Almost every theatre fan has their own “underground” favorite: a show that they fell in love with through things like cast recordings, but have never had the opportunity to see in person; a show that makes a fan wish they had a time machine, just so they could go back and see their favorite show on stage. J2 Spotlight Musical Theater Company is looking to turn some of those dreams into reality. Every season, J2 presents short revivals of classic Broadway shows, most of which did not receive lengthy original runs in New York. The company gives audience members the opportunity to revisit these shows or, in some cases, see them for the first time while also utilizing emerging artists in New York City. Artistic director Robert Schneider said the idea to start J2 was born out of a conversation between him and executive producer Jim Jimirro, centered on their shared love of obscure musicals. 

This past August, the fall of Afghanistan was witnessed by people across the globe, many of us watching news coverage on our phone screens. We could hold those illuminating rectangles in the palm of our hand, watching horrors unfold. With one click, we could also make the horrors disappear. The conversion of refugees from living people to just pixels on a screen can impact how Afghan refugees are characterized in the news. During September of this year, one AP News report described “two tiny dots dropping from [a] plane,” at the Kabul airport. For journalists and storytellers, it’s an impossible task to narrate asylum seekers in real time. But weren’t those “two dots” real people? Doesn’t an abstract representation of an atrocity hide the reality of the people experiencing it?Studio Theatre’s new show Flight doesn’t resolve these questions as much as it dives deeper into them with immersive storytelling and incredible detail. Instead of running away from the small images that often dominate refugee news coverage, the show embraces them, creating countless dioramas of refugees in miniature. Flight proves that small images aren’t necessarily diminutive in their impact. In fact, the small images in Flight conjure a different sort of power, one uniquely theatrical and purposefully abstract. 

Our thoughts on why playwright Jeremy O. Harris needs to be on Big Brother, the hit CBS reality competition. Best known for Slave Play (and subsequently Zola and his appearance on season 2 of Emily in Paris), Jeremy O. Harris has become a household name for any theatre lover. What you may not know about him is his love of reality television. Recently O. Harris tweeted his “10 TV Shows to know me,” with Big Brother and Survivor both cracking the top 10 (great picks imo). After revealing this, he tweeted, “Listen @cbs I told @JeffProbst that unfortunately I could never hack it on Survivor…I would embarrass myself and the fandom… BUT I NEED TO BE ON BIG BROTHER. I could go the distance! I could be the Mike white of BB!” (For those who aren’t Survivor fans, Mike White is a well-known screenwriter and director (School of Rock, Nacho Libre, and White Lotus to name a few) who made it to the final 3 of Survivor: David vs. Goliath in 2018 and played amazingly.)

Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is a holiday season staple for many. But for Mark Shanahan, it’s much more than that—Shanahan headed five different Christmas Carol-inspired adaptations this holiday season. One of those shows is A Sherlock Carol, a new play written and directed by Shanahan, which will be playing at the New World Stages through Jan. 2. A sort of sequel to Dickens’s original story, A Sherlock Carol centers on Sherlock Holmes, who is called in to investigate the death of Ebenezer Scrooge by a grown-up Tiny Tim. “Along the way, as we mash up the world of Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters, we meet lots of different characters from the original Sherlock Holmes story and the original tale of A Christmas Carol,” Shanahan said. “It’s a fun mash-up.”