Jackson McHenry — Theater Critic

The closest the revival gets is during Dorothy’s big journey back to Kansas as she sings “Home.” There, thankfully, the focus stays on the performance: The backdrop shifts to a black sky punctuated by stars, and Williams has Lewis illuminated by a spotlight belting her heart out from center stage. I felt my heart rising as Lewis sang, but even then the spell was incomplete. The Wiz’s sound design, which had been glitchy for much of the show, was askew, at least from my vantage point, and Lewis struggled to make herself heard above the orchestra. The effect was, as with so much of the revival, of missing out on a moment that could have been great, if only given more care and fine tuning.

The score is built around Jelly Roll Morton’s own music — with lyrics by Susan Birkenhead and some additional music by Luther Henderson — and it serves as a showcase for Morton’s genius as well as the talents of this production’s starry cast. Jason Michael Webb, the guest musical director, fills the theater with sound and energy, making the first act feel like a series of dramatic crescendos, each outdoing the last.

That tone is a good fit for a shorter run at Encores!, even if this is a case where you might root against a Broadway transfer, given that the raggedy charm that works for a short-run engagement might not be enough to justify a Broadway ticket, and the antics themselves could well wear out a cast. It wears even by Mattress’s own second act, where the convolutions of the plot get arcane and the jokes repeat.

Mann’s production does best when, in the third act, Shannon and Hannah spend a dark night of the soul together sipping poppy tea after he’s had a breakdown. She describes her few brief and lonely sexual encounters with men, and he opens up more fully about his sense of spiritual abandonment. They also talk a lot, yes, about that trapped iguana. In the blue night light, surrounded by the rusted metal and creaky wood of Beowulf Borritt’s set, there’s an air of mutual confession and healing—two burnouts finding some kind of peace in the ashes. But where’s the immolation that got them there? There are two long acts before you hit that moment, and they are tough, slow going without a flame.

Like a lot of recent solo shows (see also Rachel Bloom), Walk on Through runs aground when it tries to accommodate the emotional impact of the pandemic, as Creel and director Linda Goodrich arrive at an overdramatic curtain-pulling depiction of the Met’s shutdown of the museum. But once Creel does head back to the museum, he encounters a new visitor, and the two of them discuss their differing interpretations of an Edward Hopper painting of the view from the Williamsburg Bridge. One sees a hopeful daydreamer looking out that window, another someone crushed by the loneliness of the city. “We’re both looking at the same thing, but we’re each seeing it totally differently,” Creel muses. That’s one of those little observations that might seem trite, but it does carry a lot with it. You go to an exhibition, or a musical, to encounter someone else’s view of the world, but you yourself can only see it through your own little window. And your view, in turn, can become its own layer of interpretation, passed off to someone else.

But in its best moments, Spamalot knows its business, and that’s show business, baby. Its smart move was to translate Grail’s cheeky meta-ness into a new medium. The movie knew it was a movie, the musical knows it’s a musical, and it goes coconuts to the wall to send up and celebrate that fact. In the Broadway landscape of 2023, Spamalot turns out to be oddly well positioned to lure people in with the promise of the quotably familiar, then blast them in the face with a confetti cannon full of THEATER (and literal confetti).

What’s the use of frivolity in an unstable time? That’s the question asked, in form and content, by Harmony, a light curio of a musical that comes with a riptide of political anxiety. The songs are by Barry Manilow; the setting is Germany in the years before World War II; the tonal incongruity you might deduce from that juxtaposition is, mostly, the point. Harmony takes for its subject the Comedian Harmonists, a sextet of singers formed in Berlin at the end of the 1920s, who toured the world until the Nazi regime turned on the group. The show aims to re-create the crew’s winningly sophomoric onstage antics and try to thread them into a large political history, and it tends to be better when addressing the former than the later, though its by-the-book history hits, at least glancingly, at compelling unease.

