Micky Jo (0:00)

Do you know what I love? If you Google the title John Proctor is the Villain. Google's AI overview will inform you that that statement is actually factually incorrect because he is flawed yet heroic and that is why this play is so important. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you're listening on podcast platforms. My name is Micky Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. I'm a professional theatre critic here on social media and today we're going to be talking all about the multi award nominated play John Proctor is the Vil by Kimberly Bellflower, currently playing at the Booth Theatre on Broadway. Among the show's many recent recognitions is a nomination for the Tony Award for Best New Play. It's in terrific company, but this is possibly my favourite new play on Broadway and today I am very excited to let you know exactly why we're going to really dig into this and why it feels particularly groundbreaking. Now I'm always curious to hear what other people think of the shows that I talk about on here, but I'm particularly curious to hear about other people's reactions to John Proctor is the Villain, particularly if you are a young theatre goer who has had the chance see this or to perform this. I would really love to hear from all of you in the comments section down below and if you enjoy this review and you would like to see or hear more from me, make sure that you're subscribed right here on YouTube. Turn on those notifications somewhere down there below my face or follow me on podcast platforms. There will be a couple more Broadway reviews coming soon as we head towards the Tony Awards. There will also be coverage of the Tony Awards. Will John Proctor as the villain become this year's Tony Award recipient for Best New Play? It might just happen. We will find out next month. In the meantime, here is what I think of it now. As you can guess from the title, this is sort of in response to the Crucible. It's not, as we've seen a lot of recently, a new adaptation of the Crucible or a new reworking of it. Instead, this is set in a Georgia high school in a small town, a town with one stop light, and it concerns a small class of English students who are reading the Crucible, who are working through it and who respond to it through through a very contemporary lens and through a lens kind of inspired by events that are unfolding around them. The play is set in 2018 at the height of the MeToo movement and essentially what this means is that the usually taught response to the Crucible, even by a teacher who appears to us to be, you know, fairly liberal in the way that he manages his classroom and fairly welcoming of all different opinions and interpretations, doesn't necessarily resonate with these girls, whose understanding of femininity and womanhood has been very much shaped by these tumultuous recent events. Events which for some of them have also become acutely personal. This group is made up of five young women and two young men. The cast is completed by two teacher figures, one their male English teacher, the other a female guidance counsellor who herself was a student at the school not too long ago. But it's these five young women who we principally focus on already. There's a little bit of a parallel with Arthur Miller's the Crucible here, with that having begun with this ritual, with this dance undertaken by these young women who became instrumental in the Salem witch hunts and the trials that unfolded subsequently. This comes into conversation a little bit with the events that we see happening in this play, but I'll talk about that in just a moment. Let me introduce you to these young characters first of all. So we have Raelyn, played by Amalia Yu, who is getting over a breakup with her boyfriend, who is still in class with her. He's one of the two boys having cheated on her with her best friend. Her best friend, who we learn is the absent Shelby, played by Sadie Sink. If the marketing and the branding of all this makes it seem like Sadie think is the star of this play, then, you know, I think it's true to a certain extent. But for what it's worth, she does not appear on stage for a very long time. It is her narrative, however, that really propel the events of the play forwards. Because once she returns, or by the time that she returns, we've been talking about her conspicuous absence for a really long time and the fact that she doesn't necessarily fit in with the group anymore after everything that's happened. But we, the audience, come to discover a few really staggering revelations about the truth behind the circumstances of her long term absence. With one particularly incendiary admission in the second half of the play that will shape absolutely everything that happens afterwards and make it impossible to see everything which had happened before in the same way. And don't you just love when that happens? I haven't yet been back to see John Proctor as the villain a second time, but because that happens, I feel like I have to. I'm very excited to, actually. Now we also have Ivy, played by Maggie Koontz. She is the character through which we observe the external goings on of the MeToo movement because her father, who is some sort businessman, he's a well known respected figure within what I'll remind you, as a small town. He is accused of sexual misconduct by a female employee, something that Maggie is obviously initially shaken by. After a certain amount of time passes, however, she ends up taking her father's side and shuts down any attacks on his character or what she perceives to be attacks on the characters of men in similar situations. Just like John Proctor in the Crucible. You see where we're going with all of this? There is also, and this is both a fully fleshed out character and a handy playwriting to tool, a character who has recently transferred from, I think from Atlanta, from a larger city. Her name is Nell. She's