Jesse Green — Theater Critic

The last half-hour or so of War Paint, the beguiling but frustrating new musical about beauty legends Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, is just about everything you could want from a Broadway show. The two leads - Patti LuPone as Rubinstein and Christine Ebersole as Arden - each get a gorgeous, perfectly conceived solo: 'Forever Beautiful' for LuPone and 'Pink' for Ebersole. Then comes a rueful duet finale ('Beauty in the World') to complete the arc of their double biography with some twin-engine vocalizing.

His moral comedy is undiminished. The scene in which he finally calls out the sexual subterfuges of his comrades - and definitively rids himself of his own extraneous women - successfully counterweights the play's many trivialities. Most of the rest of the cast, under the direction of Moritz von Stuelpnagel, seems to have got the same memo: Play the problems, not the jokes. I was especially impressed with the women. Cobie Smulders, a star of How I Met Your Mother making her Broadway debut as Joanna, not only looks sensational in gowns by Susan Hilferty but finds a core of valor in a typically odious character. Kate Burton - who played the ingénue Daphne opposite George C. Scott in 1982 - brings exceptional clarity and warmth to Liz, who can sometimes come off as a scold. And Kristine Nielsen is hilarious as the trusty secretary Kristine Nielsen.

...Which brings us to Soo. No surprise to those who know her from Hamilton or the pre-Broadway versions of Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1912, she's effortlessly lovely and a superior singer. But traits that have helped her bring Eliza and Natasha to life - simplicity, transparency - can't do much for Amélie, who remains, like the girl in her neighbor's forever-unfinished Renoir, an outline of a figure at the heart of the story. All of Soo's skill, and all the craft of the authors, have produced this final paradox: The more Amélie is revealed, the less we see. Like its title character, Amélie is a show that has very nearly willed itself into obscurity.

Farce is not an acquired taste; even babies laugh at pratfalls. Rather, farce is the taste you fail to grow out of - and thank God, because sometimes only the stupidest fun will do. If this is one of those times, then 'stupidest fun' should probably be plastered on the walls of the Lyceum, where The Play That Goes Wrong, a backstage comedy created by England's Mischief Theatre Company, is opening tonight. It's so ridiculous it makes you feel almost ashamed to love it.

What I realized seeing the play again is that its central conflict - between Tracey, who is white, and Cynthia, who is black - is trumped-up. This is not to say that longtime friendships have not been shattered over work disputes, or that work disputes have not surfaced the subcutaneous racism of white people hanging on to their last scrap of privilege. But nothing in Sweat convinces us that these particular women, as established, could develop in the way the play forces them to. Tracey especially, despite Johanna Day's valiant performance, is bent so far out of shape by the dramatic agenda that she no longer makes any sense.

But then the unrelieved hyper-emphasis of Laurence Connor's direction basically squashes whatever might be good in Miss Saigon. Certainly the rather delicate (if leather-lunged) performance of Eva Noblezada as Kim doesn't get far across the footlights; you can hardly find her half the time. Indeed, none of the signposts and pointers an audience might look to for advice about what's going on work properly: The sound is unspecific, the lighting is overbusy, and the set makes it seem as if everyone in the cast lives in everyone else's hovel. It is only in that Constructivist parade, and a few similar scenes, that the pressure is equalized between the overwrought style of the production and its overwrought content. But it's not a good sign when the most cogent parts of a musical about American perfidy are the ones that borrow a totalitarian aesthetic.

That a story is basically true does not make it more believable onstage...Not helping matters is the ambitious number of stories the show wants to tell. The cast of 12 plays at least 40 roles, both locals and plane people, most of them whizzing past our attention too quickly and indistinguishably (despite Toni-Leslie James's clever quick-change costume elements) to make lasting impressions. Even when they do, the show's pageantlike structure, in which bits of story are connected by setting and theme rather than by action, prevents those impressions from deepening over time the way they must. There's a lot of snow in Gander but no accumulation. To make up for it, the production, tightly directed by Christopher Ashley, with a handsome woodsy set by Beowulf Boritt and fine lighting by Howell Binkley, does its damnedest to knock you into submission. The songs, also by Sankoff and Hein, are pleasant, in a folk-rock-meets-Celtic-revival vein that the show exploits with the mercilessness of a phlebotomist. (Cue the fiddle, bodhran, and uilleann pipes.) There is much spirited if obligatory stomping. (The choreography is by Kelly Devine.)

