Sara Holdren and Jesse David Fox

There is a two-hour-and-40-minute luxury-car crash happening at the St. James Theatre. If I were the litigious type, I’d be trying to figure out how to sue for whiplash. Instead, here I am staggering homewards, still trying to twist my head back into position after The Queen of Versailles. If you’re morbidly curious about the experience, you could try for tickets to the new musical by Stephen Schwartz and Lindsey Ferrentino, with Kristin Chenoweth glittering relentlessly at its center. Or you could save the money and have someone slap you back and forth with a large salmon.

It may be that Washington’s lackluster performance stems from a misfiring if understandable desire to avoid stereotypes of outsize passion—of big, blustery emotional fireworks in a thorny role of color—yet the result is that we go on no journey with his Othello. We listen to him say words; we don’t, even as he enters the bedroom of his innocent wife, Desdemona (Molly Osborne), to strangle her, experience his awful interior transformation. Instead, as he approaches her in these fateful moments, a truly unsettling percentage of the audience is still laughing.

A little bit of both! But, yes, I did like it. The comedy was super-strong. Lots of different types of jokes, expertly crafted. I probably say this after all of his shows, but it's the funniest one yet. More than anything, though, I was most impressed by how it's structured.