played by Morgan Scott. She brings to the group a different kind of a perspective about social ideas. She kind of spearheads the commencement of a feminist club. They are trying to put together a feminist club to ignite conversations and foster change and really bring about intersectional feminism, which for young adults at their particular point of adolescence means having conversations both about, you know, their interactions with each other, things that are happening within their group, obviously all of the MeToo stuff once it starts happening, but as well as that, you know, things that have happened with boys. And also the tricky topic that is the feminist politics of Taylor Swift, the challenges of which are traversed very memorably by a character named Beth. And Beth, who is played exceptionally by Finestrasa, also a Tony Award nominee this year. What can I tell you about Beth? I mean, Beth was me in high school. Beth is an overachiever, anxiously just trying to do the best that she can, have every right answer, but not in an obnoxious way so as to gain dominance over her fellow classmates. She wants them to succeed alongside her. She also wants to develop a really close understanding and relationship with her teachers, which for Beth is sort of parasocial in a way that she initially considers to be pretty straightforward. You know, it's a small community, so she's aware of their teacher and his wife and the fact that they're expecting a baby. And she sort of giggles about the concept of being aware of him in the outside world and blushes and gets embarrassed when they start talking about whether or not they think he's attractive. All of this stuff, and aside from the me too of it all, which creeps in a little bit later on, it's all very playful, adolescent high school Fodder, right? Like, it's very Glee, it's very Gilmore Girls, early seasons. And then even though the return of Shelby after this prolonged absence to their class initially seems like it's going to be smoothed over and she's going to be able to re rekindle the friendship with Raelyn and the others and everything will eventually be fine. Amidst a little bit of tension, there is one particular scene where suddenly everything explodes. And like I said, nothing is the same. Subsequently, I will spoil this a little bit later on the review, but I'll let you know when I'm going to do so. In the meantime, I want to give you a little bit of an overview as to how this play feels. Because we have a lot of scenes in the beginning that feel very naturalistic and it feels quite slow paced. You start to wonder what the point of all of this is going to be. And it's entertaining and it's really funny and it's de charming. As we're listening to all of these characters in dialogue with each other. And, you know, the most important thing for a long time seems to be whether or not they're going to get the feminist club going. Are they going to get teachers to approve? It seems like the female guidance counselor, who is not that much older than them in the grand scheme of things, isn't necessarily on their side, doesn't necessarily want to support it. But then their male English teacher says that he will champion them and they can meet in the classroom. And, you know, for a long time we're wondering if we're going to get stakes higher than this. But this is not even a slow burn of a play. This is a slow boil of a play that when it reaches boiling point, continues to boil and then boils over and somehow sets fire to the entire kitchen and then eventually the house burns down. That's what this play is. It just gets cumulatively and exponentially more exciting and engaging and the stakes get higher and higher and higher and suddenly we're looking at a completely different situation than the one that we thought we initially saw. And so to review this fully, I am going to tell you about that scene and also some thoughts I around it. But before we do that, I want to tell you why I'm so excited by this and why I think actually my opinion barely matters. So here's the thing. Before I had even seen this play, I had heard about how excited people were for it. I had heard how excited young female theatre makers were about it, having seen previous productions. And it's worth Noting here as well, the producer Ken Davenport, not a producer on this play, but a Broadway producer, shared an interesting tidbit recently that John Proctor, as the villain, did something quite clever, but also unusual on its road to Broadway, which is they made the play available for licensing prior to the Broadway premiere, prior to the first Broadway production, which usually is a great tool in marketing a licensable property like you gain a lot of attention on Broadway. Everyone looks to this Broadway play from around the country, from around the world. And then they say, and now you can do it too. Now we're going to license it. They licensed it before they got to Broadway, knowing it would already be exciting because of the makeup of the cast and also because of what it's about, they made it available. And so obviously it's going to be attractive to schools, groups and to young people to do this play. So by the time it arrives on Broadway, people are already familiar with it. You have people from around the country who have been in this play going to see it from that perspective. And so it manages to offer New York audiences all of the excitement of a brand new play that they haven't experienced previously, while simultaneously having gained for itself the community and the fandom of a revival. But that's not actually what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to talk about is the fact that I had been seeing for days before I saw this at the booth. Young women talking to each other on the street, teenagers walking around holding playbills. And before we could figure out what show they were talking about, we were saying, you just know that's John Proctor