Thom Geier — Theater Critic

Not that I wanted a longer show. At its best, ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| nails something essential and true about kids in all those youth arts programs for the gifted and talented. The skills are real, but sometimes raw and in need of training. The emotions are big, but often expressed awkwardly or immaturely. Whether by chance or predetermination, though, you want them all to succeed and find their place in the melody. And in the world.

Without the threat of real violence, Williams’s The Maids gets stuck in its admittedly pretty surfaces. For a while, that’s more than enough to keep us engaged. Wilson and Saban maintain a laser focus through their ritualistic routines while adroitly recording their movements with iPhones (and adding filters in real time). By the end, Wilson’s Claire dons a designer gown and metallic wig while meeting her daily step-count goal on an offstage treadmill. I’m not sure what it has to do with Genet, but the commitment is admirable.

<em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(17, 17, 17); background-color: rgb(241, 241, 241);">Indian Princesses</em><span style="color: rgb(17, 17, 17); font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(241, 241, 241);">&nbsp;works best when the girls are interacting with each other. Growing up in a place where they don’t see many others like themselves, including within their own homes, they find a kind of sisterhood in shared outsiderness. It helps that the cast capture both preteen preococity, casual cruelty, and the impulse for reconciliation. And Rodriguez is generous enough to respect her characters’ individuality — particularly the grown-ups who often turn a blind eye to their daughters’ needs, sometimes unwittingly and with the best of intentions. Not all blundering fathers are built the same, or inflict the same kind of psychological damage.</span>

Miller is terrific, gently leading both her fellow musicians and the audience through some tricky pathways — and delivering powerful vocals with soulful runs and an easy command of many musical traditions. There’s a muchness to Animal Wisdom that is both admirable and daunting.

It also becomes clear why The Emporium was never completed or produced in Wilder’s lifetime — despite two announcements of a Broadway production (including one starring Montgomery Clift). Both Wilder and Lynn seem constrained by the structure of the piece, with nine scenes and nine goodbyes, which doesn’t allow the natural development of character or plot. Instead, we get repeated invocations of Big Picture conflicts — pleasure vs. delayed gratification, exacting standards vs. crass commercialism, risk-taking vs. security — that are never dramatized in any way that truly registers. (John at one point considers abandoning Laurencia for the daughter of his non-Emporium boss, but we know he doesn’t really mean it and the flirtation ends almost immediately after it’s introduced.)

Like the trees whose dead wood Jackman’s character diligently chainsaws, Hickson’s script could also use some pruning. She’s not averse to a narrative twist, but she never seems to want to linger for very long on what it might portend. That’s a shame, because at its best New Born captures familiar dynamics of human relationships — our addiction to scrolling on our phones, our willingness to turn a blind eye to the obvious in the name of self-preservation, our ability to allow Hugh Jackman’s charisma to distract us from his character’s shortcomings.

Bubba Weiler’s transcendent one-act drama Well, I’ll Let You Go, which debuted last summer at Brooklyn’s The Space at Irondale, was my pick as the best New York theater production of last year. The show now makes a triumphant reappearance at Manhattan’s Studio Seaview with all but one of its pitch-perfect original cast members reprising their roles. Anyone who cares about theater, or deeply human storytelling, should run to see this show — which is boosted by a riveting performance by Quincy Tyler Bernstine as a new widow whose fundamental kindness forces her to manage other people’s reaction to her grief as well as her own feelings of loss and confusion. That, and the lingering suspicion that her late husband may have been harboring a dark secret.

Andron’s plot isn’t so much twisty as it is a tangled jumble of clichés, leading to a series of reveals that will leave you scratching your head not in surprise but in befuddlement. The program says the action takes place in the present day, but Danza doesn’t seem old enough to be a WWII survivor with a twentysomething son — let alone a morally compromised thug for reasons that strain credulity when he finally coughs them up, again in flashback. (Think Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man.)

In the end, I wish Tucker had gone further to streamline the text and make it resonate more clearly to modern audiences, or to provide a consistent framework (like that Baldwin quote) that carried through the whole show. With so few actors playing so many roles, it’s harder to identify with any one of them for very long, to put ourselves in their shoes and imagine how we too might become that monster.

