Peter Calo at PANGEA. Photo Credit: Stephen Hanks
By Alix Cohen
February 1, 2026. Peter Calo has worked with such diverse artists as Dionne Warwick, Queen Latifah, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Leonard Bernstein, Lesley Gore, and The Platters. He spent years collaborating with Carly Simon. If not spot-lit by band inclusion, Calo should be on your radar as a singer/songwriter.
Aided and abetted by bassist Paul Alamy, the engaging musician tonight comes out from behind (personally branded) covers for a show almost entirely comprised of his own songs. Strumming, Plucking, tapping, palm muting, singing comfortably deep and slightly rough, he reveals prodigious versatility.
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Scott Shepherd, Stephanie Weeks, and Christopher-Rashee Stevenson in ULYSSES. Photo Credit: Joan Marcus
By David Sheward
January 31, 2026: The innovative theater collective Elevator Repair Service has tackled such literary giants as Fitzgerald (Gatz, its day-long version of The Great Gatsby), Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury) and Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises). The 35-year-old company is now taking on the greatest challenge in its history by brining to the stage what is generally regarded as one of the most confounding literary masterpieces, James Joyce’ Ulysses. The 1922 massive tome chronicles a single day—June 16, 1904—in Dublin, following the wanderings of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly and the young Stephen Dedalus, paralleling Homer’s epic The Odyssey. Joyce experiments with style and form, switches genres with each chapter and has the characters express their inner thoughts. We are told in an onstage intro that one critic famously said that not much happens in Ulysses, apart from everything you can possibly imagine.
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Elise Remender “Pink Disco” on view at WHITE ROOM GALLERY.
IMAGINE featuring Elise Remender on view at The White Room Gallery through March 1, 2026.
January 27, 2026: The White Room Gallery, 3 Railroad Avenue, in the village of East Hampton will present IMAGINE featuring John Joseph Hanright, Elise Remender, Paul D. Fuentes, Sabine Jindal, Tanner Valant on view January 10 through March 1, 2026. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, February 7 from 5 – 7pm.
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Ed Schmidt in EDWARD. Photo Credit: Emma Callahan
By Isa Goldberg
January 27, 2026: On a recent Saturday night at the POWERHOUSE Arena, an independent bookstore in DUMBO, I fell into my first adventure with the playwright Ed Schmidt.
To theatergoers who venture into New York’s experimental theater scene, Schmidt is a celebrated monologist, whose been at it for over two decades, often performing in his New York City apartment. This, his latest, is a third person narrative that feels more like a memory play about a fictional character, Edward O’Connell who passed away 12 years ago, at the age of 73.
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Christopher Lowell and June Squibb in MARJORIE PRIME. Photo Credit: Joan Marcus
By Iris Wiener
January 26, 2026: The Broadway production of Marjorie Prime unfolds in a near future where artificial intelligence has become intimate enough to share a living room. Written by Jordan Harrison and directed by Anne Kauffman, the play centers on Marjorie (June Squibb), an elderly woman experiencing memory loss who regularly converses with a “Prime” — a digital recreation of her late husband designed to remember what she can no longer hold onto. As Marjorie’s daughter Tess (Cynthia Nixon) and son-in-law Jon (Danny Burstein) navigate their complicated relationship with this technology, the play gradually reveals how each character edits, reshapes, or withholds the truth in order to survive emotionally. What begins as a story about technological assistance evolves into a layered examination of grief, memory, and the stories families tell themselves. The smart Broadway production invites audiences into a quietly unsettling vision of love enduring beyond physical presence. Here are five reasons why Marjorie Prime is a memorable experience:
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Sophia Lillis, Karan Brar and Justin H. Min in DATA. Photo Credit: T. Charles Erickson
By David Sheward
January 26, 2026: Matthew Libby’s Data could have easily become like one of those made-for-streaming spy thrillers in which attractive young techies steal vital software and wind up running through the streets of LA or London after bedding each other. But what the playwright delivers is a thoughtful, complex work exploring scary issues of government overreach and technological eradication of human rights. With the inflammatory national debate over immigration raging on our streets, Data is an important and gripping indictment of the Trump administration’s authoritarian policies and the digital industry’s complicity.
