Adam Feldman

The modern world is full of stress, so go and have a party, brah, And shake it like a necklace made of gaudy beads at Mardi Gras. Enjoy this Broadway hybrid that is tuneful and poetical: A most delightful model of a modern operettical.

When Daldry and Martin bring the show's best elements together—McCartney’s acting, Miriam Buether’s sets, Brigitte Reiffenstuel’s costumes, Jon Clark’s lighting, Paul Arditti’s sound, the production group 59’s video design and effects—the production is like a breathtaking theme-park ride. And as with a roller coaster, there are longueurs as the show chugs up to where it needs to be to deliver the next big whoop. Go and enjoy, but don’t be surprised if you soon forget that Stranger Things has happened.

The show is one long elegy for a man we have barely met and barely get to know, and who doesn’t seem especially special except as a victim of circumstance.

Somehow, I enjoyed the overall experience of Smash. Aside from Ashmanshas and a few diverting numbers, the show is undeniably unmoored. But isn’t that ultimately true to the brand? This production embraces failure; it hugs its own shambles. And for diehard Smash appreciators, perhaps that—in a meta way!—is right for the material: Part of the appeal of Bombshell has always been that it had bomb written right into it. To be fair, this production isn’t really a bomb; it doesn’t go hard enough for that. It’s the shell of a bomb.

Perhaps fittingly, the best reason to see Old Friends is the oldest thing in it: Bernadette Peters. At 77, she remains astonishingly youthful-looking; when she takes the stage to sing “I Know Things Now” as Little Red Riding Hood from Into the Woods, it really doesn’t seem like that big a stretch. She does a little cavorting—especially when clowning with Leavel and Riding in Gypsy’s “You Gotta Get a Gimmick”—but mainly she offers emotional ballads and ballast. Most of her solos are in songs she has done before, including some that she has done on Broadway (“Send in the Clowns,” “Losing My Mind”), but her versions are in constant, exquisite evolution. She knows things now, many valuable things, and she brings them to Sondheim’s work like the best kind of friends: the ones who can tell you the truth.

This musical will not change your brain in any way, but it delivers what it promises: a big Broadway production that leaves you grinning, and a star performer with the poise, charm and chops to make you believe that what the world needs now might be, of all things, a little more Betty Boop.

If everything else about this revival were perfect, it might somehow overcome the wrongness of its Jamie. But aside from Warren and the band—expanded from six to nine pieces in Brown’s new orchestrations, and music-directed once again by Tom Murray, who has been with this show from the start—White’s staging looks a mess. Model buildings crop up like Monopoly hotels on David Zinn’s unprepossessing set, and Stacey Derosier’s lighting nearly drowns the characters in pools of blue and red; even the costumes, by the normally faultless Dede Ayite, often miss their marks. Brown’s show deserves better than the serial missteps of this 85-minute faux pas de deux.

Good Night, and Good Luck promises the familiar: What you’ve seen is what you get. It is selling nostalgia for the solemn journalistic ethics of men like Murrow, and perhaps also for the old-fashioned type of stoic and handsome leading man that George Clooney represents; the show’s publicity photos are even, like the film, in black and white. Onstage, the characters don't have much more color. In the movie... the camera fills in a lot of blanks... That can’t happen in the same way onstage, but Clooney and Heslov have made no effort to translate those feelings into language and gesture.

After intermission, the play moves from the Chinese restaurant to the salesmen’s shabby office: plywood in part of the window, rust from a pipe bleeding down an upper wall. (Scott Pask’s sets for both acts are unimprovable, as are his costumes; the pale green shirt under Burr’s brown suit is a miniature triumph.) Culkin’s performance improves in this brighter environment, with greater mobility and action to play, but he’s still all wrong for Roma. When he loses control, there’s no menace to his anger; it’s just a peevish tantrum. To the extent that Marber’s job as a director here is, like John’s, to “marshal the leads,” it is only partly accomplished.