A play starring actors like John Turturro and Elizabeth Marvel, based on an acclaimed — and, more importantly, filthy — novel, should not make only a small impression. But the mystery of the New Group’s adaptation of Sabbath’s Theater is that it struggles to shock you or even to stick in your memory. The production is a faithful-to-a-fault adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel, by Turturro and the author Ariel Levy, that gets stuck in translation. It’s the story of a chronically, self-destructively passionate man, but its writers can’t figure out how to render that fire onstage. The raw materials are there, but the spark is lacking.

This cast can pull off Adjmi’s knotty dialogue scenes, and they’re all remarkable musicians, able to jam in perfect synchronization and (as the plot often demands) total discord. Brill, so nervy and and raw as Astrov in Uncle Vanya this summer, is almost frayed to pieces as Reg, able to contort his body into postures that range from unsettling to pathetically funny. Across from him, Canfield makes Holly that much more careful and precise—you saw that same quality in her assistant on Succession, and also in the behind-the-eyes mysteries of Fefu and Her Friends. Stack draws on an element of Monty Python-ish good humor (Simon is, unsurprisingly, a big fan of their comedy) but is able to downshift into brawler mode at any moment. Pecinka and Pidgeon, together, get the lived-in savagery of a long relationship, allowing Peter and Diana to be as sweet as they are cruel to each other.

In The Refuge Plays, Nathan Alan Davis has put together a three-part drama full of engaging small gestures that fail to add up. The drama is Davis’s follow-up after arriving in New York in 2016 with Nat Turner in Jerusalem, and it’s admirably ambitious; this production directed by Patricia McGregor runs three hours and 29 minutes. That’s not nearly as long as some epics, but certainly longer than your average nonprofit subscription theater program (The Refuge Plays is a co-production from New York Theatre Workshop and the Roundabout), especially at a time when most are cutting back. It’s got an intriguing hook: The trilogy begins more or less in the present with a Black family in a house hidden in the woods of Southern Illinois and then steps back one generation with each installment. But as it telescopes into the past, the series falls short of coherence, wandering away from itself and losing the audience.

Seen that way, resisting Death’s demands is also about resisting letting the trauma plot overtake your own comedic style just for the sake of dramatic heft. On the one hand, I did side with Death, in that, though it may be cruel to the performer, for real catharsis to arrive you want something blunter and more exposed than this. On the other hand, Bloom is so good in her default mode, with a glint in her eye and dozens of curse words in her mouth, that she wins you over to her helter-skelter view of the world. She wins Death himself over too, or at least manages to get him to sing along with her about the cum trees.

That extra-textural dramatic irony gnaws at The Shark Is Broken, which has less integrity as a play than as a thoroughly researched dress-up presentation for a history-of-film class. Ian Shaw, no great surprise, strongly resembles his father, and Brightman and Donnell have both been made up into ringers for Dreyfuss and Scheider. (Praise to Duncan Henderson’s costumes and to the wigs by Campbell Young Associates.) Everyone is meticulously re-creating those familiar voices — Brightman in particular zips right through Dreyfuss’s manic, cokie rants with gusto — and acting out his character’s well-known on-set habits. But although the actors are raring to go, the staging is cramped, with director Guy Masterson running out of ways to shuffle them around a boat that, yes, we know, is quite claustrophobic. (That’s surely the intent, but it makes the play seem smaller than it should.) More pressingly, the writing, intent on remaining lightly comic and knowing, keeps delivering what is familiar and unchallenging. Donnell, in a nod to Scheider’s love of tanning, strips down in an awkwardly staged moment to sunbathe, drawing titters from the audience, a gesture where fan service and beefcake collide.