If it's more of an inquest than a definitive statement, it's an inquest at a very high level; Sally Field, who plays Amanda, does not appear in basement black-box theaters. So Gold is performing a tricky balancing act: narrowing the scope of the representation and maintaining his cutting-edge cred while selling the story to an audience of 1,000. One of the casualties of this approach is what Tom calls 'the social background' of the play. We lose not just the particular St. Louisness of it (the accents are nearly nil) but also the world-on-edge tension that Tom describes at the start: Guernica exploding in Europe, and, in America, 'the fiery braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.' Instead Gold focuses on a novel and largely convincing interpretation of the family's warfare as a symptom of the powerful but constraining love they share, and on the way both things shape Tom's character deep into the future from which he narrates.

If only Significant Other, which opened tonight on Broadway, were as dramatic. But although Joshua Harmon's sour comedy has many fine supporting qualities - wit, a neat structure, lacerating dialogue, and a clutch of terrific performances from a cast led by Gideon Glick - they don't have very much to support.

Sunday in the Park with George, which opens tonight in a bare-bones but beautiful-enough Broadway revival starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford, is both a deconstruction and an example of that duality. A deconstruction because Lapine's book, among the brainiest ever written for a musical, works innumerable trenchant variations on the theme of sacrifice for art. The show is also a demonstration of that theme, because Sondheim's songs are so profound that they feel, even while unspooling in unbroken threads of human longing, as if they had left the realm of lived experience and entered a Keatsian plane of absolute truth-beauty far above our own. The lyrics constantly delight the ear while also dramatizing, in that very delight, the way art both exalts and erases. 'Rapturous' and 'capture us' are like the jaws of a trap snapping shut.

But Sunset Boulevard, which opened tonight in a train wreck of a revival starring a woeful Glenn Close, also comes with a poison pill for would-be adapters. Its daring mix of film noir and Hollywood satire requires the utmost finesse to carry off, lest it turn into camp, a mere coffin of curiosities. (We are in fact introduced to Norma as she kisses the corpse of her pet chimp.) That it doesn't go rancid - that the film remains beautiful despite its overbite - is attributable to Wilder's worldliness: No extreme of human behavior surprises or discomfits him. It may be impossible to achieve that kind of detachment in theatrical song, which pretty much defies a neutral point of view. Perhaps that's why Kander and Ebb gave up. As for Sondheim, who was writing with Jeanette MacDonald in mind for the lead, he dropped the project after Wilder told him at a cocktail party that the material could only work as an opera.

Ruben Santiago-Hudson's staging, on a terrific David Gallo set that makes the hill in the Hill District palpable, tries to honor both, but is limited by the patchwork text. We certainly get the great Wilsonian flow of men's voices as they spool out their rough poetry of survival, and the delight of characters who are real characters. Some are familiar types from the rest of the cycle: There's dignified Becker, who runs the off-the-books jitney service; troublemaking Turnbo, the yakker with his nose in everyone's business; Youngblood, the struggling 20-something trying to do right by his girlfriend and their child; and Fielding, the dipso-sage with unexpected seams of experience and expertise. (He was once a tailor for Billy Eckstine.) Wilson orchestrates their voices with jazzlike felicity, abetted perhaps a bit too glibly by the setting; every time the phone rings with a customer needing a ride home from the grocery store, the kaleidoscope of characters reconfigures. Somehow the phone never rings in the middle of big speeches.

... if the politics of this Platonov revamp are apt enough, the drama still founders on the play's inability to link them convincingly to the nearly farcical social comedy of individuals at loose ends. Partly this is because the production, directed somewhat bumpily by John Crowley, keeps the politics at bay for too long while it focuses on the radiating damage an empty man can cause at great removes, like a storm surge. We do not really understand the stakes until it's too late, which may be accurate for the characters but undermines the audience. Chekhov's famous dramaturgical dictum - 'one must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off' - is meticulously observed here; the General's old pistol is all but spotlit throughout. But however much damage it finally causes, it isn't enough to turn The Present, which operates best as a comedy, into the tragedy it seems to wish it were. It would take Chekhov another 20 years to figure out how to make the two things into one.

