Jackson McHenry — Theater Critic

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 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.”

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.)

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.

A lack of clear intention is, itself, perhaps a common bio-musical trope too. Even when shaded with a firmer angle, the overriding message behind most of these productions tends to be, simply, that a great musician was great. Squire, to his credit (it’s easy to blame a book writer for everything in a musical; the flaw here seems deeper), does push toward commentary, but what he comes out with are really four books for four different shows. I’d much rather have this thing cut down to size and watch a show just about Louis’s early days in Chicago and the financial predation of the jazz scene, or one just about him in Hollywood dealing with racist producers. Film biopics often fare better when they narrow their focus: Think of Pablo Larraín carving depths from slivers of a life in Jackie or Spencer. Or, take the model of something like Jelly’s Last Jam and go whole-hog with a concept like putting your lead on trial in the afterlife — that recent Encores! production does, unfortunately for A Wonderful World, hang in comparison to this jazz-icon musical. If we all know the melody these shows always follow, it’s long past time for some variations. But in this case, for an open run on Broadway, we get the whole shebang played as straight as possible. Don’t drop your sheet music. Improvisation is not so welcome here.

The first iteration of Teeth, in the higher-brow context of Playwrights Horizons, tied itself in ideological knots as it barreled into its back half. Jackson and Jacobs have Dawn, here endowed with eldritch powers that infect the rest of Teeth’s female ensemble, become all too powerful. Teeth builds to a big, bloody, apocalyptic climax — again, very much in the mode of Carrie and especially Little Shop — and as it gets there, suddenly inserts a reminder that revenge taken to any extreme is bad. Beware a feminocracy, it says, as much as a patriarchy. It’s a fair conclusion, if also the sort of thing that can read as a cop-out. In this go-round, Benson has placed a heavier emphasis on the thrill of Dawn’s rise to power, and she floors it, coherence be damned. During Dawn’s tense falling-out with Loftin’s character, she’s wearing a Taylor Swift T-shirt that reads “A LOT GOING ON AT THE MOMENT.” Then there’s all that blood and the hail of severed genitalia. All contribute to a feeling that we’re all sailing Thelma & Louise–style over the cliff of bad taste and reveling in it as we go down. The momentum gets the audience to the place where the recrimination may sting more pointedly. You wore the poncho. You cheered for the blood. You’ve got teeth in you too.

But what do you get when you stand back and let the piece’s contradictions speak? A Rorschach Ragtime that means many things at once, just take your pick. The agnosticism, I’m guessing, is due in no small part to the performance schedule. Everyone in the audience knows there’s an election on Tuesday, after which this production will, by force of context, simply have to become either tragic or triumphant for the final week of its run. Just as in American Idol, the public decides! Soon, we’ll all learn whether this country was a good or bad idea. That hangs a lot of weight on electoral politics, and as with that teenybopper Romeo & Juliet and the star-packed Our Town, puts this Ragtime in the frustrating position of deriving gravitas from this upcoming moment in American history while, in fact, saying very little about it. If I had to name what I imagine to be the one underlying theme in Ragtime, it’s that there’s always, in America, new music playing, and a rush to forget the past and sing along. The future is one intoxicating melody. But if it’s all you pay attention to, you miss the sound of what’s already playing now.

As with many a project that’s been in development for over a decade, especially a new musical from new writers, you can sense the Lazours’ mad rush to get everything they want onto the page initially, as well as the toothiness that sets in after too many rounds of workshops and revisions (We Live in Cairo was at ART back in 2019 and has moved through a bevy of other developmental programs). Their book, in the first act, strains as it gets these characters on their feet while also offering the audience a primer on 2010s Egyptian politics; often, they default to rote exposition, which Magar has the actors deliver dutifully. We’re told the differences between the characters’ backgrounds and political stances — the two brothers are Coptic Christians, the others are generally secular Muslims, and Karim befriends an acolyte, Hassan (Drew Elhamalawy), whose family members are Muslim Brotherhood — in bursts of dialogue where you might hope for the tension to lie in action or music. The songs, some of which made it onto an album released during the pandemic, contain real highs, like an a cappella number that introduces the second act, though there are also darlings that express a feeling well but don’t service the drama in situ.

The structural gambit lends short, cheap pieces like Deep History, which runs to 70 minutes, a level of expansiveness they might not be able to achieve otherwise and sends you out the door with a grabby level of surprise and some tantalizing open questions. (And, in this case, a needle drop.) But then you think, How about we examine those open questions? “So how can we reconcile clear-headedness with an appropriate sense of immediacy?” “If baseline survival at all costs isn’t the right metric, what is?” Art need not have the answers here, but you’d like Finnigan to spend a little more time in the process of synthesis, spelunking around in the dark pondering what they might be.

