Frank Scheck — Theater Critic

This is the sort of theatrical memoir for which the term 'lyrical' must have been invented. Recounting the story of his early life and only briefly dipping into the sort of show business anecdotes (none of them particularly juicy, alas) for which some gossip-craving theatergoers might be hoping, the piece is so quintessentially Irish that you'll find yourself craving a Guinness on the way home. Redolent of both James Joyce and Eugene O'Neill, two writers whose work Bryne has performed in his lengthy career, Walking with Ghosts feels far more literary than theatrical.

Whether or not to preserve the legacy of the past, however horrific, is the compelling theme of this elemental drama which showcases Wilson's prodigious gifts for poetical dialogue and richly drawn characterizations. It's filled with emotionally resonant moments, the quieter of which are the best rendered in this production. Perhaps the highlight is the scene in which the eager Lymon, newly clad in a resplendent if far too small silk suit and fancy shoes that he's purchased from Doaker's comically blustery brother Wining Boy (Michael Potts, terrific), nearly manages to break down Berniece's emotional defenses by gifting her with a bottle of fancy perfume. Brooks and Fisher play the delicate scene perfectly, thoroughly winning over the audience which practically swoons. Unfortunately, the production falters in its more explosive moments, with Washington, apparently making his stage acting debut, maintaining such a high energy and decibel level throughout that his unmodulated performance becomes monotonous. Boy Willie is supposed to be the volcanic center of the drama, but here he comes across as more irritating than a force of nature.

Everything in the production seems pitched over the top, including Willy's declining mental condition, which here feels more like full-blown dementia than merely a man defeated by life who is losing his grip. The flashback scene in which Willy is discovered by Biff (Khris Davis) to be in a hotel room with another woman (Lynn Hawley) is bizarrely played for laughs, with the woman loudly cackling in demented fashion. Throughout the evening, the actors frequently shout their lines, as if not trusting us to appreciate the dialogue.

Martyna Majok's Pulitzer Prize winning drama has fortunately been given a chance to achieve greater exposure after its limited 2017 run at Off-Broadway's Manhattan Theatre Club. Currently playing on Broadway in a partially recast version produced by the same organization, Cost of Living has lost none of its emotional power and poignancy. Although dealing largely with the difficulties of two physically disabled characters, this is really a beautifully observed play about the human condition in general.

But, and it's a very big but, none of this will matter to Crystal fans, as everyone should be. The 74-year-old performer displays the vitality of someone half his age, his energy fueled by the waves of audience laughter cascading over the footlights. It's a treat to see him up close and personal as he works his tuchus off (the Yiddishisms prove infectious) to entertain us. Mr. Saturday Night would prove an absolute triumph for him...as long as you eliminated the plot, the supporting characters, and the musical numbers.

Mixing pitch black comedy with genuine terror, Hangman reveals McDonagh at his most technically accomplished, although not his most profound. Overlong at nearly two-and-a-half hours, the play feels like an extended episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, complete with twist ending. Despite its longueurs, however, it's wonderfully entertaining, thanks to the playwright's gift for acerbically funny and ever-surprising dialogue, the superb performances by its well-honed ensemble, and Matthew Dunster's marvelous staging that fully immerses you in the morbidly funny proceedings. Anna Fleischle's set design, featuring inventive use of the overhead space, is a stunner. While the first act drags at times, the second barrels along at breakneck pace, the highlight being the unexpected arrival of Pierrepoint himself (John Hodgkinson, stealing the show in just a few minutes), who makes clear his intense unhappiness at the way Harry spoke about him in his interview.

Audience mileage will vary on the play which transforms itself from a satirical comedy about small-town bureaucracy to a dark vision of historical revisionism and collective guilt. Lett’s audacious conceit doesn’t fully work in its lengthy build-up and abrupt transition to surrealism. But it’s nonetheless a bracing and fascinating attempt to wrestle with deep moral themes.

The current Broadway revival seems designed to showcase Sam Rockwell, who has often played fast-talking, dim-witted and often racist characters in his illustrious career, as exemplified by his Oscar-winning turn in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The role of Teach seems tailor-made for him, much as it did for Al Pacino decades earlier, and, not surprisingly, he kills in the part. But what makes this production so successful - unlike its previous, mediocre Broadway revival in 2008, starring John Leguizamo, Cedric the Entertainer and Haley Joel Osment, which only lasted a week - is that his co-stars are equally up to the challenge.

It's hard to say for whom the show is intended. Children, the presumed target audience, are likely to be bored out of their minds (thankfully, there's an intermission to provide them the opportunity to vent), while baffled adults will find their stamina tested by the 110-minute running time which seems to go on forever. The overblown but underwhelming production seems lost in the vast Broadway Theatre, but probably would have seemed right at home in the intimate New Victory. There will be some, no doubt, who will find the proceedings magical and transporting. After all, lava lamps were once all the rage.

For many, Birthday Candles will no doubt prove deeply moving, especially since it inevitably deals with so many relatable issues for both young and old. And if I'm being honest, there were moments that got to me as well, proving that there's still something resembling a heart beneath this curmudgeonly exterior. But then, I've always found cheap music extraordinarily potent.

There's nothing revelatory about this Music Man, and that's probably just as well. In its determined effort to evoke the musical comedy Broadway of yore and make us feel happy simply to be in a theater again, the show ironically feels urgently timely.

If you've ever hung out at a break room at work, you know that generally not very much happens there. People eat snacks, engage in small talk, and generally relax during the few precious minutes they have before resuming their labor. Playwright Dominique Morisseau captures that ambience all too well in her 2016 play now receiving its Broadway premiere courtesy of Manhattan Theatre Club. Stronger on atmosphere than actual drama, Skeleton Crew never proves thematically arresting, although it does earn points for sociological resonance.

