Photo: Jenny Anderson

Not surprising, one night with the original Broadway revival cast of Falsettos was never going to be enough. The 10th Anniversary Reunion Concert of William Finn and James Lapine’s beloved musical sold out Carnegie Hall in a remarkable 90 minutes, and now a second performance has been added for Monday, November 2 at 7 p.m. at Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage.

And yes, the gang really is all coming back.

Tony Award winners Stephanie J. Block, Christian Borle and Brandon Uranowitz, Tony nominees Andrew Rannells and Betsy Wolfe, and Emmy nominee Tracie Thoms will reunite to reprise the roles they played in Lincoln Center Theater’s acclaimed 2016 Broadway revival. Anthony Rosenthal, the production’s original Jason, will also make a special guest appearance.

The originally announced October 18 concert was intended to be a one-night-only event. Broadway audiences apparently had other ideas. Once tickets disappeared almost immediately, “one night only” became considerably more negotiable.

There is another lovely full-circle element to the reunion. Tony-nominated director and choreographer Ellenore Scott, who served as assistant choreographer on the 2016 revival, will return a decade later—this time as director of both Carnegie Hall performances.

“Ten years ago, I had the gift of watching these brilliant actors work, and helped bring this beautiful show to life on Broadway as an assistant choreographer,” Scott said, describing the company as having since become dear friends and her return as director as “the most beautiful full-circle moment.”

Vadim Feichtner also returns as Music Director and Conductor, leading a band that will include most of the revival’s original musicians, while Cory Pattak will design the lighting.

The reunion carries particular poignancy following the death of composer and co-creator William Finn in 2025. Falsettoshas always possessed that rare ability to be screamingly funny until suddenly it isn’t. Beneath the neurotic family dynamics, sex, jealousy, baseball, Judaism and glorious messiness lies a story about love confronting mortality—and about the families we inherit, create, fracture and somehow continue to love.

The musical grew from Finn and Lapine’s one-act works March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland, eventually becoming Falsettos, which opened on Broadway in 1992. Set against the emergence of the AIDS crisis, it centers on Marvin, his former wife Trina, their son Jason, Marvin’s lover Whizzer, psychiatrist Mendel and the wonderfully described “lesbians from next door,” Dr. Charlotte and Cordelia.

Lincoln Center Theater brought the musical back to Broadway in 2016 under Lapine’s direction, opening at the Walter Kerr Theatre on October 27. The revival received five Tony Award nominations and was subsequently filmed for PBS’s Live From Lincoln Center, allowing a production with a relatively limited Broadway run to find an audience far beyond West 48th Street.

Ten years later, that audience clearly hasn’t gone anywhere. There is something particularly fitting about Falsettos returning through a reunion rather than a conventional revival. This is, after all, a musical obsessed with the complicated meaning of family. Bringing these particular actors and musicians back together isn’t simply nostalgia; their chemistry became part of what audiences loved about the 2016 production.

Both Carnegie Hall performances will benefit The BroadwayEveryDay Foundation and Family Equality, adding another layer of purpose to an evening already steeped in memory, love and chosen family.

Tickets for the newly added November 2 performance go on sale to the general public Wednesday, August 26 at 11 a.m. ET through Carnegie Hall, by phone at (212) 247-7800, and at the Carnegie Hall Box Office at 57th Street and Seventh Avenue.

Considering what happened the first time around, anyone planning to attend might not want to spend 11 a.m. leisurely contemplating the decision.

Apparently, Falsettos fans move fast.

For four decades, Ken Fallin has been looking at famous faces and seeing what the rest of us miss.

Joan Crawford

A few strokes of ink become a raised eyebrow. A slightly exaggerated jaw becomes an entire personality. A familiar silhouette suddenly tells you everything you need to know about the person inhabiting it. That is the peculiar magic of caricature when it is done brilliantly: exaggeration somehow produces something closer to truth.

Alfred Hitchcock’s website

This fall, Fallin celebrates that remarkable career on two fronts. On Wednesday, October 7, from 5 to 7 p.m., New World Stages will host the opening reception for an exhibition of his work, offering audiences an opportunity to see the drawings beyond the pages and screens where so many first encountered them.

