Sara Holdren — Theater Critic

Is it too much? Nah, no such thing. While I admit that I raised an eyebrow upon learning the show's runtime-two and a half hours seemed like a whole lot of SpongeBob for a single sitting-I left realizing that I had smiled for literally every minute of it. Even at that length, it may be a shameless celebration of the short attention span (there's something new and shiny to look at pretty much every thirty seconds), but its relentless novelty has a sweet earnestness to it. Not to mention real inventiveness: It's like a kid running up to you to show you the Super Powered Extra Awesome Cybernetic Blaster Raygun she just made out of a cardboard tube and some pipe cleaners. (Indeed, Sheldon J. Plankton, SpongeBob's miniscule but nefarious antagonist, cackles over just such a contraption: the Avalanche Maker 3000's construction looks to involve a caulking gun, a camera tripod, and several buckets).

The Parisian Woman is back onstage, lounging at the Hudson Theatre after a makeover for the age of Twitter and Trump. But despite high wattage both onstage and off (Uma Thurman is our present-day Parisienne and Willimon created House of Cards), the results are not sparkly but wooden and smug. In attempting to walk the line between classic sexual intrigue and contemporary political resonance, The Parisian Woman falls flat on both counts, delivering yet another lamely apologetic, latently self-satisfied slog through the worldview of an ostensibly liberal white dude.

Meteor Shower may not be groundbreaking (few meteors are), but comedy doesn't have to be revelatory to work. And Martin's particular brand of humor is loopy enough to keep us interested. He's also a master of the dad joke: The extended setup that builds to a wince-inducing punch line. (Re: Norm's dick: 'It's been photographed by Mapplethorpe.' 'How did he hear about it?' 'Word of mouth.') Yeah, yeah, groans all around - but you can't help giggling, too. And you could do far worse than spend 80 minutes chuckling and groaning in the company of this game foursome of actors (there's far worse out there right now). So grab a pre-wine or three and settle in for some puns and some Perseids on this lightest of all dark nights of the soul.

Plenty of plays are tackling issues of system failure, miseducation, and underrepresentation with dogged earnestness. And while the sprightly Latin History for Morons-now playing at Studio 54 in a transfer from its joint premieres at Berkeley Rep and the Public-has its fair share of sincerity, it's also got a leg up on some of its fellow pieces of sociopolitical theater: the unmistakable, irresistible sense of humor of its creator and star.

Director David Cromer, book writer Itamar Moses, and composer/lyricist David Yazbek are clearly unified in their pursuit of the specific and the humane over the grandiose. Together they've created a play of deep integrity - funny, generous, sweet without sentimentality, poignant without melodrama, and emotionally expansive even as it insists upon its own smallness.

Junk's driving tempo, cinematic smash-cuts, and clarity of underlying action undoubtedly hold our attention. Akhtar has said that he wants audiences 'to have an emotional experience of this process of capital' - to get caught up in the thrust of each scene ('somebody's instructing somebody, somebody's stealing from somebody, somebody's betraying somebody else's confidence') even if phrases like 'undisclosed equity stakes' sound a bit like Chinese. Director Doug Hughes understands that one of the things Akhtar is doing in Junk is riffing on the Shakespearean history play. He keeps the action rolling relentlessly forward on an effectively streamlined, compartmentalized set by John Lee Beatty that - not unlike an Elizabethan theater - allows for quick, imaginative shifts in time and space.

When David Henry Hwang's memory play M. Butterfly made its Broadway debut almost 30 years ago, it took home the Tonys for Best Play, Best Direction, and Best Performance by a Featured Actor (B. D. Wong in a career-making turn as the Chinese opera singer Song Liling). It also ran for almost two years - a remarkable feat considering its thematically ambitious, stranger-than-fiction story. The play is based both on Puccini's romantic (and deeply problematic) tragedy of an opera, Madama Butterfly, and on the real-life affair between the Beijing opera singer Shei Pei Pu and French diplomat Bernard Boursicot, who for 20 years believed his male lover to be a woman.

If only the play itself lived up to the extravagant - and admittedly powerful - visual metaphor that Patel and Taichman have created for it. But despite intermittent moving moments, the text often feels clunky, dated, and more than a bit sentimental. Taichman, whose work with her actors is sharper in the second act, overplays the first act's saccharine notes, and Paloma Young's costumes fall into the same trap: In 1937, they're crisp and evocative. In 1919, they feel like cotton candy - too sugary, too fluffy, too, well, costume-ish. With so many nails being hit squarely on the head, out in the audience it's easy to feel caught in one of Dunne's time-bending premonitions: We're constantly ahead of the events unfolding in front of us.

Though the music soars, the show's central figure remains a bit generic, a bit out of focus. We don't really see Prince - certainly not as we got to see Sondheim, through actual personal video footage, in the 2010 Broadway revue (and similar career retrospective) Sondheim on Sondheim. Instead, we see a mostly young cast, all looking very chic in black-and-white baseball costumes by William Ivey Long, delivering a number of well-meaning truisms about luck and heart. (The book, which weirdly feels both a little too slick and a little too earnest, is by David Thompson).

First of all, because it's almost entirely unsurprising. In an interview with Time Out, Moore promises that 'for 87 minutes, you're going to experience something you're not expecting' (the show runs 110 minutes, by the way), but my feelings upon leaving the Belasco Theatre can best be summed up with a long sigh. If I had had to make a guess as to what a Michael Moore Broadway show would feel like, this would have been pretty much it. The Terms of My Surrender feels like a live version of my Facebook feed: a few good stories and a boatload of preaching to the choir (add requisite helpings of self-congratulation and liberal-on-liberal shaming for full effect).