Frank Scheck

Late in the show, Ross wanders out into the audience, cracking hilariously insulting jokes to good-natured audience members who eat it all up. It reminded us why he made it to Broadway in the first place. We came to see his inner Don Rickles, not to hear the sort of maudlin confessional of which far too many bestselling memoirs are made.

McGovern delivers a capable performance, laced with dark humor, with Gardner flirting provocatively with her interviewer and reflecting ruefully on the failed relationships in her life… But she’s never quite convincing as the legendary beauty, and the writing… fails to provide much depth or illumination.

Dramatically, the show feels comparatively undernourished as we’re introduced to soldiers Johnny (Drew Becker), Thomas (Justin Matthew Sargent), Andy (Daniel Yearwood) and Mike (Deon’te Goodman, who also plays several other roles). The characters, who speak via monologues and readings from letters, are defined in the thinnest of terms.

Unfortunately, the show isn’t just one act but rather two, its second half completely squandering its theatrical momentum with a descent into narrative hokiness. Despite a terrific performance by Betsy Wolfe in the title role, the awkwardly titled Joy: A New True Musical needs some serious mopping up.

The play, originally presented at the 2018 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, skewers and satirizes the ideas that Roger is parroting, and the manner in which he absorbed them, with copious amounts of humor. Most cannily, Skinner makes Roger sympathetic, even likable, rather than obviously loathsome. The casting of Krasinski is a masterstroke, with the actor’s inherent charm and warm appeal fascinatingly contrasting with the frequently loathsome ideas his character is expressing. Addressing us in the same folky, self-deprecating manner as he did playing Jim Halpert in The Office, the actor instantly has the audience on his side, providing an uncomfortable tension to the proceedings.

Neither the play’s characterizations nor dialogue achieve the complexity of Margulies’ best works, and it all feels a little too neat in its set-up. But despite its schematic elements, Lunar Eclipse proves poignantly moving nonetheless thanks to its dramatic restraint and Kate Whoriskey’s pitch-perfect direction. Birney and Emery, who have long graced our stages, deliver impeccable work, never hitting a wrong emotional note and making us fully empathize with their characters — especially in a heartbreaking coda that depicts them at a very early stage in their relationship, getting together in the same field to witness a blood moon. Their superb work is abetted by the wonderful design elements including Grace McLean’s affecting music, Walt Spangler’s evocative set design, and Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting that gorgeously conveys every stage of that lunar eclipse.

That blunt messaging proves endemic throughout the 90-minute show, resulting in a serious bummer of an evening. Which is why, when Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. (a tremendous Daniel J. Watts) engage in a fabulous tap-dancing duet, choreographed by Jared Grimes, on “Me and My Shadow,” the joy of their terpsichorean skills provides a badly needed lift and becomes the highlight of the show. (It doesn’t help that the Davis character, who acts as a sort of Greek chorus, is so dynamic compared to the glum Cole that you wish you were watching an entire show about him instead.)

The ensuing affair, complete with liaisons in cheap hotel rooms and the inside of Jon’s car, proves predictable in its complications, feeling very much like any number of dramas revolving around imbalanced sexual relationships. It’s only as the play progresses that it becomes something more original and interesting, with the power dynamics and eventually even the perspective shifting. That the playwright is a woman telling the tale from a man’s point of view provides a clue as to what makes Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes so distinctive, if not particularly weighty.

It’s the staging and the star’s performance that truly elevate the evening, however. Alex Timbers’ limber, imaginative direction uses the space fantastically, with a large stage at one end of the theater providing enough room for a terrific big band, another smaller one at the opposite side for more intimate interludes, and cabaret tables in the middle. Groff works the room like nobody’s business, going from one end to the other, wandering into the aisles, and, at one point, standing atop one of the small tables which magically starts spinning. It’s no wonder that he apologizes in advance for the profusion of his sweat and saliva that frequently soaks audience members in the best seats, bringing an all too literal meaning to “Splish Splash.”

Providing just around two hours of silly joy, Pirates! The Penzance Musical would make Gilbert and Sullivan proud. They might object to some of the changes, but they would surely approve of the pleasure it’s providing to modern-day audiences.

Grief Camp proves so elliptical and amorphous in its writing that it seems to drift along without providing anything to hold your attention, unless you’re riveted by the sight of young people fighting to get into their cabin’s sole bathroom.

The Playbill cover for John Proctor Is the Villain conveys it perfectly. It features several of the young characters in a circle while appearing to be screaming their heads off. That’s exactly how you’ll feel after enduring this well-meaning but exhausting play.

What was galvanizing onscreen is curiously lifeless onstage, its airless quality not helped by the lackluster staging from the normally superb David Cromer. Despite running a mere 90 intermission-less minutes, the play feels much longer...

They certainly do so here, although this rendition features one significant miscasting that robs the play of some of its impact. Odenkirk and Burr fare the best, with the former playing the older salesman Shelley “The Machine” Levene like a sadder, tired-out version of Saul Goodman. If he doesn’t quite convey the pathos of previous actors who’ve played the role such as Robert Prosky or Jack Lemmon, his sharp comedic instincts garner laughs that weren’t there before.

