Thornton Wilder’s holiday classic gets a nationwide celebration, with more than 30 organizations joining a theatrical feast that spans 90 years in just 40 minutes.

Forget the turkey, the awkward family conversations and the relative who insists on bringing up politics before dessert. This Christmas, Thornton Wilder is inviting America to a dinner that lasts ninety years, and some rather extraordinary guests are pulling up chairs.

Thortan Wilder

The Thornton Wilder Estate has announced The Long Christmas Dinner Festival, a nationwide celebration of Wilder’s beloved 1931 one-act play, with more than 30 theatres, schools, colleges and independent bookstores presenting the work throughout November and December. The ambition is as charming as it is audacious: to make The Long Christmas Dinner a holiday tradition alongside A Christmas Carol, The Nutcracker and Handel’s Messiah. Considering how many of us already spend the holidays revisiting the same beloved stories, there is something wonderfully appealing about adding another place at the table.

The festivities begin Monday, November 2, at New York City’s Public Theater, where Ethan Hawke and Jose Llana will be among the performers bringing Wilder’s extraordinary little play to life. Joining them is Tappan Wilder, the playwright’s nephew and managing member of the Wilder Family LLC, making this particular family gathering rather more authentic than most. Additional casting will be announced.

Chicago is getting its own star-studded dinner at the Goodman Theatre, with original RENT cast member Anthony Rapp and Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy joining the celebration. It’s not every day that a Broadway original and an alternative-rock icon find themselves seated at the same theatrical Christmas table, but Wilder has always had a way of bringing seemingly different worlds together.

And what a remarkable piece of theatre this is. First produced in 1931, The Long Christmas Dinner takes place during one continuous holiday meal, yet somehow carries its audience through ninety years of a family’s existence. Generations arrive, grow older, fall in love, quarrel, celebrate, disappear and are replaced by those who follow. The dining table remains, but the people around it change. In a mere forty minutes, Wilder captures the comedy, tenderness, absurdity and heartbreak of being human.

It is a theatrical conceit of astonishing simplicity, and one that feels particularly appropriate for the holidays. After all, Christmas dinner is rarely just about the people sitting at the table. It is also about those who once occupied the empty chairs, the traditions we inherited without remembering who began them, and the children who will eventually become the keepers of those same memories. Wilder understood that a family gathering is never really confined to a single day. Every holiday carries the ghosts of Christmases past and the promise of those still to come.

What makes this festival especially intriguing is its refusal to confine Wilder to the grand theatrical institutions. The first wave of participants includes 31 organizations across 20 states, stretching from Alaska to Florida and California to Maine. Alongside such distinguished companies as The Public Theater, Goodman Theatre, Seattle Rep, Miami New Drama, Pasadena Playhouse and Rude Mechs are high schools, colleges and independent bookstores. Vassar and Yale are also participating, with Yale holding a particularly meaningful connection to the work: students there collaborated on its original 1931 premiere.

That mixture is precisely what gives the festival its heart. Wilder’s work has never depended on elaborate scenery or theatrical machinery to reveal something profound. His genius lies in stripping away the unnecessary until the audience is left confronting the things that matter: time, love, mortality, family and the extraordinary significance of ordinary life. A school auditorium or bookstore can become as fitting a home for this play as a celebrated professional stage.

There is also something rather refreshing about a holiday theatrical event that doesn’t require a sleigh, a dancing snowflake or a miser visited by three ghosts. Wilder gives us something at once simpler and more unsettling: the realization that life moves with breathtaking speed, even when the days themselves seem endless. One moment we are children waiting impatiently for Christmas morning; the next, we are the adults remembering the people who made those mornings magical.

The Wilder Estate’s hope is that this nationwide celebration will become an annual tradition, encouraging families and friends to experience the play together and discover something new in it as their own lives change. That is an especially lovely idea for a work whose entire meaning deepens with the passage of time. The person who sees The Long Christmas Dinner at twenty will not experience quite the same play at fifty, and certainly not at eighty.

With its combination of celebrated performers, community participation and a story that has quietly endured for nearly a century, The Long Christmas Dinner Festival offers an unusually thoughtful addition to the holiday season.