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Top row left to right: Padraic Lillis, Bill Irwin, Will Eno, Sean Casey Leclaire, Erin Layton, Gary Sloan.
Bottom row left to right: Christopher J. Domig, Dean Poynor, Julie Klein. Photo Credit: Biagio Dell’ Aiera
By Alix Cohen
January 26, 2026: Christopher Domig was an increasingly self-produced actor when asked to become artistic director of The Firebone Theater Company in Manhattan. He’d fostered no such ambitions. Of course, “I was honored. Who doesn’t like to be asked in a leadership position?” Having children changed the financial part of the equation. It was no longer plausible to leave town for a job. Chris had a good experience with Firebone, but felt the company lacked elements and values which could’ve been better realized.
Wife, Janelle Garcia Domig, suggested he “might as well” start his own company. In 2016, a la Babes in Arms, they became co-founders of Sea Dog Theater at St. George’s Episcopal Church -209 E 16th Street. Chris stresses the generosity of the church is the company’s lifeblood. “Without the location, there would be no chance.”
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Christiani Pitts and Sam Tutty in TWO STRANGERS (CARRY A CAKE ACROSS NEW YORK). Photo Credit: Matthew Murphy
By Iris Wiener
January 26, 2026: In a Broadway season often defined by scale and spectacle, Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) is a reminder of the power of simplicity. Now playing at the Longacre Theatre, the musical follows two unlikely companions—British tourist Dougal (Sam Tutty) and New Yorker Robin (Christiani Pitts)—who meet by chance and spend a single day trekking across Manhattan to deliver a wedding cake. What begins as a quirky premise quickly unfolds into an intimate journey through the city and through their own guarded hearts, revealing a tender, funny, and deeply human exploration of love, loss, and the courage it takes to let someone in—even for a moment. Here are five reasons why we recommend this quietly delightful production:
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By Alix Cohen
January 25, 2026: Protest songs proliferated in the 1960s. Writer/adapters like Pete Seeger made way for original songwriters. Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs Buffy St. Marie and Nina Simone were some of the most prominent. Too many of those lyrics continue apt. Today’s topical resistance writers, whose work circulates outside commercial music channels, are far less well known.
Michele Bettencourt’s protest songs (she also writes other material) are resolute—less about taking to the barricades than about refusing to look away. She uses plainspoken, literate lyrics to expose systems of power, gendered expectations, and the toll of injustice. Instead of proclaiming slogans, her songs provoke unease and thought.
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Audience viewing AN ARK. Photo Credit: Marc J. Franklin
By David Sheward
January 22, 2025: Billed as a “new play with mixed reality,” Simon Stephens’ An Ark begs the questions “Is it theater?” and “Does the technology make up for a lack of conflict, character or clear purpose?” Audience members remove their shoes (although the reason for this is never explained) and enter an open space at The Shed. Folding chairs surround a large, illuminated globe suspended above the center of the room. You are shown to a seat and instructed by the friendly staff to put on a headset with goggles. The headset allows you to see virtual versions of four empty chairs. When the “play” begins, four actors or rather their video images, enter, sit down and advise you not to panic. They then deliver a series of verbal sensory images and fragments of memories in the second person, repeatedly asking us to savor what it’s like to be alive. At one point, we can hear raindrops. Perhaps that’s why it’s called An Ark? After about three-quarters of an hour, we have been taken through a lifetime’s worth of touching and sensing. The headsets come off, we reclaim our shoes and return home.
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RESPITE
By Alix Cohen
January 17 2017: Fifty-something Carey (Janet Zaresh) has always had unerring instinct for what someone should read. There’s a kind of justice to her owning a bookstore after a career in publishing. Hers is the kind of shop under threat of modern extinction where staff is curious, enthusiastic and knowledgeable.
