Jesse Green — Theater Critic

I'm no fan of jukebox musicals. If they're the type that tell an invented tale, like Mamma Mia! or Rock of Ages, the book is generally rendered idiotic by the effort to accommodate the songs. If they're instead pop biographies, like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the problem is even worse because the songs, too, are denatured, by the effort to accommodate a preexisting storyline. Furthermore, the structure of musicals in the second category can only lead to a bathetic climax: In the final scenes, the protagonists (Frankie Valli, Carole King) become exactly who we already knew them to be. That's more than ever the case with the new Gloria Estefan jukebox musical On Your Feet! because if you don't arrive at the Marquis Theatre knowing the billboard headlines of her story (Cuban immigrant becomes American pop star, gets hit by a truck, eventually returns in triumph) why are you there? The only real issues for me in approaching a show like this are the fun of the tunes and the ingenuity of the distraction. To say that On Your Feet! is better than most of its ilk is therefore faint praise; it means you might have almost as good a time as you would if it were merely a concert.

As the use of blank verse suggests, Bartlett aims to dress up the skeeviness of this speculative royal-watching in Shakespearean grandeur, and he mostly succeeds. The iambic pentameter is supple and amusing ('But here's my husband, he's been on the phone') even if it depends a bit too much on auxiliary verbs to fill out the lines. The scene-closing couplets, the elaborately extended metaphors, the near quotations ('Say more. For nothing comes of nothing said') all support in language the Shakespeare-sized themes and characters he has tossed into the blender.

...Knightley...makes a stark and somewhat counterintuitive Broadway debut. She is compelling and articulate, especially when silent, and brings to the morose tale the banked-fire quality that seems to illuminate such material from within...The drawn-out dénouement...is basically a slow return to the grimness of the reality in which Thérèse (and the others) were always trapped. That grimness is beautifully realized, at least; Beowulf Boritt's sets, lit exquisitely by Keith Parham, are all gesso and grisaille, suggesting a prepared canvas with no painting on it...Even a relatively short novel like this one offers too large a meal. The set-ups are lovely, and then comes the hasty glut. The director Evan Cabnet's unusually handsome staging, dominated by the sculptural deployment of the actors' bodies, often in silhouette, in a way highlights this failing, making the massive repression of the opening scenes powerfully eloquent but offering diminishing returns thereafter.

Unfortunately, this fantastic comic challenge is a dramaturgical disaster. To begin with, the rules of Sylvia's doghood are unclear and chaotically enforced. At first her English is presented as an approximation of what a human might think a dog is thinking: Barks are rendered as 'Hey! Hey! Hey!' and soulful stares as 'I want to sit near you.' Sometimes, wittily enough, Sylvia responds to Greg's philosophizing with deflections like, 'I wish I could contribute something here, but I just plain can't.' At other times, though, Sylvia speaks like a normal person, and the other characters talk to her in the expectation that she will understand them specifically and rationally. Is she becoming more human, as Ann Roth's witty canine-human crossbreed fashions, moving from a furry sweater and velour bodysuit to a black cocktail dress, seem to suggest? Then why does she switch back to the furry sweater later? I suppose this is all covered under a general talking-animal-comedy indemnification policy, but it does add to the ad hoc feeling of the play, as if it were built to stand for only the two hours it takes to perform and not a second longer. At the stroke of ten, no matter how many shout-outs to Shakespeare it has offered, and despite the lovely Cole Porter tune jammed in for no reason, it collapses instantaneously.

Rather than comment on the quirks or shortcomings of their models, [the songs] merely copy them, in presumably deliberate and definitely third-rate imitations...What once made this mediocre material work, if anything did, was the panicky contrast between the outsize ambition of the '30s originals and the downsized reality of the spit-and-cardboard tribute...The camp, in other words, was genuine. And while it's lovely to hear the score orchestrated (by Jonathan Tunick, no less) for eight instruments instead of two pianos and a drum set, the material's internal wiring gets tangled when mounted at the scale -- and with the bland polish -- of Randy Skinner's Broadway production...Not to pile on, but I was surprised to find most of the dancing, and for that matter the performances in general, so ineloquent...Camp, it turns out, can't be faked; without deprivation and desperation, there is no wit.

