LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD
Booth Theatre
222 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 21, $74–$206
littlebearridgeroad.com

For me, the biggest disappointment of the year in theater is the early closing of Samuel D. Hunter’s sensational Little Bear Ridge Road. Originally scheduled to run until February 14, it is instead closing December 21, after opening on October 30 to a bevy of rave reviews. The play is a gripping ninety-five minutes of nonstop tension, brilliantly directed by two-time Tony winner Joe Mantello on Scott Pask’s beautifully minimalist set. On a couch on a round, carpeted platform, Sarah (Laurie Metcalf) and her nephew, Ethan (Micah Stock), spend a lot of time watching TV and complaining about their lives following the passing of Sarah’s brother, Ethan’s estranged father, a drug addict who died a miserable death. It’s a fabulous Broadway debut for Hunter, whose previous superb works include A Bright New Boise, The Whale, Lewiston/Clarkston, Greater Clements, A Case for the Existence of God, and Grangeville. I apologize for all the superlatives, but each one is well deserved.

Perhaps it’s what I’ve just dubbed the Metcalf curse.

Despite having earned four Emmys (out of twelve nominations), two Tonys (out of six nominations), and an Oscar nod, Metcalf has been in several shows that have shut their doors early, although not because of her performance. For every success like Three Tall Women and A Doll’s House, Part 2, there’s Hillary and Clinton, Grey House, The Other Place, and the aptly titled Misery.

In Little Bear Ridge Road, Metcalf plays Sarah, a nurse and loner who seems to be mad at the world, ripping off such one-liners as “Just because it’s so complicated that you have to watch an episode recap every week doesn’t mean it’s better,” “Why are you still here?!,” and “All this time you’ve thought I had an issue with you being gay? That’s the most interesting thing about you.” Ethan is a wannabe writer who is deeply uncomfortable in his own skin and exploring a potential relationship with an astrophysicist named James (John Drea) he met online. The narrative takes place between 2020 and 2022, and the pandemic plays a key role in how characters interact with each other, whether out at a bar or sitting home watching television, especially Extraterrestrial. Heather Gilbert’s intimate lighting is exceptional, making the audience feel like it’s on the couch, hanging out with Sarah, Ethan, and James.

Talking about the Orion constellation, James tells Ethan, “Okay, so — all three stars in the belt look like they’re in a line, but they’re actually spread out over about eight hundred light years. The closest is like twelve hundred light years away and the farthest is like two thousand.” It’s a clever metaphor that relates to how far away people can be even when they’re right next to each other — or conversing online. It’s both hilarious and meaningful when Sarah thinks she is texting Kenny, a handyman who is helping them with Ethan’s father’s house, but instead finds that she has accidentally FaceTimed him.

Hunter, who wrote the play specifically for Metcalf’s return to Chicago’s Steppenwolf company after a fourteen-year absence, brings it all together in a poignant finale that incorporates so many major and minor details and what seemed to be asides but then form a cohesive and thought-provoking whole, like a musical composition without a note out of place.

So why is it closing so early?

If I knew that, I’d be a producer.

ART
Music Box Theatre
239 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 21, $136.10 – $371.10
artonbroadway.com

One of my favorite theatrical moments of 2025 occurred at the end of the matinee of Art I attended. As the curtain closed, James Corden gave a little hop, skip, and jump, grabbing onto the shoulders of his two costars, Bobby Cannavale and Neil Patrick Harris, as a wide, childlike smile broke out across his face. It was one of the most happy-making things I’d seen all year.

It made the whole experience that much more enjoyable, helping me forget some of the holes in what is a pleasurable if not nearly as deep as it wants to be show. What are these men doing in Paris? Were they ever really close friends? Can Marc (Cannavale) and Serge (Harris) just leave poor Yvan (Corden) alone already?

When the audience enters the Music Box Theatre, they are greeted by a framed white rectangle on the red curtain, not only representing the white painting that Serge has paid three hundred thousand dollars for, but also the blank slate we all come into the world with, onto which we project our personal likes and dislikes, including how we appreciate, or don’t, art itself. When the play is over, some will have loved it, some will have despised it, and other, perhaps most, will find themselves in between. Friends will defend their views, just as Serge defends his purchase to Marc, who is insulted that Serge spent so much money on a white canvas, while Yvan is caught in the middle.