is the villain. Because it was the energy at Stage Door for all of the cast, not just for Sadie Sink. The energy inside the auditorium. It is explosive. It is so energizing, particularly to young people and particular to young women, because what Kimberly Bellflower does so sensationally well here is to uplift the voices of young people, and again, young women in particular. If you don't know this about me, I used to be a teacher and I worked with 16 to 18 year olds. So very close to the age range being depicted in this story here, if not the same age range. And we see on stage and on screen so many depictions of teenage characters that don't necessarily feel authentic in the way that they talk to each other, in the way that they navigate the world. I love this for leading with the adolescent perspective. It is centered on this. It is not a play that has some young characters offering a young interpretation. That is the interpretation of this play. That is the Principal voice of this play is these young characters and they are, you know, forming human beings in progress, but they have these fierce emotions and they are passionate and they are intelligent. We're going to get onto the Crucible of it all in just a minute, because I love that as well. But there's something so familiar about the way that they talk to each other about these experiences that they're having, about all of the stuff that they're dealing with. And, you know, some parts of that might feel trivial to older audiences. We can all look back on our adolescence and think, you know, it seemed like our problems were the biggest things in the world. Some of the problems that they face are actually hugely substantial. But everything is felt so acutely and so accurately. And I just love the idea of really championing what feels like a really truthful version of that young perspective and of those characters and allowing them to lead the way with their voices and allowing them to be right and allowing them to challenge authority. I think that's just so effing cool. But not as cool as the fact that what it's about is them reading a play and responding to it emotionally and passionately and interpreting it through a contemporary lens and again, challenging the pre existing interpretations of it. This idea, the idea that, you know, people have been drawing for decades about John Proctor, the idea that is being taught to them by their male teacher, the idea that Google will share with you if you Google the name of this play. And I get so energized and so excited about the idea of real young people at the Booth Theatre getting excited about these young characters, getting excited about the Crucible and, you know, really paying attention to it. I think a lot of literature and a lot of drama that is used as educational resources in schools, particularly in my experience, and also, you know, with the Crucible as well, there is a lot to be learned from it. And I think in the context of this play, they're having all of the right conversations for a contemporary reevaluation of the Crucible. And I love that and I love the way that they really dig into it and the way that they apply it to their own lives so immediately. But I also think that way more exciting than that is something like John Proctor as the villain. The fact that schools groups can now go and see this and see themselves represented, see a text and a play that they can access a lot more effortlessly, that's going to get them excited about how relevant theatre can be and how cool theatre can be for audiences at the time. The parallels with The Crucible and, you know, like McCarthyism and scapegoating and witch hunts and mass hysteria may have been incredibly clear. And I think for young people studying it now, until you start to have a conversation about, like, the parallels with me too and the parallels with Cancel Culture, it won't necessarily feel blisteringly relevant, but this will. And I love that. I love a play, you know, being great and also being for young people, about young people, that's going to get them really excited. I think that's brilliant, actually. And that's why, you know, my almost 30 year old interpretation of it. I love it. I think it's fantastic. It barely matters what I think because young people are loving this and that's the most important thing. And also everything that they're doing in producing it in terms of like bringing young actors into it who are going to get those audiences is excited. Just like they did with Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor with Romeo and Juliet, setting records with young people, buying tickets to that Broadway show, but also working with schools, filling the auditorium with students and giving away backpacks and doing chapel roan hot to go dance alongs at the curtain call. It's just, I think it's amazing. We don't always see Broadway doing a lot of outreach, certainly not as much as, you know, like theater on a more local level. So that has to be celebrated. Carrying on, though, with a heavy spoiler warning, I am desperate to tell you about this, this pivotal climactic moment in the play after which everything changes. So spoiler alert. Once again, in this section, we are going to be talking about a huge revelation that happens towards the second half of the play. I say second half rather than second act because the whole thing is one uninterrupted act that runs at about a hundred minutes. And like I said, if it feels very slow in the beginning, it gradually starts to feel faster and faster and faster and faster because we come to find out that the character of, of Shelby, who has returned to school eager to learn, trying to rebuild things and trying to get back to where she was, particularly where her education and her role in the classroom is concerned. However, during one particular lesson where they are talking through the Crucible, Shelby really can't understand the way that they