Jesse Green — Theater Critic

The comparison is pungent but inapt: Archival work is not death work. Likewise, a play is not a museum. That’s part of why, while admiring Tectonic’s intentions and technique in “Blueberries” — not for nothing was it recently named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama — I find it even more unbalanced today than I did when I saw it last year in Washington.

That it does not have one here is not fatal. Neugebauer is such a detailed director, honing every moment and movement to a chic polish, that this typically gorgeous Lincoln Center Theater production offers a hundred things to enjoy. Mimi Lien’s sylvan set, receding into the depths of the Beaumont stage, is one. Musical interludes, by the songwriter Andrew Bird, often featuring accordion and violin, are another, striking the play’s jaunty melancholy just right. Kaye Voyce’s contemporary costumes, quickly identifying each character’s status and self-concept, are wonderful, and in the case of Elena’s knit dresses with their form-hugging cuts, sensational.

The Manhattan Theater Club production that opened on Tuesday, starring the rom-dram charmer Rachel McAdams, confirms that earlier diagnosis. But Herzog, whose Broadway adaptation of “An Enemy of the People” is running a few blocks away, is not interested in locking down meaning. Like all great plays, “Mary Jane” catches light from different directions at different times, revealing different ideas. On the other side of the worst of Covid, “Mary Jane” feels less like a parent’s cry for more life than an inquest into the meaning of death.

But then “Patriots” is no better a source for moral news than the other kind. Perhaps no play is. Here, though, Putin is given way more than his due: glamorized as a shy, upstanding mayor corrupted by Berezovsky and his plutocratic ilk. Whereas Berezovsky, who did after all try to bring Putin down, is left in the gutter, with a certain amount of dramaturgical glee. Goold stages his downfall like a rock opera, with strobes, bursts of loud noise (these are often assassination attempts) and weird dancers. If not moral clarity, then, “Patriots” at least offers a lesson: There are moments when tyrants are still tyros, when Putins are nobodies — and evil can be redirected or sidelined. Wait too long and you could lose your chance.

Let me quickly add that Rebecca Frecknall’s production, first seen in London, has many fine and entertaining moments. Some feature its West End star Eddie Redmayne, as the macabre emcee of the Kit Kat Club (and quite likely your nightmares). Some come from its new New York cast, including Gayle Rankin (as the decadent would-be chanteuse Sally Bowles) and Bebe Neuwirth and Steven Skybell (dignified and wrenching as an older couple). Others arise from Frecknall’s staging itself, which is spectacular when in additive mode, illuminating the classic score by John Kander and Fred Ebb, and the amazingly sturdy book by Joe Masteroff. But too often a misguided attempt to resuscitate the show breaks its ribs.

The Greeks are useful here, having made sure to embody injustice in emotion, and even song, not just instruction. Their theater depicted the way policy and character were inseparably bonded. As such, “Suffs” is already good, in both senses — a good show and good for the world. I even shed a few political tears. But to be great, a musical (like a great movement) must grab you by the throat. “Suffs” too often settles for holding up signs.

The subtlety, cleverness and humanity with which “Sally & Tom” approaches the story of Hemings and Jefferson, dazzlingly doubled in the story of the troupe putting it on, come as no surprise at all. They are the hallmarks of an author incapable of writing a line unfilled with the bewildering burden — or is it the treasure? — of human contradiction. Indeed, Parks begins with an unprovable yet also undisprovable thesis. She has Luce, the author and star of “The Pursuit of Happiness,” decree: “This is not a love story.”

That there is little if any historical truth in that characterization is not ultimately the problem. The painter Georges Seurat in “Sunday in the Park With George” — a show referenced in the first lines of the script — is largely fictionalized too, a cad to his mistress and generally unlikable. “Lempicka” doesn’t have the craft, especially in the mis-accented, often vague lyrics, to make its title character a relatable modern woman, nor the boldness to let her be awful and great. Perhaps if it were less of a machine she could be more of a monster.

And yet the musical version of “The Outsiders” that opened on Thursday has been made with so much love and sincerity it survives with most of its heart intact. Youth is key to that survival; the cast, if not actually teenage — their singing is way too professional for that — is still credibly fresh-faced. (Five of the nine principals are making their Broadway debuts.) That there is no cynical distance between them and their characters is in itself refreshing to see. Also key to the show’s power is the director Danya Taymor’s rivetingly sensorial approach to the storytelling, even if it sometimes comes at a cost to the story itself. Many stunning things are happening on the stage of the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater — and from the sobs I heard the other night, in the audience, too.

Today, though, unless you’re a die-hard fan who thrills automatically to every lick and lyric, you may want something that calls itself musical theater to offer more than a full-tilt assault on the senses. This production — directed, like the original, by Des McAnuff — won’t provide that, being less interested in trying to put across the story (by McAnuff and Townshend) than in obscuring it with relentless noise and banal imagery.

I find the result a bit mystifying. Jackson is a major talent, and Jacobs, in her Off Broadway debut, is already highly accomplished. Benson, in her stagings of “Fairview” and “An Octoroon,” has proved herself the kind of director who can deftly manage complex genre pastiche. But in “Teeth,” I’m sorry to say, this holy trinity has bitten off more than it can chew.