Performed in a single two-hour burst, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a marvel of coordination. For much of the night, Snook acts opposite prerecorded clips of herself as other characters, which appear on video screens that float beside her or above her head; the parts of her performance that are delivered in real time onstage are frequently filmed live and displayed on those same screens.

Yes, I have seen the new Othello with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, the one that is raking in almost $3 million a week by selling out Broadway’s Barrymore Theatre with tickets priced at up to $900. And no, you probably won’t see it. Jealous? Well, you shouldn’t be. It’s not just that jealousy itself—famously described in Othello as ”the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on”—is deleterious to the soul. It’s that this production, though perfectly good in most regards and better than that in several, isn’t worth voiding your purse.

What I do know is that the performer who comes across best is the one who seems the least forced: Jak Malone, who not only provides the show’s best mincing—as a campy fraudulent coroner bedecked in sequined blood—but also, by far, its meatiest dramatic moment: the Act I ballad ‘Dear Bill,’ in which Hester imagines a letter to the fictitious downed airman from his fictitious sweetheart, and which rings truer in feeling than anything else in the show.

Fortunately, the plot is just a hanger for the musical numbers, which is where Buena Vista Social Club comes to thrilling life. The show makes no attempt to rope its score into character work; all 15 songs, of which 10 were part of the original 1996 recording sessions, are presented as performances in nightclubs or studios, sometimes heightened by the six excellent dancers who execute Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck’s gorgeously fluid and individuated choreography. The lyrics are untranslated, but that hardly matters. The music itself is the story.

Juggling characters can often look frantic onstage, but it doesn’t in Vanya. Nothing about Scott’s performance feels hurried; he is unafraid of long silences, like the ones between Michael and Helena that practically heave with the heat of what they can’t say. In that sense, it is of a piece with the use of negative space in Rosanna Vize’s set.

The Streetcar revival now playing at BAM, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, doesn’t have much truck with magic; it does not invite the audience, even momentarily, to share the nympho- and dipsomaniacal Blanche’s delusions of gentility. But neither does it go for realism: There is barely any set, and nearly all of the action is squeezed onto a central square platform on cinderblocks that suggests a boxing ring minus the ropes; an onstage drummer sometimes bangs loudly on his kit, like a migraine in Blanche’s head, and there are occasional shifts into dancey stylized movement.

Purpose is a big swing, but that’s what it takes to get a big hit. Jacobs-Jenkins’s breakthrough play, An Octoroon, was a rejection of old theatrical conventions. This one takes a seat at the table, where—rising to the occasion—it makes speeches, makes trouble and makes excellent theater.

Where Redwood really shines is in the physical. As she proved with the underrated SpongeBob SquarePants, Landau has a fine sense for spectacle, and much of this show is lovely to look at. Hana S. Kim’s video design, rendered on tall and curved LED columns, has a vertiginous majesty, and the gigantic central tree, designed by Jason Ardizzone-West and lit by Scott Zielinsky, is a wonder. As in 2007’s unfortunate King Kong, the colossal title character of Redwood (whom Jesse christens Stella) is the best thing about this musical, even though—or maybe because—it doesn’t sing. But arboreal splendor can’t compensate for the blandness that surrounds it. The show is all bark and no bite.

If Toossi’s thoughtful and searching play has things to teach us—about character, culture, postcolonial identity—it does so through immersion. We first see Marjan’s classroom from the outside, through a window. But Marsha Ginsberg’s boxed set soon rotates to invite us inside; it keeps turning throughout the play to give us new angles, and Toossi does the same. Like any grammar, English has rules and structures that it carefully maintains, but enough exceptions and variations to provide character and texture. It unfolds fluently, but not glibly; its choices of word have purpose and care.

The show is not a comedy per se, but an anthology of comedy writing: short humor pieces by Simon Rich, performed script-in-hand by a rotating cast of actors. And while all of these pieces touch on awkward modern love in some way, that love is not always romantic; it can also be parental or familial or universal. But although the stories tend to resolve on awww-inspiring notes, All In is first and foremost funny—often very, very funny.