Gregory Peck

At the same time, Fallin is assembling a self-published book featuring selected drawings from his 40 years as an illustrator and caricaturist—and for those who think they know his work primarily through Broadway, the collection may contain a few surprises.

Ethel Merman in London

Because Ken Fallin’s world has always been considerably larger than the theatre district.

Karl Lagerfeld

The proposed book reaches through an astonishing range of subjects and assignments: actors and filmmakers, politicians and journalists, fashion royalty including Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent, architect Jean Nouvel, and hundreds of figures drawn during Fallin’s long association with The Wall Street Journal. Taken together, the images become something more interesting than a conventional career retrospective. They are a visual record of the people who shaped several decades of American culture.

Fallin’s first major break came in 1983 when he began creating the posters and advertising artwork for Gerard Alessandrini’s deliciously wicked Forbidden Broadway. It proved an ideal marriage of artist and subject. Fallin’s ability to lovingly skewer a famous face mirrored exactly what Forbidden Broadway was doing musically to Broadway itself.

Andy Warhol

Those drawings eventually traveled far beyond Manhattan, with Fallin’s Forbidden Broadway artwork appearing as productions reached London, Tokyo and Sydney. His visual language became inseparable from the show: you could recognize Forbidden Broadway before reading its title.

Bassets

By 1987, The Boston Herald had commissioned Fallin to create a weekly celebrity caricature for its Sunday arts and entertainment section. But another chapter of his career would eventually introduce his work to an enormous national readership.

Jean Nouvel

For The Wall Street Journal, Fallin has illustrated roughly 500 notable figures, ranging from presidents to movie stars, cultural figures and newsmakers. His subjects have included Barack Obama and Paul Newman, as well as journalist Tim Russert, whom Fallin drew for Peggy Noonan’s memorial following Russert’s death.

Bernard-Henri Levy

That work reveals something particularly interesting about Fallin’s gift. Caricature can easily become cruelty. Fallin rarely needs cruelty. His drawings can certainly be wicked—and anyone who has followed his theatrical work knows that his pen possesses teeth—but underneath the exaggeration is observation.

Warren Buffett

He isn’t merely drawing what someone looks like. He is drawing what makes us recognize them.

Cole Porter

Sometimes it is posture. Sometimes hair. Sometimes the architecture of a face. Sometimes it is simply attitude. Fallin understands that likeness has surprisingly little to do with photographic accuracy. Capture the right three things about somebody and suddenly there they are.

DOVER Quartet

That ability made him equally valuable outside editorial illustration. His commercial clients have included American Express, HBO, Showtime, CNBC and Walt Disney Productions, while assignments have taken his distinctive line into national advertising campaigns and commissioned work far removed from Broadway.

Patti LuPone

LuPone Carnegie Hall

Then there are the subjects themselves.

Gloria Vanderbilt

Sunset Blvd. Gloria Swamson

Fashion designers. Architects. Movie stars. Presidents. Broadway legends. Journalists. Cultural eccentrics. Fallin has spent forty years quietly assembling an extraordinary paper cocktail party populated by people who, in many cases, would never otherwise have occupied the same room.

John Williams

The forthcoming book promises finally to invite us into that room.

Judge Douglas Ginsburg

What makes the project especially appealing is the possibility of seeing work that even longtime admirers may never have encountered. Editorial illustration is ephemeral by nature. A drawing appears beside an article, advertisement or review and then disappears into an archive. Decades later, an artist can discover that he has created an enormous visual history almost accidentally. Fallin has.

Lani Bell

While the mediums surrounding illustration have transformed dramatically during those forty years—from newspapers and print advertising to digital publishing and social media—the fundamental appeal of his work hasn’t changed. A Ken Fallin drawing remains unmistakably a Ken Fallin drawing.

