Adam Feldman

It seemed as though the show had been condemned to obsolescence, humbled and disavowed like its own once-grand Grizabella the Glamour Cat. But now along comes a thrilling reconception that not only rescues Cats from the oversize junkyard but lifts it, like Grizabella herself, to unexpected heights. After an already-legendary Off Broadway debut at the Perelman Arts Center in 2024, this production—under the chosen name Cats: The Jellicle Ball–has now re-inhabited Broadway, where it remains a categorical triumph.

Cullman’s revival, which marks Becky Shaw’s Broadway debut, serves its plot very well. The production moves fast—even the set changes (to David Zinn’s fine set) have humor and purpose, and Kaye Voyce’s costume design is perfection—and all five actors are first-class, including the scene-stealing Linda Emond as Susie’s acidic mother, Susan, who is prone to Lucille Bluth–esque judgments from on high. Which characters you root in the play’s romantic rectangle may reveal something about your own character, but it speaks to the strength of the writing and performances that a credible argument is possible for all of them. As dark as it sometimes gets, the play encourages all of us to see the good inside even damaged goods.

To fill the holes left by suspense and realism, Guirgis offers broad jokes about drug use, office politics and the romantic lives of the ladies who work at the bank (who, thanks to overmiking, scream their gossip from the outset). There is also endless blathering by Ortiz’s Detective Fucco, who has been named Fucco just so that his name can be insulting mispronounced by a snide FBI agent, Sheldon (Spencer Garrett), whose every on-the-hard-nose line sounds like a South Park parody of his character. (“If this was my case to command, I could make dinner reservations for 7:30 this evening, assure the missus I wouldn’t be late, and be at the bar with a tall gin ricky by 7:15. But hey, this is your thing. And when you screw it up royally—I’ll be here to clean up your mess.”) Not all the well-chosen Brenda Abbandandolo costumes and David Bowie songs in the world can disguise this production’s flaws. Guirgis has written plays that capture the spirit of New York City in vibrant and original ways. But this one? This one’s a dog.

Glancing is what this production does best: It’s a visual experience more than a visceral one. Directed by Martha Clarke, who has an excellent eye for beauty, the play is a bit of a tableau vivant. The set, by production designer Neil Patel and set decorator Faye Armon-Troncoso, is a piece of cluttered art in itself, and it is also the canvas for other very fine work: Christopher Akerlind’s lighting, John Narun’s projections, Fred Murphy’s cinematography, Ruth Lingford’s animation. The result is a diverting way to spend an hour at the Vineyard Theatre, and a fair introduction to Darger and his work, but—perhaps out of respect—it seems unwilling to take imaginative or critical liberties. While the play’s heart is in the right place, its portrait of an archetypical outsider doesn’t afford him much internal life.

Berger’s judicious editing helps make Titus sympathetic by eliminating his early murder of his own son, which casts him as something of a murderous psycho from the start. And although Page is justly celebrated for playing villains—and recently devoted a one-man show, All the Devils Are Here, to Shakespearean ones—it’s his nonvillainy that is most compelling here; there is an underlying nobility, and a surprising tenderness, to his interpretation of the role, and especially in his treatment of Lavinia. Faridany likewise emphasizes Tamora’s maternal pain over her Jezebel-like machinations.

Nicholas Hytner’s bracing production ran in the West End in 2024 with the same four actors in the main roles, and they mostly work together as a smooth machine. Lithgow’s Dahl can be the soul of charm and playful wit when he’s being indulged, but the judgmental mean streak that enlivens his kids’ books (and especially his macabre short stories) can also make itself felt in real life when he feels challenged. The characters in his orbit know how to flatter and deflect when required, including his good-natured Kiwi housekeeper, Hallie (Stella Everett), and his hearty groundskeeper, Wally (David Manis). Cash’s performance is a somewhat different register—it feels more strained—and this hint of formal discontinuity works to the production’s advantage. Jessie is the outsider here, ill at ease from the beginning, and Dahl treats her with annoyed contempt, homing in on her points of vulnerability (as a young person, as a woman, as an American and especially as a Jew). The marvelous nastiness in his work, Giant suggests, extends from the fact that he can be a nasty piece of work himself.