In many ways, this Gypsy is grandly old-fashioned: It has a cast of 30 and an orchestra of 25; the set (by Santo Loquasto), costumes (by Toni-Leslie James), hair (by Mia Neal) and lighting (by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer) are worthy of the Majestic Theatre’s name. This is a tree with all the trimmings—including restored bits of text that Laurents trimmed from previous revivals; here’s even new musical material, such as a brief introductory duet for “Small World.” Many of its pleasures are traditional ones, such as the excellent supporting performances: the ideally cast Danny Burstein as Rose’s put-upon lover and manager, Herbie, a mensch with a core of moral strength; Tyson as a June whose potential this production takes seriously; Mylinda Hull, Lili Thomas and the uproarious Lesli Margherita as a trio of dilapidated strippers who show Louise the ropes. This Gypsy has a running time of nearly three hours, and it luxuriates in its own length; it wraps around the audience like a mink stole, and none of it drags.

Eureka Day was already timely when it made its local debut Off Broadway in 2019. It is even more so in this Manhattan Theatre Club revival, now that vaccine denier Robert F. Kennedy has been chosen to lead the Department of Health and Human Services in the next administration. It seems more important than ever to engage with this issue and to understand the views of those who disagree. Eureka Day is often very funny, but it also contributes valuably to that discourse. Even as it needles the left, it offers an invigorating shot in the arm.

Larger themes notwithstanding, Cult of Love is mostly concerned with exploring just such complicated smallness. With an analytic precision that is tempered by sympathy and humor, Headland expertly renders the shifting dynamics and allegiances within the family and the couples: the gang-ups and ambushes, the protective measures and defensive thrusts. And Trip Cullman’s Second Stage production captures that complexity beautifully. It’s there in every inch of John Lee Beatty’s detailed farmhouse set and in Sophia Choi’s perfectly chosen costumes, and especially in the first-rate work of the large cast. Whether singing or sniping or merely stewing, these ten actors don’t hit a false note, and they blend together seamlessly. It's ensemble acting at a shared high level. They do themselves proud.

Death Becomes Her’s deft score, by Broadway newcomers Julia Mattison and Noel Carey, gives the performers plenty of humor to play with, along with nicely overblown strains of mystery and grandeur when called for. The book by Marco Pennette, a veteran TV comedy writer, preserves key jokes from Martin Donovan and David Koepp’s screenplay while adding solid zingers of his own—when Madeline condescendingly suggests that Helen should change jobs, she notes that being a pharmacist is “like being a doctor and a cashier”—and only minimal injections of filler. (Don’t think gay audiencewon’t notice when you crib a joke from Maggie Smith!) Pennette’s most significant changes to the story, at the end of both acts, have the salutary effect of keeping the show’s focus securely on the two main women. Sieber stops the show in a drunken and frantic second-act number, “The Plan,” but in the end this Ernest is just not important.

Although I admire Swept Away’s sincerity, however, I must admit that I was not ultimately very moved by it. The Avett Brothers’ voice is richly conflicted and specific, but the characters in this show are not; they are generic in their typology, and the story doesn’t quite support the framing of Mate’s deathbed confession and conversion to spreading the truth. Swept Away made me want to listen to more songs by the Avett Brothers, but I wasn’t sold on its larger points about brotherhood. For others, perhaps, the sense of redemption Mate lands on will seem worthier of his grim trip of guilt.

Christmas has come early to Broadway this year. Previous productions of the family-friendly comedic yuletide fable Elf The Musical, though pleasant enough, have seemed short on the very Christmas spirit—an ineffable sense of animating joy—that the musical is about. Its current revival, however, is another story entirely. To be honest, I wasn’t eager to see Elf get taken down from the shelf yet again. But my grinchiness soon vanished, to be replaced with a big wide grin. For the first time in my experience, this show is really elfin’ good.