Jesse Green — Theater Critic

In short, as I felt the production’s blunt force more and more, I grasped its aura and aims less and less. “Othello,” unique among Shakespeare’s tragedies, is lean. (It’s even leaner in this production, thanks to some judicious cutting.) It has fewer major characters than most, and fewer sideshows. (Among the cuts: the annoying clown.) Its poetry is extraordinary. And though four principals die, all ultimately by Iago’s hand or influence, it does not tumble indiscriminately toward the blood bath. The deaths are specific and necessary to its themes. Leon’s “Othello” gets all that, except the themes. A good enough bargain, I suppose — or would be, except that center orchestra tickets are selling for $921. You could spend a lot less — or a lot more — to learn the sad truth “Othello” dramatizes: that those who choose to assume the best in people are most vulnerable to the worst. Innocence is ignorance, certainty a death wish. In a world (and on a stage) that loves not wisely but too well, Iago will always win.

I enjoyed ‘Operation Mincemeat’ well enough, but I would have enjoyed it much more if I thought that were true onstage.

I enjoyed ‘Operation Mincemeat’ well enough, but I would have enjoyed it much more if I thought that were true onstage.

What makes the production exemplary, like the play itself, is the emotion. I hate to think why Scott is such a sadness machine, but the tears (and blushes and glows and sneers) lie very shallow under his skin. He only rarely raises his voice. As the feelings are evidently coming directly and carefully from his heart, he narrowcasts them directly and carefully at yours.

This family, as Aziza realizes too late to escape, is off the rails. That’s exciting while the story remains in midair in Act 1, less so upon landing in a heap in Act 2. By then the dials set for bright comedy are stuck way too high for serious retribution; Solomon especially behaves so abominably that the playwright’s attempt to rehabilitate him cannot succeed.

This is all compelling; the play is so brilliantly conceived and plotted it can hardly be anything else. While Blanche, with her airs and long baths, works Stanley’s last nerve, he mercilessly needles her and debunks her claims. (She is no virgin, even aside from her early marriage to a doomed gay man.) Trying to keep the peace is Stella, who despite everything still loves her sister. (In Anjana Vasan’s excellent performance, we sense that love, even more than the usual weak-tea toleration.) But as Blanche’s options foreclose on her — Stanley foils her chance to snag his one halfway-decent poker buddy as a husband — even Stella grows fearful, and the balance tips disastrously."

Distasteful though that is, it’s good drama, and 'Ghosts' remains a provocative, engrossing work, to which O’Brien’s production does justice. It also does justice to the idea of provocative, engrossing work in the first place. 'Ghosts' is the 14th and presumably final collaboration between O’Brien and André Bishop, Lincoln Center Theater’s producing artistic director, who is stepping down at the end of this season after 33 years with the company. Their notable productions of Hellman, Stoppard, Shakespeare and others have earned them this warm valedictory moment. And yet not totally valedictory. As 'Ghosts' demonstrates, men’s imprints do not fade so easily. And nothing is ever as haunted as a stage.

Yet when you look for the souls within the clothing you find nothing as precise or vivid. That’s a problem that comes with the play’s virtues. Respect and delicacy, wonderful life values, are less so in drama, and Dring’s framing of the work with ingratiatingly comic narration from three priests, as if her subject would otherwise be too strange for New York theatergoers, has a paradoxical effect. It makes sumo seem like a museum exhibit, trapped behind glass. Better, perhaps, just to throw us into the ring.

The play’s engine having finally turned over, it purrs confidently to the end, which includes a coup de théâtre reminiscent of the one in Hunter’s previous Signature outing, “A Case for the Existence of God.” Like that gorgeous play, too, it offers the idea of incremental hope to those whose lives would not seem to allow it. The trick, as Stacey learns from reading medieval history, is to find the freedom in that. There is no fate, Hunter argues, and his play demonstrates: just an infinity of second chances.

Critic's Pick-- But “Liberation,” which opened on Thursday at the Laura Pels Theater, is neither satire nor agitprop. As directed with cool patience by Whitney White, the better to let its climax sear, and with a cast led by Susannah Flood and Betsy Aidem each at the top of her form, it is gripping and funny and formally daring. In a trick worthy of Escher, and befitting the complexity of the material, it nearly eats the box of its own containment, just as its characters, lacking other emotional sustenance, eat at theirs.

Except that we don’t in fact want silence from a musical, and “Redwood” would make a dreary play. Happily, whenever its book drifts into familiar tropes of the genre, the songs pull it back to its wild and unsettled heart. Diaz’s rangy, propulsive music has immediate curb appeal but with a scary, questing quality that provides the necessary big endings without pat resolutions — a combination that hits Menzel’s sweet spot over and over. The other characters also get strong defining numbers, all beautifully sung.

Some of these scenes are beautifully drawn, with the wit, pith and undercurrent of sadness characteristic of Harrison’s best work. (The opportunities and perils of A.I. as human companions were the subject of his play “Marjorie Prime,” a Pulitzer finalist in 2015.) The boy who gets the prosthetic finger is left at the workhouse because his family can no longer afford him. (Father to son: “Well. Goodbye, Tom. I don’t expect I’ll see you again.”) The reason the 1987 boy is grieving is that his bachelor uncle was buried that day. We don’t need to be told what he died of. But other scenes, like one set in 2076, when the last humans live as outlaws in a dystopia of semi-robot overlords, feel more like place fillers, necessary as steps in Harrison’s timeline but not compelling in themselves.

