Adam Feldman — Theater Critic

Dave Malloy's mercifully transporting musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 is both a celebration and a cause for it. Mimi Lien's stunning set design transforms the stately Imperial Theatre into an ornate red-and-gold Russian nightclub, with stairs that wind up to the mezzanine, a sinuous catwalk that cuts through the orchestra and musicians planted strategically throughout the space. Members of the cast scatter into the audience and sit next to spectators at cabaret-style tables onstage. Director Rachel Chavkin's approach to the show-spectacular yet intimate, theatrical yet personal-is an ideal complement to Malloy's brilliantly unconventional musical, which breathes modern life into a section of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace.

'It's about time, don't you think?' sings Marvin (Christian Borle) at the outset of the second act of Falsettos, and yes: It is. It's about time that William Finn and James Lapine's intimate, obstinate, heart-shattering 1992 musical has returned to Broadway, to poke us and amuse us and reduce us again to helpless tears. Few musicals have the range, idiosyncrasy and emotional punch of this profoundly unconventional and personal work. Directed by Lapine, the show's revival is very much about a specific Jewish family in the early 1980s, and while its story of a man who leaves his wife and child for a male lover may be less novel today, its larger truths continue to resonate. Seeing Falsettos now is like opening a time capsule and finding a mirror.

If I understand the oblique title correctly, Heisenberg is about how being with another person-being observed, at close range -can affect your direction. Georgie and Alex are set in their different ways, defining who they are by who they've been; their unlikely romance opens them to things they would not have imagined for themselves. Mark Brokaw's spare production, which played at Manhattan Theatre Club's small City Center space last year, seem even less imposing in the company's Broadway house, but that works to its advantage. Stephens's carefully crafted 75-minute play has a sense of how little its characters matter to the universe. It makes that smallness feel liberating.

Perhaps you have spotted them at diners, parks, used-book stores or Zabar's counters. Or maybe you've seen them in sketches on Comedy Central's Kroll Show, hosting a cable-access prank show called Too Much Tuna. Embodied with a gleeful blend of affection and mockery by Nick Kroll and John Mulaney, respectively, Gil and George are miraculous comic creations who have earned a well-deserved cult following. Oh, Hello on Broadway, directed by goofy-smart prince Alex Timbers, stretches the shtick to 95 minutes of metatheatrical horseplay.

Perhaps you have spotted them at diners, parks, used-book stores or Zabar's counters. Or maybe you've seen them in sketches on Comedy Central's Kroll Show, hosting a cable-access prank show called Too Much Tuna. Embodied with a gleeful blend of affection and mockery by Nick Kroll and John Mulaney, respectively, Gil and George are miraculous comic creations who have earned a well-deserved cult following. Oh, Hello on Broadway, directed by goofy-smart prince Alex Timbers, stretches the shtick to 95 minutes of metatheatrical horseplay.

As the morphine-addicted Mary Tyrone in the latest Broadway revival of Eugene O'Neill's bitter masterwork, Long Days Journey Into Night, Jessica Lange brings stunning colors to the role of a woman clawing her way through fog. You can't take your eyes off her; it's a mesmeric performance...Lange's Mary is a desperate fighter, defensive and manipulative...By turns, she is loving, wistful, lonely, proud, vicious and confused -- but above all, she is an addict...Gabriel Byrne plays her husband, James, with striking weariness and restraint...As their dissolute oldest son, Jamie, the riveting Michael Shannon infuses his climactic drunk scene with acrid dark humor and reluctant, wounded tenderness toward his consumptive younger brother, Edmund (a willfully sincere John Gallagher Jr.).

Before he became a household name as the uptight Mitchell onModern Family, Jesse Tyler Ferguson was one of New York's most inventive comic character actors. You can sense his delight at stretching those muscles in the Broadway revival of Fully Committed...Over the course of 80 minutes, he also portrays some three dozen other people...Ferguson's performance is necessarily broad, and not always precise: a half-British accent creeps into several voices. But it hardly matters. The actor's likability glazes his hamminess with sugar, and the play, while not very filling, can be enjoyed with few reservations.

