Caroline Cao — Theater Critic

The notes of coming of age are complex for four students at an all-girls summer music academy in earthquake-prone Berkeley, California. Directed with no frills by Pam MacKinnon at Vineyard Theatre, Eisa Davis’s play ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| is a stark, messy portrait of teen musicians figuring out their harmonies.

The Lost Boys’s rushed final battle traces back to the source material’s spectacle-driven climax. A post-curtain call epilogue, theatrically fun but thematically sloppy, suggests vampires will always rise elsewhere beyond Hollywood endings. It’s a testament to Bourzgui’s magnetism that he still eclipses everything that came before.

Nicole starts by amusingly recounting clumps of her childhood, quickly getting the Travolta gags out of the way: her uncle’s Saturday Night Live disco dance and the memory of riding his bedroom-supplied airplane. Also, she’s not a Scientologist. But as she journeys into her parents' split (her father, Sam, being the “cheaper Travolta” compared to John) and her then-husband confronting her credit card spending, the show pivots into darker territory about the relatable humiliation of debt and the unsettling, yet darkly comedic, tribulations of doing customer service at a spray-tan salon.

My audience laughed nervously as Reynoso vowed to get Clinton elected, as if the play is ushering in a Shakespearean tragic hero. This final scene seems like the play’s cross-examination of itself, acknowledging that faith in the government might as well be taking not just a fall, but a farcical plunge. But its abruptness sidesteps a real sense of reflection.

Clarke renders Bughouse as a haunting piece about an artist’s ego and thwarted innocence, but the production’s restraint is also its weakness. Even a sturdy Kelly holds back on penetrative inquiries into Darger. The visual and animated designs drench the man’s study in his disheveled mindscape and ineffable awe of his paintings, but the production erects a steely dam behind which its watercolors long to spill out.

The townsfolk are as doltish as Elmer Fudd and rendered so cartoonishly that they announce their personalities, motives, and gullibility as blaringly as Yosemite Sam. The book contains mile-a-minute jokes mixed in with meta-gags and screeds on environmental justice and corruption. But for every clever quip, there are groaners. If it’s not the preachiness that undermines them, it’s the overstuffing of jokes with little breathing room. While Bigfoot! drops zingers and sight gags like an SNL sketch, that sketch spirit fizzles out in a musical production that needs structure to sustain itself. Overtickling the funny bone stalls the heart.

If the AA storytellers actively engage, The Dinosaurs also illustrates those who exist to listen. The audience doesn't witness everyone sharing a story. Some characters offer only fragments about themselves, whether through their behavior or whispers. A novice playwright or director would act on the impulse to expand or resolve, but The Dinosaurs commits to the feeling of leaving a room with an unspoken story suspended in the air.

The Disappear bites off more it can chew, attempting to ruminate on intergenerational tensions in the film industry, the scars left by art, composing art amid climate disaster (the Los Angeles fires seem to get a nod), and more all at once, leaving me pining for a cohesive version of this play.

This Picnic At Hanging Rock staging yearns to scale a further mile, like the girls who pine from an escape from time and the inevitable doom of growing up. Though the show is imperfect, the finale “Time and Place” peaks among the many harmonies, with an entire ensemble ensnared and enchanted by the Rock.

Tutty (who wears his role like muscle memory, having originated it in London) and Pitts flex their chemistry as scene partners: Dougal is an animated, British chatterbox who views the Big Apple through a lens of pop culture, while she’s the exhausted New York native who rolls her eyes at his touristy prattling. Their adventure involves Tinder matchmaking, nods to rom-com tropes, some verbal and physical stumbles, and a spending spree with a borrowed American Express. The writers get plenty of mileage from quips about the taboo that the pair are soon to be in-laws.

Let’s Love! is a comic, microscopic introspection on sex, relationships, and love across three disparate stories — nothing more, nothing less. Perhaps the show arrives with expectations of ambition due to its playwright: Ethan Coen of the Coen Brothers, who previously penned the existential play trio Almost an Evening. If that show aimed to be the apple in Eden, the more modest Let’s Love! wants to be a box of bittersweet chocolate.

After the blistering meeting, the epilogue threatens to package the tale as an inspirational story. It doesn’t stick the landing, but it leaves one last thought: Forgiveness isn’t a clear-cut route for everyone.

But, boy, when Heathers takes flight, it punches a hole through the roof. ‘Candy Store’ still grooves as a catchy paean to cruelty, and ‘The Me Inside of Me’ is ingeniously ironic... These two ballads herald a final 30 minutes ratcheting to a nail-biting climax.

