Chris Jones — Theater Critic

'The Inheritance' invites comparison to Tony Kushner's 'Angels in America,' although it does not similarly concern itself with intersectional political ideologies and crises of religious faith. 'The Inheritance' remains a fundamentally intermural look at the gay community - the only female character in the show, played by Lois Smith, is a semi-mystical figure defined entirely in terms of her surrogate sons - and its existential ambitions are less expansive. Still, it reveals a deep advocacy for community responsibility and shares a world view with one of Kushner's most central notions, that the smallest indivisible human unit is two.

The show has a futuristic look, all right, and by presenting everyone dressed the same, conceived as part of a whole, the vibe is resoundingly, Ted Talk-y egalitarian. You might even say Byrne has evolved into a cooler, trimmer Bernie Sanders, directing an ensemble of enlightenment and inclusivity, welcoming to all. Even a cover of the Janelle Monae protest song 'Hell You Talmbout' is performed with the collective sense that a community of caring, decent people can solve this problem together.

As played in this gorgeous piece of theater by Mary Louise Parker - and, heaven forfend, what a complete performance! - Bella is a fiftyish woman, a professor of creative writing who sacrificed her personal life to a climb up the academic tentpole to a position at Yale University. She's the maybe-unreliable narrator of her own story, self-critical and fiendishly intelligent, even if she never has been all that productive. Couple of minor things published. That's been it. Still, a life to fill the years.

Kids love Harry Potter because J.K. Rowling refused to dispense facile bromides and instead trusted them with complexity and ambiguity. And Potterland has always showed the punters how their hard-earned cash has been spent for their enjoyment. Those are the lessons 'The Lightning Thief' has to learn. You know, along the way.

Remarkably, you believe Tomei throughout. Most Sarafinas I have seen have nailed one or the other; Tomei, never contained by either, gets them both. It's a remarkable picture of restlessness and need, and reason enough to see Cullman's staging, which also leans wryly into the comedy of the piece, even to the point of including a bunch of pink flamingos in a rich setting from Mark Wendland that shrewdly suggests the immigrant's need to replicate their homeland, even as American visual banality shoots that desire in the foot.

He's got one foot in the movies of Woody Allen: a lovable loser with whom younger women mysteriously want to sleep. He's got a big toe in 'High Fidelity,' resembling Rob Gordon in his misanthropic attempts to fight off the cheap mass culture that now assaults his delicate aesthetic sensibilities from the age of vinyl. And there's a good bit of the Howard Beale about him, except that no one gives two shakes of a lamb's tail about his being mad as hell, even if he can't take it anymore.

But 'Slave Play,' which runs over two hours in one act, is under no obligation to make those points. It is the work of a major new voice in the American theater, a fervent, assured, hyper-articulate young moralist seeking acknowledgement of and reparations for, white supremacy, and who is utterly disinclined to dispense false hope to those who think 'I love you' makes good on anything.

It's all very interesting and fair-minded in a retro kind of way - and surely educational for the young. Its even-handed, centrist point of view is also distinctively out of step with the moment, a Biden-esque island in today's sea of activist progressive writing, even on Broadway. But the whole shebang nonetheless lacks bite.

These days, most Broadway theatergoers don't so much want to see a show as take a warm bath inside of one. We crave relief from our growing terror of physical intimacy and our technology-fueled loneliness. What used to pass as immersive theatrical entertainment is, as we end this panicked second decade of the 21st century, no longer immersive enough. The bar has risen. Ergo, 'Moulin Rouge! The Musical.' Yes, baby, you're a firework.

But with a lot of help from McDonald and a deceptively expressionistic set from Riccardo Hernandez, the director Arin Arbus effectively operates on the levels of the then and the now. In the best moments of the piece, you think about the different terms of relationships in the 1980s and also how so much and yet so little has changed.

The show, at the Winter Garden Theatre, might have a better chance of persuading us to go on some deep satiric dive here if it was using an adult actress. But Caruso is not yet an adult, although a whopping teenage talent and about the only human to really emerge well from this disaster. Except perhaps for Leslie Kritzer, whose comic instincts as Delia are so great that even the less-than-Perfect's lyrics and the Scott Brown book cannot bury them in bad taste.

Or as a populist mastermind who could see the cracks in the walls of the liberal elite's country clubs, who realized great storytelling always requires distinct heroes and villains, who knew one guy's fact always is another guy's fiction, and who figured out long before the other dumb media titans that user-generated content and 'Five hot things!' was far more profitable than the tortured copy and long sentences favored by pontificating columnists and critics? Well, as they like to say at Fox News, the new Broadway play 'Ink' mostly reports the facts. You decide, dear reader, you decide. At least you will have fun doing the deciding.

There really is much to like about 'Tootsie.' Horn's book is chock-a-block with digressive one-liners that tickled me pink when I first saw the show in Chicago and worked their magic all over again on Broadway. Dorsey, a pill who taunts directors with his ego, has a lovable deadpanning roommate, Jeff (Andy Grotelueschen) and a wacky best frenemy named Sandy (Sarah Stiles), and this boffo comedic pair, along with John Behlmann's clueless bit of beefcake, keep the laughs rolling.

