Jonathan Mandell

Having seen the performer's facial expressions in close-up (like the close-ups in most of the photographs and videos on this page, but not on the stage of the Nederlander), I couldn't help wondering whether a 1,200-seat Broadway theater was the ideal venue to showcase this performer's talents. The dim lighting and occasional total darkness had a different effect when so many of the audience (not all of them in the far-away seats) were already straining to follow what has happening on stage. This is why the design is so important. And it is sometimes surprising; at climactic moments, awesome. Indeed, the sets and especially the lighting threatened at times to swallow up Jefferson Mays. Like many a scene partner, the design seemed on occasion to try to upstage the star.

The Bard takes a back seat to the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears in '& Juliet,' a jukebox musical that is being billed as a sequel to Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet,' imagining Juliet's life if she hadn't killed herself when Romeo did. The plot winds up more busy and berserk than that description, and, in any case, the show is primarily a vehicle for the hits of Max Martin.

'The Old Man and the Pool,' opening tonight at the Vivian Beaumont, recalls the title of Hemingway's novella, 'The Old Man and the Sea,' and can be likewise interpreted as being about the struggle against death, except it's funny. An engaging standup comedian even (especially?) when riffing on uncomfortable subjects like illness and aging and ugly genitalia, Birbiglia, in his fifth comic monologue (the second one on Broadway) has put together a show that's not his best, but it's his latest, and that is likely enough for his fans.

Yet, the musical might have benefited from paring the various subplots. The problem for me is not primarily the odd pairing of zany comedy with trauma and tragedy (and criminality.) But add up all these moments and they threaten to overwhelm or at least distract from the heart of 'Kimberly Akimbo' - Kimberly and Seth.

In a way, the production itself doesn't take Lester's advice either. It's not dumb enough to be enjoyed as straight-out rock n roll - like, for example, the jukebox rock musical 'Rock of Ages.' But at the same time, although it has its pleasures, 'Almost Famous' is not quite smart enough to have been fully satisfying to me as musical theater. I remember loving the movie. I don't feel as enthusiastic about the musical, even though the story is virtually identical, scene after scene, and the book is written by Cameron Crowe, who both wrote and directed the movie, winning an Oscar for a screenplay that was inspired by his own experiences as a teenage journalist for Rolling Stone in the 1970s.

'Walking With Ghosts' is a modest show, with quiet humor and gentle pathos - which is exactly why it's so wonderful. Even on Broadway, modesty can be a virtue.

A key to appreciating 'Topdog/Underdog' is understanding that it was never really here and now. The play is less a literal depiction of two down-and-out Black brothers than a smart, dark, often funny allegory, with subtle allusions to the Bible (Cain and Abel) and less subtle similarities to classic Theater of the Absurd. There is little linear story here but daily life shot through with layer after layer of metaphor.

Of the three well-known performers, Danielle Brooks stands out the most, her face an expressive journey, angry and grief-stricken at the death of her husband three years earlier, which she blames on Boy Willie. She is devastating when she tells what the piano meant to her, how her mother 'polished this piano with her tears for seventeen years. For seventeen years she rubbed on it till her hands bled. Then she rubbed the blood in... mixed it up with the rest of the blood on it.' But she is also exquisite - touching, warm and funny - in a scene with Boy Willie's friend Lyman, her very posture revealing the years of loneliness as Lyman tests out a bottle of perfume that he bought for a dollar from a man who said it was from Paris 'This is the same kind of perfume the Queen of France wear.'

The 'Death of a Salesman' that opens tonight on Broadway begins and ends with the people around Willy Loman literally singing the blues - the music that turned the bitterness and exhaustion of the African American experience into something powerful and beautiful. The hope for that same kind of vital transformation is surely what is behind the casting of Wendell Pierce as Willy Loman, Sharon D Clarke as his wife Linda, and other Black actors as Willy's family, in this sixth Broadway production of Arthur Miller's modern tragedy about an ordinary American.

