated by some big, you know, some BDE artists out there, right. To know that they can have a swing and a mission. I don't really trust anyone who has favorite artists and can't name at least one thing they've done that wasn't great. If you have an actor or a writer or director or a pop star or whatever and you're like, oh, everything they've done has been amazing and has been life and has been iconic, I'm like, oh, then you actually, you are, you are a smooth brained fan. Because again, any artist is going to make one mulligan decision for anyone in this world, even if you are in line with them. Like I said about last week's episode, it wasn't one of my personal favorites. I don't think it was a bad episode, but I don't think it was one of my better ones. And I'm trying to always do better each time and it doesn't mean that each episode will just be better and better than the next. We will have our flops, but it doesn't mean we stop trying. Right? And so with McNeil, I don't want anyone who's involved to ever stop trying because there are a lot of artists in this who I greatly admire. But yeah, this was no good work from anyone. I honestly think the best person in the show was Melora Hardin, who had like the second to Last scene of the show, major princess track. She didn't show up until the very, very end. But also, I would say any person who isn't McNeil in McNeil has a princess track. Because you get one scene. I think Andrea Martin got two. That's. That's a major supporting player right there. Oh, boy. Yeah. Nothing left to say about McNeil. We can skip it. No one's gonna remember it. I did have. We had a. I think it was Thanksgiving, maybe Thanksgiving or some family dinner where my family asked about the theater I'd seen, because my family all goes to theater, too. And I was only one of two people who'd seen McNeil. And my step grandmother, who is a former Tony nominator, former casting director, sees a lot of theater. She said, oh, I disagree. I thought McNeil was very compelling and had a lot of things to say. She also loved Mother Play last year and for that. And she also really enjoyed Redwood. So. And she's not, you know, she. She's an esoteric fuck like me. But now is when I went, oh, Fran, we. You and I are going in different directions in life now, aren't we? We've gotten to that point. We've gotten to that fork in the road, have we not? And she McNeil. Then I, Mcstood. That's. That's where we. That's where we land with that. Moving on, number 40. Oh, help me God Forgive the man with tenderness, mercy, open hands I wanna believe it this woman. I say I am Tammy Faye. Oh, boy. What to say about this one? This is, of course, the musical based on the life of Tammy Faye Baker that transferred from London at the. What was the theater? It's the theater where American Psycho premiered. You know what I'm talking about? Anyway, I'll remember in just a second, but this was written by Elton John, Jake Shears and James Graham. James Graham is the Olivier Award winning playwright who actually, I'll be seeing his play Dear England in London in just a few days. And Elton John, of course, is Elton John, the Grammy winning icon of pop music. But also for musical theaterland, did the Lion King and Aida. Billy Elliot also did Lester stat as well as this. And then of course, has devil verse, Prada in the West End, and Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters. What I guess I'll say first is musicals are hard just because you. The Almeida Theater. That's what it's called. I knew it was an A. I was like, it's not the Adelphi. It's something the Almeida Theater musicals are hard. They are very different beast. And you could be very talented at something then in a lot of ways people might think would relate then to musical theater, and it doesn't always work out. Rupert Gould was the director of this as well. And Rupert Gould, I've seen some of his productions. He did King Charles iii, which I really, really enjoyed. He also also did Patriots, which I appreciated but didn't say I enjoyed it. Did American Psycho, which had some interesting things about it. Enron, which very much bombed over here. You know, Rupert Gould is a very visual man. He has a bunch of ideas in staging and design and really can sort of come up with really clever metaphors in his stagings. But I don't find Rupert Ghoul to be a very compelling storyteller. At best, I tend to admire the things he does, but sort of at arm's length. And at worst, I find it very cold and boring. But on top of that, Elton John is a good composer, but I would actually argue he's not a good musical theater composer. His most successful stage works have been genuine collaborations with other people that I don't think he was the guiding light on. You know, Lion King was Disney. And, you know, he contributed music to that with lyrics by Tim Rice, who maybe isn't a musical theater mastermind, but is absolutely more on the pulse of musical theater than Elton John is. And on top of that, there was a lot of work done to his music that made it more theatrical. The thing about Circle of Life that we all remember is the opening, and that part's not Elton John. Aida. It's no secret that Paul Bo gave really kind of whipped those songs into musical theater shape. You listen to the demos of all of Elton John's songs for Aida, and then you listen to the Broadway recording and it's like, oh, the arrangements for this are so more interesting and dramatic and compelling than the basic charts that you sort of put together on the piano. And I'm not trying to undersell Elton John's importance as a pop artist, but for musical theater, it's a very different beast. Even Billy Elliot, which I actually think is maybe his most adult work and most overall successful musical, I think part of what makes Billy Elliot work is the book and the staging of it. I don't think many people talk about Billy Elliot and think about how the score on its own is so fantastic. I think what makes that score work as well as it does is that it is a genuine leaping off point for everything else in Billy Elliot. Billy Elliot is a show where dance is the most important thing. And so the songs allow for the dancing to really take flight, which is a very collaborative thing for Ellen John to do. The thing about Tammy Faye is that's not the case here. Everyone has to bring their A game to bring what is a very odd story to tell on the stage. And it's very British team telling a very American story. And no one really understands musicals. Elton John has the most experience, but as I said before, I don't think he really understands musicals. Jake Shears is a pop artist who hasn't really had to write for different voices in different eras. Like there. How do. When you are writing songs that are personal to you for years, that are in your own voice and your own style, and then all of a sudden you have to write very story specific songs for very specific characters. That's a skill set that you just haven't honed before. So I don't blame Jake Shearers for not being able to handle it. For all I know, this is his first time at bat doing musicals. And James Graham is a good playwright, but not every playwright can write a good musical. James Graham's other musical was. Drumroll, please. Finding Neverland. When you're writing the script of a musical, you have to check your ego because you are, as I said with. If Elton John's score for Billy Elliot is setting the grounds for dance to take away a book for a musical, a script for a musical has to set grounds for music to take away. Music is the driving force. It's what distinguishes it from being any other kind of theatrical work. And you have to structure the show in an economic way and then also understand where the songs are most crucial and then build your scripts to those moments. There are playwrights who have had very successful, consistent careers as book writers. And I would argue those playwrights may were not a list playwrights. They had written two or three very good ones but like were not necessarily a Tennessee Williams or an Arthur Miller. They were good writers who had a good number of solid plays under their belt. But they were. Their writing blossomed with musicals because their writing deepened when you added songs as opposed to on their own feeling solid but maybe not quite finished. And then. Or maybe they went to saccharine when they were just to play. But you add music and there becomes. There's an added depth to it. Right. It feels like with a writer like James Graham, his writing is not conducive to songs. He does not know how to make his book leap off the page and off of the stage and build to a point where singing makes sense. Songs in Tammy Faye feel shoehorned in because they said, oh, it's a musical and we need to have music now, not because it made sense in the moment. It was in the Palace Theater, which the renovation is gorgeous, but it was far too big for the show. The leading lady, Katy Brabin, really gave her all, but gave absolutely no inkling that she was Tammy Faye Baker. And that is a very imitation, you know, heavy woman known to a lot of American audiences. Maybe she isn't the pop culture icon now that she was before. She's become more of a gay icon now and very niche. But with the Jessica Chastain movie so readily available and everyone sort of thinking about that Oscar winning performance, to do Tammy Faye and to not have any major take on her, both as a performer and as a writer, it's like, well, then what are we doing here? And the show wanted to be satire with heart, but it couldn't really land either. And so sometimes things would be intentionally funny and. And sort of just a light chuckle and then things would take a harsh turn to uber dramatic, which would make you laugh uncomfortably. On top of all of this, when it wasn't weird, it was just boring. It was very long. So much of it I forget. The things that I probably best remember are the random diversions into things I remember at the very end, as Tammy Fay Baker is getting, you know, an X ray or a. A scan for. To check and see how her cancer is progressing. And she's talking to the nurse and saying, oh, you know, there's one group she couldn't have done it without. And she said, and the nurse is like, oh, you couldn't have done it without God? She goes, no, I couldn't have done it without the gays. And they project the rainbow on. On the stage. With the exception of the one scene where Tammy Faye Baker meets an AIDS patient. A lot of parallels to Diana. Let's be real. There's no. There's no showing whatsoever of Tammy Faye's gay fan base of her being sort of a camp icon. It's her. Her as a person is taken very seriously and her impact is taken very seriously while also not even showing enough of it. It is. It want. This show wants to be a vita for America, for the religious right. And it's not smart or funny enough. It's not creative or exciting enough to be that. It's just. It sits there. It sits there like uncooked fish and chips, telling you it's a hot dog with ketchup. And it's. It just, it just doesn't do it. I'm sorry to say. I'm sorry to say, but I guess that's Tammy Faye for you. Yep, that is. That is Ms. Tammy Faye at number 40. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break, and then we're gonna get to number 39. So let's take a quick break. You're an arrow collar. You're the top. You're a Coolidge dollar. You're the nimble tread of the feet of Freddy. Summer's here, and Nordstrom has everything you need for your best dressed season ever. From beach days and weddings to weekend getaways in your everyday wardrobe. Discover stylish options under a hundred dollars from tons of your favorite brands like Mango Skims, Princess Polly, and Madewell. It's easy, too, with free shipping and free returns in store order pickup and more. Shop today in store stores, online@nordstrom.com or download the Nordstrom app. Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from Ebglis. After an initial dosing phase of 16 weeks, about 4 in 10 people taking EBGLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. EBGLIS Lebricizumab LBKZ a 250mg per 2ml injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. Ebglis can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to Ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be. Severe eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Eglis before starting Ebglis. Tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection searching for real relief. Ask your doctor about ebglis and visit epgliss.lilly.com or call 1-800-lillyoptics or 1-800-545-5979. And we're back. So at number 42 we had left on 10th, 41 was McNeil, 40 was Tammy Faye at number 39, laughing, laughing at the Le Redwood. And here, ladies and germs, we have our first New York Times critic. Critics pick from Mr. Jesse Green. Redwood is the new musical starring Tony winner Idina Menzel, with a book and direction and lyrics, I believe, as well by Tina Landau. The music is by Kate Diaz. Yes. Lyrics are by Kate Diaz and Tina Landau and music is by Kate Diaz. Book by Tina Landau. Conceived by Tina Landau and Idina Menzel. Redwood is. This is already going to be on Instagram, but Redwood basically is the movie Wild with Reese Witherspoon. But instead of hiking, she's climbing a tree, and instead of having a dead mom, she's got a dead son. Redwood tells the story of a woman, a lesbian New York art gallery owner who runs away to the west coast and falls in love with a redwood tree. Not really in love, but, you know, finds rejuvenation and joy again with a redwood tree after her son has an accidental, or maybe not accidental overdose. Someone online noted that it sounds like a Jenna Maroney project, 30 Rock. And it's so true. They even made a screenshot of Jane Gracowski in her dressing room as Jenna Maroney with the text, like, it's called Redwood, Liz. I play a lesbian business owner who falls in love with a giant redwood after her son overdoses. It's such a specific, and I hate to say this preposterous show and wants to be taken so seriously, wants to really live in the art of it all. And it's just not baked through at all. If we were to give it some positives. Oh, I forgot to give positives to fucking Tammy Faye into McNeil. Well, I gave McNeil positives on the design. My positives on Tammy Faye is it's a talented cast. Katy Brabin really puts her whole body into it, and Christian Borrell and Michael Servis really give their all, but that show just didn't work at all. But. And I guess I could say, you know, when I said that the Palace Theater's renovation was beautiful, those are the positives on Tammy Faye. Positives on Redwood. It has a set design that was very effective for a lot of people. It was effective for Jesse Green. It was effective for a few people I know. And it was looking like it might get a set design nomination. It is almost purely projection, with the exception of Stella the Redwood. And I am not anti projections. I am anti being overly reliant on projections. If you're gonna do them, they have to really live as a set, and you have to have A point of view about it. And it's very rare that I see projected sets that do that. The best one is still one of the earliest cases I've seen of it, which was the Meniere production of Sunday in the park with George, where the projections really were a second character in the show and helped honestly propel the storytelling redwood. It's. I can't tell you why. It just sort of feels like Tina Lando had an idea of wanting to use screens and. And maybe because the show weaves in and out of Idina Menzel's psyche all the time. So maybe it helps with the fluidity of that of being in present day and then flashing to the past and being in her memories and being within sort of the great beyond in the third act of the show. Don't ask. Other positives. Zachary Noah Peyser plays everyone who isn't. Idina Menzel plays a multitude of roles, but Zachary Noah Peyser, one of his roles, is Idina Menzel's son. And he has the best number in the show at the very end, I think it's called still, and it's a duet with him. And Idina, as she sort of has this, I don't want to say epiphany, but she kind of. She's in Stella the Redwood during a forest fire and she sort of passes out and in her passed out state, she's in her train station purgatory a la Dumbledore in Harry Potter with her son, it's all white and they have this sort of meeting of the minds and she gets her closure and he absolves her of any guilt. And for some people, it's very beautiful. For me, I'm like, oh. Her subconscious is telling her, you are free of guilt. Don't think about it anymore. Don't worry about what might have been. Everything that could make you feel less guilty about it is true in your mind's eye. I don't view it as the actual ghost of her son giving her the real answers. I view it as her brain telling her what she needs to hear so she can move on, which is, listen, we all eventually have to move on from our pain. But it requires genuine work. It doesn't require running away and then having your mind go, it's