And unlike most family Christmas dinners, this one promises to take only forty minutes, cover ninety years of family history and leave you with something considerably more lasting than leftovers.

Live From The Hotel Edison Times Square Chronicles Presents, is filmed from the Hotel Edison and is a podcast extension of T2C. We are back after a small hiatus.

Today on Live From The Hotel Edison Times Square Chronicles Presents, we meet Alyssa Wray. Alyssa is a singer, actor, artist, and extremely clumsy romcom enthusiast from small town Kentucky, currently residing in NYC. You may have seen her in 2021 on ABC’s “American Idol” where she was a finalist (Top 9). Her regional credits include: Rocky Horror Picture Show (Magenta) at Bucks County Playhouse, Rent (Maureen) at the Palace Theatre, Murder Ballad (Narrator) at Prima Theatre, Songs for a New World (Woman 1) at the Gateway Playhouse. Other favorite performing credits include her New York City debut solo show at 54 Below, Alyssa Wray: Songs that Speak to Me. She is extremely grateful for her agents at DGRW, Sarah & Dave at Creative Talent Company, Link ’21, and my entire family and community back home as always.

See Alyssa in Going Bacharach at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theatre running through November 29th.
I am so grateful to Alyssa Wray for her conversation, his joy of life and his art that captures the imagination.

The world is ending. Manhattan is getting hotter by the day, humanity apparently has only months left, and Charlie has decided that the most reasonable response is to stay on her couch with peanut butter, doomsday television and her Jewish goldfish.

Welcome to Nick Blaemire’s Soon, the devastatingly honest indie-pop chamber musical that opened last night at The Loft at St. Luke’s. Presented by Out of the Box Theatrics in association with Bella Vita Entertainment and Red Horse LLC, Soon begins with an almost deliciously eccentric premise. If the world is going to end anyway, why bother getting off the couch?

Charlie (Ava Delaney) has essentially shut out Manhattan along with everything else. The temperature outside keeps climbing, the television keeps delivering increasingly dire news, and Charlie remains planted in her apartment, eating peanut butter, waiting out whatever time humanity has left. Delaney makes her funny, maddening, vulnerable and deeply human. She never plays Charlie as simply another quirky musical-theatre heroine, and that distinction becomes increasingly important as the evening unfolds.

Sean Frank’s hyper-realistic scenic design makes Charlie and Steven’s apartment feel less like a set than a place they have actually been living in for years. Old theatre tickets, board games, journals and the accumulated debris of everyday life fill the room, creating the kind of intimate detail that makes us feel almost intrusive watching them. More importantly, the apartment becomes Charlie’s entire universe, effectively isolating us inside it with her. Paige Seber’s lighting design beautifully tracks the shifting emotional temperature of the piece, moving between the familiar warmth of home and the increasingly unsettling world pressing in from outside. Together, Frank and Seber make the apartment feel simultaneously like a refuge and a place from which Charlie desperately needs to escape.

Ava Delaney and Oliver Richman photo by Valerie Terranova

Then the groceries arrive. Jonah, played by the puppy-eyed and utterly lovable Oliver Richman, is the delivery man who begins nudging Charlie toward the terrifying possibility that there may still be something worth getting off the couch for. Richman has an openness that makes Jonah almost impossible not to fall in love with. He doesn’t come crashing into Charlie’s life as some great romantic rescuer. He simply shows up. Then keeps showing up, with a gentleness that slowly begins making Charlie’s carefully constructed little world harder to maintain.

Mike Millan, Ava Delaney photo by Valerie Terranova

The people already in Charlie’s life aren’t quite ready to surrender her either. Mike Millan is hysterical as Steven, her roommate, and seriously seems like the best roommate in the world. His comic timing is impeccable, but what makes Steven work is the affection underneath it. Millan never loses sight of how much this man cares about Charlie, even when she is making it nearly impossible for anyone to reach her.

Ava Delaney and Mylinda Hull photo by Valerie Terranova

Then there is Mylinda Hull, who nearly steals the night as Charlie’s mother, Adrienne. A boozy lounge lizard of a woman, Adrienne seems considerably more comfortable finding consolation at the bottom of a pitcher than offering it to her daughter. Hull is enormously funny, but there is something wounded underneath the alcohol and bravado. She knows precisely how far to push the comedy before allowing us to glimpse the woman hiding behind it.

