Sara Holdren — Theater Critic

That’s why it’s refreshing to come across a play like Preston Max Allen’s Caroline, the assured, affecting three-hander now getting its premiere at MCC under the emblematically thoughtful and ungilded direction of David Cromer. Allen is writing about something that’s in our newsfeeds daily, but crucially, that thing doesn’t flatten or predetermine his people. What he’s actually interested in are relationships, the interconnectedness of messy human beings. His characters are grappling with the consequences of broken trust and the agonizing question of how much we can truly protect anyone we love. The political resonance of his project arises not from an explicit statement of values but from a tender demonstration of complex, undeniable humanity.

The tempo of Punch slows and the performances sharpen and deepen. Though the air is thick with anguish, three people start to grope their way through it toward each other. One can only imagine that these were the scenes that made Graham want to write the play. They are its finest and—in a moment where truth and reconciliation can feel like utopian fantasies—its most radically hopeful.

Because the production feels too cool (in more ways than one), its hottest performance leaps out like a firecracker set off in a Soho boutique: Brandon Dirden’s superlative Pozzo. Once per act, a second duo crashes in on Didi and Gogo, providing the tramps’ power balance with a lurid, distended foil. Pozzo is a histrionic slave-driver, Lucky his abused chattel who speaks only once, spewing forth a churning flood of half-thoughts, broken refrains, and dire imagery — a mind shattered, perhaps by direct violence, perhaps simply by the daily assault of living on “this bitch of an earth.”

Reza, though, doesn’t get into it, apart from making some easy jabs at “conceptual art” and “deconstruction” and the chichi gallery world. These things aren’t legitimate concerns but coat hooks on which to hang generic contention and an overall icky view of human nature — which is why some of the play’s actually funniest stuff, in both writing and performance, occurs in a frantic two-page monologue delivered by Yvan, who hurtles into Serge’s apartment mid-meltdown over complications with his upcoming wedding. Corden makes big, broad, breathless work of the set piece, eventually crash-landing in a chair to well-earned applause. It works because it’s played well but also because it has nothing to do with the matter at hand. Neither does anything else, but at least here, the disregard is genuine.

A gloriously grotesque aluminum corset in the shape of an alien spine; a pair of pearlescent antlers draped in embroidered lace; stiletto heels, bulbous, scaly, and spiky, like armadillos balancing on their heads and tails; wraithlike models with black contact lenses or silver prosthetic jaws, or covered in feathers, chain mail, spray paint, or the shells of razor clams … These might be some of the images that spring to mind when you think of the fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen, known to the world by his second two names and lost to it when he took his own life in 2010 at the age of 40. They are also among the near-endless array of gestures from his oeuvre that spur more excitement, more agitation, more pure feeling in their contemplation alone than does House of McQueen, the flat soufflé of a play now endeavoring to pay homage to its namesake at the Mansion, a nightclub-ish new performance space amid the glass towers of Hudson Yards.

Shenanigans like these aren’t unenjoyable, but neither are they entirely fulfilling. It’s a happy relief, therefore, that Oh blows through this Twelfth Night like, as Orsino might say, the sweet wind “that breathes upon a bank of violets, / Stealing and giving odor.” Her Olivia is a giddy, glowing delight — playful and sexy and grounded, as full and compelling a human being as this production will allow. She finds the play’s joy without resorting to gimmick, accessing her character’s essential truth and beauty while still allowing for the exuberant artifice of farce. In her, one can glimpse a broader, deeper Illyria, a Twelfth Night that — because it is as full of wondering as of wonders — is indeed most wonderful.

The new musical Real Women Have Curves is, on the whole, a vibrant, exuberant affair, soaked in the pink and gold of L.A. sunsets, with painterly projections of tropical blossoms regularly unfurling across its proscenium in such verdant profusion you can practically smell their perfume. Yet surrounded by all this lushness, the show’s darkest, grayest moments are some of its most striking.