What Back to the Future does deliver instead of commentary on the original is a beat-by-beat translation of its set pieces. The DeLorean arrives onstage at the same time as Bart’s Doc, and actor and car split the entrance applause. When Marty gets inside and guns for 88 miles per hour, the screens around the stage blur behind him. (I felt right back in that Universal Studios amusement-park ride.) You’ll perhaps notice a V-shaped set of slats in the stage, ready to ignite behind the wheels of the car, and later on, the DeLorean soars into the air for its own “Defying Gravity” moment — turns out the flying cars are here. The stagecraft is well managed (Chris Fisher, of The Cursed Child, is credited with the illusions, while Finn Ross did the video design and Hugh Vanstone the lighting), but watching the climax, where Doc and Marty race to get everything set in time for lightning to strike, I kept noticing how much the musical nearly turned into a movie. The screens, which so dominate the set, provide for cuts between Doc and Marty, the score’s basically the one you know, and the actors are really there only to sit in a car and on a ledge and shout lines you know. When the ledge under Doc crumbles, that’s a screen too. If this is the future arriving on Broadway, it looks way too much like another medium’s past.

The most interesting thread of The Cottage involves Rustin’s trying to work against the knee-jerk sexism of the genre as Sylvia slowly discovers that her happiness shouldn’t depend on the men around her. Fittingly for the 1920s setting, Rustin even weaves in a few references to the women’s-suffrage movement. But because the characters, for the sake of the comedy, have already become so abstract, Rustin’s points remain abstract too. As is true of so much in the play, you can see the turn coming as soon as Rustin starts laying out hints about it. Sylvia’s burgeoning consciousness arrives just in time to help usher in a tidy resolution of the plot, one in which almost everything (marriages, rediscovered romances, property ownership) gets sorted out. Like a lot of The Cottage, it all fits together pleasantly and too neatly. You’d think, or hope, that upending the status quo would involve a bit more mess.

Thanks in part to their hard work, Here Lies Love is a great, unsettling time. The show originates with David Byrne, who conceived an album built around Imelda’s story with lyrics largely excerpted from her and other political figures’ interviews and speeches, laid juicy get-on-your-feet hooks devised in collaboration with Fatboy Slim. The resulting music is irresistible to a totalitarian degree. The title song references the phrase Imelda (still alive at 94) has said she wanted on her gravestone, and starts out with her diaphanous platitudes about her humble upbringings before it hits a chorus that hints at her megalomaniacal ambitions and practically begs everyone to sing along. The point, as elsewhere in the show, is to get the audience grooving with the synthy messaging of dictatorship, with enough moral dissonance to make your stomach churn as your feet keep moving—a that’s how they get you parable.

This is, as most audience members will know going in, a show about a Jewish comedian who ended up going to a white-nationalist meeting So why are we starting by imitating a zookeeper describing celebrity deaths in sign language? Because Edelman’s opening gambit reveals itself to be cannily constructed. He pulls the audience close with the self-deprecation and then destabilizes the dynamic. He turns things around and makes the show all about his need, as a comedian, to appease, which reacts nauseatingly when it comes in contact with Nazis. This is a crowd-pleasing, often hilarious show, with a time bomb labeled “Is it good that I am here making you laugh?” at its center.

If you run fast enough across Times Square, you might be able to see two Broadway takes on “Oops!… I Did It Again” in one evening. Given that Once Upon a One More Time follows those shows in this mini-genre (not to mention their sparkly, belty, much better fairy godmother Six), you might have reason to hope that it refines and improves upon the tropes. Instead, it’s reductive and pandering, hitting all the expected marks without any unique spark.

Three years of solitary writing time turns out to be productive. Seemingly every playwright produced lately has been thinking about the pandemic, as well as its accompanying loneliness, many different stabs at generational angst, dollops of horror, and addiction (more of those later this week). You see gestures and ideas repeated, many different attempts to get at similar feelings. Then you get to a play like The Comeuppance, which channels and condenses what’s been floating in the ether and brings it all to earth. Here’s a drama where Branden Jacobs-Jenkins both sums up and reconfigures the present moment.

I won’t try to explain what exactly is going on in the Grey House, both in order to avoid spoiling the plot and because I’m not entirely sure myself. (The production sent over a PDF explaining the lore to critics after they attended, which may be a sign that things aren’t entirely clear in the performance.) I’ll just say that Holloway inches toward a double-underlined, not exactly groundbreaking message about how men treat women, though the more the play tried to emphasize its insights, the less I bought into them. Things are better unspoken, as in a gory set piece near the end of the play that’s accompanied by some haunting music (heed the chilling credit of “a cappella arranger” Or Matias in your program) that’s stuck with me more than any of the direct exposition.