After Marc calls the painting “shit,” Serge tells the audience, “He doesn’t like the painting. Fine . . . But there was no warmth in the way he reacted. No attempt. No warmth when he dismissed it without a thought. Just that vile pretentious laugh. A real know it all laugh. I hated that laugh.”

Marc decides to get Yvan’s opinion, explaining, “Yvan’s a very tolerant guy, which of course, when it comes to relationships, is the worst thing you can be. Yvan’s tolerant because he couldn’t care less. If Yvan tolerates the fact that Serge has spent three hundred grand on some piece of white shit, it means he couldn’t care less about Serge. Obviously.”

Are we nothing more than our thoughts about art — or, for that matter, politics or other loaded subjects? Can each one of us see a white painting differently without casting aspersions?

Art was written in French by Yasmina Reza and premiered at Comédie des Champs-Élysées in Paris in 1994. Christopher Hampton’s English translation debuted in London two years later, with Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, and Ken Stott, and made it to Broadway in 1999 with Alan Alda, Victor Garber, and Alfred Molina. It’s a star-driven vehicle, so director Scott Ellis gives each actor the chance to shine, and Cannavale, Harris, and Corden chew up the scenery with glee, especially Corden, whose Yvan is a kind of everyman not wanting to fight with his besties, more concerned about his impending wedding, which has reached the crisis-level planning stage. When Marc asks Yvan if he would be happy if Serge gave the painting to him and his bride as a present, he says to the audience, “Of course it doesn’t make me happy. It doesn’t make me happy, but, generally speaking, I’m not the sort of person who can say I’m happy, just like that. . . . You’re either happy or you’re not happy, what’s why wouldn’t I be got to do with it?”

Exactly.

EVERYTHING IS HERE
59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through December 20, $75.50
www.59e59.org

One of my favorite plays of 2023 was Annie Baker’s Infinite Life, which takes place at a Northern California clinic that treats chronic pain sufferers, mainly women.

One of my favorite plays of 2025 was Talking Band’s Triplicity, an experimental work about the interconnected, overlapping lives of four strangers in New York City.

Peggy Stafford’s Everything Is Here is a charming and gentle tale that is like Talking Band’s version of Infinite Life.

Bev (Jan Leslie Harding), Janice (Mia Katigbak), and Bonnie (Petronia Paley) live at a senior community retirement facility, where they participate in programs, sit around and discuss personal issues, and are taken care of by a young nurse named Nikki (Susannah Millonzi). The play begins with Grant (Pete Simpson), who runs several of the programs, asking the women to lie down on the floor and follow his instructions:

“There are these huge old trees that you don’t even know how old they really are / Maybe they’re ancient? / You’re not sure but this thought crosses your mind: ANCIENT TREES,” he says. “You stop dead in your tracks / Stop right now / Everybody stop / Don’t move / Okay, good / Something is gone that should be there / And it was there / In your pocket and now it’s not.” The audience falls under his spell as well.

For the next eighty minutes, the characters converse about dogs and cats, Salisbury steak, the large garden gnome just outside the window, Middle Earth, assisted suicide, and trust. They feed the fish, worry about a dangerous tree branch that could fall at any moment, and help Grant audition for a local production of A Streetcar Named Desire. (The curiously comforting set is by Richard Hoover.)

We soon learn that Bev is considering leaving, Janice is a kleptomaniac, Bonnie is a fine Blanche DuBois, and Nikki and Grant take a liking to each other.

But at the center of it all is a constant feeling of loss, of something that’s missing, physically, emotionally, and psychologically, with a hovering sense of impending doom.

Everything Is Here is worth seeing for the excellent cast alone, a joy to behold, whether they’re arguing, getting their vital signs checked, or dancing in their chairs to Lisa Fagan’s minimalist choreography. (Note: Simpson and Katigbak were in Infinite Life, and Simpson and Millonzi were in Berlindia!, which also used a goldfish tank as a metaphor, so the closeness of the actors is palpable.) Finn (The Invention of Tragedy, Doomocracy) adds just the right touches, and Stafford (Motel Cherry, 16 Words or Less with Katigbak) maintains a level of mystery around the proceedings, providing no easy answers in her abstract narrative.

On the way out, don’t be surprised if you reach into your pockets, wondering if something is missing, if everything is where it’s supposed to be.

