Eleven shows. Eleven days. Welcome to April’s theatrical marathon. What follows are compressed reviews – 300 words each, five shows per roundup – covering everything we’ve seen for Outer Critics Circle nominating and voting purposes. The format is leaner, but the critical standards remain unchanged: what works, what doesn’t, and why it matters.

“ATTICA! ATTICA!” Sonny Amato’s battle cry turned him into a 1972 folk hero – a Vietnam vet who robbed a Chase Manhattan Bank to pay for his trans wife’s surgery, then held the NYPD at bay for eight hours while Brooklyn cheered. Stephen Adly Guirgis’s stage adaptation promises to make that rage feel contemporary, that love story feel urgent. It doesn’t. What felt radical in Sidney Lumet’s 1975 film feels inadequate in 2026, when trans rights are being actively eroded, ICE operates with impunity, and LGBTQ Americans face existential threats from the current administration. We’ve lived through the AIDS crisis. We’re living through coordinated attacks on civil rights. Members of the LGBTQ community aren’t cartoon characters, and treating Sonny’s desperation as crowd-pleasing underdog theater misreads the political moment entirely. The stakes are higher now, not lower. Attica isn’t distant history – it’s prologue.

The production works technically. David Korins’s scenic design handles the August Wilson Theatre’s scale well, Isabella Byrd’s lighting captures power outages and helicopter chaos, and Cody Spencer’s sound design (gunfire, sirens) grounds the real-time urgency. Rupert Goold’s direction moves the action forward successfully, maintaining real-time tension across two acts. The acting is uniformly excellent – Jon Bernthal’s Sonny, Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Sal, strong ensemble work throughout. (The Ray-Ray character remains unnecessary, adding nothing.) But technical competence can’t solve the adaptation’s fundamental problem: Guirgis doesn’t carry the weight of the LGBTQ themes he’s inherited. The audience responded positively, seemingly missing the disconnect between 1975’s context and 2026’s dangers. That’s the tell. A play about queer survival that doesn’t reckon with how much more precarious that survival has become isn’t radical. It’s nostalgia.