Surely not the Ibsen, which aligns closely with their views and is a distant source of them. (The play was first performed, as “En Folkefiende,” in 1883.) Nor does it make sense that they would object to Sam Gold’s crackling and persuasive production, which drove those views home despite having to regroup once the protesters were ejected.

When songs provide so little information, barely differentiating the characters let alone advancing the plot, a musical tends to sag. And when a musical has gone to some trouble to accommodate those songs — the movie of “The Notebook” runs two hours, the show hardly 20 minutes more — the trade-offs are of the nose-versus-face variety.

Both precepts seem plausible, even if one is harsh and one loving, and both are chewily written. The entire play is like that: ideally worded, ingeniously structured, sinewy and swift. It never lets you, or poor Sister James, reach a conclusion as to which, if either, of her superiors is right. By the time Shanley takes the astonishing step of having Aloysius interrogate Donald’s mother — Quincy Tyler Bernstine, scoring big in a short but vividly counterintuitive role — you no longer know what you believe.

Both precepts seem plausible, even if one is harsh and one loving, and both are chewily written. The entire play is like that: ideally worded, ingeniously structured, sinewy and swift. It never lets you, or poor Sister James, reach a conclusion as to which, if either, of her superiors is right. By the time Shanley takes the astonishing step of having Aloysius interrogate Donald’s mother — Quincy Tyler Bernstine, scoring big in a short but vividly counterintuitive role — you no longer know what you believe.

Mostly, “Illinoise” makes me wonder why so many musicals, even those that feature dance heavily, are so leadfooted in their storytelling conventions. (No surprise that Peck was influenced, as he told The Times, by the groundbreaking pop jukebox dancicals of Twyla Tharp.) “Illinoise” instead builds on its faith in the audience, trusting us to organize its various streams of information into a steady river of deep feeling inside our own heads. Or if you wind up crying, as I did, outside.

Which is not to say that “The Ally” is artless. Quite the opposite, it is almost too artful, arraying its eloquent arguments in clever pairs of impossible contradiction. If only frustration and hopelessness were feelings worth intensifying, it would win a prize for its form-follows-function design. But I felt the need for more wisdom than craft.

The book has unsolvable problems, but then so do most musicals, until they are solved — or bulldozed. Even then, few give you a first act like this one, or a subject — the creation of American music in the furious cauldron of race — as hot. I mean hot as entertainment, of course, but also, even hotter, as history.

That’s the setup, if nowhere near the payoff, of the “The Apiary,” a bright, strange and mesmerizing marvel by Kate Douglas, making her professional playwriting debut with this Off Off Broadway production. Unlike most such debuts, though, “The Apiary,” which opened on Tuesday at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, is receiving a nearly perfect, first-class staging under the almost too good direction of Kate Whoriskey.

Complicity was not of course possible in the no-longer-available 2020 streaming production, which required viewers to process it on the fly, in much the way they process social media, deciding for themselves what to laugh at — and what to ponder, repost or trash. Lacking that formal congruence, the live “Russian Troll Farm” has a temperature problem: Instead of cool, it feels overheated; instead of suggestive, prosaic.

But that animating idea is also a problem because aside from Jason Robert Brown’s typically propulsive songs, which excite even the most absurd moments of Jonathan Marc Sherman’s book, the engine of the story, set in the 1990s, depends on uncertainty about Ethan’s veracity. That’s a nonstarter.

That this Manhattan Theater Club production, directed by David Cromer, remains mostly riveting is the result of the richness of Harmon’s novelistic detail — and the exceptional skill of the principal actors in realizing it.

It would also be easy to attribute the improvement to Neugebauer’s direction, which is so smart and swift for most of the play’s substantial length that you feel gripped by storytelling without being strangled by argument. Her staging, on a towering double-decker set by the design collective dots, is also nearly ideal, accentuating (with the help of Jane Cox’s painterly lighting) the conflicts and alliances among the characters. And the daredevil cast, instead of reveling in falling apart, focuses for as long as possible on keeping it together. We thus experience, in the force of that repression, just how awful human awfulness must be if human will cannot ultimately corral it.

But when the staging, singing and playing come together, whether in exuberance or sorrow, I was happily reminded of another musical about music that originated at the Atlantic: “The Band’s Visit.” (David Yazbek, that show’s songwriter, is credited here as a creative consultant.) In such moments — the hypnotic “Chan Chan,” the ear-wormy “El Cuarto de Tula,” the heartbroken “Veinte Años,” the gorgeous “Drume Negrita” — you really do feel the past harmonizing with the present. What Compay says is true: “Old songs kick up old feelings.” Even, as in the showstopping and, yes, scorching “Candela,” with a flute.

Perhaps it’s enough that “How to Dance in Ohio” offers solace and encouragement in a mild, conventional package. (There are cool-down spaces for those who need them, as one of the actors explains in welcoming the audience.) Doing sweet, reparative work for any part of humanity means doing sweet, reparative work for it all.