Alexis Soloski

Critic's Pick. Icke’s change in timeline trades catastrophe for suspense, ontological disaster for down-to-the-cuticles nail biting. Is this a fair exchange? Maybe. Is it electrifying? God, yes. The results are slick, sleek, mordant. It’s a spine tingler, if not quite the ethics tangler of the original.

Still, on its very many levels and for most of the assembled audience, “Masquerade” works. At the close of the final scene people all around me sobbed. Was this relief at our escalator rescue? More likely it was compassion for the Phantom’s tragedy. My eyes stayed dry. I don’t know about you, but I am tired of being made to care why bad men do bad things. The Phantom already has all the best tunes. Does he really need our sympathy, too? Either way, the music of the night plays on.

Thirty or so years ago, Vogel told a reporter, “I like theater that makes me feel like it’s a healing.” That’s what “Mother Play” is, a balm that comes in cardboard boxes and packing tape. It honors the dead by making them alive again and nurtures the living by providing a place to put a daughter’s love and rage. Martha’s box is not Pandora’s. It’s just another way of organizing a life.

Tonally, Mayer's production, accented with Will Van Dyke's fine arrangements and Ellenore Scott's gestural, loose-hipped, giddy choreography, takes a chirpy see-what-sticks approach, but the script is daffy and capacious enough to allow performances as emotionally grounded as Blanchard's, as blithely comic as Groff's, as bananas as Borle's, who plays Scrivello with the precision of a Swiss wristwatch and the derangement of a candidate for exorcism. He mugs, he twerks, he chews scenery like it's a wooden amuse-bouche. If scene-stealing is a crime, someone should make a citizen's arrest at the stage door.

Midway through, “Pericles” finds its sea legs, mostly because the action shifts to Pericles’s daughter, Marina, played by the luminous Emily Young. This also signals the play’s move away from struggle and loss and toward redemption and joy, more natural keys for Fiasco, which has always excelled at comedy. The brothel scenes, in which a chaste Marina reforms would-be customers, are sprightly. And the ending, among Shakespeare’s best, is suitably moving. But the chief delight here, as in any Fiasco show, is watching the actors work with such fluency and in such communion, supporting and enjoying one another’s work. That’s not quite a miracle, but it’s reason enough to set sail.

Díaz’s best routine was performed alone to a peppy Jacques Brel song. Breathlessly, Díaz manipulated a ball (a tribute to Cardini’s classic billiard ball routine), many cards, even his own right shoe. His hands would be empty. His mouth would be empty. You would swear to it on any available Bible. Then they would be full, cards raining to the floor. He sent a few cards whizzing through the air in a way that reminded me of Ricky Jay, the scholar and magician, who died in 2018. I may have teared up a little. This was Díaz’s simplest sequence and also his most beautiful. Who needs a helicopter when you can make magic like that?

But the adventures of the knight and his horse (Royer Bockus) and squire (Ben Steinfeld) are beautifully silly. The interruptions of the grocer and his wife are better still, especially when Nell is pulled onstage to play a pan-Slavic princess who talks like Dracula. Best of all, though, is the Fiasco mien, which favors a giddy, affable, let’s-put-on-a-show quality. The actors are clearly enjoying themselves (Steinfeld, who sings most of his lines, often accompanied by Bockus and the actor and multi-instrumentalist Paul L. Coffey, even more than the rest). And their performances carry with them a swaggering sense of rehearsal room experimentation and delight. They seem to be performing for the sheer pleasure of it, with the audience a welcome afterthought.

With dazzling imagination and sublime control, the show’s cast and crew conjure a delirious, dynamic, highly pettable world. And oh, is it a wonder. Though the play is ostensibly about one boy’s fraught survival after a disaster, that story is somewhat thin. “Life of Pi” instead succeeds as a broader tribute to human ingenuity and animal grace.

