Greg Evans

A very busy Broadway season comes to a close with its final production, and Sam Gold's staging of Macbeth starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga is nothing if not a dynamic attempt to cap an unusual and often extraordinary theater season. Uneven - if not so much as Gold's 2019 King Lear with Glenda Jackson - and peppered with choices both curious (what, no 'double double toil and trouble?') and captivating (a brief prologue that's as funny as it is timely), this iteration of The Scottish Play, which opened last night at the Longacre Theatre, nearly holds up to the unavoidable hype of its starry cast.

Better is the sibling friction Crystal and Paymer display, with the irresistibly sad-sack Paymer doing the forever-disappointed also-ran brother convincingly and appealingly. The chemistry between the brothers - or, more accurately, between real-life pals and long-ago co-stars Crystal and Paymer - is easily the most enjoyable thing in a generally enjoyable production. The pleasant score by Jason Robert Brown and Amanda Green keeps things light, putting all that much heavier a dramatic burden on a book (by Crystal, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel) that can't quite carry it. Buddy's career comeback isn't assured - and never entirely credible, come what may - but the familial reconciliations are as predictable and welcome as a joke that always makes you laugh.

If POTUS, directed by Susan Stroman and opening today at Broadway's Shubert Theatre, never quite rises to the level of those three influences - not as darkly clever as VEEP, as lightning quick as Noises Off nor as go-for-deliriously-broke as Ludlam - POTUS barrels through its weaker stretches on the contagious enthusiasm and in-it-together vivacity of a crowd-pleasing cast.

Fluidly directed by Stephen Brackett, with Raja Feather Kelly's clever choreography punctuating Jackson's delightfully brash score, A Strange Loop grabs hold of us the moment Usher concludes that funny introduction. If the show begins to lose a little steam - but just a little - towards the end, it's only because Jackson has already made his points so clearly, pointedly and winningly.

Lincoln Center Theater's major new revival of the play, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, with additional material by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the tireless efforts of an exemplary cast, does, in fact, afford some newfound vitality for a work so often more admired than loved. An exercise in endurance - for the cast, for the audience - The Skin of Our Teeth long ago passed along the novelty of its time-tripping, allegorical flourishes to subsequent (and, frankly, less laborious) heirs, from Caryl Churchill to Tony Kushner to the Wachowskis, so any attempt to meet and rise above the play's inherent challenges would seem to require a vision, maybe a ruthlessness and certainly a firm grasp of the play's continued reason for being.

Feldstein is at her best (even when the show occasionally lets her down). While she doesn't have the vocal gifts that Streisand could employ to stake a claim on show-within-a-show stardom, Feldstein is no less convincing in her Fanny's self-belief and determination. No one would dare rain on her parade.Well, maybe a drizzle or two. Was it necessary to have Feldstein fall to the ground and roll downstage for the cheapest laugh in a show that has its share? Not even the possible period-correctness of a Ziegfeld comedy bit in which Fanny plays a Jewish WWI doughboy with bagels hanging from his belt could justify that groaner (and Feldstein's exaggerated, desperate mugging doesn't help). The kettledrum sound when a wedding-dressed Fanny, sporting a comic pregnancy pillow, bumps into her fellow dancers seems more like a bad 1970s Sonny and Cher Show sketch than anything worthy of today's Broadway stage.

With a sure eye for finding the laughs and the shocks in McDonagh's universe, director Dunster and his cast inhabit this little corner of the world with total conviction, conveying the larger implications - safe to say Harry's resolute convictions about guilt, justice and the unshakeable rightness of his life's work aren't the mere personal quirks of an isolated individual - while maintaining the specificity of a seemingly safe little cocoon where everybody knows your name, if not your secrets.

Director and choreographer Camille A. Brown and her cast of seven female singer-dancer-actors breathe life and vitality into Ntozake Shange's still-potent mid-1970s touchstone for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf. Opening tonight at the Booth Theatre on Broadway, Shange's fantasia of poetry, dance and stories of confession, defiance, sisterhood and, above all, perseverance, holds a power that's not been weakened either by decades or the loss of a once startling newness.

