Sara Holdren

These are meaty, complex questions and intriguing to ponder — Morisseau’s plays often sit atop fascinating historical strata, even if their dramatic construction tends to stick to the middle of the road. Sunset Baby doesn’t burst off the stage, but it keeps us intellectually engaged. What it offers for contemplation is the unglorious face of revolution, what Kenyatta calls “the man in the mirror.” That face is tired and worn, full of mistakes and unintended consequences, but Morisseau suggests that it is not the face of failure. It needs rest and grace; it needs to soften. The sun will rise again, and the revolution — unglamorous, daily, personal, imperfect — will continue.

Connecting the dots of what The Apiary actually wants to say might be less sticky if Whoriskey’s production felt more fluent. Instead, there’s a broad, vaguely dissonant quality to much of the show’s theatricality — as if the production keeps elbowing you in the ribs, taking you out of it every time you try to sink in. This sensation manifests in the acting—Schilling’s ranting, largely two-dimensional Gwen feels like she’s in a completely different play from Matthis and Herlihy—and in the design. Spangler’s set is bulky and expensive-looking, seemingly committed to a kind of realism, and yet that soaring netting is speckled with what look like raisins — stationary black dots that are meant to be bees. Same goes for the hive frames that Pilar lovingly removes for testing: more black dots. The delicate vestiges of life and movement that remain in these creatures are of such central importance that seeing them manifested as clearly static set dressing is disconcerting. Realism has gone as far as it can go and has hit a wall: What could have happened on the other side?

Though Izzard is far from a tedious host—she is, as she always has been, a uniquely enjoyable human being to spend time with—Cadell hasn’t followed through on her premise. Tyler Elich’s lights keep the audience conventionally in the dark, and Eliza Thompson’s original music—a dismal blend of low strings and horns that comes off as royalty-free “medieval”—gives us the feeling of listening to a live book-on-tape rather than engaging in a full theatrical event. Most discouraging of all, Izzard doesn’t connect with us all that much. Of course she looks out through the footlights during the soliloquies, but her Hamlet doesn’t really need us. She could get to the end of “To be or not to be” without seeking the answer in our eyes. Our presence—and thus the whole project we’re embarked upon together—lacks urgency. Izzard isn’t soaring to the text’s dizzying heights or dropping to its gutting psychophysical depths: She’s making her way steadily through.

Yes, its characters work at a real-life organization, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, which does employ an army of coders and tweeters to sow discord on American social media. And yes, a good percentage of the tweets we see these characters firing off are real in that they were really created by Russian internet trolls and really deployed during the 2016 election. But as Gancher notes in the program, “The Office is not about paper, [and this] play is not about politics. It’s about the people.” While that aim — to unmask the trolls and flesh them out as humans — is potentially compelling, it doesn’t end up generating a consistently powerful engine for the play.

Of course, there is a perspective from which too much grousing about Days of Wine and Roses feels unkind: Lucas has been sober for 19 years, Guettel went through his own journey to sobriety more recently, and O’Hara has told the story of a woman thanking her after the show and whispering, in parting, “23 years.” If the show—if any show—strikes someone, somewhere, for some reason, to the heart, well, so shines a good deed in a weary world. And yet… I hunger for more. O’Hara and James are capable of leaving us not simply pensive, but elated and shattered, if they had a show that would let them.

As a three-hour-and-two-intermission multigenerational family epic that’s Serious But Also Funny — and full of prolonged opportunities for actors to shout — it’s essentially purpose-built to win awards, and it has. Off Broadway, it nabbed Outstanding Play and Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play from the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle, respectively. It has the shape of something profound and easily laudable, but inside that outline, though it doesn’t shy away from gnarly questions, it often feels showy in its engagement with them. Like that guy who corners you at the grad-school mixer, Prayer for the French Republic is smart and it has a heart in there, but its primary interest is in its own demonstrations of rhetoric.

Hell’s Kitchen-the new musical spearheaded by the multi-Grammy-winning R&B singer-songwriter Alicia Keys—is chocolate-chip cookies: Its shape and taste are familiar, and when it’s best, it’s because there are some extremely high-quality ingredients in the mix.

If you tried to adapt an M. C. Escher painting for the stage, you might end up with something like John J. Caswell Jr.’s Scene Partners. Its reality is fragmented, tessellated, constantly re-creating itself — it’s a house of interlocking, perspective-defying staircases, a dream hallway where it’s impossible to tell which way is up. If you happen to be someone who takes notes during plays for a living, you might find yourself writing down helpful observations such as: Okay so none of it’s real. Then, ten minutes later: JK it IS all real. Five minutes after that: … wait is it? (Like I said: helpful.)