Robert Glasper

That may be the greatest achievement of all. In an age increasingly dominated by photographic perfection, filters, digital manipulation and now artificial intelligence capable of manufacturing faces that never existed, there is something wonderfully human about the visible intelligence of a hand-drawn line. You can see the decision. You can see the joke. You can almost see the instant when Fallin looked at his subject and thought, Ah. That’s it.

Steve Jobs

The October exhibition at New World Stages brings that line back where so much of Fallin’s story began: the theatre.

Yves Saint Laurent

The book promises something larger.

Vivek Ramaswamy

It reminds us that Ken Fallin hasn’t simply been drawing Broadway for forty years. He has been drawing his time. And what a cast he has had.

Ken Fallin

Broadway is rarely accused of being inexpensive, which makes September one of the better times of the year to rediscover the Theatre District.

NYC Broadway Week returns September 8 through September 20, 2026, offering 2-for-1 tickets to 25 Broadway productions, from long-running blockbusters including Wicked, The Lion King and Chicago to some of the season’s newest arrivals.

The participating shows are & Juliet, Aladdin, The Book of Mormon, Buena Vista Social Club, Chicago, The Great Gatsby, Hadestown, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Just in Time, The Lion King, The Lost Boys, Maybe Happy Ending, MJ The Musical, Oh, Mary!, Operation Mincemeat, The Outsiders, Paranormal Activity, The Rocky Horror Show, Schmigadoon!, School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, SIX: The Musical, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, Titaníque, Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) and Wicked.

That’s an unusually broad menu, which creates another problem: What should you actually see?

T2C has some thoughts.

Buena Vista Social Club

This is the choice for anyone who wants to remember what live music can do inside a Broadway theatre. The Tony-winning musical turns the story behind the legendary Cuban album into something visceral, rhythmic and gloriously alive. The musicians aren’t accompaniment—they are the pulse of the evening—and when the music takes over, the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre practically changes temperature. If you have been waiting to see this one, a 2-for-1 offer removes the excuse.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Even people who couldn’t tell a Horcrux from a Hogwarts house can appreciate the sheer theatrical wizardry happening at the Lyric. Cursed Child remains one of Broadway’s great technical achievements because its illusions don’t feel like technology showing off; they feel like actual magic happening several feet in front of you. Broadway Week is particularly useful for the expensive spectacle shows, and this is precisely the kind of production where getting two seats for the price of one feels like you’ve performed a little magic yourself.

Just in Time

Jeremy Jordan playing Bobby Darin in a theatre transformed into a nightclub was already an irresistible proposition, and Jordan’s extraordinary ability to erase the boundary between performer and audience makes Just in Time considerably more than another jukebox musical. Circle in the Square becomes part concert, part nightclub and part biography. Go for Jordan, certainly, but stay for the terrific music and the intimacy of watching a star seemingly make an enormous Broadway theatre disappear.

The Lost Boys

One of Broadway’s newest offerings makes Broadway Week an excellent opportunity to find out how the beloved 1987 vampire film translates to the stage. With its mixture of teenage rebellion, rock music, danger, sexuality and supernatural mythology, The Lost Boys arrives with built-in nostalgia but has to create a theatrical identity of its own. For audiences who would rather use the discount to discover something new than revisit an established hit, this is one of the obvious choices.

Maybe Happy Ending

If you still haven’t seen Maybe Happy Ending, this is the one I would tell you not to miss. What sounds on paper like a peculiar little musical about obsolete robots becomes something exquisitely human—a meditation on love, loneliness, memory and what it means to know that something beautiful cannot last forever. It won the Tony for Best Musical for a reason. In a Broadway landscape increasingly dependent upon recognizable intellectual property and enormous spectacle, Maybe Happy Ending accomplishes something much harder: it makes you care deeply about two small beings sitting quietly in a room.

MJ The Musical

An oldie but a goodie. You may arrive for Michael Jackson’s catalogue, but the reason MJ continues to work is that it understands those songs require extraordinary performers to recreate the electricity surrounding them. The dancing is sensational, the production values are enormous, and the sheer number of songs embedded in the evening makes it one of Broadway’s most unabashed crowd-pleasers. If you want your Broadway Week ticket to deliver spectacle, choreography and a catalogue you already know by heart, MJ remains a strong bet.

