Charles Isherwood — Theater Critic

Yes, it's often quite funny, whether borrowing dialogue wholesale from the movie or freshening it up. And, like its celluloid progenitor, it indulges in moments of sweet sentiment that tiptoe toward the cloying line without crossing it. But it shares a fundamental problem with most similar shows: The movie was chosen for adaptation because it was a hit, and superbly executed, which makes it virtually impossible to equal, let alone surpass on stage.

For the most part Nottage establishes her characters and their troubled pasts and uncertain futures economically and with compassionate nuance. But 'Clyde's' nevertheless also feels schematic, as scenes of confrontation with Clyde (who, incongruously, appears to the both proprietor and the only front-of-house worker) alternate with scenes of communal sandwich-making that bind the kitchen gang together. At regular intervals, we hear revelations about just how the characters ended up behind bars.

To answer the question that absolutely no one with a Netflix account and an interest in Broadway musicals is asking: Why, yes, 'Diana, The Musical' is every bit as abysmal as rumored. Social media was briefly aflame with withering descriptions when the show first began streaming in October, so the Broadway opening - long delayed by the pandemic - almost feels like a pointless afterthought. The wedding cake that was flavorless to begin with is now both flavorless and stale.

But stripping away any element of this far-seeing and fiercely imaginative show might compromise the whole. In any case it has become a landmark of musical theater in the 21st century. Still, for this viewer, it is the unblinking yet compassionate portrait of the title character that lifts the show into the sublime, and Clarke's performance - much like Tonya Pinkins's in the original production - is the driving force behind its moments of transcendence.

Something of a grande dame of Off Broadway - although I suspect she'd roll her expressive eyes at the notion - O'Connell here gives a performance that seamlessly blends an extraordinary technical acting challenge with the earthiness, plucky everywoman humanity and the subtle spirituality that have often been hallmarks of her work. Both play and performance are a gift we are lucky to receive, as this Broadway season shapes up to be a landmark one for its presentation of unconventional new plays and revelatory performances.

But for all its surface stylishness, 'The Lehman Brothers' is a stolid and rather monolithic slab of a show: a three hour and twenty minute talking Wikipedia page, so dense with description and narration, and devoid of drama - or even dialogue - that watching it is like watching very expensive paint dry, or maybe, to use a more apt metaphor, listening to cotton growing.

Much of the play's effectiveness derives from Davis's utterly natural yet entirely extraordinary performance, for which she won both an Obie Award and a Lucille Lortel Award for the Off Broadway production at the Vineyard Theater. Davis bears a certain resemblance to Winner, but that's incidental. What gives her performance such quiet force is the manner in which she renders the character's shifting and conflicting emotions, and the racing mind beneath the placid exterior, as the interrogation proceeds.

Much of the play's effectiveness derives from Davis's utterly natural yet entirely extraordinary performance, for which she won both an Obie Award and a Lucille Lortel Award for the Off Broadway production at the Vineyard Theater. Davis bears a certain resemblance to Winner, but that's incidental. What gives her performance such quiet force is the manner in which she renders the character's shifting and conflicting emotions, and the racing mind beneath the placid exterior, as the interrogation proceeds.

The most welcome, and most stimulating, innovation is the fresh orchestrations, by Daniel Kluger, for a small band seated in a pit onstage. The instrumentation favors guitars, banjo and accordion, and while Broadway musicals usually feature more robust and varied orchestrations, Kluger's arrangements, and the terrific music-making, gives the show an authentic-feeling countrified flavor that makes the classic songs soar and leap with a new, spirited sound.

Directed by Doug Hughes at the dizzying pace of speed traders racking up dollars at full froth, and acted by an excellent cast, the play is supremely well-researched, insightful and smart. It is also, on the other hand, so conscientiously thorough in its analysis of its subject that it often feels dense to the point of stultifying. And its ample array of characters - as well as its many-threaded plot - result in a play with greater breadth than depth. As a many-chaptered primer on an ominous turning point in the American economy, it earns full marks. But emotionally, and to some extent dramatically, it's pretty much a washout.

