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.

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