'If you knew my story, you'd have a good story to tell,' sings Alice (Carmen Cusack) in the introductory number of Bright Star. But would you know how to tell it? That's where Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, cowriters of this gawky tall tale, fall short...Bright Star aspires to be what the older Alice asks from a young fiction writer (A.J. Shively): 'a sweeping tale of pain and redemption.' But it cries out for an editor's sharp blue pen. Sweeping? In lieu of the color that the story seems to call for, Walter Bobbie's production is often actively plain, as though trying to hide its central bathos in beige. Painful? For the audience, perhaps, thanks to shoddy craftsmanship that saddles likable, plucky bluegrass music with lyrics that run from workmanlike to egregious. It does, however, have a genuine redeeming feature in Cusack...Cusack is distinctive and immediately interesting, convincing at playing Alice at both ages, with a voice that is full of beautiful surprises.

Put The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake and Airplane! in a blender; add 30 pop hits from the 1970s (such as 'Hot Stuff' and 'I Am Woman'), carefully chopped; stir in a seasoned cast of Broadway pros and a magical secret ingredient called Jennifer Simard; add garish coloring, muddle with camp and garnish with the kitschiest cocktail umbrella you can find. This is the recipe for Disaster!, a lovably scrappy and often deliciously silly jukebox-musical spoof...Not every joke in Disaster! lands, but there's a lot to enjoy on this nostalgia trip. Sit back, kick off your shoes and have a few laughs on the lido deck.

Put The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake and Airplane! in a blender; add 30 pop hits from the 1970s (such as 'Hot Stuff' and 'I Am Woman'), carefully chopped; stir in a seasoned cast of Broadway pros and a magical secret ingredient called Jennifer Simard; add garish coloring, muddle with camp and garnish with the kitschiest cocktail umbrella you can find. This is the recipe for Disaster!, a lovably scrappy and often deliciously silly jukebox-musical spoof...Not every joke in Disaster! lands, but there's a lot to enjoy on this nostalgia trip. Sit back, kick off your shoes and have a few laughs on the lido deck.

...not every show manages a Broadway transfer with equal grace, and I wondered if the some of the qualities that made it special Off Broadway -- the sharpness of Joe Mantello's staging, the ease of the ensemble acting, the audience's shared awareness of being in the dark -- could survive a transfer to a larger theater. I needn't have worried. The Humans is just as funny, just as moving and just as sneakily unsettling in its new Broadway incarnation, and retains its essential intimacy...Seeing the play a second time, and knowing some of its secrets, makes it even more compelling; you're more alert to what some of the characters aren't saying.

No one plays Jewish mothers with secrets better than Linda Lavin...You recognize these women right away, because Lavin plays them so hilariously to New York Jewish type: She has a cartoonist's control and economy of line. But to recognize them is not, it turns out, to know them...Greenberg's writing is elegant and keenly epigrammatic...Directed with canny ambiguity by Lynne Meadow, Our Mother's Brief Affair lets you to wonder how much this scandal has been retouched. But there is no doubt as to the casual mastery that Lavin, at 78, brings to the part. Shifting in and out of the past, elevating one-liners to three-dimensionality, she brings a lifetime of command to the stage. She owns this part and claims it like nobody's business but her own.

Seeing The Color Purple on Broadway, a decade after its premiere, is like meeting an old friend who has gotten her life together since the last time you saw her. It seems more confident in itself, surer in its sexuality, and it's lost a lot of weight...Doyle's production intensifies The Color Purple and brings out its deeper hues. The musical blossoms into a classic...Celie's journey has a clearer sense of direction than before, but she doesn't have to travel it alone. Erivo is supported by a mighty sisterhood of performers: Jennifer Hudson as Shug, Mister's mistress and Celie's lover; Danielle Brooks as the seemingly indomitable Sofia; Patrice Covington as the exuberant Squeak; Carrie Compere, Bre Jackson and Rema Webb as a trio of gossipy church ladies. This Color Purple is a celebration of black women, and it fills you with appreciation for the musical's return. It's here, and it's beautiful.

