The Perils of Parenting: EUREKA DAY, ANNIE, and RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR — Review

Three shows dealing with parents – one on, one off-, and one off-off-Broadway – opened this past week. There’s no right way to bring up a child, or way of knowing how it’ll turn out.

Eureka Day - Manhattan Theatre Club at the Friedman Theatre

“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster” is advice playwrights looking to critique Millennial Liberalism would do well to heed, as evidenced by the two beasts to which Jonathan Spector’s 2018 comedy Eureka Day mostly loses in its bright and bubbly Broadway premiere.

The first monster it encounters is thematic. As with last season’s The Thanksgiving Play, which mocked a well-meaning elementary school drama teacher’s attempt to mount an even-handed history of the holiday, there are only so many laughs you can wring out of liberal cluelessness. Here, it’s the board members of a bougie California day school when faced with a mumps outbreak among its students. They’re the sort of people for whom things like “holding space” and “feeling seen” are paralyzing conundrums instead of useful frameworks in the fight for equity. The jokes at their expense start off strong but lose steam quickly, despite strong performances from a cast including Jessica Hecht and Thomas Middleditch.

The second is structural. About halfway through the play, the group hosts a live-streamed town hall to discuss options with the other parents, whose comments appear on a wall behind the cast (projected by David Bengali). The parents’ increasingly unhinged online behavior is wildly funny; Anna D. Shapiro’s staging receiving its biggest and most constant laughs as the audience waited for a new bubble to pop up. But though the onstage dialogue is largely irrelevant – they might as well be saying “rhubarb rhubarb,” I confirmed with the script later – I still felt I was robbed of a live experience. My mind also began to wander: How have parent-teacher relations shifted in the online age? Are parents acting out against educators, the way people might do anonymously on Twitter, and then still leaving their very real children in their care? Will we ever get a grip on our online actions?

It’s not that the play, which is set pre-Covid, fails to address this so much as it cannot bear its weight, and so bringing in that scene feels detrimental to both its experience and its message. I couldn’t bring myself to care much about the onstage antics after this, nor were any laughs fresher or louder. Parents will likely have greater laughs of recognition, but I found myself skimming over other tabs left open in my mind.

Annie - The Theater at Madison Square Garden

Whoopi Goldberg as Miss Hannigan! The beloved musical (book by Thomas Meehan, music and lyrics by Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin) is in fine shape in this touring production currently stationed at the gargantuan theater inside MSG. Though the space means the staging, directed by Jenn Thompson, must sacrifice some intimacy, Wilson Chin’s set and the to-the-rafters performances ensure the material gets its proper dues. (Ken Travis’ sound design, though, at least from where I was seated, amplified the orphans’ chorus to a level of shrillness I cannot recommend to the Uncle Jockos among us.)

Hazel Vogel is an unusually soulfully voiced Annie, who finds a sweet counterpart in Christopher Swan’s Daddy Warbucks and especially Julia Nicole Hunter’s sensational Grace. Savannah Fisher more than earned the applause she received throughout her terrific turn as Star-to-Be.

Despite underselling her own performance while promoting it on The View, Goldberg sang and sold her comic lines with much more gusto than I’d anticipated. She also offers a curious take on Hannigan, adopting a servile tone when speaking to those who held power over her character. It’s a curious (and, for a production otherwise unconcerned with matters of class and race, appropriate) choice that beefs up her involvement from stunt casting to star turn. If that View non-endorsement came from a place of shyness, then her performance here points at a promising future run of delightfully assured featured roles onstage.

Racecar Racecar Racecar – The Hearth at A.R.T./New York Theatres

A casualty of the Connelly Theatre shutting its doors to provocative plays, Kallan Dana’s reversible new play follows a daughter and father (Julia Greer and Bruce McKenzie) on a cross-country road trip from New York City to their native Sacramento. It’s a trip they’d done years before, and the play relishes in the palindromic: the two pass the time listing off examples and noting the things they’d experienced before that might be coming back to haunt them, like their at-times tense relationship to each other, and to alcohol. The reverse bits get increasingly more Lynchian, with backwards-playing music and surreal interactions with a ragged drifter (Ryan King), a pigtailed little girl (Camila Canó-Flaviá), and a Wendy’s employee named Wendy  (Jessica Frey, absolutely scene-stealing).

Brittany Vasta’s set is an enviable conversation pit around which characters walk and, against the upstage wall, cleverly flash lights through paper cutouts with city names (by Normandy Sherwood) to signpost the duo’s location. The road trip reaches an absurdist peak when Dana’s language leans hardest into word association to refract the daughter’s fractured mental state, which slowly reveals a more vulnerable core. The specificity of her trauma becomes a bit too confessionally therapeutic, bordering on therapy art, but Sarah Blush’s direction is brisk without undermining character or intention.

Eureka Day is in performance through January 19, 2025 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on West 47th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

Annie is in performance through January 5, 2025 at the Theater at Madison Square Garden at Pennsylvania Plaza in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

‍Racecar Racecar Racecar is in performance through December 22, 2024 at A.R.T./New York Theatres on West 53rd Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.