A New York moment: 

In recent days I’ve had two wildly divergent theater experiences: one, SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical, and two, Babette’s Feast, which just opened off-Broadway. It seems wrong to even put those productions in the same sentence, but they’re playing in the same neighborhood.

Broadway bestowed its top accolades last night during the Tony Awards. Dear Evan Hansen, a musical about a 17-year-old who invents a friendship with a classmate who commits suicide, won the night’s top honors, winning best new musical and earning leading man Ben Platt the best actor award. Oslo, a show about the 1993 meetings between Israelis and Palestinians, won best new play of the season (see Emily Belz’s WORLD Magazine review of Oslo).

At a time when political discord seems to find its way into every dinnertime conversation, a new Broadway play explores the world’s most intractable political divide: that between Israelis and Palestinians. Oslo recounts the top-secret back-channel talks in Norway that led to the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accords, a story drawn from the playwright’s relationship with some of the negotiators.

Ten years ago WORLD, I believe, was the first national publication to report of an effort to bring a strong Christian musical to Broadway.

We don’t like to follow a sad but common journalistic tendency—get a story and then abandon those whose lives are tied to it—so it’s a pleasure to report that Amazing Grace, after a short and unsustainable Broadway run in 2015, will in November become the first production ever on the boards of the brand new World Stage Theater at the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C.

Max McLean’s Fellowship for Performing Arts has its latest production playing off-Broadway in New York—Martin Luther on Trial. The story, which McLean wrote along with playwright and King’s College professor Chris Cragin-Day, imagines Lucifer putting Luther on trial to see whether the father of the Protestant Reformation belongs in hell rather than heaven. In this show, McLean is essentially a producer—he does not act in the play itself. A national tour is in the works after the play’s New York run ends Jan. 29.

Two Christians in the theater world have found professional success creating smart, funny plays that communicate Christian ideas. Jeffrey Fiske is a playwright based in Williamsburg, Va., whose plays have run in both Christian and secular theater companies in Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, and elsewhere. Fiske adapted and directed C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters for the stage with actor and producer Max McLean. The play had several popular runs throughout the United States and most recently in London.

Since Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton opened off-Broadway in New York in February 2015, I have tried to find a way to see the eternally sold-out show without selling a kidney. Finally in late August, thanks to a friend who works there, I went to see the genre-changing show that blends together old operas like The Pirates of Penzance with pop, rap, and hip-hop into something addictive and wonderful.