Evan Cabnet's production, with its handsome set by Beowulf Boritt, does atmospheric justice to Thérèse's desperation: When she and Laurent meet for a tryst, his cramped artist's garret hangs in the middle of the stage, like a cloud. Helen Edmundson's cold-eyed thriller doesn't shy from the lurid misanthropy of Emile Zola's 1867 novel (a tale of adultery and murder and their brutal retribution) or its gothic, Poe-esque denouement. But it does give a sharp sense of the limited options available to women. Thérèse may be a shark -- the word in French is requin -- but you pity her the way you might a shark in an aquarium.

Dames at Sea was launched in 1966 at the downtown coffeehouse Caffe Cino, where its affectionate send-up of 1930s movie musicals tapped -- or, rather, tap-danced -- into nostalgia for the busily silly spectacles of yesteryear. Now it's on Broadway, where it lands like a harmless piece of wet fluff. The first 20 minutes of wide-eyed antics are cute; then your mind starts to wander. Dames at Sea's mild pastiche...is passable but passé -- imagine a revival, half a century from now, of a Fringe show about the '80s -- and it's presented with tongue so far in cheek that it can't say much at all. The cast of six works hard to sell it, though...Director-choreographer Randy Skinner gives them furiously fast tap numbers to perform, as though they were pumping invisible air pedals to keep the show from deflating. In the end, no such luck: pfffffft.

Together, the stars of The Gin Game, James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson, are 175 years old. They draw from massive piles of skill and goodwill, and watching these masters play the audience is a delight. Watching them play cards for two hours, however, is less compelling. Jones is the ornery, hypercompetitive Weller; Tyson is the prim, shrewd Fonsia...As they chat, flirt and turn on each other, the play asks us to consider how much of their isolation stems from bad hands they've been dealt, and how much from bad judgment...Leonard Foglia's revival lacks that sense of purpose in its shape. The age of the actors perhaps makes them slower and cuter than might be ideal; the result is likable but shambling.

Life spurts out all over the place in the first two thirds of Lisa D'Amour's Airline Highway...Although the characters are familiar in many ways, director Joe Mantello and his accomplished cast of 16 breathe spirit into most of them, and the big, boozy party scene has jazzy vigor. (Freeman and White are standouts.) But D'Amour's dialogue is short on the kind of poetry that might elevate her gallery of beautiful-loser types, and she can't sustain the wide focus she initiates; Airline Highway's multiple plot threads are pulled out (or forgotten) in a rushed, unsatisfying denouement that resorts to summarizing its message to the audience in the form of a (literal) high-school class presentation.

Being is not the same as acting, and this lesson is illustrated by Fleming herself throughout Joe DiPietro's lousy new comedy, Living on Love. She's a great star giving a mediocre performance as a great star...The canned corn of DiPietro's writing -- 'This dog was petted by more Italians than Sophia Loren!' -- is pressed into mush by Kathleen Marshall's clunky direction; the younger actors, who spend most of the play in a panic, are nearly unwatchable. Living on Love is meant to be hammy, but it's not even that. It's a bland, synthetic dud: a ham-flavored turkey.

Being is not the same as acting, and this lesson is illustrated by Fleming herself throughout Joe DiPietro's lousy new comedy, Living on Love. She's a great star giving a mediocre performance as a great star...The canned corn of DiPietro's writing -- 'This dog was petted by more Italians than Sophia Loren!' -- is pressed into mush by Kathleen Marshall's clunky direction; the younger actors, who spend most of the play in a panic, are nearly unwatchable. Living on Love is meant to be hammy, but it's not even that. It's a bland, synthetic dud: a ham-flavored turkey.

The best way to enjoy the madcap, madly old-hat It Shoulda Been You is to pretend it's a lost TV relic from the 1970s. The shortcomings of Brian Hargrove and Barbara Anselmi's mossy new show, about an interfaith wedding gone awry, are easier to forgive through a lens of affectionate camp: the dated stereotypes of pushy Jews and boozy WASPs, the creaky farcical contrivances, the hokey-schmaltzy jokes...But while the antics are predictable -- aside from one huge, implausible twist -- they're not unenjoyable, thanks to a seasoned and flavorful all-star ensemble...Though the cake is stale, they decorate it well. It shoulda been better but it coulda been worse.

