David Cote — Theater Critic

Following a book that lurches from satire to workplace drama, Brown’s score surfs various idioms, none of which really stick. There are stretches of ’90s power pop (reminiscent of Jonathan Larson), bossa nova, Hamilton–style hip hop, and an overblown sequence set in Israel (or which Ethan claims happens in Israel) where klezmer rock gives way to a Bo Diddley beat. Brown is too strong a composer not to produce intriguing melodies and colorful orchestration and arrangements, but few songs emerge from dimensional people with conflicts we can care about; it’s mostly abstract notions of language, truth, or sexist power structures. Having contributed major works such as Parade and The Bridges of Madison County, plus the beloved two-hander The Last Five Years, Brown deserves a better foundation for his talents.

After suffering through Once Upon a One More Time last summer, I concluded that musicals about princesses had become a royal bore; no more singing and dancing tiaras for me, please. And yet Sutton Foster’s full-body comic onslaught as Winnifred the Woebegone in Once Upon a Mattress has restored my fealty to throne. Playing her first stage princess since the ogre-besotted Fiona in 2008’s Shrek, Foster musters every talented inch of her limber frame, rubber face, and iron lungs to generate waves of zany ecstasy in this delightful concert version for City Center Encores!

Off Broadway, Patrick was played by the canny and empathetic actor Richard Topol. Currently, the part belongs to Anthony Edwards (of TV’s E.R.), who has a wry, befuddled quality that works in group scenes, but leaves him unfocused in monologues directed to the audience. Still, if Prayer’s frame has grown wobbly, the central story remains vibrant and confidently driven by three outstanding women from the original cast: the fierce-willed Aidem; Francis Benhamou as Marcelle’s brilliant but bipolar daughter, Elodie; and Molly Ranson as college-age Molly, an American cousin many times removed who’s spending a gap year France—while getting drawn into Benhamou drama.

Clearly relishing their juicy roles, the dream cast has been impeccably directed by Lila Neugebauer, who burnishes the comedy and cruelty to a bright sheen. Her production would not cohere and hurtle as it does without its superbly unified design. The collective dots creates the perfect spacious, seen-better-days living room with genteel touches from the past. A pastoral mock-fresco adorns one wall, a vintage chandelier dangles from above and allows lighting designer Jane Cox the chance to cast its spidery shadow by the staircase. Cox lights nighttime scenes with intricate, textured dimness, pierced by the occasional smartphone or candle. The extraordinary soundscape by Bray Poor and Will Pickens amplifies and distorts a cacophony of cicadas between scenes, like voices of the dead clamoring for justice, punctuated by Cox’s brutal, horror-movie blackouts.

Generically staged by Sammi Cannold, How to Dance in Ohio was clearly made with love and will touch some hearts—on the spectrum or not—but feels synthetic and patchy when not outright tacky. Even the triumphant final fête, in which our heroes get to strut their stuff, is overshadowed by a head-scratching design choice (sets by Robert Brill). Drew, tasked with organizing the “Second Chance Dance” in a day (!) unveils and hangs a jumbo disco ball which he somehow had time to decorate. The giant orb is festooned with mauve flowers and shiny heart-shaped balloons—and it bears an unfortunate resemblance to the CDC illustration of the novel coronavirus. I cringed, but maybe I’m looking at it all wrong. One person’s deadly pathogen is another’s fascinating pattern.

If our culture were fearless and thriving, we’d have more plays like Manahatta—which is to say, ones better written than it. We’d also have more big-budget movies like Killers of the Flower Moon (but made by Native filmmakers) and more series like Reservation Dogs. Not to mention more Native theater critics. The play disappoints because it could have dug deeper, told us something research materials don’t or can’t. May it inspire other, beginning writers. Anyone can scribble a moral; mapping a journey to the revelation is hard.

In contrast to its intimate domestic scale and relatively subdued dramatic stakes, Hell’s Kitchen is slick and aggressively commercial; Keys, also the producer, has made no secret of her desire to transfer uptown. Ending with the earwormy urban jingle “Empire State of Mind” more out of fan service than anything story related, this feel-good empowerment fable hungers for a home on Broadway. And why not? Tourists are not going to nitpick about where a neighborhood begins or ends. They probably won’t even visit.

Shamblin’ Shannon and Blazing Sparks: the powerhouse duo we’ve waited decades to see sharing the spotlight as Beckett’s tramps, threadbare in trousers and spirit. In what might be a post-apocalyptic neverwhere, they dawdle and quarrel and peevishly await one Godot (O’God?), who will never arrive. Estragon wrestles with his painful boot, trying to free it from his smelly foot; Vladimir periodically races offstage to urinate (bad kidneys). Sound designer Palmer Hefferan creates thin piddling in a shallow metal receptacle. I saw a hubcap, since director Arin Arbus and scenic designer Riccardo Hernández translate the “country road” stage direction into a U.S. highway; the two men stalk up and down asphalt and across yellow median stripes looking for all the world like Depression-era hobos who lost their bindles at dice.