Is it a play? I mean, yes-ish? Is it an extravagant TV-meets-theater-meets-theme-park hybrid that probably has not entirely heartening implications for the future of Broadway? For sure. Is it also so unrelentingly absurd that it’s hard to be mad at? Absolutely.

Smith’s writing shines brightest in small units, be they sentences or scenes. The six teenagers at her imagined grief camp — a ramshackle labor of love run out of the home of its founder Rocky (voiced by Danny Wolohan), who remains unseen but asserts a deeply earnest, increasingly surreal presence over the camp loudspeaker — are all weird normies, ordinary weirdos.

Floyd Collins leaves far too soft an impression. It never really joins its hero in the depths... For a show with such a potentially powerful symbol at its core — a man trapped in the rock, singing as he’s crushed by America — the production feels like it’s skimming the surface. Visually beautiful at times, but the horror of Floyd’s situation is never truly realized, and the people above ground feel more like concepts than characters. I felt more fear reading a sketch of the real entrapment than during the entire two-plus hours of the musical.

Along with a dexterity for shaping character out of the casual contours of contemporary speech, Belflower also has a keen sense of balance: She hangs just enough of her play on The Crucible but not too much. This isn’t a riff or a rewrite. Miller’s text functions as a kind of flint — a surface on which Belflower’s characters, especially Shelby, can create sparks, but the fire that grows belongs to them. They are the living, wrestling souls, contending with more than any teenager should have to and just as much as many do.

Whitney White’s revival is sleek and unpretentious—Stacey Derosier’s lights, elegantly juxtaposing oranges, golds, and blues, are particularly lovely in helping to score the story’s temporal and spiritual separations—but it hasn’t quite solved the asshole problem. Emotionally, this Last Five Years goes the route it’s easiest for the show to go: It belongs unquestionably to its Cathy, the luminous Adrienne Warren.

Movie star he may be, and flashy ticket Good Night, and Good Luck is, but there’s no arguing with his or the project’s sincerity, even its sense of duty... Clooney and his collaborators give a dignified and resonant answer.

For Glengarry to land its hardest, we’ve got to feel a measure of that Arthur Miller anguish in Levene’s ultimate downfall, no matter the character’s moral worth: Odenkirk shrinks toward pathos rather than expanding toward tragedy. Burr, meanwhile, plays Moss with a comedian’s ear for rhythm, setting up each blunt force blow and devious jab like so many cans to be shot off a fence. It works — there’s not much soul in Dave Moss to go digging for.

It’s a mark of Williams’s savvy—combined with the expert calibrations of his adaptation’s solo performer, Sarah Snook—that neither this moment nor any other in the show is approached with the heavy highlighter of relevancy. Wilde, with his withering disdain for moral snobbery, would have hated that, and this Dorian Gray stays true to its originator’s brilliant ghost, even as it winkingly inserts a phone selfie here and a creepy TikTok filter there. The show arrives on Broadway trailing acclaim from its London run, including an Olivier for Snook, and it works because it is, first and foremost, a sensory feast. Fast, clever, delicious, and performed by Snook with the giddy virtuosity of Simone Biles executing a floor routine, it reaches the gut and the heart lightly, thrusting like a fencer, by way of its playfulness and spectacle. It doesn’t need a bullhorn to talk about the now — just a great story and an acrobatic actor.

Operation Mincemeat isn’t exactly blazingly clever—the jokes fly thick and fast, and they tend toward broad grin-crackers rather than breathless zingers—but it overflows with good humor and heartfelt commitment… While some moments certainly sizzle more than others, there’s more than enough sincerity and goofy charisma on stage to keep the show powered.

To its creators’ great credit, the show’s form registers not as a celebrity stunt—or even, whatever the reality, as one of the many solo performances producers have gravitated toward in the era of COVID-altered theater—but as an intimate and sincere actor’s laboratory, a chance to turn one of Chekhov’s rangy, yearning ensembles into a kind of revelatory Russian doll, messing about with his inimitable voice in order to channel it to thrilling effect.

