IS O'NEILL FORGOTTEN? AND SIX OTHER RUMINATIONS ON THE EVER-REGENERATING GENRE OF THE MUSICAL

The hard part of having an aging legacy as a playwright is “being forgotten,” confesses Eugene O’Neill in the Goodman Theatre’s new musical Iceboy!, Or The Completely Untrue Story of How Eugene O’Neill Came to Write ‘The Iceman Cometh.’  The O’Neill character in the Goodman’s outlandish screwball comedy, played by TV’s Nick Offerman ("Parks and Recreation"), ought to know if he’s being forgotten. He begins each act with a survey of the audience: “How many of you have heard of me?” (The results are divided. The upper balcony has largely not heard of Eugene O’Neill; the main floor largely has.) “Boo yourselves if you’ve never heard of my play The Iceman Cometh.” (Lots of hearty boos.)

Iceboy! is one of seven musicals spanning quite a cross-section of the history of the genre that I happened to see in this strangely musical July. Iceboy! is not the best of them, and in many ways is the worst, but it’s the most interesting place to start. Together the musicals show the art form over time struggling against an atrophy not unlike that described by O’Neill, and often emerging triumphant.

Iceboy!
It’s as though the creators of this new musical, which also stars Offerman’s wife Megan Mullally (who won two Emmys and four SAG awards playing Karen Walker on "Will & Grace") had read my blog post last October titled “Is Eugene O’Neill’s reputation getting fragile?” In that blog post, I noted that O’Neill is in his longest drought on Broadway in 100 years, that until the pandemic his plays usually got performed roughly every other year, and that in the last seven years Broadway has not staged one. Meanwhile a 2020 movie depicted O’Neill as a racist jerk just in time for the revision of racial priorities the American theater affected after the killing of George Floyd. Was this the beginnings of a weakening reputation of the sort O’Neill experienced after his death, until Long Day’s Journey into Night was performed posthumously?

Now comes this strange tribute to O’Neill, which makes much of his fading reputation, and fills the great majority of its stage time with silly gags that really have nothing to do with the playwright or his plays. The premise is that the show tells the story of how O’Neill came up with The Iceman Cometh: A caveman encased in a chunk of ice is melted in the present day and bonds with an aging actress (Mullally) doing substandard Broadway work. The show commits to the bit thoroughly, with a relentless pointlessness that O’Neill and other characters mock as it progresses.  

It’s a telling commentary on the state of the modern musical if this is what the creators think will revive O’Neill on Broadway. In fact, one could take that as part of the message of the show, the plot of which centers around Mullally and her fiancé’s attempts to find success on the Great White Way. This show goes out of its way to avoid a point altogether, and its obvious aspiration to transfer to Broadway suggests it feels what makes it there today is not much more substantive. Thus, writers Mark Holleman (music and lyrics), Jay Reiss (lyrics and book) and Erin Quinn Purcell (book) look back at O’Neill’s heyday with nostalgia and absolutely no pretensions to taste.

A Little Night Music
Where Iceboy! erred too far on the side of the laughs, the brilliant A Little Night Music at the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire, Illinois this month caught a perfect balance between comedy and melancholy, landing squarely where a good Sondheim musical should: reveling in ambivalence. 

Ambivalence is Sondheim’s great theme. He wrote about it most explicitly in his first solo musical, Company, which gave us so many iconic lines about indecision over marriage: “You're Sorry-Grateful. Regretful-Happy." But the theme of indecision runs throughout his work, even in his songs for the 1990s summer blockbuster Dick Tracy, in which Mandy Patinkin and Madonna sing of their plans to reveal romantic feelings, only to drop them in a fit of ambivalence: "With so much to gain, there's too much to lose."  A Little Night Music is less explicitly about ambivalence than Company but its depiction of several simultaneous love triangles is still dripping in emotive ambiguity. Sondheim’s solo work was born in the swinging 1970s of New York after the sexual revolution, and thus there is always a sense that as the barriers of sexual propriety come down and the options for love are greatly expanded to multiple potential lovers, the result is an ambivalence about which route in life to choose. “I still want and/or love you,” one character sings in this production. “Before I met you … many things were different,” says another: “Better, worse—different anyway.” Another character describes life as “the same old routine,” and is asked “But it has its compensations?” “Yes,” she replies, “No,” she adds, “yes,” she concludes. “That’s a rather ambiguous answer,” comes the retort. And when the starring couple launch the underrated gem “You Must Meet My Wife,” there are still more ambiguities:

“I suppose it’s time to talk about my wife.”
“Boast or complaint?”
“Both I expect.”

