Jesse Green — Theater Critic

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.

Among the 22 songs, many more relate to the wisp of a love-triangle plot than to the supposed theme, thus emphasizing the build-up instead of the payoff. And that build-up is tedious, as the former song-and-dance man, Jim Hardy, and his hoofer ex-partner, Ted Hanover, compete for the affections of Lila Dixon, a leggy bimbo, and then Linda Mason, a homey good girl. Indeed, the lumpy structure makes you wait until nearly the end of the first act for the 'inn' numbers to start, and thus for the show to get moving. At that point a terrific production number of 'Shaking the Blues Away,' led by Megan Lawrence as a butch 'fix-it man' - don't ask - briefly makes you forget how unsatisfying the show has been so far.

Among the 22 songs, many more relate to the wisp of a love-triangle plot than to the supposed theme, thus emphasizing the build-up instead of the payoff. And that build-up is tedious, as the former song-and-dance man, Jim Hardy, and his hoofer ex-partner, Ted Hanover, compete for the affections of Lila Dixon, a leggy bimbo, and then Linda Mason, a homey good girl. Indeed, the lumpy structure makes you wait until nearly the end of the first act for the 'inn' numbers to start, and thus for the show to get moving. At that point a terrific production number of 'Shaking the Blues Away,' led by Megan Lawrence as a butch 'fix-it man' - don't ask - briefly makes you forget how unsatisfying the show has been so far.

McBurney tries to connect these themes - well, not the anti-materialism; the sound equipment must be expensive - to the technology at hand, noting that most of what we call reality is a fiction constructed, like the show's soundscape, from bits of information and shared assumptions. For McIntyre, those assumptions collapsed in his months with the Mayouruna, as dissociated, primal thoughts crept out of the gaps formerly filled with guesses.

To be fair, Cats is not quite as bad as cultural elites liked to suggest; there were far worse shows during its 18-year run. But Cats was both pretentious and déclassé, dragging the musical form down from its recent supposed glory just as it dragged Eliot down from Prufrock to Pouncival. This was, after all, the megahit that opened the door for the invasion of European pop operas that all but smothered the native product for two decades. Seeing it 34 years later, in a Broadway environment that has recently produced the likes of Hamilton and Fun Home, is to experience something milder and less dangerous than it once seemed. It's not so much feline as bovine, as if Nunn and Lloyd Webber had spliced in some genetic material from another Eliot poem of the same period: 'Cows.'

Paramour's idea of the Broadway musical is particularly disturbing, evincing as it does only the skimpiest knowledge of the form. If we broadly describe a musical as an entertainment that offers a story about characters through song, we have already raised the bar too high. What Paramour offers is more of a series of clichés about humanoids accompanied by sounds. The main cliché is the one that glorifies Old Timey Hollywood as a land of tragic romance and glittering sophistication. ('Welcome to the Golden Age / Tux and tales [sic] it's all the rage,' the opening number helpfully explains.)

This review might have begun 'Audra Smiles!' -- so unusual and uplifting is it to see our leading vocal tragedienne in a part that (until Act Two) is essentially as light as a soubrette's. McDonald sings beautifully, of course; the role sits mostly in the thrilling upper part of her range. But you may not have remembered...what she can do with comic phrasing...As if that weren't enough, she taps (as everyone else does) with a nearly reckless vigor, despite the impossibly subdivided counts of Glover's syncopations. By the time she brings Act One to a rousing climax with the huge success of the show-within-a-show, you may feel that the outer show too is one of the best old-fashioned entertainments -- tunes, dances, comedy, costumes, the whole hotcha package -- to hit Broadway in years.

The age of a show's protagonist often provides a clue to the age of the audience the show is pitched to: Patrick in American Psycho is 27; Jenna in Waitress is 'in her thirties'; the character Frank Langella plays in The Father is 80 going on dead. So perhaps we should be grateful that Winnie, the heroine of the 1975 'young adult' fantasy novel Tuck Everlasting, has been bumped up from 10 to 11 for the musical adaptation that just opened on Broadway: She is that much more bearable. But whether the work of so many talented people in effecting the adaptation has added anything of value beyond that one year is another matter; this is, almost until the end, a ruthlessly by-the-book treatment of a high-concept, low-wattage fairy tale. Those nostalgic for their seventh-grade enthusiasms may love it; I found it to be a musical for the child in someone else.

