Laura Collins-Hughes — Theater Critic

Eisa Davis’s “Girls Girls Chance Chance Music Music,” at the Vineyard Theater (the playwright renders the title with musical repeat symbols), is a play with live music. It is also a love letter to creativity and collaboration, to fleeting youthful friendships that become touchstone memories, and to artistic spaces that allow girls to thrive in one another’s company — at least when the kids themselves aren’t getting in the way of that.

Adroitly attuned to the audience upstairs and down, Jackman is utterly in the room with us. Charmingly relatable and lightly comical, his performance is at times emotionally naked — especially after the tree surgeon leaves Katie because his attraction to her has left him. “You can’t live the rest of your life against your body, against your nature,” he tells us. “I didn’t stop loving her, incidentally, ever.” Tears fall helplessly from the tree surgeon’s eyes. The sight of it stabs at our hearts. And Jackman, in his element, has us rapt.

Bertie’s impending death is the frame for the story of their friendship, the telling of which is distractingly sloppy as the action toggles between 1985 and the past. The set (by James Noone), which has a cut-rate roadshow look, is highly reliant on video (by David Bengali). Yet those changeable surfaces are never used to note what year it is, or where the characters are geographically — details that you will puzzle over, along with how old the adult Cee Cee and Bertie are meant to be at any given time.

*CRITIC'S PICK* With Trip Cullman’s Second Stage Theater production at the Helen Hayes Theater, where it opened on Monday night, I mean that as a compliment. Besides which, the play’s male characters are also magnificently flawed. We don’t require a rooting interest in them as individuals to be caught up in the story. The cast is terrific. The show moves fast. The many laugh lines land.

This polished, assured and charming company reminded me how much the pleasure of theater comes not just from the risk of live performance but also from its triumph when it works. This absolutely does. A “Hamlet” that confronts darkness and death, it ends with a dance party, not a stage full of corpses. Joyous revelry is this show’s choice. Never does it take life lightly.

In Thomas Kail’s luminous and mesmerizing revival of Eugene O’Neill’s 1921 drama “Anna Christie,” which opened on Sunday at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, Michelle Williams and Tom Sturridge play the tumultuous lovers. Her lonesome Anna is amused by Mat and happy to let him adore her; his peacocking Mat is a terror yet given to disarming gestures, like fantasizing about their blissful picket-fence future just minutes after they meet (she looking New England chic in an oilskin coat; costumes are by Paul Tazewell).

But while Young, one of New York’s most fascinating stage actors, is enrapturing in the first scene, that is by far the high point of this tantalizingly tricky play. Braun, seeming subdued and less than comfortable in the role, does not match her, and the show overall is too often curiously flat. Neither its sometimes pitch-black sense of humor nor its characters’ bond and brokenness are fully realized. The synergy isn’t there, at least not yet; that might come with time.

As gleefully as the musical follows the formula of the rom-com genre, it also has a welcome comfort with ambiguity and, stashed up its sleeve, some psychological bombs. The action floats along so comfortably, both in and out of song, that it seems odd to interrupt that momentum with an intermission. But the second act brings a stark shift in tone, getting darker for a while before rebounding with great silliness and gratifying sympathy.

The play’s futuristic framework notwithstanding, and despite the distinct “Groundhog Day” element to its conceit, connoisseurs of Nora Ephron’s movie “You’ve Got Mail” will detect several echoes of that classic here. Not because of any writerly pilfering but mainly because Hanks, who made his Broadway debut a dozen years ago in a posthumous production of Ephron’s “Lucky Guy,” is the one speaking the lines.

Chenoweth is a wonder, sounding a little bit country whenever Jackie is most herself, as in “Each and Every Day,” a love song to the infant Victoria; taking her high notes out for a spin in “The Royal We,” a duet with Marie Antoinette (Cassondra James); and convincing us for a moment, in a turn-on-a-dime song called “Grow the Light,” that Jackie has recalibrated her priorities. Not so. For the central character of this tale, living out her American dream, there is no point of satiation. There is only a vast emptiness that must be filled with more, more, more. Preferably, of course, dipped in gold.

Directed by Steve Cosson, Washburn’s compatriot on her thrillingly mind-bending “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,” which ran Off Broadway in 2013, this is a quieter wow of a show. Onstage in its world premiere at the Vineyard Theater, in a co-production with the Civilians, featuring a cast of eight, it takes its time at unspooling the narrative — frustratingly at first, then tantalizingly, and building to a final third in which whimsy, horror and splendor exist side by side.

Hunter, a prolific Off Broadway playwright with an oeuvre of works set in Idaho (“A Case for the Existence of God,” “Grangeville”), is making his Broadway debut with “Little Bear Ridge Road,” which had its premiere last year at Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago. Its transfer declares the Broadway resurrection of the exiled-for-a-while producer Scott Rudin. (Allegations of bullying in 2021 led to widespread denunciations.) And honestly? Everything about this impeccable production, presented by Rudin and the media mogul Barry Diller, exudes the nearly flawless taste that Rudin is famous for.

