Jackson McHenry — Theater Critic

Williams’s cine-theatre is an interesting device, but what’s more compelling as a viewer is the way in which human desire and action gets distorted or revealed through these technical whirls. Use a video camera all you want, but wield it with intention. Don’t make the screen an end unto itself.

Dad Don’t Read This resolves, in many ways, but there’s an unfilled spot left at its center. Amid the warmth and humor of her portrait of teenagehood, Smith is touching on a cold and bracing thing. Sometimes, people, like pixels, can just flicker out.

In that ending, the play adopts a shrugging sophistry about the vagaries of real justice that disappoints, especially with so much talent on display. If you’re going to excavate a story this horrific, make a claim, have a thesis, tell us more than just “you can get away with a lot in America.” “So… what?” Holden–as-Baird asks his supervisor. “What are we doing here?” I wanted to know the same.

If there’s cleverness to the way Lindsay-Abaire keeps passing the buck of hypocrisy between the members of the neighborhood association, there’s also a pervading sense of decorum that limits how far the satire can go. Just as Elliot respects the importance of neighborhood serenity above all, Lindsay-Abaire and Leon aren’t going to put anything onstage that will truly turn off an audience.

If you respond to musical theater like a professor with a grading rubric, I can’t imagine you’d find fault with Schmigadoon! The show’s got love songs, patter songs, a few reprises, a soliloquy, and production numbers with hooky choruses guaranteed to stick in your head. There’s a big ensemble, elaborate costumes, a book that winks at every Rodgers and Hammerstein inconsistency that has ever bothered you, and, briefly, a dream ballet. It’s exuberant, clever, eager to please, dexterously devised, and yet, with all that technique behind it, it lands in a place that’s awfully unambitious. Why does a love letter to the classic musical make the project of musical theater feel so damn small?

Even in the harshest descriptions of the violence and almost unbelievably cruel twists of fate that Yarris endured (the DNA testing keeps getting accidentally mucked up), Brody lends him a vital indomitable spark. But he’s so enamored with that bravado, that of his character and his own, that he only glancingly finds a dimension beyond it. He was, as is the play itself, repeating a good story but not providing deeper insight, giving us a mythology without a deeper sense of a man.

But to The Jellicle Ball’s credit, that tension is also fundamentally what the show is about, more so than just singing cats. And that is a great subject for a musical. As in the original, we spend much of the production watching the fate of Grizabella, the once-fabulous Glamour Cat now sidelined and made to pace the side of the stage. Here, played by “Tempress” Chasity Moore, initially with a busted face of makeup, Grizabella is a former house mother whom the other cats offer passing respect and pity but are unable to give much help. That is, however, until she is recognized by a newbie and given her chance to return to the stage, delivering The Jellicle Ball’s most extravagant ballroom-plus-Broadway moment as she belts “Memory” full-out: key change! Costume change! A fusillade of spotlights! The gesture is sentimental, showy, and, in all its glitz, moving in a way that haunts me. The terms may be compromised, and the moment may be brief. But given any kind of stage, some talent, and enough attitude, a person can transform into whatever real thing they want to be.

The Unknown could use more of that menace. Throughout the production, and especially once Elliott’s circumstances start to get weird, director Leigh Silverman hits the audience with sudden, silent horror-film punctuation marks. The lights (by Cha See) will drop out and isolate Hayes in a beam of dread as he arrives at some further unsteadying discovery about his stalker. But those swerves into ominousness don’t linger, and Silverman and Hayes don’t keep us submerged for long.

Picture Andrea Martin on a bicycle. You’re already giggling. Now imagine her surrounded by ensemble members who are holding handlebars, dancing as if cycling, pedaling away in place while singing about how she loves to swoop, she loves to swerve, she loves each highway and byway and curve. She’s also wearing a cloak and gesticulating wildly. First question: What could be more immediately funny? Second: Does this song have anything to do with the plot of High Spirits? Not really, although you might make the old fish-and-a-bicycle joke about how little this musical needs this number, but the absurdity is absolutely essential. Why come see a show like this if not for the joy of watching a ham on wheels? It’s musical comedy.

As you grow, you do the hard work of parting with the vision of the world you had in your head. That’s a dynamic repeated throughout Two Strangers. Dougal is learning to give up both his idealized image of a foreign city and the relationship with his father he thinks he could re-ignite during this trip, and Robin learns to abandon the myth she’s telling herself about her own failure. When the show’s creators zero in on those feelings, something a lot more specific and wistful than a love story between two strangers, the piece comes alive. If only it stayed there.

