Jonathan Mandell — Theater Critic

“Mother Play” is not as great as plays Paula Vogel has written in the past – perhaps not as great as she might be able to make it in time – but under Tina Landau’s direction, it is a mesmerizing production, albeit not always easy to watch. That’s not only because of the fully-invested acting, but also because of the fully-infested sets (thanks to projection designer Shawn Duan.)

The Lincoln Center “Uncle Vanya,” which is the 11th production of the play on Broadway, doesn’t completely solve the central difficulties of staging it. The production still requires patience; there’s no concession to the Tik-Tok generation. And while Schreck’s translation does bring out the humor, and gets rid of the stuffiness, it introduces potential problems of its own. Still, under Lila Neugebauer’s direction, the performances of the nine-member cast do click often enough to reward those of us who are patient.

The episodic adventures should be delightful, but they are instead removed and remote, for a compound of reasons. Ruhl’s script relies on narration rather than dialogue (of which there is admittedly relatively little in Woolf’s novel.) Six of the cast members (all but Mac) spend most of their time not as characters but as chorus members. They divvy up their exposition, often one single line after another. And they are often huddled together on a stage that is essentially bare – which results in a vastness that swallows up their lines.

“Patriots” ultimately feels like a play for a different time and a different place. It is opening at the crowded end of a busy Broadway season, and if New York theatergoers are going to be offered a play about Russia that involves Vladimir Putin, why a British play about a Russian oligarch whose heyday was in the 1990s, with most of the depicted events having occurred decades ago? We don’t get enough of a background or perspective on what much of the world (including Americans) view as an urgent current moment — Putin’s continuing war on Ukraine. If it’s true, as the play indicates, that Putin began his reign making overtures to the West — we’re told he even wanted Russia to become a member nation of NATO — then what happened? We’re left in the dark. We can guess; try to read between the lines, do some research afterwards on our own. Or if we want a more complete picture from Peter Morgan, we can wait to see if he turns the story into another Netflix series.

So, ok, I won’t call “The Heart of Rock and Roll” poppy. If not poppy, it’s certainly predictable, a dose of 1980s nostalgia with a by-the-numbers plot that would not be out of place in a conventional 1950s musical comedy. But for what it is, the show has its moments. Cott gives another reliable central performance, surrounded by stand-out supporting players. Lorin Latarro’s choreography rocks, and hops, and sometimes completely flips (there are acrobatic dancers in the ensemble.) In between the catchy tunes, eye-rolling contrivance battles it out with cleverness; sometimes, clever wins.

Luckily there are two performances that do more than their share in trying to right the imbalance. Bebe Neuwirth is exquisite as Fraulein Schneider, the landlady of the boarding house where Clifford rents a room; she brings attention to songs that are not normally among the most memorable in the musical – “So What” and “What Would You Do,” — which drive home the real-life despair and high stakes then facing people in Germany. Her performance is matched by Steven Skybell, as Herr Schultz, one of her boarders. The two older characters gently fall in love, accompanied by some lovely melodies, “It Couldn’t Please Me More,” and “Married.” In the most effective scene in which the Emcee participates:, he wraps a wine glass in a napkin and steps on it – central to the traditional Jewish marriage ritual – but it’s accompanied not by hurrahs, but by a loud boom, darkness, the sound of glass shattering, and the lights up on a fluttering of what might literally be stage confetti, but hits like a preview of Kristallnacht.

Watching this play by David Adjmi made me think of the last (and possibly the only other) play I’ve seen that was set in a recording studio, “Million Dollar Quartet,” not because there were any similarities between the two, but precisely because their differences made me realize how I could be impressed by the writing and acting in “Stereophonic” and still be disappointed by it.

If Dixon and Bean give swoon-worthy interpretations of some of Keys’ catchiest melodies, Kecia Lewis is on fire in Keys’ most moving and intense tune, “Perfect Way To Die.” The song is about a woman whose son has been shot dead. Nobody is shot dead in “Hell’s Kitchen.” There’s no indication that Miss Liza Jane had a son who was killed. Miss Jane sings the song after Ali enters the Ellington room and tells her she is too angry to play piano right now. In the scene right before, the police have a (somewhat murky) encounter with Knuck, possibly instigated by Jersey, which led to his arrest. Miss Liza Jane excoriates her student: “Then why the hell are you in here and not out there. ¥ou were in pain. That pain led you here. Listen to that pain. Do something with it.” If the lyrics don’t correspond to the situation of the scene, the emotions are deeply aligned and easily shared by the audience. The same could be said about much of “Hell’s Kitchen.”

