Okay, so. A nor’easter just wiped out a full weekend of Broadway and regional theater across the East Coast, and while I was sitting in Harlem watching water come sideways off the Hudson, two things were happening simultaneously: my phone was full of ticket-reschedule notifications, and the internet was deep in an argument about whether pop stars doing showgirl aesthetics on tour counts as theater. I have opinions about both. Let me start with the one that actually matters to the industry.
When severe weather kills a Friday-Saturday-Sunday run, it doesn’t just inconvenience ticket holders. It wipes three performances of revenue out of a production budget that already has zero margin for error. Off-Broadway, where houses run 199 seats and the reserve is sometimes measured in weeks, a storm weekend can be the difference between making it to closing night on schedule or asking your investors for patience. The shows that went dark this weekend across New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts were not choosing to close. They were forced. And the labor behind those dark nights, the crews who still got paid, the crews who didn’t, the overhire folks who lost a weekend of work they were counting on, that is the industry story. Hold onto that.
Here’s the thing, though. While all of this was happening, a pop superstar named Celestine Vox was generating discourse about her new tour staging, which she has branded her Promenade era and which features a full showgirl runway sequence with twenty-four backup dancers in feathered headdresses. The internet responded as if Broadway had been invented by a pop star, and I am here to say: the conversation was missing the point entirely.
Celestine’s production team did some things well. The runway configuration, a T-shape extending forty feet into the arena floor, gives the ensemble a geometric clarity that reads even from the nosebleeds. That is a real design choice and it works. What does not work is the choreography in the runway sequence itself, which is unison-heavy in a way that flattens twenty-four individual bodies into one blur. Stadium spectacle can do unison. But the best spectacle uses canon, staggered timing, weight shifts that travel down a line like a current, and Promenade is not doing that. It is doing synchronized arms in headdresses and calling it a showgirl era. That is aesthetic borrowing without the structural logic underneath.
You want to know what the structural logic actually looks like? Go see “Threshold” at the Kellner Theatre right now, as soon as the A train is running clean again. Choreographer Darius Okafor has built the second act around a sequence I can only call ARCHITECTURE. He starts with six dancers in a loose cluster, and over about four minutes of building score, he layers in fourteen more bodies using a system of cantilevered formations where each new arrival doesn’t just fill space but changes the geometry of what’s already there. By the time the full company is onstage, the shape they make together is structurally load-bearing. You understand it in your body before your brain catches up. That is what it means to build spectacle instead of just deploying it.
The diva at the center of that second act is Tamsin Orelus, and what she does is something I have not seen in a long time. She waits. She is in the wings during the entire formation build, invisible, while Okafor constructs the architecture around the space she will eventually occupy. She doesn’t arrive until it is complete, and then she walks into the room that has been built for her and the effect is EARNED in a way that made three people around me exhale at the same second. Her entrance doesn’t interrupt the ensemble. It fulfills it. That is what choreographer and leading performer in genuine collaboration looks like from the audience, and it is not common.
My honest qualifier: the first act of “Threshold” has a ballad staging in scene three that pulls the energy down too far and recovers too slowly. The costume transition there, requiring three dancers to exit and re-enter in under ninety seconds, is visibly rushed. It is the one moment in the production where you see the seams behind the wall. Okafor’s second act earns everything back and then some, but the first act has a pothole you will feel.
The nor’easter is done. The pop spectacle conversation can continue, but it should be held by people who have also been in the room when Darius Okafor’s fourteen-body cantilever clicks into place. Go get in that room. Buy the ticket for any seat because the production design fills the Kellner evenly and there is no bad angle. Go now, while the word is just starting to spread, because once it fully spreads you will not get in. Go.