okay, mom, you didn't do anything wrong. So I have issues with that. But this show is just. It wants to be so serious and it wants to say so much and tackle so much. And we admire things that, again, take big swings and want to take a big bite out of an apple. But when you bite off more than you can chew and you don't actually understand musical theater, which I will say this about Tina Landau. She doesn't actually understand musical theater. She did very well with spongebob. But I will say with spongebob, a lot of that was design. A lot of spongebob was work that she didn't personally write. And I will also say, you know, spongebob for me was a phenomenal opening number that then had a very weak first act and then had a really weak act two opener and then a really strong second act. It definitely needed someone who understood musical theater better to come in and really fucking shave off 20 minutes of that first act. There were numbers that did not need to be there. It was padded. But when it worked, it worked really well. And we'll get to Floyd Collins later on in this ranking. But she doesn't understand, like I was saying earlier, of how songs need to help propel the story and bring in insight to a character. It can't just always be statement songs. It feels like a pre Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, but with a 2025 taste and aesthetic. Right. The songs may seem like modern music, not even modern musical theater, but modern music. But it's still very like, no, no, Nanette. Good news, Irene era of you have a scene and then someone goes, oh, now let me do three minutes of a song for no reason. And then we get back to the plot. You can have songs that are idiot space, you can have songs that are just living in the moment, but you have to have the majority of your songs help move shit forward again. Musical theater is supposed to be economic storytelling. And if we are stopping the action every time for a song, no ground is getting covered. That is now up to the scene work. And you can't cover a lot of ground in a two minute scene. Everything's got to be stitched together and this was not stitched together. But, you know, it's always nice to see Idina on stage. I've said before I think she's underrated as an actress and she definitely found some beautiful work in the show. Her scene with Zachary Noah Peyser is absolutely a highlight. Supporting cast is strong. I give a lot of props to Kayla Wilcoxon, who plays Becca, who is just. Her character is this amalgamation of every single thing covered in our, you know, liberal demographic that we want to include. She's bipoc, she's lesbian, she's Jewish. And I was like, oh, what else can we add to make her Cover all the grounds possible so everyone can feel represented. Like, she's not specific. She feels like the ultimate diversity scavenger hunt checklist of like, well, we covered it all so no one can get mad at us. I'm like, but she's not a person. She's really not a person. She's a mouthpiece. So that way, as she becomes the production team's shield, so that way, Twitter and Instagram and TikTok won't try to cancel them. Like, we're not trying to cancel you. We just think your show is bad. That's the thing is, when a show is bad, people will try to find ways to cancel it because they can't talk about artistically what doesn't work. They want to say politically it's wrong, and thus you shouldn't support it. And I find that lazy and also rarely the case. Redwood is deadwood as far as I'm concerned, But it's gonna be closed by the time this comes out. I'm pretty sure, so. Or like, the day after this comes out. So we're not gonna kick it too hard while it's down. We applaud Adina for always taking a chance on new writers and. And wanting to develop original material. But it's really hard because so many people making musicals don't actually understand how musicals work. They get lucky once or twice and then think they understand the medium, but they. They don't. And it's very clear here that no one involved with Redwood actually understands how a musical works, and that's Redwood. So moving on to number 38 for my goodbye until tomorrow Goodbye until I call to your door and I will be away five years. So I kind of struggled for a minute of if I wanted to put this revival of Jason Rupert Brown's song cycle this low. Because, you know, part of the struggle I have with this ranking is recognizing when material may be solid, but maybe just not for me, or a revive or a production might be put together of a material I don't like. It's really hard, right, because you're trying to be objective, but ultimately it all is subjective, and you kind of have to marry the two. So there are shows on here that maybe I enjoyed less than others, but the material is probably stronger, and so it's higher. And then other shows that the material might be weaker than others, but I just enjoyed it so much more that I had to put it higher. Like, it's just. It's a balancing act. And I like the last five years as a piece. I don't think it totally works as a stage musical, but there's always something about it that's worth revisiting and it's I do think ultimately great to listen to how you feel about the show and how you feel what makes it successful often comes down to who was your intro? Kathy and Jamie for the last five years. Whether it was Sheri Renee Scott and Orbert Leo Butz, if it was Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan in the movie, if it was Betsy Wolf and Adam Cantor in the last revival, or if you're in London and you had seen Samantha Barks and I think Jonathan Bailey, those were the two who did it at the Meniere. This production is Adrian Warren and Nick Jonas, two people who are not without talent. Nick Jonas I don't think is the is a total untalented fuck like some people like to claim. I think he's first of all he's very, very attractive. That's just plain truth. But he has a pleasant sounding singing voice. He is not without being able to sing. This is not Russell Crowe and Les Mis here, but he is ultimately not the singer that Norbert Leo Butz is. That Adam Kantor is that Jeremy Jordan is. And that is what we are used to for jamie in last five years. It is a big sing. The show is 75 minutes of non stop music. And maybe Adrian Warren and Nick Jonas aren't singing the entire time because the show goes back and forth. It famously has raised, you know, bookending reverse chronological order. But it's still a big sing. Songs like Shiks the Goddess moving too fast. Nobody Needs to Know. Those are big old numbers. Ironically, I actually think that Nick's best number is Nobody Needs to Know both as a singer and as an actor. The issue I have with his Jamie is more that he is a vocally, he's not super well equipped for it. So he's definitely making it work for his register. But if you know the show remotely, you know what those songs can sound like. And it's definitely underwhelming in that respect. And then on an acting front, he just isn't able to fill the stage. He isn't able to fill the theater. He gets very swallowed up by the piece and by the character. And the one thing that Jamie needs to be is owning the room, charismatic up the ass because he's ultimately a douchebag and egotistical and you have to find that endearing at first only to eventually sour on it. And that's something that Norbert Leo Butz was able to do very much so in the early 2000s, I would argue that something Jeremy Jordan struggles with is bringing on the charm and then turning toxic usually kind of comes off as toxic and has to sort of win you over with charm. And Nick just sort of seems lost, especially for the first two numbers, which are big numbers. Like Jamie's first two songs are big ass things that have to fill the space. Shiksa Goddess and moving too fast and he just can't do it. Adrienne Warren fares better just because she is. She owns a stage in a way that Nick really can't. And she is also objectively a better singer. Adrienne Warren is a phenomenally talented individual. She is also, in my opinion, miscast as Kathy partly. Her voice is so striking in a way that doesn't allow a lot of Kathy's numbers to sail. Songs like See I'm Smiling, Summer, Summer in Ohio. Even part of that. Kathy is a professional victim, similar to Jamie. She has a charm and a quirk about her and she has an intelligence. Right. Like Kathy comes off. If you were to go through Kathy's story from start to finish, she would come off in a way of like the I'm not like other girls, which then actually reveals that she is a pick me girl. And the kind of pick me girl that only can really flourish when she is on equal footing with her partner or doing better than her partner. But if her partner is succeeding and she is not, rather than be fully supportive of her partner's success, their success is my success. It reveals a lot of her own insecurities. What makes it. What exacerbates the problem is Jamie is unable to tend to her when he is succeeding, when he doesn't have a lot going on in his life, he can be supportive and he can be wonderful. But the moment he's starting to get a fuller plate, he cannot begin to make room for Kathy and. And that ultimately makes her hunker down within their partnership and demand more and more from him because he keeps giving her less and less and it's just a complete divide of their communication. And you have to be able to see where the pain is coming from with Kathy, but also see where her insecurities start to unravel what made her engaging in the first place. In the same way, where Jamie has to lead with charm and then reveal sort of the toxic ego, Kathy has to lead with the sweet gregariousness that reveals the insecurity and vulnerability underneath it all. And Adrienne Warren just leads with warrior. She is tough and she is A fighter, and she will not go down without a fight. And it's an interesting take you could possibly give Kathy. But I think what this revival, directed by Whitney White, ultimately reveals to us is that the characters of Jamie and Kathy are kind of locked in. There's not a ton of room for interpretation because there's not. They don't get very nuanced journeys. We only get postcards of each of their perspectives. And it's always a major point in either of their lives in this relationship. And there's not a lot of subtext they are because they are singing the entire time. It's just always what they're genuinely feeling all the time. And you can't find a lot of nuance within that. You can find moments of new humor, find new moments of empathy, but ultimately the narrative is the narrative, and this production tries to fight that. Whitney White has a whole lot of staging that tries to go against the grain of what we normally expect with these songs. And again, I admire the effort, but it does ultimately reveal that it's misguided and reveals that the show kind of is locked in a specific narrative that you can't break free from, which I find that to be a weakness of the material. I think the best material is open to a lot of interpretations and can withstand five different perspectives coming at it. And last five years has proven to me that it really can't do that. The music on the band front sounds incredible. It's an expanded orchestration and the orchestra sounds awesome. Each orchestra member gets a moment to be sort of in the spotlight during songs on sort of the upper platform of the set. And again, they sound great. I would say the sound design is really great. And the team tries to fill the space of the Hudson stage and theater and make this two person chamber musical for feel like a medium sized Broadway musical. They ultimately do not succeed in it. But I admire that they tried to go for that bigness and fill the space. They ultimately don't. And it's ultimately an unattractive design that feels confused and bold, but not precise. And that's ultimately the. The downfall of this revival. It's. Again, I said I was debating if I wanted to put this a little higher because in retrospect I go, oh, was this really quite a disaster? But the more I speak on it, the more I'm like, yeah, this is kind of the worst revival of a musical this season. And it was. I don't think this was ever gonna be a slam dunk, but when your best thing in it is the orchestra. And your second best thing is Adrienne Warren, who really is only the second best thing because she is so talented and confident as a performer, can own a stage that even though you. I don't find her performance works. It's not a hardship to watch her. That. That's ultimately not a great perk of your show. So, yeah, I'm. I'm gonna stick with it at 38. All right, so that is last five years at 38. At 37, I'm disgusting. Romeo and Juliet, the revival at Circle in the Square, directed by Sam Gold, starring Kit Connor of Heartstopper fame and my future husband and Rachel Zegler. West side Story. Snow White fame and social media infamy. Romeo and Juliet. This revival I was very hesitant about because Sam Gold has given me some of my favorite things and some of my least favorite things as a director. Fun. Home Doll's House, Part ii. An Enemy of the People. Love, love, love. Some of my favorite nights of theater things that I hated. King Lear fully walked out of that with Glenda Jackson. So I was apprehensive, but I was like, you know what? Let's see what he does. And Kit and Rachel actually made a lot of sense for casting. I was like, oh, we're going young. We're going sexy. They were giving sort of a modern take on it. I was like, okay, yeah, let's do it. This might have some energy. This might have some fire to it. And on a positive side, this was definitely a production that got a lot of young kids into the theater and experiencing Shakespeare for the first time. And I know a lot of younger theater goers now who saw it and really enjoyed it. And I am okay with that. I'm so glad that they had that entryway with it. I hope that this allows them to experience other Shakespeare in the future and continue to see shows. On top of that, I thought that Kit Connor as Romeo objectively gave a phenomenal performance. And I wish, wish, wish that he got nominated for a Tony for his work, and sadly, he was not. But I hope he understands that he did really wonderful work and we would be lucky to have him back on Broadway. Really understood the character had a fully developed performance and take on it, and the language of Shakespeare just came off of his lips fluently. It sounded both. It had the poetry that you come to expect from Shakespeare in the Iambig pentameter, but it also felt organic and it made sense. It didn't sound rehearsed. It didn't sound like he was just reciting lines Other thing I'll say, and this is our Liz Lemon quote of the day, the lighting was really neat. It really did have some beautiful lighting. The whole aesthetic of this Romeo and Juliet was very euphoria, HBO's euphoria, with, like, a lot of pinks and purples and blues, a lot of diamonds on the face and. And a lot of giant teddy bears. Ultimately, that is where the buck ends with me for this Romeo and Juliet. The rest of the company, I am sorry to say, I found be quite underwhelming. Rachel Zegler, very beautiful, very thin. Like, she's. I'm like, girl, eat a. Eat a burger. Unless she's eating burgers, and she's just naturally that way, in which case, you know, live your life. And she's got an incredible voice. They have her sing two different songs in the show. One makes sense. It's at the Capulet party. And the other one was the end of Act 1, and it. Or it was either the end of Act 1 or it was right when Romeo dies. I can't recall. Some of it's blurry, but the voice is beautiful. It sounds just as beautiful live as it does in west side Story and in Snow White. The woman has an actual gift with voice, but the rest of the company outside of Kit just doesn't. The language of Shakespeare did not fit on them. It did not seem like they understood what they were saying. They were making choices that felt as if it was to adhere to a Gen Z mentality, which, again, this production is trying to be a Gen Z Romeo and Juliet. And in a lot of ways, it does hearken back to when Shakespeare actually was being performed for the first time. It was being performed for the masses and would lean into what would get a crowd rowdy. And I respect that, but it just felt uninformed and un. I don't feel like anyone in the company outside of Kit could really back up their acting choices or their instincts if we were to talk about it, because it just wasn't on the stage. Some performances, I won't say who, but there was one specific performance in Romeo and Juliet, one that was a very big part that is up there for me with Juliana Margulies of just like, do you know how to be on stage? And do you know how to say a line? Do you know how to be a person? Some people just really know how to work it for film, for cameras, and just can't make it work in a crowded environment live. Which is ironic because then there are also some stage performers who just can't scale back what they do on stage for film. And it's, it's