Thom Geier — Theater Critic

Devotees of Joyce may quibble about this staging. Unlike the quintessentially Irish author’s original story or John Huston’s memorable 1987 film adaptation, the script by Paul Muldoon and Jean Hanff Korelitz doesn’t really explore the interior monologue of its taciturn and writerly hero, Gabriel, except in a well-executed final scene where he and Gretta settle down after the party in their hotel bedroom (situated for this show on the third floor, just above the dining room, with the audience cramming in on one side to face the windows overlooking Central Park and the Met). Here, Gretta drifts off to sleep after confessing the memory of a girlhood love that the evening’s festivities have jostled back into her consciousness. And Gabriel is finally able to articulate aloud his deep-seated anxieties about the choices he’s made as well as about the overall evanescence of life — as snow magically falls just outside the window. The Dead, 1904 captures the sublimely melancholy mood of Joyce’s story, like a melody from the past that’s bubbled back into our consciousness, and that alone is cause to rejoice.

O’Hara has a gift for writing comic set pieces, like a musical interlude set to a Nicki Minaj classic, as well as for punchlines that recall the cutting putdowns of ’80s sitcoms like Designing Women and The Golden Girls, as when Rodger dismisses Eve’s claims of political activism: “The only marching she’s done is to a sample sale at Balenciaga.” The cast, most veterans of long-running sitcoms, seems perfectly aligned to roles that call for a tricky blend of grounded cartoonishness. Most are playing variations on roles that are familiar to TV fans, and that built-in good will tempers some of the nastiness here. The actors work together seamlessly to make some fundamentally unlikable characters entertaining enough to tolerate for a few hours, waiting for their well-deserved uppance to come.

Despite all this effort, Swept Away hasn’t found a rationale for telling its nightmarish story. We don’t have enough sense of these individuals to care about their fate, and we only get glancing references to larger moral questions that might implicate us, or make us consider how we might respond in such extreme circumstances. The show has the power to shake us up, but then it merely tosses us overboard and sets us a adrift, floating on troubled seas without a clear destination.

Yorke is a bit too loud, abrasive, and quick to laugh at her jokes — and she upsets the norms and rhythms of courtship that we’ve come to expect from decades of rom-coms. We can see it in Zegen’s stuttering responses, his self-conscious rubbing of his hands up and down his pant legs, and the way that she keeps throwing him off his game while still sparking his interest. Not that this guy has much rizz. He’s a self-described “nice normal person” who says he works at Mount Sinai, but immediately fesses up that he’s an auditor and not a doctor, who quickly admits he used a fake name on his profile, and who blurts out details about his most recent ex, a woman who dumped him after 16 months who remains a rent-free tenant in his brain.

If there were ever tears behind that famous smile, Iglehart’s Armstrong is too reserved to share. (The actor is also weakest when he feigns playing the trumpet, the instrument that made Armstrong a star.) There’s no time for introspection when there’s another career highlight to hit, another song to cram into a show that boasts nearly 30 tunes in all. A Wonderful World doesn’t offer a very deep understanding of Louis Armstrong and what made him a legend, but it does over Satchmo, mo, mo.

Gold and his creative team produce some stunning tableaux on the cramped stage, and the fight scenes are athletic enough that you fear that players may end up in the laps of first-row theatergoers. But Gold himself is in his mid-40s and a lot of his attempts to youthify the material fall flat. In the hurried second act, just after the Capulets learn of the “death” of Juliet (though she is merely in a chemically induced sleep state), Gold shoehorns in a forgettable comic-relief scene featuring a Capulet servant (Gían Pérez, who also plays Samson and Paris) and a musician. The moment serves no purpose except to play a snippet of Antonoff’s fun. song “We Are Young,” to allow Pérez to drop an F-bomb, and to give music director/DJ Sarah Goldstone a single line that resonates more deeply than I suspect Gold intended: “Tis not an appropriate time to play music.” (Unless you know Shakespeare’s script, it’s not even clear that Pérez is playing a servant and not Paris, the deep-pocketed Juliet suitor whom the Capulets prefer.)

