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Mickey-Jo's Off-Broadway Review Roundup (We Had a World, All the World's a Stage, The Jonathan Larson Project, The Magic City, Conversations With Mother)
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Mickey Jo
So a couple weeks ago I was in New York city and I saw 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 off Broadway shows, plays, musicals, musical reviews, shadow puppetry and I am about to review all of them for you right now. 5 reviews, back to back. 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 Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things them theater. If you don't know me, if you're meeting me now for the first time, I am a professional theater critic here on social media. I go and see shows around the world and then I talk about them on the Internet. I'm usually based in the uk. I just got back from my eighth trip in three years to New York, seeing predominantly a lot of the new spring Broadway shows, but there were also a lot of hidden off Broadway gems and not so hidden off Broadway gems. What I mean is that alongside the big and splashy and exciting and vibrant Broadway shows, it's also important to support of Broadway theatre. And that is what we're going to be talking about today with five reviews of the five shows that I saw which were, in order, Conversations with Mother at Theatre555, the Jonathan Larson Project at the Orpheum Theatre. Sadly, since closed the Magic City at New Victory Theatre, all the world's a stage at Theatre Row and we had a World at New York City Centre presented by Manhattan Theatre Club. I'm going to be letting you know my thoughts about each of those pieces of theatre. We have some plays, we have some musicals, and as always, I would love to know what you thought about them. If, if you have seen any of them, let us all know in the comments section down below. And more importantly, if you haven't seen these, but you're going to be in New York or you're currently in New York and you find yourself with a hankering for some interesting theatre, please check out the ones that sound interesting to you. Like I said, very important that we are nurturing these spaces and supporting these theatre makers, producers, performers, creatives, everybody involved. Now if you are meeting me today for the first time with these reviews and you're not already subscribed, make sure you subscribe to my theatre themed YouTube channel for so many more regular reviews, Broadway shows, West End shows, or if it's easy for you to do so feel free to go and give me a follow on whichever podcast platform you prefer. In the meantime, here is what I thought of everything that I just saw off Broadway. So we'll begin with the first play that I saw on this trip, which was Conversations with Mother at Theatre555. I saw this on a Thursday afternoon, and I've said this before, but this was a perfect Thursday afternoon kind of a show. If I'd seen this in the evening, it's a two person, it's one act. I don't know if it would have felt quite as substantial, but on a Thursday afternoon, it was just about perfect. So this is a semi autobiographical new heartwarming comedy play by Matthew Lombardo. Like I said, two Hander, with two performers, Caroline Aaron and Matt Doyle playing mother and son, Maria and Bobby Kolavecchio. And theirs is a slightly fraught, slightly challenged, but enduringly heartwarming and affectionate relationship. The key characteristics here being that she is the matriarch of a large Italian American family and that he is her gay son. Another notice that throughout their relationship, he always seems to be getting himself into trouble. Our first glimpse of that is when he is a very young child and he has run away because he has misbehaved and he's worried that he's going to get into an enormous amount of trouble as he gets older and he moves to New York and he becomes a playwright. Like I said, semi autobiographical. And he exists amongst the queer community. Then the misbehavior starts to look a little bit different, as do his confessions to his mother. And when I was reading about this, prior to seeing it, it was described as non linear, which I don't think is necessarily an accurate description of what this is. It's very linear. It begins in his childhood and it charts the extent of their relationship. It reminded me structurally of Mother Play, the Paula Vogel play, which I'd seen at the Hayes as part of, I think, the last Broadway season with Celia Keenan Bolger and Jim Parson, the two of them playing queer siblings who we first meet in childhood, with it following them growing up and into adulthood. Again, semi autobiographical and with Jessica Lange playing the mother figure of that piece. Structural similarities, but a significant difference in terms of that mother's relationship to her children. This one is entirely more heartwarming, and that's because it's a beautiful depiction of the unending love and strength that a mother like this has when it comes to her children, when it comes to her son. And more specifically, I think that's just sort of a general thing that it invokes. More specifically, it does talk about this very individual cultural experience, which is the relationship between a gay son and his mother within the cultural context. Of an Italian American Catholic family. And listen, it's a straightforward enough piece of theatre. It's quite simply, but movingly staged by director Noah Himmelstein. I think it's certainly a piece that is