Chris Jones — Theater Critic

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.

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.

'Great Comet' goes so much further than any of those aspirational predecessors, with Lien and her team sending part of the audience through a faux-Soviet backstage, building a series of walkways that can carry actors to the back of the balcony, installing ramps and catwalks throughout the orchestra and stuffing the stage with risers and banquettes that really do look like they were built with the rest of the theater. (Bradley King's lights seem to explode everywhere.) It's a seamless work of retrofit design that will, I think, carry historical import. Especially when combined with Malloy's quirky, unconventional and thoroughly beguiling suite of songs.

'Great Comet' goes so much further than any of those aspirational predecessors, with Lien and her team sending part of the audience through a faux-Soviet backstage, building a series of walkways that can carry actors to the back of the balcony, installing ramps and catwalks throughout the orchestra and stuffing the stage with risers and banquettes that really do look like they were built with the rest of the theater. (Bradley King's lights seem to explode everywhere.) It's a seamless work of retrofit design that will, I think, carry historical import. Especially when combined with Malloy's quirky, unconventional and thoroughly beguiling suite of songs.

Therefore, any production of this play requires Valmont to have a palpable ticker. Simply put, you just don't believe that here. Schreiber, handsome devil though he may be, just does not appear to have enough skin in the game. There is a listlessness to this performance - which is problematic since the basic equipment required of even the lowest tier of Casanova is great enthusiasm for the task at hand. Schreiber seems to want to expend the minimum amount of energy, nothing really beyond his probing hand and fingers, which works against the operating procedure of a smooth-tongued seducer whose flattering charm is his principal weapon. More problematic yet, the crucial turn-key scene in the play where Valmont's true feelings and insecurities are revealed feels no different from any other.

Some of the individual moments of this Lincoln Center production are fantastic - Block, who is so well cast here and doing the best work of her Broadway career, does everything you could ask with the show's great, reflective ballads. You are never entirely convinced that Borle and Rannells are deeply in love, partly because Rannells does not sufficiently communicate the confidence that comes from being desired, but both these charming actors have moments that delight. The show centers on men in its structure, but the women in this cast all are so strong that you sense a realignment from 25 years ago.

He had the advantage of the John the Baptist that is Robert Morse and, in his wily partner John Slattery, the oldest, driest and most cynically unlikely Hildy Johnson that ever snagged a scoop. But at the Broadhurst Theatre on Thursday night, America's master farceur grabbed Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's creaking, dramatic homage to the beleaguered but indomitable craft and calling of Chicago newspapering by the scruff of its scraggly 1928 neck. And - nearly a century on - Nathan Lane declared it to still be beautiful.

It is no mean feat to revive an archaic but seminal Broadway musical...and create an entertainment that not only celebrates the classic song-and-dance material but ennobles it further by showcasing the royal talents of Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Billy Porter, Brandon Victor Dixon and Joshua Henry, thus vaulting it to new heights. But it is a yet-greater achievement to simultaneously offer what is essentially a lesson in theatrical and racial history...'Shuffle Along,' the final new Broadway musical of the 2015-16 season has achieved all of this. There has been debate about whether this is a musical revival or a new musical. Self-evidently, it is both. It should really be in a Tony category of its own.

Lange plays that drugged-up mother with courage. Her Mary Tyrone has fewer moments of lucidity than most, and too few moments when lucidity and the heebie-jeebies are duking it out before our eyes, but who nonetheless really goes to some dark spots. And there's nothing artificial about that state of her being. It is expressed with profundity and truth. And that, along with Shannon's unceasing attempts to unlock some of these scenes and spill out their devastating emotional content, is about the only truly successful aspect of this strangely marauding and meandering theatrical experience.

The score, by Chris Miller, has echoes of 'Finian's Rainbow' and 'Brigadoon' and often showcases the sound of flute or penny whistle. And the choreography, by director Casey Nicholaw, is balletic, pretty, interested in the social dance forms of the 19th century and fundamentally circular, sending the ensemble members swirling through the years. Even much of the acting is plumby and fantastical. For a competent Broadway show aiming to capture the family market, such a safe approach is hardly unreasonable...But it removes much of the tension from a story filled with agonizing decision-making and enough talk of life and death to keep anyone awake at night.

Mueller's is a performance stripped of condescension, lived in the moment and rich in musical pleasures; surely there is no singing actress of Mueller's generation better able to play a woman of low power and self-esteem....In this show she immediately moves her lips whenever Jenna is asked a question - signaling to the audience that Jenna's main problem is that she worries so much about pleasing others that she never has learned how to put her own needs first. Jenna eventually grabs such an opportunity with her comely-but-married gynecologist (played by Drew Gehling), and it is here that the show stutters: Gehling's Dr. Pomatter feels like a sitcom doc rather than a serious love interest for a serious young woman, and thus you don't pull for them as you should. I had the same issue with Nick Cordero's Earl (Jenna's husband), played as a standard-issue man-spreader when the show would be better if you saw deeper into his anger and depression - especially since Bareilles has given him 'You Will Still Be Mine,' one of the most poignant songs in the show.

