Adrian Horton

Any listlessness, however, is expelled by the far superior second act, which boldly opens with a meeting in the nude (full bush, hence no phones), inspired by the real efforts of 70s consciousness groups. (Intimacy director Kelsey Rainwater coordinates a fast-settling normalcy to the proceeding.) The play’s second half unravels the frayed distinctions between then and now, memory and reality, skirting the line of self-awareness without tipping fully into self-importance. (It helps that it’s frequently quite funny, even biting.)

Lloyd’s take on Beckett is an especially disorienting, purgatorial one – at one point, Gogo and Didi approach a literal blinding light at the end of the tunnel, only to turn back. But it is more coolly strange than spiritually disquieting, seeming to strain for provocation without need. The introduction of the mysterious Pozzo (Brandon J Dirden) and the enslaved Lucky (Michael Patrick Thornton) throw a wrench into the duo’s day and into the show’s polished limbo. Dirden, who is Black, plays Pozzo with more than a dash of Calvin Candie, Leonardo DiCaprio’s unforgettably sadistic and dandyish plantation owner from Django Unchained. Thornton, who is white and uses a wheelchair, appears without Lucky’s standard rope or Pozzo’s whip – the production forgoes almost all props – but bound with a gimp mask. The racial inversion of the invoked history of US enslavement suggests the arbitrariness of human cruelty. But though Thornton turns Lucky’s famously impermeable monologue – an erudite-seeming rambling on the command to “think!” – into a spellbinding swirl, there’s a ghoulish, overdone quality to their intrusions that tip the show into uncomfortable sensory overwhelm.

You can only talk art for so long. All three characters eventually crack open, though not, perhaps, to the degree one would hope, as Serge and Marc still rely on abstractions of taste, influence, ideas. It’s when Yvan crumbles, tearfully admitting the significance of these friends in this life, that the production unlocks some prismatic, elusive sentiment, a color noticeably missing from the canvas. Or maybe that’s just my reading, colored by many a frustrating attempt to pull emotions out of a man. Ultimately with any play, just as painting, you supply your own background and see what you see.

The 73-year-old actor, most famous, at least at the moment, for her starring turn on the Max comedy Hacks, possesses the kind of seasoned verve and magnetic presence that is never less than fun to watch, even if the material can’t match her. Like her Emmy-winning Hacks character Deborah Vance, Smart is making the most of a late-career renaissance, surfing a wave of goodwill to the bright lights at Studio 54 for her first Broadway role in a quarter century, where she plays a woman with starkly different means – though no less resilience.

But the play’s main draw in the manosphere-dominant year of 2025 is Krasinski, who ultimately delivers a masterful performance that not only conveys Roger’s loneliness and delusion but the confusion, bewilderment and hurt of the women around him. That the rushed ending, with a late-stage twist, is as effective as it is owes to his body near vibrating with currents of shame, confusion, hate and, yes, anger. It’s a fascinating use of the everyman quality, turning our sympathy to someone who espouses misogyny, playing into aspects of traditional masculinity while evincing its traps, framing red-pill ideology as poison and straight men’s feelings as prey. One could contest the framing, but I can’t begrudge empathy, nor the potential that Jim Halpert might give some unsuspecting boyfriends a surprise warning.

The show puts an interesting twist on the cliche of a past-his-prime singer becoming a nightclub nostalgia act – typically a sad, pitiable fate for a pop star instead presented as a victory, a return to form and homecoming worthy of one of the show’s most vivacious numbers. Both Darin and Groff understood the implicit contract of a performer: lend one’s time in exchange for entertainment. The retro style of show will appeal to some Broadway-heads more than others, but on that promise, at least, Groff more than delivers.

Now, the metamorphosis is complete: Smash has made it to Broadway, as an actually good musical about the troubled production of a bad musical about one of the most troubled celebrities of all time. With a book by Bob Martin and Rick Elice, this iteration of Smash is, in fact, even more meta than advertised... The musical stands on its own as an entertaining, competently made and performed show on the agony and ecstasy of musical theater – this time, with self-awareness.