These slow-boiling dynamics build up to a raw sexual act staged, by intimacy coordinator Ann James, as coldly mechanical yet achingly balletic.

Although Birney and Emery plant the heart and humor of Lunar Eclipse, Margulies struggles to craft a momentum of highs and lows as the couple unravel their regrets. In particular, dour introspections, such as George admitting he cares for his dogs more than his late adopted son or Emery sacrificing her city upbringing for married life on the farm, feel smoothed over.

With an exuberant band, Just in Time rides easy on Groff’s waves of showman charisma while paying tribute to the era-specific music and other singers, especially the women in Darin’s life who inspired his performance, starting with Michele Pawk as a parental figure with a vaudevillian past. The book seamlessly weaves in how other stars like Connie Francis (a blazing, must-see Gracie Lawrence) and Sandra Dee (a commanding Erika Henningsen), the latter of whom witnessed his fallible humanity, were integral to his life.

While Scott Zielinski’s lighting suggests the darkness that enfolds Floyd, it’s visually silly that he is ‘trapped’ in a chair purposed for relaxation... The first act may frustrate with its lagginess and scant urgency, and yet it complements the second act’s tragic turns as Floyd’s ordeal inflames a media circus... Guettel’s folksy bluegrass score, complete with yodeling, is a remarkable one. The yodeling is its own indecipherable language, and it's also the sound of Floyd’s communion with the very forces of nature that lured and then trapped him.

Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends, hosted by megawatt stars Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga, is as cozy as a longtime friend’s living room. Best of all, the honeyed orchestrations (originally by Sondheim’s longtime collaborator Jonathan Tunick) and crisp sound mixing in the Old Friends setlist help remind us why the best of composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim’s repertoire still attracts talented titans.

Operation Mincemeat is a cup of British comedy, sometimes with drawn-out humor to a fault — not for every American. But it also captures the Hollywood hagiographic, the self-deprecating, the ironic, and the tragic that will make you gasp.

Ghosts ask how deep you can bury unpleasant truths before they fester into —perhaps fatalist — despair. How much does holding back a family secret make you an accomplice to your and your loved ones’ misery? Unfortunately, Ghosts struggles to sink hooks into those questions, even as it crawls toward its chilling, inconclusive end.

Beyond nostalgia, The Jonathan Larson Project leaves Larson admirers in want — and not just for the potential of his unrealized ideas. The program explains for what or whom Larson originally wrote each song. Some numbers can speak for themselves, but others would benefit from more onstage context. For example, Larson composed ‘Love Heals,’ rapturously performed by Jones, to honor the late AIDS activist Alison Gertz. But only the program will tell you that, and the show leaves this person’s life untouched.

It’s a long, wintry walk to Theater 555 from the nearest heated subway, but it’s worth the warmth playwright Matthew Lombardo’s Conversations With Mother has to offer. Directed by Noah Himmelstein, the play is tactful, personal, and precise while hitting the sweet spots of relatability.

It’s anything but a stagnant affair, at least. As the stars pantoimine and read, their voices inhabit colorful characters. Some beats may land as treacly, but the stories contain plenty of zippy lines and outlandish, cartoon-inspired shenanigans. A short story that grabs hearty laughs is one where a talent agent (Kind) persuades the Grim Reaper (Armisen) to try acting. Projected images illustrated by Emily Flake add additional humorous imagination to the show.

Not to sound a little salty, but Elf The Musical (directed by Philip WM. McKinley) can overstuff itself with misfired quips upon quips, mistaking fluff for quality. Trading sincerity for schtick can deflate the humor (often nostalgic nods to the movie) when desperate to grab laughs. Although the musical is critical of the corporate grind of Christmas, a referential script can border into product placement. High-wattage star Sean Astin, as Santa Claus, finds his charms trapped in cloying references — ironically underlining how Astin himself effectively doubles as corporate antagonist Mr. Greenway.

The actresses' tales collide in other clever ways. When Bundy and Butler reenact their childhood glory days as models and pageant queens, an envious Winokur was not as blessed with performance opportunities. (Winokur eventually ended up the only Tony winner among them.) Other mentions of less pleasant incidents from their lives, such as Liza Minnelli making an insensitive comment on Winokur’s body, open a critique of the theatre industry’s fatphobia, but this show feels such topics are meant for another time. At Mama, I’m A Big Girl Now!, we simply bask in the women's glitter.