David Cote

A hardworking and very effective Coon is left to maintain dramatic tension. In her TV triumphs as plucky social climbers (The Gilded Age and The White Lotus), Coon’s fresh beauty and vivacious yet sensible vigor has elevated so-so scripts. She makes a smart and relatable protagonist either in nineteenth-century bustle or Thai resort muumuu. Adopting a Southern-Midwestern twang and artfully revealing the full depth of Agnes’s trauma and hunger for meaning, Coon relishes the scuzz and grace of Agnes, even if her dance partner’s limp.

All the same, to make Anna Christie truly sing, the tortured lovers need animal magnetism: sex appeal, they used to call it. I never saw the 1993 Broadway revival, but to judge by photos, Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson had the goods. That gorgeous pair met through the Roundabout production, left their partners and got hitched a year later. In Brooklyn, the showmance already happened: Williams and her director, Kail, are married, with children, and live not far from St. Ann’s in DUMBO. I sincerely hope that their next family affair takes place on a more seaworthy vessel.

Still relevant after its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons, the 90-minute chamber drama sparkles and unsettles in its Broadway debut, positing that holographic avatars will remember us after we’re gone, airbrushing life’s sorrow and complexity from every snapshot. In 2025, such a message is not ahead of its time, but perfectly punctual.

Capitalized at $25 million and extended into next February, Masquerade tries to be a lot: a karaoke Phantom by hard-working troupers; a theme-park ride inside the world; a two-hour chunk of fan service with extra back story; an IRL mingle for Phans to play dress-up and quaff champagne in the bar afterward. What it wasn’t, for me, is fun or emotionally resonant. If you think Phantom of the Opera is legit art, that’s your problem. I’ll assume you’re not reading this, that you’re busy charging $500 on a pair of tickets. I hope the actors are well compensated, because they don’t get a bow—shameful. We all know the modern musical has to evolve to survive in the face of technology and economic precarity, but this cash-grab stunt tries to look backward and forward at once: hard to do with a silly mask on your mug.

For Beckett devotees, this Godot will come across as both idiosyncratic and faithful, a weird masterwork seen and heard afresh. Fans of Bill & Ted and the John Wick franchise may be converted to theater of the absurd. Because if they attend expecting time-travel gags or hitman Gun-Fu, it’ll be a long wait.

James Corden was legit hilarious in One Man, Two Guvnors, but that was 13 years ago, before he became a late-night tryhard and the bane of Balthazar. neil patrick harris still has impeccable sitcom timing. Bobby Cannavale has paid his stage dues for years—whether or not he’s right for the part. Is this cast worth half a grand? Is the play? Reza’s 1998 comedy abounds in witty chuckles and elegant structure, but it remains a slight boulevard comedy: three self-obsessed Frenchmen bickering over a pricey painting.

These comedies are intrinsically musical, peppered with songs of the time. Accordingly, composer Michael Thurber’s vibrant, polyglot score excels, with pieces for an all-women string quartet, a jazzy art song for Sumney and even a burst of Elizabethan rap for Viola. In addition to the natural musicality of Shakespeare’s verse, we also hear bewitching fragments of Swahili (translated from the source) when Viola and Sebastian fall back into their native tongue. Dialect coach Karishma Bhagani and the Nyong’o siblings weave these lilting, wonderful notes into a swoon-worthy night’s symphony.

Beyond its sociological themes, Heathers is a ton of stylish, well-crafted fun with top-notch acting and top-to-bottom earworms. After intermission, the score grows darker and introspective, giving individual characters moments to unburden their hearts... Neat thing about Heathers: it may appear to be coldhearted and ice-blooded, but by the end, there’s a thaw and everyone is part of the club.

Catchy and crammed with memorable hooks and lyrics that are clever as well as touching, Yazbek and Della Penna have written what is easily the best new score on Broadway since, well, Yazbek’s masterful score for The Band’s Visit (which also had a superb book by Moses). Bearing influences from Frank Loesser to Britpop band XTC, Yazbek has for 25 years remained one of my favorite composer-lyricists. He’s got a witty, skeptical way with melody and lyrics that always reminds you of his roots as a singer-songwriter (Dead Outlaw’s quirky black comedy sent my mind back to the 1996 album The Laughing Man). Along with Jeanine Tesori and Dave Malloy, Yazbek is an artist who sustains hope for the American musical.

It’s a remarkably lived-in play. You have the sense that Smith built her world in granular detail, establishing a hefty biography for each camper, tracking everyone’s location at all times over the 15-day span of the action. The design enhances this sense of place and the lazy, dreamy passing of time... Grief Camp is a banquet of perfectly meshed design, fully inhabited by the lovable, convincing cast.

I cannot overpraise the talented cast and the snappy production, which moves like a bullet train and ends with a rebellious “Presentation Day” dance that sends shivers down your spine and tears down your cheeks. Sink and Yoo enter in white peasant dresses and enact a visionary feminist rewrite on The Crucible, then burn the house down with a war dance to, yes, “Green Light.”

Loosely adapted from a short-lived television series, this musical comedy about the making of a musical is full of showstopping songs and powered by a phenomenal cast.

Since Snook’s eyeline often goes straight to the camera, as characters in close-up or when Dorian stares at his portrait, the identity of the screen itself grows slippery. When Snook looks at the portrait, she’s looking at the audience, as if through a portal. She and we are simultaneous stand-ins for the enchanted canvas: two black mirrors gazing narcissistically into each other’s fatal depths.

