Spring 2026 Broadway Review Roundup: Every Brilliant Thing, Giant, Dog Day Afternoon, and More

ChannelTim must keep up with the times, so I’ve joined TikTok! I am reviewing the New York spring theatre season over there, so go throw a follow my way. For those of you not on that app, I’ll be doing a couple of review roundups here. Below are the scripts for my videos. 

Every Brilliant Thing

Daniel Radcliffe returns to Broadway in Every Brilliant Thing, on the very stage where he last appeared, in the Tony-winning revival of Merrily We Roll Along. Whereas Merrily showcased his chemistry with his co-stars, this time around, Radcliffe’s the only credited actor on the stage, although he’s not entirely alone, as Every Brilliant Thing incorporates a good deal of audience participation. Now, I know a lot of you out there are weary of shows with audience participation, I know I am, but here I thought it was not awkward at all, and that wasn’t an easy task considering there are multiple scenes that require these audience members to play character and hit emotional beats. Especially successful in this regard were the scenes with the school counselor, although , perhaps it helped that on the night I saw the show, the counselor just happened to be played by the actress Ellen Harvey.  By its very nature, the show will feel different every night because every audience is different. 

The show was conceived by British playwright Duncan Macmillan, who co-directs this production with Jeremy Herron. Describing the subject matter, which concerns depression and suicide, might make the show seem like a bummer, but it is a credit to both Macmillan and Radcliffe that the evening remains funny and high-energy throughout. Although, those inclined to cry at emotionally-affecting art should be advised to bring their tissues.

 
My only hesitation in wholeheartedly recommending this show is that it is definitely a monologue, rather than a play. It runs less than 90 minutes long, and when it ended, I was left feeling disappointed there wasn’t more to it. It feels more like fringe festival fare than your typical broadway show, and, indeed, it originated at the Edinborough Fringe festival over a decade ago. Does the addition of a A-lister justify changing the venue to a Broadway theatre and charging Broadway prices? It certainly was among the more unique shows I’ve ever seen, and Daniel Radcliffe is a charming stage actor, whether he’s performing Becket, Sondheim, or this. 

I paid 179 dollars for my ticket and I sat in row E of the dress circle. Every Brilliant Thing is playing at the Hudson Theatre and is currently scheduled to run until May 24th, 2026.

Bigfoot! A New Musical

Comedy musicals can be hit or miss because the necessary emotional shifts that accompany the transition between scene and song can be ruinous to comedic momentum. The ones I find most effective are joke machines that don’t really bother with making you care about the characters or the stakes. I’m happy to say that Bigfoot! is a successful joke machine that also leaves you with a ton of affection for the characters. 

The premise is that in the 1980s, the citizens of a failing town called Muddirt blame the town’s problems on Bigfoot, whom they then try to hunt down. Of course, Bigfoot, who is played by Grey Henson, is actually a nice guy who wants to help the town. Henson is really funny in the role, and the whole cast is great. I’ll mention Crystal Lucas-Perry as Bigfoot’s mother and Alex Moffat as the Mayor of the town, who both have some great moments as well. The book is by Amber Ruffin and Kevin Sciretta, and the songs are by Ruffin and David Schmoll. 

Speaking of the music, the songs are all in the style of classic 80s music and they are really fun. The costumes are also terrific and very evocative of the 80s. If there isn’t really a particular reason for this show to be a period piece, I’m glad it was at least consistent through every element of the production. 

If not every joke was a winner, that only speaks to the high joke density of the show and there was always another joke right around the corner that did make me laugh. I don’t know if Bigfoot! does anything to further the art form of the musical in the 21st century, but it’s a nice and funny show and sometimes all you want from a night at the theatre is a nice and funny show. 

I paid 42 dollars for my ticket and sat in row L. Bigfoot! is playing at NY City Center Stage I until April 26th. 

Dog Day Afternoon

Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon is one of the most seminal movies of 1970s. Based on a real life bank robbery turned hostage crisis, the movie starred a never-better Al Pacino as Sonny, the bank robber who bonds with his hostages. An urgent, messy examination of the anxieties of ‘70s New York, the movie is the height of New Hollywood cinema. 

The stage adaptation, by Stephen Adly Guirgis, is the height of nothing. I know it’s not really fair to compare it to the movie, but it really does feel like the primary motivation for the existence of this production at all is to exploit the name of a famous movie for ticket sales. Now, you could say, the story of a criminal who wins over the masses has even more resonance in the era of Luigi Mangione, but I think that would be giving Guirgis too much credit. His adaptation doesn’t expand upon the sympathy for Sonny beyond what the movie shows us.  Where Guirgis does choose to expand the story is in the characters of the bank employees, who are like the cast of a bad sitcom. These characters are thinly drawn, mostly there for comedy, and, although there are attempts to deepen the characterizations, these detours just end up taking time away from the main focus of the story, which ostensibly is the robbers.  

The always reliable Jessica Hecht delivers what I’d argue is the only good performance in this show as the head teller Colleen. It’s a performance that is very much of a piece with what Guirgis and director Rupert Goold are trying to do with the bank employee characters in that she’s an easily recognizable archetype and she gets a lot of laughs, but Hecht is such an adept actor, she finds grace notes that are missing from her dialogue. 