The '1776' revival has a minimalist design on a muted theme of Americana; the curtain suggests faded fragments of the red, white and blue - as if shying away from overt patriotism. Yet the show retains all 13 of Sherman Edwards' original, often bright and tuneful songs from the 1969 production, and also most of the sometimes goofy humor. At the same time, it makes some half dozen changes that sometimes provide a fresh perspective; most often offer a new emphasis on what's always been the strongest aspects of the musical; and only occasionally go too far.

Manhattan Theater Club, which produced the play at City Center in 2017, has moved it largely intact to its Broadway house, the Samuel J. Friedman, for a short run. Only the two performers who portray the caretakers have been changed - David Zayas and Kara Young, who each give the latest in their respective long lines of beguiling performances. The production is otherwise the same: First-rate direction by Jo Bonney, effective and efficient design by the original design team, and, above all, extraordinary performances by Gregg Mozgala and Katy Sullivan, as the two people in need of caretakers. If the lack of discernible alterations to the script feels like a missed opportunity, its strengths allow for a series of remarkable scenes that are surely unprecedented for Broadway.

As in his previous work, Stoppard's nineteenth play on Broadway offers dialogue that doubles as intellectual and political discourse. The usual effect of his approach is to make his scripts as rewarding to read on the page as to see acted out on the stage (if not more so.) But 'Leopoldstadt' has little of Stoppard's trademark cleverness in wordplay and none of his playfulness in structure. It is a straightforward if sprawling epic about a dark history that also winds up both intimate and ultimately moving. It's hard not to see it as the 85-year-old playwright's attempt at a personal reckoning.

I wish I didn't have the nagging feeling that the director was less interested in these actors than in his special touches. These include a particular attention to gore (an amputated leg chopped up as part of the witches' brew elicited an audible blecchh from the audience.) This seems ironic, because this 'Macbeth' struck me as a bit bloodless.

There's something engaging about each of these three basic layers of 'Mr. Saturday Night,' although Crystal's comedy far more so than the story or the music. But they exist uneasily together, and wind up undermining one another, not least because the running time of about 170 minutes (including intermission) - way longer than the movie - is too long for a light, sentimental comedy that gets its juice from quick-hit Borscht Belt humor.

If there is a stand-out among these stand-outs, it is probably Julianne Hough as Dusty, whom we first see vomiting blue slushies in the White House bathroom, because she's pregnant...with the president's baby. If Dusty appears to be a stereotypical bimbo, no more capable of having a coherent thought than the flax she grows on a farm in Iowa, little by little we learn that she's extraordinary in a whole host of ways, some of which (but far from all of which) are X-rated. (She's where the ass play comes into play, and that's all I'll say.) Hough, who among her other accomplishments was a two-time champion of 'Dancing with the Stars,' does triple duty in 'POTUS' - at one point, rapping while she plays her body like a drum; at another, leading the rest of the ladies in two different song and dance numbers, which are in the play because....well, why not. Besides, Susan Stroman, four-time Tony winner for choreography (and once for direction), is the director, so why not give her something to do besides stage these characters standing around spouting vulgarities in the different elegant rooms of the White House that spin around on designer Beowulf Boritt's turntable set.

Navel-gazy? Sure. But, two decades in the making, this is a piece full of craft and rigor, and nobody is writing off Michael R. Jackson, a big gay Black guy who's no longer struggling to write a musical...

Director Lileana Blain-Cruz has assembled a terrific design team, most of whom are making spectacular Broadway debuts. These include: Set designer Adam Rigg, who creates a convincing suburban home during an encroaching Ice Age, then the Atlantic City complete with rollercoaster and neon signs (one of which becomes cleverly R-rated) right before The Great Flood, then a burnt out suburban home after the devastating war. Projection designer Hannah Wasileski, who begins each of the three acts with elaborate newsreel like 'News Events of the World' videos that are a fit visual accompaniment to the loopy narration James Ortiz, who designs and directs the life-sized dinosaur and woolly mammoth in Act 1. It would do these extinct species a disservice to call them mere puppets. When the dinosaur slinks into the Antrobus household and says 'It's cold,' your heart will melt. The design helps establish the rich, bizarre juxtapositions of the play, between the everyday and the cosmic, between playfulness and resilience.