Beloved, James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson certainly are. Whether their roles are meaty depends on whether you classify stamped patties of denatured cow parts as meat...Nothing happens to either of them in the course of the bleak action except that their foibles are revealed, over and over, in a series of hands of gin...the production is so lame and misguided (by the director Leonard Foglia) you would almost prefer that they suddenly started ad libbing selections from far better work each of them has done. As it is, they stick at least to the outlines of the script. In so doing, they successfully establish the general outlines of their characters, and it's undeniably a nostalgic pleasure, for about one shuffle, to hear Jones boom and bustle and see Tyson offer her aren't-I-cute moue as she lays out her winning hands. But mostly their game looks like solitaire, not gin...

The production, already excellent when presented at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2014, has only improved. Physically, it is just about perfect, especially the lighting design by Justin Townsend, which creates its poetic effects (as the play does) from the most concrete situations. Arianda's alternately spitfire and limpetlike fierceness has rarely been channeled as effectively, and Rockwell, a string bean in a cowboy hat, with a mean lasso and a mortifying chicken dance, brings tremendous vulnerability to a role often played as a brick.

Pinter means to keep the audience on its toes: There is detective work to be done, sorting out the relationships and alibis. The characters, both in their tastes and distastes, are perfectly etched...And, at a fleet 70 minutes with no intermission, the play smartly limits your exposure to the intense narcissism of people playing a game of erotic musical chairs. But for all its verbal brilliance and surgical precision in dissecting the characters' personalities, Old Times no longer feels quite real, if it ever did...if you see the play as a profound portrait of a permanent human condition, it's going to disappoint, which is exactly the trap Douglas Hodge's production falls into...He has encouraged an excellent cast...to play the subtext so broadly that it basically everts the drama, leaving very little sense that feasible humans are involved. Even so, the actors are good enough to make it fun: Owen a monkey on a hot tin roof, Best a Sicilian goddess, Reilly an impossibly sexy sphinx...But with neither the history nor the hostility very mysterious, the sum on this one-plus-one-plus-one plot is zero.

Occasionally - and Deaf West Theatre's production of Spring Awakening is a superb example - something latent in the material meets the mood of the time to make a revival not just a necessity but a great pleasure... This revival would have been unjustifiable were it not for the brilliant idea of placing the story in the context of deafness and using many deaf actors to tell it.

A second look...suggests that something even more significant is going on. The breakthrough isn't so much the incorporation of those contemporary genres; after all, Miranda already did that, throwing in Latin music to boot, in the charming In the Heights. But Hamilton not only incorporates newish-to-Broadway song forms; it requires and advances them, in the process opening up new territory for exploitation. It's the musical theater, not just American history, that gets refurbished. And perhaps popular music, too...I noticed only a few textual changes since it opened downtown, all smart. The role of the villain, Aaron Burr, has been carefully streamlined...The paradoxical result is that Leslie Odom Jr.'s already excellent performance is even more thrilling...I still wonder, too, if the manic staging by director Thomas Kail and choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, fun as it is, may sometimes get in the way of the action instead of enhancing it.

Amazing Grace, a new musical purporting to tell the story of the 18th-century British abolitionist John Newton, is the 'first work of professional writing' by Christopher Smith, a 45-year-old former police officer from suburban Philadelphia. (He wrote the music and lyrics himself and co-wrote the book with the more experienced playwright Arthur Giron.) What he has somehow gotten produced, and offered with good intentions to Broadway audiences and critics, is the equivalent of a child's drawing: naïve, sincere, glowing with an unimpeachable if hard-to-pin-down vision of what it wants to be. (I'd guess that it wants to be a Christian family entertainment with a bold message about the power of redemption.) It is also a confusing cartoon so lacking in craft that it ruins any chance of being taken seriously. Certainly it can't be recommended as history; it's riddled with falsehoods that alone would sink it. But it also fails as musical theater, on two counts: the music and the theater.