why it's such a difficult thing to do and it's why it makes it such a craft. But this ultimately was a giant miss for me for the positive of Kit and the lighting. That ultimately isn't enough to move this out of the bottom 10 for me. Kit and the lighting. I would say Kit is what keeps this from, you know, being in the bottom three. And the lighting moves it up above last five years, but this was a part of. Me also struggled if I wanted to move this up three or four spots because of Kit. But ultimately the whole production for me just did not work and was both confusing and boring all at once. And that is ultimately where I leave it. So that's Romeo and Juliet. Okay, moving on at number 36. I'm disgusting. Home. This was technically the first show of the Broadway season. Oh, I should also mention we're not gonna include Ben Platt at the palace, which I did see. I did see. But it's not Tony eligible and it's not really part of the Broadway season, honey. So, no, we're not gonna check about her. Home is the first Broadway revival of the Tony nominated play for 1980, written by Sam Art Williams and directed by Kenny Leon. Starring Tori Kittles, co starring Brittany Inge and Story Ayers. Oh, boy. I think what I talked about with Home when we did the last ranking, I can barely remember this show. Similar to McNeil, similar to Tammy Faye. I found it so dull. And on top of that, I just can't recall so much of it. What I can recall is Story Ayers and Brittney Inge as the supporting women of the show, being really wonderful. If the story focuses around a man named Cephas Miles. That's who Tori Kittles plays. And he narrates the whole thing. He enacts the show as well as narrating it. And Brittany and Story, I'm calling them by their first names because we're close now. They play, you know, a multitude of women and men in their lives in Cephas's life. And I'm always a sucker for supporting players who play a multitude of roles. I mean, that's what we were talking about with left on 10th, right? But I remember watching Brini Engine Story airs and just going, oh, like again, specific. Just like the people in left on 10 that went, oh, you have definition for each character. You have a point of view. You have an attitude. You also understand the pacing of this show. You understand what needs to wake up the audience. And you're not ever commenting on any of your characters when they're comedic. And you're not indulging in the drama. You're both being dropped in, but big enough to fill this theater. And I found that very admiring. I was very admiring of that. That was very admirable of them. So that, that's my big thing with Home. And I can understand when watching it how this was impactful in 1980 at the time of the Broadway landscape. Because the show, from what I understand, yeah, the show was created in 1979 by the Negro Ensemble Company, which was a very, you know, I want to say avant garde, but much more experimental theatrical company. And so I'm sure it was a shake up for the Broadway season to have something like this on there. Very much tied to shows like For Colored Girls, which fucks around and finds out with exactly what you can do with storytelling in a theater. And I admire that. But I don't know if I think Kenny Leon was the right director for this. I don't know if this was the right theater for this. This feels like a show that absolutely lives and dies off of the size of its theater. And while the Hanes is not a large theater, it is about 700ish seats. Yes, about 740. And this should be in a 200 seat max theater. This is like a show meant for a black box where the furthest row is like row seven. That's just sort of how the show should work. Yeah. Because it just was so hard for it to land with everyone in the theater. And it's a shame. It was the first one of the. Of the season. It didn't really start us off on the right foot. But, you know, it's not that Home was atrocious. It wasn't a train wreck. It just was very, very unmemorable. Which is ultimately why it is so low at number 36. Because if it were more memorable and if it were a little worse, but more memorable, I probably would put it up like four more spots because making an impact is important. But on the other hand, you can make an impact and it can be so negative that you still remain low on this list. Which leads us to number 35. So that is 42 left on 10th. 41, McNeil. Number 40, Tammy Faye. 39, Redwood. 38. The last five years. 37, Romeo and Juliet. 36. Home 35 is from the bridge. There are some in this world who have strength of their own Never broken nor need of repair but there are some want to shine who can't do it alone so protect them and take special care Take care When you see someone silent we smash. Oh, Smoosh, you are a show Smash, Smoosh. We're going to keep calling it Smoosh from now on. I really want to get this going of of us just calling the show Smoosh. Smoosh. Adapted from the TV show Smash. Book by Bog Martin and Rick Ellis. Directed by Susan Stroman. Choreographed by Joshua. I've been calling him Joshua or Brigace for a while. And then I was watching an interview with Megan Hilty from a while back where she referred to him as Josh Burgasse. And I was like, oh, I guess that's how you say his name. Josh Bergasse. Starring Robin Herder, Carolyn Bowman, Brooks Ashmanskas, Krista Rodriguez, John Bellman, Christine Nielsen. I went into this with a very open mind. Smash is a TV show that for a long time, people were hoping would make some sort of Broadway premiere, specifically the musical Bombshell that the TV show centers around. Because the TV show is about people putting on a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe. And there's drama everywhere. There's drama with the producer, with the. With the writers, with the director and. And, oh, which leading lady's gonna play Marilyn? Is it going to be the chorus girl Ivy Lynn, who's put in the work, but maybe she just isn't quite special enough to be Marilyn? Or is it going to be fresh off the bus from Iowa, Karen, who comes in and magically sweeps the director off his feet and gets the part over Ivy, and Ivy's kind of the villain. But then there's a rebrand in season two where Ivy's actually very nice and Ivy gets to be Marilyn finally, and it just goes back and forth and back and forth. And so there were rumors of, oh, are they gonna do Bombshell as a musical? They did a Smash cast reunion, or they did a Bombshell concert and everyone got to do different songs and they recreated certain numbers from the TV show and people like, oh, this is gonna revive interest in it. But no, they made Smoosh instead, which is the similar premise of the TV show. It's about Broadway folks putting on a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe. And they do incorporate some of the drama of who's going to play Marilyn, because when the show begins, it is Robin Herder as Ivy, who is already cast as Marilyn, and she is a Broadway star with 3 million Instagram followers, because that's how this works. And everything's going Smoothly. Brooks Ashmansk is the director, and he's like, we're doing a big old musical comedy about Marilyn Monroe. Krysta Rodriguez and John Bellman are the married writers, and they're trying to crack the number. Let Me Be youe Star. How do we make this work? It's gotta be the opening number. But how. How exactly do we do Let Me Be youe Star? Oh, we want to incorporate more nuance and depth into the show, even though Brooks Ashmanskas is like, no, we will not end this show by having Marilyn Monroe die in a bedsheet, even though that is how Marilyn Monroe died. And eventually, Robin Herder's Ivy gets her hands on a book written by Christine Nielsen, and it's all about method acting and specifically who Marilyn Monroe was as a person. And because of this, Robin Herder's Ivy decides to do method acting and bring on Christine Nielsen as her coach. And she goes from a perfectly normal person to a psycho in five seconds and makes all of these demands and starts terrorizing everyone in the company. And it becomes semi clear that Ivy knows that what she's doing is having a negative effect, but she still keeps doing it anyway, as well as Kristy Nielsen serving her pills. Everyone just sort of lies down and lets Ivy make all of these bad decisions, tanking the show. Brooks Ashmanskas gets fired, and the first thing he does is does is kiss a chorus boy. And then when the show bombs, they go, oh, well, let's make a musical out of our experience. And that's how the show ends. And there's other stuff in there that's not worth mentioning. Smoosh. We have yet again, another Jesse Green Critics pick and listen. I've had friends see Smoosh, and they've enjoyed themselves. Friends of the pod, Connor and Dylan McDowell. McDowell have talked about it on Drama. And if you want to hear a much more positive and enjoying review of that show, you can listen to that episode. On a positive note, I think Robin Herder is an exceptionally talented triple threat and, you know, a beautiful dancer, a very good singer, and a very smart actress. And she tries very hard to make the character of Ivy Lynn make any kind of sense. She doesn't succeed because the book just refuses to make her make sense. And I would even argue the book is very hateful towards women in general, even when they're claiming to prop them up. I'm like, oh, you're doing so in the most basic and shallow way. And it's all like when the show is doing equilibrium of gender it's not actual equilibrium. It's gaslight, gay keep, girl, boss, which I feel like we've all evolved from. Right? In the same way. Like we've evolved from a Yas Queen work, you know, queer rights representation. Everyone in this world is messy and nuanced. Even when you're doing a comedy, you want to embrace the messy and nuance and give people their intelligence and their independence, while also sometimes making a bad decision or saying the wrong thing again. That's sort of how comedy of manners work, especially in something like this, where everyone's having this. A singular goal. Have different voices all over, like, make different contributions and have them work. Have them not work. And that's just sort of not the point of Smash. Smash wants to be a satire, but it doesn't actually look inwards on a lot of the people who make a lot of the drama on Broadway. Not the producers, not the writers, not the director. And God knows that none of those people in the theater have ever done anything wrong. It's not like we have playwrights who have had fully cancelable opinions. It's not like we've had directors who've been me too'd. It's not like we've had producers who've been me too'd. No, absolutely not. The drama comes from when your leading lady reads a book because women shouldn't read books. And you should never let actors have opinions on your show. Thanks, Smoosh. Thank you for that takeaway. Other positives. The music is fantastic. Everyone loves the songs of Bombshell. That's ultimately what carried over into people wanting Smoosh to be made into a musical at all. And I wish that we got more of the songs. Smoosh is much more of a play with music than it is a full blown musical. All the songs are diegetic. They take place in the rehearsal room or on the stage. And every now and then a song is done in a way that actually propels story and feels like a musical theater piece the way they do. I Never Met a Wolf who didn't like to Howl, which is done while they're in previews for the show. And covering a long period of time of previews actually is done as a montage as well as 20th Century Fox Mambo in Act 1, covering a long period of rehearsal over the course of this montage in the song. That, for me, is when the songs in Smoosh work their best. And I want to give major props to Stephen Ramis and Doug Besterman for their work on the music because it sounds great. Everyone in the cast sounds good and the arrangements and the supervision of the music is really top notch. And ultimately, I think anyone who has a good time at Smoosh has those two to primarily thank for it as well as the cast that, you know, does their best. Everyone else in the company works really hard. Again, I think that it's a script that just isn't funny and doesn't make a ton of sense. Brooks Ashmanskas is a pro and knows how to land a joke and know and has a certain bag of tricks that he comes back to and uses intelligently to sell material. It's very old school. It's very Nathan Lane. It's very Carol Channing of him. And I say my only gripe about that is I've now seen Brooks and like seven Broadway shows. And so I'm starting to clock certain things he does to sell those laughs. And it doesn't make it any less intelligent or any less successful. But because I'm starting to be able to clock it, the surprise is gone for me now. And surprise is a major component to humor. So it's. It's this weird dichotomy where I'm like, it's. What you're doing isn't bad. It makes sense and it's clearly getting a result. But. But I'm not laughing and I'm not here to tell Brooks Ashmanskas. Three time Tony nominee Brooks Ashmanskas that he has to appeal to me and, and my having seen him so much, it's just my. My takeaway from watching him in the show. Bella Coppola has a beautiful voice. She really sells the act. On finale of Let Me Be youe Star, which they do almost to completion. And that's really it. Joshua Bergasse's choreography works very well on tv. I find it works less well on stage. The design, I think is mostly okay. It's not necessarily creative, but it doesn't seem like they really want it to be. I just every. I walked out of Smoosh and I was. I didn't. I did not like it. And there were many things that I fully hated. But I had heard so much of it being a train wreck that I walked out going, that wasn't total train wrecky. But then every day since I have seen Smoosh, I have gotten angrier and angrier the more I think about it. And I cannot in good conscience rate it absolutely last on this list because with things like songs that we enjoy, being given a good treatment by Eremis and Besterman by having people in the company like Brooke Seshmanskas and Robin Herder, even Christine Nielsen with a part that I fucking hate. But she's Christine goddamn Nielsen, and I'm never gonna not like seeing her on stage. You know, that is. I cannot in good conscience put this show all the way at the bottom with that, you know, happening. But I cannot put this any higher. I really can't. Especially with everything else this season and just thinking about even shows that maybe are worse than Smoosh, but are. Are aiming for more. I don't know. Again, this is sort of where you kind of have to balance it out of, like, well, if something's aiming to be middle of the road and it hits it dead on with creativity and intelligence, do you give that a higher placement than something that's really trying to go for a really bold, beautiful artistic thing, but falls quite short of it? I don't know. For me, it depends on each show. For Smoosh, it's not trying to be high art, but I also don't think it succeeds at being the satirical musical comedy it claims it's being. And I do fully lame blame for that at the book, as well as, honestly, Strowman as director for not having full control of the tone of the piece, of the comedy of the piece. There's also no creative comedic staging. It's a lot of standing around, which blows my mind. Like, come on, move. Movement. I'm surprised that Strobin didn't choreograph this because she's really such a strong choreographer. But I guess with Smoosh, you gotta have. Sorry. With Smash, the TV show, Bergasse's choreo is so integral to the success of the show, and maybe he also had a right of first refusal. I don't know. But I felt that Bergasse's choreography could have been finessed more for the stage. It doesn't help. Like, half of the numbers are cut in half anyway. But, yeah, this for me was a giant miss with a couple of people working very hard to keep it afloat and doing impressive and commendable work, but. But that's not enough to save Smoosh. All right, so that's it at number 35. We are gonna take another break and then come back in at 34. Billy, I beg to differ with you. How do you mean? You're the top. Yeah, you're an arrow collar. You're the top. You're a Coolidge dollar. You're the nimble tread of the feet of Freddy out here. There's no one way of doing things, no unwritten rules and no shortage of adventure. Because out here the only requirement is having fun. Bank of America invites kids 6 to 18 to golf with us for a limited time. Sign them up for a free one year membership giving them access to discounted Tetons at thousands of courses. Learn more@bankofamerica.com golf with us what would you like the power to do? Bank of America restrictions apply cpfa.com golf with us for complete details. Copyright 2025 bank of America Corporation this episode is brought to you by State Farm. Knowing you could be saving money for the things you really want is a great feeling. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state. And we're back. Alright, so to recap, at 42 we had left on 10th, 41 was McNeil. Number 40 was Tammy Faye. 39 Redwood 38 the last five years 37 Romeo and Juliet 36 home 35 smoosh. And at 34 right 35 with smoosh. 34 is I'm disgusting. All in Comedy About Love this is written by Simon Rich, son of Frank Rich. Simon Rich is mostly known for writing short stories and opinion pieces. This is not a play. This is a collection of his stories all centered around love that are recited and sort of acted out by a rotating cast of four. The opening night cast which I saw was John Mulaney, Fred Armisen, Renee Elise Goldsberry and Richard Kind. The production is supervised by Alex Timbers. It has a design by David Korins and has some doesn't really have costumes, but there is a costume designer, lighting and some projections as John Mulaney narrates and then acts out with everybody else as they sit in these chairs on book. On book, meaning that they're reading from scripts. There are sometimes projections behind them to help illustrate these stories that are being recited to us. And in between is music being performed by the Banksons, which is a band that Simon Rich really loves. What I will say is this show was. Did I laugh maybe three or four times. Was the were the performances bad? No, it is. It was a criminal under usage of Rene Lee Skoldsberry as well as Fred Armisen. But I will give John Mulaney credit. John Mulaney and I also saw him on stage in oh hello Owns a room. I actually also saw his Stand up twice. I saw it in New Jersey and then at Radio City Music Hall. He knows how to own the stage and he knows how to sell material by doing Stand Up. You know, Stand up is a lot of storytelling, so he's able to do that very well. He's very charismatic. He has a way of pitching comedy to an audience that you feel like you are in on the humor with him without it seeming like he's commenting on it. And that is a very special gift that not a lot of people have. Again, as I said, everyone else does a commendable job. They are just often underused. Richard Kind, weirdly, is sort of the second lead of the show. No one has as much material as Mulaney did. But Richard Kind probably had the second largest amount of material and he does very well. But I know that I would have loved to see more from Renee Lee Skoldsberry and more from Fred Armisen. Overall, this is just. It's not really a play. It's not for me. It wasn't funny enough, nor was it sweet enough or moving enough and not exciting or entertaining enough. And I was very fortunate. I won a lotto seat, so I only had to pay 40 bucks. I was all the way up in the nosebleeds, but it was 40 bucks. What they were charging for the show is insane. And granted it was a short run, they felt they fit it in there in between Once Upon a Mattress and the last five years at the Hudson and Wanted. And the only way they could probably make their money back was if they charged that certain amount for the eight weeks or nine weeks that they had of the show. But still for 90 minutes of four people in chairs reading from scripts that were just a collection of short stories that, in my opinion, were only semi funny. Not worth it. Highway Robbery completely. Was it again? Is it the worst thing on the list? No. If the prices weren't so steep, would I maybe rank it a little higher? Who's to say? But that's where it is at now, is at 34. It is 1,000% still in the bottom 10 of the season for me. At number 33. I'm disgusting. Othello, Starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal. Directed by Kenny Leon. Our second Shakespeare of the season. Second on the list already. Our second Kenny Leon on the list. Of the three that won't be of the season, Othello. This is another one that is now notorious for the insane ticket prices that they were charging over $900 for, you know, prime orchestra seats. If I was not fortunate to have a Tony voter friend, and if I had not told him the moment they they announced Othello that I was calling dibs as his plus one for Tony seats, I would not have been able to see this show. I just wouldn't have. And I would not have had a complete overview of the season for you guys. But here's the thing about the Othello. Is it again, is it the absolute worst thing? No. Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago is giving a commendable performance. I wouldn't say he's incredible. Tales of his incredibleness online I think are a little overblown. It's more that he succeeded more than a lot of people expected, considering he had never done Shakespeare before, according to him. And Denzel Washington has done Shakespeare and has worked with Kenny Leon a bunch. So I think there was an expectation that Denzel would succeed more than he does here, especially because this was apparently a bucket list role for him. And it's not that Denzel is sloppy or that Denzel Washington is bad. Denzel Washington is a good actor. He knows how to be a good actor. He makes and is someone who makes choices and is committed, but he's making such weird choices for this. His Othello is an odd performance for sure. And it is a microcosm of the rest of the production that is mostly rudderless. It is, it's. There are basically Othello this production. Othello has two. Has two modes, which is no take and a wild take. The premise that Kenny Leon has done for this is that it's like three years in the future, but they don't do anything with that. There's not a lot of creative input on him or his design team's part in regards to staging or anything like that, except for two moments and they're wild moments. There's a transition into Desdemona, Othello's wife's bedroom in Act 2 where he's spoiler alert about to kill her. And the transition into that bedroom scene is wild. They bring it like a see through curtain down and bring it out all the all these candles in the bed while like very intense classical music is playing. It's very odd. It was very, very odd. The best performance in the show is Andrew Burnap as Cassio, the soldier that Iago tells Othello is having an affair with his wife, Desdemona. And Burnap, I've always just felt has is a very compelling, very special actor who is very committed to the bit every single time. And whether he's right for the role or not, you at least commend the work he's doing. And this is something where he actually fit the role very well. And I maybe don't understand what Kenny Leon was going for with this Othello by having it set the way it was. It actually worked best for Andrew Burnap as Cassio. I don't know if he would have done better for a more classical presentation of the show. I don't know. We didn't get it. But because of how this is presented, his work on Casio made a lot of sense and worked the best of any performance in the show. Similar to Kit Connor, the text felt very natural on him. You got the poetry of Shakespeare while it also making sense and just feeling organic. And that is a major positive. I give him. That's a major. And I give Jake Gyllenhaal a lot of positive on that as well. And he really tore into the vindictiveness and just toxicity of Iago. But mostly this is just an insanely, expensively missable performance. This whole show, it's gonna close soon. It's made its money back. So the producers are happy. They've recouped. They got no Tony nominations and middling reviews. So I don't know, in terms of their own ego, how they feel, but it's gonna close soon. And I'm telling you, by next season, all that people will remember about it was the ticket price. That's it. They're not going to talk about any of the artistry, any of the other performances. Some people might talk about Jake Gyllenhaal's performance, and it's a good one. I think. I would rather people speak more highly about Andrew Bernap's performance, because I do think that is the best one in the show. But Jake is the bigger name and does a solid job, so I get it. But this is not a show with any kind of lasting impression. This is not like a Brian Dennehy in Death of a Salesman. This is not a Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in Fences, where, like, we still talk about that revival. And that revival having an impact like that revival led to the movie version of Fences with Denzel Washington and Viola Davis. I do not see there being a lauded movie version of Othello. If they make one, they might. I've heard rumors that they want to do it, but I doubt it if they do. I don't think it'll. I can't imagine it'll land any better than this does. But hey, miracles happen. Anyway, so that's Othello at 33. At 32, I'm disgusting. Glengarry Glen Ross, the Pulitzer Prize winning play by David Mamet made into the Oscar nominated film. This is the third revival we've had of Glengarry Glen Ross in the 21st century. There was a revival directed by Joe Mantello. There was a revival, forget who directed that one, but that was, I think, 2016, 2017 that had Bobby Cannavale and Al Pacino. This one is directed by Patrick Barber, who directed Leopoldstadt two seasons ago starring Oscar winner Kieran Culkin as well as Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr. This revival is not bad. It's not great either. It is similar to Othello. It is very heavy ticket price. It has no real take on the material like Othello. This is a good play that has one really phenomenal performance, one really strong performance and then an ensemble that's sort of there as and a central performance that is very weak and kind of undermines the show. But also, again, is sort of representative of what's wrong about the revival. Glengarry Glen Ross, if you don't know, is about real estate salesmen who are at a struggling firm. And there are three in particular that we mostly follow. Richard Roma, Shelley Levine. And then I'm forgetting the name of Bill Burrs. It is. Hold please. Dave Moss. And these are the three best roles. They were all nominated for the Joe Mantello production with Lev Schreiber winning for Richard Roma in the original Broadway production. Roma and Shelley Levine were nominated as well, with the actor playing Roma, I believe, winning for that production for the original production as well. And then Al Pacino played Richard Roma in the movie and was Oscar nominated for it. The Bobby Cannavale revival. Cannavale played Roma, but nobody was nominated for that. And Al Pacino played Shelley Levine. I would argue those are the two best roles. And then Dave Moss is the third best role. But if you are a really good Dave Moss, as Bill Burr is, you can really take the spotlight. And Bill Burr for me is the most successful performance in this production and I felt should have been nominated for a Tony. In fact, I thought he was a lock up until the day. And then Bob Odenkirk ended up being the production's only nomination for Shelley Levine. And granted, Shelley is a great role. He's also very sad role. You know, he's maybe struggling the most, has the most to lose from not doing well. At this firm and really much needs the Glengarry leads to make a commission to, you know, stabilize his income, not even his future, just like his present. And he goes to an extreme that very much backfires on him and. And screws over the entire firm. And it's a very tragic character. It's. It's. It's a Mamet version of Shakespearean. It's. It's Mamet's version of Death of a Salesman, or at least the. The Irrelevance of the Salesman. And it is a good play. It's a better movie, in my opinion, but it's a good play. It's mostly known for its dialogue. Mamet in his prime had a way of sort of being the Shakespeare of crudeness, of vulgarity and an explicit language, and he's now become an incredibly awful human being with opinions that I wish no one would publish. And it's rather upsetting that Broadway claims to be progressive and inclusive and whatnot, while having no problem continually reviving works by Mamet, who, granted, even if the plays are good, it's like, do we need to give this man more money? Because he's actually. He has become an active participant in the community that is trying to tear down so many other members of the Rabbit community against queer people, against women, people of color. This is a man who said that all teachers are predators. And I'm like, okay, this guy needs to literally fuck all the way off. He's all the way out into the woods, and we don't need to deal with him anymore. So already the fact that this revival exists kind of pisses me off. But on top of that, it's not even an exciting enough revival. It's a perfectly respectful revival. And because of that, a lot of it is also very dry. It's a very dry first act. Odenkirk, for me, took a while to warm up. He opens the show, and it's. Again, they're in the Palace Theater, which is honestly far too big of a theater for this show. They are filling it to the ceiling, but it is too big for this kind of a play. And Odenkirk has to set the tone. He has to fill the theater, and he has a hard time with that first scene. Bill Burr comes in with the second scene of Act 1 and nails it completely and really livens things up. Then comes Kieran Culkin as Richard Roma, which is the Denzel performance of the show, where it's just. It does not work. It's a miscast. It's a misdirection he doesn't understand. He doesn't fit the role. He can't sell the material. It's him giving his real pain succession performance with mammoth material, and it just doesn't. It doesn't work. It doesn't land, it doesn't sell. And then Act 2 works a lot better. But again, it takes a while for things to get going. And then Bill Burr's character leaves about two thirds of the way through Act 2, and we never see him again. And when he goes, so does a lot of the energy. Luckily, Bob Odenkirk picks up the slack by that point, but it's not exciting enough. It's got moments where it's pretty good, moments where it's pretty good, and then a lot of moments where it is drier than burnt toast. So that is what puts this above things like smoosh or Romeo and Juliet. But ultimately, this is the top of the bottom 10 for us in this ranking. All right, coming up next at 31. I'm disgusting. The Roommate, the Two Hander, starring Patti Lupin and Mia Farrow. Directed by Jack O' Brien with a set designed by Bob Crowley. Hey, girl, hey. Incidental music by David Yazbek and written by Jen Silverman. The Roommate ultimately tells a story of Mia Farrow living in Iowa, a divorced woman with empty nest syndrome who takes on a roommate, Patti LuPone, who is a lesbian from New York, a vegan lesbian from New York. And it's ultimately a budding friendship, sisterhood, comedy, odd couple situation that then tries to blossom into something more complex, which, on paper, I have no problem with. I like it when shows and plays to lead with entertainment and comedy and then actually have something to say at the end, or, you know, have something to question at the end. Even better, something to question. And I think that objectively that is a really admirable thing to do. And the Roommate, to its credit, absolutely nails the demographic it is selling the plate to. Which is to say, I went to a Sunday matinee, like, about a month after the show had opened, theater filled with audience members who were 50 and older, and they were absolutely living for this thing. I myself was not. I just, I. For a show that is mostly a comedy, I did not laugh pretty much at all. There were times when I went that was a solid joke, but I did not laugh. What makes this play ultimately higher than others for me is that, again, I think that its intentions are admirable and that in some ways it succeeds at what it's trying to do because there were enough People around me that felt it was successful. And I cannot deny that, that, you know, it worked for so many others around me. I will also say that Mia Farrow in the play gave a very surprisingly strong performance similar to other actors I've mentioned on the pod where once you sort of recognize how it is that they perform, you can start anticipating how they're going to say certain lines. And about an hour into this hour and 50 minute play, I fully cracked the code of how Mia Farrow, as the role of Sharon, approached the dialogue and approached her scene work with Patti. And it didn't make it unfunny, it didn't make it uninteresting or not endearing. It just, again, the surprise was gone. And I then just started anticipating each moment that Mia Farrow had. Again, not bad. Just the anticipation was there. And maybe this is just a me thing, but it's sort of like when you crack the formula of a Grey's Anatomy episode, right? Like most episodes there'll be like three surgeries and there's always one who has to die while the other two tend to live. Sometimes they'll try to shake it up and have them all die or have them all live. But usually it's like there's. It's a two and a one. Same thing with 30 rock. You know, you can usually count when a smash cut to a smash cut is going to happen. Like they'll make a joke about something and then they'll smash cut to a flashback of that joke. And it's not. There's not necessarily anything wrong with it, but you have to start