Sara Holdren — Theater Critic

Director Trip Cullman has a buoyant feel for the play's comedy and, along with arranger and music director Jason Michael Webb, he gives Choir Boy's songs the front-and-center treatment they deserve. The play is an undercover, and gorgeous, a cappella musical, kept aloft by the extraordinary vocal talents of its cast.

Bartlett Sher and his designers have created a shifting, breathing, gorgeously orchestrated world, and while the top-billed Jeff Daniels is indeed lighting up the stage as the story's iconic lawyer, every member of the ensemble shines alongside him. As a company, under Sher's careful and majestic direction, they are incandescent.

I'm okay with the real thing, and even with nostalgia in YouTube-size bites - but not as the only fuel in the tank when you're trying to do a play. Put Cher, or even three Chers, on Broadway and not only do you in fact decrease the potential for expected spectacle - you've also got to try to make her into, well, theater. And that requires more than costumes, even costumes by Bob Mackie. It requires more than several good Cher impressions (Diamond, Wicks, and Block are all doing their best Janice-from-the-Electric-Mayhem voices, and Block especially sounds great belting out the brassy, vibrato-heavy hits). It requires more than wigs and wings and sailors and celebrities and tangoing gypsies and hoedown-ing cowboys. The problem isn't that it's all too much. It's that, when all the glitter's swept up, it's not nearly enough.

Its trajectory is familiar: Benighted would-be heroes gallop in to save the day, make a mess, discover their actual moral centers in the process, fess up to their initial selfishness, and then we all sing, dance, and love one another a little better. But its tone is fresh and zingy, its characters genuinely laughable and lovable - in part because the performers playing the Broadway babies are smartly poking fun at themselves.

Not that the show is willfully shallow. In fact, in a brochure handed to me outside the theater by the show's press representatives, one of Kong's lead producers, Carmen Pavlovic, writes about the resonances she found in the story while developing the production over the last ten years. She talks about the global recession, Harvey Weinstein, the environmental crisis, and xenophobia in both Australia and America. Brett Kavanaugh gets a mention. So do the immigrant children forcibly separated from their families. King Kong, it would seem, is about everything. But what stands out from Pavlovic's essay are its title - 'Why King Kong?' - and the sole pull quote. 'Could he achieve a chest-beat without punching a hole through his own sternum?' it reads. 'Could he pick up a girl and run with her?'

American Son has power behind it: Shonda Rhimes, Jada Pinkett Smith, Dwayne Wade, and the show's star, Kerry Washington, are on its long, glittery list of producers. It has its serious sights set on a subject of indisputable tragic weight: the unjustifiable killing of unarmed black men in America by unaccountable police officers. It also has a contrived, TV-ish script peopled by one-note characters and peppered with amateurish flourishes. Its playwright, Christopher Demos-Brown, a writer and lawyer who runs a practice in Miami, seems to be positioning himself as a kind of John Grisham for the stage, and its director, Kenny Leon, can't push the material past its inherent paperback flatness. Derek McLane's bulky, photo-real Miami police-station set, with real rain falling outside the upstage windows, tells us all we need to know about tone: There's nothing remotely theatrical about this play, no reason for it to be a play at all - save that we retain a kind of anxious cultural cachet about drama. Putting something on stage seems to aggrandize it, make it more serious-minded and more luxurious, closer to opera than Netflix. But the truth is that contemporary plays like American Son are simply imitations of the shows on Netflix-or, in this case, NBC-and pale ones at that, because unlike our age's spate of fascinating television, these plays want to be something they're not. They neither take joy in the possibilities of their own form nor respect its demands.

The play tells us that we should remember Gladys's story, but doesn't take advantage of the infinite potential of its form in the telling of it. There are lots of things we should remember, from flossing to giving to charities, but what makes us remember theater is revelation. By confining itself to a familiar box, even an expertly rendered one, The Waverly Gallery ends up feeling smaller than it should, especially when its very mission is to see the world in a grain of sand. Even in the sensitive hands of its actors, especially May and Allen, it's an affecting play, but not a revelatory one.

The devil of it all is that is that, both despite and because of its flagrant use of formula, The Ferryman hooks us through the gills and pulls us along. After all, are we not entertained? There's a live goose, for God's sake. In the wake of the play's frantic, lurid, pull-out-all-the-stops-and-knock-down-all-the-pins conclusion (which makes the whole play feel like the prequel to an as-yet-unwritten bloodbath blockbuster called The Wrath of Quinn), the audience rocketed to its feet - and I got the reaction. Even though, when I stopped to think about it, at least three different elements of the story's final catastrophic 60 seconds left me wondering, 'Wait, but why?' In a sense, set and costume designer Rob Howell's rendering of the Carneys' farmhouse, with its barrage of meticulous detail and its absurdly outsize proportions, is the perfect metaphor for the play itself: It's a head-trippy presentation of rich, authentic-seeming texture inside a romanticized, larger-than-life box - a gourmet meal by a very clever chef that somehow gives us the same uneasy satisfaction as Lucky Charms. 'That just... almost looked right,' said the friend who saw it with me, whose family lives in Donegal, 'And... almost felt right. But...'

