Sara Holdren — Theater Critic

As The Blood Quilt lumbers toward its finish, Hall keeps loading it up with revelations, each one more ostensibly shocking than the last. Except that, inside the formulaic container she’s built, none of them is really a shock at all. The inevitable storm blows in, but by that point, its blows and buffets are too artificial to rattle us. There is, however, an element to the production that transcends that feeling of schematic craftsmanship: the quilts themselves.

Shit. Meet. Fan.’s ostentatious awfulness just comes off as incurious and hacky. Is it any surprise that the few shreds of humanity and solidarity in the play will almost always be displayed by Logan and Hannah, the two members of the group who aren’t white? Or that they’re the only ones able to walk out of the flaming wreckage with some dignity intact? What exactly is revelatory at this point about “Men Suck,” “White People Suck”? Honestly, I might still pause for “Rich People Suck,” but the play is more interested in identity than in economics. In the end, Shit. Meet. Fan. feels almost like some kind of bitter prank: Get a bunch of famous TV actors together and use them to tell the audience “Shame, shame, shame.” What a waste of theater’s tools; what a sour, narrow use to put them to.

In turning the Avett Brothers’ take on this gruesome true story into a musical, Logan and director Michael Mayer were facing a strangely paradoxical task. On the one hand, the events are there, the songs are there, and the central characters and situations are just waiting to be brought to three-dimensional life. Conversely, that very straightforwardness is a potential trap. A piece of theater assembled from preexisting songs, or charting a known historical event, can wind up feeling by-the-numbers: The things we expect to happen happen, and along the way folks sing about them (or, more likely, they sing about slightly generalized circumstances adjacent to the specific ones onstage). Despite its creative team’s efforts to lace a capital-T Theme through the work, Swept Away often falls prey to this roteness. Logan, with the support of Scott and Seth Avett and their bandmate Bob Crawford, has chosen “salvation and redemption” as the play’s big idea, but its deployment is telly not showy — we hear a lot about it, but our pulses never really rise with the stakes.

The blithe big-tent-ism (which also seems to be Elton’s go-to interview stance) feels pat. Clearly the production’s not all that interested in people with serious Christian-conservative leanings, unless they have a whole lot of patience for endless puns about Jesus being “inside her/him/me/you” and “the sound of the Lord, coming right in your ear.” And if you are, to quote Tammy Faye’s version of Jimmy Swaggart, a “liberal-loving Marxist,” you’re probably too heartsick to find all this much fun.

Genre fiction is harder than people want to give it credit for, partly because 90 percent of it is world-building. Watching In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot, my brain kept jumping to Severance, a TV dystopia that’s got its t’s crossed and its i’s painstakingly dotted. (Just look at how much time that show spends explaining why a character can’t sneak a written message out of the office, even if she swallows it.) By contrast, Mantell’s characters are surrounded by unaddressed blips in internal logic — if the show were a Dungeons & Dragons game, the players would be endlessly riding the DM about loose ends and loopholes.

Marketing is marketing, and it might not have mattered then, but it certainly does now — now being the moment in which you can see all this high-key, try-hard set dressing clogging up Circle in the Square. At the center of the whole trendy, clubby, stuffed-animals-and-inflatable-furniture jumble is, as Cordelia once said to her dad, nothing. One could be forgiven for walking away from this show’s two (and a half) hours’ traffic thinking that maybe Romeo and Juliet is kind of mid after all. Such is the enervating effect of so aggressively clickbaity and uncurious a production.

Scherzinger’s ravenous performance provides a great part of the adrenaline, but the show is also jolted into new life by the collision of the spartan Lloydiverse with all the plush and purple of Lloyd Webber’s score. Chu described the composer as, in the ’80s, mounting a kind of maximalist coup on musical theater in the name of the operatic notion of primo la musica: “Nothing—neither plot nor character, not social issues, not even good taste—would be more important,” she wrote about his shows, “than what happened when that invisible beam of music shot across the darkened theater into their souls.” Productions of Lloyd Webber’s aspirations to Puccini have long tended to put a hat on a hat. The music throbs and flourishes; so does the stage, loaded up with gondolas and chandeliers, fog and fashion and fur and roller-skates. Lloyd, true to form, runs the other way. He and his collaborators, the set and costumes designer Soutra Gilmour, and the lighting designer Jack Knowles and video designers Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom, craft a spare, echoing dungeon, girded by towers of LEDs. (This kind of seeming minimalism is its own circus trick, costing as it does millions of dollars.) Inside Gilmour’s vast, deceptively empty box, Knowles, Amzi, and Ransom’s incredible work is, in and of itself, a liquid, high-octane form of scenery. They’ve kept little but the fog.

