Adam Feldman — Theater Critic

Hwang has given Yellow Face a minor face lift since the original New York production. It’s good work: Minus its intermission and a few inessential scenes, the play seems tauter and smoother, but not unnaturally so; its wrinkles and laugh lines remain. Kim, whose only previous Broadway experience was a brief stint in the King and I role originated by the non-Asian Yul Brynner, capably holds the show’s center as DHH, with an appealing layer of fluster behind his veneer of success. Three versatile actors—Marinda Anderson, Shannon Tyo and Some Like It Hot’s expert Kevin Del Aguila—fill out the many minor roles, often playing against ethnic type; these include quick, insider-y sketches of real-life journalists, activists, theater creators and (such as BD Wong, Margaret Cho and Jane Krakowski).

Or does he? It’s hard to know. Nothing in McNeal is convincing: The characters are thin, the timelines are off, the situations are at once implausible and cliché. (When McNeal is negotiating his contract, he is shown a big number on a cell phone—barely a step up from a folded paper slid across a table.) The play’s middle scenes—McNeal’s lurid confrontation with his son (Rafi Gavron) and an off-the-rails interview with a young, Black New York Times reporter (Brittany Bellizeare)—ring utterly false, and the actors elsewhere seem flat: Andrea Martin as McNeal’s agent, Ruthie Ann Miles as his doctor, Melora Hardin as his former mistress. McNeal is the only one with any dimension, but neither his dialogue nor Downey's guarded, petulant delivery suggest the charm that others impute to him. Dressed in a writerly uniform of corduroy blazer and jeans, he’s a standard-issue manchild; the play feels a bit like spending 90 minutes with Bill Maher on a crabby day.

While the play is an ensemble effort, it is also an extraordinary showcase for Donnelly. The present here is haunted by the past, and the two collide powerfully in the wreckage and reckoning of the play’s third act. (Butterworth has rewritten it for the better from the version that played in London.) Donnelly returns in this final stretch, strikingly and effectively, to play a wholly different character. But the moment in her performance that will stay with me the longest comes a little earlier, at the end of the second act, when Veronica stares out at the audience, failed by her aplomb, listening in terror for a silence she dreads. In her eyes we see the cost of her ambition: As ancient in its way as any, this is a story of human sacrifice.

Sometimes the old can be full of surprises. That’s the running premise of The Roommate, which brings together two very different senior citizens—Sharon, an unworldly Iowan played by Mia Farrow, and her new housemate, Robyn, a streetwise Bronx transplant played by Patti LuPone—and sends them down paths of self-discovery. It’s also what makes this production of Jen Silverman’s crowd-pleasing comedy work as well as it does. A variation on odd-couple themes, the play tills land that has been farmed many times. Yet it finds freshness in the familiar through a series of small twists—and, in Farrow’s star turn, an enchanting revelation.

Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! is not just funny: It is dizzyingly, breathtakingly funny, the kind of funny that ambushes your body into uncontained laughter. Stage comedies have become an endangered species in recent decades, and when they do pop up they tend to be the kind of funny that evokes smirks, chuckles or wry smiles of recognition. Not so here: I can’t remember the last time I saw a play that made me laugh, helplessly and loudly, as much as Oh, Mary! did—and my reaction was shared by the rest of the audience, which burst into applause at the end of every scene. Fasten your seatbelts: This 80-minute show is a fast and wild joy ride.

A revival of Cats, at least in theory, might well give you paws. After a then-record 18-year run on Broadway—with a tagline, “NOW AND FOREVER,” that began to sound a bit like a threat—Andrew Lloyd Webber's synthtastic 1980s musical finally hung up its leotards and yak-hair wigs in 2000. Its comeback efforts since then have been less than thrilling: a taxidermic 2016 revival, a widely mocked 2019 film. It seemed almost 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 at the Perelman Performing Arts Center that not only rescues Cats from the oversize junkyard but lifts it, like Grizabella herself, to unexpected heights.

