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.

There is something wonderfully disarming about watching a room full of adults surrender to magic. We know there is a method. We know nobody has actually violated the laws of physics. We watch carefully, determined to catch the move, the distraction, the moment when one thing becomes another. Then Jim Vines and Carl Mercurio do whatever it is they do, and suddenly the sophisticated grown-ups are staring at the stage with exactly the same expression as the five-year-olds.

That is the considerable charm of Broadway Magic Hour, playing select weekends at 2 p.m. at the Broadway Comedy Club on West 53rd Street. The show is promoted for ages five and older, and children are very much part of the proceedings, repeatedly invited onto the stage to become accomplices in the afternoon’s illusions. But calling this children’s entertainment undersells what Vines and Mercurio have created. The children may be the most visibly enchanted, but the adults are having just as much fun.

Vines and Mercurio conjure something rarer than illusion at the Broadway Comedy Club: they conjure shared joy.

Jim Vines

To watch Jim Vines perform sleight of hand is to witness a kind of visual lyricism. His dexterity is so refined that the technique seems to disappear, leaving only the impossible result. His credentials explain some of that assurance. Vines is a FISM North American Champion in Close-Up Magic, has performed in eleven countries and has appeared at Hollywood’s legendary Magic Castle. His appearance on Penn & Teller: Fool Us earned considerable praise from two men who make their living knowing precisely how magicians fool the rest of us.

Jim Vines

Knowing that Vines possesses formidable technique, however, doesn’t help you very much while watching him. I tried.

Magician before the show started

Card tricks give way to sleight-of-hand illusions. Objects vanish and reappear with bewildering nonchalance. Most of what Vines does looks deceptively simple, which may be the greatest compliment one can give a sleight-of-hand artist. There is no visible strain announcing, Pay attention, something difficult is happening. It simply happens. I watched his hands. I watched where I thought I wasn’t supposed to be watching. I knew perfectly well I was being manipulated. I still couldn’t tell you how he did it.

Carl Mercurio

Carl Mercurio brings a complementary energy to the partnership. A former corporate executive who traded the boardroom for the stage, Mercurio is both a skilled magician and a genuinely funny comedian. He regularly performs at venues including Mohegan Sun Casino, City Winery, Philadelphia’s Smoke & Mirrors Magic Theater and the Chicago Magic Lounge, and his ease with an audience is immediately apparent. Where Vines can mesmerize through the elegance of technique, Mercurio understands how comedy can lower an audience’s defenses just before the magic arrives.

Carl Mercurio, Jim Vines

The two styles play beautifully against one another. More importantly, neither man treats audience participation as filler between tricks. It becomes part of the architecture of the show. Children aren’t merely brought onto the stage to look adorable while a magician performs around them. They become essential to what happens, and because children haven’t yet perfected the adult art of politely pretending to be impressed, their reactions provide some of the afternoon’s greatest pleasures.

Jim Vines

At one point, a child flies. Yes…..flies. I’m perfectly aware there is an explanation for this. I don’t particularly want it.

Then there is the unfortunate father who volunteers and discovers that audience participation occasionally has financial consequences. A hundred-dollar bill becomes part of the trick and subsequently disappears, leaving its owner to contemplate the wisdom of volunteering at a magic show. What follows is a beautifully constructed little piece of theatre. The bill ultimately materializes in the least reasonable place imaginable: inside a kiwi fruit. The sequence has everything a good illusion needs—tension, comedy, escalating impossibility, surprise and finally release. The entire audience becomes invested in this poor man’s money, and when it returns, the relief belongs collectively to the room. Even if, as we joked afterward, he only seemed to get his ten dollars’ worth of emotional security back.

The show before it began

Other illusions expand beyond individual volunteers to encompass the entire audience. Card tricks become communal experiences, with dozens of people participating simultaneously, and the eventual results produce that delicious sound particular to good magic: laughter followed immediately by people turning toward one another and asking, “How did they do that?” That question is ultimately what Broadway Magic Hour understands.

Magic doesn’t require us to believe that something supernatural has occurred. In some ways, knowing that it hasn’t makes the experience more intriguing. Somewhere between what our eyes have witnessed and what our rational minds know must be possible lies a gap. A great magician lives inside that gap.

Vines and Mercurio also understand something increasingly rare in family entertainment: adults don’t have to be bored for children to have fun. There is no condescension here, no dividing line between entertainment for the children and material slipped in to keep their parents awake. Everyone is invited into the same experience.