There are plenty of talented folks around Hanks who have been roped into making this, and plenty of people in the audience who might be paying a lot to see him, but they don’t factor into the equation. This thing is entirely about admiring its star. Hey, at least there are some fun hats.

A Conversion on the Road to Calabasas: Meet the Cartozians Portrait of Jackson McHenry By Jackson McHenry, a Vulture critic covering theater, film, and TV 10:00 P.M. save Comment From 'Meet the Cartozians,' at the Pershing Square Signature Center. From Meet the Cartozians, at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Photo: Julieta Cervantes “I’m going home,” an Armenian American matriarch announces as she storms out of a reality-TV taping in Glendale, clutching her oversize purse. “To Calabasas.” It’s a typically sharp laugh line from the playwright Talene Monahon, delivered with the level of comedic precision that only someone like Andrea Martin could attain—she really knows how to revel in the comedy of a hard consonant—that cuts quick and cleanly, and then, like a lot of Meet the Cartozians, leaves a throbbing, unclotted wound. The pain all has to do with that tricky final word, “home,” which recurs throughout Monahon’s time-hopping drama of assimilation. In the play’s second act, Martin’s character, Rose, shows up to discuss her culture with other Armenians at a taping of a Christmas episode of a show that is, in all but name, Keeping Up With the Kardashians. (In the universe of the play, the reality show bears the play’s title.) They bicker, of course. Monahon is doing an enjoyable send-up of SoCal superficiality, and of course Rose, a wealthy traditionalist, lives in the same comfortable enclave as Kris Jenner. But how much of a home is Calabasas? It’s a refuge, of a sort, and a place of comfort for Rose. I’m sure she loves the Erewhon. But is it where she belongs, where she wants to belong, or somewhere that even wants her? By that point in Meet the Cartozians, we’ve already spent an act with Martin and the rest of the cast in a different era, pondering the same questions 100 years earlier in a different register. Before she gets to the reality-TV satire, Monahon kicks off her play with a stouter, though often still bitingly funny, historical reenactment. In Portland in the early 1920s, an Armenian family, the Cartozians, meet with an American lawyer, Wallace McCamant (Will Brill), after the patriarch, Tatos (Nael Nacer), has been denied citizenship, seemingly based on the color of his skin. His brother Aram, he reminds McCamant, was naturalized a few years earlier without issue. They are assembling their arguments for what would become a real and landmark court case, United States v. Cartozian, with far-reaching implications for those fleeing the Armenian genocide. The surreal terms of American immigration law as it stood at the time were that “free white persons of good character” could be naturalized, as well as those of African descent. This left out most other groups, and although challenges from Japanese and Indian immigrants had failed by the time of the Cartozian case, the real McCamant successfully argued that Armenians were white enough in culture and looks to meet the definition. (A photo of Cartozian and his daughters looking as assimilated as possible was published in a local paper as a crucial out-of-court argument.) As Brill’s McCamant explains this onstage, the matriarch of the Cartozian family, Markrid, also played by Martin, happily netting three-pointer physical comedy in the way she wields desserts, interjects in unsubtitled Armenian, “Asīga īnč əsél é, ‘white person’?” Or, What does this mean, “white person”? You understand the question without translation, though you’d be hard pressed, then or now, to answer her with precision. In the first act, Monahon and her director David Cromer infuse the absurdity of that legal case into the weft of the play, allowing the facts of history to shimmer with dark humor. Nacer’s excellent as the dutiful and serious Tatos, committed to winning his case no matter what, even as his children differ about what should be sacrificed to perform sufficient whiteness. His hard-charging son, Vahan, played with heat by Raffi Barsoumian, is happy to leave traditions behind to get ahead, while their gentler daughter, Hazel, played with grace by Tamara Sevunts, holds onto the old ways. Monahon’s dialogue can overwhelm you with jargon—you have the sense that she has research to get off her chest, and she wants you to learn it all too—but she also has an impressive gift for knowing how to keep flipping and reversing her characters’ expectations. Vahan, the most committed to Americanization, has the darkest and hairiest complexion, and would be least able to provide a convincingly European-ish mien in court. Hazel, meanwhile, is developing a dangerous fondness for McCamant. Then, even as they pursue the white whale of Americanization, the Cartozians are banking on exoticism. They advertise their oriental carpet business with the image of a camel. “Are there camels in Armenia?” asks McCamant, terrified that this will leave people thinking that they’re Arab “Mohammadens,” rather than the upstanding Christians he’s portraying. “Don’t be crazy!” Vahan tells him. A century later, in Monahon’s bracing second act, you’ll notice Martin’s Rose quoting an “old Armenian saying” about a camel. By then, the going exchange rate for whiteness, so to speak, has shifted. The members of Cartozians’s cast have all been shuffled into new roles. Everyone’s sitting on a couch in front of gold wine glasses while wearing gaudy renditions of traditional outfits—the on-point costumes are by Enver Chakartash—ready to raise awareness about Armenian history by talking with “The Celebrity” about her own culture, if she ever makes it out of hair and makeup. Brill, in his groove as another kind of wheedling Irish American observer, is now the harried camera operator apologizing for the delays. Monahon indulges in some satire of Hollywood vapidness, and the empty chair where her Kim Kardashian figure would sit is marked by the presence of a Stanley cup and a salad; she also turns toward legal debate. One of the invitees to the couch, a prim poet and activist played by Susan Pourfar, tries to use her time on camera to discuss a push for a subcategory for Armenian-Americans among the newly defined census classification of Middle Eastern and North Africans, which she insists would allow for better data collection. (Gavin Newsom recently signed a California bill doing so into law.) Rose, on the other hand, insists that being grouped with white people, the result of the hard battle we’ve seen in the first act, should not be given up. In this argument, just as the previous court case, there’s another flurry of starchy terms—Monahon has a lot of fun making the characters swat around acronyms like they’re playing pickleball—undergirded by an awareness of the fickle yet immense power that racial classification holds in America. The play’s double-casting underlines the strange in-and-outness of assimilation. (Tatiana Kahvegian’s set encourages double vision, too; the walls of her realistic rendering of the Cartozians’ 1920s home are pushed back and to the sides of the stage but still visible, a carapace around the brightly-lit 2020s “reality.”) Barsoumian, once the ambitious too-dark Vahan, is now a reedy university professor griping about being overlooked for tenure because he says he was seen as another white man. He also says the things about “The Celebrity” that everyone else is too polite to mention. When he’s set off, he revs himself into a blistering tirade about how she’s made a career by playing with both sides of whiteness: “You wanna talk about the fucking self-tanner???” Were Monahon merely to continue on with that back-and-forth, the second act of Meet the Cartozians might just be an enjoyable flame war, but she knows how to let the bottom drop out. A breathless stretch of humor, in the play, will crest and then be punctuated by a dark turn, or, in a mode at which her director Cromer excels, a haunting and meditative stillness. Though the Cartozians prefer to bury their memories, Monahon does not let her audience forget that this family was fleeing near-complete elimination. Before we see Pourfar as that activist poet, we see her as a character deeply touched by the trauma of genocide. This family must find a way to belong in America, because, as Nacer’s Tatos tries to put it to his lawyer, “There is no longer actually Armenia. It is no longer a place.” One hundred years later, Nacer is a soft-spoken community leader named Robert who, in a touching grace note, holds genuine fondness for The Celebrity. (Monahon has also given him a significant first name.) Nacer allows those memories of Tatos to resonate through his remarkably subtle and engaging performance, the characters almost merging in homesickness. Robert, as it turns out, has been back to Armenia, made a trip that Tatos might not have been able to fathom. The play leaves the question open: Was that a journey forward, or back? Toward home, or away from it?

