Good Time Charlie

Good Time Charlie is a new autobiographical play by Ryan J. Haddad, produced by The Public Theater as a world premiere. As of October 2026, it is a limited run in the Public's 2026-27 season. The tone is comic, with dramatic turns, and although it is a play rather than a musical, its characters now and then slip into brief sung moments borrowed from other shows.

The heart of it is a friendship across generations. Charlie is a gay dentist who once wanted a stage career but was nudged by his parents into dentistry. He hands his love of culture to his nephew Ryan, a theater-obsessed gay kid with Broadway ambitions who grows up to write and perform. Ryan is a version of Haddad himself.

Haddad calls the result a gay family romp that turns serious. Its subjects are gay elders, chosen family and a taste for theater passed down through generations, and it compares what happened to two generations of gay men in one family when they came out.

The play covers 1976 to the present day, mostly around Cleveland, Ohio, and its suburbs. It is held together by a framing device: Ryan, as a child, put on plays with his relatives in the backyard, and about 20 years later the family gathers to stage a play about their own lives.

Within that frame, Charlie's history unfolds. An early scene has him taking eight-year-old Ryan to see The Phantom of the Opera on tour, where the chandelier frightens the boy. Charlie's own parents spent years pressing him to stop being gay and would not meet his partner, Lou. Lou is a divorced film studies professor roughly two decades older, and the two bonded over movies. Lou's best friend Sheldon, who runs an art-house cinema, becomes Charlie's closest friend and another gay mentor.

Ryan's thread starts around 2008, when he comes out in suburban Ohio and gets grudging acceptance, played mostly for laughs. His mother Judy, father Bob and lesbian aunt Janice are on his side, and both his parents and Janice insist they were the ones who introduced him to theater. When Ryan's play drags painful family secrets into the open, Charlie stays in his corner.

Haddad made his name with solo pieces drawn from his life as a gay man with cerebral palsy, including Hold Me in the Water and Hi, Are You Single? This is the first of his plays built from scenes among a cast of characters rather than monologue. His earlier Dark Disabled Stories, also at the Public, won an Obie Award.

The script is metatheatrical. Characters break in, dispute Ryan's version of events and argue about edits, and the rewriting itself turns into a running joke. Seven actors play nine characters, and two of them double as two sets of parents.

Musical theater is woven through the humor. Jokes touch on Mame, A Star Is Born, Fun Home and All About Eve, among others. The sung interludes come from four sources, including Into the Woods and Knickerbocker Holiday, and the pre-show music includes My Fair Lady and Guys and Dolls.

The real Charlie, whom Haddad thinks of as his gay uncle, is strictly speaking his father's first cousin. The play points this out itself.

The set rebuilds Lou's Japanese-inspired garden, with bright flowers and tall feathery grasses, and it stays on stage for the entire evening. Lighting and sound carry the story between time periods and into musical moments.

As of October 2026, Jonathan Raviv plays Charlie and Ryan J. Haddad plays Ryan, the character based on himself. Timothy Bagley plays Lou, Michael Cristofer plays Sheldon, Beth Malone plays Janice, Nael Nacer plays Charlie Sr. and Bob, and Artemis Pebdani plays Joan and Judy. Three understudies cover the seven principal actors.

Several of them bring notable credits. As of October 2026, Raviv is an Emmy winner. Cristofer won the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award as the playwright of The Shadow Box. Malone earned a Tony nomination for originating Alison Bechdel in Fun Home, which adds weight to the show's Fun Home jokes. Pebdani is known for It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Scandal. Bagley makes his New York stage debut and his Public Theater debut, after television work on Will & Grace, Hacks and The Comeback.

Haddad wrote the play as his application to the Public's Emerging Writers Group and kept working on it there for two years. Many more years of development followed, with Sharron involved throughout.

To research it, Haddad quit his day job and returned to Cleveland for a stretch of five to ten days of interviews at Charlie's home. In total he recorded 10 to 20 hours of conversation with Charlie and about two hours with Lou. The real Charlie read drafts from the beginning and gave the project his blessing.

The first preview, in Martinson Hall on September 24, 2026, was a Joseph Papp Free Performance, with free tickets given out by digital lottery. Opening night was October 9, 2026.