Dan Rubins — Theater Critic

The technology distracts from the real human drama that McNeal depicts, and the seriousness of that drama dilutes any coherent argument about the impact of machine language models on literature or life. And, no, that lack of clarity cannot be explained by Akhtar using A.I. himself in creating the text, as he insists that all the words are his alone. The hollow McNeal, after all, is only halfway to presenting as artificial intelligence. It’s got the artificial part down pat.

But Michael Urie, in transmogrifying the dopey Dauntless, doesn’t so much fill shoes as turn shoemaker, cobbling his own glorious take on the role that’s wildly silly but also moving. Foster upholds the reputation of Once Upon a Mattress—especially its goofy-gorgeous score by composer Mary Rodgers and lyricist Marshall Barer—as a quick-witted, big-hearted gem. It’s Urie who convinces, for the first time, that this musical isn’t just about a spunky, scrappy princess succeeding against the odds but also a real love story between two moonstruck misfits.

But the creators of Life and Trust have opted wisely for mood over minutiae, and who anybody is doesn’t matter once you’re immersed in a tapestry of stories that seem to unspool almost infinitely. Almost infinitely but not quite, because Life and Trust, like Sleep No More, runs on a loop so most scenes will occur twice. But I only once stumbled upon a replay, a surging waltz for a dozen cast members, with Mephisto presiding maliciously. I didn’t mind seeing it a second time. If the price of succumbing to Life and Trust’s devilish delights is a lingering desire to see the whole thing again, that’s the kind of deal for which I’d willingly sell my soul.

The play’s climactic pivot from thoughtful interrogation toward shock value finally positions it neither as psychological thriller nor dark comedy, but as horror. In describing, if never depicting, the truly grotesque and evil, Job achieves a sort of tonal homecoming. But its horrors are very real, involving the darkest corners of human behavior. They’re also inexcusably unexplored. Lobbing the bleakest imaginable themes at the audience simply to make the play’s lurid twists pay off makes this hollow play less of a job well done than a piece of work.

But even if Leon hasn’t stretched Home to fill the space, there’s a poignancy to spotlighting this playwright at this moment: Williams passed away on May 13, four days before preview performances began. If this revival doesn’t quite constitute a homecoming parade, it’s a cozy, unflashy tribute, perhaps just the way Cephus Miles would have dreamt it.

It’s not that Malloy, the multi-hyphenate creator of works like Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812 (for which he received Tony Award nominations for book, score, and orchestrations) and the a cappella choral-theatrical Octet, is afraid to plunge rawly into the depths of isolation. Rather, Three Houses, in wading through its excesses of ideas and often free-associative images, suggests misleadingly that it has a particular point to make, even a moral to unfurl (after all, the show is loosely based on the fable of “The Three Little Pigs”). But the disparate pieces never bundle into something fully legible, and Malloy’s sinewy music drifts away too wispily to cohere: As drama, this is, perhaps, closest to a house of straw.

And while any adaptation of The Great Gatsby has to thread the needle between wowing audiences with opulence and inviting critique of the ostentatious hollow center (those pyrotechnics are surely ironic, right?), the show’s final images seem to find that balance successfully. “I don’t want to live here, but I never want to leave,” the bombastically independent Jordan Baker (Samantha Pauly) sings as she enters one of Gatsby’s extravagant parties. That’s about right: If The Great Gatsby doesn’t have the makings of a long-term Broadway resident, it’s become, in its newly minted tension and decadence, a welcome visitor.

And while any adaptation of The Great Gatsby has to thread the needle between wowing audiences with opulence and inviting critique of the ostentatious hollow center (those pyrotechnics are surely ironic, right?), the show’s final images seem to find that balance successfully. “I don’t want to live here, but I never want to leave,” the bombastically independent Jordan Baker (Samantha Pauly) sings as she enters one of Gatsby’s extravagant parties. That’s about right: If The Great Gatsby doesn’t have the makings of a long-term Broadway resident, it’s become, in its newly minted tension and decadence, a welcome visitor.

The first musical by a Black composer to win Tony Awards for best musical and best score, this well-loved show turns 50 next year. If Schele Williams’s simplistic and sometimes bewildering staging doesn’t itself demonstrate how the show has held up across those decades, she wisely steers all attention toward the main event: the stunning vocal performances from her cast. And since the show’s underwhelming visuals feel like less of a distraction than an afterthought, it’s easy enough to put the “hard stuff” to one side and just relish the aural euphoria.