The revivals that Kenny Leon has directed on Broadway form something like a syllabus of modern African-American drama, from Loraine Hansberry to August Wilson to Suzan-Lori Parks. Last season, that project brought him to Purlie Victorious, in which a Black man travels to his birthplace in the South to reclaim his place there in triumph; now Leon follows it with a play in which a different rural homecoming seems less happy, at least at first. But don’t give up too fast: Home, after all, is where the heart is.

The Great Gatsby looks great. If you want production values, this adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, directed by Marc Bruni, delivers more than any other new musical of the overstuffed Broadway season. It’s the Roaring Twenties, after all—now as well as then—so why not be loud? Let other shows make do with skeletal, functional multipurpose scenic design; these sets and projections, by Paul Tate de Poo III, offer grandly scaled Art Deco instead. Linda Cho’s costumes are Vegas shiny for the party people and elegant for the monied types. The production wears excess on its sleeveless flapper dresses.

In Uncle Vanya’s original setting, the characters are constrained by very real limits, financial and social; here, they seem trapped by authorial mandate—by a shadow fidelity to the mores of a different time and place. Perhaps that explains why this production, despite the talent involved, left me unmoved, and with a nagging question that Vanya might relate to: So much work has gone into this, but what’s it all for?

All are rendered in lovely detail by Herzog and the five women of the cast, directed by Anne Kauffman with characteristic attention to the importance of offhand nuance. Information is revealed in a steady drip of medical jargon, bureaucratic obstacles and personal history; the moment-to-moment concerns in Mary Jane are often quotidian. (As a friend once advised the title character: “You’ll still have good days and bad days.”) The world of the play is unblinking but not bleak. Herzog shows the strain of Mary Jane’s situation, but she also succeeds in dramatizing kindness, attentiveness, honesty, connection.

As its title suggests, Hell’s Kitchen extends its attention to the neighborhood beyond the central story. The fire escapes and signage of Robert Brills’s scenic design and Perter Nigrini’s projections, augmented by the dazzle of Natasha Katz’s lighting, help set the urban scene. But the most important factor is Brown’s outstanding choreography: Executed gorgeously by an ensemble that includes several dancers she has worked with in the past, the show’s bold and graceful movement summons a world of kinetic energy for Ali to tap into when she is finally able to organize her talent. When Hell’s Kitchen inevitably concludes with “Empire State of Mind,” the song doesn’t feel tacked on, because New York has been keenly felt throughout the show. It may touch on social issues of consequence, but Hell’s Kitchen is ultimately a celebration of the city—and the people who make it pop.

Great expectations can be a problem when you’re seeing a Broadway show: You don’t always get what you hope for. It’s all too easy to expect great things when the show is a masterpiece like Cabaret: an exhilarating and ultimately chilling depiction of Berlin in the early 1930s that has been made into a classic movie and was revived exquisitely less than a decade ago. The risk of disappointment is even larger when the cast includes many actors you admire—led by Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee of the show’s decadent Kit Kat Club—and when the production arrives, as this one has, on a wave of raves from London. To guard against this problem, I made an active effort to lower my expectations before seeing the latest version of Cabaret. But my lowered expectations failed. They weren’t low enough.

David Adjmi’s intimately epic behind-the-music drama Stereophonic has now moved to Broadway after a hit fall run at Playwrights Horizons. At the smaller venue, the audience felt almost immersed in the room where the show takes place: a wood-paneled 1970s recording studio—decked out by set designer David Zinn as a plush vision of brown, orange, mustard, sage and rust—where a rock band is trying to perfect what could be its definitive album. Some fans of the play have wondered if it could work as well on a larger stage,but that question has a happy answer: Daniel Aukin’s superb production navigates the change without missing a beat. The jam has been preserved.

