A Walk on the Moon

Laura Pels Theatre, NYC, June 27, 2026

Reviewed by Chip Deffaa

A Walk on the Moon, a new musical based on the 1999 motion picture of the same name, opened on June 28 off Broadway at the Laura Pels Theatre in New York. I caught it the night before it opened and was thoroughly charmed. It’s not perfect—few shows are—but I warmed to it from the opening bars. There is an honesty and accuracy to this musical, which is set in the Catskills in 1969, that I like very much. It has resonated with me, and I hope to see it again.

A Walk on the Moon has a strong, emotionally rich book by Pamela Gray, who wrote the original film. (Good musical-theater book writers are in short supply these days.) The show is well acted, well cast (by the TRC Company, Merri Sugarman, CSA), well directed (by Sheryl Kaller), and well designed (by Tal Yarden). It has a big cast for an Off-Broadway show—13 actors—and there is one exceptionally vibrant performance that I’ll tell you about in a bit.

The score by Annmarie Milazzo with additional lyrics by Gray is uneven, but I hope they make a cast album; I’d enjoy it. This show’s strengths far outweigh its imperfections. It’s warmly recommended.

Gray wrote the first draft of her original screenplay back in 1992, drawing upon memories of summers spent in the Catskills. The film was—and is—a great favorite of mine. It was one of those films that struck me as being so unusually well-crafted that when I first heard talk, years ago, that Gray was developing a musical-theater version of her work, I questioned the need. (The film was a drama, not a musical, but included signature recordings by so many notables of the era, such as Bobby Darin, Dean Martin, Janis Joplin, and Joni Mitchell, that it almost felt like a musical.)

But I’m grateful that Gray has given us this musical play. I was unable to see an earlier tryout at the George Street Playhouse in New Jersey; I’m very glad I was able to catch this musical now.

* * *

The show takes place in the summer of 1969. The Kantrowitz family—mother Pearl, (Talia Suskauer); father Mart (Max Chernin); their children, 15-year-old Alison (Sophie Pollono) and young son Danny (Leo Caravano); and the paternal grandmother, Lillian (Andrea Burns)—are doing what so many Jewish families in New York did back then. They’re spending the summer “in the mountains.” It was a tradition—long-gone now—that they thought would go on forever. The only “big event” that anyone was anticipating that summer was that astronauts would be going to the moon.

But times are changing. Women’s liberation is in the air, and not far from the little resort in the Catskills (“Dr. Fogler’s Bungalow Colony”) where the Kantrowitz family is staying, hundreds of thousands of young people will be gathering this summer for the Woodstock Festival. The voices of the younger generation will definitely be heard.

The show captures well the feeling of the time (which I certainly recall vividly; like Pamela Gray, I was coming of age in 1969). Gray has a terrific ear for dialogue, and she treats each major character with respect. There are no villains here. We see each character’s point of view. All seem sympathetic; we feel for them, from the hapless, put-upon father to his wife who so badly wants more out of life than she’s found thus far to the impassioned daughter, who’s glad she’s on “the right side” of the generation gap.

The mother, the children, and the grandmother are spending the whole summer in the Catskills. The hard-pressed father, a TV-repairman slaving away at a job he doesn’t like, can join them only on weekends—and not even on all weekends; he has to stay in the city to make a living.

Pearl has lots of time on her hands this summer to reflect upon how unfulfilling her life feels. She falls for a dashing, free-spirited fellow named Walker Jerome (“the blouse man,” played by Sam Gravitte)—a man who goes from resort to resort selling clothes to women. She winds up having an affair with “the blouse man”; he tells her she should leave her boring, constricting old life behind and run away with him to California. To her, he seems to be living life much more fully than the people she knows.

In the second act, she gets to sing—with tremendous impact—a wonderful song with an absolutely dreadful title: “Ba Ba Ba Dah (Fine).” In this song she gets to express—better than she could via mere dialogue—the elation her affair is bringing her. Her lover has opened her up to seeing so many more possibilities in life. It’s a peak moment in the show, and I’d buy a cast album, if they ever make one, just to hear Talia Suskauer sing that song (which really deserves a better title) once again.

At the same time that the mother is finding fulfillment in her affair, her 15-year-old daughter, Sophie, is falling in love for the first time—with a 16-year-old she’s met at the resort, Ross (played by Oscar Williams). Ross persuades Sophie to sneak off with him to Woodstock. Then Walker persuades Pearl to sneak off with him to Woodstock. Sophie winds up seeing her mother with the blouse man at Woodstock and realizes that her mother is cheating on her father. At about the same time, the father is learning of his wife’s affair, and Pearl suddenly feels like everything is falling apart.

It’s a very well-constructed story, and the actors bring it to life with great flair.

* * *

It fascinated me to see the ways Pamela Gray has changed the story in the process of turning the motion picture into a stage musical. There are some things I liked better in the movie and other things I like better in the current stage musical. And there are ways, I think, that the stage musical production could be made even better.

Both the film and stage versions have been well cast. In the movie, Diane Lane played Pearl, Liev Schreiber played Marty, Viggo Mortensen played Walker Jerome, Tovah Feldshuh played Lillian, Anna Paquin played Sophie, and Joseph Perrino played Ross.

The film felt very much like the mother’s story; the other characters felt to me rather like adjuncts, like supporting players in Pearl’s story.

The performances that registered most deeply with me, when I originally watched the film, were those by Feldshuh (unforgettable as matriarch of the family, the grandmother with steel in her spine, fiercely determined to hold the family together) and by Lane playing Pearl (whose desires to find herself—to fully realize who she could be, besides being defined as someone’s wife or someone’s mother—were what drove the whole story).