In the 25 years since Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse first performed Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize-winning play How I Learned To Drive, the name for the disturbing process that we witness being depicted on stage has long since entered widespread usage. If audiences can now readily label what happens as 'grooming,' Vogel's emotionally complex masterwork remains as unsettling, disarmingly funny and as deeply moving as ever.

Tracy Letts' The Minutes would be one of the most thrilling new plays on Broadway this season even if recent real-life events hadn't made it seem as uncanny as it is funny and, ultimately, disarming. The Minutes - there are a brisk 90 of them in all - begins as one thing and ends up quite another, and every step along the way is so finely rendered that we're too busy savoring the moment to see what's waiting just ahead.

Superbly performed by Laurence Fishburne, Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss, with director (and longtime Mamet collaborator) Neil Pepe finding every comic beat and threatening glare, American Buffalo - opening tonight on Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theatre - retains a vitality that eluded some recent equally starry revivals of works by Mamet's bad-boy contemporaries (here's looking at you, True West).

Everyone in the large cast, whether engaging in various dance styles, gymnastic tumbling or soaring and twisting high above the stage, gets a moment to shine, with the slight, wild-haired Zalachas in the title role impressive throughout. Even when the production crosses into the overlong and bloated, Zalachas comes swinging by, demanding our attention yet again.

What the play doesn't quite manage is balance of a more stylistic bent, moving fitfully between naturalism and a more fabulist approach, the latter marked by some rather twee flourishes (a goldfish or, rather, a 100-year series of goldfishes, all named Atman, which, we're told, is a Sanskrit word for 'the divinity within yourself.' Despite whatever missteps, though, Messing and the rest of the cast nicely convey the spectrum of emotions that a life's sweep encompasses, from happy times to sad (at the reviewed performance, audience sobs and sniffles were as audible as the laughter). Not even a tacked-on final birthday scene that strains credulity can sour the simple, icing-sweet pleasures of Birthday Candles.

With an impeccable cast headed by Jesse Williams, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Patrick J. Adams, Take Me Out just might be a revelation even to those who saw the original Broadway production nearly 20 years ago.

Paradise Square comes very close to saving itself from its own impulses - not least from a theatrically disappointing climax of a brief, unterrifying and bloodless riot - by giving star Kalukango the evening's single greatest moment of glory: a powerhouse anthem of anger and defiance called 'Let It Burn,' in which this wonderful singer castigates the rioters and the destroyers and taunts that the human spirit can survive the destruction of ramshackle structures. As a battle tactic, 'Let It Burn' falls a good deal short, but as a vocal exercise for an astonishing singer, the number is a treasure (and might very well hand Kalukango a Tony Award nomination that might otherwise have missed her).

More than anything else, Plaza Suite, opening tonight at the Hudson Theatre, provides one of Broadway's most loved couples the chance to share the stage in a slick, amiable setting that asks just enough of its stars to successfully woo an audience primed for love. Directed by John Benjamin Hickey with a clear reverence for Simon and the theatrical era in which his 1968 comedy titillated matinee audiences, this new Plaza Suite feels mostly like an exercise in nostalgia - for a couple we've watched grow up, for a Broadway that demands little, and for the late playwright whose contributions to popular culture go far beyond this mid-level effort.

Warren Carlyle's energetic, song-and-dance choreography blends vaudeville panache, ballet and pre-Depression dance craze, hitting all the right spots at all the right angles. Still, anyone who has seen the thrilling movies of MJ or the boundary-pushing explorations of Flying Over Sunset might be left a bit un-wowed. Like so much else with this Music Man, from Loquasto's attractive, wheat-colored turn-of-the-century costumes to Brian MacDevitt's autumn lighting, the dancing is expert - effortless even - yet still and all underwhelming. The Music Man lives up to every expectation except the most crucial one: Surprise.

