Get ready to Sell! Sell! Sell! The beloved film Trading Places will have its world-premiere musical at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta next spring directed by Tony Award winner Kenny Leon. Based off the 1983 film from Paramount Pictures, Trading Places is a contemporary reimagining of the prince and pauper fable. Billie Rae Valentine, a savvy hustler down on her luck, and Louis Winthorpe III, a minted commodities-trading firm director, have their lives deliberately switched by the devious Duke brothers to settle a petty bet in an outrageous debate of nature versus nurture. Trading Places is helmed by an exciting creative team including television and film writers Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, musical writing team Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner, acclaimed film, television, and music video choreographer Fatima Robinson, associate director Tinashe Kajese-Bolden.

We first see Walter reprimanding his students for being distracted in class. Soon enough, however, he realizes he is just as distracted with his own life. Walter, played admirably by David Hyde Pierce, is a widowed economic professor whose spark is in danger of going out. In The Visitor, a new musical based on the 2007 film of the same name which premiered at the Public Theater, he rekindles that flame thanks to the discovery of two strangers who have set up camp in his unused Manhattan apartment. With music and lyrics by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, and a book by Yorkey and Kwame Kwei-Armah, it is a story which attempts to bridge the gap between an established American and the two undocumented immigrants he finds. Whether it closes that same divide between its intentions and its results is a question the work seems to have left answered back during the film’s premiere. The Visitor is now in performance at the Public Theater through December 5, 2021.

Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord is an exuberant release of a show, a total joy to behold. Wong unfolds her tale of a ragtag group of quarantined volunteers who sewed thousands of masks with boundless, chaotic energy. But the show, which opened tonight at New York Theatre Workshop, also never loses sight of an essential fact: none of this should have been necessary. 

Winnie the Pooh is now in performance at the newly renamed Hundred Acre Wood Theatre at Theatre Row in New York City.