Grief, in most theaters, arrives dressed in black and speaks quietly. In “Once In a Lifetime, Again,” the tender, unexpectedly funny new musical and part of the tenth-anniversary Broadway Bound Theatre Festival at the AMT Theater in Manhattan’s Theater District, grief instead straps on a guitar and steps up to the microphone. It is a shrewd and, frankly, moving choice, one that turns the well-worn machinery of the rock musical into something closer to confession than to concert.

The show is Stephen H. Gardner’s debut musical. He spent four decades in advertising before moving to Connecticut, where a rhythm guitarist and a bar band called Not My Problem reintroduced him to songwriting. When the band’s gigs stalled during the pandemic, Gardner turned inward, eventually writing the book, music, and lyrics for a full-scale musical that follows a grieving widower from breakdown to breakthrough across fourteen numbers ranging from blues shuffle to calypso lament. There is something wonderfully unpretentious about a first-time writer years later delivering a show this structurally assured. It plays like a man finally saying in public everything he had been composing quietly for years.

Cooper Grodin’s Jesse Davidson: A Widower Who Sings to Survive

Cooper Grodin anchors it all as Jesse Davidson, a successful businessman undone by his wife’s death and, eventually, forced into a therapist’s office when his unprocessed sorrow begins to seep into his professional life. What could have curdled into maudlin therapy-speak instead becomes the show’s most persuasive device: Jesse cannot say what he feels, so he sings it, and the songs become the only honest language left to him. Grodin, a trained singer with a genuine theater pedigree, plays Jesse as a singer-songwriter and guitarist, making the character’s compositions feel less like conventional musical-theater numbers than private songs suddenly spoken aloud. His performance has a lived-in credibility that recalls the great confessional singer-songwriters of the classic-rock era, the world-weary romantic who writes his diary in three chords and the truth.

Grodin is backed by a tight, unfussy band anchored by music director Logan Medland on piano, Justin Rothberg on lead guitar, bassist and bandleader Rowan “Mutiny” Caine, and Russ Zapp on drums. The ensemble captures the late-1960s archetype of the songwriter-fronted bar band without tipping into pastiche. Longtime readers of this publication will recognize the lineage; I tracked some of these same rock-and-roll bloodlines in a recent piece on the women who shaped the genre, available here. Gardner’s score, with blues, calypso, and heartland rock folded together, belongs comfortably in that conversation.

Two agile dancers, Arianna Dolan and Aiden Pressel, flow through the songs as a kind of physical subconscious, embodying memory, longing, and the slow thaw of a man learning to move again, both literally and otherwise. Their choreography by first-time professional choreographer Julia Feeley of Clear Talent Group never over-illustrates the lyrics; it breathes alongside them.

Jenny Lee Stern’s Comic Gallery of Modern Dating

If Grodin supplies the show’s aching backbone, Jenny Lee Stern supplies its comic nervous system. A Broadway veteran and Drama Desk nominee, Stern plays six women Jesse encounters as he wades, terrified and bemused, into contemporary dating, deploying a small United Nations of accents and attitudes, including French, Mulberry Street Italian, and crisply British, sometimes within the same scene. Her sendup of the modern dating app, rendered here as match.com, is the evening’s funniest sustained bit, and it lands because Stern never mocks Jesse’s bewilderment; she reflects it at him through six warped, hilarious mirrors. The audience’s laughter possessed the particular quality of recognition, the sound of a room full of people who have also, at some point, stared blankly at a dating profile, wondering how they got there.

Thursday Farrar’s Steadying Hand as Dr. Carrie Little

Thursday Farrar provides the show’s ballast as Dr. Caroline “Carrie” Little, the therapist who permits Jesse to sing his way toward the truth. Farrar, a stage and screen actress with an AUDELCO Award, plays Carrie with a compassion that never slides into softness; there is real clinical intelligence in her stillness, and the character’s quiet arc, from professional observer to something more entangled in Jesse’s recovery, is dealt with real delicacy. It is a performance built on restraint, which makes it all the more affecting when that restraint finally cracks.

Direction, Design, and a Festival Built for New Work

Director Misti B. Wills keeps the production moving with a light touch, trusting Gardner’s songs to carry emotional power rather than piling on stagecraft. The design team—James Morgan’s set, Josh Liebert’s sound, Emily White’s costumes, Keith A. Truax’s lighting, and Noah Glaister’s projections—works in service of intimacy over spectacle. This suits a ninety-minute, intermission-free chamber piece about one man’s interior life. Stage manager Olivia Fletcher, a Juilliard-trained AEA professional, keeps the transitions between song and scene nearly seamless.

All of this unfolds under the banner of the Broadway Bound Theatre Festival, now in its tenth year of developing new plays and musicals in New York under Festival Director Lenore M Skomal. It is precisely the kind of curated, hands-on incubator that new American musical theater needs and too rarely receives, providing selected writers with dramaturgical development, workshops, readings, technical support, and a professional New York production environment.

The three principal actors appear courtesy of Actors’ Equity Association, while Wills is a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society—professional affiliations that underscore the level of theater craft assembled for this festival production.

A Score with Something to Say About Growing Older

What elevates ‘Once In a Lifetime, Again’ above the familiar conventions of the singer-songwriter rock musical is its refusal to treat late-life romance as a punchline. Moreover, the subject is not entirely theoretical for Gardner: his wife of 31 years, Betsy Means, died in 2013; in 2025, he married Tracey Eve Johnson. Gardner writes explicitly for what he calls a baby boomer sensibility, and the show trusts its audience to sit with real loss before it earns its comedy or its hope. There is something almost Woolfian in its structure, a single consciousness turning grief over and over until it catches the light differently; something of Kenneth Tynan’s appetite for theater that argues with itself in real time. The songs do not resolve Jesse’s sorrow so much as metabolize it, verse by verse, until what is left standing at the end is not a man who has forgotten his wife but one who has finally made room, by her memory, for the possibility of someone new.

It would be easy to file this show under “charming diversion” and move on. That would undersell it. “Once In a Lifetime, Again” is a small, sincere, well-played piece of music theater that trusts silence, believes in a lyric, and trusts an audience old enough to have buried someone and young enough, still, to want to dance again.

Organizations & Contact Information

AMT Theater

354 West 45th Street, New York, NY 10036  ·  Tel: 917-388-2630  ·  amttheater.org

Broadway Bound Theatre Festival (BBTF)

354 West 45th Street, New York, NY 10036 (at AMT Theater)  ·  broadwayboundfest.com  ·  Tickets: broadwayboundtheatrefestival.ludus.com

“Once In a Lifetime, Again” (Stephen H. Gardner)

Contact: 917-679-2459  ·  steve@onceinalifetimeagain.com  ·  onceinalifetimeagain.com  ·  Tickets via BBTF box office