Nick Kourtides’s sound is crisp and well-balanced, and Rachel Chavkin’s direction adds considerable visual dynamism to a story that is necessarily about confinement, with particular help from Alan Edwards’s lighting and David Bengali’s video design. Aside from one droop at the two-thirds mark, the energy stays high, and episodes of goofy humor periodically cut the navel-gazing tension. But there’s no question that, as promised by the title, a lot of this show is pretty heavy going.

But without specificity and motive, one is left with a thickly padded elaboration of an idea that Rodgers and Hammerstein compressed into two and a half minutes in The Sound of Music’s “My Favorite Things.” Primo tickets for Every Brilliant Thing cost more than $400, and if you don’t mind spending top dollar on a dime-thin show, this one won’t disappoint; it’s diverting and at times even touching. But, appealing though he is, there may be better things on which to spend that money than 70 minutes of Radcliffe doing crowd work.

The story’s timeline is not always intelligible—or, for that matter, possible—and Afsoon Pajoufar’s attractively curved Roll-a-Rama set, which employs mirrors very cleverly at one exit, doesn’t do much to define the play’s various physical spaces. But clarity is not exactly the goal. Reddick is not aiming for realism; a bomb in the climatic sequence is just bundled red sticks of dynamite, Looney Tunes style.

Handled with proper care, this could be the basis of a compelling new vision of Antigone. But Ziegler’s play is, at times, quite bafflingly sloppy. Early on, for example, while providing “Antigone 101” background, Dicey says that Oedipus “was famously cursed to murder his father and sleep with his mother—which he did and then promptly killed himself.” But he didn’t kill himself, of course; famously, he blinded himself. Is this a deliberate howler, intended to make Dicey’s narration unreliable? It’s hard to tell, because so much of the rest of the show and Tyne Rafaeli’s direction of it at the Public are tonally chaotic.

The duo’s journeys include abandonment and substance abuse, but The Monsters is not a sob story—it’s a sib story, in which two people, misshapen in their youths, give each other a chance to remake themselves. For him, that means trying to open up and settle down; for her, it means finding confidence and putting herself out to be noticed. (“I aint a meat and potatoes fighter like you,” she brags of her style in the cage. “I’m a steak fritz bitch.”) Anyanwu charts this progress smartly, without pushing too hard, and the actors complement each other beautifully as Mizzelle’s scrappy charisma bounces against Onaodowan’s musclebound grace. They keep you gripped as you watch them fight for what freedom they can find in the cage and beyond.

Putting the word shitshow in the title of your play seems almost like a dare to the writer of an unenthusiastic review. I will resist the easy jab, though, because writer-director Aya Ogawa’s carnivalesque pageant—which explores and explodes different facets of motherhood through satirical vignettes, musical numbers and bouffon body horror—is audacious in more than its name. The show is intent on airing ugly and troubling aspects of maternity, and Ogawa delivers them cesarean style: with a few deep cuts and a lot of mess.

As he proved in SpongeBob SquarePants and more recently in the Wicked movies, Slater has a real gift for movement. Marcel on the Train gives him ample opportunity to showcase it as Marceau tries with varying success to entertain his 12-year-old charges, Life Is Beautifully, and distract them from the dangers outside. The adolescents, all played by adult actors, include the virtuous Adolphe (Max Gordon Moore), the mischievous Henri (an amusing Alex Wyse), the sour and pessimistic Berthe (Tedra Millan) and the cowering Etiennette (Maddie Corman), who—perhaps in response to unspeakable trauma—never says a word.

Barron presses on tender bruises—loss, comfort, fear, concern—in ways that often leave you laughing with a strange pleasure of recognition. But if you find yourself in tears by the end, the play can handle that, too. It holds you in a bracing embrace, as close as it needs to—which is to say, too close.

At the same time, the women—as in Bess Wohl’s Liberation, another celebration of female support—are crisply individualized, both in the writing and by a first-rate multigenerational cast under the direction of Les Waters. The presiding eminences are the testy Marvel and the patrician Chalfant, icons both of the New York stage, but this is, appropriately, very much a group effort. Together, the performers give fresh breath to the old observation that theater is like a church. Through their congregation, mutable yet constant, the play demonstrates the healing power of other people’s stories.

How well do you know Sean Hayes? You probably think of him as a master of broad comedy, as he demonstrated in 11 seasons as Jack on Will & Grace (and as Jerry in Martin and Lewis and Larry in The Three Stooges). Maybe you enjoy his good-natured enthusiasm on the podcast Smartless. Maybe you saw him quip, scowl and play classical piano in his Tony-winning portrayal of Oscar Levant in Broadway’s Good Night, Oscar. Even so, you might still be surprised by how well he plays a basically regular guy in The Unknown: Elliott, a somewhat isolated, somewhat depressed, mostly sober middle-aged writer who has been having a hard time devising a screenplay, perhaps because his own life has so little drama.