With film and TV regulars Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks donning the dirty bowlers and too-tight boots this time — as Estragon and Vladimir, respectively — Arin Arbus’s Waiting for Godot feels vigorous and down-to-earth. It leaps right over hurdle No. 1 (the night I saw it, it kept several little kids in the audience giggling regularly — a pretty marvelous sound to hear while watching Beckett). If it doesn’t always clear hurdle No. 2, well, that one’s very high. And perhaps, in this particular moment, we walk down the street with enough clear and present dread weighing down our pockets.

In the end, what Ward, Abbott, and Plaza access is that Danny and the Deep Blue Sea isn’t really a play about violence at all, but about absolution. It ends in the morning, with the new possibility to show a little faith, ’cause there was magic in the night.

In Theresa Rebeck’s I Need That — which makes its 100-minute run time feel as stretched out as the waistband of an old pair of sweatpants — Danny DeVito is Character B, or Sam. His daughter, Lucy DeVito, is also his daughter onstage, a.k.a. Character A, or Amelia. Sam, a big fan of old sweatpants, isn’t quite a hoarder, but he’s close. He doesn’t go outside, his house is bursting with heaps and heaps of “junk” (according to Amelia) or “treasure” (according to him), and it’s bad enough that the neighbors have called the authorities. “The fire department is coming,” says Amelia anxiously, as she says everything, “and they’re going to condemn the place and tell the health department to throw you out if you don’t do something.” A says, “Clean up!” B says, “No!” In the words of Mortal Kombat: “Fight.”

Here We Are is torn between its reasonable desire to obliterate its characters and its aspiration, if not quite to save them, then to remain open-ended as to where they—and we—go from here. If it’s sometimes a muddled impulse, it’s also a humane one. Sondheim certainly didn’t go gentle into the apocalypse of late capitalism, but he didn’t go heartless either. He stayed complicated. He gave us more to see.

Rannells and Gad are wonderfully matched and, it appears, having a real blast with each other. Their comic timing is wetsuit tight, their chemistry indisputable, their energy manic but precise and, crucially, unflagging. It has to be — it’s them and no one but them (well, and the Middlesex Three) for two hours, plus intermission. Which is, frankly, too long. Gutenberg!’s origins as a one-act remain palpable, and in its current form the show feels padded. Its stars are almost able to disguise that fact by throwing buckets of geek charisma at it, but despite their agility and generosity as performers, Gutenberg! could still come home in a tight 90-to-100 and leave everyone with a little more pep in their step.

The enlivening pulse created by Radcliffe, Mendez, and Groff gains strength and drive through the production’s rock-solid ensemble. Gilmour (also the costume designer) dresses them in softly period, unified swaths of color as the play moves back in time — blues, then beiges, then, in the lavish, La Dolce Vita–ish early ‘60s, in hard black and white. There’s something smart happening here: Groff, as Frank, wears varyingly sophisticated versions of the same white shirt and black trousers throughout the show, but at the top of Act Two, as Gussie (not yet his wife) seductively introduces him to “The Blob” — a pulsating swarm of influentials, “the ones who know everyone that everyone knows” — Frank’s clothes match the company’s for the first time. He is, whether consciously or not, getting sucked into something. No — it already has him.

Jaja’s can sometimes veer a little formulaic or presentational: In the single-scene appearance of Jaja herself, Kakoma spends most of her time standing directly downstage center (in, not to spoil anything, an absolute battleship of a wedding gown), facing out and delivering a rousing monologue about her right to call America “my country.” It rings clear and true, though I wonder how the same speech would have felt had White oriented Jaja as much toward her fellow characters as toward us, or what its effect might have been in a theater space without such a flat, front-on relationship with the audience. But this isn’t subtle stuff, and it’s not meant to be. Instead, it’s bright, generous, and forceful, and those currents carry the day. As Miriam says, perhaps speaking partly for her playwright, “No more time for quiet. I want to be loud, yeah? … Yeah. Very loud.”

Happily, I have no need to keep my mouth shut about Purlie Victorious. (Conveniently, too, since my job is to run it constantly.) Fast, fierce, and big-hearted, the show crackles with the verve of its central performances, and the play, at 62 years old, feels wittier, braver, less careful, and more caring than much contemporary writing. Both unflinching and generous, it’s just about as sharp as satire gets.

It leaves you in an ongoing feedback loop inside your own brain. And, at least for me, doing a lot of second-guessing of my own impulses. Even feeling semi-paralyzed. This time around, I find myself trying to work through this visceral feeling of isolation just as much as I'm working through the play itself. I think I'm left wondering: Does this play prescribe something about how to go forward as a human being in the world with other human beings? Or does it avoid prescription?

