Review: Signature Theatre and Wolf Trap make magic in ‘Broadway in the Park’

The sun goes down, the breeze wafts in, and nine first-rate performers distill American musical theater history into a 90-minute hit parade.

By D.R. Lewis
June 30, 2025

This review originally appeared in DC Theater Arts.

As the DC area was walloped by a historic heat wave last week, the thought of an outdoor concert seemed, at least to this critic, daunting. There was a time before air conditioning when open-air venues like Wolf Trap’s Filene Center offered audiences and performers an escape from the stifling indoors, but if the pulsating wave of playbills at Broadway in the Park, a stellar one-night co-production from Signature Theatre and Wolf Trap, was any indication, those days are behind us. Still, there’s an unmistakable magic to enjoying music outside, even on the hottest days, and you could pinpoint the moment the magic overcame the audience on Saturday, when a cool breeze wafted through the venue just as Jessie Mueller started George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and a single firefly made itself known to the right of the stage; it was like the audience got comfortable for the first time all week.

It was one charming moment in a string of them at the hands of nine first-rate performers, Signature Theatre Artistic Director Matthew Gardiner, and the 25-piece Wolf Trap Orchestra under the baton of Signature resident Music Director John Kalbfleisch. Together, they distilled the history of American musical theater, from the Gershwins and Cole Porter to Sara Bareilles and the late William Finn, into a 90-minute hit parade.

Mueller — a Tony Award winner for Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and three-time nominee for roles in Waitress, Carousel, and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever — went beyond the Gershwin number to lend a tender, tempestuous touch to the setlist. Her crystalline solo rendition of “If I Loved You,” typically performed in conjunction with ne’er-do-well carnival barker Billy Bigelow, instead came as an internal battle of whether to let oneself fall in love or admit that you may already have. Mueller bookended it with a pitch-perfect “She Used to Be Mine,” the Waitress anthem of what happens when a person has lost themself in love to the point of self-destruction.

In contrast, Mendez’s solo numbers represented another hallmark of musical theater: not the rich excavation of an emotion, but the reflection of a character’s personal evolution. In “Moments in the Woods” from Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim tracks one woman’s life-changing epiphany over the course of a single song, and Mendez nailed every small twist in that journey (and sounded fabulous all the while). And in Ragtime’s “Back to Before,” Mendez conjured the spirit of a woman who, after years of comfort playing the role society deemed fit for her, finds both a new purpose and voice to articulate it. With the latest revival of Into the Woods not so far in the rearview and a new Broadway production of Ragtime opening this fall, Mendez may have missed her chance to play those roles on the Main Stem in the near term, but the message is clear anyway: she’s ready for something big. We are, too.

The Carousel co-stars reunited to perform a short sequence from that show, including “You’re a Queer One, Julie Jordan,” and that most perfect showtune, “Mister Snow” (Mendez at her best). They further delighted with Annie Get Your Gun’s “Anything You Can Do” and Waitress’s “You Matter to Me,” the latter of which was respun as a loving epistle between friends and rebuke of loneliness, rather than a romantic duet.

Though Mueller and Mendez were ostensibly the evening’s headliners, star turns abounded. Performing Funny Girl’s “I’m the Greatest Star,” Awa Sal Secka, radiant in a yellow sunflower-printed dress, made a strong case for her argument; her rendition of the song so closely associated with Barbra Streisand was rapturous. Kevin McAllister was surprisingly underutilized, but in lending his rich voice and easy phrasing to William Finn’s yearnful “I’d Rather Be Sailing,” was deeply, unsurprisingly moving nonetheless. And Tobias A. Young accomplished an extraordinary coup in seizing Grease’s frothy “Beauty School Dropout” as a launchpad to showcase his virtuosic vocal control and versatility.

Felicia Curry offered a strong and soaring performance of Aida’s “Easy as Life,” to boot, while Tracy Lynn Olivera’s riff on Mack and Mabel‘s deep-cut “Whatever He Ain’t” teased her saucier side. Christian Douglas’s take on Pippin’s “Corner of the Sky” was straightforward and pleasant, and “Defying Gravity” was a worthy selection for Nova Payton’s irrepressible vocal talent.

Gardiner’s inclination to bring the cast together for a handful of ensemble numbers (“A Lot of Living” from Bye, Bye, Birdie, among others) is certainly understandable, and perhaps unavoidable, but the bizarre irony is that they look anemic on the big stage in a way the solo numbers don’t. Those individual turns, which facilitate the most connection with the audience, were fortunately numerous and uniformly splendid.

Signature Theatre’s cabaret series is a staple of the region’s theater season, and this extension of it, now in its fifth installment, should be regarded as one too. Even on the huge Filene Center stage, with thousands of people overflowing onto the lawn, the magic comes easily when the band strikes up, the sun goes down, and the breeze (thank God) wafts in. Even the fireflies feel it.

Running Time: 90 minutes, with no intermission.

Broadway in the Park performed on June 28, 2025, produced by Signature Theatre and Wolf Trap performing at the Filene Center, at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, 1551 Trap Road Vienna, VA. General information for upcoming shows is available by calling 703.255.1900, or by going online.

See the digital program here.

Lindsay Mendez and Jessie Mueller. Courtesy of Wolf Trap/Lock & Co.