From Screen to Stage: 2025

Marshall's Theater Diary

Tonight is Broadway’s biggest night! Watch the Tony Awards live on CBS or Paramount+ if you want to see Sarah Snook move halfway to EGOT status.

Why care if you don’t live in New York and can’t fork over $900 for a star-studded Othello that got zero nominations? Firstly, a lot of these shows (especially the musicals!) may tour near you at some point, or jump across the pond to London. Second, there’s a generous exchange of ideas between the theater and the cinema in a town where so many artists cross-pollinate.

The show I’d expect to have the biggest impact on the overall entertainment ecosystem is Cole Escola’s riotously campy Oh, Mary! This work of delirious imagination, positing Mary Todd Lincoln as a frustrated cabaret star who feels oddly liberated by her husband’s assassination, has been the talk of the town for nearly a year since it debuted on Broadway. I’ve become insufferable by letting people know that I, of course, saw it off-Broadway before it made the transfer uptown. To show you how surprised I am by its continued meteoric rise, it didn’t even get a mention in last year’s version of this post!

Tonight, I’m rooting for what Slant’s theater prognosticator has predicted: a clean sweep for Maybe Happy Ending, the show that unexpectedly swept me off my feet. Here’s hoping this gets the big-screen treatment at some point, although there’s real magic in experiencing the immediate humanity of a show about who (and what) gets to have real feelings.

As for the rest of the theater year, though, I’ll run paid subscribers through a diary of stage experiences that stuck with me (because they had some tangential relation to the cinema). Rather than do a chronological diary, I’ve attempted to chart a thematic journey through the themes, trends, and innovations that matter. If you haven’t had a chance to partake in the NYC theater scene, I hope you’ll come away from reading this understanding why it matters … and perhaps inclined to check out these productions in some form or fashion.