But much has changed in “Suffs,” almost all for the better: The show is more streamlined, more focused. At the same time, with the transfer to Broadway, my assessment has changed somewhat. “Suffs” on Broadway is likely to be sought out more for its inspiration and enlightenment than its entertainment.

The eight members of the cast give their most absorbing performances as the 18th century characters. Rodrigo Muñoz’s authentic-looking costumes – surely better than Good Company could afford – help make the scenes at Monticello feel you-are-there real, not a rehearsal. The performers’ many interactions as the present-day members of the troupe (too minor to be considered full-fledged subplots) are less interesting as a whole.

What I mean is: The cast as a whole can sing to the rafters and dance like the dickens, but their belting started to feel like an American Idol competition, and some of the dance numbers seemed so frenzied that at times they gave off an aura of desperation. This unmodulated, artificial-feeling fervor made me wonder whether there were too many cities on their 13-city pre-Broadway tour, leading the cast to overcompensate in order to stave off fatigue. Or had director Schele Williams simply decided that entertainment is best served with an overdose of adrenaline?

In any case, the show’s oft-mentioned fusion of humanity with machinery suddenly struck me as a clarifying metaphor for my mixed reaction to “Lempicka,” which opened on Broadway tonight at the Longacre. Carson Kreitzer, who conceived of the musical and co-wrote the libretto with Matt Gould, has created some artful lyrics for Gould’s music. Director Rachel Chavkin oversees some precisely calibrated moments. Naturally gifted cast members give polished performances, most notably Eden Espinosa in the title role, and especially Amber Iman as Rafaela. But the songs and scenes ultimately add up to an almost mechanical-feeling sameness, loud and overwhelming.

Luckily, the words matter less than they might have because the most outstanding aspect of this musical is the staging – by which I mean primarily the choreography. The set, design (especially the lighting by Brian MacDevitt) and special effects (rain, smoke, fire) allow for, and sometimes enhance, the movement. This encompasses not just the dancing, but the fighting, which at its most arresting, resembles not just slow-motion cinematography but stop-motion animation – performed by the human beings on stage.

The Who’s hardcore fans may like these hard-charging spectacles the most in “Tommy.” There are certainly some terrific stage effects. But I appreciate the few quieter moments – maybe these reflect the spirituality that Townshend was aiming for — when Quinten Kusheba (who portrayed the ten-year-old Tommy on the night I attended) sings a piercingly clear rendition of “See me, hear me” without any of the rock noise.

He tells stories. The stories, in eight different scenes or segments, range from harrowing to comic, and sometimes both; and are, he says, sometimes true, sometimes false, sometimes both: He is an actor and a storyteller, he explains, “which is a polite way of saying I’ve been a bullshit artist all my life.” Fishburne mixes recollections and impersonations that seem connected only by his talent and intelligence. There is no obvious overall theme. This is how “Like They Do in the Movies” differs from the solo shows by the three theater artists who have apparently inspired this piece: Among the many people Fishburne thanks on a page In the playbill are “Dr. Whoopi Goldberg, John Leguizamo, and Anna Deavere Smith, for showing me the way.”

The circus setting is the excuse for what’s most awe-inspiring about this musical adaptation of Sara Gruen’s 2006 bestselling novel, which opened tonight at Broadway’s Imperial Theater. It’s the Big Top-like entertainment, especially the heart-stopping acrobatics, which are not just athletically spectacular but often visually beautiful and emotionally expressive, enhancing the dancing and even advancing the story. Much else in “Water for Elephants” has its pleasures – the score, the singing, the puppetry, the acting, even the love story — but nothing else matches the circus artistry for its originality, variety and consistency.

But “Teeth,” opening tonight at Playwrights Horizons, seems likely to turn off at least as many theatergoers as it would draw in: It’s deemed “appropriate for audiences ages 17+,” and it’s impossible to see how It could be otherwise, given that it’s an adaptation of a 2007 horror movie of the same name about a woman who has lethal teeth in her vagina. What’s most disappointing about “Teeth” is not its excesses, although these are deliberately in-your-face — the aggressively vulgar lyrics, the gory severed penises – but how the various elements of the show don’t completely hold together.

