Chris Jones — Theater Critic

Is he a relative of someone Harry hanged looking for revenge? A reporter looking for a story? A devil come to take Harry's soul? All three of those options and plenty more beside remain on the table throughout this play and I'll keep shut on the truth, finally revealed in a way that will, I swear, turn you into the sort of goop you typically find on the head of a foaming pint of bitter.

The best moments in this production, which features the performers Amara Granderson, Tendayi Kuumba, Kenita R. Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Stacey Sargeant, Alexandria Wailes and D Woods, are those when the words face forward, the speaker tells truths, and the lyrical beauty of the piece is allowed to soar, without apology. Pain and all. That said, there are many rich and vibrant moments. It's great to see this spectacular American piece of writing now reaching a new generation of Broadway theatergoers. Shange, who could and perhaps should have been poet laureate, deserves every last piece of applause.

In the case of Parker, a riveting, restless explorer of the human psyche who can bend time, it seems, it truly does. This is, after all, a memory play and memories abide and perhaps even clarify. That said, and with all due respect to a remarkable actor, Morse feels rather less sexually menacing. That might well be a smokescreen or even a dangerous learned stereotype, given the way abuse issues often play out in reality. But if you recall the energy of his manipulations the last time, the way he clung on Li'l Bit's youth like an insect sucking blood, you will feel the difference this time around.

I wish Shapiro's powerful original production had not been obliged by all the COVID-19 chaos to move to Studio 54, a bigger theater than ideal and a space that diffuses some of the original intensity of the piece, especially since people moving on and off microphones is baked into the play. Still, 'The Minutes,' which has a set from David Zinn that deliciously parodies small-town self-mythologizing, can survive that. It's an important play, a visceral theatrical experience, all about what has happened to retail American democracy and how this nation decides on which stories about itself it wants to believe.

There are times when director Vivienne Benesch's production, staged on a single setting from Christine Jones, does not fully exploit the epic, metaphysical sense of the writing; transitions are marked by annoying sound cues when we'd be fully aware of what transpires without them. Some moments are rushed, others too broad. But those really are minor quibbles in a truly must-see show that is fully successful when it comes to everything that really matters. Messing didn't pick some revival or obvious showcase for her comedic chops: she strives mightily and beautifully to find her way through a wise and sad drama, just like the character she plays.

The production is, for sure, broad and embracing of an exuberant kind of theatricality, occasionally at the expense of the pace of a show that has to maintain a rush of ideas. Many of the laughs that come are as intended, but a few feel gratuitous. And the David Rockwell set is a rare disappointment from this gifted designer: there was an opportunity there to radically freshen the vistas of the work, but it offers few sharp edges and no real surprises. That said, you're watching a skilled and earnest ensemble. Adams makes for a very reliable narrator, but most of the best scenes involve the consistently superb Williams, whom you can easily believe as a real ball player and whose acting has the single quality most essential to all Greenberg plays: He never reveals too much at once.

The show genuinely wants to be entertaining, of course, and much of the time it succeeds. It movingly celebrates the power of love and of families we make for ourselves. But it does not want to offer the traditional cathartic comfort of musicals; rather, it seeks to reflect all the pain these struggling characters feel. And thus 'Paradise Square' will survive on Broadway only if audiences are willing to see that these artists are doing their best not just to reckon with the past, but to make the radical (for a musical) point that the present is not so much better.

COVID means a lack of tourists, short-term. But the show has all kinds of artistic beauties to offer the artist's global fans. Thanks in no small part to the gorgeous palate created by Derek McLane, Natasha Katz, Paul Tazewell and Peter Nigrini, the show is genuinely beautiful to experience throughout, which one almost never can say about jukebox musicals. Aside from a few clanging scenes, it's a gorgeously executed celebration of a pained subject's artistry.