going to make you think about your relationship with your own mother. If it's a positive one, it's going to make you want to call your mother afterwards. I think it would be a hugely emotional experience to actually go and see this with your mother, especially if there was any kind of crossover in the relationship that you had and the one depicted on stage. For me, it was more the feeling of the thing rather than any literally depicted events that resonated more so. But there is a line towards the end. Now, there's been this recurring joke that every time she talks about a show, most of them she wasn't a fan of, for example, Carousel and the Sound of Music. There are some brilliant one liners about those. My favourite of which is about the Sound of Music, when she simply says, nuns should be nuns. But when this happens for the final time in the last conversation that they have together during the play, there's a really beautiful line that just sent me into floods of tears because Bobby asks his mother, why did you even go to the theatre? And she replies to her playwright son, because I got to sit next to you. And as someone who has been to the theatre with their mother many times, a lot of my earliest theatre trips I was going with my mother because I was too young to go by myself. There's no way I was making it. That line alive like that was always going to take me down. And if that triggered any kind of an emotional reaction for you, then chances are that you would experience that a lot in this play. Brilliant performances. If you've seen Caroline Aaron's work on television, then it's a very familiar kind of a Persona that she plays here. It's another great role for her, but more substantial than a lot of the cameo appearances that she's done on the likes of, like, hospital dramas and Desperate Housewives. Also, if you're not familiar with her by name, google Caroline Aaron, because chances are you have seen her on television. She's really fabulous in this. She's this no nonsense matriarch with this extraordinary heart, but a very stern delivery. And no matter how far the two of them may move away from each other, no matter how far he may try to push her away when he's at his emotional lowest, there is still this abundant connection between the two of them. It's a beautiful chemistry that the two of them share the other half of which is the wonderful performance by Matt Doyle, who ages quite convincingly in this. Not only is he a huge endearing adolescent, but he plays a version of this character much older than himself towards the end of the thing very convincingly as well. I'd say I enjoyed this about as much as I enjoyed the Roommate on Broadway. This has the advantage of feeling a little paceier because we move across an entire lifetime, really. We move through different time periods. It certainly gains a lot of ground when they begin to interact more personally with each other rather than the series of phone conversations and voicemails and letters that we begin the thing with. There's a very sweet moment in the middle where it gets a little bit metatheatrical, where it makes reference to the play that we are actually seeing, being one that he wrote about their relationship as shown in this. And so it also kind of extends beyond the present time of their relationship as well. I think every playwright, or certainly many probably have a play that they could write around the idea of conversations with their mother or with some kind of a meaningful family member to them. And Matthew Lombardo's is hugely entertaining. It plays like a sitcom with a great deal more substance. A particularly strong recommendation for anyone who feels like they may relate to this personally, but a play I enjoyed very much. Next up, I headed a little further downtown to the Orpheum Theatre to see the Jonathan Larson Project. Now, sadly, this Off Broadway show concluded its run earlier than planned and is no longer playing at the Orpheum. But I'm going to let you know a little bit about it it anyway. Now, the Jonathan Larson Project was an Off Broadway review really. It was a non narrative piece collating several unearthed, previously unknown songs by the the genre redefining composer Jonathan Larson. The late, great Jonathan Larson, who of course wrote the acclaimed cultural phenomenon Rent, whose work we also know via Tick Tick Boom and Superbia. The Jonathan Larson Project, before it was an Off Broadway show, was the work of the brilliant Broadway historian and producer Jennifer Ashley Tepper conceived this work initially as, I believe, an album and a concert at 54 below. Now, each song is performed by a very talented cast of five brilliant young performers and vocalists. They're performed in a loose theatrical context. There isn't a sense of narrative. We don't have book scenes going in and out of each one. But it's also not performed simply at microphone stands. The whole thing is staged and choreographed. It was on a set sort of familiar, both of Tick Tick Boom and of Rent. Would it be Jonathan Larson if we didn't have screens and projections and orange glowing light bulbs everywhere and a lot of music cables and step units and scaffolding? No. No, it would not. And because his style is so familiar, you would be forgiven for assuming that many of these could have been cut songs from Tick Tick Boom or from Rent. There were songs that I'm listening to, going through thinking, surely this was originally conceived for Roger, or surely this could have been a Mimi song. And there's at