are being encouraged to look at the relationship between John Proctor and Abigail Williams, who is the young woman with whom he had an affair. This is what much of the Crucible hinges on. And he has to weigh his admission of this dreadful and deplorable act which would damage his upstanding reputation and trying to protect his wife, with the focus of the witch hunts having turned to her, trying to protect himself as well and trying to choose the noble choice in this act of flawed heroics, or that's how it's often portrayed and interpreted. At least Shelby doesn't see it that way. And in analyzing a particular speech of his, she questions why the value of John Proctor's good name is sort of held in greater importance than Abigail Williams own experience and what's happened to her and her body. And Shelby sort of expands on this idea and it becomes broader than the conversation about those two characters. It becomes a real world idea. And this starts to get the whole classroom a little more heated and a little more passionate because Ivy sees the parallels with the conversation about her father that's unfolding in the media and, you know, the accusations that are being made of him. Beth gets very involved when the conversation is about the book, when it's about the assignment, and she's a little more reluctant to engage in real world topics and real world conversations. And yet her eyes do get opened a little bit to the reality that, you know, Shelby may have a great point here. And Beth, in her commitment to trying to be the best intersectional feminist she can be, may have overlooked that reality for Abigail Williams as a character because you, you know, she's kind of been taught to suppress her humanity. And as Shelby starts to get more and more emboldened and outspoken, their teacher, who I haven't spoken to you much about, Mr. Smith, Carter Smith, played with a deliberate amount of charm and inspiration and accessibility by Gabriel Ebert, starts to try and suppress Shelby just a little bit, which irritates her. And it's at this point that she comes out with this startling admission where she reveals to everyone that she and Mr. Smith had had a sexual relationship months before. And she says something along the lines of, it's ironic that you now want me to stop talking when months ago you were telling me whatever it was, something very graphic and revealing the nature of their relationship, or at least that's what she is accusing him of. Not everyone else believes her straight away, but obviously this gets a huge reaction in the theater. And there've been maybe like, inklings just in terms of some, like, tiny bits of body language and some small moments of tension beforehand. And seeds have been plante granted about the idea of attraction to him as a teacher figure, but not with Shelby as part of that conversation. It's really very minimally foreshadowed so that it can be this landmine that we stumble onto in the middle of the play. And like I said, after that, nothing else is the same because we look at everything through a very different lens. I think we, as an audience, because we've been very centered in the perspectives of these young women, are kind of naturally predisposed to believe Shelby, which I think is a good thing. Thing. And so we're inherently skeptical of every scene involving Mr. Smith that follows this one in which he's, you know, just trying to maintain his carefully curated Persona and maintain his own innocence. And I actually think this is an explosive enough moment that we could have an act break here. And you can only imagine the kind of conversations that would happen over the following 15 minutes in between trying to run to the restroom and trying to go and get wine in a souvenir. And I do understand the appeal of maintaining the intensity and just going the whole way through at speed as the whole thing gets faster and faster and faster and, you know, goes off the rails. How many different metaphors do I have about the pace of this play? But if I was to direct a production of this, I actually think it would be really cool to have an act break right after this explosive statement right after the end of that scene, and then pick up Act 2 by doing the whole scene again, go right back to the beginning, have that whole conversation again. Because there's so many moments that you would see differently. I mean, you'd see the whole beginning of the play differently if you knew about that going into it. I think your second visit to John Proctor as the villain is always going to be a very different one in those early scenes. But I think it would be really cool to go through that whole scene in particular again, to see the way that he engages with Shelby in front of everything else and tries to suppress her dialogue about this particular topic, especially, you know, it's such a loaded moment, and no one else in the classroom knows why, and we don't know why until we find out why. So if we would to rehash that again at the start of the second act, we'd all be like, oh, my God, like, I can't believe I didn't see this. But also, oh, I now get it. And you'd feel completely differently about it. That's just my thought anyway. And I don't mean that as a criticism of the writing or of the direction here. I think it's actually really exciting and really encouraging when a play is so rich in its material that you say, like, oh, I could see it that way. And if you did this, then that would be brilliant as well. I don't think that's an indictment. I think that's praise. But pushing ahead a little in the realm of spoiler territory, if I may. I do want to talk about the ending that we eventually build towards because it's so satisfying. And I think it's a big part of why young people, and honestly, audiences of all ages are sent out of this theater feeling energized and ecstatic and electrified. And it's because we finished with this group assignment presentation from