Which brings us to LuPone. Her visceral, showstopping, rendition of 'The Ladies Who Lunch,' performed as her character, Joanne, sits perched in a grinding nightclub, is simply extraordinary, filled with angst, hope, cynicism, possibility, vulnerability and all of the qualities you typically and traditionally look for in 'Company.' Unlike Lenk, who is perfectly charming and perfectly consistent throughout the entire production, LuPone's Joanne actually changes over the course of the number, journeying toward some kind of love (or at least human communion) as people typically do in musicals.

A good time for all ages, despite our beloved, battered Broadway, is exactly what the audience-friendly, warm-centered, modestly scaled 'Mrs. Doubtfire' delivers. In other seasons, this show might have looked like more of the same. Fair enough. It's retro. It's old-school musical comedy. It's no font of formative innovation.

The show is stocked with hugely capable actors, including Michael Zegen (as the imperious director), Jessica Frances Dukes, Don Stephenson, Danielle Campbell, Brandon Micheal Hall, Simon Jones, Alex Mickiewicz and Chuck Cooper, but many seem led toward extremes. The show feels conceived as a star vehicle for LaChanze, an enigmatic performer in every way, but this is an ensemble piece. And I suspect LaChanze, powerful as her performance can be, would have preferred it stayed that way

'Diana the Musical' offers no meaningful insights (nor even ones lacking in meaning) into a woman who really should be allowed to rest in much-deserved peace. Dramaturgically speaking, this trashy show makes 'The Crown' look like Tolstoy's 'War and Peace.' But director Christopher Ashley has pumped up the energy. The fearless choreographer Kelly Devine (anyone who puts a real Dancing Queen on a Broadway stage gains a lifetime of stories to tell at parties) takes, as her ubertext, revenge served cold. And the masked hordes thus fasten their seat belts (as if they could find the buckle after all those pregame cocktails) and settle down for a melodrama of retribution that is perhaps best summed up by another of the show's immortal lyrics, deftly referencing one of Diana's famous attempts at exacting revenge through her couture, 'a feckity-feckity, feckity-feckity, feck-you dress.'

Clarke is the worthy star, Caroline the exhausted heroine and Longhurst puts the maid's experience firmly at the center of the stage and the story. By contrast, her Jewish employers are kept so remote and so far upstage most of the time, they're almost outside on 53rd St. In their place at the emotional heart of the piece land the Thibodeaux children, led by Samantha Williams, and Caroline's friend, Dotty (Tamika Lawrence). In the end, the production is clearly saying that Caroline's existential struggles in this riven, deeply unfair America can be rationalized only as a gift to the next Black generation. It's both a clear and a moving point of view.

That's partly because this gripping piece of docudrama - the three-act script is by the Italian writer Stefano Massini as adapted by Ben Power and directed by Sam Mendes - is so precise in its storytelling. It's partly because the Broadway cast is made of three masterful British actors in Simon Russell Beale, Adrian Lester and Adam Godley, playing successive generations of Lehmans running the firm as it morphed from a tatty fabric store in Montgomery, Ala., to a glittering titan of Wall Street.But it's mostly because this show, an import from Britain's National Theatre and far and away the best thing I've seen on any stage since before the start of the pandemic, is determined to explore the story of the Lehman Brothers from myriad angles.

I'd argue that the piece actually could use yet more of those titular thoughts on the state of the nation, of New York City, of Black America. It's striking that the characters are named after emotions rather than ideas, although there certainly are examples of both here. It also could range yet deeper when it comes to exploring the clash of what we might think of as traditional values, such as the centering influence of church or community, versus new overtly secular notions of socialism, gender complexities and intersectionality, flowing out of college campuses and now fighting for influence with the Black men of New York, as every election reveals.

It's a fascinating piece in every way, replete with fabulous central performances from both Emily Davis (who plays Winner) and Pete Simpson (who plays the lead FBI agent at the interrogation). You're left with a picture of a young woman of conscience who was hardly prepared for such heavy-handed government intervention (Becca Blackwell and Will Combs play the other two agents).