This is where Soon begins doing something rather extraordinary.

What initially feels like a wonderfully offbeat musical about a young woman hiding from an approaching apocalypse slowly deepens without announcing that it is doing so. Blaemire allows us to laugh. He allows us to become comfortable with Charlie’s peculiar little existence. We become accustomed to the couch, the peanut butter, the fish, the increasingly unbearable heat and the parade of people trying to get Charlie to participate in life. Then the emotional ground begins to move.

Ava Delaney and Oliver Richman photo by Valerie Terranova

I am deliberately going no further. Soon contains discoveries that deserve to happen in the theatre, not in a review. What I can say is that Blaemire has constructed the piece so carefully that things we have already seen begin acquiring different weight. What seemed funny becomes painful. What seemed eccentric becomes understandable. By the time we realize how deeply we have been drawn into Charlie’s world, these characters no longer feel like people we met at the theatre. They feel like people we know.

Will Blum directs with a wonderfully sure hand. He understands that this small musical doesn’t need to be pushed. Its emotional strings are played like a Stradivarius: carefully, precisely and without unnecessary force. He allows the revelations to land rather than announcing them, and in the intimacy of The Loft, that restraint becomes enormously powerful. There is nowhere for these actors to hide, and eventually nowhere for us to hide from them.

Then there is Blaemire’s score, which may be one of the most exciting things about the evening. This is indie-pop musical theatre that doesn’t sound as though someone sat down and decided musical theatre needed to sound like indie pop. The musical language belongs naturally to these characters and to this story. Blaemire’s score can be witty, strange, tender and heartbreaking, sometimes within the same stretch of music.

“Bar Mitzvah for the First Jewish Fish” is as wonderfully peculiar as its title suggests, while “Waiting” is one of those songs I wanted to hear again almost immediately. Thankfully, I don’t have to wait very long. The Soon album has already been released. It arrived August 14, 2026, after being recorded at Hit Factory. This is a score I want to spend considerably more time with. More importantly, it feels like a glimpse of where musical theatre is going—less concerned with sounding like what a musical is supposed to sound like and more interested in allowing contemporary music and theatrical storytelling to become the same language. It is exciting.

Musical supervisor Wiley Deweese and music director and pianist Andy Collopy keep the evening tight and beautifully melodic, with Kevin Wunderlich and Nyssa Grant completing the three-piece band. In a room this intimate, musicians can easily overwhelm performers. Here they never do. The music surrounds the actors without swallowing them, allowing Blaemire’s lyrics and the emotional intricacies of the performances to remain front and center.

What makes Soon linger, though, isn’t its clever apocalyptic premise. It is how completely Blaemire makes us care about four people inside one apartment while the rest of the world is supposedly falling apart. The apocalypse gives the musical a clock. It reminds everyone that time is running out. But haven’t we always known that? We simply behave as though we don’t.

That is the uncomfortable beauty sitting underneath Soon. We postpone conversations. We protect ourselves from people who might matter too much. We wait until we’re thinner, richer, braver, happier or somehow more prepared before allowing ourselves to participate fully in our own lives. We assume there will be another day to say what needs saying, another opportunity to open the door. Soon quietly asks what happens when there isn’t.

Soon plays at The Loft at St. Luke’s, 308 West 46th Street, Third Floor, through November 8. Its entire run is currently sold out, but keep an eye out for last-minute ticket releases. If one appears, grab it.

I won’t tell you what happens behind Charlie’s closed door. I will only tell you that when Soon finally opens it, it is heartbreaking in the best possible way.

I have a problem with Slam Frank. Actually, I have several problems with Slam Frank, the audacious new musical now playing at the Orpheum Theatre. I also think its cast is beyond, beyond, beyond talented, Andrew Fox’s score is fabulous, and there is so much theatrical invention exploding across the stage that I suspect this show is going to develop a cult following and remain with us for a very long time. Therein lies my problem.

