Tim Teeman

In the musical, the ensemble’s close-out joyfulness is more uniting, and Duke is cajoled into accepting Veronica’s friendship. It doesn’t feel like the right ending for Heathers, but it is absolutely the right ending for this musical adaptation—and for those fans whose whooping for the cast emerging from New World Stages’ stage door at the end of the show echoes long and loud down 50th Street.

Fair warning: Duke & Roya is slow. Transitions between scenes feel labored. But its design (Wilson Chin), lighting (Amina Alexander), and projections (Caite Hevner) are spare and attractive, and the performances are so well-observed, the humor so subtle, and the gentle slow-burn of romance, familial conflict, and resolution so genuine that you find yourself watching it with exactly the same happily seduced expression as one of those rainy-day romantic comedies.

Prince F****t ends with its most resonant monologue, interrogating notions of power and identity—and again underlining, whatever outrage and controversy might come to bubble around it, that this is not a play about Prince George’s sexuality or the royal family at all, but those marginalized and long considered to be without power finally, proudly, exercising and voicing it.

The show lives up to its title; a cadaverously made-up Durand spends just as much time playing McCurdy dead—as an impassive object of trade and a thing ultimately left in a store-cupboard—as he does alive. Playing the daughter of a movie director who buys the corpse at one point, Knitel sings at McCurdy all her teenage heartbreak and trivialities.

Groff makes clear the intention of Just in Time, indeed any show, at its end. “Doing this was when he (Darin) felt the most alive,” he says. “Honestly? Same. This can only happen in this room, right now, with you, and it’ll never happen quite the same way again.” That may read as hokey on the page, but Groff, Leight, and Oliver intend it as a final, heartfelt statement about the power of theater to connect. If nothing else, Just in Time hopes we recognize the efforts of all performers—lost to history, or not—in service of that.

Her mission to speak a new truth to old power doesn’t end there, and the play ends in a stunning mash-up of music (Lorde’s “Green Light”) and movement that unites the women on stage. It is a pulsating, fierce statement in Georgia in 2018 and also one across time and reality and fiction—a female-created dance of both defiance and an insistence upon true freedom.

The world of today doesn’t really offer an escape from attention and judgments, Betty discovers when she finds out how iconic she has remained. But in the world she eventually chooses to occupy, the excellent Rogers shows how Betty—emboldened by the love and appreciation women have for her in the modern world—finds a sense of her own power, and an ability to insist upon what she wants. That turns out to be not just good for Betty herself, but the inspiration for one final zesty explosion of color and dance.

More winning—and revealing—are the banks of bright spotlights designed by Stacey Derosier at the back at the stage and fringing the upper stage platforms upon which the excellent band is playing. The lights make the show into what it makes most sense as: a concert that at different moments showcases the best of Adrienne Warren and Nick Jonas’ voices.

In the play, the characters that say these words aren’t cautioned or castigated or proven wrong. Mamet simply has them say them; the response of the audience in 2025—laughing at them merrily saying the words—is its own telling-on-itself... The anti-Indian language was removed in a 2004 San Francisco revival, but not in this production. The cast and crew make their creative choices, and the audience pays its money to watch some high-class actors knock each other around with unrestrained verbal battery.

It is a privilege and treat to hear these musicians play; the whole theater vibrates with their collective energy and mastery—sound design is by Jonathan Deans—and each are accorded individual moments to shine. Its too-vague narrative framing does not affect the brilliance of Buena Vista Social Club’s execution of music and dance. Thanks to its supreme ensemble of musicians and singers, we can all be grateful that, as de Marcos’ character says to the audience at the end, “a sound like this…tends to travel.”

Played for laughs, and played dead-serious, Purpose manages such shifts well, even if the tonal whiplash is extreme. The anchor of the evening becomes Naz’s addresses to the audience, and Hill’s masterful shepherding of those moments of confidence- and intelligence-sharing are both brilliant and vital. Despite all the downed crockery, Purpose is a feast.

Streetcar has the additional depth and richness of Williams at his best; one of the standout aspects of this production—thanks again to the actors’ and Frecknall’s care—is the breadth of Williams’ language; its vibrancy and perfectly aimed poison darts of lyricism hit mark after mark. Even when what is being said is terrible or heartbreaking or both, you marvel at Williams’ soaring dramatic poetry, his relentless drilling into psyches, his perverse sense of play and mischief (especially around madness and pain), and his committed interrogations of both untethered, delusional romance and brutish, transactional reality.

The intensity of Shepard’s writing—which segues dazzlingly from brutal to whimsical to extravagantly operatic—is matched in director Scott Elliott’s impressive staging in one of Signature’s smallest spaces. You feel as if you’re being held hostage by what unfolds before you in this theater; the harm and dysfunction afflicting and being dished out by the Tates is the most vicious of vicious cycles, and dangerously, physically close, accentuating our discomfort.