I don't know if it qualifies as part of Broadway's ongoing diversity initiative, but in Fully Committed, the one-man comedy opening tonight at the Lyceum, that Ginger-American Jesse Tyler Ferguson plays, by my count, an astonishing 34 roles, together constituting a rainbow of assholes. Initially he's just Sam Callahan, a struggling actor sullenly working a pre-Christmas shift taking reservations at a superhot Manhattan restaurant. But as the outside lines, the in-house intercoms, and his own cellphone start ringing, Ferguson takes on the vocal and gestural lives of all the callers: would-be guests, terrified assistants; his agent, friends, frenemies, and family; the arrogant chef, the tantrum-y maître d', and various others, all exploding with ASAP demands. Needless to say, this being a restaurant, none of the demands is a true emergency, no matter how much the callers bully and scream - unless accommodating Gwyneth Paltrow with an all-vegan tasting menu for 15, with flattering light bulbs and no women servers, counts as an emergency.

Waitress can still be an uncomfortable genre mix: domestic-violence drama and workplace rom-com. That's in the source material, and the musicalization exaggerates it. What I certainly didn't expect, though, is that the musicalization could also help to justify the mismatch. As the story rushed toward its multiple conclusions - a typical Broadway problem the creative team was unable to solve - I began to understand that for these characters, life itself is an uncomfortable genre mix. Seeing that and sharing it is the start of their mastering it. Perhaps it really did take an all-female creative team to understand how such a story could be true, and how it could sing. If so, well, hand me a slice of that humble pie.

As it is, only the point of the show is invisible. Everything else, including lots of ripped hardbodies in underwear, is on vulgar display...the physical design, especially the interlocking sets and video by Es Devlin and Finn Ross, is as neat and tucked-in as aTurnbull & Asser poplin double-cuff contrast-collar shirt...But the structure and tone are a lazy mess...changes that may have worked on film are undermined by the musical format; what the camera registers sardonically feels silly and cartoonish when rendered onstage...Jean, played touchingly by Jennifer Damiano...The only numbers that consistently nail down the dramatic moment, the mood, and the period are the five interpolated from the '80s pop charts...Patrick Bateman, though played with unnerving verve by Benjamin Walker, is no Sweeney Todd; he's a cipher who never develops. He's thus a bore....

In 40 years of watching Langella onstage, from Seascape and Dracula in the 1970s through Frost/Nixon and Man and Boy just recently, I've never seen that need come as close to full exposure as in the just-opened Manhattan Theatre Club production of The Father...It's a must-see performance. The Father, though, is only a might-see play, more of a vehicle than a destination...Langella, who in some plays threatens to devour everyone else onstage, is here well matched by a cast of actors who perform their own seductions and know how to find their light. Especially effective are Kathryn Erbe...and Hannah Cabell...

And van Hove (working with the choreographer Stephen Hoggett) does wonderful things with his staging...If van Hove's directorial choices generally support and enliven the text, and force us to see it fresh, it's not because he has abandoned his avant-garde armamentarium. This Crucible features plenty of his signature flourishes, some more effective than others...Ben Whishaw and Sophie Okonedo, as the Proctors, give wrenching performances, shorn of vanity, as if the play's message of communal guilt had infected them personally...Saoirse Ronan as Abigail suggests no real excuse for her cold manipulations: She just shines with maleficence.

..Bright Star now opens with an establishing song called 'If You Knew My Story.' It's super-catchy, and Carmen Cusack, whose role in the proceedings we do not yet comprehend, sings the hell out of it. But unfortunately it does its 'show the audience what to expect' job too well. With banal, self-cancelling, upbeat lyrics...it mostly shows us that we are going to have, in Bright Star, a banal, self-cancelling, upbeat musical, the kind that wants to demonstrate a lot of heart without actually having one. Which is not to say it has no smarts and no value. There's a lot to like in Bright Star and a lot to admire in the way it was made...How the stories intersect with the songs is the larger problem here. The mostly bluegrass score, with country, gospel, and a little swing thrown in, sounds great...but almost always does exactly the opposite of what a story-based musical requires.