It’s doubtful that anyone will get it righter than director Maria Friedman. A former actor and a sensitive and lucid interpreter of Sondheim’s work, she lends clarity and humanity to the revival of Merrily now playing at New York Theatre Workshop. Informed by her 2012 Menier Chocolate Factory production, this version stars Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez as a trio of friends disillusioned after two decades amid the gutters and stars of Hollywood and Broadway. Friedman’s interpretation will probably be regarded as a gold standard. But even here, despite that indelible sour-sweet score, the gold is short a few carats. Some choices, it would seem, can’t be unmade, no matter how acute our hindsight.

There are several chase scenes in Some Like It Hot, the top-heavy musical adaptation of Billy Wilder’s 1959 film comedy. Multiple characters bustle across the stage, typically in tap shoes, hurtling up and down stairs and in and out of doors. But as the chase goes on, it becomes increasingly hazy what they’re running from or toward. As befits a show with at least two percussionists, the show rushes to the beat of multiple drums. And as the name of the in-show band, the Syncopated Sisters, suggests, Some Like It Hot often dances just out in front or a stroke or two behind.

“The Far Country” ends in 1930. That ending isn’t necessarily abrupt. But it does feel somewhat arbitrary. Why not 1950? Or 1970? There is so much more history to recover. More love. More promise. More pain. Moon Gyet claims that the strenuous physical labor required of an immigrant is nothing compared with the work of being Chinese in America. This takes patience and focus, he says. A serious mind and a necessary grace. Suh possesses these qualities in full. He has more work to do, more stories to tell.

Creepy and antic, gloomy and giddy, Michael Arden's production capitalizes on every trick in Dickens's story and then pulls a few new ones out of Scrooge's top hat. Peace on earth? Mercy mild? Please. There are moments when you would swear that Mays couldn't possibly be unaccompanied, so raucous is this 'Carol.' But he is, more or less. (Danny Gardner briefly joins as a wordless specter.) Happily, Mays - who has also triumphed in multiple roles in 'I Am My Own Wife,' for which he won a Tony Award, and 'A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder' - is a master of manifold parts. If he were left alone, without lights, sound, projections or Dane Laffrey's curving, swerving set, he might put across this fable even more convincingly.

The transition from page to stage feels undermotivated, incomplete. The lively language shifts easily enough from prose to monologue, and Byrne - with his wide, serious face, his bright, worried eyes, his voice like the growl of a polite bear - is compulsively watchable. What the show lacks (and this is true of the memoir, as well) is a sense of why he's examining his life now. In public. Why would a man lay himself bare like this, on Broadway? It's hard to discern because the show all but ignores the latter part of his life and acting career.

The joys of this production are Stone's vibrant book and the fun of seeing the cast play their way through it. Lucas-Perry is a dynamic Adams, Murray sports with the gouty Franklin. Carolee Carmello has swagger for days as John Dickinson, Adams's chief antagonist. If Elizabeth A Davis's Thomas Jefferson feels somewhat removed and empty, Jefferson was described as the American sphinx, so she may be responding to that. Page generates some nice moments, too, as with some under-the-table choreography for the congressmen's feet. But this conception offers something less than a full-throated revival of this musical, if indeed this musical needs to be revived at all. It has remembered the ladies. But it can't make them live.

Generous even in its anger, Cost of Living is an act of service toward its characters, its actors and its audience, too, enlarging the vision of what is possible in a Broadway theater and who is welcome here.

Lear deBessonet's superb production of the Sondheim and James Lapine modern classic 'Into the Woods,' which originated at Encores! in May, has made the journey west and south to Broadway. Despite some cast changes, its humor, wonder and humanity have arrived intact. Indeed, they may glimmer even more brightly at the St. James Theater than they did at City Center. So if you saw that recent staging, should you go into the woods again? Unless your budget doesn't run to Broadway prices, of course you should. To put it another way: Wishes come true, not free.

For some, this too muchness, married to Wilder's bookish mischief, will pall. The intermission doesn't come until nearly two hours in, and as I walked out into the lobby, an usher asked me if I planned on leaving. Apparently a lot of people do. But if you stick it out, you can find real power in the way the lush design garlands a profound suspicion of human endeavor. Blain-Cruz relegates Wilder's emphasis on endurance for something more questioning, mostly by giving space to the questions that are already there.