In adapting the script for the stage, Gray has made the story of the daughter and her first boyfriend more prominent. In the film, the daughter seemed much less important than the mother, and the daughter’s boyfriend was hardly much more than a walk-on character with a name. But now, it is almost as if we are being presented with two parallel stories—that of the mother and her lover (and her husband), and that of the daughter and her first boyfriend. I liked getting to know the daughter and her boyfriend better, and the actors playing them were excellent—much more impactful than the actors playing those characters in the film. It’s no longer just the mother’s story that we’re following, and I enjoyed that.

But the changes came at a price. If the daughter and her boyfriend now seem more substantive, if their characters are now more fully fleshed out, some of the other characters, such as the grandmother and the husband, seem less substantive. The young son, Danny, is now almost like an “extra.”

I wish a way could be found to restore some moments from the film that have been dropped here: the grandmother, on her own because her daughter is off with her lover, trying to deal with an emergency with young Danny (stung by a swarm of wasps) and Walker getting to meet members of Pearl’s family and grasping the extent of her ties to them before his affair with Pearl becomes public knowledge.

Those scenes not only added emotional richness to the story, they also helped heighten the tension we felt as we wondered what the consequences of Pearl’s affair would be. We saw—more fully in the film than in the stage production—how Pearl’s affair could affect others.

The tension is relieved too quickly in the stage musical, compared to the film. Maintaining the tension longer before finding a happy ending would pay off better dramatically. The musical, including intermission, has a running time of two hours and fifteen minutes. Taking another ten minutes to extend our concern over how Pearl’s affair might affect the family would be worth it.

* * *

I mentioned that although the film was filled with strong actors, the performances I personally found most memorable were those by Feldshuh (who, incidentally, gets to make a cameo voiceover contribution to the current stage musical—a nice touch) and Lane.

In the current stage musical, I might note, the performances I personally found most memorable were those by Williams as the daughter’s boyfriend, Ross—a part that barely existed in the film but has been significantly expanded now), Pollone (as the daughter, Allison), and Graviite (as Walker Jerome, “the blouse man”).

I’ve long appreciated Gravitte’s work, although I felt bad for him because for a while he couldn’t seem to catch a break. I first took notice of him when he was a student at Princeton (I’m a loyal Princeton alumnus), where he was active in both theater and arch-singing. He got to take over an important role (“Fiyero”) in Wicked on Broadway, but then the pandemic shut down all theater in NYC. Although he got to play that role for a couple of years in Wicked once the pandemic was over, most reviewers don’t ever see cast replacements in long-running shows. (I went back again, specifically to see him.) But originating a role in this New York production of A Walk on the Moon should bring him well-deserved greater attention. He has an unusually lovely voice, an engaging manner, and an easy grace; he’s never pushing. He makes his character most appealing. The chemistry between him and Suskauer is great; you sure believe in their affair.

Newcomer Pollono plays the 15-year-old daughter with aplomb, finding more in the role than Paquin did in the film (which is saying plenty). Whether she’s “up” in one scene or “down” in another, she’s aways believable. She’s stridently idealistic—her generation will fix everything!—in a way that captures the era well. And it is touching when she tells her mother that she is not sure but thinks she may be falling in love; all she knows for sure is that Ross has made her feel “more awake” than ever before. (Aptly said!) The mother cannot, of course, respond that she’s experiencing her own sexual awakening via her covert affair with Walker; all she can tell her daughter is that that’s the way she felt when she first fell in love with her husband—her daughter’s father—about 16 years before. The sexual attraction between them may have faded since then, but she still remembers how he once made her feel.

Pollano gets to display a considerable range of emotions well, from the elation of first love to her horror of discovering—at Woodstock—that her mother is cheating on her father. (Incidentally that discovery scene was handled more boldly and more effectively by the film’s director, Tony Goldwyn, than by this musical’s director, Sheryl Kaller.) In the film, the daughter does not merely see that her mother is at Woodstock with the blouse man; the mother appears to be high, and she’s exposed; there’s partial nudity. When we and the daughter see a glimpse of the mother’s exposed breast, it feels like a slap; the daughter is shocked and will later tell her mother she was disgusted. Director Kaller makes a more conservative choice in staging this scene; we don’t see that moment of partial nudity, and it lessens the scene’s impact.

But Pollano was a delight throughout and matched well with Williams, who played the boyfriend. Williams’ exceptionally vibrant performance is one I won’t soon forget. He lit up that stage from start to finish. I’ve always relished his work (from Fun Home to The Last Five Years to performing in cabaret), and he keeps getting better. He’s a musical-theater natural with vivid presence on stage. He’s got charisma, which is rare and indefinable but a wondrous gift to have. It didn’t seem as though he was acting; he was that character. He’s actually 22, but he was convincingly 16 throughout, and he gave 100%, all night.

When Sophie first discovers Ross, he is singing confidently how he sees himself as “a Jewish Jimi Hendrix.” (If they make a cast album, I’ll play that track a lot, too.) He’s funny and he’s exuberant, and there’s a light in his eyes that makes the whole performance seem to shine. He’s present and engaged in every scene, whether he’s speaking, singing, or merely listening (and realistically reacting) to what others on stage are saying. There’s a scene in which Sophie is blurting out to her mother and father (and everyone within earshot) how Ross, on their first date, got to “second base” with her. Ross, with an endearing smile, gives Sophie’s father a look that seems to say, “I’m sorry I took advantage of your daughter, but please don’t hold it against me.” I’m going to encourage the younger actors I work with to go see this musical, if only to study the way Williams makes every moment he has onstage count. And even moments when he’s not yet onstage, for that matter. He makes his entrance for one scene by bounding down the aisle from the back of the house and then leaping onto the stage! Unforgettable.