least one that was present in early versions of Ren. But for the most part, they were written as separate standalone songs for different projects, for different performance nights, or even with the intention of getting mainstream success and radio airtime. And they are really exciting pieces of music, as is all of Jonathan Larson's work. I mean, he remains a hugely influential voice in the world of contemporary musical theatre who is still inspiring composers right now, decades after his untimely passing. And that, perhaps is the reason why there isn't too much artifice around this. It may be the notion of just letting the songs sing for themselves, which for many of them really works, but for the whole piece, a little more structure probably would have been beneficial. At the top of the thing, we see a little bit of a documentary that leads into Jonathan singing the first song that we're going to hear. We segue into Adam Shola Barat singing it, and then each of the other four performers, Lauren Marcus, Andy Mientus, Jason Tam and Taylor Iman Jones, all emerge at different points, singing different verses of the song, finally coming together for the conclusion. And that's how we begin. And then they just sing each subsequent song, either as a group number or individually, with the energy of each consecutive number slowly getting lower and lower and lower, like a party that's beginning to simmer down. The problem with which is we kind of open with a lot of the most exciting songs and then we kind of take a left turn into songs that aren't necessarily less strong, but would benefit from a little more explanation. And that is the thing that's sort of absent from the Jonathan Larson project. Rather than having the few minutes of documentary simply up top, it does feel like it would be beneficial to have little video segments interspersed throughout, and they don't have to be as literal as the next song that you're going to hear was originally written for this charity event. It could be little unearthed video clips from the time or from, you know, previous collaborators or performers who've worked on his shows, talking about themes and ideas and things that he wanted to articulate and the times that he lived in and what it was like for him to be a struggling composer in the late 80s, in the 90s, all of which contextualize very well the vibes of the music that we hear. I think it's always a good idea for us to simply not just move between song and then song and then song and then song and then song. I think that can get fatiguing just in a logistical sense. But I also think it's really a disservice in terms of the great work that's been done here in unearthing all of this artistry and all of this material. If we aren't going to then share a little more insight about it, it's like putting all of this in a museum, but not including any information alongside. And the inclusion of, like I said, collaborators or more clips of Jonathan or of his family or of his friends would not only be illuminating, but it would be so much more moving as well. I will say, though, just when it feels like we're starting to decline to a slightly lower key, Taylor Iman Jones leads a performance of Love Heels and sings the hell out of it. My good Mike Taylor must be in a production of Rent at some point. It feels like we're overdue a Rent revival. That cultural phenomenon that it was. Surely we're going to get another production of Rent on or off Broadway at some point, and Taylor Iman Jones needs to be in it also gave a fantastic performance of Stay out of My Dreams, I think is the name of the song. I lied. It's simply called out of My Dreams. Very Oklahoma. But that is not a song that Jonathan wrote as a musical theater number. Like I said, that was written to be played on the radio. Taylor probably gave my favorite performance in a very strong ensemble, but I also thought Andy Mientus was brilliant and had a huge amount of star power and charisma. He sang a song called Valentine's Day, which was deeply passionate. And Adam Chandler Barat is so well suited to Jonathan Larson material. If he hasn't done Tick Tick Boom already, then that also feels inevitable. I did enjoy Lauren Marcus. She does a great job with the character number. And I always enjoy Jason Tam. It did feel in some aspects like it was performers and perhaps even some creatives who were a little more linked to the world of Joe Iconis than that of Jonathan Larson. But I suppose so many years on, it's harder and harder to find working creatives and young performers who have a tangible connection to Jonathan Larson. And what I find a little puzzling as well is Rent was so huge. I mean, this was the show that introduced the ticket lottery because so many young people were camping out on the street to try and get tickets. And I wonder what's happened to those fans now that something like the Jonathan Larson project can't sustain even a limited Off Broadway life. Anthony Rapp's Off Broadway show without you, which I thought beautiful, you know, didn't have the audiences that I thought it deserved. Rent fans of the 90s and the early 2000s, where have you gone? In any case, this was a great chance to hear thrilling and uniquely dynamic music performed by exciting vocalists. And I do think that it's a concept that we could see again and I think it would benefit from a slightly more embellished production. Now, next up, we have the surprise of the trip. This was the Magic City at the New Victory Theatre on 42nd Street. Yes, you heard me