Tim Teeman — Theater Critic

Created and performed by Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson, and directed by David Mendizábal, Mexodus is an inventive, technically impressive spectacle, both loudly propulsive and low-key meditative.

The really great thing in this all-star revival (Music Box Theatre, booking to Dec. 21) is those men are played by Bobby Cannavale, Neil Patrick Harris, and James Corden, the latter serving up an early-season comedy masterclass.

The play, directed by Sam Helfrich, darts between eras and modes of storytelling, not really settling on a compelling through-line. We hit the major McQueen life moments and personality traits—difficult childhood, abuse, working class background, the snobbery he initially endured, drugs, homophobia, sexual expression, his taking over at labels like Givenchy, suicide—but they jangle in a baffling muddle on stage.

The return of Mamma Mia! to Broadway, “for a limited six-month engagement,” is bargaining on ABBA fans’ eternal desire to hear their favorite songs again (and again). Judging by the man tapping his feet behind me, the many hands waving in the air, and the whooping that accompanied the show’s better-executed set pieces, its producers and the Winter Garden Theatre could be right in calculating on one of theater’s surer bets.

The return of Mamma Mia! to Broadway, “for a limited six-month engagement,” is bargaining on ABBA fans’ eternal desire to hear their favorite songs again (and again). Judging by the man tapping his feet behind me, the many hands waving in the air, and the whooping that accompanied the show’s better-executed set pieces, its producers and the Winter Garden Theatre could be right in calculating on one of theater’s surer bets.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?