That fundamental drive — that feeling of questing clarity, of the necessity of returning to an old play to excavate its glowing, undiminished heart — is what Kenny Leon’s new Broadway production lacks. It’s not painful, but it’s far from revelatory. In certain ways it treads safely down the middle of the road — gets in, gets on with it, gets it over with, and gets out. But Leon (like many post-Cromer directors of the play) also seems to be reaching for gestures to make this visit to Grover’s Corners new and different, and the flourishes wind up feeling tentative or hodgepodge-y, never coalescing.

Seventeen years is an eon in theater time, enough to make some plays feel as dated as fondue and Fawlty Towers, but David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face has aged well. Currently receiving its belated Broadway premiere in a swift, tangy production by Leigh Silverman — who also directed its first New York run in 2007 — the play retains its bite in part because its essential subject, like that of many a good comedy, is human folly. “Are you familiar with the Chinese concept of ‘face’?” asks a character in Hwang’s play — that’s as in “losing face” or “saving face.” Although both the inciting incident and the core conflict of Yellow Face have to do with instances of Asian impersonation by a white actor, there’s a reason Hwang’s title has a space in it. It’s not just about white foolishness — it’s about his own, too.

Generosity is also a key ingredient in the mortar that holds together Good Bones, the new play from James Ijames now debuting at the Public after a run last year at Washington, D.C.’s Studio Theatre. Like Hwang, Ijames is concerned with questions not only of race and bias but of how Americans are perhaps more shaped by the idea of Americanness than shapers of it. Good intentions, hero complexes, defensive individuality, susceptibility to certain ideas of progress — on these fronts, DHH and Aisha, Ijames’s protagonist, might have much to discuss. It’s prickly territory, but, in their different ways, Hwang and Ijames both navigate it with humor and humanity. Fundamentally, and despite plenty of reasons to throw in the towel, they like people.

Whereas The Ferryman had death in its name yet packed the stage with warm-blooded life—animals and children, drink and dance and harvest festivities—The Hills of California, acts as its reverse image. The title, taken from the Johnny Mercer tune, is all glowing, crooning mid-century dreaminess, a life of sunny days and glamorous blue Pacific nights. But those hills are as distant and untouchable as the horizon, and the play they loom over is heavy with death. The result is that Butterworth—who puts plays together like machines, calibrated for passion or pathos at the pull of a certain lever—has less to hide behind. The sheer exuberant maximalism of The Ferryman went a long way toward obscuring, even at times absolving, the show’s overdependence on some pretty trite types and twists. In The Hills of California, Butterworth’s calculations are exposed. He’s cooking with the same stock, but the soup has gotten unappetizingly thin.

With that untreated thorn in its side, The Ghost of John McCain tries to build, instead, a (I guess) joyous bipartisan coalition of political meme figures. As the upcoming election nears, there are drop-ins from Bernie sitting in that chair and Kamala sipping coconut juice — though this is all still happening inside Trump’s head, an Inside Out or Herman’s Head if the characters were all from New Yorker cartoons. The notion must be that there’s something rebellious in imagining Trump’s own obsessions all turning on him, but I found the singular focus on Trump himself tiresome. The musical has nowhere to go except to loop back, continually, to the same jokes about the same man’s mental state. That’s less a rebellion and more like tenancy, and the artistic and imaginative rent this show pays to the concept of Trump is way too high.