correctly, on 42nd street, alongside Broadway houses, across the street from the New Amsterdam. The New Victory Theatre is a really beautiful Off Broadway space geared towards family audiences and children. And before this show had even started, there was an interactive space where kids were doing activities and they were learning how to make their own shadow puppets, which is really tethered to what this particular piece of theatre was. So if you don't know, this was from a company called Manual Cinema. I believe they're a Chicago based theatre company. And I got really excited. I'd only been talked into seeing this the night before and it was not until then that I realised I had seen some of their work before at the Edinburgh Fringe. The way that these shows work is there is a screen lifted up above the stage and projected onto that is the show that they are creating using an onstage camera, using perspective, using small props and puppetry in front of the camera with a playing space in front of it and a desk beneath, and all of these different things with actors moving in and out of the frame, but also also a screen behind it and on the other side of that, an overhead projector and lighting and shadow puppetry. And they use all of these very, very clever techniques. The whole thing is so slickly choreographed to tell a story in front of that camera, projected for us to watch in the audience. It is very familiar of how the Picture of Dorian Gray is currently being brought about on Broadway starring Sarah Snook, with some parallels to how Sunset Boulevard is also being staged. Both of them making extensive use of cameras. What I really love about the that Manual Cinema does is the consistency of that approach. You can see at all times the performers down here in the playing space in front of you. You can watch them and you can see how they are bringing it about. And there is no attempt to conceal what it is that they're doing. They want you to see the wires. They are allowing you to see how they are creating that story, how they're doing the storytelling. But at the same time, you can also see what it is that they are drawing your eye towards via the projections at all times as well. Which makes this the most perfect piece, theatre, to take kids to and get them excited about the theatre. Not only was this a very child friendly story about a blended family, and I'll tell you a little bit more about the narrative of this piece in just a moment, but it means that kids can be enchanted by that thing and then glance down with intrigue and see storytelling and see theatrical techniques and see puppetry and lighting and stagecraft and all of these different things that are not exclusive to the idea of performance either. Everything that goes into thrilling, beautiful storytelling. I was so profoundly moved by this piece of theatre. And also it was really great. Another aspect of the way that it works is all of the dialogue is spoken by just one person who is also an on stage musician, who also plays the piano and sings and is creating sound effects at the side of the stage and also narrating reading in stage directions. And so she was telling us the story of the Magic City. It was a story of two sisters who then become part of a blended family. When the older of the two sisters meets a man who has a son, creating a new dynamic that the younger of the two sisters takes a little bit of time to adjust to, because she was very used to it just being the two of them. This obviously being an important lesson that young audiences can take a lot from if it overlaps with their circumstances or even if it doesn't, it teaches you a lot about, you know, meeting new people and the idea of sharing and of, you know, the necessity of change. In any case, the sort of Alice in Wonderland Narnia familiar coping mechanism of all of this is for the younger of the two sisters to create a magic city out of trash that she is shocked to find herself transported down into. And this is where it gets to its most whimsical brilliance, because you have all of these characters, these humanoid characters within the magic city, which are pieces of trash come to life. There is, for example, a policeman made out of one of those wine corkscrew things with the arms that Flap up and down. Who panics like that every time that they see humans in the Magic city? There's also some subtle political messaging around change that Philomena, that's the younger character, is noticing in the magic City and a wall that's being built around it to keep outsiders aw. This being reflective of her own resentments of being forced to spend time with this young boy who she finds to be annoying. His name is Lucas. He is eventually transported down into the magic city as well. She then has to go and rescue him. It forces them to spend more time together, learn a little bit more about each other. It's something straight out of a Pixar movie or an animated film. It's really, really lovely. I love how many jokes there are in there there for adult audiences as well. There's this recurring gag with Patrick Swayze that got a lovely laugh from the adult members of the audience. But then shortly afterwards, Elmo made an appearance and there was a kid who laughed in exactly the same way in recognition of Elmo that we all did in recognition of Patrick Swayze, which I thought was just so charming. I was like, oh yeah, that one was for us and that one was for you. Everything about this I thought was love. Lovely. And oh my gosh, the music also