Tim Teeman

This sequence first feels rushed, and a too-late story-changing add-on. However, like all the other things that should not work in a long play, this finds its smooth right spot in the adept hands of Pepe and his very good cast, led by Driver. The actor masters the art of quiet bafflement and existential muddle. His furrowed brow is broken only by one extended moment of menace; when that happens, primed for a Driver explosion of some kind, you anticipate, ultimately in vain, the inevitable detonation. Instead, Hold on to Me Darling retains its subtle mischief, gentle unspooling, and dry execution right to the end, scoring a true original in the process—in this role, Adam Driver doesn’t go off.

In Nanette, Gadsby spoke movingly about the interplay of punchlines and tension, and the need they have to tell their stories properly—beyond jokes, and beyond making themselves the subject of those jokes. In Woof!, whether that be about coming out, gender identity, the oppression of Netflix, or the meaning of whales, it means Gadsby has written and edited every word and sequence with care, despite the appearance of off-the-cuff-ness. By deploying these words with such dazzling acuity Gadsby means to fight ignorance, stupidity, easy reads, dumb conclusions, and expected tropes. Accordingly, you listen to every word as—right in front of you—they bloom into so many laughs, gut-punch sighs, and vivid meanings.

This closing cavalcade of gotchas somewhat dilutes the potency of what has gone before. But perhaps the real power Yellow Face proposes is of minority voices not just delivering sober-minded rebuttals to bigotry, but—in occupying spaces like a Broadway theater—offering those rebuttals with irreverent humor and pointed swagger while playing with audiences’ perceptions and expectations as freely as possible.

The play doesn’t come down on one side of the gentrification debate or another, but neither does it both-sides the issue. It remains rooted in character, and its conflicts are played out in good faith; its piercing ending is, in miniature, a nudge for us all to reject fear and open our doors and minds, and, most importantly, to fully live in the communities where we live.

The play has been reportedly significantly rewritten since its London West End run, but it is still just over three hours, and unlike the Tony and Olivier Award-winning Butterworth’s memorable, deservedly award-winning plays (Jerusalem, The Ferryman), The Hills of California is a sludgy drag in which not enough happens, and not enough familial depth and grit examined, to merit such a long performance. If one had a brutal red pen in hand, the first act could be scythed completely; the play would rattle along better at just under two hours.

Yes, hilarious—but for the stretches where Foster isn’t on stage, you sure do miss her. The other actors serve up some appealing light comedy and subplots to keep the motor puttering, but in act two this all amounts to one flimsy diversion after another. Once Upon a Mattress is mostly alright, then at moments—thanks to Foster and the others—very funny, but never stunning. After this Broadway run it heads to Los Angeles. Its producers should be very grateful to Sutton Foster.

For this (I think!) one-time only participant, Life and Trust was always beautiful to look at, and occasionally captivating as an experience, but without a cohering story to unfurl and something narratively to mold in my mind, it was also frustrating, tiring, and—after hours of wandering around, despite all the striking visual stimuli—thoroughly, teeth-grindingly irritating. This a fun and beautifully, impressively rendered playground, but you will need a lot of time, money, and sensible shoes to make proper sense of it. Its own Faustian bargain, you might say.

The delights of Oh, Mary! (Lyceum Theater, booking to Sept 15) are many, varied, and all-winning. If, like many, the world and life in general has left you tense, this Broadway show—transferred by way of rave reviews and celebrity visitors from an award-laden sold-out run at the Lucille Lortel Theatre downtown—will liberate waves of plentiful laughter from within. In the best way that only theater can, the hilarity is communally shared by your fellow audience members, who are losing it merrily all around you. For 80 minutes, the Lyceum is a rumbling sea of giggling and guffaws.

The poetry and staging combine both expansion and contraction; Home only lasts 90 minutes, yet it feels a grander sweep than that. Arnulfo Maldonado’s clever and simple design matches this; as if seen on a cinema screen, the frames of walls shrink and expand to the shapes of home and church.

But that crackling charge you hope from Uncle Vanya—the sense of a hot summer and the alternately comic and tragic cauldron a family adrift and questioning and interrogating themselves individually and as a unit—feels unmet here. Neugebauer’s loose direction—so different from the sharp and precisely realized Appropriate—doesn’t give the characters space to breathe, but instead an unintended void in which to lose themselves, and our attention.

This production wants you to have immense fun, and to never forget the well-known horrors just over its horizon—the relationship between Fraulein Schneider and Herr Schultz is imperiled by Nazism’s charge, a smashed window is stunningly conveyed by petals of falling paper. It also wants you to get, well, liquored up. Just what kind of night does Cabaret on Broadway intend you have? Glug pricey drinks and nibble on charcuterie and dwell on the effects of fascism, bigotry, and violence that Cabaret animates? The night this critic attended, an unruly person, likely inebriated, was thrown out for reaching at Redmayne.