This world is colorless and impersonal (Derek McLane’s towering gray columns on wheels), and so are its inhabitants. At the top, a supertitle says the story takes place in some unspecified tomorrow. How I longed to jump to that near future, in which Washington has taken his bow and I’m sipping a martini at Joe Allen.

Operation Mincemeat is totally lovable and expertly zany, with Big Let’s Put on a Show Energy. See it now before SpitLip’s visas are revoked and they get thrown in Guantánamo.

The Irish film and TV star (All of Us Strangers, Normal People) may be the name driving up ticket prices and attendance at BAM, but his performance is carefully integrated into Rebecca Frecknall’s keen, intelligently deconstructed revival. Mescal doesn’t shrink from his role’s indelible association with young Marlon Brando; the actor’s credibly flat accent (urban Midwest dusted with Brooklyn) and unforced physical beauty constitute what you might call a Brando-adjacent reading: not trying to reinvent the wheel but perfectly able to handle the curves.

In its spareness and dreamy drift from fragmentary scene to direct address, director Arin Arbus’s superbly focused and balanced production inevitably brings to mind Our Town, but with ecological dread and greater social anomie. The ghost of Thornton Wilder surely perched on Koogler’s shoulder during the composition. This current production remounts the one Clubbed Thumb premiered in Summerworks two years ago and remains a model of less-is-more eloquent restraint.

While the design team does much dramaturgical lifting, the acting is equally superb. Just when you think you’ve seen every vocal twang or behavioral quirk from the longtime secret weapon Paul Sparks, he whips up another virtuosic portrait of a damaged, complicated weirdo (they tend to be more country than urban).

I don’t care how balsa-weak that joke is (will I be the 14th hack to use it, or the only one lacking self-restraint?). Redwood rhymes with deadwood, the derogatory term for people or things that no longer serve a function. Menzel has plenty to give. She could be the greatest squandered resource on Broadway in decades, which makes this well-intentioned misfire more frustrating: they are literally hanging Menzel out to dry.

It’s a pity: The Antiquities is a compelling concept and Harrison has a poetic, philosophical bent, but the execution lacks a certain audacity. One wonders what Caryl Churchill would have made of the premise (as with Love and Information, she’s master of the short, sharp shock). Not even a tightly directed cast and boldly designed production can overcome the sense that we’ve seen these tropes before on screens.

English premiered in 2022 at the Atlantic Theater Company and the following year Toossi won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. As now, I found the earlier iteration engaging, a wistful indie film with a magic-hour glow that suggests Terrence Malick gigging Off Broadway. Knud Adams translates his impeccable production to a Broadway venue without losing any of the original intimacy or fine-grained naturalism. The director smartly brings his superlative designers from the Atlantic: Marsha Ginsberg with her modular, deracinated classroom rotating in black void; evocative sunlight and streetlight by Reza Behjat filtering through pale amber curtains; and Enver Chakartash’s costumes—Western streetwear accented with jewel-toned scarves and accessories. Between this intensely focused and sensitive staging and his no-less powerful handling of Primary Trust, Adams must be on top of every young playwright’s vision board. Whatever dialect he’s speaking, it’s welcome on the ear. My mentor Babilla had crazier, more experimental tastes, but even he would have smiled to hear the music of his mother tongue.

Purists or anyone allergic to experimental-theater tropes (metatheatrical gags, presentational acting, deadpan delivery) may flee at intermission. At my performance, a few did. It helps to read the original libretto or watch the 1936 film before going. I did both, which help me appreciate how the staging scraped away a century of cultural rust and sentimentality to reveal an often deeply sad and frequently funny masterpiece of music-theater. Full disclosure: It was the first Show Boat I ever saw live. Will it be my last? Centenary’s coming in two years. Will the country have moved on so much that no rewrite would justify a return to Broadway? Or will Ol’ Man River roll backwards, sweeping us into a past where we don’t belong and don’t want to live?

At the end of, shall we say, a testing year, it seems perverse to cheer for a malignant narcissist, a thieving liar, a fake patriot and toxic parent who exploits their children in bitter pursuit of fame. But if the world has become a sad, sleazy circus, more reason to welcome the consolation of art. The miraculous Audra Mcdonald blooms as Rose in what may be the most heartstopping Gypsy you’ll ever see. The fifth Broadway revival of this shatterproof classic, and the third I’ve witnessed after those starring Bernadette Peters and Patti LuPone, the current version carries a thousand-volt electrical charge and lands at the Majestic with the force of a tornado. McDonald is the thunder-tossing center of that tempest, reminding us that the root of Audra means storm.

The whole ensemble excels, firmly steered by director Anna D. Shapiro to a hilarious state of bureaucratic and ethical crisis. In the end, consensus is reached, and the community heals—but not without a sacrificial lamb. I left the Friedman Theatre equally amused and disturbed: If a coterie of smart, morally sophisticated citizens devolves into chaos, what hope does a nation of poorly educated yahoos have? There’s no germ that spreads as fast as stupid.

Shakespeare never lacks for juicy insults, and King Lear is especially thick with verbal abuse. The unhinged title monarch viciously curses his daughter Goneril with rot in her ovaries and there’s a comically long string of invective the disguised Kent heaps upon villainous servant Oswald in front of Gloucester’s castle. In the trimmed version now running at The Shed I particularly miss one put-down—again, between Kent and Oswald. “Thou whoreson zed!” Kent sneers. “Thou unnecessary letter!” Gone from this sped-through, two-hour cut. But what would you expect? This is an unnecessary Lear.