Though it ends with a tragic death that mimics the searing ending of Puccini's 'Madama Butterfly ' - which is alluded to (and heard in bits) throughout - Taymor's plodding, sometimes fussy staging, coupled with Hwang's revised version of the play, ultimately leave a wearying, watery impression. Today the play seems overstuffed with now-shopworn metatheatrical gambits (direct address, audience engagement, a fake 'I'm ending this show now' moment, etc.), as well as self-explanatory dialogue that bluntly lays bare its themes. Plus there's the melodramatic climax for a big finish.

Although Springsteen is 68, his voice - never a crooner's smooth instrument - retains all its grit and vigor. Rough-edged, surly, sweaty and dark and raw, it can also hit notes of whispering tenderness that underscore the vulnerability hiding in plain sight in many of his best songs. It's a voice that defines the sound of rock 'n' roll as it was and will always be defined, the holler of rebellion and ecstasy, of swagger and hope.

Priestley is not always subtle in pointing out how precisely things have gone wrong for the characters; some ironies seem to land like bricks, and while the fog of disillusion is convincing, we in the 21st century cannot be expected to find all his revelations to be, well, revelatory. But for the most part 'Time and the Conways,' presented here with impressive polish, has weathered the years with impressive grace. Time can be cruel to people, but on occasion it can at least be kind to works of art.

Certainly the more than 30 songs performed by a superb cast of nine include some of the most beloved, or accomplished, ever written for musicals. A short list of the shows directed or produced (or both) by Prince ranges from the bouncy 'Damn Yankees' to the storied collaborations with Stephen Sondheim - 'Company,' 'Follies,' 'A Little Night Music' and 'Sweeney Todd' among them - as well as two Andrew Lloyd Webber megahits, 'Evita' and 'The Phantom of the Opera.' Plus 'Cabaret' and 'Fiddler on the Roof.' But Prince's protean ability to infuse an electric vitality into shows of such disparate styles and tones almost confounds the revue format - or rather is confounded by it. Prince's work was often celebrated for its seamlessness, the fluid interplay between dialogue, song and dance, between story and character and theme. But even the most skilled seam-sealer cannot make a revue of such diverse material into a conceptually cohesive and theatrically compelling evening.

Michael Moore's solo show, 'The Terms of My Surrender,' comes as close to being a campaign rally as anything you are likely to see on Broadway - or anywhere else, for that matter, save an actual one. Taking the stage of the Belasco Theatre to the kind of frenzied adoration currently being enjoyed on Broadway only by Bette Midler, the liberal filmmaker and author flings at his audience plenty of red meat dripping with contempt for Donald Trump, the country's current 'president,' as Moore puts it, fingers winking air quotes. And yet this shaggy but enjoyable evening, an autobiographical solo show spliced with a rabble-rousing call to arms against the reigning political regime, contains more surprises - and more funny diversions - than I expected.

It might be surmised that some quarter century later McPherson's bleak comedy might have lost some of its sting, now that the central metaphor of illness - the ghostly presence of the AIDS crisis - has somewhat abated. But in fact 'Marvin's Room,' seen today in the director Anne Kauffman's delicately hued but big-hearted production, seems as mordantly and ruefully truthful as ever. Maybe more so. As baby boomers struggle with issues of end-of-life care for their parents, and indeed themselves, and health care (mental and physical) has become a defining issue, if not the defining issue, in American political life, 'Marvin's Room' feels even more acute and piercingly funny.

Summer entertainment options do not get more counterintuitive than the Broadway adaptation of George Orwell's '1984' that opened at the Hudson Theatre on Thursday, just as beach season swings into high gear. In truth, to call this almost unrelievedly grim production entertainment may be misleading. If you're in the mood for a meal of pure spinach, to use a now-outmoded food metaphor, this 100-minute immersion in one man's bleak odyssey through a brutally oppressive culture certainly fits the ticket.