This critic’s advice is as simple as it was in 2022. Book a ticket right now—an exquisitely written, beautifully acted and mounted one hour and forty-five minutes of theater awaits. At this moment, with immigration—and attacks on immigrants’ rights—at the top of President Trump’s agenda, the play assumes a new, urgent precision.

One’s mind returns to the banner names—AUDRA GYPSY. McDonald’s commanding performance certainly delivers, but the structure and look of the show are significant negative distractions. Gypsy remains magnificent, but this production—with its excellent singing and cast—requires a stronger conceptual execution to make it truly great.

Eureka Day is extremely funny for sure, but in choosing to ridicule liberals’ overzealousness it also feels antiquated—its 2018 target a comparatively unthreatening sheep when viewed in light of what may soon come to the fore in the public arena in January. Will dramatists find a way to write just as waspishly and unsparingly about those new overlords?

The play doesn’t want to end sourly; at beginning and end it returns to the uniting power of song—the family’s warring members brought together by music. The unity is nice to see, but after all we have seen it also rings false. As formulaic as some of the issues in the play feel (addiction, faith, prejudice, acceptance), the performers are so good—and Cullman such a great conjuror-of-activity as a director—it would be more effective for Cult of Love to stay true to its best, most uncompromising scenes, and deliver an unhappy ending.

The relentless, deliciously played, perfectly directed hilarity of Death Becomes Her (Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, booking through August 31, 2025) distinguishes this skillfully executed riot of a Broadway musical. Based on the 1992 movie starring Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, and Bruce Willis, the musical sees life-long frenemies Madeline (Megan Hilty) and Helen (Jennifer Simard) fight to beyond-death in their body-punishing and mangling struggles to stay young and beautiful, and to one-up each other.

In a play of twists, it is not surprising that just as an eclipse feels like a surreal moment outside our everyday, so—it finally turns out—the play we have been watching may occupy its own unique orbit. Finally, as three characters silently stand on the terrace in the shadow of the eclipse, a wordless point is well-made: in a world where so much goes unsaid, the most destructive of personal and cultural poisons silently multiply.

In this 90-minute show, directed by Michael Mayer, the folk-rock score of the Avett Brothers is a rich pleasure (and sung beautifully by a talented cast, particularly its four principals). However, the story (by John Logan) and staging of the ill-fated sailors—on board a whaling ship that leaves New Bedford, Massachusetts, sometime around 1888—creaks a little more ominously.

Elf: The Musical passes an important test of a seasonal Broadway show. It passes the wide smile/slightly moistened eyes/ridiculous amount of falling snow test, and—more significantly—passes the far more difficult actually-not-annoying-for-kids-and-adults test.

The structure and messaging of the musical is a puzzle. At moments, it wants to be as gleefully salacious and irreverent as The Book of Mormon with songs like “He’s Inside Me” featuring Brayben and Christian Borle (Jim; both excellent of voice) imagining God physically inside them. “God’s House/Heritage USA” also revels in the technicolor, surreal lunacy of the Bakkers constructing a Christianity-centered theme park. Here, the musical briefly, and successfully, revels in how excessive their subject matter is. The rest of the songs—shockingly, given the musical bona fides of their creators—are earnest, forgettable duds, with a story surrounding the Bakkers that becomes more and more ill-fitting as the performance progresses.

There is no “maybe” about it when it comes to the brilliance and winning charm of Maybe Happy Ending (Belasco Theatre, booking to May 25, 2025). Visually, theatrically, and musically, Maybe Happy Ending, directed by Michael Arden with a nuanced delicacy and lightness of touch, is the most original and innovative show on New York’s main theatrical drag this autumn—and it dazzles with subtlety rather than bombast.

However, the orchestrations and arrangements (by Branford Marsalis) are rich and delicious; the choreography and musical staging by Rickey Tripp similarly slick. Perhaps this is enough for Armstrong devotees; a boisterous “Hello, Dolly!” which returned Armstrong to fame later in life and a restrainedly luminous “What a Wonderful World” both bring the evening to a resounding close. But have we gotten to know Armstrong as a musician, husband, cultural force, his politics, his passion for music, his strengths and frailties? Not fully—this is a soft biography, with a soft landing, leaving us feeling just as fuzzily-good as Armstrong’s lovely voice leaves us feeling on the stroke of midnight every new year.

Think bright lights, pumping rock and pop from an onstage band, and fabulous costumes. All the awards should go to Marco Marco for a parade of ever more incredible creations, including a personal favorite lime-green lampshade-shaped dress with two crying eye emojis WORN FOR A FUNERAL. Yet, featuring stars of RuPaul’s Drag Race, this musical—for all its flash, jokes, poppy standards and bitchy one-liners—is, similar to antecedents like Torch Song Trilogy, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and The Birdcage, really about love, pride, identity, and family, both biological and chosen.