Adam Feldman — Theater Critic

“Stuff in your life you think you’ll never get over, you will get over,” he says. “You might even laugh about it someday.” Here, though, laughs are not the final goal. Vicious comedy may be Ross’s superpower, but this show aims to reveal his secret identity as the nicest of guys: an über-mensch.

If last week’s box-office tallies are any indication, Broadway audiences really want their mommy. The national tour of Mamma Mia! has just set up camp (or at least kitsch) at the Winter Garden Theatre, where the show’s original production ran for 14 years, and in the first week of its scheduled sixth-month engagement it outgrossed every other show except fellow marathon runners The Lion King, Wicked and Hamilton. This show, the mother of all jukebox musicals, is nothing if not familiar—and in this case, familiarity breeds contentment.

If last week’s box-office tallies are any indication, Broadway audiences really want their mommy. The national tour of Mamma Mia! has just set up camp (or at least kitsch) at the Winter Garden Theatre, where the show’s original production ran for 14 years, and in the first week of its scheduled sixth-month engagement it outgrossed every other show except fellow marathon runners The Lion King, Wicked and Hamilton. This show, the mother of all jukebox musicals, is nothing if not familiar—and in this case, familiarity breeds contentment.

Ruhl's riff leans into surrealism, symbolism, dark humor and poetry as the title character is torn between husband and father, romance and grief, the living and the dead. The production includes moving moments and breathtaking visuals... Her Eurydice is a reimagined remembrance of a story we feel compelled to revisit over and over, even once we’ve learned the dangers of looking back.

For all its flaws, there's a lot to cherish about Goddess. Arnulfo Maldonado's lush set brilliantly bridges the secular and celestial worlds. Dede Ayite decks out the cast in African-influenced streetwear complemented by Nikiya Mathis's luxurious hairdos. Bradley King's purple and blue lighting gives off an ethereal glow, and choreographer Darrell Grand Moultrie's athletic moves are impressive. And best of all, there's Iman, every inch a deity, beguiling us with her smoky, honeyed timbre and delivering an emotional epiphany through music that the dialogue can’t match.

The writing is piquant and sly, the songs have verve and resonance, and every element of Cromer’s production seems to fit exactly in place. The show premiered last year as part of Audible Theater’s Off Broadway programming, which is apt: The whole project has the spirit of a serial podcast, branching off whenever it likes to explore some fascinating tangent with help from Cromer’s protean supporting players: Knitel, Eddie Cooper, Dashiell Eaves, Ken Marks, Trent Saunders and crowd favorite Thom Sesma (as a Tinseltown coroner turned crooner). These very fine performers, along with Brown and the onstage band, revolve around Durand’s extremely stable center. The 2024–25 season has been strangely full of cadavers; things to do on Broadway when you’re dead this year include faking out Nazis in Operation Mincemeat, narrating yourself in Sunset Blvd., getting a makeover in Death Becomes Her and feeding your friends in Swept Away. But Durand takes rigor mortis to new levels of morbid rigor. He’s the hardest-working stiff on Broadway.

First things first: Just in Time is a helluva good time at the theater. It’s not just that, but that’s the baseline. Staged in a dazzling rush by Alex Timbers, the show summons the spirit of a 1960s concert at the Copacabana by the pop crooner Bobby Darin—as reincarnated by one of Broadway’s most winsome leading men, the radiant sweetie Jonathan Groff, who gives the performance his considerable all. You laugh, you smile, your heart breaks a little, you swing along with the brassy band, and you’re so well diverted and amused that you may not even notice when the ride you’re on takes a few unconventional turns.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.