Emily Nussbaum — Theater Critic

“Delirium” also felt like a relief to me—it offered a break from the usual polemic realism. Absurdity can be a liberation: it’s permission to stop making sense, an open door to ambiguity. Still, what makes Golyak’s production really roar into flame is the astonishing magnetism of his performers, Chulpan Khamatova, a Russian theatre and movie star who fled her homeland because of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and Andrey Burkovskiy, a celebrated Russian figure skater and actor.

Will you, too, fall head over heels? I sure did. My response to entering Schmigadoon was, to be frank, not that different from Melissa's: I'm an easy lay for a swoony ballad, I love a deep-cut golden-age callback, and I'm happiest when grinning lunatics in crinolines start grapevining around a gazebo.

Will you, too, fall head over heels? I sure did. My response to entering Schmigadoon was, to be frank, not that different from Melissa's: I'm an easy lay for a swoony ballad, I love a deep-cut golden-age callback, and I'm happiest when grinning lunatics in crinolines start grapevining around a gazebo.

From then on, The Lost Boys never stops moving, managing to be at once kinetic and poetic, earnestly emotional and rock-and-roll bombastic, a remarkably sincere vampire story produced with such attention to detail that you might forgive the fact that the music is pretty weak.

In Coon's openhearted, subtly joyful portrayal, Agnes is not a broken person who is tricked into faith; she is someone who makes a series of choices to get something she needs, a glue to fix a broken world. In her final monologue, this all becomes clear: it's liberating to see a pattern in your pain, instead of a nightmare that makes no sense. Who among us wouldn't bite at the chance?