[NoHo Arts District, CA] – A NoHo Arts 2026 Hollywood Fringe Festival review of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, a powerful queer reimagining of John Patrick Shanley’s acclaimed dark romance featuring mesmerizing performances by Carter Scott and Jobeth Locklear.
If you see a lot of theatre, and I see a lot of theatre, then you will undoubtedly come across this well-loved and not-performed-often-enough, in my opinion, ode to love and hard hearts. It is probably one of John Patrick Shanley’s most well-known plays and certainly one of his most loved, with very good reason.
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is also a perfect vehicle for excellent actors and this production boasts two truly excellent and beautifully nuanced performances from two wonderful actors.
It’s a story about two disparate souls who push away the world and encounter each other one sad night in a seedy bar somewhere in the bleakest areas of the Bronx.
Danny is almost psychotically violent. His hands bruised, his heart too, he limps and strikes his way through his life. Working, then getting fired over and over as his temper gets him in more and more trouble. He is one bad fight away from kill or be killed and he knows it.
Roberta is equally lost. A young mother, living with her parents still, deeply troubled by a terrible sexual encounter with her father, wishing her life were different, looking for love or something, anything to change everything.
This night. This one magical window for them both. We witness them as they spar and parry, cajole and flirt and almost kill each other with words and more.
It’s hot, heartbreaking and deeply poetic, and you just can’t tear your eyes away from this almost car crash of a love story. And it is very definitely a love story.
What makes this production even more electric and meaningful than most is that Danny is played by a non-binary actor, Carter Scott. A first, in fact. And they play Danny with a very different kind of breaking, giving them a softness, a tenderness and a coolness that I haven’t seen before. I cannot tell you how mesmerizing the juxtaposition between this Danny and this Roberta, played so incredibly by Jobeth Locklear, is. You can feel them aching for each other. It’s electric and gorgeous, and as I write this I am right back in that theatre with them both, wishing them to get over themselves and to just say I love you.
What a wonderful, magical production to find in the middle of the Hollywood Fringe. What a gift they gave us, and a wild kind of tranquility in the midst of a world of chaos. If these two people can figure it out, then maybe the rest of us can too.