The musical receiving its world premiere from Lincoln Center Theater was one of the most eagerly anticipated of the season, for good reasons. Besides the formidable creative team, the lavish production features a killer cast including Harry Hadden-Paton, Carmen Cusack, Tony Yazbeck, and Robert Sella as Gerald Heard, the philosopher/author who guides the trio through their drug-induced trips. Besides, how can you not root for a large-scale Broadway musical not based on a pre-existing property and featuring such an audaciously original concept? It's sad to report, then, that the show from the librettist of such landmark musicals as Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Passion is a misfire. A provocative misfire, to be sure, and one that will no doubt have its ardent admirers. But a misfire nonetheless.

Strange as it may be to say, getting shut down by the pandemic during previews last year might have been the best thing to happen to the new Broadway musical Mrs. Doubtfire. For one thing, the long hiatus gave some breathing room between this adaptation of the hit 1993 movie starring Robin Williams and Tootsie, the short-lived Broadway musical also revolving around a straight man who dresses in drag. For another, it provided the opportunity for the creators to do some apparently much-needed tinkering, as evidenced by early reports. Finally, the long theatrical dry spell has created a renewed appetite for a feel-good, family-friendly musical comedy. At a late preview performance, you could feel the audience's desire to simply relax and have a good time.

Director Charles Randolph-Wright doesn't successfully balance the play's comic and dramatic elements, with the result that the evening sometimes feels like a backstage comedy and other times like a polemic on race relations. The performances, too, vary in effectiveness, with the most memorable work coming from the luminous LaChanze, the veteran Cooper, and Dukes, who makes the most of the sardonic Millie.From a historical perspective, Trouble in Mind is an important, groundbreaking work. It's just a shame that it feels so dated now upon its long belated Broadway premiere.

It shouldn't work, it really shouldn't. A three-and-a-half-hour drama spanning over 160 years, featuring a mere three actors playing dozens of roles ranging from infants to coquettish young women to elderly men, depicting complicated historical and financial events with a minimum of scenery. And with much of the dialogue delivered in the form of third person narration, no less. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but The Lehman Trilogy proves an unalloyed theatrical triumph.

There's a palpable urgency to Keenan Scott II's poetic drama making its Broadway debut after several regional theater productions. Revolving around numerous themes endemic to the Black experience in contemporary America, Thoughts of a Colored Man is the sort of finger-on-the-pulse work that elicits murmurs of approval from its audience, one that is more racially diverse than usually seen on the Great White Way. It's advertising proclaims it to be 'A New American Play for a New Broadway,' and the tagline doesn't seem like hyperbole.

The performers, several of them new to Broadway, strive mightily to mine the broad humor for all its worth and generally succeed. The standouts are Mizzelle, a hoot as the precocious teen, and Urie, who gets laughs with every nervous twitch, although he's playing the sort of role from which he should have graduated by now. For more than a few, Chicken & Biscuits will live up to its name by being enjoyable theatrical comfort food. But you can't ignore the fact that it simply isn't very nutritious.

There are only two men onstage, but there's an awfully big crowd populating Lackawanna Blues. Ruben Santiago-Hudson's autobiographical one-man play (plus musician) paying loving tribute to the woman who raised him features such a gallery of colorful characters that it's no wonder it was adapted into a cable television movie featuring a large ensemble. But the piece works best as it was originally conceived-the actor narrating the tale and portraying some two dozen other characters in a virtuoso demonstration of solo storytelling.

The three actors, repeating their Lincoln Center performances, couldn't be better. Hill and Smallwood expertly play off each in the manner of seasoned vaudevillians, while Ebert delivers a tour-de-force turn, infused with comic physicality and an undercurrent of danger, that keeps us on edge even as we're laughing.

Watching the new comedy by the normally more adventurous playwright Bess Wohl, it's hard to avoid the feeling that it resembles a never-aired episode of Everybody Loves Raymond. The play features a squabbling elderly couple and their adult children who trade sharp one-liners while dealing with a domestic crisis. And if you've seen the memorable episode of the long-running sitcom in which Marie, the family matriarch played by Doris Roberts, crashes a car through the Barone family house, you will have effectively gotten a sneak preview of one of the more startling moments in Second Stage Theater's Broadway production of Grand Horizons.

Mea culpa. The show's producers apparently took my review, and many other favorable notices, too much to heart. Arriving on Broadway following a national tour for a limited run (timed to the upcoming holiday season, natch), The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical has lost all of its charms while gaining a dramatic uptick in ticket prices. What seemed inventive and clever in the confines of a small off-Broadway theater feels utterly wan in its current incarnation. The production represents glorified children's theater, only with seats going for as much as $199. Any parents who shell out that kind of money for this tacky, bargain-basement production seriously need to reevaluate their financial priorities.

The show essentially follows the same structure as the troupe's off-Broadway engagement last winter, but since every performance is almost entirely improvised, your experience will be different each time. And this is definitely a show that rewards repeat viewings, if only to be amazed again by the endless ingenuity with which the performers devise their versatile routines.

The show, directed by Andy Nyman and Andrew O'Connor, who co-wrote the material with Brown, is infused with a theatrical polish that makes its substantial running time fly by. By the time it's over, you'll be thrilled you've been so oblivious to the evening's devilish machinations that you somehow didn't see a man in a gorilla suit snatching a banana from a podium onstage in plain view. Not once, but twice.

It's easy to see why Terrence McNally's 1987 romantic two-hander is being presented on Broadway less than 20 years after its last incarnation. Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, about one very long night in which two lonely souls debate whether or not to take a chance on love, is a veritable feast for actors. And in the new revival directed by Arin Arbus, Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon wolf it down with gusto.