...Airline Highway, a beautiful and mesmerizing kaleidoscope of a play by Lisa D'Amour... is set in a post-Katrina New Orleans...In Airline Highway, she has evidently sought to split the difference between her devised high-concept work and the kind of traditional narrative that theater companies can actually stage. There are characters you get to know and care about; an event everything points toward; a perceptible conflict leading to a crisis; and at least a quasi-resolution. On the other hand, the play bleeds well beyond those ordinary dramaturgical boundaries...The crisis, too, is unusual: It is not a central overarching one but a series of related realizations, dispersed among the characters. The unusual resolution, bringing together a fantasy sermon from the spectral Miss Ruby with an excerpt from Zoe's finished sociology paper, is, for me, the play's only overindulgence.

...the version that has now arrived at the Lyceum represents not only a triumph of persistence but a distillation of many years' worth of theatrical savvy. It is as lean and as sere as a skeleton...Doyle is expert at stripping away the surface decoration and audience sops that can detract from the seriousness of the form...With The Visit, this creates a certain tension, though. You have, on one hand, the unimpeachably cold -- almost terrifying -- production design...On the other hand, you have Rivera, whom everyone adores and hopes to see succeed in a challenging role at age 82. This a tension that's useful, at least insofar as it puts the audience in sympathy with the devil...The songs, too, pull in two directions...The better the songs are, the weirder the show gets...Alienation and gregariousness make strange co-stars, but then so did Kander and Ebb. What a joy to have them back on Broadway and to think that, even half-dead, they're unkillable.

Anything you've ever liked in a musical comedy (and a few things you haven't) are here, just waiting to sing-and-dance you into submission...It's total silliness, of course; Nicholaw keeps the lights bright, the sound loud, and the plot moving at a furious boil...As light as the material may be, it's no easy achievement, and quite a surprise coming from a group of writers with no experience on Broadway...For every freshman infelicity...there are a dozen smart lyrical jokes, nicely set on tunes that do only as much as they need to in order to keep the momentum going...a more fundamental problem -- the only one, really -- is too deeply entwined in what makes the show work to have ever unwound it. I refer to its relentlessness, the will to conquer at any cost, like Mel Brooks on steroids.

Anything you've ever liked in a musical comedy (and a few things you haven't) are here, just waiting to sing-and-dance you into submission...It's total silliness, of course; Nicholaw keeps the lights bright, the sound loud, and the plot moving at a furious boil...As light as the material may be, it's no easy achievement, and quite a surprise coming from a group of writers with no experience on Broadway...For every freshman infelicity...there are a dozen smart lyrical jokes, nicely set on tunes that do only as much as they need to in order to keep the momentum going...a more fundamental problem -- the only one, really -- is too deeply entwined in what makes the show work to have ever unwound it. I refer to its relentlessness, the will to conquer at any cost, like Mel Brooks on steroids.

Living on Love, as directed by Kathleen Marshall, is tacky and weirdly downmarket, as if divas and maestros could only be made palatable to contemporary audiences by turning them into frenetic buffoons...And while Sills has the craft and comic experience to scale up his performance to Broadway levels, I'm sorry to say he's the only one of the four leads who can convincingly project this weak material to the back of the house...It is certainly very strange to report that Fleming, one of the great operatic sopranos of the last three decades, cannot. She is lovely, she is game, and you always sense her niceness. But these qualities domesticate Raquel's monstrousness; she isn't fierce enough to make her middling antics funny...What's oddest is that, without music, Fleming can't seem to find a natural shape for her lines...This distinction becomes clear when, after teasing us with snippets of arias throughout the play, Fleming finally lets loose with a whole song: 'Always.' Now we realize what we've been missing.