Even more than its distillation of a failed relationship, the reason to see this full-length duet of a show is for the singing, and on that account, The Last Five Years delivers. Warren may blow Jonas out of the water, at least in terms of vocal prowess, but both have a solid grasp of their characters in isolation, if not together. In a season of overhyped shows, the evident sincerity, the effort, the fervent belief in character – and Warren’s occasional transcendence – feels refreshing.

There’s an echo quality to the stage version – imitative, resonant but hollower than the original. That’s partly an issue of medium... what the staging delivers in newsroom cacophony, it loses in nuance, character and the entrancing mood of momentous defiance.

The show, instead, belongs to Gyllenhaal, an actor of singular intensity who makes a meal out of Iago’s desperate two-facedness. He opens the show with a hypnotic screed against “The Moor” he so loathes – a denigration of blackness (of soul and skin) in Shakespeare’s time titled just enough to resonate more clearly in ours, and never ceases to mesmerize. At turns preening, desperate, boastful, plaintive, easily convincing in his maneuverings of the guileless lieutenant Cassio (Snow White’s Andrew Burnap), as well as gullible townsman Roderigo (Anthony Michael Lopez), Desdemona and Othello, Gyllenhaal’s Iago is the one truly fun performance to watch throughout the show’s nearly three-hour runtime.

Still, there are so few shows not derived from IP now, and the challenge of mounting anything so steeply uphill, that is difficult to root against what is ultimately a tough sell. Menzel, once a prize fighter of Broadway, takes a lot of swings and only connects some of them. The whole enterprise has the air of chasing ghosts, but there are moments – in a moving track about the impossibility of full healing, or an anxious breakdown – where the magic flickers again. Not enough, though, for a subject as monumental as a redwood, nor to convert New York audiences to, as one song puts it, Big Tree Religion.

But any questions of fit are allayed in the second act, as McDonald tears into Rose’s toxic ambition with sharp teeth. Rose, and the actor playing her, is the reason to attend Gypsy; with McDonald locked in on the mother’s white-knuckled obstinacy, the rest of the production falls neatly, if not too remarkably, behind her. Santo Loquasto’s sets – peeling entertainment ads on faded brick, humdrum boarding houses and shabby caravans – are enough to convey the indignities of show business during the Depression, the persistent gap between Rose’s bright-light dreams and their reality. The full 26-piece orchestra, under the direction of Andy Einhorn, makes lush work of the fully restored, golden-age music by Jule Styne. The trio of Lesli Margherita, Lili Thomas and Mylinda Hull conjure delicious, extravagant slapstick out of You Gotta Get a Gimmick, introducing Louise to her burlesque destiny.

The way this seemingly straightforward issue – health department-ordered quarantine and then return for vaccinated students – mutates into a furious beast of conflict is a devilishly pleasurable thing to behold, owing to Spector’s on-the-pulse script, which sharpens as the viewpoints polarize, and a slate of excellently balanced performances.

Though to be fair, intense over-acting may be for the sake of the crowd, for whom Shakespeare remains a dense and daunting endeavor (“I have soooo much algebra tonight,” said a girl behind me as I exited.) In this play about teens, now vigorously pitched for teens, to Borg or not to Borg may be a pertinent question – and if it serves as an entry to a genuinely refreshing take on the oft-spoken balcony scene, then so be it.

Between the two of them, you can’t really fail to enjoy an evening of theater, bumpy as the road may be at points. Farrow, especially, shines in a brisk yet moving conclusion that underscores the power of fleeting relationships to alter the trajectory or our lives. The Roommate, as with a real, solid house-sharing arrangement, is neither disastrous nor perfect. It entails moments of awkwardness and adjustment, some settling in and some compromises, to find the best of it.

It’s muscle-tensing and entertaining, particularly in the play’s middle stretch, to watch a meeting of two differently melted minds. And satisfying when Loyd pokes at Jane’s hypocrisies and delusions, her conviction that she’s nothing and also an online martyr – “It’s a privilege to suffer as much as I do,” she says. Still, Friedlich’s line-by-line writing is shrewd enough to convey Jane’s internal hell of self-reflective mirrors, her spiral of judgment to nowhere. Job is, for the most part, a tonal highwire act that wisely keeps to a taut 80 minutes. Or perhaps the more accurate metaphor is trapeze – swinging wildly between farce, zeitgeist-y drama and thriller. Somehow, it lands most of the tricks, including a turn toward the pitch-black in the final act, which ends just before it runs this tight battle of wills and expertise off the rails. Job smartly knows when to log off; there may be no grand messages (and thank God), but this is one of the more insightful internet spirals.

