Adam Feldman

New York, New York is an affection project: a loving group tribute, with 40 producers above the title, to the 96-year-old Kander, one of Broadway’s most beloved creators. It’s an excuse for a big, old-fashioned dance on not-quite-finished materials. And thanks to the elements of it that do shine—the craftsmanship of the score, the wrought-iron fire escapes of Beowulf Boritt’s set, the splendid variety of Donna Zakowska’s costumes, the command of Uzele’s vocals, the infectious energy of the production numbers—there’s a lot to enjoy if you don’t look down.

The anodyne, bittersweet Summer, 1976 seems designed to stir nostalgia among Manhattan Theatre Club’s subscriber base—not just for the 1970s, when most of it takes place, but for MTC itself. The production reunites director Daniel Sullivan with playwright David Auburn, who wrote the company’s 2000 hit Proof, and with the very fine actor Laura Linney, whom he has directed in four previous MTC shows on Broadway; joining them is stage treasure Jessica Hecht, of MTC’s The Assembled Parties. It’s a dramatic dream team; what’s missing is drama.

I leave it to the jury of theatergoers to determine whether the larger legal argument that Miller makes in Prima Facie follows necessarily from Tessa’s specific experience. But about Comer’s performance there can be no doubt: This is a powerful and moving star turn. It has a very different energy from the Broadway season’s other great dramatic performance by a woman. Whereas Jessica Chastain spends A Doll’s House nearly immobile, Comer is a whirlwind: moving furniture, changing costumes, standing on tables, switching into the voices and accents of more than a dozen minor characters as Tessa narrates her story. Her virtuosity is not just a game—it’s emotional. Miller builds a respectable case, but Comer argues it brilliantly.

FastHorse effectively roasts her characters as turkeys, trussed by their own self-consciousness. In a swift 90 minutes, The Thanksgiving Play delivers solid laughs at the expense of targets that are admittedly, at this point, not unfamiliar: clueless liberals so busy holding space that they don’t get around to filling it with anything. What the play doesn’t do is provide much sense of a better solution to the questions that its hapless theater folks are stultified by. This absence leaves you with a question, at the end, that is double-edged: Where the representation of identity and history are concerned, is nothing good enough?

The best way to enjoy Peter Pan Goes Wrong, in fact, may be to take it as some kind of comedy of errors. And even as I drafted worried letters in my head to Actors’ Equity and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, I was unable to resist joining the laughers in the audience on frequent occasions: Seeing actors desperately commit to going on with a show is a reliable comic hook, even if they lack the initial dignity that could make the fails even funnier. Yet as in Cornley’s last show, the game resilience of the actors—as they suffer through relentless variations on disaster slapstick—gets a little tiring, at least for me, when offered in a two-hour dose. They push through the pain and keep on pushing, but the fun of watching them peters out.

For all the changes this Camelot attempts, its most traditional aspect comes out on top: Loewe’s music, which is faithfully and beautifully served by a luxurious orchestra of 30 pieces, including six violins. But the production is essentially dispassionate, and there is only so much one can be swept up by the strings. (In the most misguided of his edits, Sorkin sabotages the central love triangle at the finale.) This musical is nearly three hours long, and despite occasional gestures toward liveliness—a maypole dance, an extended sword fight—you can’t help feeling the length. It moves like a funeral procession for itself.

Over ribs and ribbing, cracked karaoke and a game of charades intended to unmask a villain, Fat Ham keeps you cackling so consistently that the play’s sudden acts of cruelty land like punches in the gut. Yet Fat Ham manages to acknowledge the characters' trauma, especially Larry's and Juicy's, without indulging it.

While the lyrics sometimes lack the rigor of the best Broadway songwriting—the word “Tampa” is forced into shotgun rhymes with “camera,” “plasma” and “extravaganza”—the songs mostly hit the spot, and the show knows how to sell them. Director Jack O’Brien and choreographer Sarah O’Gleby set the show’s winking tone in an opening number that nods to Michael Bennett and Tommy Tune, and roll out the barrels later on for the Seven Brides for Seven Brothers–style showstopper “The Best Man Wins.” Innerbichler acts and sings with winsome lucidity, and the limber-voiced Durant scores with Beau’s hurt-but-defiant “Somebody Will.” But Newell ignites the show’s real barn burner: “Independently Owned,” in which hooch mama Lulu declares her autonomy and Newell, as in Once on This Island, soars to stratospheric vocal heights with unperturbed poise. (When I saw the show, the song earned a partial standing ovation in the middle of Act I.) The show’s most valuable player, however, is book writer Robert Horn, who won a Tony for his similar Tootsie role and who stuffs Shucked’s script with laugh-out-loud puns and one-liners.

The result is something like children’s theater for adults. Actual kids may be upset by the horrors that beset Pi on the traumatic journey from his hometown of Pondicherry in the 1970s—accompanied at first by his zookeeper father (Rajesh Bose), his protective mother (Mahira Kakkar) and his brainy sister (Sonya Venugopal)—to a doomed cargo ship, a hellish lifeboat, a paradisal island and finally the western coast of Mexico. But grown-ups will marvel at Tim Hatley’s sets and costumes, Andrzej Goulding’s video and animation, Tim Lutkin’s lighting and Carolyn Downing’s sound design. The production is often beautiful, especially when seen from above. (Because the floor is featured prominently, this is the rare Broadway show that is better experienced from the mezzanine than the orchestra.) But if Life of Pi is transporting, where does it leave you?

Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served. Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s 1979 Sweeney Todd may well be the greatest of all Broadway musicals: an epic combination of disparate ingredients—horror and humor, cynicism and sentiment, melodrama and sophisticated wit—with a central core of grounded, meaty humanity. But while the show’s quality is baked into the writing, portion sizes in recent years have varied. Sweeney Todd’s scope makes it expensive to stage; its 1989 and 2005 Broadway revivals (and the immersive 2017 Off Broadway incarnation) presented the show with greatly reduced casts and orchestrations. Not so for the thrilling version now playing at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, directed by Hamilton’s Thomas Kail: This production features a 26-piece orchestra and cast of 25 led by Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford. It’s a feast for the ears.

The score, by Lloyd Webber and lyricist David Zippel, goes in one ear and comes out the other without troubling anything in between. You are unlikely to remember much of it, except the oft-repeated title-song motif—which has an advantage coming in, since it shamelessly evokes “In My Own Little Corner,” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella—and perhaps “Only You, Lonely You,” a ballad that Dobson delivers with suitable ardor. Directed sleekly by Lloyd Webber loyalist Laurence Connor, Bad Cinderella is the kind of show that seems destined to be left behind. It’s a shiny glass slip-up.

Mournful though it be, the revival of Parade is cause for celebration. Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown’s musical tragedy, about a grave miscarriage of justice more than a century ago, lasted only a few months in its original 1998 incarnation. But director Michael Arden’s heart-piercing new production, introduced at City Center’s Encores! series last year and now playing a limited run at Broadway’s Jacobs Theatre, makes a masterful case for giving the show a new hearing—and what you hear at this Parade, as sung by a splendid cast led by Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond, will echo for a long time to come.

Lloyd mostly surrounds Chastain with dry, sympathetic performances. Michael Patrick Thornton, a highlight of last year’s Macbeth, plays Nora’s pining confidant, the sickly Dr. Rake, with an affecting mix of Weltschmerz and good humor. Okieriete Onaodowan brings low-key decency and desperation to the role of her secret loan shark and potential blackmailer, and Jesmille Darbouze is believably hard-nosed as her widowed friend; Tasha Lawrence has a sharp scene as the nursemaid who gave up her own child to care for Nora and hers. Only the production’s slick, peevish Torvald seems out of step: As played by the gifted Moayed—and as written in an otherwise sensitive new adaptation by Amy Herzog (Mary Jane)—he is transparently unworthy of Nora’s love from the start, and too thin a foil for her burgeoning consciousness. If that lowers the stakes of Ibsen’s famous denouement, however, Chastain keeps the tension high. What may look like a marital crisis is truly, for Nora, a matter of life and death. And as Chastain grasps her way to a final decision, she quietly, firmly brings down the house.

The play tries to tell what Sultan’s photographs show, and to some extent it succeeds. Because the actors are so appealing, they make for good company: Lane can wring laughs out of any line he wants just by slapping a comic cadence on it, and his restless, carping Irv is an apt foil for Burstein’s tender, reflective Larry; Wanamaker brings wit and spine to a part that is supporting in more ways than one. Director Bartlett Sher frames the play in a spare, asymmetrical physical space-designed by Michael Yeargan and lit by Jennifer Tipton—that helps keep it from seeming too cozy.

In veteran director Austin Pendleton’s well-balanced production, they are brought to life by an ensemble of actors whose comfort with one another is tangible: Aside from the rapper-turned-actor Common, who makes a solid Broadway debut, the cast has been with this play since its Off Broadway debut at the Atlantic Theater in 2014 and subsequent extension at Second Stage (which is also behind this delayed transfer). The earthy Rispoli and the divine Colón-Zayas, in particular, are unimprovable in their tricky roles. But it is Henderson who, at Between Riverside and Crazy’s gravitational center, holds it all together. He’s a perfect combination of rent and controlled, and his deceptively natural star turn is the twisted, generous soul of the play.

This Merrily is in an ironic position: It’s too big of a hit. Tickets for the limited Off Broadway run sold out more or less instantly, which means that we can only now hope for a Broadway transfer. This is a show that makes demands of its audience, perhaps sometimes unreasonable ones. But as Charley sings during a loving argument with his friends: “What’s the point of demands you can meet?” Friedman’s production meets the audience halfway, and a Broadway audience today just might be able to make up the difference as couldn’t in 1981. Cross your fingers: It finally might be Merrily’s time.

Some Like It Hot is a well-aimed throwback: a jubilant, oldfangled, crowd-pleasing musical comedy. Like many recent Broadway tuners, it is adapted from a well-loved movie—in this case, Billy Wilder’s classic 1959 sex-and-sax farce about a pair of Prohibition-era musicians, on the run from the mob, who pose as women in an all-girl traveling band. The musical version reheats this story with abundant production values and canny attention to modern sensibilities. If it wobbles a little in its borrowed heels at first, it finishes in the confident stride of a hit.