If MJ can't contain the shock of the new that turned his 1983 television performance into an era-defining moment, it is in no short supply of its own thrills, not least the reminder, after all these years of scandal and accusations, that we once observed, in real time, the blossoming of undeniable talent into unavoidable genius. That's a transition, not since equaled, that director-choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, book write Lynn Nottage and an impeccable cast led by the star-is-born Myles Frost, bring to pulse-quickening life on the stage.

In the most cramped of times - days as economically and emotionally pinched as the ones we're living through now, and the ones we survived (or didn't) in 2008 - theater can remind us of, or point the way to, some sense of emotional generosity, of expansive spirit, of connection. Dominique Morisseau's Skeleton Crew does all that and more, finding hope in the unlikeliest of places, like a cluttered, ramshackle break room of a noisy, about-to-fail factory in an about-to-fail city like Detroit.

Much of Act II feels like retread, repeating the themes and conflicts set forth in the first act without much expansion. Overlong and occasionally (but only occasionally) a bit tedious, the last third of the show loses its way. There's some Freudian demon-facing, a lot of long-delayed (and fairly pat) self-acceptance and, in the case of the short-shrifted Gerald, a bit of ascendant fighting spirit, but for all the talk of communal experience and shared enlightenment, Flying Over Sunset just can't quite figure out what these characters ultimately mean to, or do for, one another. They certainly make for smart and pleasant company, and there's not a weak link in the cast, but one can easily imagine the characters' individual psychic breakthroughs occurring without any crossing of paths. Their inward journeys are just that - inward, solo - and though it's nice to trip in friendly environs, the human connections that would provide Flying Over Sunset its emotional payoff never quite land.

If there's a better, more vital way to honor the late, incomparable Stephen Sondheim than Marianne Elliott's superb production of Company, Broadway hasn't invented it. This gorgeous revival of the Sondheim-George Furth masterwork at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, is, from across-the-board excellent performances and thoughtful revisions to the visual delight of a lovely and ingeniously clever set design, a gift both to and from the genius we lost last month.

The amount of talent behind the high-spirited, very sporadically fun Mrs. Doubtfire is undeniable, from the creators of the low-key brilliant Something's Rotten!, the legendary director Jerry Zaks, and MVP star Rob McClure, whose quicksilver vocal impressions and comedic shape-shifting more than rival the same attributes that made the movie's Robin Williams a comedy icon. Yet all of that combined know-how can only serve to shine and polish a creaky machine that probably should have been junked and sold for parts well before its arrival on Broadway.

In fact, halfway through you might be struck by the notion of what an engaging sitcom this play could make, but then you might also realize that it already has. For all its present-day concerns, topicality and up-to-the-minute compassions, Clyde's is Taxi with poetic garnish. It's not hard to imagine Danny DeVito's Louie De Palma sharing tactical advice with Aduba's Clyde, or Judd Hirsch's Alex Reiger offering a sympathetic ear to Jones' Montrellous. Nottage has recast a winning recipe for the post-Trump era, and through sheer determination and heart keeps all but the very edges from a whiff of staleness.

Sixty-four years late and right on time, Alice Childress' wise and stirring backstage comedy-drama Trouble in Mind is making its long-in-coming Broadway debut tonight, and to describe the play as prescient would be an understatement. Uncanny rings truer. With a star turn by LaChanze that takes a strong place in a theatrical season already formidable in its roster of performances, Trouble in Mind takes a behind-the-curtain look at the racism, coded prejudice, self-flattery, sexism and built-in bigotry that Broadway has always professed to eschew.

By now you've probably read, heard or seen for yourself, via Netflix, just how deliciously bad Diana is, but the truth isn't quite so much fun. Diana, opening tonight on Broadway at the Longacre Theatre, is not a so-bad-it's-good disaster. It's just a regular, run-of-the-mill mess, a well-intended celebration of a beloved figure undone by one bad turn after another. More's the pity.