Operation Mincemeat

Five actors, dozens of characters, one preposterous but true World War II operation—and one of the cleverest musicals to cross the Atlantic in years. Operation Mincemeat proves that imagination remains Broadway’s best special effect. It is fast, funny, deeply eccentric and then, when you least expect it, surprisingly moving. The show asks its actors to change characters at breathtaking speed while the audience races to keep up. Don’t worry. You will.

The Outsiders

There is a reason The Outsiders became a phenomenon. S.E. Hinton’s familiar story has been given a physical theatrical language that makes it feel immediate again, particularly in its extraordinary staging and choreography. The now-famous rumble sequence remains one of the most thrilling pieces of stagecraft on Broadway: bodies, rain, light, movement and violence collide until choreography becomes storytelling. This is theatre doing something a movie simply cannot reproduce.

Paranormal Activity

For people who like their Broadway with considerably more screaming, Paranormal Activity offers one of the season’s most intriguing propositions: can the stripped-down terror of the film franchise actually work in a Broadway theatre? Horror is notoriously difficult onstage because an audience can look wherever it wants—there is no camera controlling what we see. That makes the theatrical mechanics of frightening several hundred people simultaneously half the fun. Since I’m seeing this one Sunday, T2C will shortly have considerably more to say about whether it succeeds.

Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)

Sometimes charm is enough—provided you have the talent to pull it off. Two Strangers takes a wonderfully simple premise, two people thrown together while carrying a wedding cake across New York, and turns it into an intimate musical about connection, expectation and the strange things that happen when another human being unexpectedly enters your life. Against Broadway’s increasingly enormous productions, its relative smallness is part of its appeal. This is the choice for anyone who wants wit, romance and heart rather than another multimillion-dollar machine.

Broadway Week has always been marketed as an opportunity to save money, but the better way to use it is as permission to take a chance. See the show whose regular ticket price has made you hesitate. Take somebody who doesn’t normally go to Broadway. Try the strange little musical you’ve heard people arguing about. Or finally see the Tony winner everybody else seems to have gotten to before you.

Because two-for-one Broadway tickets don’t make Broadway cheap.

But in New York City, half-price magic is about as close as we’re likely to get.

A curtain call used to feel like the beginning of the end. Now, sometimes, it is only the beginning of a show’s second life. More and more, Broadway and UK productions are being filmed for movie theatres, creating a world where, suddenly, a production that once belonged to one particular stage can find an audience somewhere else. As a theatre junkie and critic, I find that possibility slightly unsettling at first, because theatre has always felt so tied to the live experience. But when I step back, it feels enormously exciting.

The National Theatre Live model has been doing this successfully for years, allowing productions from London, including the National Theatre, Almeida, and the West End, to reach audiences far beyond London. It has created its own kind of theatrical afterlife, where a production can close in one city and continue appearing at home for screenings or in cinemas elsewhere. Now Broadway is becoming part of that conversation in a very big way, with filmed stage productions finding their way into movie theatres across the country and beyond. And I love the idea of it.

Not because a filmed production replaces sitting in the theatre. It doesn’t. There is something about being in the room, surrounded by an audience experiencing a performance at exactly the same moment, that belongs specifically to live theatre. But a filmed version can preserve something that would otherwise exist only in memory. It can give a production another audience. It can give someone who never had the opportunity to see it live a chance to discover it in towns and cities far and wide. And, perhaps most excitingly, it can allow those of us who loved a show a chance to see it again.

The filmed live capture of Hadestown is already showing just how exciting this new theatrical afterlife can be. After exceeding expectations at the box office, the film has now grossed $18.2 million domestically after its second week in movie theatres. Its opening weekend brought in $10.2 million, edging past the opening weekend of the filmed Hamilton stage production, which grossed $10.1 million in 2025. The producers of Hadestown originally announced a five-night theatrical release, but demand, including repeat viewings, has prompted an extension that will keep the film in movie theatres indefinitely.

