When I heard that Karen Ziemba and Marc Kudisch were starring in L.B. Browne’s world premiere of Safe House at Theatre Row, I was excited. Put two seasoned stage actors of this caliber together in an intimate theatre and there is every reason to expect sparks. There are indeed some very fine performances here. The problem is that Browne’s drama, directed by Benjamin Viertel and produced by split/decision, is so packed with crises, secrets, politics, illness, trauma and family dysfunction that eventually the play begins collapsing under the weight of everything it wants us to carry.

An upcoming presidential election has left the country on edge, and Rock (Kudisch) is convinced that a second American Civil War is imminent. His response is to transform the basement of his suburban Pennsylvania home into a bunker, determined to protect his family from the catastrophe he believes is coming. What they don’t know is that Rock is facing another catastrophe entirely: more than a year earlier, he learned that he is dying from Huntington’s disease, a diagnosis he has kept secret from his wife and daughters. That alone is enough for a play.

Karen Ziemba, Anna Roman, Marc Kudisch Photos by Viktorija Mickute

However Safe House keeps going. Rock’s wife, Slipper (Ziemba), is a stay-at-home mother who has spent much of her life giving herself to her husband and family. Their high-achieving daughter Ashley (Anna Roman), a lawyer, has sacrificed much of her own life for her parents and has become wound so tightly that unhappiness seems to have settled permanently into her body. Their younger daughter Claire (Grace Church) left home at 15, an absence that appears to have torn the family apart, although the deeper question is whether these people were ever truly together in the first place.

Glenn Steven Allen, Marc Kudisch Photos by Viktorija Mickute

Then Claire comes home. She is pregnant and wants an abortion. She has joined a cult. She has also blown up a gas line. Meanwhile, Rock is hallucinating conversations with his dead father (Glenn Steven Allen), a man he idolizes and mythologizes, as well as visions of the younger Claire (Julianna Layne). Huntington’s disease, political paranoia, impending civil war, a hidden terminal diagnosis, abortion, estrangement, religious extremism, domestic resentment, terrorism, parental failure, memory, inherited illness and hallucination are all competing for oxygen. There is simply too much here.

Julianna Layne, Marc Kudisch Photos by Viktorija Mickute

What makes that frustrating is that Browne has found an interesting central idea. Rock is building a physical safe house because he believes concrete, supplies and preparation can protect the people he loves. Yet everything threatening this family is already inside the house. The danger isn’t waiting beyond the front door. It lives in the secrets they keep, the things they refuse to say and the damage they have done to one another. That is the play I wanted Safe House to trust.

Kudisch carries much of the weight of the evening, and his work is intense, intelligent and carefully considered. He gives Rock enough conviction that his obsession with the bunker never becomes merely ridiculous. Even as the character’s world becomes increasingly unstable, Kudisch keeps searching for the man beneath the fear. It is the kind of grounded stage work that reminds us exactly why he belongs in the theatre.

Karen Ziemba,Marc Kudisch Photos by Viktorija Mickute

Ziemba brings warmth and an expressive emotional life to Slipper, particularly in the smallest reactions. Her face frequently tells us what the dialogue has not yet managed to say. Unfortunately, too much of that dialogue is difficult to hear. In a theatre this intimate, an audience should not be struggling to catch an actor’s words, and Ziemba frequently drops her volume to a level that leaves important moments disappearing before they reach us.

Roman brings welcome humanity to Ashley, a character who could easily have become simply the uptight, resentful daughter. Instead, we see the exhaustion underneath her rigidity. Church and Layne, both non-union performers, hold their own impressively beside the considerable Broadway veterans around them. Church has the particularly difficult assignment of making Claire credible despite the astonishing amount of narrative baggage Browne has placed on the character, while Layne gives the younger Claire an affecting presence. Justin Lee Miller rounds out the company in the roles of a doctor and police officer, and Glenn Steven Allen gives substance to the father Rock has turned into something larger than the man himself.

Viertel’s direction, however, compounds the play’s problems rather than clarifying them. This is a small theatre, yet the production does not consistently reach the back of the room. More importantly, the staging needs to help us navigate Browne’s many competing ideas, distinguishing the essential from the incidental. Instead, too much arrives with equal dramatic importance, leaving the audience to sort through an already overcrowded narrative.

At approximately 90 minutes, Safe House shouldn’t feel long. It does. Not because there isn’t enough happening, but because there is far too much. The play doesn’t need another idea. It needs the courage to surrender several of them.