*CRITIC'S PICK* As the plot follows the intersecting fortunes of those three characters’ families, each seeking to redeem the country’s promise at a time of tumultuous change, old-fashioned musical-theater pleasures are very much on offer: a multitudinous cast clad in sumptuous costumes; riveting vocals undergirded by a 28-piece orchestra; a sprinkling of spectacle descending from above and rising from below. It works as rousing entertainment, full stop.

The play’s attention to honesty may be why it is particularly vulnerable to any elements that ring false, like a couple of Caroline lines that seem less rooted in her thinking than in the playwright’s desire for a laugh. More harmful is a late-arriving plot twist so severe that it’s as if Allen has wrested the wheel from his characters.

It isn’t that Reeves and Winter are underprepared; they have done their research, and diligently. But they have not yet reached the point at which they can let that scaffolding fall away as they slip at last into the skin of their characters. For now, they appear still to be standing at a distance from them, intimidated. Didi and Gogo spend their restive, blurred-together days in hope of a promised rendezvous with the elusive Godot, whose name in this production is pronounced GOD-oh: a solid hint to meaning. Didi and Gogo live in doubting, suspended animation, awaiting the certainty of his instructions.

The Nyong’o siblings’ casting sounds like a gimmick, but the payoff is exquisite: the twins, dazed at their reunion, establishing the truth of their identity as they talk to each other in Swahili. For the audience, too, this “Twelfth Night” is a kind of reunion — with the Delacorte, a vital space that New York theatergoers depend on, and missed. It speaks our language.

“Take a Banana” is, however, a willfully upbeat show; whenever it gets too dark, Ross detonates another joke. In his banana-yellow suit (by Toni-Leslie James), he takes us on a tour of his family and childhood, with the help of old photos and home videos projected inside the many large, ornate frames on Beowulf Boritt’s handsome, curve-walled set. (Projection design is by Stefania Bulbarella.)

CRITIC'S PICK - Les Waters’s marvelously burnished revival... stars an instantly likable Maya Hawke as a self-possessed Eurydice, cerebral but with a romantic streak, and a beautifully understated Brian d’Arcy James as her mild father, funny here in a dadly way and immensely moving, too... This Off Broadway revival is similar to that earlier Waters production, yet even more eloquent in execution — the work of a director who by now knows the play’s every ripple and depth.

Directed by Danny Sharron, “Hold Me in the Water” is as seamlessly, thoughtfully inclusive as “Dark Disabled Stories” was. At the top of the new show, after Haddad’s dramatic entrance on a lift through the stage floor, and his ebullient greeting — “Hello, darlings!” — Haddad gives visual descriptions of the set (by dots, the design collective) and himself (costumed by Beth Goldenberg). He notes the projected supertitles, the dimmed but not extinguished house lights, the audience’s freedom to pop in and out. (“I’m begging you,” he says, “if you need to go to the bathroom, go!”)

*CRITIC'S PICK* Still, Floyd Collins reaches the sublime, and that is a rare achievement in any work of art... One of the wonders of the show’s glorious-sounding new production... is how far from claustrophobic it feels... Jordan swiftly makes us want that for Floyd... Suddenly, powerfully, Floyd was all of us, waylaid mid-pursuit of happiness, uncertain how to proceed... Inside that tiny, frightening pocket of earth, Floyd needs an echo. To cry out and get only silence back: There would be heartbreak.

**CRITIC'S PICK** Glad tidings, then, from the holiday run of “Annie” at the Theater at Madison Square Garden, where Whoopi Goldberg is giving a rib-ticklingly funny, extremely smart performance as the tipsy, terrorizing Miss Hannigan, bane of all the orphans in her care. If Goldberg the TV talk-show presence has eclipsed in your mind Goldberg the savvy comic actor, her Miss Hannigan will jog your memory.

Henson, who was nominated for a Tony Award for his show-stealing turn as Damian in “Mean Girls,” makes Buddy utterly his own: sunny, darling, slightly unsettling. At the mention of tickle fights or snuggling, he emits a small noise that he doesn’t know is sexual, and moppets in the audience won’t either. That joke is aimed at the adults. It’s a tonic of a performance — the kind that makes you smile later, just thinking about it. The trouble is that Buddy is trapped inside “Elf the Musical,” a creaky adaptation whose two-and-a-half-hour length seems designed less to maximize audience enjoyment than to ensure there’s an intermission that people can spend buying merch.

So an anodyne rom-com is for the most part what we get from this play, which opened on Wednesday night at the James Earl Jones Theater. Julianna Margulies stars as Delia, an anxious, bookish denizen of Greenwich Village, still grieving her husband’s death. Peter Gallagher plays the widowed Peter, the calm Californian psychoanalyst for whom Delia falls by email, so suddenly that it feels fated.

Disclaimer to rom-com haters: “Table 17” is not for you. It is, however, for a lot of us — fans of the genre and anyone to whom theater of late has felt more arduous than entertaining. This is a play that wants you to have an amusing, untaxing evening out, and everything about Zhailon Levingston’s alluringly designed production, with its top-notch cast of three, is calibrated in service of that aim.

Taking aim at more targets than it can accommodate, the play is scattershot but genuinely experimental and, as such, daring programming by Evan Cabnet, LCT3’s departing artistic director, who was recently named to the same role at Second Stage Theater.