David Finkle — Theater Critic

Beginning to end, there’s certainly nothing amiss with the cast, including Tovah Feldshuh supplying Mrs. Fogler’s voiceovers. Sheryl Kaller is the director and also directed what could be called the pre-off-Broadway try-out when in 2022 it opened at New Brunswick’s George Street Playhouse. (Josh Prince is the helpful choreographer, Andy Einhorn the helpful music supervisor and arranger.)

But clever playwright that she is, she does anything but march out the clichés. Instead, she graciously offers the opposite, something as rare as lilacs in November. What Murray discloses is a play about four thoughtful, intelligent, understanding, accepting women dealing so close to easily with each other as makes no matter.

The ingredients on the City Center stage vary. Under Robert O’Hara’s direction, Porter and Brady—sometimes reading, often not—are at the forefront. James Jackson Jr. is a funny, light-in-the-slippers butler. Tonya Pinkins, as a flamboyant restauranteur-neighbor, steals a scene or two. James is properly turkey as the reluctant father of the bride, with Webb charming as the hardly blushing betrothed. As Jean-Michel, Diadhiou has his moments singing and tapping in delight at having Anne on his arm.

Question: What current Broadway production has the most genuine laughs? Answer: Easy—the just-opening Celebrity Autobiography, which includes the repeated phrase, “We couldn’t make this stuff up.”

Given the demands on the actors and their constantly meeting the challenges, the performances are exemplary. Perhaps the highest point of many high points is the scene during which Iago plays on Othello’s being persuaded of Desdemona’s infidelity. Though Othello insists he’s not “easily jealous,” Iago sees through the demur and only accelerates his cunning.

Okay, in my attempt to alert future audience members, I offer this spoiler: Hastie keeps it in. (Abeysekera speaks it ever-so-trippingly). But whatever his reason for placing it where he has is foolish. There’s plainly no excuse for disorienting an audience (excluding those for whom this is an initial Hamlet sighting) with so much attention diverted to fretting whether “to be or not to be” is ultimately going to be or not to be.

Of the creative staff Tracy Christensen’s costumes, Ken Billington’s lighting, and Kai Harada’s sound meet their mark. Surprisingly, the set from usually reliable James Noone’s does not. Oddly dark and compressed, it features a raised platform midstage, beyond which is a screen where David Bengali projects images of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. When the older and younger Cee Cees and Berties tip their toes in those waters, however, they do their dipping downstage, almost disconcertingly over the orchestra pit. Anyway, if Dart doesn’t hit her musical target high enough this time, there’s evidence—isn’t there?—that she’s primed to try, try again.

At the end, however, The Fear of 13 is Brody’s domain. Never offstage and often really as well as symbolically solitary, he presents a man fighting for his life until fight is drained from him. And then what seems miraculously restored to him. It’s restored, and yet at the last moments, he’s left wondering what’s left for him, what kind of future he faces. Right up to those final moments, Brody instills frayed dignity. Incidentally, the title The Fear of 13 is somewhat obscure. The key to it appears to be couched in a late in the drama reminiscence from Nick that requires close listening. Go for it.

Puns? Oh yes, there’s a surfeit of those titter-provokers, more than a few times uttered by actors brandishing self-satisfied and/or naughty expressions. The effect is enough to cause embarrassment for those who find them amusing. You want an example? Okay: The apparently repeated mention of “seamen.” Get it? See, you’re already embarrassed for those busy bookwriters.

What can also be said of this production is that director Joe Mantello—when he directed Lane 30 years back in Love! Valour! Compassion!, they first talked about this venture—has approached the enterprise not as his need to impose radical directorial changes so’s to differentiate this Death of a Salesman from that of predecessors. Instead, he’s approached the task by doing something more impressively radical. He researched Miller’s initial manuscripts, discovering that the playwright had early on intended to have two actors playing Biff, Happy and less athletic friend, more intelligently accomplishing Bernard so that they can be seen as the boys when younger.

To describe Capote as self-involved is a laughable understatement. But thank the entertainment gods for that. He’s at his funniest throughout, and certainly when a Christmas gift of poinsettias is delivered, he’s an irate hoot. Miffed at the sender’s clichéd inspiration he utters: “I’m giving stuff from Tiffany’s, and I’m getting poinsettias.”

What remains to be trumpeted about this nevertheless impressive import with its flawless cast (Stella Everett and David Manis, among them) is praise for set designer Bob Crowley. The recipient over the years of many awards, he does his magic again with a giant Giant set, a depiction of Gipsy House, Dahl’s family home in Missenden, Buckinghamshire.