ARCHDUKE
Roundabout at Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 21, $69-$102
www.roundabouttheatre.org

On June 28, 1914, nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, which led directly to the start of WWI. Pulitzer Prize finalist and Obie winner Rajiv Joseph, who has written such complex and intriguing shows as Gruesome Playground Injuries, Describe the Night, and Dakar 2000, imagines the events leading up to that fateful day in Archduke, a delicious, if slight, dark comedy.

The assassination plot is orchestrated by Dragutin “Apis” Dimitrijevic (a scenery-gobbling Patrick Page), a real-life Serbian military officer and cofounder of the Black Hand, a secret society dedicated to “Unification or Death.” With the help of a doctor, Apis convinces three young men, Gavrilo (Jake Berne), Trifko (Adrien Rolet), and Nedeljko (Jason Sanchez), that they have tuberculosis and should accomplish one last heroic deed before they die: murder the archduke.

“I never had no meaning. Not in my life. Never had it. Never will have it,” Nedeljko says to Gavrilo. “I wasted my life.” But given a new sense of purpose, the three men go to Apis’s resplendent home, highlighted by a huge wall map of Eastern Europe, are served by Apis’s dotty housekeeper, Sladjana (Kristine Nielsen), and plan the attack.

Joseph and Tony- and Obie-winning director Darko Tresnjak mix in a little of the Three Stooges’ You Nazty Spy! here, a touch of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator there, along with a dash of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. At just over two hours with an intermission, Archduke is too long, and some of the slapstick grows repetitive and falls flat, such as Sladjana’s efforts to find Apis’s “special box.” It probably would have benefited from being streamlined to a tighter ninety minutes.

That said, it’s still an enjoyable take on an international tragedy with far-reaching ramifications while also commenting on disaffected, angry, aimless young men and political violence, no laughing matter in the United States today.

“Cats do not lay eggs,” Apis says at one point. “Never let anyone ever tell you that they do.”

Yes, the Habsburg hegemony can be funny.

OKLAHOMA SAMOVAR
The Downstairs at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
66 East Fourth St. between Second Ave. & Bowery
Thursday – Sunday through December 21, $25-300
www.lamama.org

Prior to seeing Oklahoma Samovar at La Mama, all I knew about Jews in the American West I learned from Blazing Saddles and The Frisco Kid, two comedies starring Gene Wilder that feature a bit of Yiddish. In 1987, award-winning author, teacher, and playwright Alice Eve Cohen met her eighty-seven-year-old great-aunt Sylvia, who shared with Cohen her family’s remarkable history fleeing from persecution in Latvia and starting a farm during the 1889 Oklahoma Land Run, the only Jews to do so. Cohen has been working on the play, which won the 2021 National Jewish Playwriting Contest, since 1987, and it is now making its world premiere at La MaMa through December 21.

Directed by Eric Nightengale, the play begins in 1987, when twenty-one-year-old Emily travels from Brooklyn to an Oklahoma farm where Sylvia lives, bringing with her an urn with her mother’s ashes. She also has a tape recorder to document Sylvia’s answers to her many questions, most importantly: Why did her mother want her ashes spread over the farm, which Emily knew nothing about? Sylvia shares her story as the play goes back and forth between eras and several actors switch among multiple roles: Nadia Diamond is Emily and Rose, her maternal great-grandmother; Seren Kaiser is Clara, Emily’s mother as a little girl; Sahar Lev-Shomer is Jake, Rose and Sylvia’s pioneer father; Alex J. Gould is Ben, Rose’s husband, and Max, Jake’s best friend; Sarah Chalfie is Hattie, Rose and Sylvia’s mother, and Maxine, Ben’s gallivanting, bisexual sister; and the scene-stealing Joyce Cohen is Sylvia at ages four, fourteen, forty-five, and eighty-seven as well as some minor characters.

The narrative follows Jake as he emigrates from Latvia to New York to avoid fighting in the Russian army; meets Max, who helps him find a job; is joined by his fiancée, Hattie, who is not keen on moving to Chandler, Oklahoma, where there is no synagogue and no other Jews; and begins raising a family. Emily is initially tight on time; like Hattie, Chandler is not at first her cup of tea — she believes that Sylvia is living on stolen land — but she soon becomes enthralled with learning about her ancestors. At the center of it all is a Russian samovar that Hattie brought from the old country.