beautiful and spellbinding. I need to tell you about all of the individuals who put this all together because it's so clever, so creative. I'm encouraging everyone to go and see this. If you are not going with children. I didn't go with children. I went with three other people who were all my age and we were all just like staring at it in wonderment saying this is the sweetest, most amazing thing that we had seen. It's perfect. If you're feeling a little bit jaded after a lot of like commercial disappointing theater potential, this is just earnest and charming and delightful. Alicia Walter was the narrator, also providing vocals and playing the keys. Beautiful voice, very like contemporary pop. Sara Bareilles. Sarah Fornas was a puppeteer and also portrayed Philomena, who was sort of our central protagonist. But Sarah is also a co artistic director of Manual Cinema and also was a co deviser of this piece and provided the screenplay and storyboards along with Drew Dean. The other performers involved in this, Brandon Boiler, who also played the character of Brandon. Jeffrey Pascal, who also played Lucas. Casey Foster. There are other co devices credited here. Julia Miller, who is also a puppeteer, another co artistic director, as is Ben Kaufman, who also provided the music, lyrics and sound design with Kyle Vegta doing Additional sound design. Another co artistic director, Spencer Meeks for the assistant sound design, Nate V. Williams. For music preparation, Rin Hardiman, who was the stage manager and board operator, which you have to imagine for a show like this to run smoothly is hugely important. David Goodman Edberg for the lighting design. Lighting being another really essential component of this with the shadow puppetry, with all of the camera work. Micah Vanderplo did the wig and costume design, assisted by Noel Huntzinger. And all of the design, all of these little props, the charm of them, the whimsy of them, the sets that they created, that they would slowly carry across the frame in order to create a sense of panning. It truly reverses the idea of, like how you would have a camera and how you would move a camera because the camera is fixed and it's everything else that is moving around in front of it. And the way that they play with perspective to create a sense of scale and the way that they create visual comedy, to do so with such character for a young audience, to get young people to be consistently engaged with and charmed by what is essentially silent comedy in 2025, I think is stunning. Please go and check out the Magic City or another manual cinema show near you if you have the opportunity. Opportunity so, so special. Now, later that same day, it was time for my first Off Broadway book musical, which was all the World's A Stage, Still a one act. I think every single one of these has been a one act so far. This one was at Theatre Row and it's a new musical with a score by Adam Guan and in fact also a book by Adam Guan. The whole thing is written by Adam Guan. It has been produced and commissioned by Keen Co. And it tells the story a young gay maths teacher who finds himself working at an affluent school in a deeply religious conservative area. This taking place, I believe, in the 1990s. He is trying, for the most part, simply to keep his head down. He's not trying to make waves. He's also not trying to let anyone know about his closeted queer identity. He makes a friend with, I think she's the personal assistant to the principal. But even in that friendship, he is treading cautiously around the kind of conversation topics that could unearth personal revelations. What we learn about him before all of this is that he is a theatre fan. And I mean that in the sense that we understand where he really connects to it on an emotional level. The first thing we learn is that he's driven for hours to go and see A piece of theatre performed and go and sit in the dark and just live in it and respond to it. There's a beautiful opening number where they're singing the refrain on a Saturday night in a small auditorium. And it so captures and speaks to that thing that I think we all have, that I know I have. And if you're watching this and listening to this and. And if you watch and listen to me regularly, I think you have it as well. Where the theater is this indescribably special place and for reasons I've never quite been able to articulate, is able to transport us and, you know, maybe it just goes back to the simple thing of storytelling and how we love to be told stories as children, you know, making me think of the Magic City and that show that I was just talking about. Maybe, you know, if we nurture that, it can continues to live on. And theater is the way that it can most acutely do that for us as adults. It's the most sort of emotionally prevalent and honest form of live storytelling, I think. In any case, Ricky, that is the name of this character, he certainly connects to the theater. And he soon meets another young student who feels similarly. She is getting ready to perform in a dramatic monologue competition between other high schools. And having recognized him from her recent theatre trip and wanting to talk to him about the show that they both saw, she asks if he will sponsor and coach her in this upcoming competition. He brings her a Shakespeare sonnet to learn. And she is a little more intrigued by a play that she's recently found out about called Angels in America. Certainly not a piece and certainly not a play whose themes would be tolerated or approved