I already thought that Fun Home was the best new musical of the year in 2013, when it opened at the Public Theater. It's hard to imagine that its Broadway transfer, and transformation, will not make it the best of this season as well. I say 'transformation' even though in most ways it's nearly a replica: The librettist Lisa Kron has perhaps cut or tightened a few lines of dialogue, and the composer Jeanine Tesori, apart from excising one charming but redundant little song ('Al for Short'), has made only the kind of changes a fanatic would notice. Fun Home is still basically what it was when I reviewed it in 2013: the story, based on Alison Bechdel's autobiographical graphic memoir, of a lesbian cartoonist trying in middle age to understand her father, who killed himself shortly after revealing to her that he, too, was gay. Back then I called it 'hilarious and crushing,' and it remains so now. Maybe less hilarious and more crushing.

...the revival that opened tonight...is too beautiful to miss...Sher's production is the frankest, and sexiest, I've ever seen. It is also the saddest...The degree to which you want the characters to acknowledge and act on their attraction is a bit of a shock, considering the personal and cultural implications...It takes extraordinary acting and singing to build and sustain such moments. No surprise that O'Hara handles the singing easily; she has perhaps the most naturally beautiful voice on Broadway. But Anna also gives her the opportunity to dispense with the niceness that has sometimes threatened to flatten her stage persona. She has a terrific sparring partner in Watanabe...Though he's occasionally unintelligible, I never failed to understand him, and his conception of the king as a complicated blend of spoiled teenager and spiritual striver made a more convincing case for him than I've previously experienced.

Finding Neverland purports to be historical: the true tale of how Barrie, inspired by his dealings with the family of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, created the boy who wouldn't grow up. It also purports to be a singing-dancing family entertainment. It winds up being neither...What's accurate -- perhaps the only thing -- is that Barrie acknowledged the Davies brood as his muses for Peter Pan...On this slender foundation Finding Neverland...builds an enormous superstructure of trite psychology...Finding Neverland demonstrates about as much insight into creativity borne of loss as a Facebook memorial candle. Even if everything in it were profound and true, it would still be a mess, suffering as it does from confusion (or willfulness) about what makes a musical a musical. In good ones, songs are not decorations applied interchangeably to the exterior of a story, like gift-wrap. They are the gift. Here, they seem to be recycled from a different package entirely...More attention has been lavished on the show's tricks than its logic.

A musical in that antique vein would seem to be a nonstarter now...But it's not that bad...It helps that its ambition is modest: It's trying to amuse, not overwhelm. Brian Hargrove's book...is cleverly constructed, laying out its wedding plot according to musical-theater best practices...it's worth pointing out that neither plot twist is very credible, and the big one, however contemporary it may be in fact, already feels stale. Still, it has been set up well enough to produce a roar of laughter, and to carry the story swiftly to its unexpectedly touching conclusion. This is in part the result of David Hyde Pierce's understated direction, with its emphasis on comic timing and full commitment to stock characters...it's a nice surprise to find that the real star of the show is Lisa Howard...Howard...has the unusual ability of making likability and warmth, so often boring onstage, theatrical. She also sings beautifully, and gets most of the evening's best songs, which isn't saying much.

Indeed, aside from the Boleyn intrigue, which is handled fairly thoroughly, there's a little-bit-of-everything flavor to the proceedings. That makes sense, and I'm not sure you could find any other way to corral the material in Mantel's books unless you were willing to go for 60 hours instead of 6. Still, I found myself wondering whether newcomers to the period might guess from the play that anything else important happened while Cromwell was serving as Henry's marriage counselor. The dissolution of the monasteries, an event of huge significance, is mentioned briefly. The creation of the English Bible earns a line or two. But mostly what we have is an extremely elegant Tudor soap opera, the kind of 'event theater' that from time to time can fill a Winter Garden. It fits nicely with the three-course prix fixe 'English feast' dinner being offered to Wolf Hall patrons at the nearby Rock Center Café between plays. There you may choose among such menu offerings as Scotch egg, shepherd's pie, and bubble and squeak. Venison or pheasant would be more authentic, but who has the time?

