Chris Jones

To showcase and to dissect always are tricky, twin ambitions for any jukebox show, and I think the main problem with “Wonderful World” is that it worries too much about the latter, which gets in the way of fully delivering the former. The show, which organizes itself around Armstrong’s career-defining travels from New Orleans to Chicago to Hollywood to New York, has a whole lot of biographical information to deliver and it’s a very heavy load, especially in Act 2, which becomes a bit of a slog when audiences at such shows long have been conditioned mostly to expect a concert-style finale. In the Wikipedia age, information is not what audiences want so much as a point of view and, well, lots of songs and music. We still could do with less history and more time with Louis and his band.

All that said, if you like a jazzy, retro night out, “Some Like It Hot,” which is now in its first national tour, has some appeal, especially in this city. It’s a fast-paced show, as directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, although I found the touring version, which is smaller, to be thankfully less frenetic than the original. Among the standout performances to enjoy are the very droll Tarra Conner Jones as bandleader Sweet Sue and the journeyman Broadway player Matt Loehr, who plays the Tony Curtis role of Joe here. Loehr is one of those consummate pros who often are passed over for starring roles and yet have a daunting level of craft at their disposal.

Alas, while the two leads are sincere, the show itself is (a) altogether too much of too much; (b) a bit of an ill-focused mess; and (c) less than engrossing.

“Left on Tenth” is based on Delia Ephron’s 2022 memoir of that name and its adaptation into a dramatic play is, you might charitably say, modest. Margulies’ Delia narrates her circumstances throughout. Gallagher’s Peter doesn’t get to express much of a point of view; he’s presented as perceived by Ephron. Scenes of the couple going out on a date or Peter ministering to Delia as she lies in a hospital bed are brief and episodic. And while both of these actors are honest, vulnerable and appealing — no faint praise — they are not delivering bravura stage performances. I’d argue such zig-zaggingly internal material does not really allow for such performances anyway. Margulies in particular was still finding her throughline at the show I saw. But it’s still a piece of acting that reflects some courage.

None of Lloyd’s hipster ideas to make extensive use of live video feeds and have his charming and judiciously understated male lead, Tom Francis, start the top of Act 2 while walking down 44th Street and singing live among the tourists into a camera would have worked without a Norma who could deliver Lloyd Webber’s best score. “Deliver” doesn’t do Scherzinger’s performance justice. Her lower register roars through the power ballads “With One Look,” and “As if We Never Said Goodbye,” both of which are immaculately sung and clearly the result of a level of detailed lyrical and physical preparation that you don’t see much with this kind of fearlessness. Both marquee numbers received long, show-stopping ovations at the performance I saw, and not just from fans of the Pussycat Dolls. Scherzinger is fantastic.

Revival of Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ is moving, emotionally stirring production. Kenny Leon’s emotionally charged revival at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre has opened with an engaging if stylistically varied cast and a swift pacing that boils a three-act play down to an intermission-less 105 minutes.

Weird as it may sound, “Yellow Face” is a good time in the company of smart, self-aware people, critical thinkers willing to ponder the lessons and the follies of the past.

Akhtar (“Disgraced”) is a skilled scribe, best when he works in taut situations with characters facing imminent crises of the soul. There are glimpses of that here in the best bits. As counterintuitive as it may seem, and it’s certainly contrary to the instructions in the script, I think “McNeal” would work best in a smaller production where the humans and the technology are scaled to what feels like a fairer fight. As unfair as it may actually be in the future. This is still the live theater.

The ensemble acting in director Sam Mendes’ blistering production from London’s West End is off the charts when it comes to veracity, intensity and the manifestation of how childhood trauma invariably impacts adulthood. And the characters Butterworth forges are so empathetic that I never wanted this three-act show to end. Or even to pause. Not with everyone in such pain. As I write the morning after, I feel like I am still recovering from the level of emotion this thing churned around in me.

This is a production built to move on tour, and that means some limitations of spectacle in a show originally conceived to be this huge; the Dementors, those nasties who chomp on human happiness, will not here pursue you all the way in the balcony. The show stays behind the proscenium and there are not as many secret traps to facilitate Jamie Harrison’s singular illusions, not that you will notice. And, in all honesty, I miss much of the text shorn from the original two-part version, as written by Jack Thorne, Rowling and Tiffany. That’s especially true at the beginning as Harry, Ginny, Hermione, Ron and Draco (Benjamin Thys) send their kids off to Hogwarts, a familiar bittersweet experience for those of us who’ve sent kids off to school or college. The even shorter tour version is a little frenetic in places but then again (as Tiffany has said), the tour makes the show more accessible to more people. Incontrovertibly true. Incontrovertibly a good thing.

It’s near-impossible to look away from Mia Farrow’s riveting performance as a lonely Iowan in Jack O’Brien‘s staging of Jen Silverman’s quirky one-act, one-set play “The Roommate.” One fears looking down at the floor for a second and missing an implosion. Maybe “explosion” is the better word. It’s hard to know. That’s because Farrow’s organic fusing of externals and internals is so central to her work as an actress. When you get to experience Farrow live, as you now can at Broadway’s Booth Theatre, you can see, far better than on film, how deeply she immerses herself in a character.

Not in “Once Upon a Mattress.” Not as the above-the-title star climbs all over the signature bedding in search of a pea, or whatever. It takes guts, skill and talent, and Foster always has had all three of those happening at once. She’s clearly having a good time and you either jump on the Good Ship Sutton, or you’ll keep falling overboard all night long.