of by the school and by the local community, which is something that we come to find out later on in the show. Show. And so it is a little familiar of something like the prom. It's a little familiar of everyone's talking about Jamie, but tackling, I think, more of the issues around intolerance and around internalized homophobia, a little more head on and with a little less jazz hands. There's a little more down to earth honesty in the way that these conversations are depicted here. One of the most impactful scenes I have to tell you that in the meantime, Ricky has met the proprietor of a local gay bookstore who is a much more out and proud man named Michael. And before you ask, yes, the fact that there was a character in this called Michael, the fact that the whole thing is about a gay math teacher who loves theatre, I did feel almost uncomfortably seen if you don't know. That is my entire backstory. Anyway, Ricky and Michael had begun a relationship which Ricky's men, Sam, who he had not at this point come out to and who is kind of dealing with a lot of confusion because she's very connected via her father to sort of an intolerant church. She finds out about Michael, she goes to the bookstore. And her reaction is so interesting because she reacts in this very volatile way that is shocking to the audience. We are taken aback by this response. And what's even, even more brilliant and what I love this show for doing is the way that Michael responds to this because he responds with such a knowing understanding of who she is and where she is at this point in her life. He says something to the effect of, you must have really good bullies at your school. Because he recognizes this not for the same kind of lashing out and hate that he receives regularly, but from someone who is scared and confused and who has internalized this sense of shame that they don't know how to recognize and articulate, articulate. And so the scene that follows between the two of them is an attempt to try and articulate that. And it all goes to very earnest and heartwarming places while also dealing with very difficult themes. And for all of those shows that I named that live in a sort of a similar place, there's still a lot of ground that we haven't necessarily covered in the world of musical theatre. And there's overlap as well with something like Conversations with Mother that speaks to the specific specificity of the relationship between a gay man and their mother. This one, I think, speaks to a lot of the buoying and life saving interactions that young, scared, closeted, isolated, queer students, queer adolescents can have with reassuring teachers. I've also been that teacher in a classroom who has advocated for queer students. Students so much overlap, personally for me with this, but the material is also beautiful. It's a fairly small cast. Matt Rhoden plays Ricky with the most tremendous amount of sensitivity and nuance. This is a complicated character who has to be convinced to even help Sam in the first place, who doesn't see eye to eye with Michael about the way they should be declaring their lifestyle. Whatever else he's trying to navigate self preservation as well as doing the right thing with this sort of flickering flame inside of him representing the theater world. And it's conversations about that that awaken a more real quality behind the eyes every time that Matt Rhoden plays so, so beautifully. It's a four person cast. John Michael Reese Plays Michael. It's an outrageous performance. It's wild, it's hysterically funny. Brilliant, vivid characterization and flirtatious and charming. Really adds a wonderful extra element to this because I think it would be quite triggering and intense for us to spend all of this time in this closeted and repressed setting. So those scenes with Michael are able to really sing because we're all exhaling at the same time. And he's allowing us to do that with joy and. And with vivacity. Now, I mentioned the other member of staff who Ricky befriends at the school. She is played by Elizabeth Stanley, who is just so luminous, has this extraordinary quality and she is very personally ingrained in the homophobic church that I had mentioned via her family as well. She's very involved with them. And I actually said the sentence. Elizabeth Stanley could do an entire hate crime in this show and I would still love her because she is delightful. She has such a wonderful presence, such a magnetism. And spoiler alert, there is in relation to her character and one of the things that she talks about, an Easter egg connecting this show to Ordinary Days, which is another Adam Gwan musical that if you haven't listened to, you absolutely have to go and listened to. Apparently there is interconnectivity between all of Adam Guan's musicals. Oh, my God. Hey, this is me from the future, currently editing the reviews that you are listening to. And in my excitement to tell you about the Ordinary Days Easter egg, I completely missed out talking about the phenomenal performance by Elijah Pagel, who plays Sam, the young student. This was a really exciting performance from first and foremost, a hugely talented young actor. All of the choices made were so real and so vibrant and so immediate, just so alive on the stage. But also in all of the song moments, a really fascinating and exciting and unique vocal tone, which is something I really celebrate when I get to hear it on stage. Definitely someone to watch. And one more reason to go and check this out at Theatre Row. I am