Jesse Green — Theater Critic

It’s a little slick, though, at least for seen-that adults. The play’s twisty language, expressive of twisty thoughts, is largely untangled but, in the process, flattened. (Gold’s edit brings the running time, not counting intermission, to “the two hours’ traffic of the stage” Shakespeare mentions, but some of that traffic is stop-and-go.) I smiled a lot but never came close to crying.

But I can’t help feeling that Lloyd’s talent and that of his designers, let alone Scherzinger’s, would be better lavished on better material. Making “Sunset Boulevard” a hit again — the original Broadway production ran two-and-a-half years, grossing more than $100 million — is not so much an achievement as a stunt, like reanimating that dead chimpanzee. (Yes, it happens.) The revival is not, like “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” this summer, a completely new way of looking at a Lloyd Webber musical; it’s a completely new way of not looking at one. The waste! It makes me almost sad enough to weep a 10-foot glycerin tear.

But I can’t help feeling that Lloyd’s talent and that of his designers, let alone Scherzinger’s, would be better lavished on better material. Making “Sunset Boulevard” a hit again — the original Broadway production ran two-and-a-half years, grossing more than $100 million — is not so much an achievement as a stunt, like reanimating that dead chimpanzee. (Yes, it happens.) The revival is not, like “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” this summer, a completely new way of looking at a Lloyd Webber musical; it’s a completely new way of not looking at one. The waste! It makes me almost sad enough to weep a 10-foot glycerin tear.

Other than a few cast changes, most notably Driver in the role first played by Timothy Olyphant, the show is pretty much what it was when it debuted at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2016. The physical production looks as if it had been preserved since then in mothballs, with the same cramped, slowly revolving set by Walt Spangler. The few tweaks to the script are almost invisible. Neither Lonergan nor the director, Neil Pepe, seems to have felt the need for refinement.

And though some of the effectiveness of the revival is clearly the result of Kenny Leon’s swift and unsentimental direction, and of a fine cast led by the mercilessly acute Jim Parsons as the Stage Manager, we must begin with wonder and admiration for the play itself. In its portrait of “the life of a village against the life of the stars,” as Wilder described it, the monumental is always expressed in the miniature, and the miniature is always crushed by the monument.

“The Counter” laudably aims for greater spareness than those earlier plays; its best sustained moments are almost wordless. In shaping them, Cromer displays his usual directorial nerve, creating tension from time. At other points, though, his patience, which in fuller works allows feeling to emerge naturally and purely, can’t stop the story from drooping into skimpiness.

I don’t remember feeling the weight of that insight, or for that matter, the levity of the jokes, when I saw the 2007 production. Part of the improvement in this revival is, no doubt, the result of cuts, fine-tuning and rewritten scenes. The elimination of the intermission helps too; the two halves of the story don’t separate like a sauce. And there’s something to be said for the way a Broadway house, when a solid play is sized up to suit it, responds by giving it space to breathe.

I’m afraid, alas, the pixel wins, because the play, which opened on Monday, in a stylish Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Bartlett Sher, works only as provocation. Timely but turgid, it rarely rises to drama; in a neat recapitulation of current fears about technology, its humans, hardly credible as such, have been almost entirely replaced by ideas.

This is not the kind of play that brandishes a singular sharp point; it is the kind that swaddles you in innumerable impressions. Like Butterworth’s previous Broadway outings — the mythopoetic “Jerusalem” in 2011, the brawny Hugh Jackman vehicle “The River” in 2014 and especially the Irish fable “The Ferryman” in 2018 — “The Hills of California” is a yarn, not a lesson; a tale, not a tract. It resists interpretation, possibly as a way of resisting criticism, which, despite its flaws, it clearly does with great success.

If only irreverence were the problem! But the show that opened on Tuesday at SoHo Playhouse turns out to be, in its muddled way, something of a love letter. It’s just a bad one.

Though Broadway, with its vanities and oddities, is in many ways an easy target, hitting satirical bull’s-eyes is hard. Expecting Alessandrini to be as consistently sharp and catchy as the best musicals he ransacks is unrealistic. Even if the music direction by Fred Barton is, as always, top-notch, the show’s staging is rudimentary, the pacing of its mere 90 minutes erratic and pocked with potholes. As such, it’s probably a good thing that last summer’s planned production of “Forbidden Broadway on Broadway” didn’t work out; the scruffy, sarcastic, bare-bones revues that this franchise is modeled on no longer have a home there.

Though Broadway, with its vanities and oddities, is in many ways an easy target, hitting satirical bull’s-eyes is hard. Expecting Alessandrini to be as consistently sharp and catchy as the best musicals he ransacks is unrealistic. Even if the music direction by Fred Barton is, as always, top-notch, the show’s staging is rudimentary, the pacing of its mere 90 minutes erratic and pocked with potholes. As such, it’s probably a good thing that last summer’s planned production of “Forbidden Broadway on Broadway” didn’t work out; the scruffy, sarcastic, bare-bones revues that this franchise is modeled on no longer have a home there.

Most of what either woman says in “The Roommate,” which opened Thursday at the Booth Theater, is greeted by one or the other response. The two actors, old friends and old hands, play beautifully off each other, expertly riding the seesaw of a play, by Jen Silverman, that throws a Bronx grifter looking to reform herself into an unlikely alliance with a flyover frump looking to ditch her flannel ways. The actors’ intense focus and extreme contrast multiply the material exponentially, sending it way past the footlights to the back of the Booth. But as we’ve learned, sustaining and expanding are two different activities. Indeed, the Broadway supersizing of “The Roommate,” which has been produced regionally since 2015, does not necessarily represent progress, even as it no doubt reaps profit.