“Look at this samovar. It’s the family heirloom,” Sylvia tells Emily, continuing, “Mom and I were starting to – we were just beginning to make a connection, and — suddenly she’s gone. She wanted me to come here with her ashes, and I have to know I’m doing the right thing. Sylvia, you’ve told me stories, but not what I need to know. Could you fast-forward a few decades?” Sylvia cautions, “You’re in a big rush. Try switching from coffee to tea, might help ya slow down.”

The first act sets everything up well, but the second act slows it all down. Characters and relationships get confusing, the set changes involving colored windows/walls feel extraneous, and standard melodrama takes over. It probably would have worked much better as a streamlined ninety-minute one-act.

There are lovely, touching moments throughout and creative staging, but it tries too hard to be an epic while raising all-too-relevant issues such as immigration, assimilation, and bigotry. “There’s no antisemitism in Chandler,” Rose asserts. Ben replies, “Where there are Jews, there is antisemitism.” It ends up being not quite enough to sustain its length, although it’s nearly worth it just to watch the wonderful Cohen, who is endearing as Sylvia.

THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES
St. James Theatre
246 West Forty-Fourth St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 21, $88.48-$441.28
queenofversaillesmusical.com

It’s never fun writing a review for a show that is closing early; it’s sort of like that old saying, Don’t speak ill of the dead.

When I went to the St. James Theatre to see The Queen of Versailles, a musical based on the hit documentary, I was fully prepared to find something to like about it despite all the negative chatter that was circulating. And indeed, I thoroughly enjoyed the first scene, which takes place in Paris in 1661, as Louis XIV (Pablo David Laucerica) is getting ready to move to his new home in Versailles.

“I am the king, Louis Quatorze / My life is shinier than yours / In fact, I am the living proof / That life is quite unfair / I am the Sun King, like Apollo, / But with better hair,” Louis sings in an extravagantly decorated room. “And now that I am twenty-three / And fin’lly firmly in command / To celebrate the glory that is I, / I want to build a palace / Splendiferous and grand, / The grandest palace ever to be seen in any land, / In a little country village called Versailles!”

I also was all in on the second scene, with the action moving to Florida in 2006, where Jackie Siegel (Kristin Chenoweth) is overseeing the construction of her own Versailles with her fabulously wealthy, much older husband, David (F. Murray Abraham).

“We didn’t know we would need / The biggest home in America / That was never part of our plan,” Jackie sings. “But ev’ryone has needs to be filled, / Add ’em all up and we’ve got to build / The biggest home in America, / Because we can.”

After that, well, I just couldn’t.

Jackie and David live with Jackie’s daughter, the cynical Victoria (Nina White), and are soon joined by Victoria’s cousin, Jonquil Peed (Tatum Grace Hopkins). Also hovering around are Gary (Greg Hildreth), David’s business associate, and Sofia Flores (Melody Butiu), the Siegels’ nanny. The story devolves quickly into tawdry melodrama, along with clunky staging and less-than-compelling musical numbers. The book, which refuses to decide whether Jackie is a strong woman, a greedy socialite, or a misunderstood wife and mother, is by Olivier nominee Lindsey Ferrentino, the director is Tony winner Michael Arden, and the music and lyrics are by Oscar winner Stephen Schwartz, all of whom should have known better.

Tony and Emmy winner Chenoweth powers through the one hundred and fifty minutes with grit and determination — and, of course, fanciful costumes (by Christian Cowan) — and it’s always a treat to see the now-eighty-six-year-old Abraham, even if it turns out that he’s not exactly a song-and-dance man. But it’s impossible to care about anything that happens on Tony winner Dane Laffrey’s often elegant set (but the less said about his video projections, the better) or about any of the characters, particularly Jackie herself.

In a script note, Ferrentino explains, “The Queen of Versailles is the story of one family that reflects an entire country — a modern fable about the American Dream and what it has become in contemporary America. Our main character does what America teaches: work harder, want bigger, never stop. Her unfinished palace becomes a mirror to a culture that mistakes accumulation for meaning. Jackie is as complicated as the nation that created her.”

Not quite, especially as the country is mired in another economic crisis propelled by the growing wealth gap between the 1% and everyone else.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]