Richard Lawson — Theater Critic

Review Girl, Interrupted review – mental health memoir reborn as patchy Aimee Mann-soundtracked musical The Public Theater, New York Susanna Kaysen’s retelling of her time in a psychiatric hospital in the 60s became an Oscar-winning movie in the 90s and now it’s an elegant, if limited, play Richard Lawson Thu 4 Jun 2026 21.15 EDT Share Prefer the Guardian on Google In 2021, the singer-songwriter Aimee Mann (perhaps best known, as a solo artist, for her contributions to the Paul Thomas Anderson film Magnolia) released an album called Queens of the Summer Hotel, a collection of somewhat narrative tunes inspired by Susanna Kaysen’s bestselling memoir of mental health struggle, Girl, Interrupted. Mann had been commissioned to write the songs for a stage adaptation that took years (and the duration of a pandemic) to materialize. Now finally at the Public Theater in Manhattan, Girl, Interrupted is a sturdy showcase for Mann’s gorgeous, shimmering-sad compositions, but perhaps a less successful conduit for Kaysen’s arguments.

Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show, a campy 1973 musical inspired by sci-fi and horror B-movies, has lived a long and fruitful life. But its 1975 film adaptation, by some measure the longest-running theatrical release in US history, has almost inarguably overshadowed that legacy. The film’s song selection, plotting and performances – from Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon and others – have been enshrined as the definitive Rocky Horror. Which doesn’t mean that a revival of the stage show arrives without fanfare, only that the experience of actually watching it may underwhelm.

I wish them luck in that endeavor. But it may only be Vosk who can get them there. Doing one’s best Bette Midler for an audience of (presumably) Bette Midler fans is a task even the most formidable drag queen would think twice about attempting. But Vosk attacks the role with cheering vigor, bringing necessary old-fashioned brass that the show just can’t muster elsewhere. It is, in the end, a fitting Midler tribute act, a loving homage to how much work the grand diva has done over the years to take maudlin material and make it something close to divine.

A few technical missteps are nonetheless minor compared with the serious performance troubles at the heart of Kail’s Proof. And yet, the unassuming strength of Auburn’s writing manages to shine through that onslaught of actorly miscalculation. We still crave answers to the play’s mild mysteries, still chuckle ruefully at its subtly recurring motifs. This production’s handwriting may be awfully messy, but the basic math of it all is sound as ever.

When the rain starts pouring toward the end of the play, though, Brody swells to fit the hokey staginess of the moment. Yarris’s particular story is eventually flattened out into a more general consideration of life’s quotidian beauty, all that is taken for granted until one is, like Yarris, stolen away from the world. It’s a worthy enough sentiment, but one more wrenchingly and articulately rendered in, say, Our Town. One leaves the Fear of 13 certainly horrified by the injustice done to Yarris, and moved by his journey to freedom, but it’s a fleeting feeling. Ferrentino and Brody have not burrowed deep enough to make the play stick. It is polite theater that soothes rather than sears.

It was my viewing partner’s first time seeing any version of the show, and it sits perfectly well with me that the Jellicle Ball will forever be his Cats. It is a mighty testament to what is possible when producers look past the traditional scope of Broadway and bring in fresh talent to widen the aperture of commercial theater’s gaze. What those outsiders have achieved with The Jellicle Ball is a revival in the fullest sense of the word.

Director Rupert Goold is ill-suited to mitigate that sneering impulse. Goold has done good things on stage (King Charles III, among others) and decent things on film (Judy, for which Renée Zellweger won her second Oscar), but this particular milieu favors none of his fortes. The action sequences, if we can call him that, are clunky, shouty jumbles. There is nary an ounce of tension to be found during the entirety of this supposedly heated stand-off. Goold doesn’t do much with David Korins’ impressively realistic set but rotate it back and forth depending on whether we’re inside the bank or outside of it.

Kail tries many things to make this mess of performance feel like a dynamic piece of art. Actors (rather needlessly) rearrange sets between scenes, overlong transitions that are scored by original compositions from Nicholas Britell (who, among other things, wrote the theme to Succession). There are some trust falls, a fog machine is frequently employed (as fog is a heavy motif in O’Neill’s text), a great metal beam spins ominously over the proceedings. But it’s all adornment of a sinking ship, a production that seems to have no concrete or compelling stance on what forces have sent these people crashing into one another.

Harrison, in his poetic but sometimes cliched language, suggests it is a little bit of both. Our time on Earth is terribly fleeting, and isn’t that sad? But also some part of us does linger on in those who knew us, those who tell our stories, who reach fondly for us in moments of nostalgia. If tech can somehow aid in that, perhaps we should let it. Marjorie Prime is frustratingly ambivalent about that idea, tossing it around and wanly entertaining both sides of the argument before it ventures off into what perhaps interests Harrison more. With its tech conceit set aside, Marjorie Prime is mostly a story of trauma echoing through generations of a family, which is a quite common theme within the American theater canon.

There’s a strange, undermining, conflicted nature to Mayer’s project, a push and pull between eras and customs. Perhaps that is actually the great insight of this Chess. Not about the Able Archer 83 incident that almost ended the world, nor about the whirring mechanics of mind and heart that govern chess phenoms. (Truly, the actual game barely factors in here, save for two inventively staged sequences that imagine the interior monologues of players during a match.) Rather, this Chess teaches us a history lesson about the world pre-meta-irony and the one post-, in which we find ourselves mired at the moment.