Robert Hofler — Theater Critic

Sykes, to his credit, doesn’t ask for our sympathy the way his dialogue begs for it. In a normal “Pal Joey,” he would be a great Joey. He exudes confidence without ever pushing it, and especially affecting is the understated way he unveils a song like “I Could Write a Book.” He leaves the over-emotive deliveries to his two leading ladies. Tony Goldwyn and Savion Glover direct, and Glover also choreographs. Tap-dancing spirits (called “griots” in the credits) follow Sykes around the stage. They don’t provide segues between scenes so much as they remind us that several elements of this production, including these dancers, have absolutely nothing to do with what Rodgers and Hart — not to mention O’Hara — wrote.

One great benefit of seeing “Sabbath’s Theater” brought to the theater is that I had never realized how Shakespearean the novel is. It’s not just the graveyard scenes, but the overall outrageousness of Mickey’s language and behavior. Turturro plays Mickey, and while he has never had the lightest touch as an actor, he brings a benign levity to the tale that sometimes runs counter to the spirit of Roth’s novel. Roth dares us to find anything admirable in his hero. Turturro, on the other hand, seduces us into liking the guy.

The actors clearly relish these splashy scenes, but they are more impressive in far quieter moments. Pidgeon and Canfield quickly establish a female refuge against all the testosterone raging around them. As the leader of the band, Pecinka projects a strong sense of male entitlement that masks a deep insecurity, because the two female characters played by Pidgeon and Canfield are the real creative force in this recording studio. The actors expertly perform original songs by Will Butler, who regurgitates the sound, if not the spirit, of Fleetwood Mac.

Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells bring a great Oscar-and-Felix chemistry to the stage. They also work tirelessly and exert their considerable charm, but in the end, they’re asking us to be entertained by a two-hander staging of an absolutely dreadful musical. Yes, the songs and the book for this parody of a musical within a musical that is “Gutenberg!” are witless and relentlessly repetitive, which is to be expected from the team of Scott Brown and Anthony King, who gave us one of the worst Broadway musicals of this century, “Beetlejuice.” That show now has a companion piece in the Netherland.

Watching the show on Broadway, I found myself concentrating less on Mendez and Radcliffe’s back-to-back screeds and drawn more to Groff, who almost singlehandedly, and in a very quiet way, makes this revival drive forward while going backward on all eight cylinders. He plays off the over-the-top performances of his two costars — who bring a sly Oliver-and-Hardy chemistry to the stage, Radcliffe being Stan to Mendez’s Ollie. Mendez entertains us with her nasty one-liners and Radcliffe stops the show with his powerful, yet nuanced rendition of “Franklin Shepard, Inc.”

Even though “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” takes place entirely in the hair salon, as does “Steel Magnolias,” the play is a series of short skits, as is “The Women”; and like that Boothe Luce play, many of those scenes lack a good button. They tend to dribble away dramatically rather than end with a comic bang.

Davis and Ludlam both possessed a real flair for the outrageous, but they end up in different places. Ludlam’s aggressive sense of irony was unyielding. Davis, after entertaining us with memorably flamboyant characters, turns to agitprop, but keeps his sense of wicked humor intact. Despite all his sermonizing, Purlie never turns into a pedagogue, thanks to Davis, who has loaded the preacher’s speeches with great one-liners and epigrams — none of which will be repeated here. They need to be experience first-hand in the theater. “Purlie Victorious” is the funniest show now performing on Broadway, and that includes “The Book of Mormon.”

Robert Shaw’s portrayal of Quint in “Jaws” remains one of the most grating performances ever put on celluloid. Ian Shaw imitates his father’s every grimace and vocal mannerism, delivering one of the most grating performances ever put on stage. Meanwhile, Brightman and Donnell don’t appear to be playing Dreyfuss and Scheider, but rather the characters Hooper and Brody as portrayed by those actors in the film. “Shark” is written so that each actor gets his solo moment to unload on Dad, blow up in a dramatic fashion and show off his thespian chops. Guy Masterson’s blunt direction does nothing to mitigate these over-the-top acting exercises.

