Steven Suskin — Theater Critic

Unspeakable tragedy—of a sort unimaginable only a few years ago, but now almost predictably commonplace—is at the center of Well, I’ll Let You Go. Playwright Bubba Weiler concentrates not on the horror of the event, but on the struggle to piece together the how and the why. Combine a keenly wrought puzzle of a play, masterfully understated direction by Jack Serio, and an astonishing performance by Quincy Tyler Bernstine, and you have a remarkable evening at Studio Seaview.

The play parades as a drama about math, mathematicians, and elusive formulas that can shake up the world—the academic world, at least—if only some brilliant mind can find the key. In truth, though, the play centers on those key words: the “brilliant mind” and what happens when the once-brilliant mind is pushed into oblivion. In 2000, it was a question of the great thinker losing his mind. What makes this new production at the Booth even more powerful than before is today’s audience—that is, our collective knowledge and experience with depression, dementia, and despair. This was always there in the text, yes, but it now comes across with added urgency and personal relevance. The majority of today’s audience, of course, will be seeing Proof for the first time. For them, the experience will be that of attending a vibrant and provocative new play.

Radcliffe, who has demonstrated increasing power as an actor since his inescapable cinema origins, is so perfect in the role—and so suited to the play—that a spectator might think Every Brilliant Thing built for and molded upon him. Not so. The play began on a small scale, at the Edinburgh Festival in 2013, fashioned by Macmillan around Donahoe, a comedian. The play has since traveled the world, including, notably, a 2014 stint at off-Broadway’s Barrow Street Theatre and an HBO version (both starring Donahoe) as well as a 2025 production at London’s intimate Soho Place with a handful of actors playing short stints in the role (namely Donahoe, Lenny Henry, Ambika Mod, Sue Perkins, and Minnie Driver). So Every Brilliant Thing is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a custom-built vehicle for Radcliffe. That said, his participation has propelled this small play into the Broadway spotlight. Does it work, in a three-tier 1,000-seat proscenium house? Spectacularly so.

Lin demonstrates that she is a talented writer, whipping up plot and characters into a series of frenzies. It all adds up to an entertaining comedy, with sparks of laughter and even a nightmarish Mandarin gameshow. What it doesn’t add up to, alas, is a compelling piece of theatre. The playwright aims arrows in many directions: the glass ceiling, sexual abuse, loveless marriage, the sacrifice of children for career, immigrant battering, intra-racial badgering (as in which Chinese characters are really Chinese and which aren’t Chinese enough), and more. Harvey Weinstein even makes a cameo, surprisingly but—in the context of the play—inevitably.

The playwright’s most promising comedic idea doesn’t pan out, either. Specifically, the notion presented by the title, Chinese Republicans. Sounds intriguing, no? But no. One of those scattered plot lines has a disgruntled employee quitting, discovering the works of Marx and Engels, lauding Teddy Roosevelt, and going on strike wearing a Ronald Reagan t-shirt. And then Lin and her characters and her play move on to something else.

Lincoln Center Theater’s Amahl and the Night Visitors might not be just the thing for all audiences: it is a bona fide opera (written and performed in English) with religious subject matter, running under 50 minutes. But good theater is good theater, I say, and Lincoln Center’s production of Menotti’s Amahl is good theater.

But Hnath’s new Tartuffe is, to use an archaic term, a dud. “A razor-sharp reinvention of Molière’s iconoclastic comedy in a mad-dash production full of ferocious wit, outrageous design, and downright buffoonery” promises the promotional material. Not nearly. What we get, peppered by infrequent flashes of high humor, is sparkling wine sans sparkle.

The one illusion Lake misses out on, at the Broadhurst, is the illusion that his entertainment—even with the Playbill billing page proclaiming “special guests The Muppets”—is anything other than an over-rehearsed and over-polished touring Vegas show.