Is there still an audience for a show like Left on Tenth, an awkward blend of rom-com and dramedy about a couple of urban boomers that Delia Ephron adapted from her own 2022 memoir? I don’t know if there are enough ladies who lunch, or who at least grab a bite before a Broadway matinee, to pay up to $291 to sit through a genial, female-centric show that Lifetime would reject for lack of dramatic tension.

From the moment Nicole Sherzinger strides across the stage of the St. James Theatre in Jamie Llloyd’s magnetically cinematic revival of Sunset Boulevard, she seems to own the place as well as the role of Norma Desmond, the silent movie star who’s been consigned to the scrap heap of Hollywood in the late ’40s despite only crossing the threshold of 40. It’s as if she never said hello, or needed to. The delicate and slender former lead vocalist of the ’90s all-female pop ensemble the Pussycat Dolls looks as if she might easily be blown away as she stands barefoot in a black slip of a dress — at least until she plants herself downstage center and launches into one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s signature solos with all the command of an artist who knows how to modulate between barely whispered low notes, an ethereal head voice, and a powerful belt that threatens to turn the St. James into an open-air amphitheater.

It may be unreasonable to expect continued innovation from a comic whose signature work was such a mold-breaking masterpiece, one that paved the way for a whole subgenre of comedy rooted in breaking down trauma in artful and darkly comic ways. Gadsby insists that their creative well of personal tragedy hasn’t run dry — “There’s a whole herd of baby reindeer I could slay for your consumption,” they say in yet another Netflix reference — but there’s a sense that Gadsby is no longer as interested in dredging up fresh anecdotes of despair. Been there, bled that. What we’re left with are playful, artfully phrased riffs on familiar themes like lesbian culture, autism, social media, and contemporary U.S. politics that feel like they might have been discarded pages from the notebooks for past shows.

Musically, the Bengsons have obvious skills. Abigail’s voice has an alt-rock edge to it, but she also can flip up into her upper registers with the fluidity of a trained opera singer; while Shaun’s quick-fingered work on the acoustic guitar overshadows his more workmanlike baritone. But there’s a bit of sameyness to the songs, which fall comfortably into the guitar-based folk idiom, with the addition of synthesized drum beats and live production of overlapping vocal tracks to create instant harmonies.

When he dives fully into the plight of displaced Black men, his ideas get squishy and as hard to grasp as a deflating balloon. We never really understand the forces motivating his childhood friend Lucas, whose behavior after a scuffle on a night bus becomes increasingly criminal (and, frankly, indefensible).

Given the A-list cast and the size of the space, this “Merrily” has become one of the hottest tickets of the season — and it’s easy to imagine a Broadway transfer in its future. Friedman works hard to blur the weaknesses of Sondheim’s biggest flop, and she mostly succeeds in delivering a psychologically coherent study of how youthful aspirations and good intentions can evolve over time into something less rosy but no less real. Still, even a perfect version of this material is unlikely to win over casual theater fans. “Merrily” is a show that is more likely to be admired than fully embraced.

Given the advances in technology, you can imagine a future in which coders will be able to re-create the Neil Diamond concert experience in hologram form. (The star, now 81, retired from touring four years ago due to a battle with Parkinson’s.) For now, though, Swenson & Co. offer a reasonable facsimile of Diamond in the flesh for fans to soak up. Or, to paraphrase that quintessential Diamond hit “Sweet Caroline,” they try so hard, so hard, so hard.

The concert portions of the evening are a cotton-candy delight. Helen Park and Max Vernon have written a handful of pulsing K-pop gems that feel like they'd fit right into a Seoul top 40 playlist, with pulsing beats, solo vocal runs, tight harmonies and occasional interjections of rap. The talented cast deliver the goods, aided by Jennifer Weber's crisp and energetic choreography, Clint Ramos and Sophia Choi's flashy costumes, Jiyoun Chang's dramatic lighting and Gabriel Hainer Evansohn's sleek scenic design.

Birbiglia has a way of swallowing his punchlines, of going off in tangents that circle back to hard truths, that signal his gift for shaping an overarching narrative within the confines of the stand-up form. Yes, there are jokes - like his comedic complaint about how Airbnb's are guilty of false advertising for failing to deliver breakfast - but many serve as popcorn kernels strewn along the path to his larger point. (A point that he often then subverts with a perfectly timed punchline.) When you're in the good company of Birbiglia, after all, it feels perfectly normal to laugh in the face of death.