The DeLorean car in the new musical “Back to the Future” is definitely more exciting than the antique roadster in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” That musical, with songs by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, ran for a few months back in 2005, and while lackluster, it does have one thing over the new flying-car show: The Sherman brothers score is definitely more engaging than the songs Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard have written for “Back to the Future,” which opened Thursday at the Winter Garden Theatre after the show’s world premiere in the U.K. in 2020.

Sometimes a bio in the Playbill is an apt warning for what you’re about to see. For instance, the Playbill for the new comedy “The Cottage” includes a bio of the playwright Sandy Rustin. It reads, “Her adaptation of the film ‘Clue’ is one of the most-produced plays in the U.S.” Yes, there is a world of lousy theater beyond New York City, and “The Cottage,” which opened Monday on Broadway at the Hayes Theatre, is destined for it.

The three words of the title were Imelda’s humble choice of verbiage for her own tombstone. David Korins’s scenic design for “Here Lies Love” on Broadway is far more expansive than the bare-bones production at the Public, and it is immensely enhanced by Peter Nigrini’s jazzy projection designs of vintage photos, documentaries and animated graphics that literally engulf the theater.

What do you get by crossing “Six” with “& Juliet”? No, “Bad Cinderella” was last season. Today, that mash-up of two similar musicals gives you the slightly better Cinderella show, which has been tortuously titled “Once Upon a One More Time.” This new jukebox tuner, which recycles songs written and/or performed by Britney Spears, opened Thursday at the Marquis Theatre after its world premiere at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C.

Eric Ting directs with a subtle hand. He lets his actors and the script do the work. Only the moments featuring Death get a little showy, with Amith Chandrashaker’s design of a solo spotlight on the actor and Palmer Hefferan’s sound design, which suddenly overlays the voices with echoes. The special effects are definitely not needed.

Stories of horror are fantastical, but need to follow their own inner logic once the parameters of that fantasy have been established. One game played in “Grey House” dictates that a mother will die if the “it” person tells a lie. Well, many lies are told and Raleigh, while tortured, somehow survives. If she’s the kids’ mother, why doesn’t she die? If she isn’t their mother, why is she tortured by these lies? Raleigh survives because if she didn’t, “Grey House” would end well before Holloway delivers his climax, which is a very unappetizing dinner party that involves way too much exposition to make narrative sense of what’s happening.

Its love letter to the city often doesn’t set well on its target board of the city, especially in the confused first act. But “New York, New York,” under the savvy direction and choreography of Susan Stroman and featuring a score by John Kander and the late Fred Ebb, additional lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda and a book by David Thompson and Sharon Washington, ultimately delivers its melting-pot message with intelligence, style and, yes, good old-fashioned razzle-dazzle.

Comer is a superb athlete. “Prima Facie” runs 90 minutes, and in its first 15 minutes, it appears that this actor never takes a breath as she races at breakneck speed through her character’s background as a defense barrister for persons accused of sexual abuse. The extreme alacrity and force of Comer’s delivery is part aggression; she plays a very truculent defense lawyer named Tessa Ensler. It is also part compensation for the character being a woman born in the working-class. At Cambridge University, she had been surrounded by students, most of them male, to the manor born. She defends her fierce grilling of the plaintiff because that is her role as a defense lawyer. Tessa is a real professional.

Beyond Harris' very physical performance and all the staged deaths, the high point of 'Peter Pan Goes Wrong' is extremely low tech and of even lower humor. It comes when the Captain Hook (co-author Henry Shields does a very good imitation of John Cleese) has problems removing the cork from a bottle. The moment goes on forever and ends sooner than it should.