In director Kenny Leon’s thoughtful production, Beowulf Boritt’s set suggests a storm of research-library shelves, some suspended in midair and some half-buried in the ground, as though Suzanne existed in both the midst of catastrophe and the ruins of one. The forces stacked against her extend to the back wall of the stage, which is gashed by a craggy ravine—the site of a winter homicide—behind which snow descends continuously. The chills that periodically shoot through this play are part of the same cold front as the steady, muffling whiteness that falls gently in its background.

In the end, A Beautiful Noise can’t overcome the central challenge of being a Neil Diamond biomusical, which is that Diamond’s life has not been, in and of itself, especially dramatic. (The Gloria Estefan musical On Your Feet! had the same problem.) His first two marriages failed, but in drifts and not crashes; an association with mob-linked record executives (Michael McCormick and Tom Alan Robbins) is quickly overcome. The therapeutic framing notwithstanding, what we get here is less a story than a retrospective sequence of events, or perhaps events of sequins.

KPOP doesn't stint on concert-style numbers, and that's where this production shines. Directed by Teddy Bergman, the well-drilled young cast performs Helen Park and Max Vernon's exuberant pastiche songs (several of which are new to this version of the show) with panache, executing Jennifer Weber's rigorous choreography with zippy synchronized swagger and verve. Their costumes, by Clint Ramos and Sophia Choi, are spectacular-wild hybrids of patterns, fabrics, textures and international influences-and the performances are appropriately heightened by the show's lighting (by Jiyoun Chang), sound (by Peter Fitzgerald and Andrew Keister) and multipaneled set (by Gabriel Hainer Evansohn).

Every year at holiday time, theater goes to the Dickens. So many Christmas Carols ring out annually on the stages of New York that the sheer volume can be confounding: Can anyone manage to make this Victorian chestnut seem fresh again? I confess that I went to the new Broadway production with a touch of trepidation, prepared to roll my jaded eyes and mutter “humbug!” under my breath. Instead, my breath was plumb taken away. This splendid production is a Christmas miracle: The most theatrically fulfilling account of A Christmas Carol that I have ever seen.

That may be why & Juliet, though often entertaining, also feels pretty disposable. The show-within-a-show framework doesn’t make a lot of sense if you think about it too much (or at all); aside from a plot strand involving the proto-trans May, who sings “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” the stakes are not sharp enough to drive the story into solid ground. Directed by Luke Sheppard, the musical exists in an elaborately unreal world: Soutra Gilmour’s scenic design and Paloma Young’s costumes are delightfully creative transhistorical mix-and-matches that float the show in a swirl of unfixed fantasy. It all feels comfortingly familiar and indistinct—there’s not much narrative thrust to Jennifer Weber’s synchronized hip-hop choreography, which mostly suggests energetic background dancing at a concert—and the ideal place for it might be the high school auditoriums where it will surely enjoy a rich afterlife someday. But there’s no denying the relentless effectiveness of Martin’s earworm craftsmanship. & Juliet gives audiences what they want from it: all those hits, baby, one more time.

'Dives' is perhaps the wrong word for Birbiglia's approach; he's more of a wader. His new yarn centers on visits to doctors-to address troubling breathing issues and his family history of cardiac arrest-but also includes long and enjoyable digressions about his childhood experiences with public swimming. Birbiglia doesn't wallow in his suffering, but he doesn't go that deep; part of his great charm as a performer is in the way he deflects pity with stoic geniality, mentioning potentially grave issues (such as what sound like anxiety attacks) lightly and fleetingly, almost in passing. He's in the pool, but you never worry that he's really going to drown. He's having too much fun in there, splashing around.

Clever, touching and idiosyncratic, Kimberly Akimbo was the best new musical of 2021, when it premiered Off Broadway at the Atlantic. The dark absurdist comedy of Lindsay-Abaire's original play-reminiscent of Christopher Durang, John Guare and the playwright's own Fuddy Meers-remains, but it is tempered by the addition of Tesori's winding, agile melodies and a geek chorus of four students (Olivia Elease Hardy, Fernell Hogan, Nina White and Michael Iskander) twined in a daisy chain of frustrated romance. In the hands of these gifted writers, material that might have been rendered as merely zany has human and forgiving dimensions, and the score finds sneaky ways to break your heart even as it maintains a general air of cheer. (Kimberly's establishing number, known in showtune lingo as her 'I Want' song, is literally a letter to the Make-a-Wish Foundation.)

Once more unto the breeches, dear friends, once more! The American-history musical 1776 is not, in itself, unfamiliar: Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s tunefully educational account of the process leading up to the Declaration of Independence was a hit in 1969, and its 1972 film adaptation soon became a television staple; it has since returned in major productions on Broadway (in 1997) and in the Encores! concert series (in 2016). Yet the Roundabout’s latest revival of the show doesn’t feel stiff: It infuses this august body of show with a rush of fresh blood.