Freestyle Love Supreme, like the quick-spitting rap style in its name and the improv comedy form it's built around, is held together by nerve and verve, good instincts and a lot of good will. You may hit it on an on-fire night or a night of mostly mild chuckles, but it's still a formidable performance feat. It's high-energy, very sweet-natured fun.

If it weren't so doggedly self-serious, Robert Schenkkan's The Great Society would be almost entertainingly bad. I didn't see its predecessor, All the Way, which won the Tony for Best Play in 2014 after the production, commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and directed by Bill Rauch, came to Broadway with Bryan Cranston as Lyndon Johnson - but after almost three hours of its leaden, long-winded, blithely self-congratulatory sequel, I think I'm good.

In some ways, the delicacy of The Height of the Storm is its strength - in the opportunity it offers for powerful actors to work with small brushes, and in the notable and refreshing absence of rage and resentment from its central characters. But this gauziness of tone also keeps the play from feeling intellectually or emotionally filling. It feels, to use the French, like an étude - a chance for performers to play briefly, and at times movingly, on certain themes, but without much ultimate sense of consequence.

Despite the real power of Hiddleston's performance, that empathy gap strikes me as a flaw. We can't quite take Emma at her word (we've also heard her lie on other important matters), and so the scales of Lloyd's play end up tipped rather than balanced. It seems to be a play about a victim and two perpetrators - but I think it's a play about three people, all of whom we should empathize with, all of whom we should mistrust, all of whom are capable of great selfishness. Ashton has the hardest job: Emma's got that sense of mystery about her that sometimes happens when men, even very talented men, write women. The scenes between Robert and Jerry, though often tense and terse, feel lived, red-blooded, affectionate. Emma often seems ethereal - her motivations and actual desires somehow far away. (For a real bust-up of that trope, get into Bakewell's essay - there's no mystery woman there; instead there's a super-smart Cambridge grad who was expected to become a housewife and mother at 25.) The character is already the most opaque in the play, and Ashton's performance doesn't do much to elucidate her. Tall and willowy, with bare feet and a dancer's limbs, she tucks her hair behind her ears, tilts her head and half smiles. It's clear she likes Jerry's attention, but it's not clear where her own deep hungers lie. Lloyd has her leaning into the enigmatic aura Pinter gave Emma, and it renders Ashton less visceral and-and this is the real problem-less sympathetic than her male counterparts.

For all its splashy, glittery, high-kicking, butt-cheek-baring, sword-swallowing maximalism, Moulin Rouge! is something more unsettling than not good. It's not even very interesting. There's a shapelessness about it, a weird enervation underneath the flash and bang. It's directed by Alex Timbers, but it feels like it was assembled by committee, even by algorithm. The show veers broadly away from its beloved-by-millennials-everywhere source material, which in itself is no crime. But the path its creators have taken is one long trip through the Kingdom of Pandering, with multiple pit stops in the Meadows of Cutesiness and the Forest of Flat Characters. Everywhere it should be filthy, it's scrubbed aggressively clean, yet somehow it's still a hot mess.

Unsurprisingly, the real treat of this Frankie & Johnny - and perhaps any well-cast Frankie & Johnny - is watching the lively interplay of its two excellent performers. It's a showcase for actors, and there's a sweet, off-kilter, earthy chemistry between the down-to-earth McDonald and the hepped-up Shannon. Though Frankie is often nervous when she speaks, McDonald has a way of half-smiling or half-frowning while she listens that gives the sense of a deep, unarticulated inner life. And Shannon - who spends most of the play in boxer shorts, looking gloriously normal-bodied for a big-time actor - smartly leans into Johnny's oddball qualities and his bursts of childlike enthusiasm.

Beetlejuice, the rowdy, raunchy musical adapted from Tim Burton's 1988 horror-comedy, openly embraces the theme park-y aspects of an enterprise like the one it's engaged in. True to its source material, it's loud, it's cheeky, and it's all about excess. It's also-thanks in large part to Alex Brightman's spot-on performance as the incorrigible titular ghoul-a pretty fun time.

Carvel is a devilish delight to watch as Murdoch. He hikes his shoulders up and juts his head forward, giving him a vulturish vibe even in his loose, lanky frame. His mouth is always slightly open, his tongue creepily active - he's always hungry - and his eyes are like two tiny black lasers, constantly scanning the room. The director Matthew Warchus, who directed Carvel as the hideous headmistress in Matilda (for which he won a Tony), affectionately calls him a 'nose-putty actor' - and it's true that there's something refreshingly broad and tricksterish about his style. Brits in general are more comfortable as character actors, knowingly playing games with their own bodies and voices. Americans tend to want to be serious heroes - we get stuck in our heads and our feels. Not that Murdoch and his editor-and-chief have no feelings, but Ink is in large part a story of ambition, which means that sparks of doubt, distaste, and conscience are systematically doused until it's too late.