For an hour, age becomes strangely irrelevant. The child is thrilled because something impossible just happened. The adult is thrilled because something impossible just happened and they cannot figure out how the hell it was done. That may actually give the adults the better afternoon.

Broadway Magic Hour plays the Broadway Comedy Club on West 53rd Street in Midtown West on select weekends at 2 p.m. The show is recommended for ages five and older, with tickets beginning at $25.

Bring the children, but don’t pretend you’re only going for them.

By Ken Fallin

There are performances that impress you, and then there are performances in which you can actually see an actor transform thought into flesh. Linda Purl’s extraordinary work in Sharon Scott Williams’ Crazy Mama: A True Story of Love and Madness, now receiving its Off-Broadway premiere at 59E59 Theaters, thanks to the Rubicon Theatre Company, belongs firmly in the latter category.

Linda Purl photo by Carol Rosegg

Linda Purl photo by Carol Rosegg

Purl plays 16 characters over the course of Williams’ deeply personal story, but calling what she does a display of versatility almost diminishes it. There are no cheap tricks here, no parade of funny voices announcing that another character has arrived. Purl creates through-lines. A transformation begins in her eyes, travels into her face and then seems to spiral through her entire body, stretching almost like taffy until another human being stands before us. The movement is continuous, organic and astonishingly precise. She is beyond brilliant.

Linda Purl photo by Carol Rosegg

Linda Purl photo by Carol Rosegg

Crazy Mama began as Williams’ own story, inspired by her award-winning memoirs about growing up with a mother suffering from severe mental illness. The play begins with eight-year-old Sharon racing home from school, determined to beat her teenage brother Spikey to the final slice of her birthday cake. Instead, she enters the kitchen and finds her mother holding a knife. Soon the sheriff arrives, Mama is taken away, and a child begins a decades-long attempt to understand—and somehow save—the woman she loves.

Linda Purl photo by Carol Rosegg

What follows could easily have become unbearable. Instead, Williams writes with a Southern lyricism that occasionally reminded me of Tennessee Williams—not because she imitates him, but because she understands how language can expand beyond ordinary speech when ordinary words are no longer large enough. Humor and horror live surprisingly close together. A phrase can be funny until suddenly it isn’t. Beauty can emerge from circumstances in which beauty has no apparent business existing.

Will Huse, Linda Purl photo by Carol Rosegg

The historical treatment of Mama’s illness makes the story particularly painful. Psychiatric care during much of the period depicted could be brutal: institutionalization, isolation and electroconvulsive therapy existed within a mental-health system very different from the one we know today. The production itself describes Mama as repeatedly committed to institutions while Sharon remains convinced that somehow, someday, she can bring her mother home.

Linda Purl photo by Carol Rosegg

Linda Purl, Anson Williams

Crazy Mama is ultimately less interested in diagnosing Mama than in asking what happens to the child who loves her. That is where the play becomes devastating. Children don’t stop loving a parent because that parent is ill. They don’t understand diagnostic terminology or treatment protocols. They understand that Mommy was here and now Mommy is gone. They understand promises, disappearances, fear and the desperate conviction that if they can only do the right thing, somehow everything can become normal again. Sharon carries that hope into adulthood.

Will Huse photo by Carol Rosegg

Will Huse, Sharon Scott Williams, Anson Williams, Patrick Duffy, Linda Purl, Ron Howard and Cheryl Howard

The remarkable thing about Williams’ story is where she eventually takes it. She could have written an indictment. She could have remained inside the anger of a childhood shaped by circumstances no child should have been expected to understand. Instead, Crazy Mama moves toward something considerably harder: redemption. Not denial. Not pretending the damage didn’t happen. Forgiveness.

Sharon Scott Williams, Anson Williams, Linda Purl,, Will Huse Photo by Carol Rosegg

Will Huse, Sharon Scott Williams, Anson Williams, Patrick Duffy, Linda Purl, Ron Howard and Cheryl Howard

By the time Mama finally dies, death becomes less an ending than a release from a mind that had imprisoned her for much of her life. Sharon, too, is released—not because the past disappears, but because she refuses to allow it to consume everything that comes afterward.

Will Huse, Sharon Scott Williams, Anson Williams, Linda Purl, Ron Howard and Cheryl Howard

That distinction gives the play enormous relevance at a moment when mental health dominates so much of our cultural conversation. The recent death of 27-year-old Presley Gerber has once again reminded us that money, beauty, access and an apparently privileged life tell us very little about what may be happening inside another human being. We still have enormous difficulty knowing what to do with suffering we cannot see.

