Jonathan Mandell

“Weather Girl” has a plot of sorts, although it’s not especially detailed or what you could call linear; I’d be surprised if the Netflix series sticks to it (assuming a Netflix series actually materializes.) In a program note, Watkin explains that he wrote the play to address the question: “Why do we wreck the places we love?” He explicitly means California, and implicitly Planet Earth. In answer, he packs his play with numerous ways we are all complicit. To give one example: During the date with the tech bro, he tells her he’s “part of a startup that’s building six hundred ‘smart homes’ nearby, and I say what about the water crisis, where will they get their water, and he says I dunno someone’ll figure it out” (Is this why she crashes his car? If so, the dots aren’t directly connected.) It’s not the plot nor the points that exert the biggest pull for “Weather Girl.” It’s how Julia McDermott’s performance holds all the elements together, even as everything is flying apart.

As Ulysses works through the tensions and pressures towards the perhaps-inevitable conciliatory hugs and celebratory voguing, the scenes and songs that depict Ulysses’ developing relationship with Raymond feel the most credible and the most endearing. That may be because they seem to come closest to what those kids who walk through the church’s red door each week may actually be like, or at least what they most realistically hope for.

“The Brothers Size” is a kind of dance, in some ways literally (the performers moving around that white circle to the sound of the drums) but also metaphorically – a swirl of envy and resentment and deep love that engages all three characters in different, fascinating and (of course) oblique ways.

These efforts pay off in visual splendor. Yet, in part because of the great inherent promise of its subject, “House of McQueen” feels mostly like a missed opportunity.

There are so many reasons to be excited by director Saheem Ali’s production of Shakespeare’s comically convoluted tale of mistaken identity and addled affection. It was inspired to cast Lupita Nyong’o and her brother Junior Nyong’o as the twins Viola and Sebastian, who are split apart during a shipwreck and make their separate ways through Illyria.

I couldn’t embrace everything about this show. But I couldn’t remain neutral either. For one thing, antisemites will hate it. He starts a lengthy routine by explaining that he earned a black belt in karate and developed comic retorts after being bullied in school, including by someone who called him a dirty Jew; this leads to his listing the many inventions by Jews (Prozac…Theory of Relativity…Pickles), and concludes by his inviting the audience to sing along with a jingle

Book writer Catherine Johnson deserves credit for trying to make the mother-daughter relationship resonate, although she is more often lauded for having worked in twenty-two ABBA songs into the story in sometimes clever ways, without changing almost any of the lyrics. But the lyrics don’t always fit snugly with the narrative; and some of the melodies – all of which were already oldies when the musical debuted – aren’t really evergreens. A reimagined “Mamma Mia” could have benefitted from dropping some of the songs, and making the show shorter.

“Joy: A New True Musical” lies somewhere between the movie and book in tone, but it has a quirkiness all its own, in part because, well, it’s fifteen musical numbers about a woman who sold a mop, but mostly because it exists in an art form that tends to skewer business people. (The exception: show business people.)

Having lost the courage of its own outrageousness, ‘Heathers the Musical’ feels too toothless for the Trump era, even as it maintains a level of tastelessness that I might call amoral, if that didn’t make me sound too much like a ‘Reefer Madness’-era scold. Let’s just say the show feels too tonally jarring and too calculated for me to sign up for membership in the Corn Nuts.

The events of the last few days make Duke’s line extraordinarily timely, and would likely heighten interest in a suspenseful and pointed story of an American’s clueless and disastrous entanglement with a foreigner, presented as a microcosm of America’s entanglement with foreign countries. The timing might even boost something less political, a steamy romance set against a background of danger and intrigue. The production lands somewhere in-between pointed tale and romance, not completely satisfying as either, despite a charming four-member cast. Like other promising moments in the play, little is made of Duke’s line about America’s wars.

Eventually, there are revelations. Abby Rosebrock’s new play is evidently intended to be intriguing, even seductive in the slow way it parses out the info, with a payoff of an ending that is deliberately shocking. But from the get-go “Lowcountry” was easily the most exasperating production I’ve sat through all year.

'Call Me Izzy’ offers pockets of humor, and an opportunity for Smart to demonstrate her versatility as an actress. There is even at least one poem that Izzy recites that is worth listening to. But a play that revolves around domestic violence evokes comparison to such seminal dramas as ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ and such popular musicals as ‘The Color Purple’ and ‘Waitress.’ This new play, which veers between the predictable and the implausible, adds little to the conversation, and pales beside that canon.

If ‘Goddess’ is a vehicle for Iman’s talent, there’s LOTS of other traffic. The musical is lively, long and busy. The staging, set and costumes are sometimes so vibrant it’s hard to know where to look. Composer Michael Thurber has created an eclectic score of some two dozen musical numbers, some from Kenya, where the show is set, but also jazz and pop and soul – and at least one percussion-heavy number that felt borrowed from Buena Vista Social Club.