“I am a ghost,” she tells us. “I just don’t know it yet…” Carey has Cancer. Please continue reading. There’s nothing ominous or maudlin about this charming, realistic play. Despite being periodically alerted to passing months, captivation with what goes on relegates death to a back burner till late in dramatization and even then, is deft.
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Carrie Coon in BUG. Photo Credit: Matthew Murphy
By Samuel L. Leiter
January 27, 2026: As the first-rate actress Carrie Coon (The White Lotus) can testify, theatre can be dangerous. Coon is currently starring as Agnes White in the Broadway revival of Bug, a harsh 1996 thriller by actor-playwright Tracy Letts (Coon’s husband) about depression, loneliness, insanity, and conspiracy theories. I first saw it Off Broadway at the Barrow Street Theatre (a.k.a. Greenwich House) in 2004, starring Amanda Pliummer and Michael Shannon. Now, Broadway’s Manhattan Theatre Club is presenting David Cromer’s acclaimed, Covid-interrupted production of 2020 and 2021 for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. Despite this distinguished genealogy, Bug’s bite seems shallower than I recall.
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Anna Mirodin, Madeline Brewer, and Hamish Linklater in THE DISAPPEAR. Photo Credit: Jeremy Danieland Hamish Linklater in THE DISAPPEAR. Photo Credit: Jeremy Daniel
By David Sheward
January 16, 2026: People who make movies and write novels are terrible at relationships. What’s more they don’t give a hoot about the environment or climate change unless their more mature teenage kids force them to. That’s the take-away from Erica Schmidt’s dark comedy The Disappear, presented by Audible at the Minetta Lane Theater. There are some funny moments in this Virginia Woolf wanna-be, but the entire evening feels like a sitcom version of Noah Baumbach’s 2019 film Marriage Story which handled basically the same material of a show-biz couple splitting with more subtlety and depth. Schmidt deserves credit for clever dialogue and a few insightful observations on art versus reality and our narcissistic culture, but the characterizations are too often inconsistent and the plot feels overly familiar and forced.
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Sarah Olmsted Thomas, Gwen Grastorf, Mark Jaster, Alex Vernon and Sabrina Mandell in JUXTAPOSE. Photo Credit: Leah Huete
By Alix Cohen
January 12, 2026: Genre-defying Happenstance Theater offers an arsenal influences, inventiveness, and subtlety. Collectively devised, the company landscapes a stage with fine-spun virtuosity. Juxtapose is prompted by the work of assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. (It will not affect enjoyment if you’re unfamiliar.)
Echoing Victorian cabinets of curiosity, Cornell combined found objects/ephemera into playful, poetic assemblages exploring memory and nostalgia. Everyday materials were transformed into what critics deemed “shadow boxes.” Cornell’s themes of whimsy, flight and birds, the cosmos, theater, ballet, film, romance and longing are apparent. The play should not be construed as 80 minutes of frothy, snow globe-like captivation, however. Its folly has teeth as well as heart.
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Carrie Coon, Jennifer Engstrom, Steve Key, Namir Smallwood in BUG. Photo Credit: Matthew Murphy
By David Sheward
January 8, 2026: Since its London premiere in 1996, Tracey Letts’ riveting psycho-thriller Bug has become more relevant and therefore even scarier. Currently revived in a forceful production from Steppenwolf Theater Company and director David Cromer, presented on Broadway by Manhattan Theater Club, Bug explores the paranoid fantasies of a conspiracy theorist and how his fear of phantom big-government forces destroy his life and that of everyone around him. In the years since its London opening and Obie-winning Off-Broadway run in 2004, our national fever dreams have intensified, fed by the ravings of our unhinged president and the unrestrained avalanche of disinformation spewing out of the Internet. Twenty years ago, this was a crackling good horror story. Now it’s all too real.
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