I can't square the musical sophistication of In Transit with its narrative hackwork. Kathleen Marshall's staging, with its let's-get-past-it rather than the let's-explore-it approach, doesn't help: It's definitely an express. (Even so, the show is a bit too long at 100 minutes without intermission.) If all of Marshall's cleverness as a director and choreographer goes toward smoothing and polishing the surfaces, perhaps that's because in a cotton-candy musical like this one there's nothing underneath. The cast, for instance, is admirably diverse, yet from the show's portrait you would think that the New York subway in 2016 represented a utopian post-racial environment. Nor is anyone poor, except for one smelly homeless person who is the butt of an obvious joke, and the once-rich white guy who is learning his lesson. Donyale Werle's charming set, with its treadmill tracks and mosaic motifs, gives the MTA a Museum of Transportation gloss, but it made me wonder, as did the show in its entirety: Have you been down there recently? And have you been up here?

The big problem in writing great musicals is not the difficulty of writing great songs. The big problem is that the songs, great or not, are cannibals, picking the stories clean and leaving a pile of bones. It's a zero-sum system. In musical dramas the problem is even worse, as innumerable failed adaptations of huge 18th-century novels have proved. (They often seem like Cliffs Notes of Cliffs Notes.) But when a musical drama clicks, an amazing fusion event occurs: The songs and the story enlarge each other in the process of becoming inseparable. Think of Sweeney Todd or, more intimately, Fun Home. And now add to the list Dear Evan Hansen, which opened tonight in a production beautifully directed by Michael Greif. I called the Off Broadway production at Second Stage this May 'the feel-anxious musical of the season.' But it is even better on Broadway, so fine in its craft and rich its gathering of themes that, like the best works of any genre, it rewards being seen again - and again.

The musical is handsome and reasonably well performed, especially by Bobby Conte Thornton as Calogero and Nick Cordero as Sonny. And it still has, in précis, that timely and timeless set of concerns. In a corrupt society, is the working man 'a sucker,' as Sonny maintains? How do we make moral sense of the good qualities of bad people - and vice versa? That A Bronx Tale, as a musical, never answers these questions is fair enough; that it lacks the subtlety to raise them seriously is very nearly a crime.

The musical is handsome and reasonably well performed, especially by Bobby Conte Thornton as Calogero and Nick Cordero as Sonny. And it still has, in précis, that timely and timeless set of concerns. In a corrupt society, is the working man 'a sucker,' as Sonny maintains? How do we make moral sense of the good qualities of bad people - and vice versa? That A Bronx Tale, as a musical, never answers these questions is fair enough; that it lacks the subtlety to raise them seriously is very nearly a crime.

I say all this with both awe and revulsion. There may in fact be value in distraction at this moment in our history, and rarely has distraction looked as lovely. The scenic designer Mimi Lien's nearly complete redesign of the aptly chosen Imperial Theatre begins as you enter its formerly pink-marble lobby, which is now a grubby underground bunker with fluorescent lights and post-Soviet punk-rock posters. By contrast the main auditorium has been reconfigured as a Czarist wonderland, with brass and candlelight and onstage seating and stairways and catwalks and acres of red velvet swathing everything in a cardiac glow. Continuing the thematic use of anachronism, Paloma Young's costumes combine Empire stylings and contemporary grunge to exquisite effect. The lighting by Bradley King is brilliant, colorful, alternating between tête-à-tête warmth and stadium-rock heroics. Even the expanded orchestrations, by Malloy, enhance the sensation of lushness and well-being; an oboe and a bass clarinet will do that. Russia under Alexander, even with Napoleon fast approaching, was a nice place to be rich.

I say all this with both awe and revulsion. There may in fact be value in distraction at this moment in our history, and rarely has distraction looked as lovely. The scenic designer Mimi Lien's nearly complete redesign of the aptly chosen Imperial Theatre begins as you enter its formerly pink-marble lobby, which is now a grubby underground bunker with fluorescent lights and post-Soviet punk-rock posters. By contrast the main auditorium has been reconfigured as a Czarist wonderland, with brass and candlelight and onstage seating and stairways and catwalks and acres of red velvet swathing everything in a cardiac glow. Continuing the thematic use of anachronism, Paloma Young's costumes combine Empire stylings and contemporary grunge to exquisite effect. The lighting by Bradley King is brilliant, colorful, alternating between tête-à-tête warmth and stadium-rock heroics. Even the expanded orchestrations, by Malloy, enhance the sensation of lushness and well-being; an oboe and a bass clarinet will do that. Russia under Alexander, even with Napoleon fast approaching, was a nice place to be rich.