Austen Horne, Amelia Louise Barr, and Olivia Bernábe in Slam Frank_Photo by Shawn Salley Photography

I am not particularly a parody person. I understand what parody is trying to accomplish intellectually, but when the subject being used as the vehicle is The Diary of Anne Frank, I cannot entirely separate myself from the story underneath the joke. Anne Frank was a real child. She hid from the Nazis. She was discovered, deported and murdered. There is something about using that particular story as the framework for this satire that I found offensive, even while understanding that offending us is very much part of what Fox and book writer Joel Sinensky intend to do.

They have a great deal they want to offend us about.

Olivia Bernábe as Anita (with ASM Walker Stovall) in Slam Frank_Photo by Shawn Salley Photography

Slam Frank takes Anne Frank and turns her into Anita Franco (Olivia Bernábe), a queer Mexican girl whose diary is written in Spanish. Her family and the people sharing the annex have been reinvented through virtually every contemporary discussion surrounding race, gender, sexuality and identity. The production then throws all of this against the Holocaust while simultaneously parodying the conventions of modern musical theatre. Dear Evan Hansen, Spring Awakening, Fiddler on the Roof, West Side Story, In the Heights and the musical vocabulary associated with Lin-Manuel Miranda all wander through the evening in one form or another.

Alex Lewis at Peter Van Daan in Slam Frank_Photo by Shawn Salley Photography

Here is where Fox does something remarkably clever. You recognize exactly what is being parodied without leaving the theatre singing the musical being parodied. He captures the musical language without simply stealing the song. That is much harder than it sounds, and his score is one of the strongest things about the evening. The music understands the joke even during moments when I wasn’t convinced the book did.

Rocky Paterra, Jaz Zepatas, Olivia Bernábe, Alex Lewis, Austen Horne in Slam Frank_Photo by Shawn Salley Photography

Bernábe is sensational as Anita. She has the voice, timing, energy and complete fearlessness necessary to stand in the center of this insanity and somehow make us follow her. Anita is part Anne Frank, part Maria from West Side Story, part contemporary musical-theatre heroine and part creation entirely unto herself. Bernábe understands all of those layers and commits to every one of them.

She is surrounded by a remarkable company. What continues to boggle my mind is that these actors are non-Equity. There is an astonishing amount of talent on the Orpheum stage, and nobody is treating this outrageous material as an excuse to coast on the joke. They sing it, act it and play the absurdity as if the stakes were completely real.

Rocky Paterra’s Otto is gay. Austen Horne’s Edith has been reinvented as a fiercely sexual Black feminist. Alex Lewis’s Peter is non-binary. Jaz Zepatos’s Mrs. Van Daan has her own sexual and feminist awakening, while John Anker Bow’s Mr. Van Daan represents a magnificently pompous strain of male superiority. Eventually, practically everyone seems to be coming out to everyone else while the Nazis remain, somewhat astonishingly, outside.

Then there is Margot. The fabulously vocal Amelia Louise Barr spends much of the musical almost mute, which makes what eventually happens with her considerably more startling. I don’t want to destroy the surprise because this is one of those shows where telling you everything that happens would rob you of the experience of sitting there thinking, Did they really just do that? Yes. They did. Repeatedly.

That is both the pleasure and the difficulty of Slam Frank. Things happen in this musical that will make people argue about it for days. I certainly did. Some will find it liberating. Some will find it hysterical. Some will find it offensive. Many will probably experience all three reactions before reaching Second Avenue.

Sam Lafrage’s direction understands that there is no point in approaching material like this timidly. The production barrels forward, gleefully puncturing theatrical conventions and contemporary sacred cows. Nobody gets much protection, and the cast commits with the kind of confidence required to keep something this deliberately provocative from collapsing beneath its own conceit.

Where I struggle is with Sinensky’s book. It is frequently very funny and occasionally wickedly perceptive, but it is also highly confusing. There are so many targets being fired upon simultaneously that I sometimes lost track of precisely what was being satirized. Is the joke about identity politics? Contemporary theatre? Performative progressivism? The commercialization of trauma? Our insistence upon filtering history through present-day values? All of them are legitimate targets, and all of them appear here, but occasionally so many ideas arrive at once that the satire becomes harder to decipher rather than sharper.

