Review: "The Trojans" Trades Spears for Touchdown Passes in Spectacular Synthwave Musical
The Trojans Book, lyrics, and music by Leegrid Stevens Directed by Eric Paul Vitale Presented by Loading Dock Theatre and Nancy Manocherian's the cell theatre at the cell theatre 338 W 23rd St., Manhattan, NYC March 19-April 19, 2025 [Update 4/1/25: Performances extended through April 26th] Sam Tilles, Jen Rondeau, Deshja Driggs, Roger Casey, and E. James Ford. Photo by Vivian Hoffman One of the recurrent stock phrases in Homer's Iliad , as translated by Caroline Alexander (HarperCollins, 2015), is "battle where men win glory" (76), though Alexander stresses in her introduction that the poem "makes explicit the tragic cost of such glory" (xiv). While literal battlefields have hardly disappeared from contemporary American life, sports has long provided an alternative avenue to glory through a sort of ritualized–or theatricalized–evocation of combat. The wildly entertaining new musical The Trojans , with book, lyrics, and music by Leegrid Stevens, makes fan...