When a production has enough outstanding elements working in its favor -- as the Roundabout's revival of She Loves Me starring Laura Benanti and Zachary Levi certainly does -- your mind can fill in the rest, and more. Benanti, with her thrilling voice and zany self-deprecation, is perfect casting for Amalia Balash...Their lyrics, by Sheldon Harnick, marry gentle wit to character development with the highest technical polish; his rhymes get laughs not because they're tricky but because they're so apt...These nearly prose observations miraculously sit on music, by Jerry Bock, that maintains their contours while flowering into arias of enormous beauty, especially for Amalia, who has a heavy stack of them to sell. This is where Benanti's gifts become crucial. She is, no surprise, a joy to listen to -- even when, as last night, recovering from bronchitis. But she brings to the job of making beautiful sounds the natural comic's instinct of opening herself to heartbreak.

Without in any way glamorizing the situation, Blackbird so complicates the questions of consent and trauma and recovery -- and even love -- that it would be difficult to look at any of these subjects the same way again...Una is a victim, yes...Still, she is not so clearly innocent. As played with devastating rawness by Williams, she is alternately viperish, vengeful, sarcastic, bizarre, and desperate to reconnect...Similarly, Ray is drawn as richly and provocatively as possible, getting as far from ambient stereotypes about the pedophile personality as can reasonably be achieved...Daniels goes so deep into the man's depravity that he seems to come out the other side, in a place of honesty...Daniels...has not merely redecorated his earlier performance but done a gut job on it, starting over on deeper foundations.

The front cover of the Playbill for the Broadway production of Eclipsed, which opened tonight, features the beautiful face of its star, Lupita Nyong'o, looking worried. The back cover, an ad for Lancôme, also features Nyong'o, smiling broadly. No doubt the back cover subsidized the front, because the chances of a play like Eclipsed getting to Broadway without a star of Nyongo's current cachet are nil. Eclipsed is about Liberian women forced into sex slavery during that country's mad civil war. And while it has moments of light-heartedness, and a wind-up that could conceivably be called hopeful (the war, after all, does end), most of the play, by Danai Gurira, is crushingly sad; what else could it be? So let us be grateful to 12 Years a Slave, the Academy Awards, and Advanced Génifique Youth Activating Serum for allowing a moving and must-see production to move and be seen.

Whitaker is a fine film actor who has brought method intensity and authenticity to a variety of highly dramatic characters, from Charlie Parker to Idi Amin. But the method technique isn't a good match for Hughie, even if Al Pacino made a success of Erie on Broadway in 1996. The role requires not just the deep dive into personality that the Method suggests but the huckster tricks and verbal animation of a true stage animal. (The original Broadway Erie, in 1964, was Jason Robards.) Whitaker is so interiorized he seems catatonic, with peculiar diction, a strange accent ('dolls' is rendered as 'dawls'), and a way of chopping up sentences that suggests he has only a tentative grip on the lines. He moves well, which is to say idiosyncratically, with a rolling gait and a charadeslike intensity of hand movement that might well make the characterization visible if it weren't so inaudible. Even so, you spend a lot of the time looking at Wood, a theatrical creature through and through, doing much more with much less.

Would The Humans be so effective if its 95 minutes of 100-proof family drama took place in a neat little doorman condo? I doubt it: Location is destiny. With its irrational layout and strange, sickening noises, the apartment, as the stage directions put it, is 'effortlessly uncanny,' as is the play itself....It is still the most, well, human play I've ever seen about fear and disappointment and the attachments that transcend them...Contrary to the prevailing wisdom about intimate plays, transferring The Humans has done nothing to diminish its effectiveness. In fact...it seems even tighter and sharper than it did...To me the performances, all already excellent, now seem both more natural and more detailed: New beats have been found within old ones, resulting in a fractal complexity of small behavior that more nearly approximates the smooth skin of reality.