It is only in the last few minutes – and, really, only after the show has ended — that it sank in how much of what Jon does is despicable, and how much of what happens to Annie falls short of consensual. It seems plausible to me that playwright Hannah Moscovitch and director Ian Rickson deliberately set out to make Annie dull – the opposite of a seductress or a predator (predatress?) in the David Mamet mold — and even worked to emphasize the 30-year difference in the actors’ ages, achieving an uncomfortable father-daughter vibe.

“Real Women Have Curves,” which has opened tonight at James Earl Jones Theater, marks choreographer Sergio Trujillo’s Broadway directorial debut. If it has a predictable plot, it’s all these women together, and the proud characters they portray in the show, that make it work. “Make It Work” is the title of the first of twenty tuneful and rhythmic musical numbers in the show, and the guiding principle of its characters. They see the broken fan, or the shortage of thread, or their fear of la migra, as just obstacles to work around: “If you prick your finger…make sure the fabric’s red/When something breaks/Make it work instead.”

Much of what we’re told in “Just in Time” about Darin is a fairly standard show biz story. It’s a measure of how little in his biography there is to work with that the show holds off until nearly the end to reveal a big family secret, one that’s easily available in the most cursory bio of Darin online. But there is some drama in the relationship with Dee. For all his charm as a performer, Darin doesn’t seem like a very nice man. He insists she go on the road with him, and show his fans and hers how much she appreciates his act. He soon tires of her. He sends his brother-in-law turned valet Charlie (Joe Barbara) to relay the message: “He wants a divorce.” There is a hint that his impatience is motivated by his knowledge that he will die young, but it’s buried too deeply beneath an off-putting ambition.

he has been promoting “Hold Me in the Water” as a “poignant romantic comedy.” On its face, a romantic comedy is challenging to achieve with just one performer on stage, and Haddad doesn’t even seem interested in giving his crush anything resembling an independent identity. The man is not even given a name, nor any other specific details that would make him something besides just the object of Ryan’s desire. Perhaps the playwright is trying to protect the real man’s privacy. But the one-sided account makes the romance feel shallow at best and Ryan less than self-aware. “How much did Ryan get to know the actual person?” I wondered — way before Ryan recounts the man telling him “you don’t even really know me.”

“Pirates!,” which opens tonight on Broadway, is billed as a reimagining of Gilbert and Sullivan’s 146-year-old comic operetta. But luckily there is plenty it shares with the twenty-six previous Broadway productions of “The Pirates of Penzance, or The Slave of Duty.” The creative team’s noodling doesn’t get in the way of some exciting performances, such as David Hyde Pierce’s, mastering “I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major-General,” the granddaddy of all patter songs, and Ramin Karimloo’s, swashbuckling his way through “I Am The Pirate King,” leaping from the ship’s deck, sword at the ready.

“Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp” is being given a production that’s watchable enough – Deirdre O’Connell is the undeniable standout, but the entire cast is game, including a couple of circus acts in-between the plays (acrobat Junru Wang and juggler Maddox Morfit-Tighe) – so that you may be OK with not being able to grasp what it all means. Until you get home, and the plays continue in your head.

Central to the appeal of the production are the five actors who portray the female students. Their frank conversations about sex and celebrities, their shifting enmities and alliances, are funny but also feel spot-on. Their extended moments of laughing and crying and dancing together, even shrieking together, are infectious.

"Smash” can be viewed as a thought-provoking experiment in cross-platform adaptation. Do the musical numbers, now that they’re actually on Broadway, feel less legitimate than they did when they were part of a TV show? Is the theatergoing experience now confused or undermined by the clash of tones between the relatively straightforward musical numbers and the flippant, farcical scenes in-between them? … If it’s not interesting enough as a musical, why are they asking us to invest our time and emotion in the fiction of making it?

The producers apparently believe that showstoppers sell a show. But it’s unreasonable to expect cast members, no matter how capable, to deliver one number after another that outshine the iconic performances with which Sondheim-lovers in New York are well-acquainted. And there’s that problem of a lack of context. Too many of these numbers, revved up from nothing, start to make the revue feel like a singing competition. Everybody is supposed to be old friends, no?

Little of it feels original, and none of it feels necessary. But just like actual Betty Boop merchandise — the many toys, t-shirts, scrunchies and socks covered with her image – ‘Boop!’ doesn’t have to feel necessary; it’s fun. And the main reason for that is Jasmine Amy Rogers.

But novelty and cleverness are not enough to turn “The Last Five Years” into a fully realized musical, and neither is Brown’s score, although many of the songs, ranging from catchy to lilting, have become beloved singalong and audition material. What has made “The Last Five Years” hold together as more than a pleasant-enough collection of show songs was a credible sense of connection between the two characters. Of the several productions of the show that I’ve seen, the one in 2021 achieved this best — through the staging, which circumvented the script by placing the two together in the scenes, and through the palpable chemistry of the two performers, Nicholas Edwards and Nasia Thomas (who, intriguingly, is the standby for Cathy in the current production.)

If there’s not much change in content, ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ is transformed by its context. On the night I attended, the audience treated the play like the gathering of the like-minded at a public square, responding to this real-life drama from the 1950s as if a comment on life in America under Donald Trump.