Though cleverly accomplished, the shift, as Jane turns the tables on Loyd’s supposed probity, makes “Job” feel even more manipulative than other therapy-based psychological thrillers. By comparison, “The Patient,” the FX series starring Steve Carell as a psychiatrist held hostage, seems like a model of earned dramatic tension. The tension of “Job” feels merely gratuitous.

They protest too much. “Oh, Mary!” may be silly, campy, even pointless, but “stupid,” I think not. Rather, the play, which opened on Thursday at the Lyceum Theater, is one of the best crafted and most exactingly directed Broadway comedies in years. Which is a surprise on many levels, and on each level a gift.

They protest too much. “Oh, Mary!” may be silly, campy, even pointless, but “stupid,” I think not. Rather, the play, which opened on Thursday at the Lyceum Theater, is one of the best crafted and most exactingly directed Broadway comedies in years. Which is a surprise on many levels, and on each level a gift.

The play’s ideas and ideals are fine, and modestly if repetitively dramatized, but what makes this swift summer trifle so diverting is the embodiment of the women themselves. N and A are perfect incarnations of their congressional doppelgängers, down to Pelosi’s golden Mace of the United States House of Representatives brooch and A.O.C.’s signature “Beso” red lipstick. The gimmick also gives Holland Taylor (as N) and Ana Villafañe (as A) tasty roles and a meaty conflict to sink their teeth into.

The play’s ideas and ideals are fine, and modestly if repetitively dramatized, but what makes this swift summer trifle so diverting is the embodiment of the women themselves. N and A are perfect incarnations of their congressional doppelgängers, down to Pelosi’s golden Mace of the United States House of Representatives brooch and A.O.C.’s signature “Beso” red lipstick. The gimmick also gives Holland Taylor (as N) and Ana Villafañe (as A) tasty roles and a meaty conflict to sink their teeth into.

I should say at this point that, no, I haven’t turned into a fan of the show itself, the one you can see at your community theater or license for your high school. I don’t believe musicals should need whisker consultants. But as happens occasionally, the right idea can transform the wrong material. If “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” has managed a Grizabella turn, reincarnating itself in fabulousness, do not expect an 18-year run or, pardon me, copycat productions. It’s a lightning strike: not now and forever but now and once.

I should say at this point that, no, I haven’t turned into a fan of the show itself, the one you can see at your community theater or license for your high school. I don’t believe musicals should need whisker consultants. But as happens occasionally, the right idea can transform the wrong material. If “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” has managed a Grizabella turn, reincarnating itself in fabulousness, do not expect an 18-year run or, pardon me, copycat productions. It’s a lightning strike: not now and forever but now and once.

Even if you buy that argument, your tolerance for its expression may be greater than mine. I don’t feel improved, enlightened or even chastened by a furious man repeatedly cracking a bullwhip in my direction. Nor was I amused by the dragooning of theatergoers brought onstage to witness atrocities or, at another point, to be turned, without warning, into slaves at an auction. The close-ups of their faces, as they crumple or freeze in the act of realization, are devastating, and not just for those undersold at $1. The devastation is of course the point. Everything “Dark Noon” chooses to explore figuratively was once quite literal to its victims. That there were millions of those victims lends moral importance to the endeavor — all the more reason it must be done well. But the play’s format seems to have gotten away from its values, creating a disturbing symbolic alliance between the storytellers and the perpetrators. It is no longer a representation of cruelty; it is cruel.

That tension between adventure and safety is what makes “Titanic” more than just a collection of tragic sketches. Perhaps a little baldly — Yeston’s lyrics are not as sophisticated as his music — he has Andrews (Jose Llana) say, in the show’s first words, that the liner he designed is part of mankind’s eternal attempt to “fabricate great works at once magnificent and impossible.” It’s a statement of hubris, of course: The show, after all, is about the human urge to dominate nature — and other humans — by whatever means necessary. Yet in art we can’t help relishing that hubris, if works like “Titanic” are the result.

Except for Halston, who is incapable of not grabbing an audience, there’s little the cast can do to make this material feel full or fresh. Even Bonney, a director with miles of excellent productions to her credit — including “Mlima’s Tale” and “Cost of Living” — resorts to too many clichés. (The sound design, by Darron L West, and the projection design, by Elaine J. McCarthy, are especially obvious.) And a Hail Mary pass toward tragedy in the last moments of the play feels like an incomplete.

But do not fear. This is not the kind of play to abandon you in a dark alley, even if Cephus’s distaste for city life is the most compelling and counterintuitive part of the story. Plot machinations that you will see coming at quite some distance deliver a happy ending and may even elicit a few nonconsensual tears. No matter: They cleanse the soul just the same. Williams, who died a few days before this revival’s first preview, seems to have been willing to go anywhere to free his hero from despair as a way of freeing the rest of us, too.

For many, it will be enough compensation that Malloy’s music remains as hypnotic and embracing as ever, performed faultlessly by the cast (especially Seibert) and a busy quartet (violin, cello, French horn, keyboards) under Or Matias’s musical direction. A close-harmony coda, accompanied only by a hurdy-gurdy drone, specifically recalls the a cappella wonders of “Octet” and the hushed beauty of the title song of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.” But intermittent gorgeousness is not, for me, a sufficient substitute for substance. What is “Three Houses” trying to say, or have us experience, about living through the pandemic — beyond the usefulness of eight quantities of liquor?