Now the show is back on Broadway, opening Thursday at the Golden Theatre, where director Kenny Leon has orchestrated two riveting performances from young stars best known for their onscreen work: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II ('Watchmen') plays the older brother, Lincoln, a former street hustler with a demeaning and dead-end job as an Abe Lincoln impersonator in whiteface; while Corey Hawkins ('Straight Outta Compton') is younger brother Booth, an unemployed man who gets by shoplifting his basic needs while yearning for his brother's abandoned skills at three-card monte to make some real money.

Second Stage Theater seems to be single-handedly attempting to revive the boulevard comedy on Broadway. There was a time when the Great White Way was dominated by such middlebrow, mass-appeal fare, with the late, great Neil Simon as the chief avatar of the genre. Just months after staging Tracy Letts' genial comedy 'Linda Vista,' Second Stage has mounted Bess Wohl's broadly entertaining 'Grand Horizons.' (The show opened Thursday at the Helen Hayes Theater.)

Grier returns in the first Broadway production of 'A Soldier's Play,' which opened Tuesday at Roundabout's American Airlines Theatre - this time as the fearsome, foul-mouthed Sgt. Vernon Waters, who commands his all-black troops as if their every move was a reflection on the future of the race. It's a searing performance from an actor best known for his work in comedies like 'In Living Color' and 'The Carmichael Show.' And he's well-matched by Blair Underwood as the Howard Law School graduate captain who's dispatched to investigate the murder - and who soon learns that this wasn't the work of the locals. And that even the white troops who are none too pleased by the presence of black soldiers - or to get beaten bad by them on the baseball field - may not be the culprits he's quick to suspect.

Alone on stage for the 90-minute running time of the show, which opened Wednesday at Broadway's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, Linney skillfully segues between the authorial voice of Lucy and the sharp Midwestern twang of her mother without ever veering into caricature. Bob Crowley's simple set design, supplemented by Luke Halls' video projections, helps set the scene for Linney's performance, which maintains a cunning sense of narrative progression even as she digresses far off the beaten path. (The adaptation is by Rona Munro.) Under Richard Eyre's nuanced direction, she maintains full command of the story even as it meanders from Lucy's hospital stay to flashbacks to her hardscrabble, TV-free Illinois upbringing to glimpses at a future success borne of sacrifice and loss.

Despite its flaws, 'Slave Play' announces the arrival of a bold and challenging new voice in theater. And there's no doubt that Harris has the talent to produce a masterpiece (or five). He also has that rarer quality, drive. In the words of his muse, he is willing to 'work work work work work.'

It's a heroically talented team but the performance I saw was, perhaps understandably, a mixed bag. There were some genuinely clever rhymes (function and liposuction, dog and gulag) and turns of phrase ('Forget about your ego / I'm not your amigo') scattered throughout, but also plenty of verbal stumbles and stalling-for-time riffs.

It's been five years since Bryan Cranston's Tony-winning turn as Lyndon B. Johnson in Robert Schenkkan's 'All the Way.' Now Schenkkan has followed that epic historical pageant with a sequel, 'The Great Society,' opening Tuesday at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre, that like LBJ's second term dwells mostly in the shadows of its predecessor.

Zeller's play, expertly translated by Christopher Hampton, continually leaves us as disoriented as André himself - 'People who try to understand things are morons,' he says at one point - and the accumulation of contradictions is both unsettling and deeply moving. That is particularly true in the gut-check final scene, brilliantly lit by Hugh Vanstone, which is haunting in every sense of the word.

McNally's hopeful and heartfelt dramedy still carries a message for audiences who have grown perhaps even more jaded about love than those of three decades ago. Sex is easy, and intimacy is hard. And cynicism, while always just within reach, doesn't hold a candle to the untrustworthy but undeniable power of sincerity.

Chavkin, her production team and cast are working at the top of their form - and they go a long way to masking some of the show's shortcomings. Mitchell is a better composer than a lyricist, alas, and sometimes leans too heavily on De Shields' narration to advance the plot instead of her occasionally repetitive songs. And the fact remains that there's just not much story here - not nearly enough for a two and a half hour show.