switching things up eventually. You got to keep it fresh, keep it on its toes. And Mia Farrow, I give her a lot of props for coming back to the stage. I last saw her in Love Letters, which is a very different beast entirely. But, you know, for someone who mostly does film and hasn't done a lot of stage in the last 40 years, this was a big endeavor. And I think that she mostly succeeded. She got a Tony nomination for it and I think that that's well deserved. Patti LuPone as Robin, the vegan lesbian roommate from New York. You know, her character basically exists for Mia Farrow to have reactions off of. And then when their characters sort of switch places as one is the more corrupt one and one is the more innocent one, and Mia Farrow's Sharon becomes a lot more corrupt and shows her inner con artist. Patty's character sort of exists then to just react off of Mia Farrow again. They sort of like switch places in this. In this odd couple dynamic. And, you know, Patty always invests 1000% into every performance she does. It's. It's rare if you see a Patti LuPone performance and you feel like it was being phoned in. So it's not as if she was going through the motions. She's definitely invested, and it's clear that she thinks highly of the material. But it's a character that makes very little sense to me. It's a character that, you know, it. It's a character that doesn't thrive on mystery, but exists solely to be mysterious and to be a catalyst for one other character's journey. And maybe because I didn't find that Sharon's journey was particularly believable, and thus I didn't find that Robin was a strong enough. I don't say opponent, but like an obscene partner for her and an inciting character for Sharon's arc. It's all these things where I'm like, I get what we're trying to do here. And obviously it works for others. And I'm not saying that it's insufferable in any way, but it's just not gelling. And maybe also part of it is that Bob Crowley, for all of his intelligence and craft, created too slick and modern and chic of a set. Jack o' Brien, as the director, mostly just worked with the actresses, I'm sure, on the text, but did not provide any kind of momentum with the piece, any movement with the actresses. It was a lot of sitting at stools or standing around the kitchen island, and comedy needs physicality to it, and there just was so little of it. And it's a shame because I think that if there was. If this. I think if the design was a little less sleek and if the direction allowed for more physicality, this would probably be. Go up a couple more steps. I think there are other. There are bumps that I would have been a little more forgiving if other elements of the production were improved. As I said, like, this is not absolute bottom of the barrel. This goes above Smoosh and Othello and Glengarry Glen Ross, but it's no out of 42. This is at 31, which is. We're. We're about a third of the way through the list now. So that is the roommate for us at 31. All right. At number 30. Ah, I'm disgusting. Our Town, the Kenny Leon revival of Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece. This is the next item on our list. Again directed by Kenny Leon. But the Next critics pick of our list. So far we are. We haven't cracked the middle of the rankings yet and we already have three critics picks from Jesse Green, Redwood Smash, and now Our Town. When I saw this revival, it was very low on my ranking at the time. And part of its moving up is a little bit of my, you know, in retrospect and in comparison to other shows this season that have come out, it is definitely a more competent production than others. Similar to Othello and similar to Glengarry Glen Ross. This is not a production that really has a point of view. Its only point of view is the inclusive casting, which is great. The problem with it is every actor in this Our Town was in a different production of Our Town. It was a clashing ensemble if ever I saw one. And I mean, like, everyone was in a different time period. Everyone was in a different part of the country. Everyone was in a different style of play. Now, could you argue that that was intentional? That that if America is a melting pot and if the town in Our Town truly is a community, community doesn't necessarily mean that everyone is homogenous. It just means that everyone has collected together as a. As a group? Sure. But this is where theater has to take one step aside from reality. Because ultimately every story you see on a stage and is a pocket of the human experience, condensed and shrink, wrapped into a specific amount of time that it's willing to get away with and presented as an entertainment. And when you're presenting that, everyone has to be on the same page. So if it's intentional that these styles are clashing, that has to be more clear to us. Because when it's not, you have assholes like me going like, why is everyone in a different production of Our Town? It works for some people. Obviously works for Jesse Green. I also couldn't tell you why the design was the way it was. The design basically was it looked like gray painted sea wood driftwood with hanging lanterns all throughout the theater that went to the back of the stage and then ultimately was revealed to stem from the cemetery where the end of the plate is. So one could argue that the lanterns are the departing souls from the town. In Our town, Grover's Corners, that's entirely a take. I personally don't buy it. And if that is the real take, it absolutely doesn't land enough. It makes a very pretty image a couple of times. That's the best I'll say about those lanterns. So, yes, okay, we'll say that the lanterns sometimes make a pretty picture. That is a Positive, we will say about it. Another positive I will have is that Donald Webber Jr. As the choir master, the alcoholic choir master, gave my favorite performance in the show. And then after that would probably be Richard Thomas, as. Is it Emily Webb? Yeah, Emily Webb. Dr. Webb. Emily Webb's father. Everyone else, though, even if they had moments that I enjoyed, it was just. Everyone was sort of out to sea. And again, another performance in this that comes up with Juliana Margulies of a. Just like, what are you doing and how are you on this stage? Plenty of people in the show who I've enjoyed and other things. Ephraim Sykes I've enjoyed in the past. Zoe Deutsch I've enjoyed in the past. Julie Halston, fucking Billy, Eugene Jones. But everyone's just on different pages. It doesn't come together as a collective. It felt. It also felt as if no one really wanted to invigorate the material. Our Town is, in my opinion, one of the most brilliant plays ever written in America. English language, definitely, but especially in America. And it has a reputation now for saccharine and suite and for just like every high school and every community theater in the country doing it for decades upon decades. And I do think that the worst productions of Our Town are more like the most insufferable productions of Our Town lead into sort of the pretentiousness of it, of like, live every moment for now and love each other and be there for each other. And, you know, oh, the American dream is one thing, but it can go wrong and sour so quickly. You know, things that we've been harping on for decades and decades. And sometimes every now and then, a new writer has something new to say about it all. But Thor and Wilder really did encapsulate so much of it in this play, and in classic Wilder fashion, loves to fuck around with the fourth wall. We have our stage manager here, played by Jim Parsons. There's a gravitas to Our Town, but there's also an urgency to it and a relatability to it. And the production that David Cromer directed off broadway about 15 years ago really drove home the relatability of the show and its evergreen quality. He also really was able to find a new take on the Emily coming back to earth from beyond to live another day and understand all of a sudden how humankind takes for granted the miracle that is humankind, and that is just being alive. Because it's something that I'm sure many audiences in the 1930s didn't really comprehend until they saw the show and Then, because Our town has become such a staple everywhere and has been done by every age of every kind of person in this world with various degrees of acting skill, the heart and the impact of that final scene loses steam for a lot of folks and becomes trite. And the David Cromer production really hit you hard by, because, you know, with Our Town, it's also. You're miming all the props, and you never really see what the town looks like. There's no set. And they did that with the Cromer production, and everyone was in modern dress. But then when Emily went back to earth, they pulled back a black curtain that had been there the entire time that you just thought was part of the theater. But behind it was a period specific, fully detailed kitchen with Emily's mother cooking breakfast. And you smelled the bacon and you heard the sizzling of the bacon on the pan, and you realized, oh, now that she's back and seeing all of the details again, sharper than ever before, because it's now gone. It's hitting her harder and more intensely than ever before. And no one on set sees it like she does. And it was really powerful and it went super. The scene also went really, really quickly because that's the other thing is when she comes back, she's recognizing just how fast everything goes. She's seeing her parents, she's seeing her brother, and she knows that her brother's gonna die in five years. And she wants to hold on to every moment, but she can't. And she wants everyone around her to sit and enjoy the moment. But that's also sort of the thing about being alive, is if you are just appreciating every second, you're not experiencing every second. You can never really experience and appreciate at the same time. You can do one or the other, and usually appreciation comes in retrospect, and that's fine. But if you are aware of it and try to find the balance, you'll never fully succeed, but you will maybe at the end, look back and feel like you had enough of life that you were able to chew. And every now and then, you savored the flavor of it. And this production just doesn't. It's a lot of flavors that come together to create no taste and has no immediacy, has no pulse. It's just sort of there. They're like, well, it's our town, and you like our town. So we're going to make a couple of trims to make it go by a bit faster, and we're going to throw in A whole bunch of different acting styles and see what sticks. And very little of it does. And nothing about it surprised me, nothing about it moved me. Is it the worst thing I have ever seen? No, because ultimately the play itself is just too good. And it's not as if every actor in the show is bad, as I said, two or three that I really enjoyed. But yeah, this is Our Town is pretty low on my list because ultimately everything that the team quote unquote brought or didn't bring to the material was a miss for me, a miss or just didn't exist. So that's Our town at number 30. At number 29. A Wonderful World. The Louis Armstrong Musical. This musical is the obviously bio jukebox musical about Louis Armstrong, the jazz musician. And it is a passion project of one James Monroe Iglehart, who not only starred in it as Louis Armstrong, but also co conceived it and co directed the piece. The show basically, you know, follows the same pattern as any bio jubox musical, right? It's, you know, there's always like someone who doesn't believe in the artist until somebody does and they have a breakout song and then there's like the one song that's like their major, major hit. And it's usually a sing along of some sort. And there's always a romance issue. And with Louis Armstrong, he had multiple wives, not all at once, but you know, he kind of went from one to the other and then supposedly had some love children out there and was a major fan of the marijuana. The problem with Louis Armstrong is that he wasn't really a writer. He was a musician and he was an interpreter. He could take things that existed, give them their own spin. And he was a performer. He was a very gregarious performer with a very distinctive voice. And A Wonderful World doesn't really go in on the process, I guess, of how to turn something into a piece of jazz, of taking something that people already know and giving it its own spin. For example, probably the biggest hit Louis Armstrong ever had was his cover of the title song from hello Dolly, which they do, and it's a sing along at the end. And it is about as shoehorned in as you would expect. But I would have loved to have seen. And maybe it's because we get spoiled with something like stereophonic and you don't have a lot of time in a bio musical to spend time on the process of something, the creative process of something. But how someone like Louis Armstrong could hear a Jerry Herman tune like that and give it the spin that he Gave it that. Gave it its own identity that's equally as iconic and memorable as the original. But they don't do that. It's just sort of, yeah, I recorded and it was fine, whatever. And maybe it was just that easy and fast for him and it became such a hit. But still, if not that song, then a different song. What the show really wants to focus on is his relationship with four different wives, all of whom are very, very good. I want to give specific props to Darlesia Circe as his final wife, Lucille Wilson, as well as Jenny Harney Fleming, who plays Lil Hardin, his second wife who he meets in Chicago. They gave, in my humble opinion, the best performances in the show. Jenny, I thought, gave the most fully rounded character on stage, whereas d' Alecio just gave the kind of fire and sweat that you expect from a show that takes place in this era and deals with this genre of music. The show ultimately goes to soft and Louis Armstrong in the same way that all of these bio musicals do, because when the estate of the artist is involved, you can never go too hard on the subject because ultimately these shows become a not like vanity piece, but they are ultimately they genuflect to the subject of the musical. And it's, it's, it's. It's just not interesting to me. Even something like mj, which I feel is more a coup for the director and design team of creating a lot of very phenomenal visuals and putting together three or four really amazing numbers. Ultimately, that book still is just, you know, every, every flaw of Michael Jackson as a person comes down to a quirk and anything that might actually be a real hardship for other people from him comes down to trauma of his from childhood. So he, it gets blamed on his father or is a hit piece from the media. And I don't mean to harp on MJ too much, but that is representative of so many other bio jukebox musicals where your lead performer just has no flaws or the flaws they do have are easy ones to forgive and you can even shift some blame onto other people. The one thing I will say that Wonderful World does is that he does. They. They don't. They do let Louis Armstrong come off sort of in the wrong. Two of his wives of him not treating them terribly well. But he's always saying to the audience how each wife left him. He didn't cheat. He was always left by the last wife. So he found himself a new one. And it's just a little bit of an easy out, especially when the wives for as little stage Time as each one gets have more personality and more gumption than he does because the writers are not concerned about making them necessarily likable. They become much more memorable and much more interesting than he does as a character. The show also wants to throw in a political side to Louis Armstrong of sort of late in life as the civil rights movement is taking off him all of a sudden becoming extremely political and extremely passionate in a way that doesn't make a lot of sense. He is portrayed for the majority of the show as a delightful oblivion who has seen some terrible stuff. There's a. Not to trigger, but there's a lynching that happens in Act 1. It's off stage and it's. Or rather it's a metaphorical staging of it, but it's something that he witnesses and then never grapples with ever again until the last 10 minutes of Act 2 when all of a sudden he's like, actually I remember all of it and I hate all of it. And I. And I want to fight for, you know, my. My fellow race again. Super admirable. But they are too dots that are not connected on the corkboard that is this show. They are moments that are. That pop for an audience but have no fleshing out and have no narrative to them. So that is one of the major negatives of the show. And it's ultimately it goes by a lot of the paint by numbers that you see in this type. Type of show. And the things that they do try to do differently, they don't do terribly. Interestingly, I would say outside of the Four Wives and specifically Darlesia Searcy and Jenny Harney Fleming, I would say that the arrangements sound good. Obviously they hearken to the Louis Armstrong