David Roberts

Broadway Review: Second Stage’s “Marjorie Prime” at the Helen Hayes Theatre (Closed Sunday, February 8, 2026)

Where do our memories go when we die? Jordan Harrison’s “Marjorie Prime,” now receiving its Broadway premiere at the Helen Hayes Theatre, asks this question with stunning simplicity and devastating honesty. In Harrison’s near-future, holographic AI companions called “Primes” serve as repositories for family stories, programmed by the living to remember what we tell them—and only what we tell them….

Read More Buy Tickets

Broadway Review: “The Queen of Versailles” at the St. James Theatre (Closed Sunday, December 21, 2025)

In late 2025, as wealth inequality reaches historic levels and millions struggle with housing costs, “The Queen of Versailles” arrives on Broadway at the St. James Theatre to ask: wouldn’t it be fun to watch billionaires build a 90,000-square-foot mansion? The musical, based on Lauren Greenfield’s 2012 documentary about timeshare mogul David Siegel and his wife Jackie constructing their own…

Read More Buy Tickets

Off-Broadway Review: “Initiative” at the Public’s LuEsther Hall (Closed Sunday, December 7, 2025)

Most coming-of-age plays invite us to relate to individual characters as they navigate adolescent turmoil. We watch from outside, recognizing ourselves in their struggles. Else Went’s “Initiative,” receiving its world premiere at The Public Theater, does something far more ambitious and profound: it draws us inside the collective unconscious of seven teenagers coming to terms with trauma, sexuality, violence, and…

Read More Buy Tickets

Off-Broadway Review: “The Seat of Our Pants” at the Public’s Newman Theater (Closed Sunday, December 7, 2025)

Thornton Wilder wrote “The Skin of Our Teeth” in 1942 as the world burned. Ethan Lipton’s musical adaptation “The Seat of Our Pants,” now at the Public Theater, arrives as history repeats itself with eerie precision. The Announcer’s opening number catalogs our contemporary disasters—”We made it through the recession-pandemic-wildfire-oligarchy by the seat of our pants”—and suddenly Wilder’s absurdist chronicle of…

Read More Buy Tickets

Broadway Review: “Little Bear Ridge Road” at the Booth Theatre (Closed Sunday, December 21, 2025)

In Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road,” currently playing at the Booth Theatre, James, an astrophysics graduate student, explains to his boyfriend Ethan that the three stars forming Orion’s Belt look aligned from Earth but are actually separated by eight hundred light years. It’s a casually delivered bit of astronomy that becomes the play’s quiet revelation: perspective changes everything,…

Read More Buy Tickets

Off-Broadway: “Kyoto” at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater (Closed Sunday, November 30, 2025)

After garnering mostly rave reviews in London’s West End and Stratford-upon-Avon, “Kyoto” by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson is currently running Off-Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater. The play spans 1989-1997 and is narrated from the point of view of Don Pearlman (Stephen Kunken), an American oil lobbyist who works to sabotage UN climate negotiations. It’s framed as…

Read More Buy Tickets

Off-Broadway Review: “Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God” at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater (Closed Sunday, November 16, 2025)

Jen Tullock’s “Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God” has been hailed as a searing examination of how evangelical Christianity wounds its queer children. Critics have called it “the best solo show in years,” praising Tullock’s tour-de-force performance as she embodies multiple characters to tell the story of Frances Reinhardt, a writer whose memoir about growing up gay…

Read More Buy Tickets

Off-Broadway Review: “Oh Happy Day!” at the Public’s Martinson Hall (Closed Sunday, November 2, 2025)

Jordan E. Cooper’s “Oh Happy Day!” at The Public Theater promises to explore whether a queer man rejected and abused by the church can choose his own happiness on his own terms. It’s a radical question that deserves a radical answer. But Cooper delivers a morality tale about earning God’s love through forgiveness and obedience instead. His protagonist Keyshawn (played…

Read More Buy Tickets

Broadway Review: “Punch” at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre (Closed on Sunday, November 2, 2025))

“You always step in,” Jacob Dunne (Will Harrison) tells us from the stage of the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, explaining the code of the Meadows housing estate where loyalty means throwing fists without thinking. “Always. With a mate. No matter where, no matter what.” This philosophy—this toxic, tribal, inevitable logic—will cost James Hodgkinson his life in a single, unprovoked punch…

Read More Buy Tickets

Off-Broadway Review: “The Honey Trap” at Irish Repertory Theatre (Closed Sunday, November 23, 2025)

“You could be dead tomorrow,” young Dave (Daniel Marconi) tells his army buddy Bobby (Harrison Tipping) during a night out in 1979 Belfast, justifying their reckless behavior. “Live in the moment.” Thirty-five years later, after Bobby’s murder, that moment has become the only moment that matters—an endless present tense of guilt, rage, and impossible choices. Leo McGann’s “The Honey Trap,”…

Read More Buy Tickets