For its first half, the 80-minute play keeps your attention with its dated but energetic battle of the sexes, but the longer we spend with these folks the less authentic they become. The scope is intimate to the point of claustrophobia; it contracts rather than expands. There’s only so many times you can watch these two take one step towards joy, and two steps back in shame or fear. By the hushed, tentatively hopeful end, the actors are crumpled on Lucille Lortel stage—practically below the sightlines of my row. What began as two rabid animals tearing each other apart ends as a whimper as they agree to share a cage.

To be honest, I slightly dreaded this one, after suffering through A Beautiful Noise a year ago. But although Manilow and Neil Diamond share similarities—Jewish soft-rockers big in the ’70s with kitschy afterlives—Harmony aims higher than jukebox navel-gazing. A story this compelling could have made a good musical—with less narration, more character development, and a finale that milked the nostalgia less. Needless to say, a tale of innocent people caught in a nauseating wave of antisemitism hits harder in our present moment. Director and choreographer Warren Carlyle skillfully weaves the elements together and gets the Harmonists—a handsome six-pack of triple threats—on their feet and dancing. Lovable tummler Zien gives his all to a self-recriminatory 11th-hour number about failing to save the group—call it “Rabbi’s Turn.” You might leave humming the title tune, but also unsatisfied. Well, he wrote the song.

DeVito gets more mileage out of Sam than you’d expect from the page, performing with a loose, raffish panache. When Foster tells Sam he’s planning to move to Ohio to be with his son’s family, Sam reacts with visceral incredulity. “Cleveland?!” he repeats, elongating the first syllable with a gargling glottal stop slathered in phlegm and contempt. Funny pronunciation. Silly faces. Kooky obsessives behaving irrationally. It’s been the stuff of sitcoms for decades and popular for a reason. Still, when you put TV-level product on the Broadway stage, don’t be surprised if the audience talks back.

Without exception the cast is appealing and utterly cohesive, directed by Daniel Aukin with his usual preternatural gift for tonal control. Like his jukebox heroes, Adjmi has worked on this play for a long time (almost a decade), and his devotion and insane attention to detail has yielded a dense and novelistic weave with the uncanny heft of observed life. I’ll be honest: I don’t remember every scene of this long, luxurious fly-on-the-wall beauty.

What music there is, is playful and joyous. You wish there were more of it, especially a finale. But Ives and Mantello do heroic work endowing it with coherence and force. Sondheim always insisted on giving equal credit to his book writers, those who fed him and goaded him. It’s fitting that his last collaborator finished the epitaph. Viewed in the context of Sondheim’s monumental career—quirkiest since Anyone Can Whistle, most political since Assassins—Here We Are is a tenderly whispered coda. It shocks, how much he achieved: writing the lyrics to West Side Story and Gypsy before he was thirty; noodling at the piano in his nineties. Here he was. Yet he’s still here.

Scenic designer Scott Pask simulates a disorganized backstage area with tables, technical gear and touches that suggest a Nutley yard sale (I see he bought the Star Wars bedsheets from my childhood on eBay) and costume designer Emily Rebholz gives the boys the perfect level of dweeby élan, down to Rannells’ tucked-in sweater. I don’t know if the bazillion trucker hats are sets, costumes, props or what, but give someone a Tony. Having staged much costlier and busier spectacles, it’s a treat to see Timbers work his signature blend of irony and ecstasy on a smaller scale with a tighter focus, while reserving a juicy reveal for the end. Gutenberg! is not designed to be anyone’s gateway musical or inspire a career in that impossible, flop-filled field, but it’s firmly imprinted on my heart, sans serif.

Despite the occasional tangent on, say, plant-based medicine (cannabis versus chemo), My Window is a straightforward artist’s journey of self-expression and survival, lovingly ladled to a fan-filled crowd in itself worth watching. Two women behind me gossiped unabashedly through most of the second act but clammed up every time Etheridge launched into one of her chart-toppers: “Bring Me Some Water,” “I’m the Only One” and the title heartbreaker. Let’s be real: that voice is why we’re here, raspy compound of whiskey, gravel and gasoline. Like its owner, it has mellowed, lessened in force and range, but still calls to our window from the darkness, an alley cat wail of raw desire and the will to never back down.

At the center of this prodigious cast and Leon’s clockwork staging—the pearl if you will—is Kara Young. With several Off Broadway and now three Broadway shows to her credit, Young (Cost of Living, Clyde’s) always astonishes. She’s a walking paradox: demure yet fiery; petite but imposing; seemingly naïve yet a conduit of deep, witchy wisdom. Her physical comedy is outrageous, especially when Lutiebelle, worked into a tizzy about facing Cotchipee, falls apart and reassembles right in front of us. Wobbling on heels, one hip jutted out in a burlesque of urbanity, arching neck and back 30 degrees upstage to catch prompts from Purlie as her eyelids alternate between dilated terror and fluttering on the verge of a fainting spell, Young seems to have packed the clowning of five virtuosi in one compact body. Purlie is victorious indeed; but anyone who gets to see Young in her comic glory is a winner.