This kind of surface-level engagement is all The Roommate can really withstand. Farrow and LuPone are fun to watch — especially Farrow, whose church-mouse character gradually blossoms with the demurely unhinged glee of a midwestern Mephistopheles — and Silverman has written a good number of funny things for them to say. Their chemistry is spicy and real, and there’s nothing wrong with having a straight-up good time. The trouble is that there’s something weird and sour going on in Silverman’s play that precludes uncomplicated enjoyment of its comedy but never quite touches anything really profound. Beneath its veneer, The Roommate is in an on-again, off-again relationship with its own conscience. It doesn’t know quite what it wants to do or say, or, crucially, exactly how bad it wants to break.

That’s why it’s refreshing to see a show like Table 17, which not only includes a program note of encouragement from playwright Douglas Lyons but actually succeeds in creating the welcome physically and theatrically. “Laugh openly …” Lyons writes. “When the characters ask you for advice, don’t be shy, talk to ’em.” On the page, that’s cute — but affecting that dynamic in a space takes a sharp, willing director and actors bold and charming enough to help audiences get psyched, and then flexible enough to take the curveballs when they come. Good thing Lyons has Zhailon Levingston (of Cats: The Jellicle Ball) calling the shots and the rock-solid trio of Biko Eisen-Martin, Michael Rishawn, and the unnervingly excellent Kara Young playing the game. Young — who just took home her first Tony on her third nomination for Purlie Victorious — is so magnetic, so expressive and instinctively comedic, and then so present and moving, that most bodies three times her size don’t contain a fraction of her firepower. (She’s five-foot-two and doesn’t reach Eisen-Martin’s shoulder while wearing four-inch heels, and I would trust her to lift a car.) Meanwhile, Eisen-Martin has plenty of his own charisma, but he’s also able to receive and convert her high-wattage energy with the grace of a good straight man — figuratively and also not: “Ugh, the straights,” sighs one of Rishawn’s characters, a mean-gay maître-d’ named River, with the kind of eye roll that could only be the result of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule.

I won’t compare the ambitious, expensive-looking new Empire to community theater, because the insult would be the wrong way around. If by some money-related miracle, Caroline Sherman and Robert Hull’s moldy lemon of a musical makes good on the billing of its L.A. run as a “pre-Broadway engagement,” that should be all the proof any of us require for the fact that midtown is not the be-all, end-all of the theatrical impulse. Or perhaps, with its current run at the Broadway-adjacent New World Stages, Empire considers its dreams of the Great White Way close enough to fulfilled.

The most controversial cabaret in town might be happening at the August Wilson Theatre, but the best one is at the Lyceum. There, Cole Escola’s riotous, extremely faux-historical farce, Oh, Mary!, has begun its Broadway run, and long may it reign. Oh, Mary! took the West Village deliriously captive in its big gay pirate ship back in the spring, and while the wickedly clever Escola — who made their name first on YouTube playing wonderfully unhinged characters, then as a scene-stealer on shows like Search Party and Difficult People — is on record calling the uptown transfer “a mistake,” they and director Sam Pinkleton have wisely left funny enough alone. Really, far more than enough — Oh, Mary! is hilarious and, underneath the mayhem, both structurally rock solid and sneakily moving. It may be playing the palace now, but it’s confident enough in its own skin to have resisted any sort of unnecessary makeover.

Maslany is heartbreaking at the center of Ireland’s story; you can see her body, sometimes tensely twisted and sometimes crumpled in dull exhaustion, working through a poison it’s trying to expel. Whatever Dizzia, Chan, O’Connell, and Gevinson bring to the role, there’s a sense that they’ll be bolstered by Maslany’s performance, and that she in turn is drawing strength from the knowledge that they’re right behind her. “You have some nice friends,” Connors’s D tells A at one point. Perhaps that’s what you do with this: Find those friends, take their hands, tell your story.

Cats: “The Jellicle Ball” is the vogueing, waacking brainchild of co-directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch. It’s a high-spirited mash-up of Lloyd Webber’s possibly most dunked-on musical (the one about cats) with the culture and choreographic stylings of the ballroom scene immortalized in Paris Is Burning. It’s also a tribute to the legends of that scene, living and dead, and an energizing act of cross-community collaboration. A mix of more traditional triple threats with dancers, newcomers, and elders from the ball circuit—as well as a DJ to scribble, juggle, and sample along with the live band—creates a palpable effervescence in the room, banishing any theater in-crowd stuffiness. At intermission, I heard whispers about Steven Tyler being in the crowd. People are stoked, both onstage and off-. It’s, as the kids say, a vibe.