Directed with a light touch and a sense for gradual crescendo by Leigh Silverman, and constructed with elegance and precision on all fronts by the first all-female design team on Broadway (a fact that's half Hooray! and half What?!), The Lifespan of a Fact gives you the satisfying rush of a good mystery or a crossword puzzle. Your brain gets to go the gym for 90 minutes. But it doesn't get to go home feeling pumped and complacent. Instead, in a way that's both invigorating and unsettling, the show leaves you hanging. It suspends you in that grand canyon gap, somewhere in the fog between fact and truth, between unimpeachable accuracy and revelatory narrative, and challenges you to find your own way out.

Happily, Bean has a sense for balance, and doesn't let his farce linger too long over romance. He soon gets back to the table: '[Play] with the nap,' Dylan tells us, 'the ball will run straight with the natural line. [Play] against the nap, the ball can deviate and drift...' For Bean, the nap is a straight line to a good joke. He knows his game.

While von Stuelpnagel seems intent on out-Heroding Herod, McTeer and Rebeck are caught in a trap that's at once more difficult and more sympathetic. They're torn between the seduction of Bernhardt's myth and the more unknowable essence of her humanity - between the compulsion to hold up this spectacular woman from history as both an artistic legend and a feminist hero, and the less flashy, much more personal impulse to tell the story of a woman of the theater who's wrestling with ego, uncertainty, mortality, and Shakespeare. I know which story interests me more, but Bernhardt/Hamlet never fully makes the leap. Instead, it spends its time plucking low-hanging fruit and getting its characters into arguments that feel like cul-de-sacs. It can't decide whether it wants to ridicule or re-envision Hamlet's lack of resolve, and in the meantime, it never quite finds its own.

As you approach the Nederlander Theatre, the marquee flashes a series of bold all-caps phrases: 'BOLD WOMAN - FIERCE WOMAN - FUNNY WOMAN - SMART WOMAN,' and finally, inevitably, the title: Pretty Woman. Inside the theater, posters and T-shirts at the merch stand bear the same messaging. The show's producers have been trying to get out in front of the fact that their material doesn't exactly scream 2018 for a while, now opting for this catechism of empowerment. They needn't have bothered. For one thing, more adjectives are never the solution to a problem. For another, Pretty Woman: The Musical has plenty of problems outside of its politics. If the show were a witty, brilliantly scored, fleet-footed theatrical gem, then it might be worthwhile to attempt a nuanced excavation of the kind of worldview it's espousing beneath the top-notch presentation.

But this is the universe of Gettin' the Band Back Together: one where you cango home again, one where you are the rock-and-roll god you always thought you were, and one where, to quote Kurt Vonnegut, the destructive myth that 'it is very easy for any American to make money' is cheerfully upheld. The show's denouement - and the salvation of Mitch, his mom, and his buddies - involves a big check delivered out of the blue, in the ultimate deus ex rockina. It's one big American fantasy - Hey, you too might recapture your youthful glory and randomly become a millionaire! - being marketed to folks who couldn't afford to see Springsteen on Broadway and came to this instead. And if the cheers that surrounded me are any measure, plenty are happily buying in.

But the universe of Head Over Heels is a forgiving one, a world where love of all stripes truly does conquer all, and despite doing some real violence before the play is through, Basilius is shown mercy. 'Under my supervision,' says Gynecia to her chastened husband, 'I predict a gentler man will over time evolve.' She's not just talking about Basilius: In Head Over Heels, the future isn't female per se, but it's definitely not male either. Where gender, love, and governance are concerned, the future is free - free of the old definitions, the old order, the old beat. The straight and narrow path is a big fat dead end, and if the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice, Head Over Heels joyously insists that it keep bending.

The 90-minute examination of the ingrained dynamics at work amongst an aging father and his three adult sons is, in large part, exactly those things Lee points to as so currently unfashionable: It's nuanced, curious, and compassionate. That's not to say it's comfortable-Lee's sense of mischief and her expert control of tension are still at play-but it is, in its bones, gentle. Those buying tickets hoping for a gleeful evisceration of straight white male privilege, a parodic fuck-you of a play, may be disappointed. Good. Lee is doing something much harder and much more humane.