As for the creatives, set designer Anne Mundell has an ominous prison cell up-stage center and to its left an arch through which can be glimpsed Shawn Duan’s atmospheric projections. Stage left is a curtained stage that gets plenty of use when the curtains are withdrawn. Alan C. Edwards lighting and Joanna Lynne Staub’s sound complement the set and significantly give Monte Cristo the look of something that belongs on Broadway, if that’s the ultimate goal. David Hancock Turner underlines the score’s urgent moods at the head of a seven-member musical contingent.

Through it all the agreeable cast members do whatever they can with the material—choir members McLean, Roche, Ross repeatedly lurking and larking—but it may be director Knud Adams (with the property since its Clubbed Thumb and Page 73 development) is too committed to the overplaying that the outcome is so tiring.

Night Side Songs can assuredly boast of a stalwart cast, directed by deft Lazours collaborator Taibi Magar. Among them there’s one particularly accomplished member. Three-time Tony nominee (and multiple prize-winner elsewhere) Testa is at her best, as she always is. Just wait for her to go to town on “My Stuff,” the Lazours’ gritty second hot number. Any production is lucky to have this incomparable vet on board. There’s no denying that the Lazours had something substantial in their sights. Too bad they don’t quite hit their target squarely.

With Data, Michael Libby has written an unquestionably significant play wrenched not only from today’s headlines but possibly also ripped from headlines heading our way in the frightfully near future. Furthermore, he’s unleashed a work that fits into a category that may be entirely new or at least still thin: The Intellectual Horror Drama.

Directing the off-kilter caboodle is superb lyricist David Zippel, who on this (first?) directorial outing is less than superb. As someone who might be imagined wanting lyrics acted as often as possible, he instead prefers exaggerating singers’ professional clichés. He adamantly doesn’t eliminate the fave one where a last note is sustained as a singer raises an arm in vocal triumph. On the last number of so many famous Bacharach songs reprised, all three simultaneously do the sustained-note-arm-raise.

The intriguing Hanging Rock allure has been adapted as a musical, book and lyrics by Hilary Bell and music (and arrangements) by Greta Gertler Gold, and directed with somber celebratory flourish by Portia Krieger. Although comparison with previous formats may be uncalled for, they are also inevitable. The stage version has much to recommend it, but there are troublesome drawbacks.

In 2025, Lucas Hnath, one of our foremost contemporary playwrights who never misses, has contributed a Tartuffe revival that consists of so many off-rhymed couplets they may outnumber the couplets properly rhymed. So much so that this “new version” is instantly a disorienting miss. It’s why I cannot in good conscience recommend the production unreservedly.

More precisely, what’s offered—with only a few exceptions—are mild facsimiles of the original numbers. Yes, the numbers are mounted but for the most part, as staged, they lack the élan, the electricity, the ebullient personality with which the original creators and, of course, the original dancers infused them. (The only original choreographer working here is Randy Skinner.)

Then there’s the acting, singing and brief dancing. Pitts’s performance, especially svelte and stylish in Gilmour’s night-at-the-Plaza gown, is mercurial throughout, making Robin’s initial annoyance and then intelligent concern thoroughly penetrating. As to newcomer Tutty, who took home last year’s Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his take on the imported Dear Evan Hansen: His “New York” introduction makes it dazzlingly clear that a London musical leading-man hasn’t been carried in on the local theater tide since Tommy Steele in Half a Sixpence and Anthony Newley in The Roar of the Greasepaint-The Smell of the Crowd. Tutty’s appealing looks, pure voice, comic instincts, and obvious acting skills, and somehow resemblance to a living Teletubby make him the huge plus for a vital Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) run.

Final observation: At a point in the 1970s, Schwartz had three shows running on and off-Broadway: Godspell, Pippin, and The Magic Show. (There might even have been a fourth—The Baker’s Wife.) Right now, he’s matched the three-record with Wicked showing no signs of ever closing on Broadway, this one also on Broadway, and The Baker’s Wife currently revived off-Broadway. Congrats to him for that kind of rare happenstance. Imagine the personal pleasure as well as the weekly royalties.

Watching 44 The Musical with jaw dropped, a dazed reviewer gets to thinking about Michelle Obama’s observation that “When they go low, we go high.” No going high about these made-up Obamas. They and their musicalized pals and detractors go limbo-bar low. If the former first lady was as uncomfortable in the White House as so frequently hinted, her fears of what she’s been put at risk for are only confirmed by this scruffy property.

First, let’s hear it for the highly effective elements: Christian’s music is both sumptuous and austere. That’s to say, its presentation as a modern-day oratorio sounds exactly right, certainly as conducted by Jane Cardona and interpreted by the six-part orchestra playing unseen above the end of the room where audience members enter and exit. The resultant overarching spirituality catches listeners in the palm of its many, many pages of exacting measures.

Though The Honey Trap clamps down in an emotionally stunning conclusion, a reviewer’s mild query is whether in the Dave/Charlie twist does McGann risk confusing literally inclined spectators too much before revealing his devastating destination?