Helen Shaw — Theater Critic

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.

Some of Feldstein's assets do make the trip over from film: She's winningly fresh; she gives great 'bumble;' she has beautiful eyes the size of hubcaps, which roll and twinkle and flirt. In the first act, when Brice is an inexperienced gal blustering her way into the big time, Feldstein exudes a nice mix of hard-charging ambition and surprised giddiness when she succeeds. But in song after song, Feldstein's voice lets her down. Piercing and unpleasant when it gets any higher than her chest, fading and pitchy when it descends even a few steps, it's simply not a sound you expect to hear on Broadway. Styne and lyricist Bob Merrill wrote some stunners for Funny Girl, including 'People' and 'Don't Rain on my Parade.' The latter song sits in Feldstein's narrow comfort range, and so she blasts it out - particularly its final note - with foghorn force (if not phrasing). Everything else, though, goes sour.

The nasty-twisty plot works best in the first half, when its goads are sharpest. McDonagh needs speed and an unbalanced audience to keep his pressures high, but the last third of his play wobbles woozily, like a coaster that's gone rolling off the bar. Some of this is the fault of director Matthew Dunster's production, though it looks absolutely gorgeous (Anna Fleischle designed both brown set and brown costumes) and sounds incredible (Ian Dickinson can be thanked for many of the jump-scare transitions). Casting is everything in a show so reliant on its two leads, and here, as was the case when it played downtown, the balance isn't right.

I realize that doesn't make it sound like a fun 100 minutes in the theater. And Brokaw's production does show a few cracks: The glowing screens (designed by Rachel Hauck) are unhandsome; David Van Tieghem's sound design does not always amplify the actors sufficiently. But the chance to see these performers doing such incandescent work should shoulder all such concerns aside. See it for Parker, see it for Morse. Drive is also - and I'm sorry this is such an uncool way to put it - the truth. We have been surrounded in recent months by variously hysterical and inaccurate claims from politicians and blowhards about what counts as child endangerment. Vogel, with all her postmodern tricks, is offering a straight-forward account of how these things happen. A girl is in peril, and although the people around her all sense it, they actively push her further into harm.

I read The Minutes back in the early days of the shutdown, and I remember the moment when I began to think our real absurdities outstripped Letts's fictional ones. His touch is so perfect and light when he's doing realism that reality obliged and caught up to him. Knowing what he does now, what play would he write? Would that blunt ending be the same? I won't believe it. You can't just leave your satire lying around for two years; you have to measure it down to the minute.

Judged as a showcase, American Buffalo works beautifully. Rockwell has exactly the right tools to crack the Mamet safe. His half-whine, half-growl voice sings in what Todd London evocatively called the writer's 'fricative riffs' - unsurprisingly, given how well he's suited to other writers of masculine lyric like Martin McDonagh. Fishburne, judging his rhythms to the nanosecond, grips the play and captains it, and it's lucky that the close quarters of Circle in the Square allow you to see the details of his casual command. Criss, too, does fine work as the play's slow-minded straight man, though he finds fewer details in his character than the other two men.

Too much rests on Messing's shoulders, and it's simply the wrong play for her gifts. She has some odd ideas about playing young - her 17-year-old Ernestine has the physicality of a stomping kindergartner - and during the play's long middle she's inert, unable to strike sparks from her family. Even in moments of heightened emotion, Messing seems disconnected from those around her, twinkling at her children but not quite meeting their eyes. She's strongest when Ernestine gets into her nineties, because Messing's faraway gaze and abstracted air begin to take on poignancy. What is she seeing? What can she hear? Maybe there's some other life clamoring for her attention. Or maybe her mind is finally up there amid the constellation of lifetime things. Perhaps she's finding her place in the expanding universe, traveling farther and faster away.

Which leads you immediately to the thought - why are they so naked? We can do wonders with frosted glass these days, but Take Me Out insists that the actors be as close to us as possible (almost on the downstage lip) and that nothing obscure their full-frontality. Greenberg's deftly constructed play is full of dramaturgical distractions to keep us off balance, and the eye-catching choice should immediately raise your suspicions. Is this meant to be erotic? Even playfully so? No. Greenberg's play is unsexy in its bones. Take out the soap-and-towel stuff, and you're left with ideas that - give or take a few dozen slurs - you could take to church.

There is one good thing about the way Paradise Square has been developed into the ground: The ensemble members have had plenty of time to figure out their parts. Allen Moyer's tall, skeletal tenement set gives the two-dozen-strong cast plenty of places to stand, so director Moisés Kaufman often puts them on various levels, staring down at the floor of the bar. If the repetitive elements pall - you will start out amazed by the dancers, then those returns will diminish - you could always cast your eyes up, into the shadows. I had several favorites among the supernumeraries, including a guy who brought his baby to watch the competition and a mandolin player who fell asleep. Appropriately for a show about a neighborhood, the chorus gives us a sense of lives and passions moving just out of the field of focus.