“The Thanksgiving Play” runs 90 minutes without intermission. Interspersed throughout the show are a number of filmed school pageants in which “students” perform their own well-meaning and ridiculous enactments of Thanksgiving. All together, these filmed segments run approximately 15 minutes, giving the four live actors about 75 minutes to perform, which is about an hour more than Saturday Night Live would have taken to satirize this topic of woke run amok. Because “The Thanksgiving Play” runs about an hour longer than it should, a strange thing happens as its four characters grapple with the impossibility of Logan’s assignment: The most manipulative and openly self-centered of the characters steals the show. In her Broadway debut, Carden wins most of the laughs by doing little more than rolling her eyes, seductively throwing her hair back and applying yet another layer of lip gloss.

Once again, Lincoln Center Theater shows that it knows how to amplify a musical. The real singing voices and the real playing of 30 musicians in the pit can be heard. Marc Salzberg and Beth Lake’s sound design merely supports the music; it doesn’t replace the original sound. It’s ironic because when the Vivian Beaumont opened in 1965, the venue was lambasted as the acoustic nightmare of Broadway theaters. Today, it is the last refuge of experiencing Broadway musicals as they were meant to be heard.

Time after time in “Fat Ham,” when someone in the family has misbehaved outrageously, usually to great comic effect, it is up to Juicy to occupy the middle ground and address the audience directly in a soliloquy that binds us irrevocably to this most empathetic character. Spears plays these moments to the hilt by always underplaying them. His many dead pans and weighted pauses invariably bring down the house. As for that wonderful ghost, much of his magic derives from Maruti Evans’ set, Dominque Fawn Hill’s costumes, Bradley King’s lighting, Earon Chew Nealey’s hair and wigs, Mikaal Sulaiman’s sound and, above all, Skylar Fox’s illusions design. So don’t let that Pulitzer Prize fool you. “Fat Ham” is the most fun you’ll have at any play this Broadway season.

At their most amusing, Clark and McAnally have more in common with the gentle humor of Meredith Willson than the far more rambunctious nonsense that Horn delivers. This constant switching of gears between the songs and the joke-filled dialogue slows down the narrative, making “Shucked” seem a lot longer than its two and twenty minutes with intermission. There’s also a pair of narrators (Grey Henson and Ashley D. Kelley) who are somewhat less adorable than they think they are.

All this analysis of the singing might be a clue to what’s occasionally wrong with Thomas Kail’s direction when his actors aren’t thrilling us with their superb vocals. Kail brings out the humor in “Sweeney Todd” that both John Doyle (2005 Broadway revival) and Tim Burton (2007 film version) eschewed. Ashford sees to that almost singlehandedly. She doesn’t miss a chance to twist a phrase or an eyebrow in her burlesque seduction of Sweeney. Elsewhere, Kail’s approach is a little too operatic, too respectful. There’s even a stateliness verging on lethargy between some of the musical numbers. “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir” and “The Contest” have always been problematic.

I don’t recall how Fosse ended his “Dancin’.” Cilento ends his with a real flourish. He gives each of his nearly two dozen dancers the full-star treatment, complete with his, her or their name emblazoned (lighting by David Grill) in tall letters on the upstage wall. Cilento, who appeared in the original company of “A Chorus Line,” presents the anti-“Chorus Line” with this extended curtain call. These quick solo turns feature some of the evening’s best choreography. Here and elsewhere in the show, Dylis Croman, Jovan Dansberry, Pedro Garza, Jacob Guzman, Mattie Love, Nando Morland and Ron Todorowski grab our attention to mesmerize. Now, that’s entertainment.

A couple of the villains in the piece might be overdrawn here, but that’s debatable. Otherwise, Arden’s direction of his cast is exemplary, and an especially poignant touch is the projection of historic photos that function to introduce their actor doppelgängers. Above all, the fluid and often surreal staging of the Frank murder trial is an extended moment of brilliance in the theater that no musical aficionado should miss.

Under Scott Elliott’s direction, some of the other actors (Patrick Foley, Daniel Oreskes, Bill Sage, Amy Stiller) and their supporting characters almost come off superfluous. (To be honest, that’s often my reaction when I see the original.) The exceptions are David Cale’s wonderfully flighty landowner and Nef, who gives Sasha a droll contralto delivery that starts out ridiculously inappropriate before ending up downright tragic.