Admittedly, they all get short shrift in the text itself, though Greenberg, to his credit, tries to even things out by amping up the fantastical Provençal spirit of the village, with sprigs of lavender laid out on tables in Jason Sherwood’s set and members of the ensemble playing pétanque before the action begins. His supporting cast, too, puts in the effort toward filling out their lightly sketched characters — Nathan Lee Graham is particularly good as the lascivious mayor, and I’ll never complain about seeing Judy Kuhn. Greenberg is banking on atmosphere, which gets him some of the way toward a version of The Baker’s Wife that works. Getting there might require a page-one rewrite. I doubt it would be worth the effort. But hey, the show’s lumpy moral does, finally, come into view: Geneviève and Aimable’s relationship is worth fighting for. In marriage, as in yeast doughs, a little warmth helps things rise.

These works allow some self-congratulation, both for the play’s hammering on of a hard nut, and for your ticket purchase and bearing witness to an important work, but there’s so much showmanship involved that it dilutes the effect. The handsome British issue drama doesn’t trust you to be interested in a subject on its own terms, so like a good governess, it’ll provide more and more sugar to make the medicine go down. At a certain point, there’s so much sucrose in the recipe, you wonder if the health benefits are gone.

While Timbers and O’Keefe have said they considered this revival with an eye to the show’s underlying message—essentially, don’t deny your inner beast—the idea comes across much better through gleeful nonsense than through tidiness. By the finale, we’ve moved past “be yourself” inspiration, anyway. In the grand tradition of Little Shop and Carrie, Bat Boy gives into its guignol instincts and provides us with a lot of blood. Thank god. Don’t we all, deep down, just want to rip the heads off stuffed animals?