Shelby and Raelyn having fully reconnected, having realized that the problems were boys all along. And their assignment is to, through their own interpretation, conceive of a conversation between. Between two characters in the play the Crucible, who don't get to speak in the context of Arthur Miller's script. And so they create the conversation that would take place between Abigail Williams and John Proctor's wife. She has a name. Actually, let's not. John Proctor's wife. Her. What's that woman's name? Is she Susan? Susan Proctor. John Proctor wife? Elizabeth. Lizzie. Lizzie Proctor. And this obviously is exceptionally relevant to Raelyn and Shelby, with Relin's boy boyfriend having cheated on her with Shelby. So they understand the relationship between these two women, and they imagine a scenario in which the two of them are able to forgive each other and realize that what John Proctor is the villain. And then they do this angry, angsty, emotionally releasing interpretive dance to the Lord's song Green Light. The relevance of which to them and their friends has already been explained to us in previous scenes. But it's such a satisfying moment. And the way it ends is particularly satisfying when they exceed the maximum amount of time for the presentation. And their teacher, Mr. Smith, who is permitted to be in the classroom in order to mark it, even though he's not really allowed to be in a classroom alone with Shelby after the revelation, after the accusation that was leveled at him, he's a little dismissive of the energy of the whole thing. He tries to shut it down. But the guidance counselor character, who we didn't like at the beginning, we didn't like her because she wasn't too sure about letting the feminist club happen because you. She was trying to stick by the rules and not ruffle any feathers. She, after what Shelby said, kind of re. Examines her perspective on Mr. Smith and reconsiders other things that she'd heard about him from friends and from people who had been in his vicinity that had kind of confirmed a lot of these rumors. And she sort of half confronts him about this before they get interrupted by the class arriving. And so she stops him, bringing an end to their presentation. It's such a satisfying moment, such a moment of. Of allyship. And then the final scene, it's such an exciting and a smart way to end this play. We see Beth, who, you know, has had this huge allegiance to Mr. Smith. She's felt very close to him. She feels connected to him. She feels seen by him. He understands her. And she has really struggled to process what he has been accused of by Shelby, even in the context of her trying to be, you know, a perfect intersectional feminist. In the final moments, we see her. Her thinking about standing up from her desk to join in with the dance, with other characters joining in. We see her just like, on the precipice of doing so. And I believe the final stage direction here is something along the lines of, will she join in? It seems like she might, and that's the impression that we get. But just leaving it on that moment of inclination where it doesn't matter whether or not she dances. The fact is that she is drawn to it. And obviously, again, with the two of them dressed in Crucible clothing and dancing, it takes us right back to the beginning of the Crucible with these young women dancing around in the woods. And it asks us, it challenges us, I think, to re examine the way that that scene has always been framed. There's a conversation in this play as well, talking about why they even dance in the first place, and, you know, posing the question of whether it's not this satanic activity, whether it was this act of rebellion against a society in which they were, you know, suppressed. Anyway, I'm very aware that all of this is behind a spoiler alert warning, so I'm gonna move on and talk a little bit about the themes. We want to talk a little bit about the Crucible, a little bit about feminism as well, and about the creatives and the performers who make this so brilliant. So I want to talk about the work of the individuals that is so brilliant in this. And what Kimberly Bellflower has done so exceptionally is to create a narrative that is in conversation with the Crucible, but, like I said, is not an interpretation of it. There are parallels everywhere with the dancing that we see at the end with Shelby and Raelyn, but also in the reluctance of certain characters to believe others. We see a little bit of resemblance between Ms. Gallagher, the guidance counselor, to a character like John Hale, and moments in the play tease at a similar sort of an arc for her character in terms of awakening and a little bit of an evolution of perspective. And there are many moments where you could sort of look at Shelby as an Abigail Williams insert character, and you could look at various other characters taking on various other roles in relation to her. The other thing that we're talking about so extensively here is feminism and what it means to these young women who are, you know, waking to a lot of the realities of how women are forced to move through the world and the issues that they have no choice but to navigate, issues of sexual power, of not being believed, of being forced to turn against each other. There is some exploration of many different facets of feminist ideas. There is a little moment of male allyship which gets a strong audience response because we're like, yeah, good for that guy. It's played very charmingly by Nihar Duvuri playing the character of Mason. He has a flirtation with Nell which I think is just so endearing. It's really satisfying to watch. It's a particularly great scene, but at the same time, it's also kind of like celebrating the bare minimum of male allyship. But we get to see these young female characters, characters move past their differences and value their friendships with each other and come to respect and believe each other. Almost