Thom Geier

Not that Twelfth Night needs to wave a rainbow flag to succeed. But this production departs from other recent revivals in taking a humbler, less transgressive approach to the various romantic entanglements. Even in the curtain call, when the cast reassembles in colorful new outfits as part of a drag-ball sendoff, the show seems to be conjuring a party atmosphere for which there’s no overarching agenda. The message seems to be: Come as you are, love what you will. And to rechristen a venue that’s both fresh and familiar, a welcome beacon of summer fun, perhaps that’s enough.

He typically punctuates his death-focused anecdotes with punchlines, but there’s an overriding melancholy here that dampens the overall mood. The writing is not as strong as Crystal’s, alas, and the jokes don’t land with the frequency you’d expect. (He scores some of his biggest laughs early on when poking fun at his own alopecia-induced baldness, comparing himself to a “Jeff Bezos blow-up doll” or “Pitbull if he was attacked by a pit bull.”)

Nobody could mistake Mamma Mia! for high art. Cardboard-cutout characters vamp through a ridiculous romantic plot, while beloved disco-era ABBA hits are shoehorned in often as clumsily as Cinderella’s prince struggling to find the perfect fit for the lost slipper of his royal-ball dancing partner. But audiences still thrill to dancing queens. And Mamma Mia!, returning to Broadway nearly a quarter century after it began a long and glorious run at the Winter Garden Theatre (and later the Broadhurst), has an infectious, high-energy showmanship that’s almost irrepressible.

Ever since its 1997 debut in London (followed by a successful Broadway run two years later), Conor McPherson’s intimate drama The Weir has been hailed as a modern masterpiece. And rightly so. The play, now getting a pitch-perfect revival at the Irish Repertory Theatre under Ciarán O’Reilly’s direction, celebrates the elemental pleasures of storytelling.

Fickman’s familiarity with the material really pays off, because the production has a polish that belies its Off Broadway setting. He laces scenes with wonderful moments in the margins too, as when Ostermeyer’s dim-bulb quarterback has to be prompted to make an exit or when Teeter’s cheerleader Heather delivers a series of defiant high kicks upstage as a wall closes and casts her into darkness. (The choreography is by Gary Lloyd.) The cast also hits the perfect notes to blend believability with exaggerated cartoonishness demanded of any sendup of high school social dynamics

In the end, Tannahill is less concerned with gossip about a gay royal than in the isolation that any LGBTQ+ person faces in carving a space for themselves after growing up in the constraining embrace of a straight (and straitlaced) family. While Prince Faggot spends most of its time as a kind of speculative work of royal fan fiction, Tannahill cunningly gives the last word to Stewart — who shares a version of her personal story while questioning the very foundations of the drama in which she’s featured. Why should we care about some far-off prince and his supposedly divine claim to the throne? Isn’t the fundamental truth of queer lives the ability to shed the costumes that our parents have given us, and sometimes even the bodies, and to forge a life for ourselves that reflects our true identities?

The main draw here is Smart, and she does not disappoint. The Emmy-winning actress has an easy command of the stage and at 73 convincingly plays a much younger woman, with frizzy ginger hair sweeping down past her shoulders on a series of slightly oversized Walmart-ready outfits (deisgned by Tom Broecker) that underscore her lower-middle-class status. From the outset, Smart uses her down-home chatterbox delivery and upright stature to draw us into her confidence, smoothing over the many contradictions and inconsistencies in the script.

The biggest scene-stealer is Watts, who so dominates whenever he takes the stage that you may wish that Sammy Davis Jr.’s name was in the title. Watts flashes a feral energy that’s truly magnetic, and he moves with a catlike grace around the stage — and occasionally the auditorium. His tap duet with Hill on “Me and My Shadow” (tap choreography by Jared Grimes) is a burst of percussive performance art. Lights Out is a showcase for some wonderful song and dance, but the luster dims whenever the band stops playing.

While the cast delivers these lines at a rapid clip under Morgan Green’s direction, Five Models seems content to skim the surface of fashion-world satire without going either very deep or broad — or committing to whether it wants to be a drama or a comedy. One moment, Roberta is earnestly teaching Grace how to adjust the aperture of the lens to achieve a perfect balance between light and shadow. The next, Tatiana is revealing that a photographer raped her at age 14 and Alex describes a plane crash in the Brazilian rain forest that forced her “to survive off the condensation of airplane windows” until the shoot itself was canceled because of a local coup.

The show gains some momentum in the zippier second act, which features a buoyant Irish-dance number (as Eileen is hilariously mistaken by the Irish American cops as one of their own) and the show’s signature ballad, “It’s Love,” which is well sung by Jackson and Javier Munoz (who catches the fancy of both sisters despite a lack of any discernible onstage chemistry with either). But by then, it’s too late to salvage a revival that seems like a dull and dated throwback best kept in the vault. ★★☆☆☆

The overall result is a visual and aural delight, an affectionate dive into a forgotten chapter from the American past that recalls the having-fun-with-history energy of Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, but in a way that’s both more grounded and less weighty. Dead Outlaw unearths the corpse of forgotten history — elevating a twisty little yarn into a bizarro-world elegy to how the American Dream can curdle into violence, cruelty, and casual indifference.

The evening’s high-wattage highlight is the title tune, an ode to body positivity prompted when Ana sheds her blouse in the overheated, fan-less factory as the team rushes to finish the big order. Soon she encourages the others to strip down to their skivvies as well, and we see these women work up hte nerve to peel off their layers of shame and self-consciousness to embrace their lived-in bodies just as they are. It’s a genuinely catchy tune, artfully staged with a mirror-tiled dress form overhead like a disco ball, and it carries a powerful message that rightly generated a standing ovation at the performance I attended. Real Women Have Curves tells a simple story with musicality, with humor, with authenticity, and with an embrace of its female characters as fully rounded, three-dimensional individuals. You know, with curves.