Second, the director Sam Pinkerton moves the show at such a lightning pace that we’re all on to the next laugh before you start to wonder about the merits of the one before or even dare to question the whole tawdry enterprise. Blackouts come so hard upon the lines of dialogue that the actors have to rush to get their gags out, which makes them all the funnier because it both raises the stakes and keys into one of the key ingredients of great farce: the mutual experience of the chaotic.

This is obviously not the first deconstruction of a classic Broadway title, but what makes this one different from say, the very chilly Daniel Fish “Oklahoma!” or the recent inuring “Cabaret,” is that this “Cats” doesn’t shock or confront but meets audience members of different ages and persuasions wherever they may land. (Rauch, especially, has a long history of knowing how to include everyone.) The show, sexy throughout, comes off as a celebration of love and resilience, timeless Broadway themes long proven to work with middle America. and what is yet more impressive (and, frankly, surprising) is how much crew actually respects the material. You read that right. They respect “Cats.” They dignify “Cats.” They elevate “Cats,” and certainly make it work for a new moment where queens now sit on thrones unimaginable in 1981. There are some fresh, more percussive orchestrations but I know this show well, and as far as I can tell, they play every note of the score. And speak almost every line, with a few lively additions.

“Home” is opening at a chaotic time of year, filled with Tony Award parties and costly competitions for attention. I hope this unpretentiously and gently staged story of Cephus’ quest doesn’t get lost in the noise; it’s emblematic of what so many of us seek from time at the theater.

“Illinoise” is far from a typical Broadway show, and if you’re headed to this 90-minute piece, be aware that you are in for a sensorial experience primarily, even if the emotional underpinning of Peck’s work occasionally reaches out from the stage and grabs your heart. The piece sits very comfortably in the St. James Theatre, a more intimate venue than “Illinoise” enjoyed either in Chicago or on Park Avenue. It’s not a show for all tastes but it certainly makes the case that it belongs on Broadway.

“Mother Play” has the aura of a valedictorian effort, the completion of a canon by coming home, even a push for a confirmed spot among the greats of this era of American playwriting. Vogel certainly does not shy from her own admiration of Martha. It’s especially apparent in the final scene when she visits and cares for a mother with dementia whom the play has just shown us she has good reason to ignore. Some writers would worry about how that looked, but I suspect Vogel decided that was the truth of it. It’s her mother’s play after all. And who could argue with that?

That said, this new musical, as penned by Kait Kerrigan with music composed by Jason Howland and lyrics by Nathan Dylan, makes you feel very little, except when Howland’s lush melodies are reaching their climax. Even then, the feelings that flow are more admiration for Howland’s craft than the kind of emotion that flows back into an embrace of story.

Molina, relentlessly and yet deliciously loquacious, has the unexamined life down cold. But that’s about the only performance that feels fully secure here, mostly because this is a character utterly oblivious to the needs of other human beings. Elsewhere, it feels like the cast is living in their own little pools of life-light on the giant Lincoln Center stage, with a design from Mimi Lien that might look quite lovely but alas de-emphasizes the human traffic on the stage. You feel like you are watching nine different performances in nine different shows. Laughs are few and far between, even though they are typically a staple of this particular drama, the relief they offer being crucial to its themes. Frankly, when the most interesting moment is when it rains on stage and your eyes go to the drainage mechanism rather than anyone’s ecstasy or soggy despair, that’s not an especially good sign. Part of the issue here is Heidi Schreck’s translation, which somehow doesn’t pull people together enough, even though that’s the director’s job too. It’s a wry and smart adaptation, in places, but it doesn’t land either as an overtly contemporary interpretation nor something trying to amplify the era of the 1895 play. Indeed, temporal confusion is one of the main problems here. Kaye Voyce’s costumes read as contemporary, mostly, but that fights the lines the characters are speaking and most certainly the setting. “Uncle Vanya” never works without a strong, clear point of view and this one is just too hard to track.

Amy Herzog’s beautiful play “Mary Jane” is, at its core, a study of the extraordinary lengths to which a mother will go to care for her child. But the takeaway from time spent at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre goes beyond even that realization. You leave after 90 minutes with a near-crushing awareness of the unfairness of life.

Morgan’s characters explain themselves at times like they are walking Wikipedia entries. As with “The Crown,” these histories always run the risk of making people think they are watching historical fact, not a dramatic rendition with imagined dialogue. But very few people know the Putin backstory; as such, “Patriots” is a helpful, cautionary tale of unintended consequence.

Ideal fodder, then, for a modestly scaled and warm-hearted jukebox show that might prove to be one of the sleeper hits of the season. That’s thanks to an inestimably witty book with plenty of hard laughs and a suite of winning lead performances under director Gordon Greenberg.

The young actress Moon has a formidable task on her plate here and she’s a charming lead. But she doesn’t always sing in the middle of the notes of these blazing Keys songs, or at least that was the case at the performance I saw. In all fairness, it sounded like her instrument was not at its healthiest in the typically exhausting run up to opening night. So that may not be your experience. Dixon, though, sounds just as spectacular as Bean and Lewis, embodying as he does the unreliable charmer — a stereotypical musician-dad for sure, and I had to fight some irritation there and elsewhere at the broadness of the narrative strokes. But kudos to Keys for making her younger self a needy pain in the neck, otherwise known as an artistically inclined teenager.

You may look at all this differently. But I have to say that selling a dinner “upgrade” to the “Pineapple Room” offends me. That fruit is what Herr Schultz offers to his love, prior to being shipped off to a concentration camp, or so the show strongly implies, given that he is already in the Nazis’ sights. In this show, fruit is a symbol of generosity and love in a world of horrors. It’s not a flavor of costly cocktail nor a high-end status symbol. How gross.