Classically trained actors are naturally drawn to roles that show off their verbal fluency, but few contemporary plays give them the chance. No wonder Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereuses, with its baroque dialogue bordering on camp, has proved so popular with upmarket stars. Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman headed the 1985 premiere; Glenn Close and John Malkovich the 1988 film; now Janet McTeer and Liev Schreiber lead the gorgeous but tiresome revival that opens tonight on Broadway. The script is full of lines like 'I wonder if I'm beginning to guess what it is you're intending to propose,' which despite the heavy ironing required to make them lie flat reward the effort with only a vestigial feeling that something humorous has happened. Indeed, Les Liaisons is a trap: In portraying the moral decadence of the Ancien Régime, it aligns itself with that decadence. For Hampton and his collaborators, it's a case of let them eat cake, and have it too.

If this Lincoln Center Theater production, directed (like all the earlier New York incarnations) by Lapine, has any serious faults, they arise from that agenda. As written, Marvin is so nasty and erratic in the first act that the plot, which depends on so many people wanting his love, won't turn. Christian Borle can't resolve that contradiction and thus comes off a bit unsteady, at least until he regains his footing in the second act. The other principals, whose roles are more tightly written, are excellent throughout: Andrew Rannells delivering a super-high-gloss Whizzer without reducing him to a boytoy; Stephanie J. Block deftly coloring in Trina's insecurity (and stopping the show with 'I'm Breaking Down'); Brandon Uranowitz offering an unusually sexy Mendel; and Anthony Rosenthal making a crazy-confident Broadway debut as a sweet but not too-sweet Jason. (In the second half, Tracie Thoms and Betsy Wolfe are lovely as 'the lesbians from next door.') .

The Front Page is a classic not only for its playability but also for its timelessness: No one will ever need footnotes to understand the idea of journalists competing venally to expose venal politicians. What they may need, though, is internet access, because the presses that printed Atkinson's review, and the reviews of every Broadway revival since then until this one, are as obsolete as the typewriters and candlestick telephones and 'Get me rewrite!' commands depicted in the play. So may theater critics be. Therefore, let me use my end-times platform to contradict Atkinson, who advised 'squeamish folk' to stay home. On the contrary, squeamish folk will love it, and when it comes to politics and journalism, who isn't squeamish?

No one, of course, sets out to under-serve Chekhov. The problem, even with serious interpretive artists at the helm, is that everyone must be seeking to serve in the same way. Here that does not appear to be the case. The adaptation, by Stephen Karam, is clean and mostly neutral, with an occasional bit of contemporary vernacular ('Get out!' where fustier translations offer something like 'Think of that!') deliberately jarring the ear. I say deliberately because the staging by Simon Godwin, an associate director at London's National Theatre now making his New York debut, also underlines the modernity of Chekhov's themes, but does so rather more academically and urgently.

That changed dynamic is the other factor in the play's new spin. When I first saw it, the relative hush of the house seemed to favor Alex's arc, which was, at least superficially, more serious and perhaps more relatable: After resisting Georgie as a flake, and even after understanding that her motives in romancing him might be impure, he takes a flier with her in the hope that, sane or not, she can distract him from his profound loneliness. (His only confidant is a long-dead sister, who visits him in dreams.) But in that reading, Alex's influence on Georgie is imperceptible if not beside the point. Near the end, when she describes him as looking 'full of wonder,' you understand that his insistence on the primacy of observable fact over imputed concepts like mood or even personality have barely rubbed off on her. 'It's probably just my retinas,' he says. There is no such thing as 'wonder,' only dead cells floating in vitreous humor.

What they are actually satirizing through the medium of their hideously bewigged and age-spotted alter egos is sometimes a bit fuzzy; the characters are both in on the jokes and the butt of them. But either way the jokes are excellent, as they should be by now; the Broadway incarnation ofOh, Hello - sleekly directed by Alex Timbers - follows a sold-out 2015 Off Broadway run, a national tour, and almost a decade of development. (Kroll and Mulaney based the characters on two men they saw shopping at the Strand.) Along the way, the material has acquired a minimal plot, in which the rent on the 'measly five-bedroom with crown molding' apartment at 73rd and Columbus that Faizon and St. Geegland have shared for 40 years is set to rise from $75 a month to $2,500. In order to keep enjoying their 'god-given right' to this housing, the pair may have to compromise their artistic integrity by agreeing to take 'Too Much Tuna,' a radio show they used to host, big-time on local-access cable.