The result is a musical that sometimes embraces campiness and sometimes falls flat into camp, especially when it skirts melodrama: When kohl-eyed chorus boys, repurposed as brownshirts, violently raid Solidor’s queer bar—and then the show cuts to a wild-eyed Beth Leavel belting “It’s the end of time!!” straight at the audience—I challenge you not to giggle. And where in time are we supposed to be, exactly? By this point in the show, Lempicka seems to have abandoned history entirely: Why is the futurist Italian painter Filippo Marinetti (an emphatic George Abud) leading what appears to be a police raid in Paris in the 1930s? It doesn’t help that another musical in town right now, Cabaret, depicts queerness and fascism with a great deal more depth.

I suspect that a lot of people will like The Outsiders  more than I did. But to me, its approach misses the central thrust of Hinton’s story. Her point was that kids who might be dismissed as juvenile delinquents are teenagers like any others, with complicated feelings and dreams. But in the musical, they mostly seem neither juvenile—Grant is a terrific singer, but he doesn’t sound remotely 14—nor delinquent. Rapp and Levine add cuss words to the dialogue, but otherwise their version scrubs the Greasers clean. In the book, they are low-level criminals. Here, they are presented as innocent victims, targeted by the villainous Socs merely for being poor, and perhaps for not all being white guys: Their leader, Dallas (an excellent Joshua Boone), is now Black, and their group includes an Anybodys -style tomboy. It’s like a version of West Side Story  in which one of the gangs is entirely to blame, and the other is just trying not to die while crossing from the wrong side of the tracks. And this sanitization makes the musical feel oddly superficial. It approaches its subjects from the outside.

The deaf and blind would miss a great deal of what makes Tommy work, but it might actually help to be a little dumb. It’s best, at least, not to think too hard about this show, which is dramaturgically unwieldy—drawn out in the first act, rushed and overstuffed in the second—and sometimes doesn’t make sense. (McAnuff sets a big chunk of it in “the future,” which the projections make clear is our future, even though the action is explicitly set in post–World War II England.) And yet, despite these problems, the show works, and its epic choral finale somehow feels genuinely rousing and healing. As musical theater, Tommy is limited. On its own terms, it’s often sensational.

Step right up, come one, come all, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, step right up to the greatest—well, okay, not the greatest show on Broadway, but a dang fine show nonetheless. Although Water for Elephants is set at a circus, and includes several moments of thrilling spectacle, what makes it so appealing is its modesty, not glitz. Like the story’s one-ring Benzini Brothers Circus, a scrappy company touring the country in the early years of the Depression, this original musical knows it’s not the ritziest show on the circuit. But what it lacks in size, it makes up for in wonder, and it’s pretty wonderful at making things up.

Jacobs and Jackson embrace this idea with a vengeance. As severed-tongue-in-cheek as Teeth may be, it takes sexual violence and retribution seriously. Jacobs and Jackson’s version of Dawn incarnates a goddess called Dentata, risen from the cthonic depths of ancient legend to reboot her crusade to dismember every man. As our antiheroine moves further down this path, the production ramps up to a climax of fire and rain, and Alan matches it with her performance. No stranger to strong women—she was Hillary Clinton in 2019’s Soft Power—she moves from trembling worry to trembling fury with fearsome abandon, backed by a female chorus of six that ably mirrors her transformation.

In this regard, Gold’s An Enemy of the People—notwithstanding its 19th-century costumes (by David Zinn) and sets (by the design collective dots) and elaborate period business (the loading of pipes, the heating of drinks, the lighting and snuffing of lamps)—feels pointedly modern, a quality that is brought to the fore in the production’s pivotal scene: a public meeting at which Stockmann tries to share his findings directly with the populace. The scene takes place after a short intermission during which members of the audience go onstage for free shots of aquavit at a shiny modern bar stamped with the logo of the brand providing the liquor. Breaking from the cozy naturalism of the production’s first half, Gold introduces elements of environmental theater: He brings up the house lights and treats the audience as part of the meeting; the characters address us directly, and a few spectators are even seated onstage to pad out the crowd. Circle in the Square’s in-the-round seating plan is ideal for this scene, a public square within a circle of observers.

