Helen Shaw — Theater Critic

Lynn has a long catalog of excellent plays, and given another whack, he might find a more active approach to Wilder’s archive. In 2011, he and the Rude Mechs company brought “The Method Gun” to New York, and I still remember its audacity — at one point, the group performed incidental lines from Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” while dodging swinging pendulums. That spirit of danger is exactly what’s missing in this lugubrious Emporium. There might be a terror to adapting a giant like Williams or Wilder, but the answer ain’t reverence: You’ve got to get in there and dance.

If intensity is what you want, then Bedlam’s electrifying D.I.Y. “Othello” at the West End Theater will better fit your needs: Shakespeare’s thriller moves faster than a freight train with broken brakes; I spent so long on the edge of my seat, I actually wrecked my back.

The show makes its own journey of return in Debbie Allen’s revival, which opened on Saturday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, nearly four decades after its Broadway premiere at the same theater, in 1988. This production doesn’t always travel smoothly — some of Allen’s staging elements war with one another. A few younger members of the ensemble, crucial to the play’s novelistic ebb and flow, are also still finding their footing. But Wilson’s language rushes past and over every barrier.

*CRITIC'S PICK* So, damn it, Janet, I’m glad that the show hasn’t entirely worked out how to do deal with the audience. The show can’t just be a sacred relic — it needs a bit of destabilizing, a tussle between the stage and the seats. Roundabout’s professionalism and coy signage can’t entirely keep the fans in check, which gives the revival itself a sense that it might spin off its axis. What will it be like the night you go? Dratch will probably say something hysterically quelling; Evans will probably knock your stockings off. But who can say? The point of “Rocky Horror” is to lose control. C’mon, let’s do it again.

*CRITIC'S PICK* This psychological delicacy comes as no surprise: Lindsay-Abaire wrote one of our most persuasive dramas on social collision, “Good People,” which explores the two ends of the class struggle in New England. I may have quibbles with the way his plot here unfolds, particularly the way it incorporates Luz, whose circumstances must be manipulated in unrealistic ways. But all boulevard comedies lean on coincidence, and I guess that applies even when the boulevard is a residential esplanade. (I laughed while I watched “The Balusters”; I only grumbled while thinking about it hours later.)

Still, the father-daughter pair does, at least, perform charmingly together. Cheadle and Edebiri are both down-to-earth and unshowy in their clear affection for each other, and they’re warmly believable as parent and child. Cheadle is laid back to the point of liquidity; he’s the only star I’ve ever seen get entrance applause for lying on a love-seat. Edebiri, though, is in another league. At several points, she manages a crucial stage trick: She can seem to shrink, collapsing inward, while the audience registers an expanding sense of presence. It will serve her beautifully in other roles.

At first glance, Ferrentino’s play seems like a chance to see the pair in a shadowy, troubling romance, one unfolding between a man languishing on death row in Pennsylvania, Nick (Brody), and a sympathetic volunteer advocate, Jacki (Thompson). It’s an unlikely place for a love story, but this production makes their intimate isolation its whole atmosphere: Arnulfo Maldonado’s simple set of a wall of cell doors is sunk in ink-black gloom by the lighting designer Heather Gilbert; the deft director David Cromer encourages us to believe we are watching one 110-minute-long waking dream.

*CRITIC'S PICK* Now at the Winter Garden Theater, “Death of a Salesman” has returned to Broadway, yet again in triumph. We haven’t exactly had a chance to miss it; four years ago, Wendell Pierce and Sharon D Clarke were playing Willy and Linda Loman only a few blocks away. Still, we don’t begrudge a few Hamlets every season. You’re telling me Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf were available? And the director Joe Mantello? To quote Willy’s older brother, Ben, played here by a sharklike Jonathan Cake: “One must go in to fetch a diamond out.”

*CRITIC'S PICK* For the 40 or so minutes before it comes fully into itself, “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” is merely wonderful. The theme is: Youth. The category is: Fabulous. The directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, along with the dramaturg Josephine Kearns and the choreographer Omari Wiles, have revived and reappraised (not to say rescued) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1981 musical, “Cats,” by shifting it out of the wasteland of London’s alleyways and into New York’s queer ballroom scene.

*CRITIC'S PICK* In Rosenblatt’s play, he is a BFG (Big Fractious Giant): The real man was 6-foot-6, while Lithgow is 6-foot-3. The director Nicholas Hytner keeps Dahl’s height in reserve, almost as if it’s a special effect. When the curtain rises, Lithgow is seated. He stands only after an eight-page scene at his dining-room work table, in which Dahl banters tetchily with his British publisher Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey) and fiancée, Liccy (Rachael Stirling), about contractual this and unimportant that.

*CRITIC'S PICK* There were other reasons to feel queasy at City Center, too. Certain original structural issues — “The Wild Party” runs two hours without an intermission — have been left in place, for instance. But the assembled cast is incredible, and the show fits elegantly around Jasmine Amy Rogers, who adjusts her pixie sweetness from “Boop! The Musical” into a toxic, elfin mischief.