Lempicka sometimes recalls another unfortunate histrionic history. Diana the Musical, while disastrous on paper, recognized its own essential ridiculousness, rebranded itself as utter camp, and gracefully ended its short Broadway run with a naughty wink. But a musical about Princess Diana was clearly a terrible idea. Lempicka, by contrast, is always on the cusp of camp but unable to look itself in the mirror, so it never stands a chance of being so bad it’s good because it wants to be good so badly. It’s that friction—the tendency toward high camp in conflict with a more austere self-importance—that suggests a show at war with itself.

It’s that kind of fully realized theatrical gesture that most distinguishes Taymor’s directorial vision, elevating The Outsiders’s well-made material to a remarkable, emotionally arresting piece of theater. And, in the musical’s final minutes, as Grant’s sorrowfully resilient Ponyboy begins to pen his own self-portrait in the face of unrelenting loss, one could almost call that kind of heart-wrenching theater-making heroic.

Gold’s sharply accelerating production reveals the horror of hypocrisy, but, without outside assistance, it doesn’t quite challenge the audience’s own complicity. By the time the third Extinction Rebellion protestor arose, most of the crowd met him with vehement boos. Minutes later, Dr. Stockmann was back on his own soapbox demanding that he himself be heard: “Ask yourselves—Is what I’m saying dangerous? Or is ignorance dangerous? You don’t have to agree with me, I just ask that you listen, because I don’t have any reason to be up here, ruining my career, making my family suffer, except that I care about this place.”

Because writing for character means writing in distinct voices, there’s a thin line in musical theater songwriting between the simple and the simplistic: Unlike her gratifyingly accessible pop music, Michaelson’s score here falls on the wrong side too much of the time. That’s a shame, because, in revisiting the story, Michaelson and book writer Bekah Brunstetter have laid out the structure for a thoughtful adaptation that improves upon both the book and the film adaptation.

If there’s a red pen waiting for The Connector, perhaps it should underline the challenges of telling a tale with a twist that most of the audience will see coming from miles off. (The creative team hasn’t been shy about giving the game away in interviews either.) Indeed, you may wonder if there’s merit in an edit that, by spilling the beans earlier on, spent more time in trying to make sense of Ethan’s unraveling rather than simply hurtling toward it. Perhaps, but The Connector’s momentum is already pretty addictive, thanks to the electric collaboration of the writers and director Daisy Prince, who brought the concept to Brown shortly after helming his off-Broadway musical The Last Five Years in 2002. Prince keeps Robin and Ethan’s officemates constantly in motion and always on stage, either typing away at their desks or observing the action with intense curiosity, offering backing vocals while perched on piles of manuscripts that tower on either side of the stage. And Brown’s score, livelier if less sweeping than those for Parade and The Bridges of Madison County but more clever and compact than anything else he’s written, keeps moving too. Where he most excels as a composer, in soaring vocal lines that gaze down on nomadic grooves laced with sizzling piano licks, is the perfect landscape for a show like this. (He also conducts the show’s entire run from the keyboard.)

Isolate any 30 seconds of Hell’s Kitchen’s musical numbers and you’re probably looking at—and, more importantly, listening to—something marvelous. Choreographer Camille A. Brown keeps the ensemble engaged throughout in heart-pounding conversation with Keys’s music. If Robert Brill’s set, a real “concrete jungle where dreams are made of,” isn’t attractive in itself, it’s enlivened by Natasha Katz’s lighting and Peter Nigrini’s projections, especially in effectively channeling Ali’s elevator rides. Under the music direction of Dominic Fallacaro, the cast sounds tremendous, with sizzling vocal performances from Moon, Dixon, Shoshana Bean as Ali’s mom Jersey, Kecia Lewis as a dying piano teacher, and Jackie Leon as Ali’s supportive friend Jessica.

It’s not that either of those songs weren’t funny originally. Spamalot, as staged by the late Mike Nichols in that dominant premiere, was a giddy delight from top to bottom. And the original cast album remains a testament to the show’s scrumptiously irreverent good nature, the cleverness of Eric Idle’s lyrics, and the razzle-dazzle buoyancy of Idle and John Du Prez’s music. But not every joke told 18 years ago is going to land the same way now. Indeed, in its restaging, Spamalot has become a sort of musical theater palimpsest, a monument to what we found funny in America in 2005 resting on a pedestal of 1970s British absurdism, newly draped with some 2023 fabrics intended to keep those older structures from corroding.