One caveat I have is the final scene, a de rigueur resolution after a punishing climax which borders on pat. Tragedies can end at an unbearable apex of sorrow or offer a healing postscript. In his pre-pandemic shocker Greater Clements, Samuel D. Hunter went with the former. Sweat (2015), by Lynn Nottage, ended in grimness but with a glimmer of shared humanity. Gilman comes down solidly for forgiveness and closure (there’s even a joke related to cremains and seeds). I didn’t entirely buy it tonally (despite tender performances) and it left a bland aftertaste, but I will admit: if the choice is between giving up or going on, we should arc toward hope.

Need I add that Jaws will probably be admired for another 50 years, whereas The Shark Is Broken sinks from memory not long after you exit the Golden Theatre? As you sit watching three skilled and likable actors do celebrity impressions, there are decent punch lines, visual treats, even a poignant moment or two of harpooned masculinity. But this behind-the-scenes buddy drama—which swam from the Edinburgh Fringe to London’s West End and finally washed up on Broadway—is a handful of chum in a very big sea.

So, in summary: a gifted cast with thankless roles, a hokey book that takes no chances, and an abysmal score that drags everything down. All that’s left is spectacle. And let’s be honest; the car is the star. Designed by Tim Hatley, lit by Tim Lutkin and Hugh Vanstone, and given bleeps, bloops and sonic booms by Gareth Owen, the automotive time machine zooms to 88 mph through elaborate video front and rear projections created by Finn Ross with “illusion” effects by Chris Fisher. Looks fairly cool the first time, somewhat lame the second. For an encore, hearkening back to 2005’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the airborne contraption noses over the orchestra. Every generation gets the Broadway eye-candy it deserves: in the ’80s it was the chandelier; in the ’90s, the Circle of Life; in the early aughts a witch levitating on a broomstick. We get a 38-year-old gullwing DeLorean on a turntable.

How many crackers came to see Alex Edelman’s Just for Us? (I don’t usually gauge audience demos, but…) That crowd was white. How white was it? It was so white you could clear the hall by rolling a jar of allspice down the aisle. Okay, leaving the jokes to the pros: Get your ass—whatever its race and ethnicity—to Edelman’s smart, funny, and surprisingly poignant solo about white resentment and balancing an Orthodox Jewish and goyim-adjacent childhood. Like an Upper West Sider finding his way to a sad, hate-filled apartment in Queens, it goes places.

Nor did I expect to yearn for a jukebox bio-musical about her. But instead of a gutsy, passionate recounting of the pop star’s stardom, struggles, and fight for control over her legacy and wealth, we have a marketing gimmick. Impale the bait of a blockbuster catalog on a feminist and queer hook (a spare prince falls in love with one of the Seven Dwarfs) and reel in a cross-generational revenue stream.

Playwright Levi Holloway is certainly lucky. His 2019 shocker was plucked out of obscurity (a Chicago run) by producers and director Joe Mantello (Wicked), who give it a deluxe production filled with A-list actors: Laurie Metcalf, Paul Sparks, and Beetlejuice TikTok sensation Sophia Anne Caruso. (Tatiana Maslany is in the ensemble but, due to illness, was not at the performance I attended; instead, the warm and appealing Claire Karpen played Max.) Yes, Holloway sure won the lottery; audiences who pay for his pretentious pulp? Not so much.

The clipped, verse-like script buffets us with waves of vivid detail and quick cuts, mostly delivered at top speed by Comer. After twenty minutes of Tessa’s motor-mouthed triumphalism and lawyer-splaining one longs for strategic pauses to texture the tale, but perhaps fatigue is part of the tactic. We must tire of Tessa’s blustery assurance, so her reversal carries greater weight and complexity. Even so, Miller’s play seems padded at the top and overly preachy at the bottom, pressing home a case it has already won with metaphorical italics and boldface. Nevertheless, Comer’s astoundingly fluid, musical and passionate performance wins the day. She leaves nothing on the field.

Scripted by Lewis, Shields and Jonathan Sayer (who plays a forgetful actor fed his lines through an ill-tuned headset), all this farcical insanity would be impossible without inspired design, masterfully directed by Adam Megiddo. Simon Scullion's multi-location turntable set collapses magnificently; Roberto Surace's outfits attain the perfect level of tacky cliché (and rip away nicely on cue); and, finally, lights (Matthew Haskins) and sound (Ella Wahlström) complete the illusion of abject and total mechanical breakdown. You will not find craftier theatrical silliness this season. Not sure I believe in fairies, but groin hits? Definitely.

Let me stress, there’s much to enjoy—even as the fun wears thin as corn silk. Previous spooficals that Shucked brings to mind make for unflattering comparisons: Urinetown had more bite, The Prom had more heart and The Book of Mormon has bigger laughs. Shorn from its earwormy songs and bubbly ensemble, Shucked tends to fade. Unlike the corn you ate the night before, it doesn’t stick around to remind you.