Sara Holdren — Theater Critic

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The strains of something less than triumphant were always lurking in Hamilton, which begins with a fist-pump to the sky but ends with the plaintive question, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” But just as young Alice had no time for sweetness, Suffs has no time for wistfulness as it nears its ending. That’s because it’s not an ending, and there isn’t one in sight. As one of her epigraphs, Taub quotes the Talmud: “You are not obliged to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” Suffs may send us back out into the world a little bruised, a little somber, but in no way defeated or alone.

Sally & Tom—now at the Public under the direction of Steve H. Broadnax III after its premiere at the Guthrie Theater in the fall of 2022—is as concerned as Parks has ever been with bones and graves. But this time, there’s a good deal of padding to cushion our drop into the pit — too much padding, perhaps. It’s not just the damask and lace of Rodrigo Muñoz’s late-18th-century costumes, or the well-mannered minuets and sprightly fiddle tunes that score much of the piece (Parks also co-composed the music with Dan Moses Schreier): There’s something soft about the play, a little ingenuous and underbrewed. I kept waiting for the turn, the slap in the face.

And in its new musical form — with a score and lyrics by the folk duo Zach Chance and Jonathan Clay, known as Jamestown Revival, along with Justin Levine — The Outsiders is taking a real swing at being the strongest entry in this season’s wave of singer-songwriter outings on Broadway. We’re living in a post–Sara Bareilles age: Ingrid Michaelson, PigPen Theatre Co., Shaina Taub, and Anaïs Mitchell are all currently waving at one other from around Times Square. But whether or not the same people who make catchy pop records can also craft a solid score is another question. Chance, Clay, and Levine can, and if The Outsiders sometimes traffics, perhaps unavoidably, in cliché, it makes up for it with the tenderness and muscle of not just its songs but its staging and performances.

This is the risk, or simply the fact, of live theater: Watch Elton John and Tina Turner in Ken Russell’s 1975 film of Tommy, and you’re watching something fixed in time. Go to the Nederlander, and you’re watching strata of time interact via living bodies sweating in a real space, which will always give rise to the question of why this thing now? But this friction isn’t necessarily a bad thing — it can produce results across the spectrum in terms of a play’s resonance. With Tommy, if the dissonance is sometimes distancing, it’s also fascinating. Though I spent long stretches of the show intrigued and amused rather than earnestly rocking out, I was never not entertained. I had plenty of questions, but I also had a damn good time.

What’s more, this particular show is a sneaky marvel. Rather than handing you tidy packages of exposition, Grief Hotel trusts you to fall into an already rushing river, find a branch, and hang on.

Under O’Reilly’s steady direction, Philadelphia can sometimes feel like the dramatic equivalent of “old Screwballs” — it’s straightforward and decent and, theatrically, not given to unpredictability. Still, some of the production’s strongest moments are the play’s sketches of its menfolk. It’s in these scenes where Friel’s observational powers most fully emerge, his deftness with people who live right on the edge of caricature and yet, in startling lucid glimpses, can sense their own absurdity and helplessness.

Under O’Reilly’s steady direction, Philadelphia can sometimes feel like the dramatic equivalent of “old Screwballs” — it’s straightforward and decent and, theatrically, not given to unpredictability. Still, some of the production’s strongest moments are the play’s sketches of its menfolk. It’s in these scenes where Friel’s observational powers most fully emerge, his deftness with people who live right on the edge of caricature and yet, in startling lucid glimpses, can sense their own absurdity and helplessness.

in the case of Water for Elephants, whenever we leave the sappy present behind, there’s suddenly a great deal to enjoy. As is so frequently the case, the show’s stagecraft outstrips its script by a mile. Under Jessica Stone’s exuberant direction, a huge ensemble of ridiculously talented acrobats ebbs and flows—and flips and flies—through the house, coalescing into gorgeous paintings in front of projection designer David Bengali’s lush, shifting cloudscape of a backdrop.

Their two leads are also a real asset here, and not for their famous names. As the brothers locking horns at the play’s center — the principled Dr. Thomas Stockmann and the political animal Mayor Peter Stockmann — Jeremy Strong and Michael Imperioli both bring a vigorous contemporary affect to the material. You can feel the toughness and tension, the roiling potential energy, of their more modern characters flexing within David Zinn’s costumes, which land us softly in the 1880s without feeling rigid in their period accuracy.