Then there’s that piano performance. The piece Hayes plays is, as it turns out, crucial to the plot, so I won’t get into it, but the way he plays it is more important than either the title or his skill (though yes, Sean Hayes can play the piano very well). He conveys depths in the way that Levant reluctantly slides back into his virtuosity over the course of the performance—a coiling resentment of and yet thrill at his own talent. The play, having hit its high point, wraps up quickly soon after, and it’s a letdown to return both Hayes and Oscar to earth. There’s a lesson in there: to understand performers, you have to see them in action, no amount of describing can substitute. But if you nail that re-creation, you can get at something deep about them. The playing’s the thing, to mangle that another famous quote-vehicle, wherein to catch their consciousness.

Miller’s play provides Comer with straightforward but potent material. Trained as a lawyer herself, she structures the play like an argument. At the top, there’s the case for the law as it is. Tessa, eager to prove herself as a criminal-defense barrister in London, has taken on a series of cases related to sexual assault and developed a knack for getting her male clients off the hook. She believes firmly in the system, and rationalizes that it’s the prosecution’s failing, not hers, if a guilty man isn’t punished. She has a way of picking apart the testimony on the stand—Comer shows us how by pacing the room, a microphone close to her mouth, being poisonously sweet to an unseen witness. Then those rationalizations turn against Tessa, when she spends a night drinking with another barrister and he rapes her. Miller arranges a situation that’s grimly and believably difficult for Tessa to argue around in court: they were drunk; the two of them had sex consensually in the past; witnesses would have seen them flirting earlier. But Tessa pursues her case anyway, driven to exact whatever justice she can.

If history is written by the victors, it’s being rewritten — still by the victors — in The Thanksgiving Play. In Larissa FastHorse’s satire, a group of liberal-minded white people gathers to devise a play about Thanksgiving that will honor a Native American perspective on the atrocities Pilgrims committed without any insight into an actual Native American perspective. Their project, as you’d expect, goes wrong quickly. The problem is that The Thanksgiving Play intentionally hurtles its characters toward a dead end — like Wile E. Coyote toward a tunnel entrance that’s just drawn on the side of a rock — and it gets stuck once they crash. It takes them down but never justifies why we’re here with them in the first place.

There's an undulating curve at work in the relationship between head trauma and humor, going from funny to tedious, wrapping back around to funny, then cycling back and forth. That's the kind of thing you think about while watching Peter Pan Goes Wrong, a British farce that beats you over the head with staged concussions, pratfalls, leg injuries, and, since Peter Pan flies around in a harness, one particularly spectacular drop from the rafters. In every case, you cringe at the potential of bodily harm, then bounce back into laughter. It's basic, lowest-common-denominator theater, but it tends to work with variable but generally positive returns. Let this cast entertain you. Let their bonks make you smile.

Staging Camelot now means you have to tackle the show as it exists — a somewhat awkward epic with brilliant moments — and address its hazy nostalgic one-brief-shining-moment mythos. Enter Aaron Sorkin. Lincoln Center Theater’s production, directed by Bartlett Sher, is better on the latter front than the former. Its reconstructed book by Sorkin haphazardly drags the musical closer to reality, but it’s in its biggest, grandest gestures where the revival succeeds.

There’s little faith here that an audience might be able to understand Tedra, Juicy, or the rest of the cookout attendees, so we aren’t allowed to glimpse too much of them. It brings out a bitter, resentful tang in Ijames’s script that doesn’t sit well with the feast — all the more so because it isn’t fully cooked. I’d be interested to see another version of Fat Ham that brings that bitterness out further, slices toward the confrontational bones underneath the comedy. Instead, we get that splashy finale complete with a confetti cannon — played as celebratory, though the insistence on joy comes off as condescending. Watching the characters dance away, freed from their tragic story line, I was theoretically happy for them but left with the gnawing sensation that I didn’t know them much at all.