With several love triangles operating at once, the Marriott production brought out the Chekhov in this notably Chekhovian masterpiece. Everyone is in love with the wrong person, just as in the Russian master’s plays. But though this is staged in 1900s Sweden, it premiered in 1973 New York, rather than in Chekhov's pre-revolution Russia, so the characters express their desires more often in that trademark ambivalence. 

Chekhov used to complain that directors misinterpreted his plays as tragedies. They were really comedies, he insisted, which surprises some readers of his parades of star-crossed love triangles and suicide attempts. The best productions catch the tension between both comedy and tragedy. Similarly, when we left this production of A Little Night Music, my party debated the extent to which this musical is a farce. “It’s a slow-motion farce,” my brother asserted, picking up on the way the show slowly moved from gag to gag. “You could have had slamming and opening doors, like in a Michael Frayn comedy.” But he liked my description of it as Chekhovian rather than purely farcical. The fact is the characters have debated that very question—are we in a farce?--since before the source material, Ingmar Bergman’s lovely and hilarious 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night, inspired Sondheim to adapt it. When the situation veers towards situation comedy in the Bergman movie, one character avers, “We are not on a stage!” “Yes, but it’s still a damn farce,” her lover answers. In the number that turned out to be Sondheim’s biggest hit, “Send in the Clowns,” the composer puts that line into verse: “Was that a farce? My fault I fear. Me as a merry-go-round. You as King Lear.”  

More so than Harold Prince’s 1975 movie of A Little Night Music with Elizabeth Taylor, or PBS’ 1991 broadcast of the New York City Opera production from Lincoln Center, which are the productions available to watch on video, this one captures the bittersweet balance between the uproariously comic and the lamentable. A very strong cast of New York and Chicago actors is highlighted by Andrew Samonsky as the romantic lead, managing to be both smarmy and likeable as the role calls for, and Veronica Garza as Charlotte, who brings a comic style that recalls Kristine Nielsen. In the end, things start resembling the multiplying marriages of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is a comparison oft-made to this musical, including in Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, which is also partly inspired by Smiles of a Summer Night). The emerging happiness at the end is presented as a way out of the adulterously polyamorous mix-ups: “A coherent existence after so many years of muddle.”  

Octet
When A Little Night Music first emerged in 1973 it must have felt the way Dave Malloy’s Octet feels in 2026: a breath of stylistic fresh air. Octet, described as a ‘chamber choir musical,” is nothing like Sondheim, except that the lyrical zingers fly fast and furious, and that’s part of what makes it feel so urgently necessary now. Five decades after the emergence of the master, Broadway has seemingly tried nearly everything to respond to his revolutionary makeover of the musical, from imitation to counter-programming. There have been many innovations since, including Malloy’s own work (most notably Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812) but Octet’s concept is so original structurally that it makes the rest of the musical scene feel like it has been stuck in a rut. The eight short stories, all told with only a tuning pipe for instrumentation (there’s even a short, stunning symphony with both melodic and atonal movements played entirely on tuning pipes by the eight-person chamber choir), play like New Yorker stories sung in the raw. Nothing like that has been attempted before in a genre that sometimes feels out of ideas. Having debuted off-Broadway at New York’s Signature Theatre in 2019 and set for a musical adaptation soon by director Lin-Manuel Miranda, Octet is a cappella, episodic, and unlike any other musical you’ve ever seen. The new production, closing August 2, at the Goodman Theatre has already been described by Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune as “clearly” the leading candidate for Chicago’s best production of the year.

