Sara Holdren — Theater Critic

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.

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.

While it’s tempting to go big and brazen, Teeth loses something as it bursts its seams. But what it’s got is still, in so many moments, lava-hot and canines-sharp. Underneath the fire and blood, the mythical battles and severed dicks — inside the promise ring and the cheap paneled walls of the church rec room — is the real horror show.

If I had to take bets on how many actual tears The Notebook The Musical manages to jerk — well, I wouldn’t advise anyone to bring a bucket. With prosaic direction and a strangely heavy and sterile aesthetic sense that feels, despite Schele Williams’s presence as a co-director, all too similar to Michael Greif’s other productions this season, as well as a surprisingly beige slate of songs by the folk-pop artist Ingrid Michaelson, the show disappears from memory almost moment to moment. It’s almost enough to make one want to reference the half of the story’s plot that deals with dementia.

<span style='color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: &quot;Miller Text&quot;, Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px;'>What Moses, Yazbek and Della Penna, and Cromer are doing is both unearthing stories that have been, for one reason or another, buried in dust and pondering the cultural forces that shaped these strange tales of striving. Everything has a politics, and&nbsp;</span><em style='box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: &quot;Miller Text&quot;, Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px;'>Dead Outlaw</em><span style='color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: &quot;Miller Text&quot;, Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px;'>&nbsp;doesn’t have to spell out its skepticism of the American mythos. Underneath the bizarre facts of Elmer McCurdy’s story lie our national drive to turn everything into a product; the brutal division of people into either successes or suckers; the glamorizing of violence and individualism; the moral bankruptness, aimlessness, hopelessness, aggression, and gullibility behind the cowboy façade.</span>

Director Scott Ellis is happy not to push past the expected. David Rockwell’s set dutifully revolves between stony, ivy-twined cloister courtyard and massy mahogany office. Ryan wears the same severe bonnet and glasses that Streep and Cherry Jones wore before her. Mikaal Sulaiman’s straightforward sound design gives us crows cawing, children at play, and kyries between scenes. And, while one needn’t belabor the point, seven of the eight-person central production team are men. The famous faces onstage are new, but much of what’s been packaged here feels intensely, and intentionally, the same as it ever was.

Under the musically graceful direction of Ben Steinfeld — one of the company’s three co–artistic directors as well as the composer of the show’s songs — Fiasco gives Pericles, Shakespeare’s mixed-bag picaresque of a late romance, a clear and pleasant shape.

Would that Farr and Goold’s work gave us as much to consider as Devlin’s, but beyond the rich evocations of its set, The Hunt is a frustrating affair. It aims for thrillerish tension, but in its attempt to sound the direful minor chords of parable, Farr’s script forces its characters into behavior that feels at best underexamined and at worst absurd. Will they make the worst possible decisions, the most drastic leaps to conclusion, the most violent threats, and the least reasonable assumptions in every situation? You bet they will. Will our beleaguered protagonist fail to defend himself almost every time he gets the opportunity? The man can barely get a sentence out. Will the play indulge in some classically manipulative moves from the Tropes for High-Tension Dramas About Communal Persecution of an Innocent Man playbook? Well, there is a real dog onstage, and yes, it belongs to our hero, and no, you shouldn’t get attached to it.

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&amp;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.”