Browne has something here, particularly in the contradiction embedded in her title. Rock believes he can build safety. Slipper believes devotion can preserve a marriage. Ashley believes responsibility can hold a family together. Claire has gone searching elsewhere for whatever she could not find at home. Every one of them is trying, in a different way, to create security. Yet this house has never really been safe.

That is where Safe House becomes most interesting. Strip away some of the political catastrophe, the accumulating revelations and the sheer abundance of issues, and underneath is a painful story about a family desperately preparing itself for a war outside while failing to acknowledge the one that has been raging inside for years.

Safe House: Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd Street, through September 13.

There are performers who make you wonder how they did it. Then there are performers who make you stop caring how they did it because you’re having far too much fun watching them do it. Suhani Shah belongs firmly in the second category.

Her Spellbound, now finishing its limited New York engagement at SoHo Playhouse, left me with two questions: Why is this woman not playing a much larger venue, and how is she not already a household name in America and beyond?

Shah certainly isn’t unknown elsewhere. She has performed more than 5,000 shows across 20 countries, amassed more than 10 million followers across social media, and brought Spellbound to sold-out audiences across India, the UK, Australia and beyond. In 2025, she received FISM’s Award for Best Magic Creator, becoming the first Indian to receive the honor. Yet this extraordinary performer has arrived in New York for a relatively intimate run at SoHo Playhouse, where Spellbound plays only through September 6.

New York, pay attention. Shah doesn’t need spectacle. There are no massive contraptions, disappearing elephants or Las Vegas machinery attempting to convince us that something impossible just happened. Her material is human beings. She watches, listens, plays, calculates—or does something I am still not entirely prepared to explain—and somehow appears to get inside people’s minds. More importantly, she is completely adorable.

That matters more than it sounds. Mentalism can become chilly very quickly. There is something inherently intimidating about a performer standing in front of an audience essentially saying, I know something you haven’t told me. Shah removes that barrier with humor, warmth and an extraordinary natural likability. She has that elusive quality the entertainment industry spends fortunes trying to manufacture: the “it” factor. You want to watch her before she has done anything astonishing.

Then she starts doing astonishing things. Spellbound is built around audience participation, with Shah pulling seemingly random information from the people sitting in front of her. The audience isn’t decoration; it becomes her material. Numbers are chosen, thoughts are formed, decisions appear spontaneous, and Shah keeps pulling information out of the room that she simply shouldn’t possess.

Then comes the piece that floored me. Early in the evening, Shah borrows a twenty-dollar bill from an audience member. Remember that bill. You won’t understand its importance until much later. Another audience member receives what appears to be a certificate naming them the evening’s “Best Audience Member.” Someone is brought onstage, and that person and four others supply random numbers. Nothing about the sequence seems particularly consequential at the time. It is simply another piece of Shah’s very clever game with the audience. Until the end.

The certificate isn’t what we thought it was. It contains the total of those randomly supplied numbers. That twenty-dollar bill returns. Its serial number corresponds to the same number. I was spellbound.

But something more interesting happened to me during Spellbound. Shah convinced me so completely of her ability that I began wanting more than the show was designed to give me.

The material in Spellbound is wonderfully calibrated for a broad audience. It is funny, accessible, surprising and enormously people-pleasing. People gasp. They laugh. They stare at each other trying to work out what the hell just happened. Shah understands exactly how to construct an evening that sends an audience home delighted.

I wanted her to go deeper. I wanted to know what happens when Suhani Shah stops asking for numbers and begins asking the questions we don’t know how to answer. I wanted to see what she perceives beneath the easily accessible layers of a person. I wanted the psychological, intuitive, even psychic possibilities of what she does explored much further.

That is admittedly asking Shah to perform a rather different show—and quite possibly one that a general audience wouldn’t want to experience. I am the person who wants to know what is underneath the underneath. Give me the trick and I’m delighted. Convince me that you can actually perceive something I cannot, and I immediately want to know what that ability says about consciousness, intuition and the human mind. Shah made me believe there is considerably more there.

Whether what she does is mentalism, extraordinary observation, psychology, intuition, technique, something genuinely psychic, or some combination Shah is far too clever to reveal. What I can say is that sitting in the theatre, she made it feel absolutely real. That is ultimately the mentalist’s greatest trick or is it a trick?

