From Upside Down to Twelfth Night
August 15th – 17th, 2025
Friday, August 15th
New York – Went to see Stranger Things: The First Shadow at the Marquis Theatre, having heard excellent things about the stagecraft and overall visual and aural design, despite having no knowledge of the Netflix series it is based on. Although the play was marketed as a prequel requiring no familiarity with the show, the audience was clearly thrilled to recognise characters and connect situations to the story they already knew. Nevertheless, the theatrical experience was indeed spectacular.
As a bonus, I watched the documentary Behind the Curtain: Stranger Things: The First Shadow, about the making of the play’s original London production.
Saturday, August 16th
New York – Attended a matinée of the relatively new musical Joy at the Laura Pels Theatre. The show, like the 2015 film of the same name, chronicles how entrepreneur Joy Mangano rose to success by inventing her “Miracle Mop,” followed by a number of other household innovations marketed through home-shopping channels in the 1990s. It originated at the George Street Playhouse in 2022 and was presumably aiming for Broadway, banking on Betsy Wolfe’s authoritative performance in the title role. But I doubt that gamble will pay off. The show is competently put together, yet predictable and monotonous, occasionally relying on cheap humour. Oddly, one of the climactic plot twists, though it happened in real life, felt laboured and unrealistic, suggesting that the scene could have benefited from a rewrite.
Between shows, I had time for three small exhibitions at MoMA:
Pirouettes : Turning Points in Design claimed to highlight iconic, world-changing design innovations, but ultimately settled for a predictable and slightly random selection of familiar objects (the Post-it Note, the Macintosh computer).
The Many Lives of the Nakagin Tower chronicled the fascinating story of Tokyo’s now-defunct modular building, whose capsule units were designed to be plugged in and substituted independently, potentially allowing countless evolving configurations. Sadly, its versatility was never realised, and it was ultimately demolished for lack of maintenance. The capsule concept somehow brought to mind the set of the musical Maybe Happy Ending.
Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography offered insights into the art of the press portrait, applied mostly to the glamorous movie stars of the past. The collective magnetism of those charismatic figures still leapt off the prints.
Finally, I made my way to the newly reopened Delacorte Theater for my first-ever experience of Shakespeare in the Park: a lively production of Twelfth Night. Saheem Ali’s sense of comic timing helped balance the play’s slightly haphazard nature (“If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction,” remarks Fabian in Act III). Nevertheless, the attempts at topical “relevance” felt laboured, and a vogue-inspired curtain call struck this theatregoer as unnecessary.
Sunday, August 17th
Flew to Washington, D.C., to attend a performance of Play On!, one of at least three musicals based on Twelfth Night, at Arlington’s Signature Theatre (my 44th visit there). Having missed its original 1997 Broadway run, I welcomed the opportunity to see what is essentially a vehicle for a sumptuous selection of Duke Ellington standards, tied together by a book that transposes Twelfth Night to the so-called Harlem Renaissance. As usual with Signature, the experience was polished and generous.
Flight back to Paris – Watched The Color Purple, Blitz Bazawule’s 2023 film adaptation of the 2005 Broadway musical (itself based on Alice Walker’s novel). The film’s bold directorial choices won me over, especially its embrace of theatricality: unlike some recent screen musicals, it never apologises for bursting into song.
And so, for now, the lights dim… until the next act.