Then there is Anne Frank herself. I understand why they chose her. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I understand it. You cannot create genuinely dangerous satire by selecting material nobody cares about. Slam Frank wants us uncomfortable. It wants to test where our boundaries are and why certain subjects have been placed beyond the reach of comedy. If Fox and Sinensky had chosen something less sacred, the experiment wouldn’t have the same explosive charge. But understanding the choice doesn’t require me to like it and I did then I didn’t  and then I did when  it was explained to me.

There were moments when I could see exactly what the writers were attacking and still couldn’t get past the fact that Anne Frank was the instrument being used to attack it. That may say as much about my relationship to the material as it does about the musical. But criticism isn’t about pretending that intellectual understanding erases an emotional response. Mine remained complicated and strangely, that may be why I think Slam Frank needs to exist.

We complain that theatre has become too safe, too predictable and too frightened of offending anyone. Then somebody creates something genuinely dangerous and we have to decide whether we meant what we said. Slam Frank is dangerous. It takes enormous risks. Some work brilliantly. Some made me uncomfortable. Some confused me. Some offended me, but I haven’t stopped thinking about it. That matters.

I suspect Slam Frank will become a cult musical precisely because people will leave arguing about what they just saw. I would much rather encounter a flawed, fearless piece of theatre that gives me something to wrestle with than another perfectly polished musical I have forgotten before reaching the subway.

The cast is extraordinary. The score is terrific. The book needs clarity. The premise remains difficult for me to accept, yet, would I tell you to see it? Absolutely.

Slam Frank isn’t asking for our approval. It’s asking us to have the argument.

Slam Frank: Orpheum Theatre, 126 2nd Ave until November 30th but I expect this show to extend.

Broadway is heading into fall with stars returning, new productions arriving and one beloved musical preparing to step back up to the plate. Neil Patrick Harris and Julianne Hough are leading a newly reimagined Damn Yankees to Broadway next spring, while Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris and Allison Janney begin performances in Other Desert Cities. Ashley Park has finished Emily in Paris and is itching for a return to the boards, Xolo Maridueña is heading into Buena Vista Social Club, and Adrienne Warren and Jessica Vosk will lead an impressive company in Lynn Nottage and John Legend’s Imitation of Life. And because apparently neither wind nor rain nor a Nor’easter can keep Broadway bargain hunters away, the Broadway Flea Market still managed to raise nearly $1.5 million.

Julianne Hough, Austin Scott, Neil Patrick Harris by Emilio Madrid

After years away from Broadway, the seven-time Tony Award-winning musical Damn Yankees will return next spring in a new production directed and choreographed by Sergio Trujillo, with Neil Patrick Harris as Applegate, Julianne Hough as Lola and Austin Scott as Young Joe.

Austin Scott, Julianne Hough, Neil Patrick Harris by Emilio Madrid

Harris, a Tony winner and five-time Emmy winner, seems particularly delicious casting for the devilishly persuasive Applegate, while Emmy winner Hough will make her Broadway musical debut as Lola. The reimagined adaptation features a book by Will Power and Pulitzer Prize and Tony winner Doug Wright, additional lyrics by Lynn Ahrens and orchestrations by Doug Besterman.

Julianne Hough by Emilio Madrid

Based on Douglass Wallop’s novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, the musical follows devoted baseball fan Joe Boyd, who longs to see his beloved team achieve glory and discovers that wishes can become considerably more complicated when a charming stranger arrives offering exactly what he wants—for a price.

Austin Scott, Julianne Hough by Emilio Madrid

The original Damn Yankees opened on Broadway in 1955 and won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, giving the theatre such standards as “Whatever Lola Wants,” “Heart” and “Two Lost Souls.” This new version arrives with considerable momentum after a sold-out Arena Stage engagement that received 13 Helen Hayes Award nominations and won eight, including Outstanding Musical.

Austin Scott, Julianne Hough by Emilio Madrid

Broadway previews begin March 24, 2027, with opening night set for April 20.