desperate to hear these songs again. It's just a really very sweet show and it's not explosive, it's not earth shattering. It will be tremendously meaningful to a lot of people and it does really great job in capturing that thing about why we sit in the dark and listen to strangers tell us stories. And I was deeply charmed by that. I think you might be as well. Please, please, please, if you're a new musical theater lover, go and check out all the worlds of stage. I don't love the title. There's one Weird little thing, but they use a lot of Shakespeare in it. And it's about, you know, the roles that we play in order to conceal our true identities as queer people. So I get where all the worlds are staged comes from. I just don't really love it. But that's entirely besides the point because I did love the show. Finally then, at New York City Centre, presented by Manhattan Theatre Club, we Had a World, the latest acclaimed play from the hugely exciting contemporary playwright Joshua Harmon. I have loved every single Joshua Harmon play I have ever seen on stage. This one is a degree less explosive and incendiary and a little more sentimental because it begins with. With a phone conversation between Joshua and his grandmother where she tells him, I have your next play. It's going to be about your mother and your aunt fighting. And he says to her, amongst this dialogue, I've always wanted to write about our family in a way that's sort of asking for permission, a permission that she grants him. This seems like a throwaway exchange. We will experience that same scene repeated later in the play. We will come to understand there's a lot more weight to it, because even though this begins as a charming and intriguing examination of Joshua's relationship, relationship with his grandmother and this sort of brilliant and inspiring dynamic that the two of them had, her taking him at an inappropriately young age to go and see interesting films and museum exhibits and being this radical, magical presence in his life, in contrast to the deeply fraught relationship that she had with his mother, her own daughter. Daughter. We later come to find out that the strains in that relationship is because of her lifelong alcoholism. And the play then shifts into a couple of different gears, ultimately becoming a kind of an exploration of conversations that you would like to have with family members who are no longer with us. And once again reminded me of Mother Play and other work by the playwright Paula Vogel, who has spoken about. About writing dialogue between herself and her late brother. Because it feels like she's talking to him. When she does so, it feels like being in conversation with him, which is the exact idea that seems to be explored here. Something that feels vitally important for me to tell you about this play and it's present in the material, but it's also enhanced in the direction by Trip Coleman is the. The sort of. The metatheatrical nature of it. It is an open wound of sorts. There are many throwaway storylines between predominantly Joshua and his mother, where they say to each other, are you ready to do this next part? He expresses that there's no linear way in which to tell this story and to, you know, articulate these relationships and this life. But this is realized in little details, like a costume rail at the back of the stage that they hang things up on. It is not staged in a naturalistic sense. These are three actors performing scenes from a lifetime. And there is a whole narrative, another layer to that, that happens towards the end of the play as well. After one particularly difficult and shocking scene that took place, Joshua returns to his grandmother's company and, unbeknownst to her, secretly records a conversation, which he then writes up as a script and hands to the other actors on stage and asks them to recreate. It becomes a play within a play in that sense. It's a very literal acknowledgment of what this is, which is staging moments from his memory of their lives. There's also a lot of deference given to the fact that, you know, he has a perspective on each of them and also on his version of events. His mother has a perspective on her childhood. But there's also a moment when the scripts are put down and we are left to wonder, is this still continuing the base him? Is this a theatrical interpretation? Is this the imagined conclusion of a conversation that he never got to have? Where is the reality here? And where is that moment where he is using this play as a conduit in order to have a conversation with his late grandmother, who we find out right towards the beginning of the play is dying of terminal cancer and has died prior to the play being staged. That moment I told you about, where we return to the introductory scene and it's replayed again, we have a completely different perspective on the character of his grandmother because of everything that we've seen transpire at that point. And it's impossible for that to not color our perception of her. There's a line that she delivers the first time in that section where she says, I want you to promise to make it completely honest. You can even make your grandmother out to be Medea if you'd like. And the first time around, it's just a joke because we have no reason to understand why it. It wouldn't be the second time. The Medea line is not there, but we remember it because we understand what it is that she's saying. There's a knowingness to what she's saying because she knows that there are revelations that will