I saw the show during the first couple of weeks of previews, so maybe I went too early, and the rest of the performances just needed time to coalesce. But the acting I saw was not especially nuanced, including by Jon Berthnal as Sonny, on whose star presence this show is being sold. He came alive during the famous Attica speech, but before and after that, his performance was weirdly subdued. This is another area where the anxiety and frenetic energy that the movie was just dripping in, is totally gone from this adaptation. Most disappointing, however, was Elon Moss-Bacharach as Sonny’s accomplice Sal. I’ve enjoyed him in other things, but so much of this story hinges on whether Sal is going to snap or not and what exactly he is capable of, and none of that tension comes across in his performance

The lack of tension is a consistent problem throughout the production, partly because of an over reliance on comedy in act one. When the comedy evaporates in the second act, it isn’t replaced by anything. This kind of material needs a level of suspense that the production just cannot muster.

I do want to praise the scenic design by David Korins, which takes us inside and outside of the bank and back again. The bank set does a lot of the heavy lifting at the beginning in making us feel like this is a real place. In the opening scene, the employees carry on various conversations with each other and the customers, and every single line is pitched at the same, loud volume whether it was meant to be a private conversation or not, it just killed any sense of verisimilitude. The music that is used occasionally between scenes was loud too, and the sound of a helicopter that enters the story toward the end was also unnecessarily super loud. That’s the main thought I was left with as I was exiting the theatre: that show was loud. I paid 70 dollars for my ticket and sat in row O of the mezzanine. Dog Day Afternoon is running at the August Wilson. 

Giant

Giant takes place over forty years ago, but the set up struck me as a common occurrence of today: a famous person says something controversial and the people around him attempt to do damage control. Throw in that the controversial remarks were made in opposition to Israeli bombing of Lebanon, and you have a play that feels eerily relevant to 2026. 

Mark’s Rosenblatt’s play, which arrives on Broadway following two sold-out runs in London, stars John Lightgow as Raold Dahl, the beloved author of children’s lit classics like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It’s 1983 and Dahl has just ignited public controversy by writing an anti-Israel book review that was interpreted as anti-Semitic in the press.  His publishers descend on his home in the English countryside in an attempt to get him to apologize so as to not the hurt the sales of his next book. 

Dahl, the giant of the play’s title, is not only a legend in his field but also an unmatched master of language, leaving those around, including his publishers, his staff, his fiancée, to debate him at their own risk. He mocks them, belittles them, confuses them. He also charms and empathizes with them. He’s a complicated man, and both the playwright and the actor revel in the contradiction. We see every side of him. Lithgow’s performance is an accomplishment. Although the play takes place entirely in one afternoon, with only hints at Dahl’s family life has been like, Lithgow makes so much more of Dahl’s history come across, just by the way he moves about the room. 

Although the Israel debate is is large part of this play, in the end, it’s not actually the political argument that motivates Dahl in Rosenblatt’s conception. It’s something in Dahl’s character. Here’s a man who is one of the most successful children’s authors ever but gripes about sharing royalties with his illustrator and being snubbed for a Knighthood. He feels backed into a corner by the other characters and lashes out as a result, when he actually backed himself into the corner and we see him have to work himself up into doubling down on his views. As a character, he’s fascinating and frustrating to watch. And as a play, Giant is thrilling. 

I sat in Row L of the orchestra. Giant is playing at the Music Box Theatre until June 28th.

The Wild Party

One never knows what he is going to get anymore when walking into an Encores! Production. High Spirits from earlier this season is a perfect example of what Encores! used to always be and is still occasionally - a forgotten Golden Age show that would probably never be revived on Broadway, dug up and done with a great cast, concert-style, script-binders firmly in hand. And then there’s Encores!’s latest show, The Wild Party, which could open on Broadway tomorrow for as polished a production it is. I don’t necessarily favor one approach over the other, but it was a welcome surprise to me that The Wild Party, as directed by Lili-Anne Brown, feels like a fully-realized vision of the show.

There are too many great performers in this show for me to name, so I’ll just shout out particularly the actors who play the hosts of the titular event, Jasmine Amy Rogers and Jordan Donica. Rogers plays almost a dark counterpart to Betty Boop, her breakout role from last year’s Broadway bomb, but here the material is so much more complex and layered, she really sinks her teeth into this character. And Donica, who I’ve been a fan of years because of incredible voice, here is playing a malevolent presence and he conveys this through a ferocious physicality that I’ve never seen from him before as a performer. The whole cast is really terrific.

First done on Broadway in 2000, The Wild Party is among the recently written musicals to get the Encores treatment, but you wouldn’t necessarily guess it based on Michael John LaChuisa’s score, which is steeped in 1920s style vaudeville and jazz-tinged music. 

Based on a book from 1928, it depicts a raucous evening of Jazz Age debauchery among a sprawling cast of characters. It’s presented in the style of vaudeville, at least in the beginning. That conceit kind of comes and goes, but the effect is immediately striking, and I’m sure for some people will be off-putting. The style puts distance between the story and the audiences. Deliberately so, it’s somewhat cold and alienating, but if it weren’t, I think it’d be too depressing. These are broken, desperate people, best viewed at a remove. 

To that point, luckily, I sat in the balcony, which if you’ve been there, you know far from the stage it is, but that is where their $28 Access tickets for folks under 40 are located, and that’s what I paid. The Wild Party was at NY City Center from March 18th-29th. 

Stay tuned for the next review roundup, where I’ll discuss Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Monte Christo, and more!