Leon’s staging has its predictably silly touches, such as frequently having actors march through the aisles to the stage as if they’d wandered out of the theater for a smoke break only to find the stage door locked. A key scene is played in the dark, illuminated only by flashlights, which is more annoying than ominous. And the climactic scene set in Desdemona’s bedchamber is prefaced by florid background music that Douglas Sirk would have dismissed as too kitschy for one of his ‘50s melodramas. Lacking an overriding concept or strong directorial vision, this Othello fulfills its basic goal of putting its two stars onstage and letting them rip. But it’s hard not to wish that it had strived for something more.

For all its affectionately nostalgic, piquant details, however, the play never quite coheres dramatically. Its episodic, non-linear structure frequently proves confusing, and such tangents as an account of Renee’s solo trip to Paris when she was 35 feel like minor anecdotes barely explored. For every powerful moment— as when Ellen informs us that she had told her mother that if she ever drank in front of her grandson, she would never be able to see him again — there are more that feel like filler.

The revival has been directed by Rebecca Frecknall, whose production of Cabaret, excuse me, Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, was a sensation in London but has proved more than a little divisive on Broadway. Here, she not so much stages Williams’ play but comments on it. It feels less like an actual production than a series of annotations scribbled in her copy of the text.

What it mainly provides is the opportunity to see such film and television stars as Calista Flockhart, Christian Slater, and Cooper Hoffman in the flesh. Unfortunately, they’re all upstaged by Lois, an adorable sheep whose program bio informs us that she appears annually in the Radio City Music Hall’s Christmas show.

Redwood might have been more effective with a powerful score, but the songs, composed by Kate Diaz and featuring lyrics by Diaz and Landau, all have a similar power-ballad sheen that quickly proves repetitious and unmemorable. That’s not to say that Menzel doesn’t sing the hell out of them, which she does. But her powerhouse vocals can only do so much with numbers that aren’t exactly “Defying Gravity” or anything from Rent, in which she appeared in the same theater nearly three decades earlier. The performer sings and acts her heart out, but you still leave the theater humming the projections.

The play’s episodic structure results in inevitable choppiness, with some vignettes landing harder than others. The back-and-forth chronology, with later scenes sometimes bookending earlier ones, can prove confusing. But under the precise direction of David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan, The Antiquities proves a provocative cautionary tale, not that one was needed, about how we may not always be able to fully control the technology that seems to be advancing with dizzying speed. The writing is consistently clever, such as the tiny mistakes the characters sometimes make when emulating human behavior that they never experienced firsthand.

Sometimes, plays, like people, take a while to grow on you. Such is my experience with Sanaz Toossi’s English, which I first saw in its world premiere at the Atlantic Theatre Company nearly three years ago. At the time, I found the play stubbornly undramatic and narratively inert, even while thinking highly of the performances. Seeing it again on the occasion of its Broadway premiere by the Roundabout Theatre Company, I found it much more thematically complex and moving. (And I swear the fact that the play won the Pulitzer Prize in the meantime had nothing to do with it.)

Yes, the show is not “a” comedy, meaning an actual play, but rather a collection of short humorous pieces written by Simon Rich (son of former New York Times theater critic Frank), read by a rotating quartet of well-known performers. The current stars are comedian John Mulaney (certainly the show’s biggest draw), veteran character actor Richard Kind, Tony-winner Renee Elise Goldsberry (Hamilton), and actor-writer-musician Fred Armisen, who, like Mulaney and Rich, is a Saturday Night Live veteran. Among the stars appearing later in the limited run for stints of varying lengths are Lin-Manuel Miranda, Annaleigh Ashford, Hank Azaria, Jimmy Fallon, Aidy Bryant, and Nick Kroll.

But neither the dialogue, characterizations, nor plot elements, the latter including the revelation of an affair between Eli and Meiko, have the crisp sharpness of, say, Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage, which similarly lampooned parental conflicts. The 100-minute evening feels longer than it is thanks to the sluggish pacing and frequent repetition. There is the occasional powerful moment, most notably a monologue by Suzanne in which she reveals the tragic backstory behind her opposition to vaccination. But too much of the play is dependent on such tired cliches as the “artisanal scones” which help the board members get through the long meetings in which decisions are made not by majority vote but consensus. Still, Eureka Day deserves praise for its comic treatment of the sort of contemporary social issues not often paid attention to on Broadway, the fine performances by its ensemble (Irwin deserves special credit for tamping down his usual comic persona), and that amazingly funny livestream sequence that will prevent you from ever sitting through a similar one with a straight face ever again.

The latest example is Death Becomes Her, which actually manages the neat trick of being superior to the 1992 fantasy film starring Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, and Bruce Willis. The musical adaptation, newly arrived on Broadway after a Chicago tryout, is a laugh riot from start to finish, featuring superb comic performances from its two female leads, a lavish physical production that actually reflects the astronomical (reportedly $31.5 million) production cost, and a book featuring more zingy one-liners than a Friars Club Roast. The only thing missing are memorable songs, but fortunately the show is so entertaining you’ll find yourself not minding very much.

Director Scott Elliott fails to make the proceedings fully coherent, and such stylistic devices as having actors silently remain onstage even when their characters are not in the scene simply feel pretentious. The performers struggle with their underwritten roles; Howard, playing Gus with suitable bluster, feels miscast, the actor’s natural likability at odds with his character’s piggishness. Tomei fares the best, conveying her character’s emotional and physical travails with intensity and humor. But it’s not enough to prevent Babe from feeling schematic in its #MeToo movement themes.