Sarah Benson directs the show efficiently, but there’s no escaping how slight The Receptionist feels, like a drawn-out episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror with an overlong, gently comedic windup. Once we get to the big reveal — and the fallout from a failed client visit that went horribly, unforgivably sideways — The Receptionist hurriedly wraps everything up. Rather than grappling with the serious issues that are raised, or the repercussions for characters we’ve gotten to know (if only a bit), The Receptionist leaves the equivalent of a call-be-back-later Post-it note on our monitor.

Abeysekera seems intent on shaving a full hour off the play single-handedly, even barreling through his “To be or not to be” soliloquy with such haste that it’s hard to believe he’s really reckoning with serious questions of mortality at all. The words rush by, and so does the sentiment and the sense of a connection to a character whose eventual downfall lands like anticlimax. This Hamlet doesn’t need vengeance. He needs Ritalin.

It’s a remarkable performance, goosed by Giles Thomas’s 360-degree sound design, Joshua Pharo’s lighting, and Anisha Fields’s versatile costume and sets — including a prominent reel-to-reel tape recorder that allows Holden to engage in real-time conversations with prerecorded versions of himself (and a handful of others). He’s also backed by the glaring guitar riffs and banjo-inflected country score of onstage musician John Patrick Elliott, which literally underscore the atmosphere of a place that seems both familiar and remote.

The show looks spectacular — though it’s far less graphic in both its gore and sexiness than Joel Schumacher’s R-rated movie, which generated many of its cheap thrills from closeups of its dewy young stars. In another nod to the material’s multiplex origins, Arden has devised a Broadway first: a post-credit scene that begins after the final curtain call, a sequence involving a minor character that serves as both a callback and teaser for a possible sequel. It’s one of many final gambits that elevate The Lost Boys into something special.

Director Debbie Allen’s starry new revival, headlined by Cedric the Entertainer and Taraji P. Henson as the proprietors of the boarding house where the action takes place, is an admirable production that hits the major dramatic notes and occasionally hints at the sublime transcendence of the material. The chief draw here is Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who brings grounded authority to the role of “conjure man” Bynum Walker — a practitioner of folk magic whose particular gift is binding people together.

Speaking of personality, Evans makes a striking impression as Frank — towering over the cast in his four-inch heels while delivering a performance that is in turns seductive, off-putting, and out of this world. Which is entirely apt for a sweet transvestite from the Transylvania galaxy who after wreaking so much havoc yearns to return home, like an outré Dorothy Gale in Oz. And Frank really does seem sweet — not the walking provocateur that Tim Curry embodied a half century ago. Doing the Time Warp, again, is more an act of nostalgia than defiance, and the show’s pelvic thrusts seem more like exercise than something that will drive us insane.

Thiessen and Jacoby, the only men in the main cast, are saddled with seriously underwritten roles that deserve to be on the periphery: This is essentially a rom-com about two women, and the guys are merely obstacles to the couple getting together in the end. The actors even team up for a duet to wallow in their second-fiddle status and improbably lament, “I wish I could diagnose / why men never get that close.” (Dart’s lyrics tend to be very on the nose.) Hint: It’s not about you. It was never about you. This show misses so much of what made Beaches a phenomenon, in addition to an attention-grabbing turn by Midler in her prime. Filmgoers, women especially, were drawn to the focus on a longtime, entirely platonic female friendship as something that’s every bit as emotionally satisfying as any traditional boy-meets-girl romance. There’s not much that’s satisfying about the flotsam that’s washed up on the shores of the Majestic.

The Balusters is the latest in a series of contemporary stage comedies that are less interested in traditional drawing rooms than in drawing blood — skewering the foibles and hypocrisies of progressive lefties who also happen to be theater’s most reliable ticket buyers. It doesn’t stray into over-the-top horror fantasy like Tracy Letts’s The Minutes or the extremes of cultural appropriation like Larissa Fasthorse’s Thanksgiving Play. Nor does it boast a show-stopping comedic detour like the suburban parents’ Zoom meeting from hell in Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day. Lindsay-Abaire’s play more closely resembles the century-old Victorians of Vernon Place, boasting a sturdy frame on which the first-rate cast can express themselves with great craftsmanship. It doesn’t seek to push the genre into bold, modern directions — no glass-walled modern extension, thank you — but to embrace the virtues of a well-constructed contemporary satire. A gut renovation isn’t needed. The Balusters has good bones.