The commercial theater, or for that matter the non-commercial theater, does not regularly present us with new plays of ideas - let alone comedies of ideas. Hnath's play fairly sets your head spinning with its knotty perspectives. Each scene in this whiplash-inducing (in a good way) play flashes forth a new revelation to absorb and process, although it has only four characters - and, yes, they are all essentially holdovers from the 1879 Ibsen play that Hnath is both honoring and interrogating.

The boys singing and swinging their hearts out in 'Bandstand,' an exuberant new musical set in the days just after World War II, are chasing an uncertain future and running from their traumatic pasts. Veterans all, with the battered psyches to prove it, they pound the piano keys, bang away at the drums and blow into their horns in the hopes of burning off the steam building in their emotional pipes. This being a musical, of course, they mostly succeed. 'Bandstand,' with a frisky boogie-woogie-laced score by Richard Oberacker, and book and lyrics by Rob Taylor and Oberacker, is the last new musical to open in a season almost overstuffed with them. The total comes to a baker's dozen, an encouraging indication that the hunger for fresh voices on Broadway, fed in recent years on the success of groundbreaking shows like 'Fun Home' and (duh) 'Hamilton,' has led to a healthy spirit of risk-taking on the part of producers.

In Midler, 'Dolly' has at last found a new headliner capable of engendering the necessary ecstasies as she swans down the famous staircase at the Harmonia Gardens restaurant, shimmering in her corseted gown, peacocky plumage sprouting like fireworks from her head. From her first entrance on a (fake) horse-drawn cart to her last bow, Midler serves up a star performance of glowing luster, rambunctious clowning and, on just a few occasions, surprising emotional delicacy. To say she sweeps all before her is to understate the feat: Without breaking into a sweat - although she pretends to wilt against the scenery, to hilarious effect, once or twice - Midler transforms this cotton-candy cloud of a musical into a bona fide theatrical event.

The director Daniel Sullivan's succulent new Broadway revival of the play, a Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, cannot erase its tints of both moralizing and melodrama. But it proves once again that Hellman's 1939 drama is also redoubtably enduring entertainment, a theatrically effective indictment of human greed and its destructive power.

It would be nice to report that, despite these travails, the show, with a book by Danny Rubin, who co-wrote the 1993 movie, and a score by Tim Minchin, of 'Matilda' renown, deserves the plaudits it has already received in London, including an Olivier Award for best musical and another for Karl as leading actor. But I'm afraid the production, simultaneously frenetic and static, left me just about as glum as its protagonist is at curtain rise. Life would be grim indeed if I had to wake up and face this tedious, charm-free and often tasteless show again day after day.

It would be nice to report that, despite these travails, the show, with a book by Danny Rubin, who co-wrote the 1993 movie, and a score by Tim Minchin, of 'Matilda' renown, deserves the plaudits it has already received in London, including an Olivier Award for best musical and another for Karl as leading actor. But I'm afraid the production, simultaneously frenetic and static, left me just about as glum as its protagonist is at curtain rise. Life would be grim indeed if I had to wake up and face this tedious, charm-free and often tasteless show again day after day.

You don't have to go in search of a magnifying glass to discern the active ingredients in the new musical 'War Paint,' at the Nederlander Theatre, a dual biography of the dueling cosmetics divas Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden. The magic elixirs are quite plainly the two veteran Broadway stars above the title, Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole, giving performances of such resplendent force, wit and vivacity that the evening gleams like a freshly applied coat of nail polish catching the light.

An unruly cast of stylish denizens has arrived at the St. James Theatre just in time to relieve the torpor of all of us currently afflicted by, well, almost everything, and offer the New York spring season a comic confection whose ability to delight and distract almost never falters.