Helen Shaw — Theater Critic

He's written one quite wonderful sequence, though, in which he shows us how he arranged 'Night and Day.' He walks us through the way that specific lyrics (a reference to a clock) make him choose instrumentation, and then, once he's chosen trumpets, how he decides between cup mutes and Harmon mutes. The projections show us how the notation changes, and the brass section behind him plays the heck out of the song in response. It's still all about ease - Connick tries singing the song in a couple of different keys, then chooses the one that 'doesn't make him work that hard.' But oh, the veil is down. We've seen the musicianship and care that all that relaxation requires, and it makes us melt a little further. We're in such good hands, after all.

You start out with the comfortable sensation that you've come to your umpteenth revival of the Charles Dickens classic, ready for some beloved old wine in a new bottle. But as playwright Jack Thorne's adaptation proceeds, that feeling becomes the creeping suspicion that it's not really liquor in there. Some weird and unnecessary process has taken place: The story's deep social concern has been shifted out of the way in favor of an unconvincing self-realization tale. The already high-sugar-content sentiment of the original dissolves into goo, boneless without its moral armature.

In The Inheritance, the first three and a half hours are so full that even the most chattering mind is overwhelmed. There's the speed and effervescence of the group scenes, then there's Toby-glittering and amazing in Burnap's hands, absent too much in the second half. It also contains an image so strong that it wrenches the door closed behind it. Part Two turns on individual concerns-it's preoccupied by love, addiction, and the playwright's meta-musings on creativity-which are important, but seem like small potatoes after that ascension into prophethood and group-consciousness. Our souls had been wracked; why were we now watching a soap opera? All through Part Two, I tried to be a Margaret, but I just couldn't do it. Lopez had gone too slack, and my memories of the first half began to populate the stage again. I started to picture lost men, walking across a lightning-lit landscape. I could almost see them, even though they haven't been with us for 30 years and more.

The impersonation itself isn't perfect. After a run of scenes speaking in Turner's distinctive voice, Warren sometimes sounds like she's lapsing into 'cartoon old lady' instead of Turner's sandy rasp. But who cares? It's never a barrier, and it's all forgotten the moment she sings. Director Phyllida Lloyd has built long, multiscene sequences in Tina that crash like waves, massive song after mammoth hit after monster performance. Warren doesn't bear up under them-she rises up and smashes down too. She's gigantic. She's tidal.

In order to enjoy the The Lightning Thief, a myth-filled musicalization of Rick Riordan's first Percy Jackson novel, you'll need to read the book. Many of the show's current attendees obviously have: Secondary characters get entrance applause. But while those young theatergoers can fill in any missing details from memory, the challenge of turning a YA bildungsroman full of epic battles and road trips and snake-haired monsters into a musical has overwhelmed the creative team. In staying faithful to the novel, they've wound up with a mess.

Why is there no drama here? Clearly, there were matters of life and death confronting these men. The choices Murdoch and his editor made 40 years ago-the race to the bottom, the destruction of journalistic ethics, the anti-immigrant rhetoric-still matter a great deal today. But although Graham labors hard to humanize Lamb with shadows of self-doubt, this psychological element is oversold and unconvincing, and we're left with a long show about a foregone conclusion.

First Bening combusts, then Walker goes up like a Roman candle, and ultimately Letts collapses in an avalanche of dust. There are other strong elements in these final sequences, particularly Hampton Fluker's performance as the weirdly childlike George-who has been deeply wronged by the Kellers but who wants to forgive them anyway, because it would let him pretend to be innocent again. His dazzled eyes reflect the central trio, staggered by their charisma and blinded to any flaws. Does All My Sons have failings? Never you mind. All you'll be able to remember is a family of giants falling one after the other, like a stand of redwoods crashing down.

The performance is itself an exercise in critical thinking. Schreck almost immediately goes 'over time' to talk about how the Constitution has both liberated and imprisoned women's bodies. She burrows into her own family's painful past of spousal abuse; in one section, about her grandma Betty, she has to read from notecards so that she can muscle through the text without crying. In two years of building the show, Schreck has crafted a powerful argument that uses everything at hand: legal analysis, a dive into history, a consuming rage at sexual-assault statistics and her own very personal reasoning. (There's a scary and hilarious audio recording of Supreme Court justices that's worth the price of admission.) When her own raw grief threatens to overwhelm her, she invites a young local debater-either Rosdely Ciprian or Thursday Williams-for a sparkling debate, which offers tangible hope for the future.

We don't get many ancient Greek tragedies on Broadway. Tastes have changed, and what we think of as dramatic has shifted into different patterns. So Christopher Demos-Brown's American Son seems like a play from another time. It basically consists of two-person arguments, interspersed with messenger speeches: Something has happened offstage, and we wait with the characters to find out what it is. The rhetoric is heavy-handed, the grief and fear are unremitting, the brushstrokes are asphalt-thick, and there's no subtlety in either the characterizations or the narrative structure. In other words, Demos-Brown hasn't written a particularly skillful modern drama. But when the fate of a nation was at stake, Euripides wrote plays like this too.