Jonathan Mandell

“Titanique” is probably not meant to inspire reflection about the world we live in. But I was struck by how much the show dips into nostalgia for the 1990s: The blockbuster movie was released in 1997; that was the decade in which Céline Dion reached the peak of her popularity. The musical also has throwaway jokey references involving the 90’s TV series Full House, the movie franchise “Scream,” which began in 1996, the “Super Mario Kart video game, first released in 1992. The 1990s had less inflation, lower prices, less polarization; Americans were far more satisfied with the direction of the country, Can that help explain why so many theatergoers have wanted to escape into “Titanique”?

There are lessons aplenty and breathtaking moments in this production, as in almost any production of “Death of a Salesman” since its debut in 1949. That was just the third year of the Tony Awards, and it won six of them, plus the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The first Broadway revival, 26 years later, didn’t win any Tonys, although George C. Scott was nominated. I don’t know the reasons why the current producers have decided to mount this seventh production of the play on Broadway so soon after the sixth. But surely there is a relevant cautionary lesson right in the play, maybe that line that Biff finally says to Willy about prizes.

That’s the production that’s opening tonight at Broadway’s Broadhurst Theater. Its transfer to Broadway from downtown makes it a different experience, given the symbolic importance of the Great White Way. But the new venue also makes it a different experience in more practical ways, for better and for worse.

The audience gasped almost as frequently as it laughed during the performance I attended of “Becky Shaw,” Gina Gionfriddo’s fierce, funny comedy that revolves around a bad blind date. What audibly startled the audience wasn’t what happens to the characters, which is one disaster after another, all skillfully plotted, but what some of the characters say to one another. In the play’s complicated web of relationships, these characters feel free to deliver what they consider the truth, but what they say often sounds more like insult than insight. That theatergoers are unlikely to wind up dismissing any of these blunt-speaking characters as complete boors is a testament to the playwright’s rich, nuanced writing, and the layered portrayals by the stellar five-member cast, three of whom are making impressive Broadway debuts. “Becky Shaw” is opening tonight at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater on Broadway, one block north and seventeen years after Second Stage’s Off-Broadway production of the play, which has not lost its sting.

Compared to the movie, the playwright has given many of the other characters more lines, backstories and heightened personalities. The head teller Colleen (the always reliable Jessica Hecht) is even more forward and fearless, arguing with her captors, even outright reprimanding them like a dean of discipline (“Is she always like this? With the stick up her ass?” Sonny asks her co-worker plaintively.) Ortiz as the detective is a talkative mensch, the FBI agent Sheldon (Spence Garrett) harshly condescending to him. In general, the production plays up the comedy in the first act — The bank robbers are now far more clownishly inept — which at times feels overdone, as if the creative team is straining to distinguish itself from the movie. Certain scenes also have been altered, mostly to reflect the difference in what’s do-able live on stage versus on film, although David Korins set, which revolves to show the inside and the outside of the bank, largely keeps the action flowing, and the sound design by Cody Spencer fills in for the montage of street scene in the movie.

Conceived and directed by MacArthur “genius” Martha Clarke, who is herself 81, and is best known for her having created a vivid work of dance theater from Hieronymus Bosch’s painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” the play has a script by Beth Henley, Pulitzer-winning playwright of “Crimes of the Heart,” based on Darger’s own writing. It stars John Kelly, an Obie-winning actor and himself a visual artist. Yet despite its near-legendary creative team, its short running time and some moments of visual invention, “Bughouse” failed to keep my interest, much less convince me of Darger’s greatness in “the art brut canon” or anywhere else.

I can see three main reasons why some theatergoers might want to sympathize with the antisemite at the center of the incendiary true incident being dramatized in “Giant.” The man, for one, is Roald Dahl, the children’s book author whose titles (including “Matilda” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”) many have read and loved since childhood. Dahl is being portrayed in another virtuoso performance by John Lithgow, the fine eighty-year-old actor who has been able to locate the humanity in such insufferable villains as the Trinity Killer in Dexter, Lord Farquaad in Shrek and Roger Ailes in Bombshell. Then, some might agree with Dahl’s criticism of Israel, which he made four decades ago, but that is even more commonly heard in March of 2026 — that Israel has exhibited “appalling behavior” and exerted “powerful influence over the US treasury [and] over the presidency.”

