Kyle Turner

Cats: The Jellicle Ball’s nervy fun, total sincerity, and embrace of over-the-top theatricality are already reason enough for the curious cat to check it out. But that it turns Cats into an electrifying community that audiences get to join makes The Jellicle Ball the must-see show of this or any season, and the bar against which revivals of canon shows should be measured against.

There’s a curious feeling that the production, directed by Trip Cullman, spends much of its run time sneering at its characters as it attempts to land every joke (and the show is very funny), which has the unfortunate effect of making this quasi-farce full of caricatures and not people. Thus, Max’s more reactionary points and Susan’s nihilism dilute the clarity of the ideas the show gestures toward: the compromise and ignorance necessary for love to function, the importance of incorporating others' pain into your existence, the way power is wielded between loved ones, the weakening of a generation by way of therapy talk. Though 150 minutes worth of poison-dart dialogue is fun to watch, by the end of the show, I couldn’t figure out what it was aiming for.

The turgid impulses of Ziegler’s writing — including a laughable line where Keenan-Bolger says, “[Antigone] taught me I was enough!” — sacrifice both Antigone's and Perkins’s ability to display their shared insurgency, magnitude, and furious iconoclasm.

In the swift, no-nonsense, and riveting What We Did Before Our Moth Days, the unraveling of Dick and Elle’s family unfolds across direct addresses from Dick, Elle, their son Tim (John Early), and Dick’s mistress Elaine (Hope Davis). Playwright and theatre stalwart Wallace Shawn illustrates a family, a New York social scene, and a modest web of relationships and competing desires — sexual, romantic, professional — that are at once casually straightforward and sprawlingly novelistic. Complex and sometimes ugly feelings are rendered with precision and wit. Performances, uniformly excellent, vacillate between the slightly paranoid awareness of being observed — as if giving a talking-head interview for a documentary — and the grimy closeness of a conversation at a bar after a few glasses of white zinfandel.

Although Night Side Songs’s lyrics intermittently disappoint in their ungainliness, the show’s overall effect is impressive nonetheless. There’s a sense of communion the show reaches for and nearly achieves, as if sickness and suffering, as despairing as they can be to experience, are part of an infinite cycle of being taken care of and caring for others. Like time is composed of people by each other’s bedsides for eternity.

Challenging certain creeds about motherhood has been on the minds of playwrights this season, with Liberation on Broadway, The Waterfall off Broadway at WP Theater, and now Meat Suit, or the shitshow of motherhood off Broadway at Second Stage Theater. But while the memory play Liberation and the two-hander The Waterfall are relatively conventional in form, Meat Suit, written and directed by Aya Ogawa, is a jolting and sometimes riotously funny take on motherhood narratives.

For all the supposedly novel tech involved, it’s a rather dull experience. Even at a compact 45 minutes, An Ark began to lose this critic’s interest after the first 20. While a live performance of this text staged in the same way wouldn’t be much more interesting, at least its liveness would connect the performers and audience members. The ephemerality of the mixed-reality venture, meant to conjure the liminality of not-quite the afterlife, is compelling in theory, but the show does little to challenge or excite beyond its gadgetry.

While the absence of real tension (besides that signaled by the countdown) is frustrating, Strong and Manville find dramatic urgency in their relationship, played as misplaced optimism (or is it opportunism?) and passionate drive. The clarity of their want for one another, and their shared desire to propel themselves to power, rings sharp and crystalline. Even as doubt sets in, Strong and Manville’s dynamic is magnetic and explosive, like it's about to set the whole world on fire.

44 The Musical doesn’t seem to understand what these people believe in, even if they are caricatures, and one is left wondering what a more original satire of the era might look like. A song about bombing Osama Bin Laden and a platitude about how “they would rather watch a Black man fail than the country succeed” aside, 44: The Musical has little idea of Obama's platform, his flaws, or what his complex legacy means.

Droege could have penned a compelling autopsy report on contemporary gay male culture or a conduit for intermittently creative, pop culture-based barbs, and this play is the latter. It’s a massive disappointment, as Droege is a capable writer on a line-to-line level, with a decent vantage point about 30something gay people’s vices and virtue signaling. The blueprint for these men’s tiny, self-indulgent worldviews — where actresses, drug dealers, and tea dances dominate and people of color are a blip — is there. But Messy White Gays appears to have little interest in teasing out these privileges beyond shrill squabbling.

It’s all a bit humdrum, victim to obvious bio-play problems: It's narratively scattered and thematically unfocused, without much of a perspective about any of these people. The first act hits the biggest points in the show’s timeline, but it sells short the feeling of being swept up in any of it. An attempt to do a “show within a show” gimmick fails. The performances are generally competent to enthusiastic, but the actors are routinely trapped between doing impressions vs. individualistic takes. Caitlin Houlahan (as Jane Curtin) and Evan Rubin (as Gilda Radner) are among the few cast members whose own voices shine through their depictions of the real SNL players.

Saturday Church’s heart is in the right place, but its conventionality overpowers the serene joy that comes with just being around your people.