arrangements, but give a good sense of exciting and hot jazz. I would say the costumes are pretty solid. It's a hard working ensemble. Choreography is actually pretty good. There's a lot of tap usage in Wonderful Worlds. Not all of which I thought was integrated terribly well or built well. But I would actually argue the non tapping choreography was quite good. The rest of the design didn't really do it for me. The set design was rather ugly. A lot of suitcases in the show. I couldn't tell you why the proscenium was flanked by suitcases. It just wasn't a very well thought out set design. And I know that Studio 54 has a very shallow stage and not a lot of backstage, but. But I always feel like from confines comes creativity. You know, you have to be creative out of necessity sometimes. And some of the best things come from that. There's a famous story with Tony Walton. With the original production of Pippin, it was supposed to be a much more elaborate design, but they ran out of money and so they had to cut down a lot of his design elements. And it mostly just became a black box with a couple of drops here and there. But because they were used very sparsely and creatively, they made a much larger impact because sometimes out of a black hole, all of a sudden you get a giant tapestry coming out of the floor. And it is the surprise that really does it for people, and that is what makes that design so memorable. And for this, it sort of felt like they were trying to make it seem as much of a spectacle and crowded stage as possible. And thus there was no place for your eye to land on. It was all just a little too much clutter and not a lot of focus. So that's sort of it. With A Wonderful World, it was. It's again, we're not talking bottom of the barrel, but we're also not talking top tier either. And unfortunately, this is not the only bio jukebox musical we have this season. There's another one that also kind of falls a bit into paint by numbers, but they have a little more fun with the paint and a little more fun with the numbers. So we will get to that one in a second. So that is a Wonderful World at 29. At number 28. I'm a hard hard worker every day I'm a hard hard worker I'm working every day I'm a hard hard worker and I'm saving all my pay if I ever get some money Put a win, take it all out celebrate I'm a hard, hard worker every day Swept Away, the Avett Brothers jukebox musical directed by Michael Mayer. Swept Away had a very interesting narrative on Broadway because it didn't run for very long. About like six weeks after it opened. This is also, yet again, the next Jesse Green critics pick on the list. So I think that's four. Now. We have, yeah, we had Redwood, we had Smash, we have our Town, and now we have Swept Away. That's four. And we still haven't gotten to the halfway point on the rankings. So that should be telling you how I feel about Mr. Jesse Green these days. Swept Away ran for about six weeks, five or six weeks on Broadway. And part of. And it was supposed to just run for a month. Rather, I should say it was going to close after a month and then extended by two weeks because despite the fact that the show got sort of only okay reviews and was doing really terrible box office. It did somehow get a fan base pretty quickly and very passionately that they all sort of came out in droves for the last two weeks of the run. And I'm glad that the cast of Swept Away was able to get that kind of love before they closed. I know this was a passion project for many. They did get their set design nomination, so good for them on that. My issue was Swept Away, and this is sort of where we're now starting to kind of have the balance because we're getting to the part of the list where we're starting to head into dislike. So at the bottom we have like a fully hated into dislike hated. Now we're sort of getting to the part of, like, dislike with things about it that I liked. And Swept Away is ultimately a musical that I disliked, but it had things about it that I liked as well, or rather things that I admired. I did think it was a beautifully designed show. I'm glad they got their set design nomination. The reveal of the ship moving up during the hurricane was really beautiful. It also had very stunning lighting. And yet again, our Liz Lemon. The lighting was really neat, quote, but we mean every time we talk about the lighting being neat, we mean it. It's not just like, oh, I'm searching for something. But we are, you know, trying to talk about the positives. Right. So I did think it was a beautifully designed show. This is the first show probably since American Idiot where I liked Michael Mayer's work as director. Both his work with the cast as well as his visual eye. He. It's not fully his Spring awakening heyday, but it is closer to that than he's had for a while now, what with Funny Girl and a beautiful noise and on a clear day, just, you know, things like that. This is much more the Michael Mayer that was running strongly when I was in high school. The arrangements also are good. I don't. I did not know the avid brothers super well, but I felt that the music was very well arranged and. And kept very tight. Friend of the potted Will Van Dyck was the music director on this show and he did a very little job. The cast sounded great. It's a whole bunch of swarthy sailors and. And they all sang good and I'm sure they all smell just fine. What ultimately comes down to is Swept away is a 90 minute musical about sailors on. Apparently it's inspired by a true story of, you know, sailors on a ship that gets shipwrecked. And there are four survivors in a boat and one ends up dying and the others have to feed off of him in order to survive. And they have to sort of live with the guilt of that, knowing that also the rest of their shipmates are dead. But it also wants to deal with religion because most of the sailors are atheists and believe that God doesn't exist. And you have Stark Sands and his brother. I forget the actor's name, but Adrian Blake Ensco, who they are, you know, they are brothers who board the ship at the very last minute. And they are religious. They do believe in God. And it's sort of a battling of the heads between them and everyone else, especially John Gallagher Jr. Who was our sort of narrator and lead. His name is Just Mate, because that's the thing. No one has a name in this. It's Captain, Big Brother, Little Brother, Mate, and everybody else is just ensemble. And when John Gallagher Jr dies many years later, very sick and alone and wanting to get off his conscience, the cannibalism of the post shipwreck, he supposedly kind of like makes peace with God and meets his maker and is able to ascend into the afterlife, finally believing in all of it. Supposedly. That is, I guess, what they're trying to make you think about it. And in some ways that's heady stuff. But for all of the beautiful design, for all of the well put together music, for a lot of the strong performances, and listen, I'm never gonna complain about seeing Stark Sands on stage. I thought he was the most compelling person in the show. Other people had their favorites in it. I was not a fan of John Gallagher Jr's performance. It was a little. I don't know how to describe it. It was like, if this is gonna sound mean, but it was a little bit like if Gollum played Edna Turnblad. Like, it was the Baltimore accent with weird kind of mannerisms. And I didn't understand what that was about. So that's just sort of why I go to that kind of extreme, because I wasn't. I didn't get what John Gallagher Jr. Was going for for the role. But that's neither here nor there. What ultimately it all comes down to is that the book by John Logan, I just. I kind of violently hated. I found it incredibly dull. I found it listless and unengaging. And I was close up. I was like fifth row, dead center for this show. So if ever there was a spot to sit and have it wash over you, that was a spot to be in. And I just could not get into anything with this script. And I have been not super thrilled with John Logan scripts in the past. This was one that really just could not. For all of the loveliness of the design, the nuances of performances, the inventiveness of staging, the collective ensemble work, I could not, not get on board with this script. And when you have a script that just doesn't work, not even like a script that is flimsy but holds it all together like a script that just actively doesn't work like this one did for me, it ultimately knocks down the show a solid, like, five or six pegs than it would have been like, if this script were 20% better instead of being at number 28, this probably would have been at, like, number 20. And if her 50% better, it would be probably in the top 15. Because there's so much about what's surrounding the script that was very lovely, but it's, like, touched by this little bit of toxicity. Not to bring up my own personal life, but I remembered someone saying this to me. As many of you know, with my play, yours truly, coming to a theater near you at some point is based off of my own situation with the infamous bubble. And Bub and I have since been in contact in the last year, the last, like, 11, 12 months, and we've spoken a lot about sort of what went on between us and how we feel about each other now. And one of the things I did ask him was sort of, you know, did everything. Anything you say about how you felt about me at the time, was any of that actually real? Or were you just sort of going through it and you were saying whatever came to mind? And he said, no, I did mean everything I said, and I mean it now still. Like, I do still love you. The problem is falling in. I fell in love with you during, like, one of the worst periods of my life. And thus I did some of the worst things I've ever done in my life during that time. And so it's hard for me to separate the genuine, healthy love I have for you from all of the toxicity that happened during that time. And I always have thought about that of, like, when you have good in your life or, like, good in a show, let's keep it back to, like, what really matters here? The Broadway. When you have a good thing in a show, it's hard to make that a selling point when it's all attached to something that you find not to be, like, mean about it, but, like, kind of rotted, right? So. And. And maybe I'll Change my tune over the years. Lord knows Brooks Atkinson has that famous review of pal Joey in 1940 where he's like, listen, everything that's being done on this show is expert and top shelf. But, like, it's based off of source material that is just absolutely foul. And how can you draw sweet water from a foul well? And I think that I don't care how nasty a character can be on stage or whatever the logistics of. Of whatever story is happening on stage. I think some source materials just don't sing. And we've seen that over time. But with this, it's more sort of. Yeah, like. Like when you're. When you find that the script is not good, like, actively not good, how can you really enjoy the show even if everything else about it is. Is solid? It's really hard to. And. And we'll get to this with shows later on that. Shows that I liked more than others and shows that I liked less than others. For this, I can't. It's everything else surrounding Swept Away. What good as it is is not so incredible that it makes up for the bad book. And the book is, in my opinion, so bad that the good stuff just can't escape it because it's all tied together. So that's me on Swept away at number 28. So I'm gonna do a quick recap of our numbers, and then we're gonna take a quick break. So at 42 left on 10th, 41, McNeil. Number 40, Tammy Faye. 39, Redwood. 38. The last five years. 37, Romeo and Juliet. 37, home. 35, Smoosh. 34, all in 33, Othello. 32, Glengarry Glen Ross. 31, the roommate. Number 30, our town. 29, a wonderful world. And 28, swept away. We will come back with number 27 after this break. Billy, I beg to differ with you. How do you mean? You're the top. Yeah, you're an arrow collar. You're the top. You're a Coolidge dollar. You're the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire. Hey there, travelers. Kaley Cuoco here. Sorry to interrupt your music great artist, BT Dubs, but wouldn't you rather be there to hear it live? With Priceline, you can get out of your dreams and into your dream concert. They've got millions of travel deals to get you to that festival gig, rave, sound bath, or sonic experience. You pick Dreaming of. Download the Priceline app today and you can save up to 60% off hotels and up to 50% off flights. So don't just dream about that trip. Book it with Priceline. Go to your happy price. Priceline. This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. From streaming to shopping, prime helps you get more out of your passions. So whether you're a fan of true crime or prefer a nail biting novel from time to time, with services like Prime Video, Amazon Music, and fast free delivery, prime makes it easy to get more out of whatever you're into or getting into. Visit Amazon.comprime to learn more. And we're back. So to Continue at number 27 we have I'm Disgusting. Good Night and Good Luck. Yet another Jessie Green critics pick Good Night and Good Luck is adapted from the movie directed by George Clooney, who also stars in this production. And it is based off of the real life events of during the era of McCarthyism, when Edward R. Murrow, who was a telecaster I think for cbs, was one of the few people in media who was willing to speak openly against Senator Joseph McCarthy and really not only sort of talk down on him to try to get the rest of the country to view him as the pathetic and vindictive and not terribly bright man that he was, but also the evil and the rot that was at the root of McCarthyism, something that was ultimately one of the a major blemish on the history of the United States, one of many blemishes that we have for sure, and we thought for a while one that we were moving away from. But we are slowly and yet surely coming back to that mentality of agoraphobia, us against them, of the Red Scare, of things like that. When you see it now with the GOP of using the term communism so freely and frequently and misguidedly, like just not how many Republican politicians do you think could actually tell you what communism means? Or what would define communism? Anything that's viewed as equilibrium, whether it's health care or taxes or what have you, or, you know, minimum wage. They're like, what? Communism? Sure, sure, Jan. So with goodnight and good luck. This was adapted by Clooney from his own screenplay with Grant Heslove, and the stage production is directed by David Cromer. And I never saw the movie. I didn't care to see the movie. I learned about this era many times in school. My father has seen the movie a few times. He grew up during this era. He knows this era very well. He asked me if this was something he needed to see because he said, I'll be honest with you, Matthew. I have no desire. I know. I know everything that Happens already. I've seen the movie, I'm familiar with the material and I can't imagine that they're saying or doing anything that would surprise me or challenge me. And I said, that's correct, Booboo. Nothing on this stage will surprise or challenge you. Now, let me be clear. This is higher up than I think a lot of people might have expected. And 27 out of 42 is not terribly high. But I think for a lot of people to say, oh, you have this above swept Away, you have this above, above our town, you have this above smash into fellow. And yeah, let me be clear, this is one step above Swept Away. This is like this is one pocket above. And it's just because there's nothing in Good Night and Good Luck that's objectively bad. I don't think in terms of. In terms of material, there are a couple of performances that I think are sort of underwhelming. No one is giving a like, shockingly terrible performance, which some of the shows beneath Good Night and Good Luck do have. Design wise, it's maybe a little literal, but it is quite elaborate. It is a full blown studio with different pockets and, you know, things sliding on and off set. There are hydraulics in the show for sure. And it is probably, in my opinion, the most. How would I describe this? It uses multimedia, it uses screens in a way that makes a lot of sense. It doesn't feel egregious because ultimately this is a story that's about the medium of television and it's hard to relay what makes film so effective in a stage show. The one that's not the best is probably City of Angels, which uses theatricality for cinema and gets away with it in that respect. But so many other shows that are about film or about TV do not land quite as well. And this is not the first show to use screens this season, let alone overall. And I would say that there are more exciting usages of screen work and cameras on stage this season, but it makes the most sense here. It probably pays out the best here as well. The moments of Good Night and Good Luck that are the most exciting or the most