“Trash” has a plot with several strands, a number of surprises and a couple of meta-theatrical touches, involving all five cast members; much of what unfolds is determined by the audience voting (via the red/yellow cards) at crucial crossroads. It’s a lot to take in; maybe too much. That may be the point; the message that Caverly and Morrill most want to make: Look how much the Deaf have to deal with. If “Trash” is eye-opening for hearing audiences, it is also likely one of the few entertainments that Deaf people can enjoy without compromise. Captions are provided whenever the hearing characters speak in English. Even the music and the sound effects are captioned.

What’s not lost is Radcliffe’s performance. Jonny Donahoe, the co-creator of the show and originator of the role, had experience as a stand-up comedian; he was also a big guy who looks as if he’s about to give you a bear hug. These would not likely be among the top attributes of his Broadway successor in the role. But Daniel Radcliffe is also a witty, energetic and generous host, a cool hand at comedy (as we saw in “Franklin Shepard INC”) and something more. When his character says things like: “If you got all the way through life without ever being heart crushingly depressed, you probably haven’t been paying attention,” the pain he communicates makes it clear that he’s been paying attention.

Luckily, Reddick, director Knud Adams and the rest of the creative team stick to history in some small but satisfying ways – the way the ensemble skates on the roller rink (guided by Baye and Asa’s movement direction), albeit without skates; that Speak & Spell (an actual handheld electronic educational toy introduced by Texas Instruments in 1978), and, above all, the cinnamon-flavored jawbreakers invented in 1954 that Meek gobbles up from the neighborhood candy shop – the Atomic Fireballs.

Patrick Lazour and Daniel Lazour, the brother songwriting team who call themselves The Lazours, have composed twelve songs for their show. Eight of them have a choral part for the audience; the cast members hand out a booklet with our parts, and Robin de Jesús serves as our choral director for the refrains, while one or more of the other cast members sing the verses, accompanied by Kris Saint-Louis on guitar and Alex Bechtel on piano. Most of the songs have generic lyrics. This doesn’t necessarily make them less powerful. It was terribly moving to sing, over and over again (after Yasmine learns of the results of a biopsy)

It might baffle people to learn that Amber Ruffin, celebrated comedy talk show writer and host as well as Tony-nominated librettist for “Some Like It Hot,” spent a dozen years with two co-creators putting together “Bigfoot.’ I wondered whether it was the creative team’s reputation that drew in performers with such impressive track records – Henson, Tony nominee for Mean Girls, and the last Elf; Crystal Lucas-Perry, Tony nominee for Ain’t No Mo, and a revelation as John Adams in 1776; Jason Tam, six-time Broadway veteran, last seen as the Squip in Be More Chill. They do a fine job with parts that are just not as good as their best material. I remember when Alex Moffat, SNL alumnus, made his Broadway debut in “The Cottage” three years ago, how his aberrant acrobatics were among the highlights of that comedy. But in a scene in “Bigfoot” that sounds similar – the mayor keeps on shooting himself by accident all over his body – it was not so much a moment of low comedy, as just a low moment.

Much of “Chinese Republicans” provides a deepening and ultimately poignant portrait of four distinct characters, made all the more palpable by a first-rate cast. At the same time, through subplots or brief scenes or just a throwaway line here or there, the play touches lightly on a bracingly wide range of topical issues – the corrupting nature of corporate culture, anti-Asian violence, the costs of assimilation, female camaraderie and competition, sexism and sexual harassment in the workplace, abortion, immigration anxiety.

Directed fluidly by Shelley Butler with a minimal design, the production relies on ensemble acting; both Heidi Armbruster and Matthew Saldívar portraying multiple characters (among others, she’s Josh’s mother and a rabbi; he’s Josh’s co-worker and a neurologist), and the four grandparents moonlight as the crowd in scenes of a support group and others. But “The Reservoir” is inescapably the Noah Galvin show, and he makes the most of it. Galvin (best-known for Dear Evan Hansen and the short-lived TV series “The Real McNeal”) has fine comic timing, charm, and physical grace. But he is most impressive for the moments that his face registers, briefly but persuasively, Josh’s pain and sorrow.

But the frame of the play is the train ride, and the longer it went on, the more it felt to me like a children’s adventure story, albeit one not suitable for children. (The production is recommended for age 13+.) This is largely, I think, because the dialogue is neither as natural nor as precise as the physical movement, and because each of the children is a type.