Verdict: Jeremy Strong changes our perception of Ibsen’s character in Herzog’s complicating adaptation

“The Notebook: The Musical” will probably not be the same kind of star-making vehicle, but it is uniformly well-cast, with several memorable performances. The story is cleverly adapted by librettist Bekah Brunstetter, who seems almost as much guided by the TV series “This Is Us” (where she worked as a writer and producer) as by Sparks’ novel. And singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, in her Broadway songwriting debut, delivers almost two dozen largely folk and country-inflected melodies, most of them lovely, if blandly so; only a few stand out. Little in this musical may soar, but, given the potential of the material for over-the-top melodrama, the relatively low-key approach is part of the show’s appeal.

A regular laboratory for clinical trials is itself an artificial setting, as is the relationship between researcher and subject, so perhaps there’s an analogy at work here that explains the brutally artificial staging. The stage pictures can certainly be arresting. But it’s a conceptual imposition, which paradoxically keeps intellectual engagement secondary, at best. Director Jamie Lloyd’s last gig in New York, last year’s production of “A Doll’s House” on Broadway starring Jessica Chastain, was also devoid of props and of a realistic set, and also imposed a heavy-handed directorial conceit: The actors rarely stood up from their chairs. Lloyd clearly has a preferred aesthetic – call it minimalist chic – which others have praised as removing distractions so that the audience can focus on what matters. But what matters in a play? Is it only the theatrical effect?

The nun is certain, or says she is, that the priest is molesting one of the students in her school, but we never are so sure, thanks to John Patrick Shanley’s exquisitely well-crafted play, which debuted on Broadway in 2005, winning both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and four Tony Awards, including Best Play. In this first Broadway revival of “Doubt: A Parable,” which is running only through April 21 at Roundabout’s newly renamed Todd Haimes Theater, the deceptively simple script holds up, the production is sturdy, but only one of the four performances is superb. The others are serviceable, in roles made indelible in the original production (especially Cherry Jones as Sister Aloysius) or in the 2008 movie (Philip Seymour Hoffman as Father Flynn.)

The nun is certain, or says she is, that the priest is molesting one of the students in her school, but we never are so sure, thanks to John Patrick Shanley’s exquisitely well-crafted play, which debuted on Broadway in 2005, winning both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and four Tony Awards, including Best Play. In this first Broadway revival of “Doubt: A Parable,” which is running only through April 21 at Roundabout’s newly renamed Todd Haimes Theater, the deceptively simple script holds up, the production is sturdy, but only one of the four performances is superb. The others are serviceable, in roles made indelible in the original production (especially Cherry Jones as Sister Aloysius) or in the 2008 movie (Philip Seymour Hoffman as Father Flynn.)

For all the high-powered theatrical talent involved, this stage interpretation of Sufjan Stevens’ acclaimed 2005 album “Illinois” could probably use a warning label. It’s extraordinary, it’s queer, it’s often thrilling, but regular New York theatergoers might need to adjust their expectations. The first adjustment — and a truly exasperating one — is that “Illinoise,” opening tonight at the Park Avenue Armory, has already sold out its entire run.

“The Ally” is much-needed, timely theater, but it isn’t completely up-to-date: Written before the October 7 2023 massacre of Israelis by Hamas and subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza, it’s set in September, 2023. So much has intensified in the last few months that “The Ally” could almost feel like a period piece, a time when people who sharply disagreed could still talk to one another.

Director Rupert Goold, the artistic director of London’s Almeida Theater, where David Farr’s adaptation debuted in 2019, has turned the story into an exercise in inventive staging. In an early scene, members of Lucas’ hunting lodge sing raucous drinking songs and perform what feels like a savage ritual (in the film, they just swam naked in the local lake); later, in an apparent nod to the main community activity of deer-hunting, we see Minotaur-like figures. Es Devlin, the Tony-winning scenic designer for “The Lehman Trilogy,” has created another transparent cube for “The Hunt” – a small one in the middle of the stage that serves as the classroom, the local hunting lodge, the local church with the characters crowded inside, as if to emphasize the (claustrophobic?) closeness of the community. Characters magically appear and disappear in the cube – and not just human ones.