The Goodman’s production, running next door to Iceboy! in its smaller studio space the Owen, is a transfer from a wildly successful North Side storefront production by the Raven Theatre. It’s hard to imagine the cast being any tighter or more kaleidoscopically diverse in the Off-Broadway production than they are here, and in fact I like many of the performers from the Chicago production better than I like the voices on the delightful Off-Broadway cast recording. Octet finds eight Internet addicts at an addicts anonymous group, sitting in a circle and sharing one by one their individual tales of woe. The first, for example, is told by a woman who got caught in a viral video having an emotional meltdown. The second song is by a young gay man apparently addicted to the video game Candy Crush. The stories progress in intensity to the climax, which appears to prove (at least to its narrator, a former atheist scientist) the existence of God. The show sheds nearly all the cliches of the musical business, offering something unique in each of its be-bopping a cappella 100 minutes. Having caught Malloy’s work first before he exploded on Broadway with Natasha, in a 2008 musical adaptation of Beowulf remounted at Harvard’s tiny Club Oberon theater, which has since been taken over by a not-for-profit, it’s thrilling to see his evolution. Miranda’s movie, which will star Amanda Seyfried, Rachel Zegler, Phillipa Soo, Jonathan Groff, Gaten Matarazzo and others, will hopefully bring his burgeoning imagination to a new audience.

The Abduction from the Seraglio  
Speaking of productions that dropped in a moment of potential transition for the musical theater, I also caught conductor James Conlon’s concert performance of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio at Ravinia’s Martin Theatre on July 18. The show is not an opera; it’s what was known as a Singspiel, which carries many of the characteristics of what we now call musical theater: spoken dialogue and songs in alternation telling a story. Abduction was commissioned by Emperor Joseph II, the brother of Marie Antoinette, in 1782 for the Nationalsingspiel, a company devoted (briefly) to creating works in the German language rather than Italian as was common with opera at the time. This was in a sense another effort to breathe life into an withering form, and Mozart’s euphonious melodies are an artistic triumph. While the company ultimately failed, Abduction has stayed in the repertoire ever since, though it is probably Mozart’s least performed canonical opera. I’ve now seen all seven of Mozart’s repertoire operas (and a few of his many, many noncanonical operas as well) in performance, so it was a milestone for me.

Most of the dialogue in this production has been replaced by narration. Tony-winning actor Jefferson Mays (I Am My Own Wife) played both the part of the evil-turned-statesmanlike Pasha Selim and the narrator, reading in between arias Conlon’s own fascinating characterization of the show. (Much of the narration he read was also in the program in an essay by Conlon.) The narrator not only tells us what happens in the plot, but its significance, noting for example the representation of the Turkish people in Western art at the time: “The Ottoman Empire, which stopped at the gates of Vienna, had been an enormous threat. For the Viennese, the Turks were a menacing enemy. Although that was greatly diminished about a hundred years before Mozart was writing, the cultural stereotypes remained. In the theater, fear and loathing often were mitigated by rendering the Turks insignificant, evil or simply comic.” (For more on this, I recommend Larry Wolff’s book The Singing Turk, a deep dive on the representation of Turkish persons in the opera.)  The narration thus was frankly more interesting than much of the comic dialogue Mozart’s librettist Gottlieb Stephanie wrote for the original singspiel. (The libretto was lifted without permission from another librettist.) The audience clearly felt the highlight of the show was soprano Kathryn Lewek, with good reason. Lewek, who holds the record for the most performances as the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Magic Flute at the Metropolitan Opera, breathed soaring life into each of her arias. The evening turned one of Mozart’s weaker works into an absorbing two and a half hours.

Top Hat
The musical on the West End in London must have been in a somewhat dour state in 2013, because the coveted Laurance Olivier Award for Best Musical went to Top Hat, a somewhat empty if enjoyable adaption of a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie from 1935 that represented perhaps the peak of their careers. The stage adaptation never even transferred to Broadway, as most of the Olivier winners do. Over the summer I saw both the stage adaption, thanks to the marvels of modern-day streaming on PBS’ Great Performances, and the original. Maybe I saw them in the right order because I greatly enjoyed the performances of the pair who played the Astaire and Rogers roles, Phillip Attmore and Amara Okere (in a revival filmed in January 2026—this pair did not lead the Olivier-winning production) until I saw Astaire and Rogers. They are a hard pair to live up to. The plot, which is a little too flimsy for the two and half hour treatment in the stage version, concerns the Astaire character, Jerry, and his attempt to woo a woman who believes him to be his manager. One of the best reasons to watch are the many great Irving Berlin tunes that made the hit parade as a result of this show: “Cheek to Cheek,” the title song and “Isn’t it a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain).” But it’s also thrilling to see the emergence of Astaire and Rogers at the top of their game, lifting spirits in a way that no one quite has since. Tom Holland apparently just signed on to play Astaire in a biopic and plans to do all his dancing in one take, as Astaire did at the time. If he pulls off the difficult challenge, it might be the sort of role that attracts Oscar buzz.