Sharon Scott Williams, Anson Williams

Williams doesn’t offer an easy answer. She offers something better: the experience of what mental illness can do not only to the person experiencing it, but to everybody who loves that person.

Anson Williams, Ron Howard

Anson Williams directs with tremendous sensitivity. Best known to many as Potsie from Happy Days, Williams has spent decades directing television, and here he understands when to shape the evening and, more importantly, when to get out of Purl’s way. The production never turns Mama into a spectacle. Nor does it sentimentalize Sharon’s suffering.

Tim Abou-Nasr , Paige Carlyle Howard

Will Huse, as The Blues Man, provides another essential presence. His guitar and vocals become part of the emotional landscape rather than musical decoration, allowing the story to breathe between some of its most difficult passages. Williams also wrote the lyrics heard in the production, giving the music the same deeply personal DNA as the play itself.

Richard Thomas and Georgiana Bischoff

The technical elements remain deliberately spare. Brian Gale’s lighting and projections and Lindsay Jones’ sound design create the world around Purl without competing with her. That restraint is exactly right. When an actress can populate a stage with 16 people using little more than her body, voice and imagination, she doesn’t need scenery doing the work for her.

Sharon, Ken Fallin, Patrick Duffy and Stanley

Opening night also became something of a reunion of television and theatre royalty, with Patrick Duffy, Richard Thomas, Michele Lee and Ron Howard among those celebrating the company. Afterward, the evening continued at producer Jeffrey Grove’s apartment, where cast, creatives and guests gathered to toast a production that had clearly landed with considerable emotional force.

The reason to see Crazy Mama isn’t the opening-night glamour. It’s Linda Purl.

At two hours and five minutes including intermission, this is a substantial evening, yet Purl holds it with extraordinary command. Sixteen characters emerge from one actress, and never once does the performance feel like an acting exercise. Every transformation exists because Sharon remembers these people, because they mattered, and because each left something behind.

In lesser hands, Crazy Mama could have become either relentlessly bleak or insistently inspirational. Williams and Purl refuse both traps. Mental illness caused enormous damage to this family. Love did not magically cure it. A little girl could not rescue her mother simply by wanting badly enough to do so. But that little girl survived. She grew up. She wrote the story. And instead of handing the pain to the next generation, she transformed it into something filled with compassion, humor, forgiveness and hope.

That may be the greatest act of resilience in Crazy Mama.

And Linda Purl’s performance makes it unforgettable.

Crazy Mama: A True Story of Love and Madness: Produced by Rubicon Theatre Company at 59E59 Theaters through October 18th

There is an extraordinary play buried inside Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love. There may even be several of them. Unfortunately, at nearly three hours, Stoppard seems determined to give us all of them at once.

David Greenspan Photo by Paul Lutvak

The MAP Theater’s rare revival, now playing a brief engagement at Theaterlab, is beautifully acted, intelligently conceived and directed with considerable imagination by Zachary Elkind. At its center is the incomparable David Greenspan as A.E. Housman, the Victorian poet and classical scholar whose life was shaped as much by the love he could never openly express as by the scholarship he could. The production runs approximately two hours and 45 minutes, including intermission, through October 3.

David Greenspan, Annabel Capper Photo by Paul Lutvak

Stoppard begins at the end. Housman is dead, boarding Charon’s boat for his journey across the River Styx. Annabel Capper is excellent as Charon, and the boat becomes the central image of Elkind’s stylized production, carrying us backward and forward through Housman’s memories, intellectual obsessions and emotional failures. Theaterlab’s stark white space proves remarkably adaptable as past and present coexist without requiring elaborate theatrical machinery.

Annabel Capper Photo by Paul Lutvak

Greenspan is simply astonishing. Housman was a man possessed by language, and Greenspan has been handed a mountain of it. Dense, intricate, classical, academic, witty and frequently exhausting language pours out of him with such precision that he makes what must be an actor’s private circle of hell look effortless. Greenspan never appears to be reciting Stoppard. He appears to be thinking him.

Yaron Lotan Photo by Paul Lutvak

Yaron Lotan is terrific as the younger Housman, allowing us to see the man before reserve calcified into identity. Housman’s great emotional wound is his unrequited love for his Oxford schoolmate Moses Jackson, played with tremendous charisma by José Espinosa. Jackson possesses precisely the ease that Housman lacks. He is physical where Housman is cerebral, open where Housman is guarded, and alive in ways the older man will spend a lifetime remembering. Daniel Liu rounds out the youthful Oxford trio as Pollard.