fulfilling, the most engaging for me are all of the televised sequences when Edward R. Murrow goes on air to talk about Joseph McCarthy and also his interview with Liberace. But that's a story for another day. Part of it is that George Clooney is ultimately a film actor and he knows how to act for film. He is a charismatic, commanding presence. And what Edward Armouro says in his telecast are very. I was looking for. They rile you up because the story is so prescient to today. And to hear someone say loudly and eloquently against a tyrant exactly what this person is doing and belittle them in a way that doesn't seem mean spirited, it's just brutal, intelligent honesty. And so that's very cathartic to watch. All the other shenanigans going on in the studio I could care less about. It's not that it's poorly done, it's just that nobody cares. Clooney probably isn't the best performance in the show. I would say that Clark Gregg as Don Hollenbeck is the best performance in the show. But no one really has a Tony worthy moment. Clooney's speeches are obviously what got him his nomination. In addition to the fact that he's the co writer and he's a major champion of media and journalism and theater right now. There's been a lot of talk about the final montage that happens when Clooney talks about the importance of journalism and integrity and honesty and standing up and speaking out. And then, you know, the audience is meant to sort of have a moment of shock when it ends with spoiler alert. The fucking dumb ass shot of Elon Musk doing the most half assed and stupid Nazi salute you've ever seen. And what makes Good Night and Good Luck worth being on Broadway if not necessarily worth seeing for all of you? I mentioned this in my review. It was very clear to me in that, in that theater that this was an audience that didn't care what the play was about. When they walked in, they bought their ticket to see George Clooney only the moment he came out, phones were coming out to take pictures of him. All of these things. And because of the high ticket price, because this is a show that has been selling out and has been in a lot of ways similar to Othello, a very exclusive event. You basically have star fuckers who only want to be in the same room as George Clooney who never thought they were going to get the chance to see him live on stage ever. And then rich people who want the bragging rights in having seen the expensive hard to see thing. And these are the people who need to see that montage at the end of Good Night and Good Luck. The people who only care about YouTuber drama with people like James Charles, which, like, granted, he's a piece of shit, but like James Charles, drama is not the most important thing in the world. The Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni drama is not the most important thing in the world. It's fun, it's compelling, but it's not important, really. Those people who go. Who care about that and go see George Clooney, to see George Clooney, and then the rich people of the world who go see it because of the status it gives them, who actually know and have ties to a lot of the influential people in our country and in the world because they have the money to influence them. Those are the people that need to be told, wake up, speak up and speak out. Because a lot of people in the world and in our country are doing that. But a lot of us are not billionaires or millionaires. And they are the ones who have to join forces with us because in a lot of ways they may think, oh, what does it have to do with me? It has to do with everyone. Right. Integrity does not. Is not exclusive to any tax bracket or any ethnicity. It's something that everyone deserves to have, but it's also something that everyone needs to hold on to. Respect is something you earn. Dignity is something you keep working on. And that is ultimately what Goodnight and Good Luck talks about, is the resilience of holding onto your dignity and holding people accountable. And it feels like we are only doing that for celebrities and youtubers and we need to do it a lot more, a lot more frequently. Be intelligent, show grace and hold on to your dignity. That is ultimately what Goodnight and Goluck is saying. Is it a dry show 80% of the time? Fuck, yeah. Again, are there some performances that are weak? Mm. But the 20% of it that I did like, I did like quite a lot. And it is. And I don't want to say like, oh, it's important, it is important, but, like, it accidentally has become the exact show that the audience it attracted needed to see. And for that we give it some grace. I. I think if I were to take that part away from it, I would maybe move this down a couple of spots. But at 27 out of 42, that ain't so bad. Alright, so that's 27. Next up at 20. Pirates the Penzance musical. This is Roundabout's revisal of the Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan. A delightful operetta that I was fortunate to be in once in my youth. And if you ever want to see absolute chaotic perfection, you can go on YouTube and you can watch the filmed the film Preservation of the Central park production with Kevin Kline, George Rose, Rex Smith, Linda Ronstadt. That was filmed. I Think towards the end of its run in the park in 1980, a few months before it transferred to the Uris now the Gershwin on Broadway. And that revival was a very influential revival. Maybe one day I'll do a full episode about like all the most influential revivals of musicals on Broadway. But with Pirates the Penzance musical, this is a revisal, not a revival because normally Pirates of Penzance takes place in Penzance, which is a beach town in England. The joke being like, oh, these swashbuckling pirates. And they, they are. They're like in this touristy beach place. Okay, so I guess they're not all that swashbuckling. And then the joke is like, actually, yeah, they're not. They're kind of lame, but they think they're awesome. Sounds apropos of a lot of men these days, right? But this is now taking place in New Orleans at the same exact time period. And they have re adapted the music so it's a lot more swung and jazzy and bluesy and. And I was open minded to this. I went, okay, let's see what they do. It's always fun to hear music done in a whole new way. And even if, as a few friends of mine pointed out to me, jazz technically started being birthed around this time in New Orleans around the 1880s. It did not really take full form until the 20th century. And so they have fully formed jazz, swing and blues in this Pirates a solid like 40 years before it actually crystallizes. So, you know, that's just us being dramaturgical douches. But ultimately what the problem is with the style of music being used for Pirates is that all sense of zaniness and energy and bubbliness is gone. It is much more smooth, it's much more. They're trying to use sensuality in it, and I don't mind that. But again, it takes away the fizz. And Pirates of Penzance is a shit ton of fizz. It's also a revisal because Rupert Holmes has made this a play within a play. It's Gilbert and Sullivan telling us we are adapting our Pirates of Penzance operetta to this time period for American audiences. And a book that adheres to the structure and the story of Pirates of Penzance with a whole bunch of new jokes. Half of the songs have new lyrics. On the positive sides, I did think that this was very well designed production. It famously did not get any Tony nominations for design, which I thought they were actually going to get quite a Few for so, you know, eating my hat on that. But I did. I do think it is a very well designed show. I think the set is gorgeous. Almost no projections to be found. The costumes were good. Maybe not as elegant, not elegant, but, like, not as luxurious or voluptuous or sumptuous as I would like. But considering the style they were going for with this production, it makes sense. And I thought the lighting was very moody. It very much gave off like. Like Disney World, Pirates of Caribbean, when you're sort of in the queue for the ride without, like, any of the danger. Like, but, you know, lots of dark purples and blues to give off the sense of, like, you're at a taverna and, you know, drinking mead off the cobblestone streets while, like, it's twilight out when, like, gas lanterns, that kind of thing. It was. It. It's a fun aesthetic. I. I like it a great deal. And there's some good performances in there. As I mentioned in my review, I think Nicholas Barish as Frederick the juvenile understands his assignment. The problem is that a lot of the cartoonishness that's supposed to be around him from, like, the pirate king played by Ramin Karimloo, just isn't there. Jinx Monsoon as Frederick's nurse Ruth is very funny. I do think that the score has not been transposed properly to Jinx's voice. And the night that we saw it, there was a lot of cracking going on. And Jinx is such a good singer, it would be best to sort of really put it in a key that no matter how sick or whatever hormones their body might be sort of going through at the moment, just sort of in a safe space where they can just let loose and then really focus on the comedy. Because ultimately, with Pirates, comedy is key. The number one MVP for me in the show is David Hyde Pierce as the modern Major General. And I was talking to a friend who saw it and loved this production, but actually didn't like Modern Major General because they felt that they didn't do anything with it. And I was like, right. They mostly left it alone. I think they did, like, one or two slight tweaks to the lyrics, but overall they just kept it as it was with a little bit of choreo. Because that number is so iconic and that number just works. You don't. You don't. There are some things where it's not so much that it's sacrosanct, that, like, they're so precious, you have to do it a certain way, but more sort of like, you don't want to change the DNA of something that is. That has always iconically worked and is known all over the world. You can inject it with some new life, like they did in 1980 and made a joke of it. Each verse kind of speeding up a little bit and giving it an orchestration that is in touch with the. Again, the zaniness of the piece, but moves further away from highbrow operetta and more towards bombastic Broadway and blends the two worlds. And I would have liked a jazz and a swing for this Pirates that was nothing but energy because things like turning the song the Pirate King into, like a samba into an easygoing samba takes away the goofiness, takes away the bubbliness. And I was trying to give this show a lot of leeway because they were trying something new, and I wanted to see sort of how it all ended. And if act one, I was like, maybe half on board with half sort of middling on Act 2, just lost me completely. And it also sort of goes to show that even if you are sort of liking some of some things about a show, if it ends on a note that you hate, it sours. Was absolutely the rest of the production for you, because the finale of Pirates with the infamous Nomi Malone, we're all from different places, absolutely ruined any fond memories I had of the show before then. So I have to give credit where it's due, because within the days after Pirates, I was like, oh, my God, bottom three. My Lord, that finale. And then I was like, no, no, no. There's some good stuff to it. You liked the design? Most of the voices are. Well, the voices are good. Just. Just not everyone is in keys that they need. And some of the arrangements don't really allow songs to sell. And I don't like the rewrites, but it's not a complete disaster so much as. It's just when you know how pirates can work and then you see someone take a shot that doesn't come anywhere near the show at its most successful, it's hard to give it grace. But we do acknowledge when it does work. And there are pockets of it that are fun and pockets of it that are funny, but overall, it's an overall miss with moments that are fun, is how I would describe this. Pirates. So that's Pirates at 26. All right. At number 25. I've always been shy I confess it I'm shy Cat, can't you guess that this confident air Is a mask that I wear? Cause I'm shy and you may be shy Once Upon a Mattress. This is a transfer from City center encores from the 2024 spring season. This was the premiere production for that season starring Sutton Foster. This is the second revival that Broadway has had of this musical, which is basically an off kilter retelling of the Princess and the Pea. And those of you who don't know, this was a show that kind of came about by accident. Mary Rogers, of Richard Rogers's Daughter fame, she was the composer. This was her Broadway debut as a composer. And she, along with three other writers, sort of cobbled the show together at a summer camp that was for families. And they were in charge of writing shows every two weeks, I want to say, as entertainment for the, for the campers, the adult campers. Because this, that was something that used to happen was like families from New York or New Jersey would go like up to Connecticut or upstate New York and spend two weeks at a time at these sort of. They were almost like, you know, it was like doing a luxury resort, but it was summer camp. And again, at the end of every two weeks they would put on these shows that they would create. And they did one of Princess and the Pea and they modeled it around all of the actors that they were, you know, working with that summer. And it went really, really well. And a bunch of agents and producers came to New York and saw it and thought there was so much potential and optioned it for Broadway. And they spent like a couple of months, like two or three months working with impresario George Abbott to whip it into genuine shape. This, it was opening at the Phoenix Theater, which is a major off Broadway theater, doesn't exist anymore. It's now, I think the east village, AMC on Second Avenue. But it was like 1100 seat off Broadway theater. And George Abbott directed it and it's launched Carol Burnett's theater career. And the whole point was that it was like borscht belt humor for adults on this fairy tale that they all know with a lot of like sort of sexual innuendo to it. And it's a fun show. It's dated, it's a little creaky, but that's sort of the point. It was cobbled together at the time. And ultimately it's more sort of like the overall effect is greater than the whole, is greater than the sum of its parts. And this revival had a brand new book by Amy Sherman Palladino. And by brand new book, I mean it's like 70% new. A lot of jokes about Brooklyn in this book and in this libretto as well as spurs for Sir Harry. And it was perfectly fine at Encores. I thought it was enjoyable. It wasn't great. It starred Sutton Foster, who for years we all thought she should play Princess Winifred, who is like the off brand princess. And she had just come out of having Covid, and she was in the middle of rehearsals for Sweeney Todd, so it definitely felt like she had been sort of holding back vocally with it, but it was still an enjoyable night. And then they moved it to Broadway that summer and what was essentially a cut and paste job. And for a lot of people, that was fine. They went, oh, this is musical comedy. It's heaven. I love it. I needed more from this. There was fun to be had. I like the score a lot and the orchestra sounded good, although I think they reduced it for Broadway. And Sutton was nice. I think that after Shy, she improved vocally on Broadway. She never really let loose in the way I wanted for this role, but she did do a good job. It was a very, like, balls to the walls comic performance, a lot of manic energy. The MVP for me in this production was Michael Urie as Prince Dauntless, her love interest at Encores, Harriet Harris played the domineering queen. And then it was Anna Gasteyer on Broadway who definitely was finding her footing. When I saw it, I went to a press performance, and because this transfer was sort of thrown together last minute, much in the way that the show was written in the 50s, any new members of the cast who didn't do it at Encores were still finding their footing for this. And for Ana, that was especially true. But there were other members of the company that were still kind of figuring it out. Will Chase Daniel Breaker. At best, I'll say it was perfectly pleasant. It. It was fine. I can't say that I laughed much. I can't say that there was a lot of inventiveness or a lot of fun, freaky energy to it. This is a show that's. It's, you know, it's the. It's the weird stepchild of a lot of Golden Age musicals. And you kind of have to let it be the weird stepchild. And some people, I won't say, like Sutton and Michael Urie were able to do that, but I don't think that Lira Debessinet as a director, has that comic instinct in her. She has a good eye for casting and knows when to let her actor sort of go and make their own choices. But she didn't really bring anything to the table for me here. Nor did Lauren Lotaro's choreography. And design wise, the whole thing