...Eric Schaeffer's revival, starring High School Musical's Vanessa Hudgens as the titular girl, rescues the show from the dustbin of history and moves it to a recycling bin of the present. Revised by Heidi Thomas to accommodate modern sensibilities, this Gigi is inoffensive to a fault. The heroine remains a courtesan-in-training, but she's been given more spunk...Gigi is the story of a girl being groomed to sell herself, and when the musical dances around that -- however attractively, thanks to Joshua Bergasse's swift choreography -- it feels evasive. More often, though, it merely feels generic. Hudgens's Gigi seems lovely but simple, her gee-whiz appeal hobbled by affected enunciation...Only Cott, especially in his big solo, seems committed to the reality of the story. The rest is mostly yesterday's bubbly, domestic and served lukewarm.

Praise be to the angels behind it: Hand to God has made it to Broadway. No need for heavenly choir music, though, because the reception the play deserves is the one it gets nightly at the Booth: roars of gleeful laughter. Some have wondered whether Robert Askins's outrageous dark comedy-about a sweet Christian teen, Jason (Steven Boyer), and his demonic puppet, Tyrone-would work as well in a larger venue as in its two hit Off Broadway runs. The answer is a resounding, full-throated yes. The freshest and funniest Broadway comedy in years, Hand to God is to plays as The Book of Mormon is to musicals: a welcome breath of foul air.

Inspired by quantum mechanics, Nick Payne's captivating play, directed crisply by Michael Longhurst, explores the idea of parallel universes in a mosaic of scenes that often restart and branch off in new directions, skipping forward and backward in time...Beekeeper Roland (Gyllenhaal) and cosmologist Marianne (Wilson) are on-again, off-again lovers: in some worlds on, in some worlds off. Their relationship and its challenges -- infidelity, illness, death -- vary in ways that sometimes reflect nuances of their behavior and sometimes stem from forces beyond their control...Informed by authors like Jorge Luis Borges and Caryl Churchill, Constellations is smart but not dry; its focus is on the personal and emotional, and Gyllenhaal and Wilson reboot themselves convincingly at every stutter and turn. They're wonderfully multiversatile.

...Bill Condon's darkly sumptuous revival, it really is better than it was. The musical has been extensively rewritten, with many new songs, richer side characters and a clearer let-your-Freaks-flag-fly message. Emily Padgett (as the stardom-eyed Daisy) and Erin Davie (as the shrinking Violet) work marvelously together, achieving both the requisite synchronicity and the trickier discreteness of personality. Ryan Silverman, Matthew Hydzik and the iron-voiced David St. Louis are impressive as their side men, and some scenes are genuinely moving. But while this sincere and stylishly designed production is perhaps the best that Side Show can be, that best, alas, isn't great. Bill Russell's lyrics-the leaden rhymes drilled into Henry Krieger's tunes, the corny banalities of the declarative songs-continually jostle the musical into kitsch.

On the Town itself, though frisky and enjoyable, does not have the strongest legs as a monument...As Ivy, the object of one sailor's infatuation, the splendid Megan Fairchild dances throughout with an elegant lightness unmatched elsewhere in the piece. But although it occasionally pushes too hard, John Rando's production inspires considerable affection. The three able-bodied seamen each get moments to show off their abilities (and their bodies), and their other two main squeezes (Alysha Umpress and Elizabeth Stanley) sing well; the supporting cast of zanies (including Allison Gunn, Stephen DeRosa, Philip Boykin and the always-ripe Jackie Hoffman) give the streets of New York a suitable complement of muggers. I suspect there will be people who love the torch-carrying spirit of this On the Town, and I wish them, and it, the best. To me, however, it seems a bit like a well-mounted exhibit at some Natural History Museum of Broadway: a stuffed lark.