Holland, having emanated something similar all those years ago in the same role, thus gives his Ogun the tragedy of understanding, making him feel all the more devastated by Oshoosi’s surrender to something that may prove self-destructive. But perhaps it’s that same awareness, and touch of history within the production itself, that allows the finale to land with such revelatory beauty, fueled by an incendiary hope and fraternal bond.

The directorial vision of the working-class tailor-turned-couture provocateur is basically absent from the show, leaving the audience to imagine a clearer picture of not only what McQueen's clothes looked like, but how they were part of an ambitious point of view that epitomized what the late designer did best: sew fashion, nightmare, fantasy, and theatre together. McQueen was once called fashion’s “closest thing to a rockstar,” but House of McQueen, written by Darrah Cloud and directed by Sam Helfrich, relegates one of the most theatrical fashion designers of all time to surface-level banality.

Ross talks about his recent battle with colon cancer, his adoration for his late uncle, and his grief over losing three close friends: Norm Macdonald, Bob Saget, and Gilbert Gottfried. It becomes clear that, after all these years of material that verges on heinous, Ross is a softie, his brand of insult jokes derived from a love of people and the world around him — even if it’s hard to see — and a desire to see people surprised. Though Ross's roasting may not always work, Take a Banana for the Ride cuts to the heart of a roastmaster.

Rolling Thunder's nostalgia is rooted in the effective wail for justice, solidarity, and care that the music (like Edwin Starr’s legendary ‘War’ or Barry McGuire's ‘Eve of Destruction’) articulates in a way the script does not. The letters only offer a thin psychology of the characters, bland first-person accounts of the paranoia and brutality of war, and vaguely condescending descriptions of Saigon’s inhabitants, who are as much, if not more so, victims of Western warmongering as the soldiers.

Prince Faggot’s ambitions thus feel somewhat paradoxical: humanize and make real a figure who can ultimately only exist as a cultural imaginary, while also interrogate the allure of identification and desire to relate with/to such quasi-mythological figures, requiring a kind of academic removal. A whiff of Carol and experimental Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There director Todd Haynes can be smelt from the various acknowledgments of how these characters’ lives are mediated – by the press, by the mythology – for the audience and for one another.

Lights Out: Nat “King” Cole seems to yearn for more space to figure out what it wants to do and how. It wavers between the pleasure of its entertaining, simple variety numbers and its energetically strange and fever dream-like approach, yet it mostly occupies some middle ground of not being strange enough. But Hill and Watts, conjuring the coolness and the fire of Nat and Sammy, are enough to keep the show’s lights on.

Smith is profoundly attuned to this uncanny mutation of the everyday in death’s shadow. Much of the play takes place in a cabin where the teens address and avoid reality in equal turns at night, when they are so jittery with thoughts and hormones they can’t fall asleep. In the dark, they can be honest with themselves or each other about how they feel. Even as they try to conceal it beneath jokes or Duolingo streaks, death’s unhurried presence still lingers. The screen door swings open as a winking reminder.

There’s the occasional feeling of disappointment that the show doesn’t lean less on the theatrics and focus on the richer themes in Trefry’s script, like Henry’s fear of hurting the girl he likes, Patty (Gabrielle Nevaeh), and how that relates to his relationship to his mother, or Patty’s own self-conception as an orphan in search of her absent mom. But Stranger Things: The First Shadow was probably never going to dig deep into these ideas. It was always going to be too busy dazzling to let its audience into the real darkness.

Dorfman haunts these scenes while a puppet takes the place of a young, not-yet-self-actualized Abby. You can see Dorfman, often standing behind the puppet (operated by Justin Perkins and Emma Wiseman), take on the same anxiousness of the old Abby, whose soul is not yet matched with her body, fist clenched with a mix of anguish and determination. As the characters remind us, this bothness is intrinsic to the mysteries of life. If the show, at its best, is about someone in the present trying to make sense of their past to a parent, Dorfman seldom squanders her time.

Strangely, Hall’s play lacks focus, as if it’s juggling too many ideas to go into depth on any one. There are themes of familial discord, buried secrets, deep resentment, historical ownership, selling out, gentrification, lack of parental care, and the tension between tradition and modernity. All these subjects are interesting, but the characters feel like they’re dancing on the surface.

Armstrong repeatedly says jazz is about “the choices you make in between the notes.” Book writer Aurin Squire and conceivers Andrew Delaplaine and Christopher Renshaw toggle between conventional bio-musical choices and more challenging ones, keeping A Wonderful World lively and interesting. Shying away from an unblemished portrait of Armstrong and instead acknowledging his womanizing and self-involvement, A Wonderful World makes space for a version of Black artistry that confronts the complexities of artists as humans, and how the world around them may fail them.

Early in David Finnigan’s autobiographical narrative Deep History, he recalls how his career path diverged from his family's: Finnigan's father is a climate scientist, and their shared care for the environment propelled Finnigan to make theatre about environmentalism. He says, “Art can change people’s minds in a way that science sometimes can’t.” A viable claim and certainly a noble pursuit. But Deep History is closer to a TED Talk than theatrical art.

There’s a potential version of Ghost of John McCain that’s closer to the incisiveness of a 30 Rock or maybe a Veep, but in neither the book nor the lyrics is there the rigor that could make the current show go from an intrusive thought to a steaming train.