Yet The Other Place, like many other attempts to modernize the Greeks, has a hole where the ancient gods, fates and rituals should be. Compared to Antigone’s insistence on honoring the dead, Annie’s protest has risibly low stakes; just as an Oedipus without oracles is reduced to the story of a preposterously unlikely and monstrous bummer, Antigone without deeply rooted righteous principles is just the story of a mentally ill woman who can’t give up her father’s ghost. Compensatorily, Zeldin fills out the story with a theme of sexual transgression that emerges too suddenly to deliver the neomythic familial drama of, say, A View from the Bridge, and whose denouement is triggered by a stage convention—the coupling of an implausible indiscretion and an inopportune entrance—that is less classical than cliché.

Although Schmidt the writer specifies, in all caps, that Ben "MUST BE CHARMING," Schmidt the director ignores that imperative; as embodied by Linklater, who usually is charming, Ben is an insufferable manchild from beginning to end, and nothing more than that. Spending even a second with him, much less The Disappear's two hours and 15 minutes, is not recommended

Although Agnes and Peter sleep together early on, their relationship isn’t primarily sexual. But there’s an element of seduction to their whole dynamic, as Peter, at first reluctantly, gets under Agnes’s skin. Letts is an actor as well as a playwright—he and Coon, who are married, met while co-starring in a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—and he knows how to craft scenes that keep performers intensely engaged with each other onstage. Smallwood and Coon, reprising their roles from the 2021 production of Bug at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, strike a compelling balance. He arrives full of secrets that he gradually reveals; she arrives empty and eager to swallow them up, spiraling ever farther away from life beyond her room. (In several ways, this role is like the flip side of the steadfast mother Coon played so indelibly in Mary Jane.)

Much of the pre-opening press about this revival has revolved around the 96-year-old Squibb, who might be the oldest actor ever to play a principal role on Broadway. She merits that attention with a remarkable performance that combines frostiness and fogginess into a firm coat of rime. But the other actors are equally good. Burstein, who radiates human tenderness, is perfectly employed as the play’s kindest character, and his final scene is devastating; Lowell finds the appropriate levels of stiffness and charm for his faux Walter. And Nixon is simply the best I’ve ever seen her onstage: As Tess labors to connect with her mother—or alternatively to give up any hope of connecting with her—Nixon invests her testiness with complex underlying notes of bitterness and exhaustion.

All of the above might make for an entertaining evening if Chess were just a concert, which unfortunately it is not, despite Mayer’s concert-style staging: the orchestra is onstage, with minimal sets (by David Rockwell and video designer Peter Nigrini) but maximal lighting and sound (by Kevin Adams and John Shivers, respectively). The problems with Danny Strong’s new book present themselves instantly in the obnoxious form of the Arbiter (Bryce Pinkham), whose smarmy metatheatrical narration, when it isn’t restating the obvious, often seems to be making fun of the rest of the show. Though never welcome, and usually shouty, his narrator is at his absolute worst when he strains for humor.

Icke’s Oedipus is continuously engaging and smart, and it is exceedingly well performed by a cast that also includes Teagle F. Bougere, Bhasker Patel and Ani Mesa-Perez as aides and employees. Where it runs up against a wall—as many modern adaptations of ancient texts do—is in trying to make the story function without gods and fates. The possibility of divine machinations is brought up in passing here and there, but inconclusively.

Like the rest of the show, however, the score doesn’t quite cohere; it feels like less than the sum of its parts. Arden’s direction provides good small moments but can’t provide an overall attitude the material lacks, and the production’s look is inconsistent: Christian Cowan’s costumes are great fun, but Laffrey’s TV-set design relies too heavily on a large mobile screen, and the finally marble staircase looks a mess at the bottom. The Yiddish word for The Queen of Versailles is ongepotchket: tacky and busy, with components that might be fine alone but don’t come together. If you want to see it, you should probably see it soon: Like all those unlucky French courtiers, this show seems headed for the chopping block.

Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock star in Samuel D. Hunter's gorgeous new play. Five stars.

Five stars. Bess Wohl's feminist drama keeps the conversation going.