The Band Wagon
The brand of musical movie that had heretofore starred Astaire and Rogers was in danger of atrophying out of existence in 1953. As a lengthy essay on Band Wagon in the Paris Review implied in 2017, Astaire was being eclipsed by Gene Kelly. Two years prior director Vincente Minnelli had brought Kelly great success in An American in Paris. Even more troublingly, in a plot twist the Paris Review somehow manages not to cover, Ginger Rogers had been almost completely shelved as a film star. As Wikipedia puts it with amusing bluntness, “Rogers's film career entered a period of gradual decline in the 1950s, as parts for older actresses became more difficult to obtain.” Thus was born the concept of The Band Wagon, in which Astaire plays an aging dancing actor who has gone three years without a film role. He is passed up by the paparazzi in favor of Ava Gardner in the opening scenes of the movie. His revival comes when he is offered a new Broadway role by the biggest director in the legitimate theater. The proposal: He is to play a Faust character who sells his soul to the devil for a bit of show biz success. Astaire’s character chafes at the suggestion. Faust is high art, he objects, and he remains an entertainer. But the director convinces him that high art and low art are all show biz by singing the enduring hit “That’s Entertainment!” Nothing is said of Rogers’ predicament—Astaire simply does his dance moves with a younger woman—but for Astaire the film ended up a success, just as does its play-within-a-movie. I chose to rent The Band Wagon this month because I noticed it was the only movie musical on the American Film Institute’s Top 25 movie musicals that I’d never seen. It placed at number 17 on that list, just below Top Hat. Contrasting the two plays feels like a seminar in the trajectory of the movie musical over the years of Astaire’s career. The Band Wagon is not as consistent a source of fun as Top Hat, and the scenes depicting Astaire’s Broadway musical are deadly dull, but as a source of rumination about the musical it came at just the right time.

Hadestown  
“Wait a minute,” I remember thinking the first time I saw Hadestown. “We are allowed to do stuff like this?!” My initial reaction was to wonder why I hadn’t seen anything so vibrant and original in years of attending the theater. Ten years after its debut Off-Broadway Hadestown ran last week in movie theaters, with a pro-shot of a 2025 performance on London’s West End with the original Broadway cast, Hadestown still feels just as fresh and moving. The movie theater run for Hadestown has topped all other musical pro-shots at the box office, including (just barely) Hamilton, with more than $10.2 million in ticket sales in just five days of theater screenings. At the screening I saw, the much-discussed “Hadestown gasp” at the climax of the ages-old plotline was still very much audible from multiple corners of the theater. In college in the 1990s I used to ask friends why musicals could not use the sort of sounds that were exciting me at the time, with acoustic instruments, bold melodies and diversity in orchestration. When the musical Once emerged I somewhat grudgingly granted that this had finally happened. (The musical to me was a somewhat bloated adaptation of a film that had a thrived on its spareness.) But Hadestown felt like a dream come true. For whatever reason I spent most of this movie appearance with saltwater on my cheeks, perhaps in anticipation of the climactic moment when Orpheus loses Eurydice, perhaps just in awe of the brilliance of the execution.

I did not expect to spend the month contemplating the musical, but this septet of selections ended up creating an instructive picture of the way the genre regenerates itself periodically over time. The discussion in the world of opera in particular has centered recently around Timothée Chalamet’s much-discussed dismissal of opera and ballet earlier this year. He suggested people in those disciplines are ever trying to figure out how they can "keep this thing going" even though “no one cares." While only one of the selections in this review is an opera, and the musical world has not attracted quite as cynical a reproach as Chalamet’s, even the worst of this sample suggest the art form of marrying music to the stage has plenty of life left. Musicals will continue to regenerate themselves and won't be, as Iceboy!'s O'Neill fears his plays will be, forgotten.