The third play climaxes with various comic lazzi that Simon could have borrowed from Goldoni, if there were seventh-floor hotel rooms in 18th-century Venice. It's a bummer when it finally turns back into a Simon relationship play, with some limp observations about these youth today. Is this a flaw in the original, or in this revival? It's tricky to work out, since so much depends on rhythm. In all three plays, Hickey and his actors have found many little moments for physical comedy - Muriel sometimes kicks her legs like a colt trying to get to its feet, Roy clearly has a twingey back - but these jolts are rarely enough to create a sustained energy. The same is true for the evening as a whole. I know you can't wander around rewriting Neil Simon, but maybe they could have just ... skipped the middle one-act? That one's a cold cocktail frankfurter, I'll tell you that.

Certainly it feels like a glitzy, age-of-musicals move to cast Sutton Foster and Hugh Jackman; it's increasingly rare to see a pair of stage stars of this megawattage sing and dance together. Their celebrity and undeniable presence seem to have overcome any little concerns about fissures between the performers and their characters - there are places where Foster's mezzo strains in the high stuff and Jackman goes sour. But director Jerry Zaks solves that by bringing 'em front-and-center, to stand (or dance) on the stage lip and radiate Golden Age glamor.

The production, too, rests on Rashad's presence. Dirden is good (as he always is) at showing thought-in-action: You can see doubts shudder through his body even when his back is turned. The audience and the Friedman Theatre, though, need an operatic figure to focus all that space - and Rashad is it. Rashad's Faye wears baggy jeans and a shlumpy sweatshirt, and when she walks, she favors her back, like a woman who has done manual labor for a long time. But then, when Rashad turns her head suddenly, she looks like a queen. At its root, Skeleton Crew is about finding dignity - both in work and in the relationships between people - and it's useful, therefore, to have a person onstage who can gather majesty around her like a shawl. Rashad might seem to stop being Faye in these moments, but it doesn't break the show. She takes on the spirit of the underlying play, becoming something like the personification of labor itself. She turns into something larger and more commanding than the merely individual drama around her, and all of Broadway turns to look.

Physically, the show has two core comic tools. The first is what Rob McClure can do with his Doubtfire get-up. He plays a broom like a guitar! He sets fire to his rubber bosom! He breakdances in a fitnesswear parade for Miranda's new line! McClure himself is an antic type, elfin and prone to sudden grace and funny squawks: Imagine Kermit the Frog with incredible vocal control. Putting him inside a bulky padded costume means that we're seeing the two layers spinning in opposite directions: In the show's best dance number - Mrs. Doubtfire learns to cook from a parade of tap-dancing YouTube chefs - McClure hikes up his dress and you see the frenzied duck-on-a-pond paddle that's going on beneath his skirt. The second comic tool is more broadly applicable: farce.

Sweat asks a bleak question about whether work can sustain us; Clyde's offers a hopeful if fantastical answer. Many of the things that usually drive a play are absent in Clyde's. It's unclear about its stakes, and I couldn't always follow the way action leads to reaction - but as the play lifts off into its final minutes, it enters a realm where conventional dramaturgy doesn't apply. These characters aren't heading for dramatic resolution. They're aiming for a place, reached via sensual delight, of reconnection and reawakening.

Speaking of day drinking, the best Diana can hope for is that its tackiness will transform, through the magic of mess-addicted theatergoers, into a sort of warmly accepted kitsch. The show's social-media account has been encouraging people to have wine beforehand, cheering 'here for a good time not a long time!' There's plenty of evidence that the show's creators Joe DiPietro and David Bryan are going for a kind of late-night extended-SNL-sketch vibe.

Eighteen years ago, the musical had a little more ... hope in it. As Kushner has noted, the story has always been Caroline's tragedy, but in 2003, it used Emmie and Jackie and even Noah to point at possibilities of the non-tragic to come. The musical still ends the same way, but in the audience, we know the U.S. continues to display its own immobility, its own dogged resistance to change. Longhurst's production is therefore brave enough not to brighten, not even at the curtain call. The libretto does for a while pretend there's a kind of slantwise equivalence between the bereaved Noah and the exhausted Caroline, but in 'Lot's Wife,' the show has admitted which grief is the unrecoverable one. 'I'm gonna slam that iron down on my heart,' Caroline cries. 'Gonna slam that iron down on my throat, gonna slam that iron down on my sex.' The sound in the room grows huge and unbearable as a woman gives up on her future, releasing energy like an atom ripping apart. The show can't recover from this intensity; certainly, we cannot. Whatever comes after 'Lot's Wife,' whatever little grace notes the production gives to Emmie and Noah, we stay frozen in that song's nuclear blast.

Despite its well-honed beauty (Paul Toben sends a perfect sunset through those curtains), it's hard to measure Dana H. as a theatrical object. You can say O'Connell's performance is piercing, since it's dazzling on an artistic level, but there's also a quality of witness in what she's doing, which moves it beyond evaluation. The 'story' too has suspense, motion, revelation, exposition-all the components that critics like to tick off with their little pencils-though I came away staggered, finding that mode of critique very thin. Yet the truth isn't the whole story here either: This is not just a podcast or a dressed-up episode of This American Life. Waters, Hnath and O'Connell have made something intensely theatrical that reaches devastating emotional heights. All their distancing strategies have the paradoxical effect of drawing us close. We see the mask, but it makes us even more aware that somewhere, reality is crying out beneath it.

