Chris Jones — Theater Critic

It's a lot. You may have a headache. You may be encouraged in the view that kids cable franchises are best done in arenas with actors being forced to stick their heads inside animated costumes, if they are to be done at all. I think 'SpongeBob' deserved and got more, and this is a sincere endeavor to elevate his gestalt. Not every attempt at singularity works - familiar tropes in the storytelling sometimes rear up and squelch the freshness - but, in its best moments, it is very much its own thing. Proudly so.

This is a show that works on one heart at a time (yours). In so doing, the story of the peasant girl Ti-Moune, and her audacious capacity for love, homes in on the essential simplicity of the musical art and, especially, its place in the great human trajectory of assuaging life's crises through the collective telling, and the collective hearing, of pedagogical, allegorical and soothing stories. You do not need to spend much time with the current news to know that producer Ken Davenport has judiciously timed his revival of a show featuring a fearless female protagonist self-actualizing inside a story within a story, finding herself empowered by her community and thus able to take down the walls constructed by those with privilege.

Thurman flails around the stage, as if she does not know what to do. Soo mostly retreats within herself, connecting with no one. Lucas and Csokas have some spark, and Csokas even has a note of vulnerability, but these characters, as they play them, are absurd. Only Brown is any good, and her character is not central enough to allow anything to build. Even the jittery set from Derek McLane is a mishmash of tradition and technology; it looks as lost and as desexualized as the actors.

Which is not to say it does not achieve something worthwhile: an updating of absurdism for Gen Xers, starring their own kind but writ and choreographed by their elders. (Poor Gen Xers; those boomers just won't let go.) That marriage of the new stand-up/improv elite with the disgorged pain of a great comic writer suffering through a long stay on a planet America clearly spinning off its axis is what I have not quite seen before. Most neo-absurdist playwrights, your Will Enos and Annie Bakers, are gently compassionate satiric observers. They don't have Zaks out there in the dark going louder, faster, quicker, funnier, smarter, clearer, for goodness sake. Martin did.

'The Band's Visit' is only 90 minutes. For some, it will seem like a strange and esoteric Broadway musical, which is not wrong. There is no mention of any macro Arab-Israeli conflict whatsoever. No need. This is a remarkable and boundlessly compassionate and humanistic piece of theater. It lets us know that that is as absurd an enmity as all the other things about which we fight.

Paradoxically, 'Junk' actually represents something of a power grab by Akhtar, the ambitious young author of 'Disgraced' and other taut, oft-domestic, one-act dramas, for a more robust and defining place in the discourse of the American theater. Especially as produced here, 'Junk' is an epic, strutting, restless, sexually charged, slam-bang-wham piece of work, something akin to the huge socio-political dramas by the likes of David Hare, produced for years at the National Theatre in London but far less common on this, less reflective side of the Atlantic. There's a gaping hole, and Akhtar jumps in feet first with his fish-eye lens. Wall Street peddlers will sense there's a kindred spirit building this house of cards, even as Akhtar takes them down.

'M. Butterfly,' which officially returned to Broadway on Thursday night with a marquee director in Julie Taymor, a big star in Clive Owen and a significantly revised script from Hwang, is now an entirely different and very complicated proposition. The power balance between West and East has been transformed: Hwang himself acknowledged this in his underappreciated 2011 comedy 'Chinglish,' a play that displays much ambivalence about the so-called new China and is very much in dialogue with 'M. Butterfly.' 'Chinglish' is all about another feckless Western man in a sexually compromising situation, this time in a wholly subservient role. China doesn't flutter. It roars with capital.

'Springsteen on Broadway' is a very serious attempt at self-definition as written and self-directed by one of America's most intense and driven performers, a man who cannot act as one other than himself, and does not care to try, but who sure can make his own past live in the present moment. He can take you there for he takes himself there, and lives there again.

On this cruise through Prince's greatest hits (and a few of his flops), there are as many Hal Princes as there actors on the stage, all speaking improbably in the first person, all offering bon mots ('And we had another hit!') or epigrams, pithy truisms, famous names ('Steve and I') or wry acknowledgments of the role of good fortune and hard graft in any illustrious career. As written by David Thompson, those do not amount to meaningful insight into the subject under review. And as a consequence, and despite the pleasures of hearing reprises of musical numbers like 'The Worst Pies in London,' 'Being Alive' and 'You Must Meet My Wife,' the show functions mostly as a cautionary tale about the difficulty of anthologizing directors in a Broadway show.