The awkwardness between father and adult daughter is a sound insight, but did we need quite so much banal chatter? These scenes might have been more effective had Shawkat portrayed Mae more expressively; as less of a cipher.

It’s confusing at first, one of the few explicit clues that “The Dinosaurs” is not just what it at first seems, which is an ordinary meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. I’ve been to plays about support groups before that I thought were low-key (such as Someone Spectacular in 2024); “The Dinosaurs” is full of moments that seem positively banal. But the banality engenders a feeling of authenticity, and the authenticity at its best – rendered by some of the finest stage actresses working in New York – helps us at least pause and consider the significance of moments that we might otherwise have ignored.

It’s a somewhat baffling choice that the trial takes up only about twenty minutes of a play that runs two hours (including intermission.) The playwright, who is also a professor of philosophy, fills the rest of the play with biographical scenes, philosophical and political debates, some dozen songs and poems from the period, and lots of scenes of post-trial Hans in prison and concentration camps, during which he shows up for visits by his mother exhibiting the latest injuries from his various tortures (These were early iterations of the camps, but did they really allow family visits?) All of this material outside of the trial might have worked better if it were presented with more subtlety and subtext. For all the playwright’s effort at indicating Hans’ “inner life” (as he informs us in a program note), Lackey’s writing is too often on the level of a school play, all spelled out and on the surface.

Would “The Unknown” interest Jude Law? Only, it seems to me, if he’s willing to perform it on stage. This is a trickster’s play, in a production with almost no set, but Cha See’s oblique lighting and Caroline Eng’s sound enhancing the tension and the teasing; scarier, or at least creepier, because it is live.

It is not inaccurate to call “The Other Place” taut and tense, a showcase for D’Arcy’s embodiment of stress and Menzie’s eventual explosive expression of guilt, aided by the insistence of Yannis Philippakis’ electronic score and the persistence Josh Anio Grigg’s sound design (which includes endless startling pings from cell phone messages.). But Zeldin’s skill as a director in dramatizing the everyday is on display in the performances of the other cast members, especially Lee Braithwaite as the stepson Leni, who even in his smallest and seemingly most random of movement reveal his place in the hierarchy of the family.

Written and directed by Ngozi Anyanwu, “The Monsters,” a two-hander opening tonight at New York City Center in a production by Manhattan Theater Club, tracks the off-and-on, up-and-down evolution of a relationship that manages to be both unsentimental and sweet.

Luckily, the four splendid cast members help us overlook the playwright’s calculations by bringing these characters to life, even Brandon Flynn as Jonah. Or should I say him especially. Flynn is the only one of the four whom I remember seeing on stage before, and his performance both as Marlon Brando in Kowalski and the kidnapped child at the center of “Kid Victory,” were memorable.

In 47 minutes, “An Ark” spans the arc (ark?) of human life, from birth to death, with a lyrical script by acclaimed British playwright Simon Stephens (Tony-winner for “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” and recent Off-Broadway adaptor of “Vanya.” ) Neither Simons’ lyricism nor producer Todd Eckert’s pioneering mixed reality will work for everybody. The experiment might not wholly satisfy anybody, but it’s too intriguing and artful for me to dismiss.

It is hard to deny the creaky aura that hangs over “Anna Christie,” which is probably still best known for the play’s adaptation as silent screen star Greta Garbo’s first “talking picture” (“Garbo Talks” was the now legendary marketing slogan) – and that movie was released a full decade after the stage debut. But director Thomas Kail smartly leans into the expressionism from that same era in his production of “Anna Christie,” opening today at St. Ann’s Warehouse; the results are a bracingly muscular stagecraft that helps create electrifying moments. If the acting is uneven, sometimes even indecipherable because of the characters heavy Swedish and Irish accents, the actors are always watchable.

What’s most uncanny for me about “Marjorie Prime,” though, is that the new production, especially the ending, struck me as having been revised, not necessarily for the better. Yet it turns out that the script is exactly the same (I still have the old one; I went back and checked it.) The director and most of the design team are the same as well. The show is being billed as a look at “memory, loss and AI” — I didn’t realize it would be a look at my memory too. There is still much in the play that I find clever and thought-provoking. The starry four-member cast keeps us engaged. Harrison is nothing if not prescient in the world he imagined, but perhaps some of the novelty has worn off, because the characterizations seem less sharp and the vibe more “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” unsettling than I remember feeling before.