In Little Bear Ridge Road, Metcalf racks up the hits with ease, though the production feels more like watching home run derby than a full game. I couldn’t escape the nagging sensation, as I watched Samuel D. Hunter’s drama unfold, that the circumstances were all arrayed too perfectly for a Metcalf showcase, that they’re too custom-fitted to her skills—that there were diminishing returns to watching her do only what she does best. Is it wrong to wish for more uncertainty, more risk, the presence of another team on the field? Metcalf and her director and frequent collaborator Joe Mantello commissioned this play from Samuel D. Hunter, whose work tends toward exquisite miniatures of his home state of Idaho, often with emotionally desperate queer men at their center.

Both times I’ve seen the play—Off Broadway this spring, now returning in a larger space on Broadway—I’ve felt unprepared for the emotional wallop it lands, the way that Wohl’s work becomes cosmically immense without leaving that gym basement. I think it gets there by staying so focused on the quietly radical thing these women are doing with each other, and which Wohl is making the rest of the audience engage in. Maybe you should be scared, because listening could change you too.

The fantasy of endless space is what matters, a great chimeric promise, this production understands, that both sustains the nation and goes unfulfilled. Even America has an end. Ragtime, with its thudding sentimentality, is not a truly great musical, but deBessonet has enough finesse to convince you that it might come close.

The treacle, in any case, obscures noble intentions. The Trump administration has, especially in the last week, been motive-hunting for any reason to vilify queer and trans people, and so it’s impressive to see a nonprofit risk whatever paltry amount of federal funding it might still receive. Saturday Church, however, may be so intent on keeping things positive and palatable — to the imagined center-left white cis ticket buyer, one imagines — that it never shifts into other gears.

Two and a half decades after its sun-soaked pop fantasy arrived in England, Mamma Mia! lives on in an eternal end of history — specifically, the 1990s. The boomers get older, the world grows unstable (remember, this show premiered on Broadway in October 2001). But Mamma Mia! does not change. When you head into the Winter Garden Theatre this summer, Donna Sheridan, the expat hotel manager whose daughter has decided to invite her three possible fathers to her wedding, is still blithely refusing to learn what the internet is. She is still someone who was cavorting around in the 1970s with her girl group. There are still perky young men in wetsuits to flirt with and brooding old flames who followed those rising late-20th-century market tides from the counterculture into banking, architecture, and travel writing. But if the show’s universe refuses to age, that doesn’t mean the musical itself can’t tarnish. The title still carries that big old exclamation point, but the fantasy is more than a little long in the tooth. Maybe it should be styled with a question mark, or just an ellipsis. Mamma mia … they sure do sing a bunch of ABBA songs.

This production tries to hide its rough edges and half-hearted staging with a callow appeal to nostalgia for something that isn’t even very old yet. (The show has a teen edition available for licensing at high schools, which helps explain why so many young people in the audience know the lyrics.) But the portrait of bloody popularity politics within Heathers is what makes the story cling to you, and it’s less clearly reckoned with in this production.

Trophy Boys, according to Mattana’s notes in her script, is meant to make its way from caricature to naturalism—midway through the play’s one act, she reveals a secret about something bad one of the boys may have done—but it’s not a tonal shift that she and Taymor successfully effect. Even by the end of the play, I still felt as if I were watching paper characters conjured for the sake of a clean argument in a debate, in the way that you do high-school physics calculations without accounting for air resistance.

All of it is solid context for the world that these two characters occupy, but most of it is told and not felt. As their mismatched date barrels onward, David starts to worry that Tally is making a show of her own empathy by being interested in him, and you start to worry that Rosebrock, as a playwright, is doing the same. It’s not that Tally and David’s charged cross-interrogation of each other isn’t a compelling situation, but Rosebrock keeps commenting on it from the outside—especially via Tally’s monologues that eddy like Substack posts—instead of enacting it.

The play comes most alive in action. Shayok Misha Chowdhury, glasslike and precise in his work in Public Obscenities, directs Tannahill’s drama like it takes place in the murky dark room of a club. He’s guided McCrea and Kumar into a gently knowing intimacy, both in unspoken communications they make with each other under George’s parents’ scrutiny and in their richly expressive sex scenes. The audience’s phones are placed in Yondr pouches for good reason.

That’s too bad, because Smart is more than capable of a subtler gradation of performance. I’d love to see her in material that supports and challenges her, preferably alongside some other actors. But even alone, she’s got a quicksilver sense of timing, and she can guide her audience through sudden shifts between the broadly comic — often too broad, in this case, as Wax puts a lot of weight on Izzy’s drawling one-liners — and the violent.