Jackson McHenry — Theater Critic

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The familiarity of it all is crucial to the thing. Given the myth, or the number of times you might’ve seen it brought to life, you know the final turn is coming, though that never makes it any less painful. And it’s bracing when Ruhl tightens her lens and has the play become suddenly specific — those instructions Eurydice’s father recites, for instance, direct you to her own grandparents’ former home. For all its whimsy, the play centers on something hard and insoluble: that we’ll lose each other, from one generation to the next, and that we’ll always come back to thinking of the dead, and wishing we listened more.

Its humans are a lot less interesting than its god, but it relies on them to generate its plot. That’s no offense to Scott, who sings well and is charming enough to hold the stage. It’s more that, outside of its portrayal of Nadira, the show’s book... is made up of a series of generic complications... This makes Goddess less a musical about a goddess and more ‘What if Fiorello! were about Zohran Mamdani?’

The energy verges from electric to manic, in a way that makes you wonder Is Jonathan Groff telling us that he would like to die mid-performance? All right, that’s an exaggeration, but it does move the question of what a star gets out of entertaining, and what an audience gets out of receiving that performance, right to the center of the show, more so than the specific biography of Darin himself. It’s like Prospero at the end of The Tempest turning to the audience to be, finally, released by their applause—if Prospero were wearing a tuxedo and crooning “Beyond the Sea.” Still, as you from crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgence set him free. Cue the megamix.

Smash is tragically afraid of being bad - and worse, it wants to be respectable. Funnily enough, back in Smash’s open workshops last year, the show ended in a major character’s death. That is, to be clear, an insane way to end a musical comedy. It’s also way more compelling than the ending the Smash creative team has put onstage after all the rewrites, one that risks nothing.

Old Friends stretches to two and a half hours, counting an intermission, which is both way too long and woefully incomplete. You can’t take offense at the concept — it accomplishes exactly what it aims to do, which is to remind you that Sondheim wrote some really great songs — but you do start to fantasize about it all slowing down and just committing to the dramatic frames that contained them.

Jacobs-Jenkins has already piled other developments on his plate. In the second act, stretching across a long dark and winter night—maybe the Hayes simply re-upped their lease on the snow machine from Cult of Love—he doles out more family secrets: pills, affair allegations, a gun (hi, Chekhov!). These intensify things toward melodrama but prove harder for both the actors and the play itself to metabolize. (There’s barely space for a whole other thread involving neurodivergence.) It’s only when the playwright has already brought the action to its conclusion that Jacobs-Jenkins gets most comfortable. In a long coda between Nazareth and Solomon, he reckons with faith, beekeeping, solitude, and purpose itself (the play’s title is in part a reference to Adolph Reed’s book on Jackson’s presidential campaign). There, themes previously constricted by plot flow more freely, as if Jacobs-Jenkins is getting to a backlog of notes after the fact.

The aim, in focusing on Larson’s offcuts, may be to deepen your understanding of the composer, though Tepper and Simpkins don’t veer far out of the realm of fandom. You’ll find an insert in your program with the names and short histories of the 18 songs that Tepper and Simpkins have assembled into The Jonathan Larson Project. But the show itself goes by without much of a lesson plan from the stage, flowing between songs without introduction or editorializing. I kept peering down in the dark trying to work out the origin of each song as it was performed. That structure maintains some momentum, though it puts the show’s aims in opposition. Are we here to learn more about Larson or simply to laud him? (The latter, mostly.)

The in-group actresses are serviceably solid in their parts—Frøseth appears least comfortable, playing a character that is also least well-defined—and then Lester cannonballs into the action with a gift of a role that she can play as broad and angsty as she likes. Wilma’s the kind of tumbleweed of unresolved emotion that, in my time, used to be nicknamed a “campus celebrity,” hurtling her way through campus yelling about how she hasn’t slept in days while also making her business everyone else’s, and vice versa. Lester takes the assignment and runs with it, cavorting around the stage in a DIY outfit that anticipates the style of Chappell Roan (the on-point costumes are by Michelle J. Li) while nailing the non sequiturs that Margolin hands her, like, “I want to be a painter… and a Democrat.”

Yet Dakar 2000 doesn’t accelerate from there. Joseph works additively, tacking on new ideas about Dina and Boubs’s dynamic, then explores them incompletely. Dina’s backstory, for instance, involves the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Tanzania in 1998. She’s become obsessed with the threat of Islamic terror and her own quest for revenge. But because Joseph has placed his drama at such a specific historical spot — a year before 9/11 — it’s as if it’s hermetically sealed. He can only hint at how Dina’s perspective would soon become the standard posture of American diplomacy.

In this production, Jeff Croiter’s lighting focuses a spotlight on each actor as they get their big moment. Elliot may have been aiming for a feeling of immediacy with that choice, but double-underlining those speeches makes them each feel like more of an exercise. This may be a recurring problem with revivals of Shepard, as my colleague Sara Holdren noted with the last Curse go-round. Actors might love the cachet of trying to bull-ride a canonical work, but they’re not prepared for just how difficult a play like this is.

To delve into that sort of darkness more might be upsetting, and potentially less brand-friendly for Universal, but the surface level-focus of Death Becomes Her kept gnawing at me. It also stalls the show’s second act. Once you have Madeline and Helen taking swings at each other—and yes, shovel combat is never not funny—the production has little new territory to cover, thematically or emotionally. The plot barrels on as the enthusiasm wanes, from both the audience and the performances. Sieber’s character, the most obvious voice for a grounding rebuttal to Helen and Madeline’s obsession with eternal youth, has a solo that’s too silly by half, a duet with a talking paint can. Stuck in the mode of camp exuberance, Gattelli powers through the rest of the action by means of a chase sequence (echoes of Some Like It Hot, though not Nicholaw-level precise) toward an anticlimactic finale. As on film, Helen and Madeline end up as allies, each dependent on the other to patch up her body. They cruise, forever youthful, toward eternity, making fun of other people’s funeral services. They leave us with a wink and meta-joke, a song about how they’ll never have an ending, but if they did, it might go a little like this … The conceit’s cleverly nipped and tucked, the work of fine theatrical plastic surgery, hard to dislike and ultimately—as a medical examiner might say of these women—without a heartbeat.

If there are occasional glimmers that Elf has more going on than meets the eye, this production has done its best to convince you to grow up and stop believing in anything less than cold commercial logic. The show ends with its own flight of the DeLorean, this time with Santa’s sleigh and a ton of foam snow shot directly toward your seats. If it achieves a sense of spectacle, it’s only by way of brute force. I had to wipe a lot of crud off my glasses frames.

If there are occasional glimmers that Elf has more going on than meets the eye, this production has done its best to convince you to grow up and stop believing in anything less than cold commercial logic. The show ends with its own flight of the DeLorean, this time with Santa’s sleigh and a ton of foam snow shot directly toward your seats. If it achieves a sense of spectacle, it’s only by way of brute force. I had to wipe a lot of crud off my glasses frames.