be shared about her life and about potentially her shortcomings as a mother. From her daughter's perspective. There's an interesting line that that character has where she shares a quote from Jackie O where she says, if you botch being a mother, nothing else matters. And at the performance I saw as a result, I think of this lack of fourth wall and of it being so exposed and so personal on stage with the audience around three sides of this very intimate playing space. A woman just audibly said, mmm in recognition. At which point Janine, the actor, clicked straight over in acknowledgement, used that moment and then carried on. But it feels as a play and they feel. Feel as the actors. So in conversation with us, the audience, because of the space, but also because of the way that it's written, which feels like a great opportunity for me to tell you about the cast. Andrew Barth Feldman, the hugely exciting rising star of stage and screen, is making his New York play debut in the, I guess, autobiographical role of Joshua Harmon. He has such natural comedy instincts. We've seen this in almost everything he has ever done. But also he displays here, I think, such remarkable emotional. Emotional intelligence and the way that he visibly, throughout the play, just adapts to taking on these new layers of information and trying to consolidate that along with his version of who she was to him as a grandmother and trying to make peace with all of that. There's a wonderful line towards the end where he says, women who were never meant to be mothers can make pretty wonderful grandmothers. Joshua's grandmother, meanwhile, is played by the extraordinary Joanna Gleason, who is a performer that I have a love for beyond perhaps any other in the industry. And she is magical in this. The subtlety with which she plays this role, the subtle shift between different ages and the initial warmth that she brings to it. And then with relatively little change, how chilling some of the deliveries or some of her lines are, the way that she instills some. Some just deeply uncomfortable and jarring conversations. It's really quite haunting. And it's such an evasive personality that defies the simplicity of a diagnosis and a description. And there's a huge amount of analysis of this character that takes place after her death. And they talk about alcoholism as a disease. And the play explores a lot about the idea of the generational impact of alcoholism in families. She exists defiantly in this morally grey area, and Joanna thrives there with this portrayal that is so focused and gives so little away. She's playing poker theatrically here with, for the majority of the thing, a very narrowed emotional spectrum. She is very curt. She is very, to the point in her delivery. There is such utter mesmerizing command of all of her skills as an actor. It was the masterclass, a privilege to watch her perform on stage, and the combination of Andrew Barth Feldman and Joanna Gleeson in a Joshua Harmon play is one I found so exciting and I knew nothing about the person completing this cast, Janine Sorellis, who plays Joshua's mother, which is a really sensational standout role because she is completely exhausted by the emotional labor of all of this and that comes across in a very funny way. She proudly declares that she thinks of herself as a she throws herself on the floor when she wants to be done with it all. Janine is hilarious and sensational, but also is tasked with some of the play's most important moments and some of the play's most taxing moments. And she is this intergenerational connection between the two of them who exposes the reality of what her mother really was to her. There is plenty more that we could say about this, about Joshua Harmon's writing thriving in these thorny gray areas in his consistently witty yet incisive dialogue, imagery around inherited furniture, cultural history, of course, an enormous amount of that, as always in his work that always speaks to the Jewish experience. There is so, so much in this, it's so rich. Despite seeming like a very simple piece of theatre, the way that this is conceived, the narrative approach of this, with them performing this work overtly and in a clear theatrical context is so, so smart. I think this is a brilliant piece of theatre. I hope it goes on to have a very exciting future future life. I just thought it was wonderful. I enjoyed it very much. If you can get tickets, go and see this at New York City Centre. In any case, those have been my thoughts about the five Off Broadway shows that I saw on my most recent trip to New York. I do plan to be back in the city certainly before the end of the year. Presumably I may see some more Off Broadway shows during that time if that is something that you are interested in, as well as my thoughts on all of the Broadway and West End and other shows that I see between now and then. Make sure you're subscribed to my theatre themed YouTube channel with the notifications turned on so you don't miss any of my upcoming videos or following me on podcast platforms. If you would prefer. If you've seen any of these shows Off Broadway already, let us all know what you thought of them in the comments section down below. And if you have any other Off Broadway recommendations, feel free to share those as well. Thank you for listening to these reviews. I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For ten more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh, my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.