Repeat viewings, that might be my favourite part of this whole development. Theatre is usually so wonderfully, frustratingly ephemeral. You see it, you absorb it, you talk about it, and then you wait for the next show, hoping the next experience will be just as wonderful, or even better. A filmed version changes that relationship. Suddenly a production can become something you can return to, again and again. Ad infinitum.

Hadestown: The Musical was filmed during three performances at London’s Lyric Theatre, with Reeve Carney, Eva Noblezada, André De Shields, Amber Gray and Patrick Page returning to their roles. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival before its North American theatrical release on July 24. And the rest is theatrical history, as they say. I must admit that I love that a production that once lived inside a London theatre can now be experienced by audiences sitting in movie theatres across North America and beyond. And Hadestown, it seems, is only the beginning.

Six the Musical Live! arrived in movie theatres on August 14, captured live at London’s Vaudeville Theatre with the original London Six Queens. The idea of seeing this infectious musical on a cinema screen has me particularly intrigued because this is where my imagination starts running away with the possibilities.

I have this fantasy. It is about what a filmed Six could become. And something I have been fantasizing about for years, ever since seeing it on the Broadway stage, imagining a filmed version where each of those glorious numbers could become its own fully staged music video. I see the Queens in full-period costume, castles, English countryside, elaborate locations, intense choreography, sharp storytelling, and enormous cinematic images. Give me a little ‘Bridgerton‘ mixed with a fully formed Madonna or Lady Gaga music video. Keep the wit, the pop concert energy, the history, and the theatricality, but let the camera take the Queens somewhere the stage cannot. That is my dream Six movie project. Please, I beg you, someone develop that project too. Because I’ll be there. But, for now, I will happily take the live capture.

John Lithgow in Broadway’s Giant. Photo by Joan Marcus.

But in the real world, the filmed-theatre list is getting wonderfully crowded. There is also Giant, the four-time Tony-nominated and Olivier Award-winning play starring John Lithgow, which was filmed during its London premiere with the principal cast that just closed on Broadway. Fallen Angels, starring Rose Byrne and Kelli O’Hara, was also filmed live for distribution when it was at Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre during its Broadway run. Both are heading to cinemas worldwide.

The list continues to grow, albeit in different directions and different ways. Lin-Manuel Miranda is directing a film adaptation of Dave Malloy’s Octet, with a remarkable cast that includes Amanda Seyfried, Rachel Zegler, and Jonathan Groff. Richard Linklater’s Merrily We Roll Along continues its extraordinary 20-year filming process, while Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is also moving toward the screen, as Denzel Washington and Todd Black continue their project of bringing August Wilson’s plays to film.

And there are more projects announced for the future, including Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, Girl From the North Country, Guys and Dolls, Gypsy, Oliver!, Once on This Island and Sunset Boulevard. What form some of these projects will ultimately take remains to be seen, but the sheer number of titles suggests that this experiment in bringing theatre to screens is not slowing down.

Then there are the productions that have already been filmed and may eventually reach cinemas from places I could never have reached during their original engagements. I am particularly intrigued by the possibility of seeing Josh O’Connor in Golden Boy, filmed at London’s Almeida. That was a production I was genuinely sad to miss, and knowing that a filmed version exists gives the show another possibility beyond the theatre where it originally played. And now there is The Misanthrope, the National Theatre’s production starring Sandra Oh, which is the latest filmed capture and one I am particularly thrilled to get the chance to see. Suddenly, these aren’t just productions I wish I had been able to catch in London. They are productions I may actually get another chance to experience in all their theatrical glory.

This makes me reminisce about the productions I have already been lucky enough to see in London. I would happily sit down and rewatch the fabulous production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which I saw with friends during my May London Theatre Adventure at the National Theatre starring the powerhouse Lesley Manville. Not to mention the equally fabulous The Importance of Being Earnest that I saw in the West End last January. Years ago, because of NTLive, I was able to see the West End version of Angels in America at BAM Cinema before it transferred to Broadway, and what a treat that was. The pleasure of knowing that a production can be captured and preserved means that something I experienced once, in that particular room and at that particular moment, might someday be something I can experience twice, or even thrice, if I so desired.

