Porchlight Music Theatre’s latest virtual installment of their New Faces series (and the first this critic has seen) offers a delightful smorgasbord of musical theater entertainment. With direction by Brianna Borger and filmed at Chicago’s historic Studebaker Theater, NEW FACES SING BROADWAY 1961 offers 75 minutes of charming content. Like some of Porchlight’s other performance series, NEW FACES SING BROADWAY 1961 serves up both entertaining and informative value for audiences. Host Kelvin Roston Jr. guides audiences through the programming, offering up tidbits of context and history for each of the 1961 musicals showcased in the program.

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It seems most fitting that Goodman Theatre’s current encore streaming production of SMOKEFALL exists both in and out of time. Noah Haidle’s whimsical play, beloved by critics and audiences when it originally premiered at the Goodman in 2013 (and remounted in 2014), occupies an achronological space. While the play ostensibly lives in an undefined present in Grand Rapids, Michigan, it also pulls us into the past and propels us into the future. Thematically SMOKEFALL is a meditation on life —and how humanity may find purpose within it — told through the lens of various experimental storytelling methods.

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