What music there is, though, doesn’t disappoint. Sondheim’s score is decidedly within his most familiar vocabulary, a final master class in pressing music into the service of character. As the recent revivals of Sweeney Todd and Merrily We Roll Along also demonstrate, one of Sondheim’s superior gifts was his impeccable understanding of how the ear processes language. Rhythm and melody, under his pen, allow the text to crash like a wave over us, somehow guiding the listener response so that everyone gets the joke at the exact same moment.

The parts, though, do rise above the whole, including Derek McLane’s rather stunning set, which slides in, windowpanes locking into place, to transform the wood-framed walls for each scene before metamorphosizing in a final transition that offers the play’s most emotionally transcendent moment. And in a final sermon, Purlie erupts into gorgeous, empowering poetry: “I find, in being Black, a thing of beauty…Be loyal to yourselves: your skin; your hair; your lips, your southern speech, your laughing kindness—are Negro kingdoms, vast as any other.” If Purlie Victorious never completely conquers in cohering its disparate ambitions, its last moments offer an unexpected, quiet triumph.

The parts, though, do rise above the whole, including Derek McLane’s rather stunning set, which slides in, windowpanes locking into place, to transform the wood-framed walls for each scene before metamorphosizing in a final transition that offers the play’s most emotionally transcendent moment. And in a final sermon, Purlie erupts into gorgeous, empowering poetry: “I find, in being Black, a thing of beauty…Be loyal to yourselves: your skin; your hair; your lips, your southern speech, your laughing kindness—are Negro kingdoms, vast as any other.” If Purlie Victorious never completely conquers in cohering its disparate ambitions, its last moments offer an unexpected, quiet triumph.

If the play’s teachings get hammered home a bit redundantly in those final minutes, though, that hardly undercuts the harrowing journey that Prima Facie takes the audience on to arrive there. Martin’s production ably creates the high-tension world through Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design intensifying Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s choral and percussive score, Natasha Chivers’s intimidating flashes of light, and stage designer Miriam Buether’s untouchably towering walls of legal files. But it’s Comer’s Tessa, tough and raw, blisteringly believable as she begs to be believed, who wins the case for this play as urgent, necessary theater.

That doesn’t damn his Sweeney, though, since Groban is better able than some to explore the other edges of the barber’s frayed psyche. When Mrs. Lovett mocks him early on for vowing violent revenge against his enemies, we share her incredulity; it’s hard to believe our kindly Groban could do such a dastardly thing until the blood starts rushing from throat after throat. His violence spawns evil and not the other way around. He is, in other words, believably human. We can see in Groban the man that Mrs. Lovett fell in love with 15 years ago, and because he so convincingly sells his tender longing for his lost wife, we can buy his need for payback too.

That doesn’t damn his Sweeney, though, since Groban is better able than some to explore the other edges of the barber’s frayed psyche. When Mrs. Lovett mocks him early on for vowing violent revenge against his enemies, we share her incredulity; it’s hard to believe our kindly Groban could do such a dastardly thing until the blood starts rushing from throat after throat. His violence spawns evil and not the other way around. He is, in other words, believably human. We can see in Groban the man that Mrs. Lovett fell in love with 15 years ago, and because he so convincingly sells his tender longing for his lost wife, we can buy his need for payback too.

That doesn’t damn his Sweeney, though, since Groban is better able than some to explore the other edges of the barber’s frayed psyche. When Mrs. Lovett mocks him early on for vowing violent revenge against his enemies, we share her incredulity; it’s hard to believe our kindly Groban could do such a dastardly thing until the blood starts rushing from throat after throat. His violence spawns evil and not the other way around. He is, in other words, believably human. We can see in Groban the man that Mrs. Lovett fell in love with 15 years ago, and because he so convincingly sells his tender longing for his lost wife, we can buy his need for payback too.

'Nobody’s perfect,” goes the famous final line from Some Like It Hot, after Jack Lemmon’s Daphne confesses to a doting suitor that he’s really Jerry, a man in disguise. But even if the new Broadway musical adaptation of Billy Wilder’s classic isn’t perfect either, J. Harrison Ghee, playing a reimagined Daphne, comes pretty close.

And though one Thought suggests in answer that Usher 'might be overcomplicating,' A Strange Loop relies upon that level of introspective over-complication to make the case that Usher's thoughts deserve a stage to themselves. In proving that they do, and in bringing Usher's vivid and complex inner life all the way to Broadway with such gripping vibrancy, Jackson nudges the musical theater form in a startling, new direction.