Indeed, aside from the Boleyn intrigue, which is handled fairly thoroughly, there's a little-bit-of-everything flavor to the proceedings. That makes sense, and I'm not sure you could find any other way to corral the material in Mantel's books unless you were willing to go for 60 hours instead of 6. Still, I found myself wondering whether newcomers to the period might guess from the play that anything else important happened while Cromwell was serving as Henry's marriage counselor. The dissolution of the monasteries, an event of huge significance, is mentioned briefly. The creation of the English Bible earns a line or two. But mostly what we have is an extremely elegant Tudor soap opera, the kind of 'event theater' that from time to time can fill a Winter Garden. It fits nicely with the three-course prix fixe 'English feast' dinner being offered to Wolf Hall patrons at the nearby Rock Center Café between plays. There you may choose among such menu offerings as Scotch egg, shepherd's pie, and bubble and squeak. Venison or pheasant would be more authentic, but who has the time?

The production's desperation to appeal to tweens instead of their parents results in a disastrous if not deliberate misreading of the tale. Perhaps that wouldn't matter if the show worked on its own terms, but it did not in 1973 when Lerner brought Loewe out of retirement to expand the movie into a stage property, and it certainly doesn't now. There is still, mercifully, the score, which even if all jumbled about still contains five truly great songs and several good ones too. (Most of the newly interpolated ones are distinctly third-drawer, however.) And visually there is much to admire. Derek McLaine's Art Nouveau settings are an elegant solution to the problem of a story in which one of the stars is Paris itself; Catherine Zuber's costumes are a marvel of shapeliness, accuracy, and detail. (That's a good thing in a show that often fails to hold the attention; you can always count buttons.) But most of the other decisions made by the creative team - the director is Eric Schaeffer - reduce rather than enhance the story.

...the dark comedy more nearly approaches its darkness in Act Two, with the consequences of human outrageousness brought to the foreground, the tale becomes more emotionally legible, and at times even heartbreaking. It's a credit to the director, Moritz von Stuelpnagel, and the performers, especially Geneva Carr as Margery and Marc Kudisch as Pastor Greg...Steven Boyer, whose role is almost too dimensional for its own good. Although he tosses off with admirable ease the daunting challenge of playing both Jason and Jason-as-Tyrone, often in furious conversation with one another, there is something unsatisfying in the role's construction that he cannot quite overcome. Usually an actor must integrate the various strands of information suggested by the play's conflicts in order to create a coherent character. Here, the character is created by segregation: All the showy, aggressive traits get put into Tyrone, all the sadness and delicacy into Jason. As a result, the more Boyer succeeds, the less either half of his success resonates...

And yet here they are in David Hare's Skylight, a monkey and a moonbeam, somehow bringing the same story to thrilling life. Nighy, as will be obvious to anyone who saw him in Love Actually or as Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, is the monkey, or perhaps better to call him a Catherine wheel of tics and poses and stutters and quirks. 'Mannered' is not a strong enough word to describe the way he creates the illusion of character from a million incessant, if apparently spontaneous, affectations. (At several points, he struts across the stage sideways, his long legs pointing into the wings while his face stares down the audience.) Meanwhile, as she did in An Education and in the 2008 Broadway production The Seagull, Mulligan creates the illusion of character with no affectations at all. In fact, she hardly seems to be doing anything - and then suddenly tears will fling themselves from her eyes, or a smile will rise from some depth to the surface and recede again. She is as rivetingly, radically transparent as he is hilariously baroque, but in the end that's only fitting; the play, one of Hare's best, is about the gap between what's reconcilable and what's not.