CRITIC'S PICK - And something more is happening here, too. Radcliffe makes himself extraordinarily available to us — his fondness for the audience radiates outward from wherever he is onstage. When participants make tiny errors (say, Mrs. Patterson’s joke is a dud), he laughs with unguarded delight. He thanks those yelling out their brilliant things with a courtly nod. Radcliffe doesn’t just do away with the fourth wall, he manages to expand his magical aren’t-people-wonderful optimism to include the whole orchestra, mezzanine and balcony. (His “Merrily” co-star and friend Jonathan Groff achieves a similar area-of-effect spell in “Just in Time.”)

*CRITIC'S PICK* That’s not just a morbid nature speaking. Shawn’s play, a set of interlinked monologues, is written for and from the bardo. Gregory’s production is monkishly simple: Four actors sit in chairs, facing a dimly lit audience, occasionally sipping from their mugs, telling us the stories of their lives and deaths. Gregory keeps them relaxed, but, as three hours sail by, they tell us so much — is this what you think about, when, say, your friends bury you in a ritual grave on Halloween night?

The director Leigh Silverman treats the set (designed by Studio Bent) like a noir soundstage, filling it with hard-edge shadows (Cha See designed the lights) and banks of fog-like smoke. The primary quality, though, is sound. “The Unknown” is hypnotic, which is another way of saying that its pleasures are very quiet ones. I felt like I was listening to radio drama on a rainy night, or as if someone were reading me a familiar story, but I’d forgotten the ending. Waller-Bridge’s dreamy music sounds as though it’s coming from another room, and it’s only when Cale deploys certain haptic details — Hayes describes the spare keys to Elliott’s apartment, stuck with a magnet to his fridge — that the evening takes on momentary weight.

Unfortunately, Sturridge gives a counterintuitive performance, one so at odds with the play’s romance and the performances around him that it sinks the ship. O’Neill describes the coal stoker, in one of his many page-filling stage directions, as a “powerful, broad-chested six-footer . . . in the full power of his heavy-muscled, immense strength.” The trouble isn’t that Sturridge, who has a quicksilver, elven quality, has been cast against type; it’s that he interprets the bewildered, love-stunned lummox as a pallid, twitchy creep, crawling on his haunches like Caliban and wriggling as if he’s got an eel down his trousers. (The night I saw it, Mat wouldn’t stop fumbling with his pants—Anna, I thought, get out.) Kail emphasizes this odd disjunction by stacking the mostly unspeaking ensemble with bruisers, their rolled sleeves straining over yoked shoulders. They, alongside similarly capable-looking stagehands, haul elements of Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis’s set around, totin’ platforms and heftin’ tables. Maybe Kail is unconcerned with realism and has asked Sturridge to play Mat’s inner self, the frail and contorting one he keeps hidden. But then what’s with all the stevedores from central casting?

Twenty years have done something wonderful to McCraney’s play. It now feels more like an assured masterpiece than the first work of a prodigy; here, polished to a deep lustre, is the finest exertion of McCraney’s talents, elevated by a cast with staggering gifts. Holland’s self-effacing tiredness as Ogun is deliberately unshowy, and, while the actor’s name appears above the title in the program, he cedes the limelight to both Mays, who gives the graceful, flirtatious performance of a lifetime, and to iLongwe, who grows more radiant and funny as Oshoosi’s frustration with his brother sharpens. A certain inelegant hastiness in the plot has been resolved by treating the monologues almost as arias, giving them each an equal sense of grandeur, like the relentless finale of a fireworks display.

Thankfully, the extended gestation also means that Rashad's production comes to New York from Chicago with much of its superb Steppenwolf cast intact. (Only Young and Jackson are new additions.) Every actor gets an aria-like monologue, which throws off the play's rhythm, but at least each one is a bravura showpiece. Perhaps that's where the real promise of Purpose in the idea that somehow every member of a family (or of a movement) can be sustained by our attention, rather than our worship. So much precious energy is wasted on building people into icons and tearing them down. Can there be a form of recognition that avoids celebrity? Steppenwolf's own ensemble model shows the way.

Levingston and Rauch’s melding of “Cats” and the queer ballroom scene is so effortless that it seems to have required only the slightest alterations. The synthesizer groove has been juiced up with some new club beats by Trevor Holder, the directors have added a plotlet about the naughty thief Macavity (Antwayn Hopper) getting rumbled by the cops, and the entire number “Growltiger’s Last Stand,” in which the titular tom hates “cats of foreign name and race,” has been tastefully deleted. The true difference, though, lies in the piece’s shift from commercialized kitsch to camp sincerity.