Feldstein, whose only previous Broadway credit was in the 2017 revival of 'Hello, Dolly' as a minor lead, nails three musical numbers in 'Funny Girl' - 'Don't Rain on My Parade,' 'Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat' and the finale - that allow us to glimpse the star quality that the production must have been banking on. The three other leads who are listed above the title hold their own: Both Jane Lynch as Fanny's mother and Ramin Karimloo as Fanny's dashing but disreputable husband give their usual stellar performances, and Jared Grimes, as Fanny's friend and advocate Eddie Ryan, is so good, especially in several thrilling tap-dance numbers, that he may be the one cast member who emerges from this production a star. Under the direction of Michael Mayer, with choreography by Ellenore Scott that tries to recreate in several dance numbers the feel of a Ziegfeld Follies extravaganza (albeit on a radically lower budget), and flashy (or at least flashing) design by a team of Tony winning pros, this 'Funny Girl' offers some of the conventional pleasures of an old-fashioned Broadway musical. The charms of this revival, however, are just not rewarding enough to meet the expectations created for the show by Barbra Streisand more than half a century ago.

There's craftmanship in the way the playwright is able to maintain suspense in a plot full of surprises. There's also cleverness in the dialogue, and in the wacky characters, reflecting McDonagh's hip wit in the bad boy tradition of Joe Orton. The production design is flawless; Anna Fleischle's costumes and especially her sets are solid. But this time around, I found 'Hangmen' ultimately less than satisfying; all the caveats I expressed four years ago still exist, and now loom larger for me.

It's taken more than 45 years for Ntozake Shange's theatrical evening of narrative and lyrical poetry, dance, and song to return to Broadway's Booth Theater....and for me finally to understand its cumbersome title. 'for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf ' opens tonight in a glamorous and, in one way, newly inventive production directed and choreographed by Camille A. Brown.

Parker's reprised performance does the heavy lifting in a play that is rightly, and smartly, a memory play told from the woman's point of view. But it is the male character that offers the greater challenge. The playwright does what she can to establish Peck as a human being rather than a monster, but it is David Morse's memorable performance that makes the character credible. Indeed, his performance - gentle, earnest, likable, and thus all the more unsettling - is what I still remember from the production I saw at the Vineyard Theater in 1997. (Was that really 25 years ago?!)

What is happening in local city councils, school boards, libraries, and state legislatures - the book banning, curriculum censorship, voter suppression, the passage of blatantly unconstitutional culture war laws - has made Letts' play feel less like allegory and more like a prescient dramatization, if one filtered through the playwright's imagination, sense of humor and sense of outrage.

So, I'll resist analyzing 'American Buffalo,' avoid trying to figure out whether the original interpretations of it still hold up, given what we now know about Mamet's beliefs. That leaves me with a production that feels like little more than an acting exercise.

'What is essential is invisible to the eye,' a fox tells the little prince. 'It's only visible to the heart.' The line is from Antoine de Saint-Exupery's beloved 1943 novella, 'The Little Prince.' It's also on a t-shirt that's selling in the lobby of the Broadway Theater during the four-month run in New York of this touring stage version by a French creative team, all of whom are making their Broadway debuts. The line is unintentionally ironic when the narrator utters it on stage, though, because this 'The Little Prince,' - half dance-theater, half circus acrobatics - is a half-hearted theatrical adaptation that's almost entirely visual. There are very few words, and they are upstaged by the vivid video projections that serve as backdrops. The only character who speaks is the narrator, mostly in English but sometimes in French*, portrayed by Chris Mouron, who also wrote the libretto (such as it is) and co-directed the production.

Noah Haidle is no Thornton Wilder. 'Birthday Candles' has its warmhearted and amusing moments, but it's essentially a middle brow entertainment that tries too hard to be ethereal, poignant, and poetic. If Haidle's script isn't as impressive as it's trying to be, director Vivienne Benesh makes the best of it, with an appealing production that is beautifully designed and wonderfully acted by a nimble six-member cast who take an appropriately understated approach. The heart of the production is the performance by Debra Messing, who never leaves the stage, neither changing costume nor applying makeup, as she credibly ages 90 years over 90 minutes, using a shift in voice and posture.