The title Spellbound turns out to be unusually accurate. Suhani Shah is warm, funny, astonishingly accomplished and enormously charismatic. More than that, she feels like a performer who has not yet reached the size of American stage she belongs on. SoHo Playhouse may be where New York is discovering her. I have a strong suspicion it won’t be where New York ultimately keeps her.

By the way, T2C isn’t finished with her yet. Check out Live From The Hotel Edison Times Square Chronicles Presents, where Suhani Shah will join us for our next podcast. After watching her read an audience, I have an infinite amount of  questions of my own that I can not wait to address.

Do not miss Spellbound. It plays at the SoHo Playhouse through September 6th, so you have two more performances to catch her. Information and tickets are available through SoHo Playhouse, with Shah’s future international dates available at Suhani Shah’s official site.

This is not a show to miss.

Before Rachel Zegler returns to Broadway as Eva Perón, she is making a considerably less formal stop in Cuba.

The Olivier and Golden Globe Award winner will host the next “dance-along” performance of the Tony and Grammy-winning Buena Vista Social Club on Tuesday, September 29 at 7 p.m., continuing what has quietly become one of Broadway’s most joyful traditions.

For one performance, the usual Broadway commandment—sit down and behave yourself—gets loosened considerably. Audience members are invited to dance from their seats whenever the music takes over, whether that means swaying, shaking a shoulder or surrendering completely to the rhythms that have made Buena Vista Social Club such an exhilarating night in the theatre.

There are rules. This is Broadway, after all. Patrons are asked to dance responsibly and return to their seats between songs so everyone can see and enjoy the performance. But within those boundaries, the evening turns the theatre into something closer to a communal celebration than a conventional Broadway musical.

Zegler follows a rather spectacular trio of previous hosts. Lin-Manuel Miranda launched the dance-along series in March, John Leguizamo took over in May, and Lupita Nyong’o hosted the most recent edition this summer. Each performance sold out, making a fourth installment almost inevitable. Zegler is an especially delicious choice.

She will return to Broadway next year in Jamie Lloyd’s acclaimed production of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita, reprising the Eva Perón performance that earned her the Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical. The production begins previews February 27, 2027, at the Winter Garden Theatre and officially opens March 25.

The London production became a phenomenon, with Zegler’s “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” spilling beyond the walls of the London Palladium as she performed the number from the theatre’s exterior balcony. That particular staging will not be recreated in New York; director Jamie Lloyd has said he is developing a new idea specifically for Broadway.

September 29th is a rather wonderful Broadway appetizer. Before the balcony, before the Winter Garden, before the diamonds and the ambition of Eva Perón, Rachel Zegler will be at Buena Vista Social Club, where the assignment is considerably simpler: Feel the music…..and dance.

Tickets for this special Dance-Along performance, as well as all regularly scheduled performances, are available at buenavistasocialclub.com

Broadway is heading into fall with casting news, long-awaited arrivals and one New York tradition celebrating a milestone of its own. Krysta Rodriguez is joining A Few Good Men, Galileo has added some formidable Broadway talent, The Fantasticks has finally assembled the company that will bring the legendary musical to Broadway, and the Broadway Flea Market & Grand Auction is turning 40. Off-Broadway, a new musical takes on the complicated world of teenage mental health, while out of town Signature Theatre offers a fresh look at Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along.

The Broadway production of Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men continues to assemble an impressive company around the previously announced Bradley Whitford, who will play Col. Nathan R. Jessep, and Tom Blyth as Lt. Daniel Kaffee.

Rehearsal photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Joining them are Krysta Rodriguez, Stephanie Berry, Nick Blaemire, Michael Braugher, Christopher Gurr, Billy Eugene Jones, Collin Kelly-Sordelet, Shunté Lofton, Michael Oberholtzer, Lavel Schley, Thom Sesma, Daniel Velez and John Zdrojeski. Brendan Evan Behm, Alex Ekker, Drew Elhamalawy, Miles Fowler, Quentin Nguyen-duy and Stephen Michael Spencer complete the company as Marine and military personnel.

Rodriguez is an especially welcome addition. From Spring Awakening and The Addams Family to First Date and Into the Woods, she has repeatedly proved herself an actress capable of bringing intelligence and individuality to roles that could easily disappear in lesser hands. Pairing her with Whitford and Blyth makes this revival increasingly interesting.