Kirkwood’s play has no comfort to give, but it has the toughest kind of hope. Like Lizzy, it comes full of rage—a bone-deep consciousness of the world’s brutal helix of wrongs—and it demands, despite everything: “But shall we not try?”

Without recourse to literalism, Koogler conjures the quintessence of 2020 — the absurdity and fragility, the aimlessness and mental rabbit holes, waiting and grief, the forgetting how to talk to other people, listening to yourself and thinking I sound like an alien in a person suit. Staff Meal feels like a portal: We tumble through its funny, eerie evocation of the moment that made—is still making—our present, and we come out the other side feeling, for all its ebb toward emptiness, full.

Jordans aims to take us to a place of horror and hysteria, a place where the laughter becomes a choke, a gag, a howl. But it hasn’t gone far enough at either end of the satirical spectrum. On one side, the inhuman scale; on the other, beneath the zingers and jabs, the bruised human hearts that are, somehow, still beating.

Under Marc Bruni’s jazz-hands-happy direction, this Gatsby feels like it belongs on a cruise or in a theme park. It would make a good fit if Epcot’s pavilions expanded to include time periods as well as countries. Poor James Gatz, victim of his own disguise. A century on, retellers of his story, like his hordes of party guests, remain distracted by the spectacle. Here, Bruni and his designers lean into the roaring garishness almost to the point of cartoon.

It’s got major names (Steve Carell is carrying the autumn roses and the gun), a major stage at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont, and a palpably earnest desire to excavate the story’s humanity. And it is, unhappily, an example of how all these things can fail to cohere into something powerful. Like its luckless hero, it shoots and misses.

It’s not that the performers aren’t trying. As the naïve, swept-away American narrator, Cliff Bradshaw, Ato Blankson-Wood is doing his best to bring vulnerability, sincerity, and even some dignity to the part; but it’s always a bit of a surprise to recall just how often Cliff is left on the sidelines, and just how little he sings (a real loss here, given Blankson-Wood’s gorgeous voice). And as the strung-out Kit Kat Club singer, Sally Bowles, Gayle Rankin is making every effort to leave her guts on the stage, but she’s not getting any help. Rankin has the ability to be wrenching and spectacular — I once watched her swim across a lake in the dark, climb out and play Nina’s devastating Act Four scene from The Seagull, get back in, and swim away again. But her delivery of “Maybe This Time” and of the show’s final drill to the stomach, its great title song, is hampered by extraneous gesture. She flickers between singing, talking, and half-singing in a way that feels like a misguided directorial attempt to make the songs new, but that ends up making Rankin seem nervous about her ability to deliver them. I have no doubt that she really can, and I wish Frecknall had helped her find more connection and more release.

It’s also a stunning feat of scoring by Adjmi — whose hypernaturalistic script captures the ebb and flow of overlapping speech both inside and outside the studio’s sound room — and by director Daniel Aukin and composer Will Butler. Aukin and the show’s stellar cast play Adjmi’s rigorously constructed, deceptively casual prose with as much exactness and audacity as the actors, all playing their instruments live, pour into Butler’s songs: Smart, well-crafted tunes that blend the folk and blues and prog vibes of the ’70s with the soaring indie yearning of Butler’s former band, Arcade Fire. (There’s a cast album on the way.) The show is part concert and part breakup drama, part sound-design marvel (Ryan Rumery is the hero responsible) and part beautifully observed period piece (everyone’s legs look dynamite in Enver Chakartash’s bells and flares, and that lovingly intricate set is by David Zinn). But it’s the thing Adjmi conjures up at the end of Act One that makes Stereophonic such a meaningful and exceptional piece of work: In its bones, it’s a love song, bittersweet and wounded and ferociously loyal, to the act of making art — specifically, art that requires that most exhausting, infuriating, transcendent element: collaboration.