Fixing Frankie
Book And Lyrics by Joe Langworth; Music by Steve Marzullo; Directed by Michael Blatt and Joe Langworth
The Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at A.R.T./New York Theatres | 502 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
October 31 - November 15, 2025
Photo Credit by Russ Rowland.
Time, that slippery, ungovernable creature, pulses through Fixing Frankie like a restless heartbeat. Joe Langworth and Steve Marzullo’s new musical—making its world premiere at A.R.T./New York Theatres—moves with the unrelenting forward thrust of a life half-lived and half-remembered. In just over two brisk hours, nearly five decades of social evolution, personal reckoning, and cultural metamorphosis flicker before our eyes like slides in a carousel projector. The fashions change, the soundtrack updates, the moral compass wobbles—but what remains immutable, the show suggests with quiet melancholy, is the tyranny of self-reproach. Fixing Frankie announces itself as no mere musical but as an act of confession set to music — a deeply personal and luminously scored chronicle of becoming. It is a work that stretches across decades and dogmas, tracing the uneasy intersections of faith, identity, and desire with both tenderness and bite. What emerges is a coming-of-age and coming-out story that pulses with humor and heart, yes, but also with an undercurrent of haunting honesty — the kind that lingers long after the final note fades.
It all begins—or rather, culminates—in 2016. Frankie Scordato, now fifty and visibly frayed (George Psomas, bringing a weary sweetness to the role), has wandered back into a confessional booth after thirty-two years of silence. His voice trembles with the fatigue of a man who has carried his own judgment too long. The priest (Ryan Alvarado, in gentle contrast) offers what may be the show’s guiding credo: “Making peace with the past can be like prayer.” It’s a line both consoling and damning—for who among us ever truly makes peace?
Then, like a film reel snapping backward, we find ourselves in 1971. The air smells faintly of Aqua Net and television static. Five-year-old Frankie (the irrepressible Greyson Chapman, a prodigy in the making) lives in a Technicolor world of Matchbox cars, Barbie dolls, G.I.Joe (in silver lamé) and the jangling optimism of The Partridge Family. His mother (Andrea Bianchi, warmth incarnate) and father (Steven Scionti, deftly shading gruffness with love) dote on him, though their indulgence comes tinged with confusion. “Maude is a fashion rebel!” proclaims their precocious son, already fluent in camp and feminism, to which the audience responds with laughter—and recognition.
As the years accelerate, Frankie’s horizons expand. Upstairs, the exuberant tenants Eduardo and Patti (Alvarado and Felicia Finley, radiating free love and more love) offer him glimpses of a freer, more flamboyant life. Yet even amid the disco lights, another voice intrudes: Sister Agatha (also Finley, delightfully imperious), Frankie’s spectral nun of conscience, haunting his psyche with eternal damnation and moral panic. It’s a witty conceit that grounds the story’s more metaphysical musings in the very real neuroses of Catholic guilt.
In Margaret (Laura Pavles, eccentric and haunting in her genuine love for Frankie), Frankie finds an ally—a platonic soulmate who helps him weather the twin torments of adolescence and self-doubt. Their friendship, tender and compassionate, is one of the show’s most affecting through-lines. In his friendship with Margaret, the production distills here more than anywhere else, with eloquent simplicity and emotional precision, one of the theater’s most enduring and resonant truths: that our lives are shaped as much by the families we are born into as by the families we choose along the way. This theme unfolds not as sentimental cliché but as lived experience — the gradual revelation that salvation often arrives not through bloodlines or sacraments, but through the unexpected grace of those who see us, accept us, and love us into being. As Frankie ventures into 1980s New York, still closeted and nursing the dream of becoming a writer, the specter of AIDS descends. His affair with a young businessman based in Chicago (Austin Colburn, an absolute charmer in multiple incarnations) flickers between passion and paralysis, undone not by cruelty but by Frankie’s inability to forgive himself for surviving.
Langworth and co-director Michael Blatt keep the decades flowing with cinematic swiftness. Josh Iacovelli’s skeletal set—a frame house that expands and contracts with the years—acts as both memory palace and emotional cage. Andy Evan Cohen’s projections and Aiden Bezark’s lighting lend the production a shimmer of nostalgia, while Elizabeth Ektefaei’s costumes chart a witty progression from polyester excess to contemporary minimalism. The decision to populate the stage with wooden crates—repositories of memory that double as furniture, platforms, and literal baggage—is both clever and thematically apt: Frankie’s life, after all, is one long act of unpacking.
Musically, Marzullo and Langworth’s score is tuneful if stylistically conservative. “77 from A to Z” offers a buoyant pop history lesson, while “We All Love Who We Love” and “Another Day” deliver emotional clarity, even if the musical palette remains curiously uniform across eras. One longs for sharper pastiche—more funk in the ’70s, more synth in the ’80s—but the melodies are honest and sensibly lyric-driven. The small band, under sound designer Sun Hee Kil’s sensitive balance, makes the most of its compact instrumentation.
If the score is steady, the book is almost too generous for its own good. Langworth’s writing brims with cultural markers—references to Maude, the Twin Towers, and Annie—but in its eagerness to catalogue the passing years, Fixing Frankie sometimes mistakes velocity for depth. Scenes can tumble over one another before they fully bloom. Relationships—between Frankie and his parents, his faith, his city, his art—are introduced with promise and then sadly rushed to make way for the next temporal leap.
Kudos to co-directors Blatt and Langworth for allowing one particular moment to breathe. Amid the show’s witticisms and temporal whirl, there are moments of piercing emotional clarity — none more affecting than when Margaret, with the quiet authority of someone who truly sees another’s soul, turns to the bewildered, self-doubting teenage Frankie and assures him, “Nothing about you needs to change.” In that simple utterance lies the musical’s beating heart: the radical tenderness of acceptance, the small but seismic moment when shame begins, at last, to loosen its grip.
Still, there is genuine feeling coursing through Fixing Frankie. Psomas captures the ache of a man who has aged into introspection without ever quite finding absolution. Young Chapman’s luminous performance bridges innocence and awareness with uncanny precision. And Finley, toggling between Patti’s exuberance and Sister Agatha’s severity, reminds us how easily joy and judgment can coexist within the same soul.
In the end, Fixing Frankie is less a traditional musical than a bittersweet meditation on time itself—on how memory edits, omits, and betrays us. Langworth and Marzullo have built a show that, for all its structural sprawl, hums with sincerity. It may move too quickly, yes, but perhaps that is its truest insight: that life itself does rush past before we can decide which moments deserve to linger. And in the tender, imperfect figure of Frankie Scordato, we glimpse the ache of a generation of gay men still learning to forgive itself for surviving.
Poignant and slyly funny, Fixing Frankie unfolds with that musical richness and emotional clarity that mark it as something rare in contemporary musical theatre — a work that sings from both the heart and the wound. It is, quite simply, a must-see: an elegant, deeply felt meditation on identity, forgiveness, and the fragile architecture of belonging. For anyone who has ever questioned where they fit in the world — and, with trembling courage, set about constructing that place with their own two hands — Fixing Frankie offers not merely entertainment, but recognition.
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Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on November 12, 2025. All rights reserved.