Now that Stephen Schwartz’s latest opus is out of the way—The Queen of Versailles opened Sunday night, to a decidedly mixed reaction—here comes a new production of his half-century-old flop, The Baker’s Wife. Consider the latter without the undertow of its notoriety (as delineated below). What we find at Classic Stage Company is a charming, small-scale affair perfectly suited to chamber-musical size, given a radiant sheen by a team of over-qualified performers who compensate for the patchy material. Considered without all its history, though—and without the ticket-selling potential given the involvement of the composer of Wicked (in league, incidentally, with the bookwriter of Fiddler on the Roof)—it is unlikely that anyone would bother to resuscitate the underbaked Baker’s Wife.

The disparate elements come together, more or less, combining for a wholly satisfying evening. Albeit one with little of the exuberance that has marked various Shakespeare in the Park outings going back to the 1971 rock musical rethinking of Two Gentlemen of Verona and the glorious Civil War-era Much Ado About Nothing as well as the more recent Comedy of Errors and As You Like It. Even so, this Twelfth Night does a satisfactory job of leaving the audience beaming, and that, after all, ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

The cast of eight—all but one of whom fill multiple roles—remains stellar. Andrew Durand (of Shucked, War Horse, Yank!, and other entertainments) heads the cast as the titular desperado, and it is quite a performance. Behind that mostly ever-present scowl lie sweetness, violence, and a burlesque-type vulgarity. The demands of the plot call for him to spend almost half the 100-minute running time playing dead; not sitting immobilized in the shadows like Floyd Collins, that other historical lad presently on Broadway, but standing—dead—in a harsh spotlight’s glare. Durand manages to remain thoroughly and expressively immobile, except when he isn’t.

“Sondheim’s Old Friends, the new revue at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Friedman Theatre, offers wonderful numbers well performed by talented performers. But to quote Charley Kringas, in act two of Merrily We Roll Along: ‘true greatness is knowing when to get off.’”

Director Whitney White—who has done notable work of late in both Jaja’s African Hair Braiding and Liberation—sees fit to disrupt Brown’s cannily crafted plan. (Brown seems to have permitted this, as he has been on hand contributing modernized alterations to some lyrics.) With the two characters frequently interacting through the 15-song evening, a first-time viewer might not glean that while Jamie ends the evening five years older and five years sadder, Cathy is just embarking on what will hopefully be—as Jamie earlier puts it—the next 10 minutes, and then another 10 minutes, and then the next 10 lifetimes. An enigmatic song list, hastily inserted into the Playbill during the final previews, doesn’t help.

But Love Life is not one of those lost gems; were it not for the participation of composer Weill, the show likely would have disappeared along with other flops of the time. Sleepy Hollow, anyone? Which is not to say that there aren’t some elements on hand that work. Baldwin and Mitchell, both, are consummate actor/singers. Just about every one of their songs lands exceptionally well. Child actors Jordan and Guzman, who appear to have more than twice as much to do in this version as their counterparts in 1948, are both delightful. Singer John Edwards—who walks on stage from out of nowhere, story-wise—makes a strong case for one of the two stunning songs in the show, “Love Song.” (The other number that deserves high ranking in Weill’s catalog is the exquisite “Here I’ll Stay.”) And there’s the Encores! Orchestra, with longtime music director Rob Berman returning for the occasion. Berman has a keen understanding of the score, and the players know just how to play it. But Love Life, the musical, simply isn’t very good.

Playwright Harmon himself seems to inhabit the character Josh, pulling strings and shifting time not only from scene to scene and exchange to exchange but sometimes within the words of a sentence. The sense of where and when and what, though, remains clear from moment to moment. The cast is abetted in this by the unseen hand of director Trip Cullman (who also guided Choir Boy and Harmon’s Significant Other). We Had a World proceeds without a forced moment, without a time lag, without a moment where attention starts to lap.

To the credit of the author—and to director Arin Arbus and the entire cast—each of these characters come across as warmly human, flaws and all. Is Ella the primary character of the play? Or is it just that the always-astonishing Maryann Plunkett is playing the role, and when Maryann Plunkett speaks—or even sits alone in the light, clearly thinking but unable to express the words—you can’t help but be riveted.