The real Mary Todd Lincoln was, by most accounts, erratic, often bedridden by sadness and prone to lavish spending. Not exactly a comic figure, though in the hands of the inimitable Cole Escola, the former first lady is the buzziest, and funniest, theater draw this summer. The comedian’s show Oh, Mary!, which transferred to Broadway after critical raves and a twice-extended Off-Broadway run, takes the public blank slate of Abraham’s hoop-skirted wife as a launchpad for 80 minutes of irreverent, raunchy, gleefully deranged revisionist history.

The famous misreading of Chekhov is that nothing happens in his plays. People talk, people stew, people fight; life goes on. Uncle Vanya is, on one level, a groundbreaking play of intense, stifled feelings, until the dam breaks. Schreck and Neugebauer, with a Hollywood-heavy cast, have accomplished a feat in staging a classic that feels both accessible and dense, but perhaps more so in capturing a mood of tragicomic discontent.

The play has a hypnotic, suffusive effect – there’s not one heartbreaking or cathartic moment but a series of many wins and setbacks, hurdles and sprints of human care, that left me on the verge of tears for hours afterwards. In her small gestures – climbing into bed with Alex, reassuring him that “Mama’s here” – McAdams, with the chorus of help around her, conjures a world of compassion, one I missed when it was over.

The production is the platonic ideal of a retro classic rebooted for Broadway, broadly appealing to audiences young and old (my showing was split between boomers and kids) but not particularly searing, recognizable but not terribly distinct, sincere and competent yet not resounding.

Whether such directness is successful in imparting something beyond the thrill of live performance – the cascading second half is, as expected, a showcase for Strong’s ability to portray a man on the brink – is, perhaps, up to the viewer. The appliqué of dialogue clearly invoking our current denial to 1880s Norway is at times jarring, at times moving, but in the hands of some veteran actors and immersive staging, at least a night of good New York theater.

this new production, directed by Scott Ellis and starring Schreiber and Amy Ryan, stands on its own. Like its forebears, the revival, which runs through mid-April, keeps things simple – four well-acted performances with a powerful alchemy of faith and righteousness, judicious costumes by Linda Cho, a set by David Rockwell that economically transforms from principal’s office, exterior walled garden and spare pulpit at St Nicholas’s parish in the Bronx, 1964. The stage version carries the subtitle A Parable, and Shanley’s play remains a provocative and absorbing examination of intuition, institution and uncertainty in a cloistered powder keg of local power. It’s a testament to the magnetism of the performances and the play itself – its pared-down structure, its tension of agendas at odds – that the 90-minute show breezes by in what feels like half that.

If you grew up with it, there’s something inherently nostalgic about the sound of cicadas. The incessant chorus, once every 17 years, conjures something primordial, unsettling, country, past. Appropriate, the excellent production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play at the Helen Hayes Theater, plunges its audience into that portal at the show’s onset – all darkness and trilling racket. The sound design, lush and unnerving, is controlled by Bray Poor and Will Pickens.

Tough, when so much trauma and anger and insults are said, and so loudly. By show’s end, the play felt as lost as its flailing characters, despite the bright lights within it. Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is, as promised, challenging theater, just not in the good way.

But Shucked’s power, should it work on you, is in its impressively consistent stream of puns, slow-burn wordplays and PG-13 jokes. The cast’s comedic timing is near universally excellent, though I detected a shadow of a shrug, a hope that you’ll laugh and not groan at the base-aiming humor. Which is not my style, though I seemed to be in the minority. The audience at the matinee I attended laughed throughout, sometimes uproariously and with surprise. I’m not the buyer of this particular variety, but corn sells – which, in the name of an original musical, is something to root for.