Sara Holdren — Theater Critic

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.

Fontana is pouring plenty of vigor and vocal vibrance into his role, but the truth is that Michael/Dorothy's charm falls pretty flat pretty fast. I found myself thinking of Andy Karl's similarly charismatic-and-self-absorbed performance as Phil Connors in Groundhog Day: Yes, the hero's a jerk. Yes, we know he's going to learn his lesson. But do we really want to dedicate our time to his lengthy, self-centered learning process - especially, in Tootsie, when the hero gets to spend so much of that process enjoying the spotlight? Despite its razzle-dazzle, Tootsie feels empty at the center. It's all but impossible to sympathize with the lead, and it's hard to be that interested in the woman he falls for.

The stormy climax of All My Sons still packs a wallop, but the road to it is long, painfully dated, and-though we don't like to admit to basic failings in our canonized playwrights-marked by some truly frustrating logical potholes. And in director Jack O'Brien's production, the play's glaring issues go unexamined, swathed in a suburban summertime scenic design by Douglas W. Schmidt that's so artificially verdant it feels cloying. Of course, the point of the play is that unpleasant things are going to go down in this Norman Rockwell-esque backyard, but there are also unpleasant things going on in the fabric of Miller's play, and these are being summarily avoided-even added to-as the production reverentially, almost complacently, presents All My Sons as an unquestioned masterpiece.

The play wants to be a breathless farce, a political gut-punch, a meditation on our penchant for violence and our reverence for classical drama, a vigorous mash-up of high- and lowbrow (imagine the 'Approval Matrix' ... all squished together), and a defiant, art-forward beacon of hope. And it feels like some of these things, some of the time. But despite - or perhaps because of - the fact that George C. Wolfe's production is pitched pretty much unrelentingly at 11, Gary isn't as funny or as biting as it could be. Like the big Rube Goldberg machine that looms over Santo Loquasto's appropriately garish, corpse-strewn set, the play's working parts, while visible, aren't always activated.

Hadestown has arrived on Broadway. Like so many of its mythic antecedents, it's the product of much metamorphosis, and its current manifestation feels lush, vigorous, and formally exciting, not to mention, in certain moments, witchily prescient.

But Driver keeps the show aloft. Turns out Kylo Ren is immensely compelling onstage - a genuine weirdo in the hulking, strangely graceful body of a former Marine, unafraid of huge, ugly displays of emotion, blazing through Pale's aggrieved, hilarious, F-word-peppered rants with the dexterity of a dancer like Robbie. At one point, he gently puts his hand on Russell's breastbone, and it's genuinely unsettling how much of her tiny torso his big human paw covers. He's an unstoppable force and an immovable object. And he's funny as heck. Whether he's steaming over the injustices of the world - 'Half my fuckin' adult life, I swear to Christ, has been spent looking for a place to park!' - or padding around the room wearing one of Anna's little happi coats, struggling to get his enormous limbs through the weird double armholes, Driver's got a keen sense for comedy of multiple sizes, from the subtle background lazzo to the over-the-top tirade. It's fun to watch him interact with Uranowitz's wonderfully wry Larry - who can't help smiling, as if from behind his hand, at such a splattery, honest display of personality - and with Furr's Burton, who's sympathetic despite his many blind spots, and who really doesn't mean to bust out his aikido training on Pale. Pale just has a way of ... bringing things out in people.

The production has gotten fuller, freer, and funnier in its Broadway transfer. Its remarkable actors - especially Damon Daunno's cocky, come-hither Curly McClain and James Davis's ebullient, a-couple-knots-short-of-a-lasso Will Parker - feel loose, confidant, and playful, as if they're all taking deeper breaths and, consequently, greater risks. At St. Ann's Warehouse, the performances had a veneer of experimental coolness, a dry, distanced note in the delivery, as if the actors were standing a little apart from their characters and, along with the audience, observing these familiar figures they'd been given to play. Though that sense of comment remains - and Mary Testa and Rebecca Naomi Jones continue to make the most of it as a wry, ruthless Aunt Eller and a Laurey flush with intense, reserved desire - the characters' humanity now feels as present and comprehensive as the director's style.

There is a tragedy happening at the Cort Theatre, but it's not the tragedy of a rash and overweening English king, his three daughters, and the gaping maw of violent nihilism opened up by his childish demand that they turn their love for him into a competition. It's not the tragedy of a great king gone mad but rather of a great play that's lost its wits and its way. After a royal amount of hype built on the promise of the towering Glenda Jackson's role-defining performance, the painful truth is that Sam Gold's King Lear is a hot, heavy mess. And more painful still, Jackson's Lear fails to transcend it.

What's interesting, though, is that so many of these songs are presented only in part, tossed in as if to whet our appetites only before the biographical plot, such as it is, trundles along. The ushers who seat you for Ain't Too Proud encourage you to clap, sing along, and respond to the show, and looking around, I could tell that my audience was hungry to do so. This was a house of fans. They wanted a nostalgic blowout concert, and as so many songs peeped in and out without a real finish, you could feel their applause anxiety growing. You can't build a whole musical out of climaxes, but you also don't want a house full of blue balls. And when the big finishes do come around, they don't quite smash through the ceiling. They're pleasing without being rapturous.

All of which feels just ... fine. What's interesting about this Kiss Me, Kate's context consciousness is that its adjustments are both good, arguably downright necessary ideas, and not really show-savers. I'm happy not to listen to O'Hara sing about placing her hand beneath her husband's foot, but the subtle level-up in gender politics at the show's conclusion doesn't actually stop the whole thing from feeling like an aesthetic time capsule. And aesthetics can usurp politics.

There's a cheeky, open-eyed quality to Be More Chill that knows better than to spill over into archness - because musicals aren't actually chill at all, ever. And no one sums up this mixture of sincerity and worldly mischief better than Christine, who, when things look bleakest, delivers a distressed zinger that might just qualify for best self-own of the current theatrical moment: 'I look around and everyone's hurting. I wish there was something real I could do to make things better but I don't know how. So I guess I'll just do theater.' How do the kids put it? I feel so seen.

Hawke is lighting a fire (literally and figuratively) at the center of the play and clearly having a ball doing it. But on the other side of things, through some imperfect alchemy of actor, director, and character, Dano's Austin can't take the heat. He's so recessive for so long that Lee has nothing much to push against. Shepard builds tension between the brothers scene by scene, but here, an Austin who bends, deflates, and dwindles so easily and so consistently starts to make the play feel repetitive rather than cumulative, a drone rather than a gradual ribcage-rattling crescendo. When Dano finally reaches Austin's key aria - in which he quietly tells Lee the grim, pathetic story of their alcoholic father's trip to Juarez to get all his teeth pulled by a backstreet dentist - he's at last in his melancholy element. But the road to get there has been long and frustratingly flat.