Greg Evans — Theater Critic

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.

In this still-young Broadway season already boasting a remarkable line-up of new productions that, regardless of box office sales or seats filled, is a small miracle, the Roundabout Theatre Company production of Caroline, Or Change places itself squarely at the forefront of the best in culture this city has to offer. Directed by Michael Longhurst with intensity and sensitivity, and performed by a cast that seems to have made a pact to sustain itself at the towering heights achieved early and unfailingly by its mighty star Sharon D Clarke, this Caroline, Or Change is a hurricane wind unleashed on decrepit legacies and newfound cautions.

I mentioned that the actress here - the magnificent Deirdre O'Connell -doesn't speak, but that's not entirely accurate, but I was reluctant to use the phrase 'lip-sync' too early. The art form's usual connotation of comedy and/or deception doesn't apply here. Mouthing the words of actual interview tape recordings in which Higginbotham opens up about her ordeal, O'Connell and Dana H. convey both the specifics of one woman's trauma and something universal about the all-encompassing nature of abuse and its survival.

Money, the pop song says, changes everything, and as Broadway's magnificent The Lehman Trilogy so splendidly demonstrates, everything means everything, from the most private of personal circumstances to - if you've got enough cash (or even the suggestion of it) - the grand sweep of history.

Money, the pop song says, changes everything, and as Broadway's magnificent The Lehman Trilogy so splendidly demonstrates, everything means everything, from the most private of personal circumstances to - if you've got enough cash (or even the suggestion of it) - the grand sweep of history.

ixing spoken word, slam poetry, laugh-out-loud comedy, drama and razor-sharp dialogue, Scott's words are met with Steve H. Broadnax III's directorial flourishes that are so lovely they elicit gasps. Both playwright and director are Broadway newcomers, and their Thoughts of a Colored Man is a marvel from start to finish.

Throughout the course of its taut 70 minutes, the remarkable Is This A Room, opening tonight at Broadway's Lyceum Theatre, prompts a steady, gut-churning stream of 'what ifs' as audiences do exactly what whistleblower Reality Winner did during her 2017 FBI interrogation: We second-guess, we attempt to predict, we consider and reconsider every angle, we panic.

Lifting every last detail from Tyler Perry's recipe book, this family comedy is brimming with stock characters, creaky jokes, tired references and easy, feel-good sermonizing. Bickering relatives speechifying with exposition and put-downs? Family secrets guessable even by the most distant outsider? Characters that can be summed up in one-word signifiers? Check, check and check.

Lifting every last detail from Tyler Perry's recipe book, this family comedy is brimming with stock characters, creaky jokes, tired references and easy, feel-good sermonizing. Bickering relatives speechifying with exposition and put-downs? Family secrets guessable even by the most distant outsider? Characters that can be summed up in one-word signifiers? Check, check and check.

Ruben Santiago-Hudson summons a world of ghosts, or at least as many as will fill a couple boarding houses and a lifetime of gratitude, in his affectionate Lackawanna Blues, the one-man autobiographical tour through a childhood made golden by the presence of a strong and loving guardian angel.

Introducing themselves by both name and fate - 'Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived!', they chant-sing - the wives, dressed in glitzy, geometric dresses that recall the space-glam flourishes of Lady Marmalade-era LaBelle, take the stage in a non-stop high-energy avalanche of sound. While each of the wives is given a contemporary musical niche - Catherine of Aragon hits the Beyonce-Shakira notes, Jane Seymour goes full Adele, Katherine Howard blends Britney Spears with Ariana Grande - the numbers, distinct and in quick succession, mesh like the colors of a nicely aged tapestry.