Adam Feldman — Theater Critic

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.

I had a different reaction to the Broadway production, which feels deeper and more fully realized to me. In part, that may reflect the added resonance its themes have acquired over the past few years, when we all became more alert to questions of health, responsibility and isolation that Cost of Living touches on. But this version also benefits from new cast members Young and Zayas, who bring marvelous warmth and personality to their performances. The two original cast members remain strong-Sullivan's voice cuts through the theater like a serrated knife-but the balance of the play has shifted for the better. Majok's tender, tough-loving care for her characters shines out with new life.

DeBessonet hits these serious points movingly and gracefully at the end of the show, without sacrificing the many pleasures that the musical offers along the way. Into the Woods's legion fans are well-served by this revival, and at both the Encores! performance and the Broadway press performance that I attended, the audience response was overwhelming. The show, for all its thorniness, engenders the bliss of re-encountering an old friend who is holding up great. What more, in the end, could you wish?

Broadway's 2021-22 comeback season goes out with a shrug in Sam Gold's production of Macbeth, the kind of passive-aggressive theater party that invites two big stars to attend-Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga as the regicidal title couple-and then makes a point of ignoring them. Short, eloquent, violent and packed with sensational business (murder! witches! madness! ghosts! a decapitated head!), Macbeth is usually one of Shakespeare's most exciting plays. Not so here: Deliberately murky, this anemic modern-dress production creeps at a petty pace from scene to scene, to the last syllable of the tragedy's verse and beyond into a wistful folk-song coda.

Thirty years ago, Crystal wore aging makeup to play this role on film. He doesn't need it anymore, but he never really did: He has Buddy in his bones. Crystal has been playing this alter kocker alter ego since at least Saturday Night Live in 1985, and Buddy's type of Catskills-and-Friars-Club cut-up is embedded in his comic style: He has deep affection and respect for the generation of comedians that Buddy represents, and he keeps their spirit alive in his timing, his rhythms, his soulful aggression. ('Happy anniversary. Forty-five years!' Buddy tells his wife. 'Eleven of the best years of my life.') In Mr. Saturday Night he honors their history with a sweet, slight, nostalgic musical comedy.

Mostly, the jokes in POTUS are less pointed. The White House setting is an excuse for a broad, zany, old-school comedy, which is a rarity on Broadway nowadays-especially in the form of a world premiere by a twentysomething woman. You can feel how hungry the spectators are to laugh together, and they get to do it often in this silly, fast-paced lark. It helps enormously that the production, directed by Susan Stroman (The Producers), is so well-cast. This ensemble makes an implicit argument of its own for female accomplishment: Even when their characters are floundering hopelessly, these ladies are pros.

Jackson has made minor edits to the show since its Off Broadway run, but the biggest change is in the central casting: Originated by Larry Owens, Usher is now played by Jaquel Spivey in a strong Broadway debut. Although he doesn't have Owens's prickly self-assurance or his sometimes scary rawness-his Usher seems younger, less sure, less fully formed-he has a sensitive presence and a beautiful voice. And all six original Thoughts remain the same, and provide terrific support for Spivey even as they undermine his character. All deserve mention by name: They are Antwayn Hopper, L Morgan Lee, John-Michael Lyles, James Jackson Jr., John-Andrew Morrison and Jason Veasey. 'I'm into entertainment that's undercover art,' sings Usher of his ambitions for A Strange Loop. Jackson's musical delivers on that promise. The COVID shutdown had a lot of us holding our breaths that Broadway would dare to offer something bold and new when it came back. This is the musical we've been waiting for.

Based on the number of empty seats at the Vivian Beaumont Theater after the intermission between Act II and Act III-there is also a pause between the first and second acts-many people share her mixture of confusion and dismay. The Skin of Our Teeth was ahead of its time in 1942 but is not ahead of ours; although the text has been tweaked by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins-a quote from Aristotle, for instance, has been replaced with one from bell hooks-it often seems dated, even when the material is startlingly applicable to our particular moment in time. (When a stage manager steps forward to announce that the company has been ravaged by illness and understudies will be stepping into their roles, you may think that's a new addition to the text. It is not.) The repetition gets numbing, and the conceit wears out; by the third act, you acutely feel the nearly three-hour length.