The arguments that Letts rehearses here might have felt fresher had the play opened in 2020 as planned. But the desire to turn over Plymouth Rock, exposing Manifest Destiny as justification for genocide, and the equally fierce desire to cling to these myths - seen in the bad faith attacks on critical race theory, the frantic attempts at book banning - have since become everyday news. It's an argument that a left-leaning Broadway audience will find sympathetic, particularly when delivered in the easeful environment of an expensive theater by a cast that's mostly white and mostly male.

American Buffalo feels thin, too. And sour. Like a cup of diner coffee left to cool. It's a showcase for actors. But what really is it showcasing? It's a play about men who feel that life has done them wrong. The way they speak of others - women, queer people, 'Mexicans' - suggests that they believe they are owed more, that they are possessors dispossessed, that the American dream is their birthright, even if they never do much to make that dream come through. They fight over scraps - imagined scraps at that - and then they fight one another. Back in the day, there used to be a lot of indignation over Mamet's language and whether it heralded a coarsening of American letters. The language, it turns out, wasn't the coarse part.

In every scene, Parker is giving the most, carrying the comedy on her narrow shoulders - slumped for Karen, shrugging for Muriel, a wilting if increasingly frantic flower for mother-of-the-bride Norma. Broderick, is doing a lot less, as is his way. But they have a flagrant enjoyment in playing opposite each other, which is the best and maybe the only reason to book in. In the midst of all this heteronormative malaise, here, at least, is one happy marriage.

Overstuffed, often hollow, and for all that, incontestably ravishing, Girl From the North Country, Conor McPherson's Depression-era gloss on Bob Dylan's back pages, makes its windblown way to Broadway. In 1934, in Duluth, Minnesota, a frostbitten piece of earth and Dylan's hometown, lost souls congregate in the parlor of a rundown guesthouse, hurtling toward foreclosure. They drink, they scrap, they fumble toward what they might call love. And sometimes, when the lonesome piano plinks, they lean into I Want You or Idiot Wind.

But turn that record over. On Broadway, Jagged Little Pill harnesses the hyperemotionalism of its source to shake off the cynicism and formulaic strictures of the typical jukebox musical. Yes, its plot is shaky and contrived, its songs - and there are so, so many of them - histrionic. It seizes on enough hot-button issues - sexual assault, the opioid epidemic, internet addiction, workaholism, misogyny, sex and gender identity, and OK, sure, gun violence, too - to singe the first row. It is, indisputably, too much and that too muchness is what makes it so watchable.

Its current Broadway incarnation, adapted by Jack Thorne, directed by Matthew Warchus and embellished with a dozen carols, is as gleaming as a Christmas goose. Which is to say, it's no turkey. But in readying the play for Broadway, Thorne has echoed his Harry Potter and the Cursed Child themes - the tension between fathers and sons, the ways we misunderstand the people we love - and borrowed a bit from Dickens's own life, turning a weird ghost story into a thin psychological allegory about a man whose daddy didn't love him enough.

More than a concert and less than a musical, a one-man show with a full backing band, American Utopia brings David Byrne - gray-haired, gray-suited, barefoot, magnificent - to Broadway. A loose agglomeration of songs, sometimes linked by brief monologues and get-out-the-vote exhortations, it is both an introduction to Byrne's particular psychology and catalogue and an oblique consideration of America today and how it might be bettered. Resistance is musical.

Past productions have starred actors with a heft of gravitas - Anna Magnani, Mercedes Ruehl, Maureen Stapleton - women who may have given the gags somewhere weightier to land. Tomei is a lighter, flightier presence - sensuous and delightful - and she plays even the darkest moments brightly, in on the joke. She and Elliott have great fun together, but they don't sell sex as life-affirming. It looks effortful and cheap. The whole cast screams and flails and races around Mark Wendland's set, which scrambles any sense of indoors and outdoors in something like an orgasmic frenzy. The plastic flamingos look on, unmoved.