Arnold is firmly in control of the play, the situation, and his emotions; until, suddenly, he isn’t. Actor Brian J. Smith—who might be remembered for his Tony-nominated role of the Gentleman Caller in the Cherry Jones/Celia Keenan-Bolger production of The Glass Menagerie—offers a wonderfully shaded performance. Jerry, meanwhile, calls for a wide range of character-shading. Paul Sparks is so true in the initial scenes—during which the author seems to have painted an intentionally stereotyped picture—that his performance becomes almost startingly impressive as the 90-minute play progresses.

Wolfe’s production captures the proper Gypsy flavor. No overwhelming Broadway-style scenery here; instead, we get sets by Santo Loquasto and costumes by Toni-Leslie James flavored with the faded dinginess of the final days of vaudeville. Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer, longtime collaborators of director Wolfe, provide the evocative lighting. Andy Einhorn is in the pit, leading a rousingly good 25-piece band through the ever-vibrant orchestrations by Sid Ramin and Robert Ginzler with updates, as required, from Daryl Waters of Shuffle Along. For those curious about such things, let us point out that the unfamiliar introduction to the song “Small World” (“Here I been, looking for a suitcase…”) is authentic: it was cut during the 1959 Philadelphia tryout, in conjunction with a scenery mishap. Not an overwhelmingly dynamic discovery, perhaps, but illustrative of how Styne and Sondheim took Rose and Herbie from dialogue to song. If there are minor lapses around the fringes of this production, no matter. First and foremost, this is Audra’s Gypsy. Audra is magnificent, everything’s coming up roses.

A return production, in fact. The Dead, 1904—adapted by Paul Muldoon and Jean Hanff Korelitz from the Joyce short story, directed by Ciarán O’Reilly—originated as a site-specific production at the Historical Society back in 2016. A delightful divertissement, it was remounted in 2017 and 2018. Now, after a hiatus, it seems to have grown even more evocative. Or perhaps our perceptions of ghosts and the dead have changed since 2016. This two-hour trip through time, fueled by piano and violin, cider and stout, is a decided change of pace from a typical evening’s entertainment. Between the talents on display, the turn of the century (1900) ambience, and the hearty meal served communally to the 1904 and 2024 guests, The Dead is a distinctly unique evening’s entertainment.

Any production of Elf necessarily rests on the shoulder of the fellow in the oversized elf’s costume. (As those familiar with the plot are aware, Buddy the Elf is not really an elf, if there be such a thing as a real elf; rather, he’s a human raised by elves and exiled from the North Pole to midtown Manhattan.) Unlike prior Buddys we’ve seen—drama critics who stick around long enough tend to revisit plays and musicals, like it or not—Grey Henson has the soul of one of those old-fashioned musical-comedy comedians, striving for and achieving laughter on a moment-by-moment basis.

There is something to be said, musical comedy-wise, in leaving the answer ambiguous so that viewers can puzzle it out for themselves. The overriding flaw in Tammy Faye is that the creators seem content to jump from satire to morality tale, from Tammy-the-charlatan with her friendly proctologist to Tammy the AIDS crusader, with no clear aim other than to maximize audience response moment by moment.

So here we have a sturdily functional production of the Wilder classic. But when you walk out of a revival thinking how thrilling the play was the last time you saw it—well that’s a problem, isn’t it? David Cromer’s 2009 production at the Barrow Street Theatre (and elsewhere) was vibrant, stunning and altogether unforgettable. The new Broadway production is—well, not.

That’s a high quality group, and The Counter fits right in. Kennedy deals in secrets and grief and escape, in running away and starting again, and most crucially in standing in front of a suddenly opened door: You either stay inside, crushed by your habitual fear and unhappiness, or bravely walk through.

★★★★☆ Another Encores! musical comedy winner takes up residence on Broadway

“In ev’ry age mankind attempts to fabricate great works at once magnificent, and impossible,” goes the opening lyric of the prologue. Which, in itself, serves as something of an epitaph for not only the RMS Titanic, but for the Yeston-Stone musical extravaganza. The opportunity to hear this score in full throttle is not to be overlooked.