‘What Happened Was …’
He went to Harvard, she attended Bronx Community College. He’s a paralegal, she’s an executive assistant … at the same law firm. She’s crushing hard, and he’s totally clueless. Tom Noonan’s two-character play is set in a Manhattan apartment, where an awkward first date slowly unveils hidden dreams, loneliness and the social masks people wear. Cecily Strong and Corey Stoll star as the lonely hearts in this audio adaptation of the Off Broadway revival directed by Ian Rickson, which ran earlier this year at the Minetta Lane Theater. In his review for The Times, Tim Teeman wrote, “Stoll and Strong spikily excel at playing Michael and Jackie’s nervy dinner roller coaster, joshing, misreading, then comprehending each other. Their alternating bafflement, suspicion and empathy reveal the rewarding yet perilous cost of honesty.” Read the review.
‘Arcadia’
Watch it on National Theater at Home.
Widely regarded as Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece, “Arcadia” — with true, Stoppardian intellectual ping-ponging — probes the dichotomies of head versus heart, chaos versus order, fate versus free will. The academic mystery play unfolds along parallel narratives: one set in the past (the early 19th century), the other in the present (late 20th). This revival, directed by Carrie Cracknell and starring Leila Farzad as the reserved author, Hannah, and Prasanna Puwanarajah as the big-talking scholar, Bernard, opened at the Old Vic in London just two months after Stoppard died at 88. “Although the ideas are high-minded, the comedy is down-to-earth,” Houman Barekat wrote in his Times review, adding that “the two-and-a-half-hour run time flies by in a flurry of puns, double entendres, acerbic put-downs and Wildean aperçus.” Available for streaming Nov. 26. Read the review.
Jocelyn Bioh’s 2017 satire, which opened on Broadway in September to much acclaim, is, as the title might suggest, as biting and snarky as “Mean Girls” but set at a boarding school in 1980s Ghana. Catty queen-bee insults, sartorial one-upmanship and shoulder pads abound: Here, the students’ obsessions with the United States and dangerous beauty standards underlie their participation in a variety of pageants, local and global. Whitney White directed a sharp ensemble, including the standouts Jasmine Amy Rogers and Denée Benton. In her review for The New York Times, the critic Helen Shaw wrote that “Bioh has joined the first rank of American comic playwrights. She has a particular gift for orchestrating a group for maximum ridiculousness.” Tickets are $59; streamed performances run Nov. 10-15. Read the review.
‘The Pelicot Trial’
Watch it on the Young Vic YouTube channel.
In 2024, Gisèle Pelicot’s ex-husband was convicted of drugging and assaulting her for more than a decade, and for inviting dozens of men to rape her while she was unconscious. All 51 defendants were found guilty. Now there is a play based on the case that shook France. This work of documentary theater from the Swiss director Milo Rau and the French dramaturg Servane Dècle distills the four-month trial into a four-hour performance. Drawing from testimonies — there is no written transcript of court cases in the French justice system — the pair called on researchers, lawyers and journalists who attended the trial and incorporated thousands of pages of notes.
“The Pelicot Trial” ran as a seven-hour reading at the Festwochen in Vienna last June, and was later staged at the Avignon Festival in France and at NYU Skirball in New York. Now it will be performed for one night at the Old Vic in London. The material, Rao said in an interview with The Times last year, is meant to dispel the possibility that Pelicot’s story was an isolated event. “It’s an example of patriarchal violence,” he said. “The more we dive into it, the more we see that it’s the tip of the iceberg.” “The Pelicot Trial” will be free to watch and livestreamed worldwide on Nov. 30 at 1 p.m. Eastern time. Read the critic’s notebook.
‘Falsettos’
“There’s hardly a moment,” Charles Isherwood wrote to open his 2016 rave Times review, “in the exhilarating, devastating revival of the musical ‘Falsettos’ that doesn’t approach, or even achieve, perfection.”
Talk about a high note. For the 10th anniversary of that musical’s 2016 revival, it will return to BroadwayHD. The plot follows a neurotic New Yorker who pursues his male lover and leaves his wife, who, for her part, falls for a neurotic psychiatrist. Set during the AIDS epidemic, the tragedy is tempered by this loving, motley group of ex-spouses; their son, soon to be bar mitzvahed; and their lesbian neighbors, who together make a case for the chosen family. James Lapine directs; music and lyrics are by William Finn. With loads of warmth and humor, Christian Borle, Andrew Rannells and Stephanie J. Block form the bedrock of that family. Read the review.