A fun night out reminding us of the importance of familial love, tolerance and forgiveness. Lyons' play, which stars Cleo King, Norm Lewis and Michael Urie, and features Alana Raquel Bowers, Ebony Marshall-Oliver, Aigner Mizzelle, Devere Rogers and Natasha Yvette Williams, is filled with warm-centered performances and broad but entertaining characters.

Playing at the Samuel J. Freedman Theatre,' Lackawanna Blues' is a one-man show with Santiago-Hudson playing all the roles, and his fans might expect it to have funny characters and some lively blues licks (in this production, courtesy of the on-stage guitarist Junior Mack). And so it does. But few will be prepared for the emotional undercurrent present in Santiago-Hudson's self-directed performance, which often feels like it is being interrupted by a well of feelings so strong that the actor struggles to process them in the moment.

All shows open in a temporal context they can't always control. 'Six,' especially at just 80 intermission-less minutes and with low costs, an existent YouTube fame, a gently progressive sensibility and a youthful target demographic, is as well-suited to this moment as any piece of live entertainment.

Danya Taymor's production is well acted by all three cast members; Smallwood in particular achieves some truly haunting moments late in the play. Still, you're often left wondering how real these characters are intended to be. It's tough to perform symbols and the show struggles with specificity, especially in the difficult scenes with the cop. The show in general could do to trust more that its message is coming through loud and clear.

Far closer to Eugene O'Neill's 'The Iceman Cometh' than 'Mamma Mia!,' the beguiling and beautiful new show at the Belasco Theatre is hardly a Bob Dylan jukebox musical. Sure, the score for 'Girl From the North Country,' an ensemble piece that showcases Mare Winningham in an extraordinarily intense and musically compelling performance, is comprised of more than 20 of the legendary protest-warbler's iconic compositions, ranging from 'Slow Train' to 'Like a Rolling Stone' and 'All Along the Watchtower' to 'Forever Young.'

To put all that together, Van Hove has deconstructed the usual pieces of 'West Side Story' in service of better targeting the show's gooey, throbbing, omnisexual center: the truth that love is not only the fiercest human weapon against sectarian violence but the only real reason to live. No moment exemplifies that intent than a stunner of a sequence following 'The Dance at the Gym,' wherein a sensually smitten Tony (Isaac Powell) and Maria (Shereen Pimentel) strain to reach each other as they are held back by what looks and feels like two teams in a human tug of war. Anyone who has seen many a 'West Side' has experienced leads with no particular connection: In this production, their need for each other is so visceral as to overwhelm everything and everyone around them. In this production's take on 'Somewhere,' their feeling metastasizes with such force that everyone writhes around on the stage floor with a lover of their own choosing. Add in Van Hove's macabre talent for articulating pending tragic disaster (as seen so vividly in his 'A View From the Bridge') and the result is a gripping 'West Side' that you watch with both an appreciation for the power of the young and in love, and a profound sense of all-American doom.

Kenny Leon's lively, broadly staged Roundabout revival, which stars a savvy Blair Underwood and a bold-faced David Alan Grier, plays a kind of sly homage to the erotic legacy of that Oscar-nominated film, the stage being filled with a plethora of stunningly buff and good-looking guys - there are no women in the play, but there were plenty around me in the audience at the American Airlines Theatre on 42nd St.

The takeaway from Broadway's 'My Name is Lucy Barton,' the rich and complex new solo play at the Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, based on the 2016 novel by Elizabeth Strout and luminously performed by Laura Linney, is that you can move to a world of Starbucks, progressive politics and vegan-friendly journalism - cities where you can't even glimpse the sky from your bedroom window - and yet, eventually, it is as if you never moved at all. Such is the magnetic, lifelong hold exerted by the circumstances of our youth.

And if you want a quick lesson on just how much our culture has coarsened since then, you'll find one at the Broadhurst Theatre, where lean songs that bled with poetry and irony and fear and rage have been turned into a moralistic musical so over-stuffed and simplistic, so predictable in its hashtags and heroes and villains, as to rip almost all the complexity from the organic and unfiltered human material that provided the source.