Sara Holdren — Theater Critic

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.

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.

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.

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 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.