If the playwright Richard Greenberg didn't write the role for Linda Lavin, he might as well have, so perfectly does it suit and flatter her. It may in fact suit and flatter her too well; sometimes one would like to see Lavin clawing her way out of a role instead of slipping so smoothly into it. Here, she wears Anna as fetchingly as Anna wears the perfectly cut Burberry trench coat she imbues with talismanic powers of mysterious romance. It is just such a romance that forms the central (and really the only) plot of this entertaining but threadbare play...If I had to guess, I'd say that Greenberg got trapped (much as Anna does) by what must have felt like a daring idea.

For once, the word 'revival' is apt: Doyle's intervention amounts to a kind of theatrical CPR, restarting the heart of a show that, in its original production, seemed to die before your eyes...Of course it takes actors who have the subtlety to work at this level...The paradoxical result is a far greater range; the show is not constantly hitting the ceiling. Erivo...proves especially masterful at calibrating the gradations of Celie's emergence, from a kind of dull curiosity when she meets Shug Avery, to the suppressed rage of her nascent rebellion against Mister, to the exquisite shy smile that breaks across her face when she allows herself to believe she is beautiful, to the full sunburst of pleasure that success (as a seamstress) finally affords her. By the time she gets to her 11 o'clock number...you may feel you have seen as great and full a transformation as any previously put on the musical stage.

A disreputable charmer brings the joy of music to a staid community while stirring up romance with an uptight lady: If the plot of School of Rocksounds like a great musical, that's because it is. It's The Music Man. ButSchool of Rock, however much it borrows the shape of Meredith Willson's 1957 classic, has a different agenda, one that's arguably more timely and certainly less poetic. Its Harold Hill figure, called Dewey Finn, has real instead of imaginary instruments to offer, and the music he's evangelizing isn't Sousa but the Stones. Nonconformity replaces community as the theme; the key title in the score by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Glenn Slater (with a few songs lifted from the hit 2003 movie) is called 'Stick It to the Man.' Trouble, we are told, isn't something music will prevent but something it will enhance: 'Wreck your room and rip your jeans / and show 'em what rebellion means.'

Al Pacino is not an actor of much breadth but he stakes a narrow territory deeply, and that can be brilliant to watch onstage. China Doll, his shaky new Broadway vehicle, by David Mamet, offers flashes of that brilliance between long mucky passages in which he appears to be hunting for the narrative, if not the next line...The construction of China Doll is most peculiar. Very little conflict unreels in our presence...It's hard to figure what Mamet is up to...But eventually you can't help facing the fact that Mamet has built what plot there is around the hypocrisy and venality of liberal politicians; the story is rigged to make Mickey, of all people, a victim...Anyway, China Doll doesn't provide convincing evidence even for its own case study, and Pacino's star quality prevents us from inferring any evidence on our own...This gives the play the air of a one-percenter paranoiac fantasy...Whatever one thinks of that sort of attitude as policy, as the basis of a drama it's disastrous.

That the play, borrowing heavily on the movie, is neatly plotted does not mean it is structurally satisfying. Basically it has only two actions, which keep alternating: Sheldon develops a plan, and Annie foils it. The movie, with its variety of shots and its focus on details, could disguise that endless tick-tock, but onstage the drama flattens out and separates.

What makes this slight misfit of play and production finally unimportant is that the actors are so devastatingly good. Their habit of fealty to character as defined by dialogue survives the director's effacements. Mark Strong may be styled to look like a neutral Everyman of the past or future, but, in his bearing and cadence and anguish and bafflement, he is only Red Hook's Eddie Carbone, in full tragic tilt. Phoebe Fox makes Catherine's transition from baby doll to furious womanhood thrillingly transparent, just as Nicola Walker, as Eddie's wife, Beatrice, shows how every hopeful choice she and Eddie have made now closes in on her like a trap. (For once, Beatrice and Catherine actually look like aunt and niece.) The Italian brothers, Marco (Michael Zegen) and Rodolpho (Russell Tovey), are both excellent in difficult roles, and Michael Gould makes of Alfieri the perfectly regretful guide. Some of the credit for the cast's superb work obviously belongs to van Hove; he knew he needed actors who could stand up to his powerful, showy interventions. It's a fair trade; those interventions probably made this revival viable. Still, one looks on them, and on van Hove's upcoming Broadway production of The ­Crucible with, as Alfieri says, 'a certain alarm.'