Thom Geier — Theater Critic

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.

On the whole, Mindell has created something original — a thought exercise where serious issues get a real workout. Director Jess McLeod’s production benefits from a first-rate cast that navigates both the philosophical arguments and the punchlines with clarity and a feather-light touch. On the Evolutionary Function of Shame provokes laughter and deep thought, and gets you to see the trans community in an entirely new way.

The high-tech staging thrills, as when Menzel spins upside down from her rope while belting a ballad. But the thin, repetitive story and composer/co-lyricist Kate Diaz’s score keep bringing the show back down to earth. The songs seem tailor-made for Menzel’s magnificent voice, but there’s an exhausting sameyness to these melisma-heavy pop ballads in which virtually every phrase goes up a third during the final word, like a bird that can’t quite decide where it should land. Menzel is a natural stage star, and there are moments when Redwood truly soars, but you can only defy the gravity of real life for so long.

The initial cast of performers, all sleekly dressed in black, acquit themselves just fine, though many were still flipping through the pages of the binder while occasionally injecting vocal flourishes for emphasis or character development. My Ex-Husband is the sort of show for women who’d just as soon dress up for a night out and skip the theater, instead plopping themselves in a noisy cafe to eavesdrop on the juicy stories of nearby patrons spilling all the dirt about their lives. If you have an appetite for tea, this brew may be just strong enough to sustain you for 90 minutes. Randal Myler directs.

While rooted in the Brechtian tradition, the new production of Urinetown that opened this week at New York City Center as part of the Encores! series retains a trenchant freshness. Indeed, there are plenty of elements of the show that make it seem like it could have been written this year: the depletion of natural resources like water, the corruption of politicians in bed with corporate interests, the use of law enforcement to back them up, the reticence of the working class to question authority or stand up to their oppressors. Keala Settle, who plays a functionary for the evil Urine Good Company, even gets a big early laugh for an all-too-timely reference while defending a system that charges everyone an ever-climbing fee to use the public-only toilets: “Don’t you think I have taxes and tariffs and pay-offs to meet too?!” she exclaims. “No one’s getting anywhere for free!”

The full title of this remarkable, thought-provoking show — A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities — tips us off to the bleakness of Harrison’s vision for humanity’s ability to survive the current technological revolution. It also clues us into the buttoned-up formality of his approach to the subject matter, which is built on a series of about two dozen scenes that proceed chronologically from the early 19th century through 2240, and then reverse direction so that we revisit the same characters and settings from a new perspective.

Palestinian writer-actress Khawla Ibraheem tugs at the heartstrings in her Gaza-set monologue A Knock on the Roof, which opened Monday at the New York Theatre Workshop, recounting the plight of a young mother in an unnamed Gaza city that is being subjected to repeated attacks by the Israeli military that have leveled nearby buildings. Ibraheem’s one-woman show is a curious exercise — a fictionalized account of the psychological effects of wartime that is oddly divorced from the politics of the region.

But there’s a gap between being game and being entertaining — especially at inflated Broadway prices. Director Alex Timbers tries to amp up the production with cartoon projections (by Lucy Mackinnon) and occasional smoke and lighting effects (by Jake DeGroot) but there’s an underlying laziness to the staging that makes the show feel slight even before you note the 85-minute running time.

Eureka Day‘s ending may not match the hilarity of that Zoom meeting, but it offers a satisfying button on a well-crafted show.

Director Trip Cullman orchestrates some nice moments throughout, assisted by the sometimes cinematic lighting by Heather Gilbert in quieter night-time tableaux. But Headland’s writing lets him down in some of the more explosive scenes, where characters devolve into shouting obscenities (“Shut the fuck up!”) rather than arguing in ways that deepen our understanding of these characters or their backstories. We’ve seen reunions like this before, in tighter, better-written shows like Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate. All too often here, though, we’re stuck in an in-between world that neither quite grounded in comedy or tragedy — a liminal space like the wardrobe through which you enter Narnia (a magical land that the Dahl family members invoke more than once).