While it’s hard to resist Groff’s considerable charms, he struggles to sell us on Darin’s cockiness or the callous way he dumps Sandra Dee (which he does here without obvious venom or even a mistress-in-waiting). You don’t cast Groff for his dark side; he’s an actor who thrives in the spotlight, not the shade. And you can’t help admiring the way he glistens delivering another high kick or flip into his head voice for a deliciously sustained high note. Beyond the C indeed

Hold Me in the Water showcases Haddad’s talents in ways that show off his wit and personality. He’s a real catch, and I hope he finds his true love someday. It’s also a rather slight story about an all-too-brief romance. I also hope that in his future work he again finds ways to look beyond his heartbreak and even his own experience.

The show’s energy flags a bit in the second act, as the plot gets more convoluted and the 13-person orchestra switches between New Orleans-style and more traditional orchestrations almost at random. And yet, by the final number — a modified version of “He Is an Englishman” from HMS Pinafore with very of-this-21st-century-moment lyrics — we’re right back in that joyful space that fans of Pirates have cherished for over a century. (This is the 27th Broadway revival, though the first since Papp’s in the early ’80s.) Pirates! offers only modest concessions to modern times in look and sound, and instead embraces the old-fashionedness of the material in a way that still holds mass appeal. It’s a pirate’s booty-ful treat. ★★★★☆

The pleasures of Floyd Collins are many, but they’re often diffuse, like bits of gravel and sandstone that’s been chiseled away… While Jordan remains on stage for most of the show, there are vast stretches when the focus shifts to the ensemble—sometimes to the detriment of achieving narrative momentum… And yet you can see (and hear) the seeds of the talent Guettel would display in shows like A Light in the Piazza... Jeremy Jordan is magnificent in his opening solo, ‘The Call’... Vocally, the real standouts are the two actors playing his siblings—whose determination to save Floyd is far more apparent than our sympathy for the reckless daredevil who’s only sketchily drawn.

If you’ve had the pleasure of attending performances at the Irish Repertory Theatre, you’ve grown accustomed to certain recurring themes and tropes in the grand tradition of Irish drama: domestic disputes that unfold in either Dublin or the remote countryside, with detours to the local pub of course, and feature the eventual revelation of long-buried family secrets. Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s Irishtown, a wise craic-ing new comedy at the Irish Rep, is an affectionate and often hilarious riff on the genre’s many go-to clichés.

What absolutely nobody was asking for was the abomination that just opened at the Imperial Theatre as Smash, a polished dud that unfolds like a jukebox musical recycling the best of Shaiman and Wittman’s catchy tunes from the series with a brand-new book (by Bob Martin and Rick Elice) that’s only loosely connected to its characters — or to any semblance of reality as we know it.

This isn’t a completist’s guide to Sondheim — fans of Pacific Overtures, Assassins, or the posthumous Here We Are should brace themselves for disappointment. But Sondheim wrote too many great songs in his storied multi-decade career. It’s a delight to hear even a few dozen of them, produced so artfully in a production that doesn’t stint on visual showmanship.

But when Rogers returns, with a raised eyebrow and a cock of her bobble-sized head, all’s forgiven. Whether in trousers or a skirt, she shows enough versatility to cement her status as a major new Broadway talent. And she proves that even after nearly a century, Betty Boop still deserves a place in the spotlight.

To be honest, Warren elevates the entire revival — she even, improbably, offers a convincing portrayal of a struggling actress’s insecurities in the hilarious inner-monologue-heavy number “Climbing Uphill.” (“I’m up every morning at six and standing in line with two hundred girls, who are younger and thinner than me, who have already been to the gym,” she sings — making you wonder why this Cathy wouldn’t bowl over casting directors as easily as she does us.) Brown’s score sounds terrific, newly re-orchestrated for a nine-member band that captures his eclectic mix of pop and theater styles. It’s a treat to have The Last Five Years on Broadway after all these years, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that the show could do better than this.

The message still comes through loud and clear in Clooney’s 2005 film. All too often, the stage version feels like a noble but unnecessary repeat.

Malone, the lone cast member who isn’t credited as a co-author, is the real breakout here — and he’s blessed with the show’s best song, “Dear Bill,” a bittersweet love letter from the fiancée of the fake soldier that’s meant to be found on his person when he washes ashore, to lend an added verisimilitude to the plan. The tune works on that level magnificently, but it also taps into universal feelings of anxiety during wartime, the fears of soldiers as well as the loved ones back on the homefront.

At times, The Great Privation can also feel a bit diffuse and undercooked. Some scenes meander pleasantly without advancing either the story or the underlying themes, and the ending plays more like the result of exhaustion than intention. This feels like a show that could have benefited from another revision or two, to tighten its time-jumping connections and to sharpen its point of view. (There are no clear antagonists in the present day, which deprives those scenes of dramatic tension.) But I’d gladly spend more time with these characters, as authentic and engaging and alive as the talented cast has made them, and to sink into future worlds that spring from Robinson’s fertile imagination.

Koogler’s brilliant play captures a fundamental contradiction at the center of modern living — our yearning to engage with those around us as well as our fear that we might be rejected or dismissed. Deep Blue Sound is a perceptive parable for our divided age, a reminder that those who work up the gumption to try to save the whales may have a better target far closer to home: themselves.