What makes Mescal’s performance so riveting is that, without ever blunting or apologizing for Stanley’s cruelty, he also reveals the soft belly of the role, the vulnerability and hurt that, for a man in his world with his upbringing, can naturally lead to violence. 'When we first met, me and you, you thought I was common,' he reminds Stella, who was raised with Blanche as part of the fading Southern aristocracy, at a former plantation called Belle Reve. 'How right you was, baby. I was common as dirt. You showed me the snapshot of the place with the columns. I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it… And wasn’t we happy together, wasn’t it all okay till she showed here?

Jack O’Brien’s new attempt on Ibsen’s reviled and—eventually—revered truth-bomb doesn’t so much answer that question as sub it out for another less interesting one: What happens if you put a bunch of famous people in the show and, for the majority of its 110 minutes, play it pretty straight? In a streamlined, surprisingly low-key new translation by the Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe, this Ghosts doesn’t exactly founder, but it doesn’t haunt or horrify either. It feels stuck between times and impulses: 1880s Norway or now? Stylized or not? Unashamedly tragic or vaguely ironic?

More compelling is the play’s main subplot, which follows the relationship between Fumio (Red Concepción), a middle-ranking wrestler at the heya, and Ren (an imposing Ahmad Kamal), the hardest worker in the stable, top in the rankings underneath Mitsuo and an infinitely more humane soul. Some of Dring’s finest work happens in her exploration of the love between these two men — secretly romantic in nature — and of the wider, platonic yet intensely physical love shared by all the rikishi. As an implicit celebration of big bodies and of varying, deeply feeling masculinities, Sumo is at its most beautiful.

Mindell is a third-year student in Columbia’s playwriting MFA, and On the Evolutionary Function of Shame is receiving a full production as part of Second Stage’s Next Stage Festival, which is dedicated to supporting early-career writers. That’s great — and, at the same time, even given space to breathe on Signature Center’s big Irene Diamond Stage, the play still feels like it’s searching for itself. Along the way—and this is the real rub—it’s too eager to show its work while, at the same time, not having done quite enough of it.

The stage of Grangeville is never flooded with light — Hunter’s characters never reach so complete a catharsis — but something does grow out of the darkness. Two men who began with an ocean between them now share a pool of light. It’s not nothing, and who knows how it may grow.

I hate to be a Grinch at Christmas, but it’s not a good sign when your Broadway show has more than one Reddit thread asking if it’s a scam. So things currently stand for Simon Rich’s All In: Comedy About Love. Bothered by the lack of indefinite article there? I hear you, but alas, for All In to qualify as a comedy about love, it would actually have to be a play. Instead, it’s an expensive staged reading with a rotating cast of celebrities.

Despite its indestructible book and score and several strong performances, the show Wolfe has built never quite hangs together. Its gestures at times feel stock, at other times scattered, and as in much of Wolfe’s work with Loquasto, there’s a sense of getting stuck somewhere between worlds. Is this a scrappy production, or isn’t it? Well, of course it isn’t, but one gets the sense that somewhere along the line, it might secretly have wanted to be.

Hecht and Gray are excellent here and throughout, as is Shapiro’s whole company. They’re not clowning — though there’s a delightful wink of a moment in which Irwin’s Don waxes misty-eyed over the “actually quite subtle” mime work of a former colleague. Rather, they’re performing that crucial aspect of theater, its function as a space of civic practice, quite literally a place where we rehearse the hardest conversations, where we experiment with how to put together a community. In his script’s epigraph, Spector quotes from Eula Bliss’s On Immunity, where Bliss herself cites a doctor who describes a certain vaccine as “important … from a public health standpoint” but “not as critical from an individual point of view.” “In order for this to make sense,” writes Bliss, “one must believe that individuals are not part of the public.” It’s this cognitive dissonance, so widespread and so clamorous and so tragically American, that theater, by its very nature, is always addressing, and in Eureka Day that essential refutation takes on explicit and eloquent form.