...directed with relentless, sensationalist expediency by Rupert Goold...There is no question that 'American Psycho' is a highly unusual Broadway musical. And one that is cleverly self-protected against the aesthetic police. Goold's staging, and Lynne Page's limb-spewing choreography, evidence little in the way of consistency: Goold, whose work is about as a subtle as Bateman's preferred methods of dissection, switches styles in almost every scene...'American Psycho' thus is a smug show that games its audience, much as Bateman games his lovers and victims...The score, by Duncan Sheik, employs a narrow and familiar range of notes...It's a myopic mess, musically...underused Alice Ripley and Helene Yorke...Of course, there's no denying Walker's literate attractions, buoyed by the actor's disciplined determination to take the deepest of narcissistic dives with the full knowledge that truly competitive narcissists never self-promote.

A lone wolf prowls through Salem, Mass., in Ivo van Hove's eye-popping and wholly unconventional revival of Arthur Miller's 'The Crucible,' that great dramatic cautionary tale about the perennial dangers of a rampant theocracy fueled by ignorance and mass hysteria...But van Hove is not so much interested in McCarthyism and history as in tyranny of the more perennial sort; this production feels more attuned to our world of school shooters and suicide bombers than blowhard anti-communists...But in Miller's play, the hysterical girls are the antagonists...With Ronan as his chief asset, and Ciaran Hinds as a relentless political prosecutor, van Hove brilliantly manipulates that counterintuitive aspect of 'The Crucible.'

If you had any doubt of the formidable polyglot of talent that makes up one Steve Martin, or you were under the misapprehension that his banjo was primarily the accessory of a stand-up or Hollywood comic, the very conception of 'Bright Star' should be enough to lay that to rest. In collaboration with the folk-rock musician Edie Brickell, Martin forged score, book and story for this wholly original musical -- a piece that, despite its tonal unevenness and frequent, needless diversions from truth, still feels like a significant, distinctive and artful entry into the Broadway repertory. And it comes replete with a beautiful leading performance from Carmen Cusack, an actress who has worked often in musicals in Chicago but here makes a gorgeously authentic Broadway debut that looks likely to change her life.

Even with stars like Michelle Williams and Jeff Daniels in the lead roles, and direction by Joe Mantello, 'Blackbird' is far from a typical Broadway drama. For some of those attracted by the bold-face names, it surely will come as a sparse shock, a tough, toxic 80-minute ride into the corporate gray of fear and regret...this drama -- which I regard as one of the best pieces of writing of the last decade -- offers the uncompromising actress Williams the rare opportunity to contort body and soul into a character...What makes Williams' performance so distinctive and, to my mind, remarkable, is the way the corruption in her character's soul seems to occupy the limbs of the actress.

In the great disaster-movie epics of the 1970s, star casting was a crucial weapon...'Disaster!,' the tatty, dotty, daffy, trashy new jukebox spoof of the genre that unaccountably opened on Broadway Tuesday night, attempts much the same gimmick - albeit with Broadway rather than Hollywood royalty...It was too late for me about halfway through Act 1 of 'Disaster,' a cleverly self-protected show that embraces kitsch with aesthetic intensity. This embrace extends to many of the irony-free ballads of the '70s...Sometimes, the likes of 'Don't Cry Out Loud' are sung relatively straight...But most of the time they are mugged up, parodied, over-sung and thus the musical joke is telegraphed all the way to the back of the house. In terms of subtlety and satiric nuance, 'Disaster!' makes the heavy-metal spoof 'Rock of Ages' look like Cole Porter.

In the great disaster-movie epics of the 1970s, star casting was a crucial weapon...'Disaster!,' the tatty, dotty, daffy, trashy new jukebox spoof of the genre that unaccountably opened on Broadway Tuesday night, attempts much the same gimmick - albeit with Broadway rather than Hollywood royalty...It was too late for me about halfway through Act 1 of 'Disaster,' a cleverly self-protected show that embraces kitsch with aesthetic intensity. This embrace extends to many of the irony-free ballads of the '70s...Sometimes, the likes of 'Don't Cry Out Loud' are sung relatively straight...But most of the time they are mugged up, parodied, over-sung and thus the musical joke is telegraphed all the way to the back of the house. In terms of subtlety and satiric nuance, 'Disaster!' makes the heavy-metal spoof 'Rock of Ages' look like Cole Porter.