Yaron Lotan, José Espinosa Photo by Paul Lutvak

The large ensemble is uniformly excellent, with many of the actors moving among several characters. Abrar Haque and Leland Fowler are particularly adept at making those shifts clear within a production that is constantly moving between people, periods and ideas.

Sam Bolen, David Greenspan Photo by Paul Lutvak

But the scenes that truly ignite belong to Oscar Wilde. Sam Bolen is thoroughly convincing as Wilde, Housman’s flamboyant contemporary, although the two men apparently never met. Wilde represents almost everything Housman could not permit himself to become: visible, audacious, sexual and defiantly public. Housman hid his love for Jackson inside himself; Wilde dared Victorian England to look directly at his. Wilde was prosecuted for gross indecency in 1895 and sentenced to two years of hard labor, the persecution Housman would later address obliquely in his poem “Oh Who Is That Young Sinner?”

David Greenspan, Sam Bolen Photo by Paul Lutvak

These scenes bring the play’s central conflict beautifully into focus. This is not merely a story about a man who loved another man who did not love him back. It is about what happens when intellect becomes both sanctuary and prison, when scholarship can explain nearly everything except the life one is afraid to live.

David Greenspan Photo by Paul Lutvak

Then Stoppard keeps talking. And talking. And talking. The classical scholarship begins to overwhelm the human being at the center of it. We plunge into Latin, textual criticism, Oxford intellectual rivalries, manuscript scholarship and academic disputes with an enthusiasm that may thrill classicists but increasingly distances us from the aching simplicity of Housman’s story. I understood what Stoppard was doing. That wasn’t my problem. My problem was that eventually I stopped caring.

Yaron Lotan, David Greenspan Photo by Paul Lutvak

There is a peculiar kind of theatrical excess in which intelligence begins working against itself. Stoppard is unquestionably brilliant, but brilliance still requires an editor. The Invention of Love repeatedly arrives at its emotional destination and then continues another intellectual lap around the track. At some point I found myself thinking: I would rather be stupid if this is what I have to listen to.

Sam Bolen, Leland Fowler, Spencer Lutvak Photo by Paul Lutvak

That is particularly frustrating because the essential story is so moving. A man loves someone who cannot return that love. He lives during an era in which expressing that love carries profound social and legal consequences. He retreats into scholarship. He grows old. He dies. And only then, aboard an imaginary boat traveling toward Hades, can he finally confront the life he didn’t allow himself to have. There is more than enough there.

Sam Bolen, Abrar Haque, Leland Fowler, Spencer Photo by Paul Lutvak

Elkind nevertheless directs the formidable material with confidence and theatrical imagination. He understands that a play this intellectually dense cannot afford to become visually static. Bridget Lindsay’s scenic design makes elegant use of Theaterlab’s intimacy, while Alyssa Korol’s period costumes help distinguish Stoppard’s crowded population of scholars, poets and public figures.

José Espinosa, Yaron Lotan Photo by Paul Lutvak

Most importantly, Elkind has assembled actors capable of making Stoppard’s language breathe. There isn’t a weak performance among them. This is one of those maddening theatrical evenings in which I admired virtually everyone responsible for putting the play onstage while desperately wishing someone had been permitted to take a red pencil to the playwright.

Yaron Lotan, Daniel Liu Photo by Paul Lutvak

Then there is Greenspan. Watching him navigate this enormous, dense text is worth the evening. He finds humor without begging for it, sorrow without sentimentalizing it and intelligence without showing us how intelligent he is. The words simply seem to belong to him. When Housman finally reaches the emotional core beneath all that scholarship, Greenspan lets us glimpse the terrible cost of a life spent knowing so much and saying so little. That is The Invention of Love at its best.

David Greenspan Photo by Paul Lutvak

I didn’t fail to understand Stoppard’s play. Stoppard’s play failed to make me continue caring about something I understood perfectly well. David Greenspan, however, never lost me.

Yaron Lotan, Annabel Capper Photo by Paul Lutvak

Considering the number of words standing between him and the finish line, that may be the evening’s greatest invention.

The Invention of Love: The MAP Theater at Theaterlab, 357 W 36th St. 3rd floor, until October 3rd