just felt half baked. It's not that it was without merit. It's not that it was the worst thing of the season. It's just that it didn't really justify its transfer to me. And I'll also say, speaking of Bub, I went to Bub with this and he had seen it at Encores and loved it at Encores. And then we go see the transfer and I walk out and I'm like, yeah, that was sort of just okay. And he was furious. I think he expected it to fully be beefed up for the transfer. And I had. I couldn't. The hardest, I laughed all night was walking out and hearing him just like rage about it. And I was laughing at him because I was like, what did you expect? It's an Ankras transfer. It's a copy paste job. It's their new model. So I think people who went in expecting an inventive lavish revival, that the Encore's production was going to be like a blueprint of, would be very underwhelmed. If you knew to go in and get. And you were going to get that copy paste job, you were probably a little okay with it. But for me, I was sort of halfway between that. I knew it wasn't going to be a glow up, but I did want a little more. Again, it's sort of. This was like. It wouldn't, I wouldn't say perfectly fine. This was perfectly adequate. And we will take perfectly adequate over travesty. Right? Like, so this is 25, higher than 38, which is last five years. But there are other revivals that are higher than Once Upon a Mattress. So Moving on, number 24, I'm disgusting job. The Broadway debut of playwright Max Wolf Friedlich and director Michael Hurwitz, starring Sidney Lemon and Peter Friedman. This was a two hander that had done extraordinary, extremely well Off Broadway, I believe it premiered at the. At Soho Playhouse or soho Rep Theater in soho. And then had a second production, a commercial off Broadway production in I think the east side that summer, like earlier in that summer, like that May and June. And then it transferred to Broadway at the Hayes Theater in July. Yep. Of 2024. Yeah. Its opening night was July 30th of 2024. And then I think I saw it like a week or two later. And for a show that had so much buzz in both of its off Broadway engagements, you know, strong reviews and sold out houses, it kind of came to Broadway with A whimper there? No, there was no buzz around it. There was buzz when it was announced. And then the moment started playing performances, nobody really showed up. And then the reviews were actually kind of middling, which was sort of surprising considering its reception was before. And then the question becomes like, well, is it the space that it's in? Is this a show that really does thrive on how intimate you are in the space? And the Haze is perhaps the smallest theater on Broadway. So for that 500 something seat theater to be considered too cavernous for Job sort of speaks both about what that show needs as well as why not. Maybe not everything needs to go to Broadway. In some respects it's good for new plays to go to Broadway because it gives it some clout. And especially when you're doing licensing. And I know that job, once it closed, was being licensed in many different productions all over the world. The moment you become an a Broadway play, even like you could be an off Broadway success for two years, but if you are a Broadway play and you only run three months in a lot of ways, that is what people want to license, people want to see. So I get that there's sort of the, the clout of that. But Job is a two hander where Sidney Lemon plays a young woman named Jane who has a mental breakdown at her job and on goes on a leave of absence and then has to come back, wants to go back to her job, but she can only go back if she goes to get an evaluation from a psychiatrist named Lloyd, played by Peter Friedman. And eventually we learned that Jane's job was that she worked for this big tech company and she had to go online and see where her company's where if any advertisements for her company was being used in any bad spots of the Internet. And that led her down to some very dark sites, especially sites that her company did own if people were posting really gruesome things on there. So that led to her seeing a lot of violence, a lot of hateful speech, but then also a lot of sexual abuse content. And that is stuff that she was holding onto and sort of festering within her. And that led to a breakdown in addition to an encounter she had with a former flame from college. And that's what ultimately led to the breakdown. And then what we find out is while she's on leave, she's starting to become a bit of a vigilante because when she was at work, she was responsible for scrubbing this content from the Internet. And in a way it was her way of feeling productive and helping the World, I am taking this hateful stuff out. I am reporting these people and removing any of their agency online, any of their power. And when I can't do that, what can I do? And so she starts taking matters into her own hands, Little promising young woman of the show. But there's a twist, and I guess I'll reveal the twist. Now, there's one person that she noticed online who. She could never figure out who they were. She couldn't totally scrub all of their content online, and she could never figure out who the person was, but she would take vigilant notes of. Of his content to try to get clues as to who he was. This man is a sexual predator and. And molester. And what he really did was he would have his two children, his son and daughter, have sex with each other on camera. And according to Jane, you would see him coerce them with love and affection to do what he wanted them to do on camera. And eventually the daughter would take her own life, and the son would be still sort of in his custody and, you know, separated from his wife. And we don't know this until the end of the show because as we learn about Lloyd, we see Jane start piecing things together, and we don't know what exactly it is she's piecing together. Oh, he went to Berkeley. Oh, he's divorced. Oh, he had two kids, and the daughter died. All of these things. And eventually she comes to the conclusion that Peter Friedman is the man. And her instinct at the top of the show, which is when the play opens, she's holding a gun and pointing it at him, and she eventually puts it away, and she says, I'm sorry. I don't know what happened there. Something triggered me, and I just. And I. Something made me whip out that gun. And they go through the session, and she kind of holds him hostage to continue doing the session. And then it's sort of revealed that she realizes in the third act of the play that her instinct to whip out the gun was because something in her clocked through his voice and through the aura of the office that this was one of the guys she was looking for specifically for this video. And then the play ends with them sort of possibly making a treaty where he's like, don't shoot me. He never admits to whether it's him or not. He's just trying to get her to put the gun down. He's like, if you don't shoot me today, I will tell your boss that you're good to go, and you can go back to Work and you can do what you were doing and you can help catch all of these other terrible people. So it becomes the trolley problem of do I get this one guy and maybe never go back to work or do I let this guy go and I can get a whole lot more other people? Terrible problem to have, is it not? And so that's the play. This was a play that I enjoyed when I watched it. And then I read the play afterwards because they gave me the script and I was like, huh? I think that this play has a lot of interesting things going in it. I ultimately think it's less successful as I'm reading it than when I watched it. And it's not. And listen, plays are meant to be seen, right? So I'm reading it, not going, like, how does this read? So much as I'm charting what I watched again via the script and going, oh, you know, yeah, I think this was more sort of like sold from the actors being so good and having a really good design concept. Because I will say the on the positive sides for Job is, I do think that it is a very strong endeavor by the playwright. I look forward to seeing what else that they write in the future. And I also think that Michael Hurwitz's direction is very strong. I look forward to seeing what else Michael Hurwitz does. I said this before, I think, like, these two are going to have a very wonderful career in the theater. And we will look back at Job as like, what an interesting start to their Broadway career as this was. And then on top of that, I think Sidney Levin and Peter Friedman are absolutely wonderful. Sidney Levin in particular really impressed me as Jane. But it's a very strong two hander with two very strong actors. And for that alone, it's worth seeing. But it doesn't make the play overall as memorable as I think I was hoping it would be. But still solid enough for 24. Okay, next up, number 23, Stephen Sondheim's old friends at Manhattan Theatre Club. This is another transfer from the West End, a review of Stephen Sondheim music as produced by Cameron Mackintosh through the lens of. Cameron and Sondheim were old friends and so he wanted to focus on Sondheim material that they had worked on together. And that's a large umbrella because Cameron Mackintosh did produce two other Sondheim reviews side by side by Sondheim as well as putting it together. And thus you could say that any of those shows were shows that he worked on with Sondheim because he used scores from all of them. For those reviews. The only Sondheim musical that I am aware of Cameron Mackintosh actually producing outside of those reviews is Follies. His total overhaul of Follies in the West End, which like, has its merits, but is not. That's not my Follies and it's not the Follies that we ever do here. But so because of this, my issue with this, Revi, with this, this review is that there are some weird ass song choices. A whole section dedicated to into the woods, and I love into the woods, but the whole into the woods section that had the prologue with a little bit of on the Steps of the palace into Agony, into, I know, Things now weirdly mashed up with bounce and then into hello Little Girl and then into Children Will Listen. It just, it all. The whole section felt a bit, bit kind of like, well, we gotta honor this show and it's more fun to do a section of it than to just do a song. So like, let's have like the into the woods portion of the night. And the show also wants to be a heavily produced review. They don't want just like a couple of stools and everyone in cocktail attire. They want a little bit of scenery, they want costumes. They, you know, they have all these projections. They want to give you the feeling of each musical, which is hard because, you know, it's Manhattan Theater Club, it's the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. It's not a huge space. And it's also expensive to try to recreate all of these shows. We had the same issue with Prince of Broadway, right? Same theater. And so for something like into the woods, they definitely try to go a little heavier. Sweeney Todd, they go a little more lavish with the design. And then things like Follies, it's sort of, you know, okay, well, people in cocktail attire come on stage and do a number. But then in addition to there being weird song choices, there are also some songs where they have weird interpretations of it. Like Gavin Lee doing A Queer Bent on Could I Leave you? Where he's singing it to, I guess, the goodbye note that his ex partner has left him. There's also a performance of Waiting for the Girls Upstairs where like Kyle Selig is competing with the other two younger guys for the affections of the two younger women in the show. And he runs off with them and I'm like, but that's not what that song is about. Which then runs into the other issue of when we do Sondheim reviewswhich every Sondheim Review has always had this one. Even the best Sondheim reviews have this issue of most of these songs are written for a specific context. Sondheim did not really believe in writing a pop song. He did not believe in writing a song for a song's sake. And whenever he kind of had to, he was resentful. And you can always tell when it's Sondheim writing because he's been assigned and his heart isn't in it, as opposed to when he's actually genuinely crafting a song for a story and for a character. It's why Sort of Sending the Clowns is this weird breakout hit that he always resented. And songs like Losing My Mind and I Don't, like Let's Think of Another One or Being Alive, songs that are wonderful outside of context. They totally can stop the show in a concert, but they work even better in the show. And Old Friends is sort of a review for Sondheim nerds who love this stuff, but also kind of acknowledge when it's not as good as watching the actual show. The main fun of Old Friends is a again, hearing songs you love and then also hearing talented people do them, but then also some maybe favorites of yours doing new things. So, for example, Lea Salonga getting to do Everything's Coming Up Roses and a whole section as Mrs. Lovett. It's really fun to see her break out of that comfort zone of hers. And it's especially fun to see her do Mrs. Lovett where she. I know it's not like, you know, the Most iconic she, Mrs. Lovich, only gets like eight minutes of stage time to do it, but it's fun to see her go for broke as it and makes you go, oh, she could do Lovett in a real production. You start to see some of performers you love or performers you admire in new lights and go and think to yourself, oh, I would love to see them try that now. Which is enough to recommend the show of seeing Lea Salonga do something like that of watching Joanna Riding do not Getting married Today. Bonnie Langford do I'm Still Here, Gavin Lee doing Everybody Ought to have a Maid. On the more negative side, I love Bernadette Peters, but she is kind of past her sell by date now as a musical theater performer, as an entity, as a legend, she still holds strong. She's still got her withers with her. But I've said this before, Bernadette being such a personality, the isms that used to make her special are now being what defines her. And her restraint has gone away. And been taken over by the things that made her iconic and now just are her personality now. And it's sad because I love her sand in the Clowns and I love her children will listen and not a day goes by. But there's a lack of taste to some of what she's doing. Like a lot of back phrasing in songs. Losing my mind. It got to the point where I was afraid that orchestra was going to finish before her because she just phrases kept bleeding into other phrases and it just did not land. And especially when it's in comparison to people like Beth Leavel, who's also going outside of her comfort zone and doing a very restrained Ladies who Lunch. But it's a searing Ladies who Lunch. And when you have people really kind of fine tuning their craft outside of their box and delivering on things like that, and Lea Salonga doing Sweeney, when you have Bernadette Peters doing things she's done before and not quite as well, it's just, it's hard to ignore and it's a shame because we love her and we love Sondheim, but we want it to be a little more interesting, a little, a little better. So that's old friends for us. So we are going to take yet another break and then we are going to get back to 22. We're now at the halfway point, guys. 22 after this break. Billy, I beg to differ with you. How do you mean? You're the top. Yeah, you're an arrow collar. You're the top. You're a Coolidge dollar. You're the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire. Hey there. I'm Alan Seales, host of the Theater Podcast, a weekly podcast that takes you behind the scenes with intimate personal conversations that include the biggest stars on Broadway to TV and film. My podcast has over 350 episodes with guests including Stephanie J. Block, Kerry Butler, James Monroe Iglehart, Andrew Barth Feldman, Alex Brightman, Patti Lupone, Ramin Karimlu, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and even TV stars like Isaac Mizrahi, Ariana Maddox, Michael Urie, Eddie Izzard, and literally so, so many more. My guests have spilled secrets, told coming out stories, discussed their fears and successes, and even had huge epiphanies live in the episodes. So you're bound to hear some things from my guests that you've never heard anywhere else. I've also got many deep dive takeovers on the podcast, which are consecutive episodes dedicated to casting creatives from a single show like the Outsiders, Back to the Future and Juliet wicked. Beetlejuice, Hadestown, Frozen 6. I could go on. Can you tell I like theater? I've definitely got something you're gonna enjoy. So go ahead, search for your favorite star and listen to their episode. You can find all the info about the podcast at VPN fm, on the Broadway Podcast Network, or anywhere podcasts are found. If you need that link again, it's BPN fm ttp. Take a deep breath. Make the world a little colorful.