Lizzie and Sally may be the core duo, but Kirkwood offers her secondary characters the best material. Susannah Perkins is wonderful as Mary, one of several comic-relief characters, notable for her dim-witted sweetness (she “does not know which glove belongs on which hand,” Lizzie says); Ann Harada shines as a lusty, menopausal mischief-maker, who takes great joy in humiliating the humorless bailiff. Sarah (Hannah Cabell) is a mute jury member who forces herself to speak after years of silence; her hoarse confession that she has seen a cloven-hoofed woman, spitting on blackberries to make them sour, is the dense, dark heart of “The Welkin.” Sarah has, until her outburst, seemed affable and sane, and when she tells the others not only that she met a devil-woman but that the demon delivered Sarah’s baby, the women all accept her testimony as though it makes perfect sense. It’s like the moment in a village-gone-bad thriller, say, “Midsommar” or “The Wicker Man,” when you realize that everybody’s in on it. A sweet face is no guarantee that the mind behind it isn’t wriggling like a bag of snakes.

Like any play transferring to Broadway from an Off Broadway success, this “Prayer” is a counterproposal to its earlier, smaller, and more intimate iteration. In some practical ways—for instance, the recasting of Patrick with Edwards, whose discomfort with his narrator duties hobbles the play from the start—the competition is weighted toward the Off Broadway version. That production, though, now feels like a relic from another time, before the recent Hamas attacks and the war in Gaza. The play’s ideas about the utility of fear sound particularly strange in this changed air. The production itself seems more tentative than it was before: Harmon has removed from the script a final recounting of several hate crimes that will occur after 2016, perhaps so that the audience will not think about other, more recent events. The room in 2022 where I first saw “Prayer” is lost now. The play was built for it, and sometimes you can’t go home.

What makes a larger impact, though, is a giddy sense of movement: the show’s director, Alex Timbers, and its superb choreographer, Annie-B Parson, whisk the performers across the space’s moving platforms, and even up into catwalks along the balcony, sometimes just to instruct the audience when and how to boogie. Justin Townsend’s wall-of-color lights, David Korins’s mammoth night-club set, and Clint Ramos’s vivid costumes create a setting that both sends up the real Imelda’s passion for Studio 54 glitz and aims to have its own hedonistic fun. (The show’s unlikely mix of morality play and G-rated rave felt less freighted, at the Public, before 2022 and the ascent of Imelda’s son, Bongbong Marcos, to the Presidency of the Philippines.)

The director of 'Topdog,' Kenny Leon-who was nominated for a Tony for directing the sensitive 2020 revival of 'A Soldier's Play'-emphasizes the dialogue's overheard quality, the shoot-the-shit ease that the brothers have together. His work with the actors is light but sure. Abdul-Mateen-swaggering, buoyant, easily offended-reacts behind the beat, maintaining his optimism for a minute after bad news comes through. Hawkins, on the other hand, stays just ahead of the moment, his shoulders crumpling slightly, like a card that's been thumbed too much, even when the brothers seem to be getting along. They are both wonderful, but Hawkins gives a sly, peekaboo performance that rolls up next to you like a grenade.

Almost tenderly, then, the production drifting around Craig touches him only lightly. It's an unusually bare staging for Broadway, stuffed with ideas but stripped clean of folderol. For the majority of the company, director Sam Gold has settled on a kind of still-in-rehearsal vibe, with big events whirling up out of an empty theater lit dimly by ghost light. Who is a witch and who is a laird in any single moment seems fluid - appropriately for a cast hamstrung repeatedly by COVID setbacks, anyone might play anyone. In contrast, Craig and Ruth Negga, as Lady Macbeth, are incontrovertibly stars, gliding across the space like slow, gleaming peacocks.

At breathtaking speed, for an hour and 45 minutes, Loop continues whirling on like this: the Big Ideas and the petty ones waltzing around in Jackson's profane, hilarious, metamusical carousel. It's less vicariously exhausting than it was Off Broadway, perhaps because the company no longer wrecks itself physically with every performance - but it's still furious, both with the world and itself. The shock of that sharp emotion strikes like a lance. Especially in the Lyceum Theater: It's a red-velvet-and-gilt balloon, and Jackson makes it go pop.

The director Lileana Blain-Cruz has cast the Antrobuses as a Black family, so playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins makes some necessary, feather-light adjustments to the text. A racist murder in the second act is no longer racist, for instance, and in the third act, in the procession of the thinkers, Jacobs-Jenkins has added bell hooks to the roster. Conceptually, I'm on board. Experientially, though, the thing is a roller coaster, and I don't mean the light-up one that designer Adam Rigg has placed on a New Jersey boardwalk. Blain-Cruz meets Wilder's maximalism with her own, his gravity with her seriousness, but the writer's comedy and the director's don't coincide. Beans in particular gets caught in the gap. She is being asked to play Sabina's broad stuff so broadly - in the ill-shaped Vivian Beaumont, which tends to swallow up every gesture - that we only realize what a glittering star she is when she drops the act for one of her many asides.