And yet: As much as I rolled my eyes at The Notebook, I can’t deny that they sometimes welled up. In this version, it’s the older Noah and Allie—whom Brunstetter draws with the most care, free from the fetters of plot, and around whom Michaelson writes her most touching music—who get to you. Plunkett’s truthfulness pierces through the sentimentality, and there’s something elemental in the combination of love and loss that this pair embodies. As Younger Noah says of Allie’s painting: “It’s sadness and it’s joy, right?” At its best, The Notebook finds a way to deliver both, if only in shorthand.

To populate this parable, Mayer has wrangled a marvelous cast. Dressed in hilariously lumpy clothes, Groff's Seymour is a likable klutz with just a hint of deadpan creepiness. As Audrey's abusive boyfriend, the sadistic biker dentist Orin Scrivello-and in a bevy of smaller parts-Christian Borle solidifies his status as the preeminent musical-theater clown of his generation: His performance is a master class in milking. The three street urchins-cutely named Ronette (Ari Groover), Crystal (Salome Smith) and Chiffon (Joy Woods)-are nicely individuated (though Ellenore Scott's choreography sometimes keeps them too busy). And Blanchard is a revelation. Many actors try to imitate the magical brittle ditziness of Little Shop's original Audrey, and merely wind up somewhere that's not quite Ellen Greene; Blanchard takes the character to a different world entirely. She's earthy and tough, with a bee-stung face and a manner that suggests a world of pain in her past. She's the heart of the production, and she's heartbreaking.

Even if its principal generates less interest, however, the play grows richer every time you see it. On this latest visit—my fifth encounter with Doubt, including the 2008 film with Meryl Streep and Phillip Seymour Hoffman—I wondered if Ellis’s revival, in deference to modern sensibilities, took too clear a position on what has happened between Father Flynn and Donald. But then I remembered that my own convictions on that subject have changed each time I’ve seen some version of this work. My reactions may well say more about me than the production, and they exemplify why it remains so satisfying to sit in the dark with a crowd of people also wrestling with Doubt, divided perhaps in our suspicions but united in a liberating bond of uncertainty.

Farr’s adaptation sidesteps potential evocations of cancel culture, sometimes a bit awkwardly, to allow space for a sharp but tender drama as the story’s focus shifts to Lucas’s sweet dynamic with his son, Marcus (Raphael Casey), who accepts his father’s innocence without question. Yet somehow, even after all we’ve seen with our own eyes, there is a looming discomfort in their father-son intimacy. It might be our own paranoia seeping through, but Goold lets the question linger: Can we ever really be sure?

Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! is not just funny: It is dizzyingly, breathtakingly funny, the kind of funny that ambushes your body into uncontained laughter. Stage comedies have become an endangered species in recent decades, and when they do pop up they tend to be the kind of funny that evokes smirks, chuckles or wry smiles of recognition. Not so here: I can’t remember the last time I saw a play that made me laugh, helplessly and loudly, as much as Oh, Mary! did—and my reaction was shared by the rest of the audience, which burst into applause at the end of every scene.

Brown’s score, one of his best, has a decidedly ’90s groove, from the plaintive “Now What”—in which Conrad muses on the state of the news industry—to the twangy “So I Came to New York,” a duet that allows Robin to slam her home state (“Everyone’s an asshole in Texas…”) and Ethan to trash his (“Everyone’s a scumbag in Jersey…”). Musical numbers led by Fergie Philippe and Max Crumm, as Ethan’s dubious sources, give the musical space to breathe away from the office. And Jessica Molaskey and Mylinda Hull, as fact-checkers on Ethan’s trail, are so good that you wish they had even more to do, perhaps in a two-act version of this intermission-less show. But then again, in deference to their characters, this particular story might best be served by just-the-facts-ma’am brevity.