Joey Sims

4 days ago | theatrely.com | Joey Sims

Among the most delightful theatrical experiences of 2024 was Julia Randall’s dementedly funny play Little Miss Ransom. Staged in the subterranean Bushwick home of rising company Adult Film, Ransom tackled America’s ever-growing obsessions around true crime and conspiracy theory with a perverse wit. Randall’s mind is a dark one—indeed, Ransom ended, appropriately (and satisfyingly), on a note of gruesome brutality.

1 week ago | theatrely.com | Joey Sims

Right off the bat, Prince Faggot breaks the tension. Playwright Jordan Tannahill eases us into his fitfully intriguing, mostly frustrating new work by opening with a talking circle. Before the story begins for real, our six performers gather upstage as “themselves” (or some theatrical variant thereof) to unpack the provocative premise that has brought us here to Playwrights Horizons (who co-produce this world premiere with Soho Rep).

3 weeks ago | theatrely.com | Joey Sims

It began, as it so often does, with Spring Awakening. Taylor Trensch dropped out of college after his second year to join the Spring Awakening national tour as Moritz, launching a richly varied stage career of 16 years that has seen Trensch rack up credits regionally, off-Broadway and across eight Broadway shows—Matilda, Hello, Dolly! and To Kill A Mockingbird among them.

4 weeks ago | theatrely.com | Joey Sims

“Is y’all ready…” asks a demon-clown named Lemon Pepper Wings, freshly spawned in anime cosplayer-garb from an empty swimming pool, “...for a mutha fuckin SHOW?” At this point in the script for Bowl EP, a wild, near-unclassifiable new work debuting at Vineyard Theatre (co-producing with National Black Theater, in association with The New Group), writer/director Nazareth Hassan predicts that an off-Broadway crowd likely won’t give Lemon Pepper Wings the enthusiastic reply she/he/they are...

1 month ago | theatrely.com | Joey Sims

Senior Critic Joey Sims has been busy catching up on theatre around town. His latest roundup of productions:LOBSTERAmong the sharpest and wittiest plays I’ve seen all year, Kallan Dana’s Lobster is an exhilarating treat. The premise is wonderful: self-serious high school student Nora (Cricket Brown, severe funny), in mourning following a break-up, recruits three unsuspecting students for a guerrilla production of Sam Shepard & Patti Smith’s coke-fueled absurdist work Cowboy Mouth.