There are surely things to be enthusiastic about in Joe Mantello's glitzy, solidly acted revival, perhaps most of all the commitment of its producers, David Stone and the seemingly omnipotent Ryan Murphy, to assembling a complete cast of openly gay actors, a feat that would have been impossible when the original production shocked and captivated New York a year before Stonewall.

The revival of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh-now at the Bernard B. Jacobs under the direction of George C. Wolfe and strapped with heavy starpower in Denzel Washington-is the kind of production that puts prospective audience members off 'classics' for good. Whether you're a card-carrying member of the O'Neill Society or you simply flipped a coin at the TKTS booth, you'd be within your rights to run screaming from the theater by the first of the show's two intermissions. If, however, you decided to stick around for the whole moribund, infuriating ride, you might find yourself wondering why this play is considered a classic at all, how it's earned a place on a shelf so high that, these days, we can't get to it without sending up little hot-air balloons of reverence. You might be angry not only at the clumsy production but-blasphemy!-O'Neill's play itself.

if your first experience of Shaw or his Joan is Sullivan's tepid production and its disappointingly soft starring turn by Condola Rashad, you could be forgiven for writing this vigorous play and its fascinating playwright off as a collective bore.

They've come for the music - and perhaps theatergoers like me have our own cynicism to reckon with in the face of a fan's earnest euphoria. Whatever your personal taste, being surrounded by genuine excitement-by middle-aged women wearing sequined blouses actually standing up in a Broadway theater and joyfully shaking their booties during multiple slinky disco numbers-does a body good. That's what's currently happening in the Lunt-Fontanne, and thanks to the swift, smart construction of Summer, which neither overburdens its material nor overstays its welcome, it's a pretty damn good time.

But the additional-and perhaps the most powerful-enchantment of this particular trip to the theater is actually on our side of the footlights. Looking around me, I saw Hogwarts house colors, black robes, and wands filling the seats. When Jamie Parker made his first entrance as Harry Potter, and when Noma Dumezweni and Paul Thornley first appeared as Hermione and Ron, the already crackling energy in the dark auditorium erupted. (Later, I heard a woman actually scream in delight when a silhouette resembling that of Severus Snape began to glide forward, back to us, on the set's big central turntable.) This isn't normal entrance applause: The audience is cheering not for celebrities but for characters. Not that the actors aren't doing cheer-worthy work. On the contrary, they're turning in effective, endearing performances, from Parker's stubborn, struggling, still emotionally stunted Harry, to Thornley's dad-jokey Ron, to Dumezweni's restrained (but comically adept) Hermione and Poppy Miller's patient, not-to-be-messed-with Ginny.

Bartlett Sher's glowing revival of Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady has arrived at Lincoln Center to prove that it can be done. A beloved musical from another era can keep on kicking, and, as is the case here, it can even do so without making radical shifts in aesthetic, as long as it's got its eyes wide open.

Elliott, who's become known for her ability to coordinate vast, complex productions (she's the only woman with two directing Tonys, for War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), knows how to embrace the scope of Kushner's play while still keeping it about the ensemble who powers it. She and her top-notch design team are taking full advantage of the resources afforded by a huge, commercial show like this one, but they're doing so with purpose and even restraint, to the full support of the actors.

It's not that I hate fun. Fun is great! I love fun! Every now and again, I even love shiny, high-budget, well-constructed dumb fun based on a big-name brand. But Escape to Margaritaville is about as much fun as buying a dud hermit crab as a pet. It seems like it'll be exotic, or at least cute, but it's really kind of sad, and definitely a rip-off, and, at the end of the day, actually just an empty shell.

Despite Lithgow's tendency to wax Hallmark card-ish when he's talking about his stories rather than telling them, he's a sensitive enough performer to know when to move on from the personal - to feel when his audience needs a laugh and a lift. And when he dives into the words and worlds of Lardner and Wodehouse, Stories by Heart is pure entertainment of the most ancient and appealing kind. In his current sojourn in New York City, Lithgow seems to have taken the words of the immortal Uncle Fred as his touchstone: 'On these visits of mine to the metropolis, my boy, I make it my aim, if possible, to spread sweetness and light.'

The Children - which premiered at the Royal Court in London last year and has now transferred to Broadway's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre with its original cast and director, the deft, deceptively unostentatious James Macdonald - is a play about responsibility and guilt, reparation and redemption. It's also a British play, so these heavy matters are handled lightly, wryly, approached from the side until circumstances absolutely demand a head-on confrontation.