It can begin in a rehearsal room, move onto a stage, travel to another city, become a filmed version and find another audience in another country. Someone can discover it months or years after the original production has closed. Someone else can watch it again because they absolutely loved it the first time. And a theatre fan sitting in a cinema far from London or Broadway can experience a production that once seemed impossible to get to.

And maybe that is the most exciting thing about theatre finding its way onto the big screen. The closing notice might have been posted, but the story does not necessarily have to stop there. A great production can be preserved, shared, revisited, and even reimagined, finding new audiences long after the curtain has come down in the original room. For me, a theatre junkie and critic, that feels like a pretty wonderful second act. And I’m applauding it happily.

In honor of the 30th Anniversary of Jonathan Larson’s rock musical, Rent, Bucks County Playhouse is marking the occasion with a new production directed and choreographed by Jennifer Weber. A two-time Tony Award nominee for & Juliet and KPOP, Ms. Weber has re-imagined the show in a highly visceral and choreographic way.

30 years ago Jonathan Larson wrote the Book, Music and Lyrics for this iconic show. First performances were Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop in 1993, moving to the Nederlander Theatre on Broadway in1996. Winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Musical, Rent ran for 12 years. Unfortunately, the author died tragically before the night of its first performance.

Sam Primack as Mark & the Cast of Rent Photo By Joan Marcus

Loosely based on the 1896 Opera La Boheme by Puccini, it follows the lives of a group of starving, young artists living in Lower Manhattan’s East Village struggling to survive during the height of the AIDS epidemic as they try to pursue their creative dreams.

It’s a testament to Larson’s writing and Weber’s interpretation that this production seems as fresh and as vibrant as if it were created today. The themes of love, loss and friendship that thread through the piece make it appealing and heartfelt.

Austin Turner as Roger & Alysia Velez as Mimi Photo By Joan Marcus

Suffice it to say that this large cast of young professionals are all uber talented.  Especially as is noted in the well executed chorus numbers of which there are many i.e.,  “Seasons of Love”, “La Vie Boheme” and “Rent”. Standout performances include (but not limited to) David Louis Merino as Angel Schunard for his sheer exuberance and expert dance technique, Sam Primack as Mark Cohen for his angelic voice and vitality as our guide through the groups’ trials and triumphs, Alysia Velez for making the role of Mimi Marquez sympathetic although the character does some highly questionable things. Veronica Otim shines as the level headed Joanne Jefferson and Austin Turner as the “ever struggling to find himself”, Roger Davis not only sings, acts and dances but also plays a rockin’ guitar.

(Apologies if it was one of the band’s guitarists and Austin was just faking it.  If it’s true it just proves he’s a good actor – because I couldn’t tell!)

Needless to say, putting the band onstage in this theater is always a wise choice.  And this five person band of 2 Guitars, 2 Keyboards, Bass & Drums rocks it out – which is half the fun.

Scenic Design by Tom Rogers depicts an artist’s colorful loft with large slanted windows and a neon sign reading “RENT”. At the same time that it feels full of life it also feels rundown and abandoned – the perfect mixture. Costumes by Nicole V. Moody, bring back memories of rummaging through downtown thrift shops and flea markets. You know a costume designer has hit the mark if it makes you actually want to wear the outfits she puts together.  And I did!

Last words:  You never saw the hand of the director which means that she did an amazing job.  The show ran effortlessly as if it were a ball of yarn rolling out all by itself.  However, I did notice the choreography – which was  surprising, innovative and exciting – no old hat moves here.  

If you like the show – run to this one.  If you’ve never seen the show – see this one!  For tickets visit BucksCountyPlayhouse.org or call the Box Office at (215) 82-2121.

Rent: Bucks County Playhouse, 70 S. Main Street, New Hope, PA  18938. Running now through September 13, 2026.

Book, Music and Lyrics by Jonathan Larson

Music Director – Alexander Tom

Directed and Choreographed by Jennifer Weber

Running now through September 13, 2026 at