There may be a paucity of Knicks fans at the Nederlander Theatre, which is probably for the best. Schmigadoon! is a show by and for musical mavens — and they should climb any mountain, never walk alone, and rock the boat (without sitting down) to get themselves a seat.

Coward is no Beckett. Unlike Godot, there really is a suave Frenchman who wooed Julia and Jane (in Pisa and Venice, respectively) and arrives in the play’s rushed final scene. But when Mark Consuelos turns up as Maurice Duclos, it’s a bit of a letdown — and not just because the daytime TV veteran speaks in a voice that’s barely European much less French. The character is basically a human MacGufffin meant to generate friction among the four primary players in Coward’s romantic farce. The revelation of the heroines’ premarital sex lives — once so shocking that London censors initially banned the play — now seems rather quaint. Still, Ellis and his cast have ginned up enough boozy shenanigans in Fallen Angels that the lingering buzz carries you through the show’s duller and more dated sections.

Ayo Edibiri and Don Cheadle are two of our finest screen performers, radiating an intelligence and likability that should serve them well in the first Broadway revival of David Auburn’s Pulitzer-winning 2000 drama Proof. They play a father and daughter bound together by a love of advanced mathematics, a connection that’s further honed when Edibiri’s Catherine postpones college to care for Cheadle’s professor father during his troubled final years. And yet director Thomas Kail’s production feels more dutiful than deep, an oddly bloodless exercise in melodrama that keeps its passions bundled up as if girding for a frigid Chicago winter.

The latest film-to-stage adaptation to land on Broadway is a curious fact-based yarn about a Pennsylvania man unjustly convicted of a brutal rape and murder who sat on death row for two decades before he was exonerated thanks to DNA evidence. The basis for The Fear of 13 is a 2015 documentary that stands out by shunning the usual rogues’ gallery of interviews for a single talking head: Nick Yarris, a compellingly chatty fellow from outside Philadelphia who escaped execution and relates his tragic life story with mesmerizing skill even as you constantly question the authenticity of some of his details.

While audience’s may struggle to connect with Zero’s depressingly circular journey, Director Scott Elliott’s production soups up the material with remarkable visual flair. Derek McLane’s evocative and versatile set, with a back wall of shelves holding antique desk lamps and office machines, yields multiple surprises as wooden filing cabinets open to reveal bedrooms and coffins and other locales. Jeff Croiter’s striking lighting and Stan Mathabanes sometimes jolting sound contribute to the overall tone of the piece, by turns discomfiting and provocative. There is a great deal of skill invested to refresh this century-old cautionary tale, but The Adding Machine doesn’t quite add up.

Yes, the show feels padded in places and runs well over the 90-minute running time Mindelle promises from the stage — though it’s well under the three-hour tour of the S.S. Minnow of Gilligan’s Island and boasts a much higher laugh-to-punchline ratio. Plus, the hard-working, eager-to-please cast lean into the silliness of the material while delivering legitimately strong vocals on familiar tunes from Dion’s extensive catalog of hits. Titaníque, complete with that Frenchified accent to emphasize the final syllable, is one of the funniest musical comedies in years. It cruises into dock amid ocean-high waves of laughter.

No matter. This is a solid production of a play that continues to reflect aspects of American life and works its way into our heart and consciousness with an almost gravitational pull. While Linda gets some of the showiest speeches — which Metcalf delivers with attention-demanding skill — Willy remains its absolute center. His plight could be that of any white-collar worker on the verge of obsolescence due to a cheaper Gen Z workforce or, more likely, the advent of AI. And in a career-best performance, Lane shuffle-steps across the stage while his eyes dart around in a state of addled bewilderment. Though he’s unmoored from reality as well as his own life, he manages to close one final deal. And we’ve all willingly signed on the dotted line.

How times have changed. The ballroom kitties now elicit whoops and the audible opening of fans from theatergoers who no longer have to be dragged to cross-dressing performances. Cats itself remains a lightweight bit of fluff and most of the large cast blends together into an indistinguishable clutter of furry limbs and puffed-out wigs. But there’s no denying how much fun this production is – and how even a flawed show can find a path to rebirth via Eliot’s vaunted Heaviside Layer. These old cats might just have a tenth life in them after all.