Letts' performance likely will strike some as odd or disconnected - I find it perfectly in tune with the moment, and there is much to like about Bening's work, too. Kate Keller is a tricky part - she can come off as merely an enabler or a kook. Bening comes up with something much richer, as does Walker, who is quite moving and, well, sad. It will take another generation or two to fix things, you think.

Lane is quite spectacularly good here - he's in deeper than I've ever seen him, and I've been watching him for years. He's more vulnerable, too. His ambition - to be the fool, the kind of Stephen Colbert-like figure who speaks truth to power, rather than the clown guy who only offers non-ideological escape - is what drives this performance, remarkable in all kinds of ways.

I've liked this play since I first saw its premiere in Chicago - and, in Metcalf and Lithgow, it now has two in-sync old pros, demonstrably aware of the capriciousness of fame and power. Of course, this is not a charitable portrait of two dedicated public servants. Both appear without their pants at times - Hnath reduces them to hotel room obsessives, navigating their greatest challenge. Each other.

America's on the road to hell - better jump right off, my children. Too dangerous to look back. Instead, try and find the cracks in that famous wall we're building. That's pretty much the message of 'Hadestown,' the thrillingly alarmist new Broadway musical with the score that feels like it comes from somewhere deep in the American gut. Now an eye-popping, mythological blend of steampunk, 'Westworld' and Bourbon St. anarchy, this dystopian tuner has its origins in a 2010 concept album, a folk opera of sorts, by the remarkable singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell.

Love and sex are ever complex and while I don't doubt some will rail against 'Burn/This' and its tropes as a dated piece of Broadway theater, Wilson was so compassionate and haunting a writer that his play was, and is, filled with comfort, and some challenge, for everyone. As its title implies, 'Burn/This' is complex and dangerous; it is worth more risk.

Many of the vocals avoid the bravura in favor of the isolated choke. Most of the dance has been cut; what survives is largely an expression of individual feeling, as when Gabrielle Hamilton dances a solo dream ballet, clad in an ironic 'Dream, Baby, Dream' shirt, wherein it seems America might crush Laurey under its oppressive weight. No wonder Rebecca Naomi Jones plays the putative romantic heroine as unhappy throughout, removed from her world, aware of her own metaphors, interested in a furtive fumble with Jud Fry (the excellent Patrick Vail, who avoids all the usual tropes) but clearly far smarter than her daffy Curly (Damon Daunno).

Like a lot of intense, progressive, secular work in this time of revolutionary exploration on Broadway, Gold's 'King Lear' just has a better understanding of what needs to go than what needs to take its place. It wrestles mightily with the play's inherent moralism, religiosity and conservatism, and its demands that we feel our obligations. It seems to say that the old white guys made their mess all on their own.

Red meat for liberal feminists and clearly aimed at inter-generational audiences, 'What the Constitution Means to Me' is part progressive political lecture, part personal confessional, and part manifesto for feminist reform. The show, which opened Sunday night at the Helen Hayes Theater and will run at least through July 21, captures the political restlessness of a moment when many Americans are looking back at the assumptions and power structure behind what they were asked to do in their own past and feeling plenty ready to view those experiences through a revisionist lens.

'Ain't Too Proud' has a wholly conventional structure, as if everyone involved didn't want to run any kind of counter-narrative to that of Williams or upset Berry Gordy (Jahi Kearse), whose persona here is exactly like his persona in 'Motown the Musical.' Fascinating issues like the band's appeal to white audiences, its need to tour in the South, its internal debates over whether it should sing Smokey Robinson ballads or Norman Whitfield soul, the drug use among many of its members and the complexity of Williams' own personal life are brought up but quickly and often awkwardly dismissed. Such are the perils of doing legacy-creating shows about living people with ownership interests in the material.

Right from the opening number, you can see where Ellis is going with what turns out to be a very pleasurable and inclusive evening in the company of a plethora of seasoned professionals whether that's the great Paul Gemignani conducting the orchestra occupying the boxes on either side of the stage at Studio 54, or choreographer Warren Carlyle's clutch of seasoned hoofers with senses of humor to match their agility.

If all of its overplayed, insecure, overwrought, dial-in-the-red-zone freneticism could have been avoided, we'd actually have an interesting Broadway show that not only reveals just how terrified we all are about the encroachments of digitized technology on our human bodies - and of teenage addiction to medication - but also how difficult it is to pull off weird 'Little Shop of Horrors'-style satire in this moralistic moment when every show has the same thing to teach. Be your nerdy self and let your freak flag fly! They won't love you 'till you love yourself.

Aaron Sorkin's genuinely radical and thoroughly gripping new Broadway adaptation of this iconic novel - which opened Thursday night at the Shubert Theatre with Jeff Daniels in the starring role - has no truck with the heroic image of Atticus, his wide-eyed daughter Scout and the famous Finch briefcase, a stand-in for the slow march toward justice, all striding together into a new American dawn. No siree. Sorkin has written a 'Mockingbird' that fits this riven American moment. And the director, Bartlett Sher, has felt little need to assuage with sentimentality.