Call Me Izzy
Opening Night: June 12, 2025
Theater: Studio 54
Website: callmeizzyplay.com
Six-time Emmy® Award winner and Tony Award® nominee Jean Smart is back on Broadway for a limited time only, in a tour-de-force portrayal of a writer whose words are her greatest gift, her biggest secret, and her only way out. Written by Jamie Wax and directed by Sarna Lapine, CALL ME IZZY is a can’t-miss theatrical event and a moving portrait of one woman’s refusal to be silenced through her own sheer tenacity, humor, and fiery imagination.
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June 12, 2025
Returning to Broadway after 25 years in “Call Me Izzy,” which opened Thursday at Studio 54, Jean Smart crushes it in the good way.
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June 12, 2025
The first production of the new Broadway season, Call Me Izzy blesses 2025-2026 with a terrific beginning. One only hopes Tony voters have very, very long memories.
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June 12, 2025
These swerves of impulses could easily go off the tracks but the combination of the steady direction of Sarna Lapine (“Sunday in the Park With George“) and Smart’s riveting performance make Izzy’s world real and her conflicts believable.
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June 12, 2025
Jean Smart, heading back to Broadway after a career revival on television, has plenty of talent. The trouble is she’s stuck in a production that has little idea what to do with it, other than subject her character to grim and unenlightening suffering.
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June 12, 2025
So, it all comes down to her, and Smart delivers the kind of once-in-a-lifetime performance that lingers long after the play ends. So raw, so shattering, the distance is vast between Izzy and the characters Smart is best known for playing.
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June 12, 2025
The play is dull and unchallenging. Outside of a surprise run-in with a professor — the show’s one hearty laugh that then gets overused — the story unfurls in the most obvious, stay-on-the-runner way possible.
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June 12, 2025
After a mawkish beginning, the play somewhat redeems itself through earned emotions and an ambiguous ending that begs discussion. It’s never wise to bet against Smart, who ultimately deserves a far better vehicle for her Main Stem comeback. But even if these powder-room reveries aren’t a royal flush, “Call Me Izzy” still has a lot in its tank.
READ THE REVIEWJune 12, 2025
Fresh off the success of the fourth season of Hacks, Jean Smart is vibrant, tough, and matter-of-factly, darkly funny as Izzy in a way that has the audience alternating laughs and gasps of horror in seconds.
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June 12, 2025
Smart, returning to Broadway after some 25 years, brings astonishing clarity and depth to the part. Spinning an enticing yarn from shopworn material — the action is set in 1989, when it may have struck a modern tone — she delivers a performance that feels deceptively featherlight while demonstrating total command.
READ THE REVIEWJune 12, 2025
This new play, which veers between the predictable and the implausible, adds little to the conversation, and pales beside that canon.
READ THE REVIEWJune 12, 2025
The play runs about 90 intermissionless minutes, which still seems too long. It starts slowly and feels rather disjointed as Izzy jumps back and forth in time explaining her unhappy life with occasional dry humor. Smart brings the character to vivid life but she can only do so much to engage the audience when the writing falls short.
READ THE REVIEWJune 12, 2025
Incidentally, Call Me Izzy is the first production of the 2025-6 Broadway season, which makes Smart the first candidate for the new season’s Best Actress Tony nomination. It’s imperative she not be forgotten.
READ THE REVIEWJune 12, 2025
Smart, as ever, imbues her characters with rough edges and idiosyncrasies, world-weariness coupled with an endearing naivety; her plaintive, rueful delivery of a brief description of reconciliation after a beating, how his regret provoked a feeling of closeness akin to a drug, hints at a more complicated version of the woman than on the page. It’s easy to cheer for Smart, and as evidenced by rounds of pitying applause at Studio 54, a little too easy for this show.
READ THE REVIEWJune 12, 2025
All that is to say “Call Me Izzy” is not a total bust, especially given Smart’s formidable acting chops. Monologic shows like this with no explicit person being addressed require deeply conversational kinds of performance, as if the audience were all your best friend who just happens to be outside the bathroom door, and Smart is skilled and experienced enough to forge such a bond. I believed her entirely as a woman from small-town Louisiana capable of both great stoicism (often a feature of those in abusive relationships) and profound artistic yearning.
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