Broadway’s upcoming musical Galileo has added Javier Muñoz, Bradley Dean and Jordon Lee Garcia, who will make his Broadway debut, to the company led by Raúl Esparza, Jeremy Kushnier and Joy Woods.

There is also an intriguing development in the title role. Michael Park will alternate with Esparza as Galileo at select performances. Park brings considerable stage credentials of his own, alongside his television work in Stranger Things, making this far more than conventional understudy casting.

With Esparza at its center and Muñoz, Dean and Park now joining the company, Galileo is quietly assembling the kind of cast that makes a new musical worth watching closely.

One of the theatre community’s most beloved annual rituals returns on Sunday, September 27, when the Broadway Flea Market & Grand Auction celebrates its 40th anniversary.

Produced by and benefiting Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, the sprawling outdoor event will once again take over West 44th and West 45th Streets, Shubert Alley and Times Square from 10 a.m. until 7 p.m., with the live auction beginning at 5 p.m.For Broadway fans, the Flea Market remains something wonderfully peculiar to New York: part treasure hunt, part reunion, part theatrical yard sale and part fundraiser. Forty years later, it is still one of the rare places where a piece of Broadway history might be sitting on a table waiting for someone to discover it.

It seems almost impossible. The Fantasticks is the longest-running musical in history, yet it has never actually played Broadway. That changes this fall.

Second Stage Theater has announced the complete company for the Broadway premiere, directed and choreographed by Tony Award winner Christopher Gattelli. Zane Phillips, making his Broadway debut, will play El Gallo, joined by Maxim Chlumecky as Matt, Nathan Levy as Lewis, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer as Mildred Hucklebee, Ruthie Ann Miles as Bessie Mae Bellomy, David Patrick Kelly as Henry, Kevin del Aguila as Mortimer and Ahmad Simmons as The Mute.

The new interpretation makes a significant change to the familiar story, centering two boys and their two mothers, while retaining Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s tale of young love, parental interference, separation and reconciliation.

With its book and lyrics by Tom Jones and music by Harvey Schmidt, The Fantasticks has spent decades living just outside Broadway mythology while becoming one of the most enduring musicals ever written. Its score gave us “Try to Remember,” “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” and “They Were You,” songs that long ago escaped the boundaries of the original production.

Previews begin October 22 at the Hayes Theater, with opening night set for November 16. The engagement is scheduled for 15 weeks.

After all these years, The Fantasticks is finally moving a few blocks uptown.

KOTA Productions will present the world premiere of Sound Mind from September 17–20 at Urban Stages, timed to Suicide Prevention Awareness Month.

Featuring music and lyrics by Ray Andersen, known to younger audiences as mr. RAY, and a book and lyrics by Sheryl Berk, the musical follows a group of teenagers inside an inpatient mental health facility. Over 12 weeks, the characters confront depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, social phobia and other struggles while music becomes another language for experiences they have difficulty expressing.

Andersen’s score blends pop, hip-hop and rock with ballads, while the project itself grew from his experience watching a close family member spend time in a similar treatment facility. Andersen also has an unusual musical résumé, having performed with artists including Meat Loaf, Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi before building a career creating music for children.

An original cast album is scheduled for release in October.

There is always a danger when theatre tackles subjects this delicate that message overwhelms character. Sound Mind is attempting something more difficult: allowing teenagers to speak from inside those experiences rather than reducing them to diagnoses. That distinction will ultimately determine whether the musical succeeds.

Signature Theatre has released its first look at its new production of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along, returning the musical to the Signature stage after a 20-year absence.

Jason Gotay, Jake Loewenthal and Melanie Field lead the company, with Matthew Gardiner directing and Jonathan Tunick’s orchestrations accompanying one of Sondheim’s most fascinating scores.

Told backward across 20 years, Merrily begins with friendships damaged by success, compromise and disappointment, then gradually strips away the cynicism until we finally meet the hopeful young people those adults once were. That reverse structure remains the show’s great cruelty: we already know what these people will lose while watching them discover everything they believe they are going to have.

The company also includes Kerstin Anderson as Beth Spencer, Maria Rizzo as Gussie Carnegie, James Whalen as Joe Josephson and Neal Gaensehals as Frank Jr., with an ensemble featuring Joel Ashur, Ben Beckley, Lindsay Nicole Chambers, Eric Easter, Jonah Ho’okano, Stephen Russell Murray, Beatrice Owens, Sarah Anne Sillers and Alondra Trinidad-Colon.