Meanwhile, Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities begins Broadway performances September 29 at the Hudson Theatre, with an opening set for October 18 and a limited engagement through January 17, 2027.

And what a family has been assembled. Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Polly opposite Ed Harris as Lyman, with Allison Janney as Silda, Joe Keery as Trip and Lily Rabe as Brooke. John Benjamin Hickey directs.

Baitz’s play centers on a family gathering that becomes something considerably more combustible when daughter Brooke arrives with a memoir exposing a painful chapter of family history. With Louis-Dreyfus, Harris, Janney and Rabe occupying the same stage, the family fireworks alone make this one of the fall’s most intriguing straight-play propositions.

The production features scenic design by Scott Pask, costumes by Tom Broecker, lighting by Natasha Katz, sound design and original music by Mikaal Sulaiman, and hair and wig design by Robert Pickens.

Ashley Park

Ashley Park has wrapped filming on the sixth and final season of Emily in Paris, and apparently Parisian couture and international television success haven’t cured her of wanting to get back onto a Broadway stage.

Park’s Broadway roots run deep, with credits including Mean Girls, The King and I, Sunday in the Park with George and Mamma Mia!, and it has been far too long since New York audiences have had her back where musical-theatre audiences first fell in love with her. No Broadway return has been announced yet, but if she’s longing for the boards, Broadway would undoubtedly be happy to have her.

It takes considerably more than miserable weather to separate Broadway people from theatrical memorabilia.

Despite a Nor’easter, the Broadway Flea Market & Grand Auction raised nearly $1.5 million, with its live auction alone bringing in a record-breaking $562,300.

The day’s biggest live-auction prize was a London theatre adventure featuring three pairs of West End tickets and round-trip United business-class flights, which sold for $30,000. A meet-and-greet with the cast of The Lost Boys brought $22,000, while the opportunity to shadow a Wicked stage manager fetched $20,000. Nick Nicholson and Bryan Batt kept the bidding moving.

The 156 silent-auction lots added another $206,450, and Broadway fans proved once again that a piece of a beloved production can inspire serious bidding. Ricky Rojas’ acoustic guitar, signed by Rojas, Danny Burstein, Aaron Tveit and fellow Moulin Rouge! The Musical company members, sold for $15,500, while Satine’s swing brought $9,000.

Recently closed Chess also inspired some spirited competition. The production’s knight set piece, signed by Nicholas Christopher, Lea Michele, Bryce Pinkham and Aaron Tveit, sold for $6,300, while a cast-signed opening-night Playbill went for $6,200. Todd Buonopane, Michael Goddard and Kimberly Marable hosted the silent auction with auctioneer Dan Perry.

The numbers are impressive, but the real story remains what the Flea has always represented: Broadway taking care of its own, with fans happily turning theatrical obsession into something genuinely useful.

Xolo Maridueña

Cobra Kai star Xolo Maridueña is making his Broadway debut in Buena Vista Social Club at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre.

Maridueña begins performances November 17 for a limited engagement running through January 3, 2027. The actor, also known for starring in DC’s Blue Beetle, now adds Broadway to a résumé that has moved remarkably quickly between television and film.

And Buena Vista Social Club, with its intoxicating blend of storytelling, musicianship and movement, is quite a way to make an entrance.

One of the season’s most intriguing new musicals is also taking shape downtown. Principal casting has been announced for the world premiere of Imitation of Life, the new musical from Lynn Nottage and John Legend, directed by Whitney White and premiering this fall at The Shed’s Griffin Theater in a co-production with National Black Theatre.

Joining previously announced Tony winner Adrienne Warren as Delilah is Jessica Vosk as Bea, with Michael Luwoye as Elroy, Charlie Thurston as Archie, Aleyse Shannon as Adult Peola, Scarlett London Diviney as Young Peola and Lily Gilliam as Young Jessie.

That combination alone demands attention. Nottage is one of our most formidable dramatists, Legend brings an entirely different musical vocabulary to the theatre, White has established herself as a director unafraid of complicated material, and Warren is a performer capable of turning emotional intensity into something almost visceral.

Add Vosk and Luwoye, and Imitation of Life isn’t quietly arriving this fall.

It is arriving with expectations.