McNeal’s woozy ruminations about art and technology might strike with more force if the actual drama around them had more tensile strength. The human dynamics Akhtar and Sher hang all of this on never get past cliché: McNeal confronts a cadre of women, including Martin’s assistant (Saisha Talwar), a horrifyingly underprepared magazine journalist (Brittany Bellizeare), and a former New York Times books editor who is pretty obviously based on Pamela Paul (Melora Hardin). In his exchanges with them, they get to do little except absorb his rants about everything from the work of Annie Ernaux to Harvey Weinstein. If McNeal wants to tell us that a great artist — specifically a great man, in this case — is some unique force in the universe, it requires a more finely crafted rendering of that man. But on the opposite end, if the play wants to suggest AI could offer an alternative to that figure that’s equal in stature? Well, there’s an issue of rendering there, too.

Even if you offer a condemnation of the American Dream, the selling point of each is the fun stuff that the Devil offers: the surface-level Jazz Age aesthetics, the thrill of a good party. Avarice is hard to lampoon when you’re also selling themed drinks. Since Gatsby’s copyright has expired, I was surprised that Life and Trust didn’t take the opportunity to write those characters into a few scenes, too — though you might consider J.G. Conwell’s initials.

The first time I saw the play, crammed like a sardine right up near the performers at the SoHo Playhouse, the final moments left me with a sickly feeling like the space had filled with poison gas. I’m all for feel-bad theater, but if it’s not precisely concocted, you quickly develop an immunity. A few days after seeing Job then, the poison had passed through me, and I found myself not thinking much about the drama at all. Seeing Job again on Broadway, I didn’t experience the same queasiness when the twist arrived. Maybe the experience suffered because I didn’t have the same physical proximity to the performers. But I also sensed that the play, like a particular kind of internet edgelord, was throwing out shock value to protect itself from having to dig deeper.

N/A, by contrast, is like being stuck at dinner with a relative you wish would please talk about anything else (do N and A have any thoughts on the weather?). It’s claustrophobic, and ultimately boring; the structure traps the performers in limited caricatures. Holland Taylor specializes in playing toughened older women whether as a professor in Legally Blonde or Texas governor Ann Richards. She applies all her steel to N, throwing out one-liners with hefty torque: She can get a laugh just by pursing her lips and silently offering A a square of Ghirardelli chocolate in mid-conversation. That approach tends to chop Ana Villafañe, who plays A, right up. Villafañe’s done musicals (she was Gloria Estefan in On Your Feet!) and her angle on A turns the congresswoman into something of a flustered theater kid. I’m not sure that’s true of the actual AOC, who’s shown herself to be cannier and more of a deal-maker (at times, frustrating her own base) than the starry-eyed depiction you get here. But it’s hard to put the blame on the performer when she’s unsupported by the script, and from director Diane Paulus, who allows Taylor to showboat freely.

I wish I could say that Titanic, shorn of all its special effects, is a musical with great bones just waiting to be rediscovered, but that turns out not to be the case. The result is more of a pageant — occasionally stirring, but more often than not idling in stasis. The lack of propulsion may begin with Stone’s book, which takes a dutifully thorough, emotionally uncompelling approach to the tragedy.

As Phyllis, Lange has to carry the play, which she manages to do in fits and starts. What she can do is cast a spell. In a wonderful, wordless sequence when Phyllis has been abandoned by both Carl and Martha, she putters around an empty apartment, devoid of purpose but retaining the posture of a woman raised to be watched, finding humor and subtle tragedy in the way she slathers hot sauce on a microwaved dinner.

That gesture is typical of the understated yet gutting quality of this production of Mary Jane, which cuts the quotidian open to get to the bone of the existential.

Moon, to her credit, grounds all this wherever she can. She’s a great discovery, a virtuoso who also appears surprised and delighted by her own talent. In Dede Ayite’s throwback ’90s costumes — so much Tommy Hilfiger, such giant pants — Moon has both swagger and that crucial touch of naïveté that makes Ali feel like a real and contradictory teenage girl, even when the plot swerves around her. Her voice, for all its power, has a sandpaper edge, a texture that makes her stand out when so many young singers sound cleanly uniform. If only the material written for her could be as distinctive.