all of this takes place inside of the classroom, but there's a really lovely scene later on where we see Raelyn and Shelby having this very exposing heart to heart outside of the classroom setting. And I think the whole thing is this emotionally gymnastic feat using the Crucible as a springboard and soaring to exciting new heights in terms of authentic depictions of contemporary young adult conversation. And Daniel Tamell does a great job of directing that with comedy and with intensity and with heart and with a huge amount of impact and shock and joy as well. It's emotionally explosive and it's direction that is focused on these performances and these interactions and these characterizations and the friction that happens in these moments of collision. It's not overly choreographed in terms of its staging. It's, for the most part, a static, naturalistic classroom set designed by Teresa L. Williams and Amp. One of the most exciting parts of which visually is what happens to it under the lighting design of Natasha Katz. Because we get these moments, these little interludes in between scenes where everything just starts to distort a little bit. We have this, like, lighting and projection mapping over the top where we see everything start to look suddenly a little bit more warped. And this version of a nice, idyllic, if small town classroom gets challenged visually by the notion of these lines starting to blur and starting to shift a little bit, instilling in us the idea to ready ourselves for a discovery that not all is as it seems. Finally, let's talk a little bit about this brilliant ensemble cast. I enjoy Sadie Sink's performance an awful lot. Like I said, it's a long time before she arrives on stage, but when she does, it is declarative and she makes this bold entrance and she does a lot to win us over with everything that we've done learned prior to her returning to the classroom. I think in hindsight, some of her most interesting work is those early scenes. Again, knowing what we know by the end of the play to re examine some of those early conversations through that lens. And armed with that knowledge, it starts to look really interesting. But the tenacity that she brings to the play is as vital as the character that she plays in it. That's not to say that Amalia Yu's performance alongside her is any less brilliant. Amalia, who I think has considerably less ostentatious material, who for much of it is experiencing heartbreak and who feels betrayed by her friend, but also by her ex boyfriend who, you know, is really adamant about wanting to recommence the relationship, which is not something that she wants to do. She doesn't always feel supported by her friends, but eventually she's able to rekindle this important friendship that she, she had with Shelby and she's able to understand her perspective and everything that she's been through. I think hers is a performance of compelling honesty and huge sensitivity. I think she's really brilliant in this and underrated actually. Now, another one who has brilliant material, Finestrasa as the hard working student Beth. She has, especially in the first few scenes of the play, some of the best, some of the most winning moments and monologues. She's an immediately recognizable character. We know who this girl is and she plays, plays her so, so brilliantly. But it's those moments when her world view and everything she thinks that she knows so clearly and can see so exactly gets challenged by things that she also agrees with and understands to be important. And she has to rationalize that. And she feels sort of needlessly apologetic about having not considered it. It's heartbreaking and it's important. And I think she really lands that final moment and the excitement of that final sort of visual on stage as well because of the way that she plays it. She's great, as is the entire ensemble cast here. And I would only level the same praise at each individual. I think Molly Griggs again, it's another one where I would love to go back and see her early scenes, having now seen where she gets to at the end playing the counselor character because she becomes such a satisfying presence. And that goes even more more so for Gabriel Ebert, who I think does fantastic work. I mean, he's already charming and charismatic and winning in the early scenes and then once we come to find out about dimensions and depth that goes beyond that. There is such nuance in his performance and there's so much going on behind the eyes. It's really fascinating to watch. I just cannot wait to go back and see John Proctor as the villain for a second time. Currently, I believe it's only booking until early July. If it does have a lot of success at the Tony Awards, then who knows, that may just change. It's also, as I mentioned, already licensable, so you may have the chance to see productions of John Proctor as the villain near you. But I would encourage you to go and check this out as soon as possible on Broadway because if you're anything like me, you're going to want to go and see it a second time. It is that good. And that is everything that I have to say about this brilliant play. Oh, am I rooting for it to win the Tony Award for Best New Play? It is one of my favorite things I've seen all year actually. But as always, I would love to know what you thought if you have seen it as well. So please let us all know in the comments section down below. In the meantime, thank you so much for listening to this review. I hope that you enjoyed. If you did, make sure to subscribe to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Turn on those notifications so you don't miss any of my upcoming Broadway or West End theatre reviews. Or if it's easier, you can also find me on other social media platforms including podcast apps. I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For 10 more seconds, I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a Stagey Day. Subscribe.