Jackson McHenry — Theater Critic

Caution is inevitable when presenting work about your own family. (The real Charlie is very much alive and saw the play in previews.) But Haddad and Sharron can verge toward the too gentle, adding caveats to painful moments with eddying bits of self-awareness, in which characters interrupt Haddad, insisting they don’t want to relive their own trauma, have rewrites. That’s a playwright’s wrestling match that, as my colleague Sara Holdren noted recently, doesn’t need an audience. Either give us that unflattering scene or don’t. You have to be willing to light the fuse of your Buddenbrooks or Long Day’s Journey Into Night, walk away, and live with the ensuing Thanksgiving-table explosions.

Slam Frank tends to function best when it’s doing its own version of Forbidden Broadway, full of in-jokes, Patti LuPone references, and let’s-put-on-a-show spirit. Sam Lafarge, the director, is fond of sending up Jamie Lloyd — the show-within-a-show’s director must’ve loved Sunset Blvd., given the number of cameras involved — and peppers his staging with Easter eggs for an eager Off Broadway audience, from the beginner-level use of a Dear Evan Hansen polo to the more advanced quoting of niche theater TikToks. I was most won over by Slam Frank when it became un-selfconsciously sillier: a montage of powerful women that alternates between respected figures like Oprah and infamous scammers, pornstars, and killers before just projecting one photo of Anne Hathaway after another; a moment where a character announces they are non-binary, which “falls under the trans umbrella,” and they unfurl an actual prop umbrella. It’s lame. It’s dumb. It’s good musical comedy.

So if The Holes has a great hook and a strong engine, why does it often feel as if it is idling in place? As good as Friedlich is at crafting a superstructure of pitch and theme, he’s less sure about filling in the details of character and pacing. His director, Michael Herwitz, who also worked with Friedlich on Job, directs the play with an eye toward naturalism, as when the play starts with a slow, simmering encounter between Weiler’s Joey and Coleman’s big-city interloper on a cold winter night, or when Joey and Martha go back and forth talking about the bar’s good old days.

Jones is, as she’s proven throughout her career, immensely adept at capturing a multitude of personae with quick shifts of posture, timbre, and accent, though in this case, a sameness comes with recounting so much recent political conversation. Often, it feels as if you’re hearing a chorus ported in directly from X, or perhaps Bluesky.

Nyong’o is playing A until September 26, after which the role will pass among a succession of other actresses: Phillipa Soo, Susannah Flood, Hari Nef, Edie Falco, and Whitney White. (The previous run of Pre-Existing Condition did the same, with Tatiana Maslany, Julia Chan, Deirdre O’Connell, Tavi Gevinson, and Dizzia herself in the lead.) Though that format makes it difficult to offer a judgment of how the production will play in future weeks, the awareness that A will be portrayed through new actresses in new iterations gives Pre-Existing Condition another point of open-ended resonance.

Watching a haunting play out in the moment around a thousand strangers gives the thing an odd and interesting warmth. We’re cheering on the technique, even in the midst of our dread. Paranormal Activity, the play, builds to the sort of slick and grisly finale that would be just right for the end of a cruel horror movie, but that lands awkwardly onstage. I could feel the people around me wanting a bit more sweetness. Or maybe just more of an excuse to applaud.

Cohen will bend any rule for the sake of a good joke, even and especially at the level of songwriting: Her lyrics break scansion more often than they keep it, and her melodies doodle aimlessly in order to contain her pileup of observations. The joke contained in the jokes often is that the songs are funny because they are formless, but they are indeed still formless. A touch of structure or a clean rhyme scheme would go a long way.

To crib the half-hearted compliment that you give people after a high-school production, it looks like everyone onstage is having fun, but this time I mean it. Maybe they’ve been infected by Nettles’s own enthusiasm, but for whatever reason, they’re selling Nettles’s writing as if it’s as finely stitched as the doublets they’re wearing. I’ll give a special shout-out to Ramirez, who’s playing a heel who falls somewhere between Iago and Gaston. Ramirez is a mincing, cackling, commedia dell’arte delight, and he has the audience eating out of his hand. He’s so locked into his villainous bandwidth that I am ready to forgive the fact that, every fifth scene or so, Giulia brings up the fact that his character is supposed to be building an aqueduct to save Palermo from a drought and subsequently forgets about it.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.