Alas for imperial Russia and the family of Czar Nicholas II, the 17-year-old Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna was murdered in 1918 by the Cheka, Vladimir Lenin's secret police. But since princesses have a unique ability to skate above republican sentiment and the harsh realities of forensic science, the legend of a surviving Anastasia has lived on in popular culture, most famously as a 1997 animated musical film, scored by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty and wherein Anastasia was voiced by Meg Ryan, she whom no Bolshevik could ever suppress. Now Anastasia has reappeared on Broadway, the centerpiece of a new musical that works quite delightfully when the star is center stage, and struggles mightily when she is off in the wings, where the charming Christy Altomare spends far too long.

Borle's problems are intensified by the show's decision not to take us to the chocolate factory until intermission, spending all of Act 1 on Charlie's early life, the golden ticket backstory and, weirdly, on Charlie's relationship with the owner of the local candy shop (also played by Borle). This was a truly terrible decision (that candy store guy, who is cold, is not Wonka). It ignores what is on the marquee and also then shoves so much caper-esque plot into Act 2 that the show can't wait around for a moment to focus on what really matters.

Among her fans, which sums up an orchestra section that behaved all night like the Shuberts had pulled out the seats and installed spring-loaded standing mechanisms in their stead, Midler has more rollover minutes than Sprint could ever conceive. Even if Midler had skipped 'Before the Parade Passes By' entirely - rather than merely ad-libbing 'live theater!' and gulping 'Here it comes! Wish me luck!' before vanquishing the frog and belting out the Jerry Herman anthem like nothing had happened - it is inconceivable that anyone would have hit the lobby for a transportation voucher out of there.

Nonetheless, there is no questioning the force and sincerity of Vogel's determination to elevate the biography and artistic contribution of a little-known playwright whose early 20th-century work suffered the discrimination widely faced by the Yiddish theater, and by the immigrant artists whose stories it represented. As Vogel tells it in a highly skilled, clearly personal and deftly structured piece - co-conceived and directed by Rebecca Taichman - Asch was the near equal of such famed masters of the nascent American theater as Eugene O'Neill, and certainly a writer with even more courage.

When it comes to credible depictions of small-town Pennsylvania, 'Groundhog Day the Musical' is about as veracious as a woodchuck named Phil is a qualified rodent meteorologist. This British import to Broadway - staged by people for whom small-town America is a typology, rather than a collection of souls - is more Whoville than Punxsutawney. Director Matthew Warchus' overstuffed and near-chaotic production is similarly far from Woodstock, Ill., the doppelganger for exurban insularity used to film the 1993 movie - a film forged in the caustic and improvisational Second City style by the late, great Harold Ramis, with Bill Murray as his melancholic muse. Andy Karl, the handsome, courageous and hugely talented star of these musical proceedings, is closer to the open-face sandwich that is Jim Carrey than to the iconoclastic Cubs fan Murray, benign and dangerous, perplexing and perplexed and a guy who looked like he'd been knocked around by the storms of life. But, you know, this is still a new Broadway musical that works - even one that has a few moments of greatness, replayed and redux.

But while there is enough substance in 'War Paint' to make you feel like everyone involved here is fully aware of the complexity of what these characters represented, the show ultimately demurs when it comes to holding the great titans of makeup, and the men who surrounded them, to moral account. And that is what might just have made 'War Paint' a truly great musical, instead of a highly entertaining and provocative one.

That truth surely explains why it's so painful to watch the very determined Soo, who is both an exceptionally capable actor and completely miscast here, trying to replicate what surely was a one-time discovery, inextricably linked to a very different, much more vulnerable actress. If you watch the film 'Amelie,' you'll see it was filled with risk-taking and suffused with a veritable explosion of ideas - aesthetic, formative, emotional, philosophical. There were many reasons why it should not have worked, but work it did. In that moment. In that form.

The exceptional direction of the piece, by Mark Bell, embraces risk and danger to an extraordinary extent. That means 'The Play That Goes Wrong' never seems safe or comfortable in its own skin - the tricked-out design by Nigel Hook is exceptionally clever and suffused with booby traps of considerable aesthetic imagination, but it remains persistently tawdry, as it should be, of course. And thus at no point is 'The Play That Goes Wrong' one of those smug, accomplished London imports, sets collapsing on cue and well-spoken farceurs risking nothing.