The Broadway transfer of Sanaz Toossi’s “English,” which opened on Thursday at the Todd Haimes Theater, is the consummate consommé. Even more so than when it debuted Off Broadway in 2022, and won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2023, it strikes me as a work of uncommon discipline despite its big and occasionally easy laughs. Without ever releasing a tight grip on its theme — or perhaps because of that tight grip — it suggests a world of small tragedies and smaller compensations.

If you want to replace it with a new work told from a new and arguably more authentic perspective, do that. But the halfway treatment in this case feels like keeping the bath water and drowning the baby. As many more-faithful revivals have proved, what’s great about “Show Boat” is not really separable from what isn’t. Not even with the help of a sash or a slash.

If you want to replace it with a new work told from a new and arguably more authentic perspective, do that. But the halfway treatment in this case feels like keeping the bath water and drowning the baby. As many more-faithful revivals have proved, what’s great about “Show Boat” is not really separable from what isn’t. Not even with the help of a sash or a slash.

That not all this revival’s choices will please everyone is probably a good thing. On occasion, I found myself recalling moments that moved or thrilled me more in earlier productions, just as I did when I saw those productions in the first place. “Gypsy,” like other great works of midcentury American drama — it opened the same season as Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” — rewards a layering of lifetime impressions. Wolfe offers a rich new layer, sufficient in itself, and more so as part of history. Most important, he has given us a way of seeing a star who had to be seen in this role. As “Gypsy” suggests, and McDonald keeps proving, a pioneer woman needs a frontier.

*CRITIC'S PICK* That the intimate downtown version, directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt, instead ended softly did not make the play less incisive. But Shapiro’s production has been majorly and satisfyingly scaled up for Broadway. The library is much bigger and brighter (sets by Todd Rosenthal, lights by Jen Schriever); the costumes (by Clint Ramos) telegraphic in their sociology and the bassoon-heavy interstitial music (by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen) almost cartoonishly apt. The cast, too, hits the sweet spot between broad and deep, with Irwin, a clown by training, especially good at fatuousness, and Hecht at steely ditziness. In a slightly underwritten role, Gray beautifully counters the others with sly wit.

If that setup doesn’t exactly sound funny, there’s a reason. Though “Cult of Love,” like many unhappy family reunion plays, draws big buckets of humor from the toxic brew of religion and repression, those buckets also draw blood.

I don’t think the musical has to worry about that; no matter how many improvements it has made, it is stuck with the foundational problems of the film. But the chance to see two theatrical masterminds go at it for a few hours is sufficient justification for the effort. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in its next incarnation, the Lunt-Fontanne Theater became the Hilty-Simard.

You may nevertheless want to ask yourself whether a show whose sound effects include amplified vomit is right for you. For all its hornpipes and full-throated song, its visual panache and masculine eye candy, “Swept Away,” is among the darkest, most unsparing musicals ever to anchor itself on Broadway. And despite the suggestion of rapture in its title, it is really about the gravest decisions humans can make, the depths of souls that are darker than the sea’s.

What “Maybe Happy Ending” asks, even in its ambivalent title, is whether that’s a good thing, for them and for us, their mirror images. When Oliver fully realizes that Claire’s “shelf life” will end before his, he asks in real pain, “How can people do this?” — meaning survive the death of others. If the start of love is the start of loss, is it perhaps better to erase one’s memories (which these Helperbots can do because they have their own passwords) or even to avoid the journey altogether? A good question for robots and, as posed by this astonishing musical, maybe the most deeply human one of all.

Though a team led by Branford Marsalis and Daryl Waters has written hot arrangements and rich orchestrations for a nine-person band, including the great Alphonso Horne on lead trumpet, the program of 30 or so songs and samples cannot do deep justice to a man who spent 50 years at the converging middle of American music. Nor can a script that flips too quickly from one momentous change to another, as if it too were a jukebox. When a marriage descends from elation to desolation in a mere five minutes, no matter how sincerely Iglehart plays it, it’s as if there were no marriage at all.

Though a team led by Branford Marsalis and Daryl Waters has written hot arrangements and rich orchestrations for a nine-person band, including the great Alphonso Horne on lead trumpet, the program of 30 or so songs and samples cannot do deep justice to a man who spent 50 years at the converging middle of American music. Nor can a script that flips too quickly from one momentous change to another, as if it too were a jukebox. When a marriage descends from elation to desolation in a mere five minutes, no matter how sincerely Iglehart plays it, it’s as if there were no marriage at all.

Despite the hat tip to Thoreau in its title, “Walden” eventually goes full soap opera. Its crisis isn’t so much about forcing Stella to choose between Mars and Earth as about forcing her to choose between Cassie and Bryan. The performances often lean overbroad too, laboriously alternating between breeziness and dudgeon. Only Winters, always an expert at making contradictions emulsify, is convincing — if not overall, then moment by moment.

But there can hardly be another standout in a production that features Henry’s endless supply of vocal drama. Perhaps this “Ragtime” is so moving precisely because its most tragic character can still convince you, at least in music, that there is hope for America, even now.