Signs play an important part in the episodic play Thoughts of a Colored Man. For one thing, the show itself was a sign: Thoughts was the first new show to put up a marquee during the COVID shutdown. In February, no one knew exactly how or when an opening would happen, so the display was a big, bold, crocus-yellow promise that the theater was going to return. The play also takes place on a sign - Robert Brill's set is a gigantic billboard. Behind the performers on the Golden Theatre's stage is a huge white rectangle with the word COLORED blocked out in gray-on-white letters. As the characters visit various locations in their neighborhood in Brooklyn, the performers wander around and on the billboard's metal framework.

Signs play an important part in the episodic play Thoughts of a Colored Man. For one thing, the show itself was a sign: Thoughts was the first new show to put up a marquee during the COVID shutdown. In February, no one knew exactly how or when an opening would happen, so the display was a big, bold, crocus-yellow promise that the theater was going to return. The play also takes place on a sign - Robert Brill's set is a gigantic billboard. Behind the performers on the Golden Theatre's stage is a huge white rectangle with the word COLORED blocked out in gray-on-white letters. As the characters visit various locations in their neighborhood in Brooklyn, the performers wander around and on the billboard's metal framework.

Is This a Room dwells in a nebulous other-region, even now that it has moved uptown to Broadway. The 75-minute thriller is conducted in suspended time: You don't leave the show so much as you wake from it, shaking off its foggy, clinging, chilly mood. Satter and her company have built a highly choreographed event around a found text, the verbatim transcript (with redactions) of Winner's arrest at her home in 2017. Satter hasn't changed a single word, revealing the exquisite way lowercase-r reality can 'write' a text. On the page, the unscripted lines already throb with subtext and sing with terrifying overtones.

Going to Chicken & Biscuits does feel like being fed by loving but overweening relatives. There's a bit too much of it - the published running time notwithstanding, this show lasts more than two hours with no intermission - but it's a meal full of comfort dishes, difficulties resolved, and love requited. It turns the nearly in-the-round space at Circle in the Square into a church with stained-glass windows behind the audience and the great Norm Lewis in the pulpit.

The point of Six is its escapism. If you live at the intersection of its interests and can recognize a Spice Girls or Beyoncé reference ('C'mon, ladies, let's get in Reformation'), your animal heart will have no choice but to jump up and down with the beat. Even the sheer brightness of Six operates as color therapy. Emma Bailey's set is a simple rock stage backed by outlines of Gothic windows covered in LEDs that change and pulse in cheery display. Tim Deiling's lights are red and purple and gold, bathing your hungry pores. The color pours down your eye holes right into your serotonin receptors - all that warmth without heat triggers something deep in your lizard brain that says, 'Vacation.' So let the cares of this world roll away. Heck, let the cares of 16th-century England dissolve. This is one liberation in which you don't have to lift a finger. Queens are doing it for themselves.

In moving to Broadway, Nwandu has, while redrafting, given the script a new ending. Nwandu was raised in (and left) the evangelical church, and a sermonizing energy is certainly at work inside the play. It exhorts and exposits; it kindles the faithful. In changing the conclusion, though, she seems to be deliberately acting more as pastor than as preacher, taking care of herself, her cast, and her audience by eliding the earlier version's most hopeless moments. Some of these new, final scenes do still feel a bit improvisational. The flawlessness of the earlier sections falls away, and we can almost hear the 'let's try this?' of the rehearsal room. But I think the awkwardness of this happier ending might actually be the point.

McPherson's main dramaturgical problem here is magnitude. The size of the show is wrong, the size of the stories, the scenes, everything. It's simultaneously too long and too short-at times, so many people are getting introduced, it feels like a pilot episode, setting up the machinery for a ten-episode season. We know McPherson, when undistracted by songs, has one of the great senses of theatrical balance: He wrote plays like The Weir and The Night Alive, so perfect that they seem to continue on even after they're over, like a bicycle still wheeling along with the rider gone. That equilibrium abandons him in this, his first musical-he hasn't worked out how to get into songs gracefully, nor how to disguise that repetitive, get-to-the-next-number structure.

Dominated by an IMAX-size projection wall showing all manner of video - a live feed of actors on- or backstage, pre-shot film of New York streets at night - the production seems perversely gifted at finding the exact mode that will interfere with each moment and intention. There are certainly a few fine elements in the show, and Maria (Shereen Pimentel) and Tony (Isaac Powell) - clear, sweet-voiced, unaffected - do their iconic parts proud. Powell's superb Tony vibrates with energy and puppyish optimism; his rendition of 'Maria' is revelatory, a show-and-heart-stopper. If Pimentel's Maria seems less able to escape the show's occasional sabotage, her soprano is keenly lovely, a silvery fretwork above the rest of the ensemble's brassy, swaggering noise.