Its score contains “Good Thing Going,” “Not a Day Goes By” and, of course, “Our Time”—a song whose optimism becomes more devastating precisely because we know what happens next.

Between major Broadway castings, an Off-Broadway classic finally crossing onto Broadway, a 40-year theatre tradition and Sondheim once again asking us to look at who we were before life intervened, September is beginning to look very much like New York theatre has returned from summer vacation.

Broadway will go dark for a moment on Tuesday, September 8 at 6:45 p.m., when the marquees of all 41 Broadway theatres dim simultaneously in memory of 13 artists and industry figures whose work helped shape the theatre—and, in several cases, American culture far beyond it.

The September Broadway in Memoriam tribute will honor Tim Curry, Clive Davis, Gina Ferrall, Josh Grisetti, Jeff Hamlin, Glen Hansard, Louise Lasser, Anna Louizos, Seth Marquette, Dolly Parton, Anne Russell, James Walsh and Harold Wheeler.

There is something particularly moving about the Broadway tradition of dimming the lights. Theatre is built on illumination—the marquee, the footlights, the spotlight—and so Broadway marks loss by taking that light away. For a few moments, Times Square becomes noticeably darker, acknowledging that someone who contributed to its brilliance is no longer here.

This September’s list crosses nearly every corner of the industry. Tim Curry, forever associated with his indelible Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show, was also a three-time Tony Award nominee whose Broadway career included Amadeus, My Favorite Year and Spamalot. Dolly Parton, whose songs, personality and unmistakable generosity made her one of America’s most beloved entertainers, also left her mark on Broadway through 9 to 5: The Musical and the theatrical projects that followed.

Clive Davis, Nancy Pelosi

Clive Davis, one of the towering figures of the recording industry, spent decades influencing the music that ultimately found its way onto stages as well as records. Glen Hansard, whose music helped give Once its singular heartbeat, became part of Broadway history when the intimate musical defied conventional Broadway expectations and captured the 2012 Tony Award for Best Musical.

Broadway will also remember the extraordinary orchestrator, composer, conductor and musical director Harold Wheeler, whose career stretched across decades and included work on The Wiz, Dreamgirls, The Full Monty, Hairspray and countless other productions. Wheeler’s contribution was often the kind audiences feel without necessarily knowing whose hand created it—the musical architecture beneath some of Broadway’s most memorable nights.

Anna Louizos and Ken Billington in The Producers Exhibit Photo credit Rebecca J Michelson

Theatre designer Anna Louizos gave physical form to stories through a career that included scenic and costume work and multiple Tony nominations.

Louise Lasser Photo Magda Katz

Louise Lasser, best known to much of America through television and film, also had roots on the New York stage. Gina Ferrall, Jeff Hamlin, Seth Marquette, Anne Russell and James Walsh will likewise be remembered for lives and careers connected to the Broadway community.

Josh Grisetti

For T2C, the inclusion of Josh Grisetti carries particular weight. Grisetti, who died at only 44, possessed the kind of talent that made an audience look twice: an actor with comic precision, musical intelligence and an individuality that could not be manufactured. His work ranged from the stage to television and film, but those who saw him in the theatre understood exactly what Broadway has lost.

The September ceremony is part of the relatively new Broadway in Memoriam initiative, established last year to create a more consistent and inclusive way of honoring members of the theatrical community. Rather than allowing recognition to depend upon sporadic individual marquee dimmings, the quarterly tradition gathers multiple members of the Broadway family into a shared remembrance.

The ceremony now takes place four times annually, on the second Tuesday of September, December, March and June, with all 41 Broadway theatres participating simultaneously. The committee can also designate a separate dimming for an individual whose contribution to Broadway is considered profoundly significant.

Members of the Broadway community may submit creative professionals who have worked on Broadway, as well as career professionals who devoted their lives to the industry, for future consideration. The next submission deadline is November 17, for the December 8, 2026 dimming. Information and submissions are available through Broadway in Memoriam.

Broadway is an unusual place. Shows disappear. Sets are struck. Costumes are packed away. Dressing rooms are emptied and another name eventually goes above the theatre door. An industry devoted to creating moments that vanish every night has always had a complicated relationship with permanence.

That is why September 8 matters.

At 6:45 p.m., Broadway will briefly extinguish the lights that ordinarily announce who is playing, what is opening and what audiences should see next.

For that moment, the darkness will say something else entirely:

We remember who was here.