'Sweat' is inarguably a schematic socialist drama - and hardly the first to play at Broadway prices to mostly upper-middle-class urbanites - that clearly decided in advance what it wanted to say about the state of the nation. Its conclusion is not a surprise. But - and, along with a mordent wit, this is its mitigating strength and greatest asset - 'Sweat' also is a moral, passionate and richly articulated cri de coeur from one of America's leading African-American Playwrights aimed squarely at the ongoing inability of her hate-spewing white Brothers and Sisters to accurately locate the cause of their problems and to quit trying to drown the next worker trying to snag a spot in the lifeboat speeding away from the wreck of industrial America.

DeVito is offering a spectacularly funny performance in director (and Steppenwolf Theatre co-founder) Terry Kinney's resonant if not wholly satisfying Broadway revival of, to my mind, one of Miller's bleakest and most personal plays. Consider the trajectory of the most sympathetic character, a police officer named Victor Franz, as played in this Roundabout Theatre production by Mark Ruffalo, an actor who specializes in low-status characters with natural affinities for sadness and for whom snapping out of something is pretty much an impossibility.

Come From Away will not be remembered for its distinguished score, the rousing exuberance of several of its Celtic-rooted numbers notwithstanding. It will not be remembered for the poetry of its book nor for its sophisticated examination of human behavior in rural communities. Rather, it is determined, with good humor and generous Canadian self-deprecation, to remind us of one of the few happy stories to emerge from that terrible day. There are a few moments of conflict with an Egyptian passenger on a day of much mistrust, but they are resolved with relative ease. The Gander of Come From Away takes a while to learn how to be kind to its visitors, but it sure figures it out. Over donuts at Tim Hortons.

Surely, no star in the history of Broadway has made a more inauspicious entrance than Sally Field's first appearance as poor Amanda Wingfield in director Sam Gold's starkly unforgiving, mostly unafraid and surely unforgettable revival of 'The Glass Menagerie,' a production that scrambles the politics and poetics of the presumed fragile Tennessee Williams' fever dream by conceiving of a Laura whose disability is not slight, not in her own head, and not merely a symbolic manifestation of debilitating fraternal or maternal expectation...There will be some who argue that Gold's production fundamentally alters Williams' play.

Lapine's overall approach - assuming that is what I am describing here - is a perfectly justifiable and resonant way into this show and, I'd wager, a closer match for where Lapine (her uncle) and Sondheim are now with regard to their midlife show. The downside, though, of the projection of art as personality-killing necessity is that you don't see a lot of possibility for life lived the other way - you know, the functional one with the love, art and kids - and the diminished potential of the road not traveled has the impact of cutting the tension in the piece and compromising one of its most perpetually engaging qualities.

Well, Close and her huge 41-piece orchestra, stuffed where Napier's magnificent folly once sat and now placed in the service of rendering Lloyd Webber's most nostalgic, sentimental score with maximum symphonic, even operatic, fullness - for fun, profit and, surely, the composer's legacy. The director, Lonny Price, and the set designer, James Noone, have to work around all of that, as well as keep the Napier design out of your head, although they do come up with a series of simple but effective platforms that allow Close to appear in the rafters and then descend to her people, thus making two entrances for double applause.

And what makes 'Dear Evan Hansen' yet more extraordinary is how all of the teenage nuance explored so exquisitely by Platt, all of this fledgling character's hope and hesitation, is baked formatively into the score by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, a youthful duo I've deeply admired since first hearing their score to, all of all things, 'A Christmas Story' in Chicago. The link between that retro show and this thrillingly contemporary exploration of the trials and pitfalls of late adolescence is not as distant as one might think.

The truth, of course, is they are in the long-lived world of 45th Street, as massaged by skilled practitioners of the sentimental form. 'A Bronx Tale' is a wildly uneven show - some parts feel just ridiculous in the broadness of their strokes, others entirely charming. The greatest strength of the piece lies in its characterization of Sonny - a far more benign mob boss than we are used to seeing. If Tony Soprano was neuroses and paradox writ large, Sonny, like this show, is a thinly veiled but incurable romantic, always comfortable in his own skin.