For one, both Succession and this adaptation, directed by Sam Gold (who is married to Herzog) know how to crunchily position drama and wit, profundity and comedy, alongside one another. This brilliant Enemy of the People is notably funny in both its smarts and pacing, and even its later gathering darkness—when Stockmann is viciously trounced and isolated by his townsfolk—is studded with light, and the certainty of his self-preservation.

It has been a brisk, and pleasant analysis, but it feels in some ways too slight, rushed, and not investigative enough—like a decorous, beautifully modulated TED talk. Page alludes to the power of playing a villain, and what it has meant to him, and how intense it has been for him at times. But we hear no more of this. How has playing villains, Shakespearean and not, affected him, or changed anything of him? And what of women? Apart from Lady Macbeth’s opening salvo, we hear nothing of Shakespeare’s villainous women—we need more of Lady M, and others like Goneril. What of revelatory text spoken by villains that may be illuminating or complicating that isn’t so well-known? But Page is a charming, consummate raconteur, and this is still an inviting feast—it’s to his credit he leaves us wanting way more.

What also distinguishes it are its Broadway royalty-level, award-garlanded stars, Kelli O’Hara and Brian D’Arcy James (Tony-nominated this year for Into the Woods), who are more familiar to audiences for playing good or engaging lead characters. Instead, here they play a couple on a relentlessly degrading, depressing, downward spiral. As Kirsten Arnesen and Joe Clay, at least for the first 10 minutes, they represent the kind of sexy partnership who would ordinarily fizz and shine—both are attractive and charming performers—but in Days of Wine and Roses they fall to pieces in front of us, the most toxic of partnerships in free fall.

The piercing poetry of Williams’ words flickers into life many times, but also feel missed and blurred. Nonno’s poem, as it is finally delivered—about an olive branch observing the sky—feels underwhelming, rather than a profound underline. Williams may have known or imagined a way to crystallize The Night of the Iguana into knowability—but this almost 3-hour production feels lost, even as its actors valiantly attempt to do the same.

There is, strangely but maybe tellingly, very little reflection of the racist history staring the Lafayettes in the face, or what their responsibility should be toward it. Instead, the family is stuck in the fault-line of the two meanings of the title of the play. The audience I sat among sighed at the characters’ insensitivity and myopia, and their ability to say and absolutely do the wrong thing, or ignore what is right in front of them. Appropriate shows how the persistence of racism and prejudice does not just come down to the practice of overt racism, but the practice of unthinking, lazy, deliberate ignorance.

However, this shaky narrative framing does not affect the joy and brilliance of Buena Vista Social Club’s supreme execution of music and dance. Thanks to its excellent ensemble of musicians and singers, we can all be grateful that, as Juan says to the audience at the end, “a sound like this... tends to travel.”

“An object at rest stays at rest,” Liam sings in his final song, “Building Momentum,” which is a song about crafting one’s own destiny, the future that makes sense to you. And in the decisions and end-points of the characters on stage—and in their final rock-out dance and singing—that is the emphatic common theme. The song is not a plea for understanding and acceptance of any kind. It is, like the rest of How to Dance in Ohio, a funny, joyful, and cheering assertion of both diversity and self-determination.

The production, directed by Michael Greif, has a through-line of sweetness that overrides a roughness of New York City living it implies but never delivers on—and spiritually never wants to dwell in. Its mean streets are not that mean, its central romantic storyline never rises to a passion that the audience feels invested in, and its family dramas are of the safe, after-school special kind. This is, at its heart, a warm bath of a musical; Camille A. Brown’s fabulous choreography supplies a welcome and impressive swagger.

Spamalot’s expertly written and performed silliness is endless, beguiling, and winning, and so well-done that—despite the gay and Jewish clunkers of songs—the musical remains a daffy, rollicking night out. The final confetti canon—a Broadway staple, and often a last desperate roll of the dice in any show—here feels absolutely perfect.

Even as they finally resolve to “go,” in this Godot—as in every Godot—Shannon and Sparks remain stuck in the perennial purgatory that follows the utterance of that final line. However, this production comes with the cushion of comforting companionship its two lead actors skillfully conjure and convey. It’s a rare production that you want to carry on waiting for Godot with Didi and Gogo, but this is one.

However, the musical—music by Manilow, book and lyrics by Sussman, directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle—only makes an occasionally compelling case that the Harmonists (Ari Leshnikoff, Erich Collin, Erwin “Chopin” Bootz, Robert Biberti, Harry Frommerman, and Cantor Josef Roman Cykowski, aka “Rabbi”) should be better remembered by history. The unevenly staged Harmony is a shakily constructed set of misfiring elements, whose most compelling beats around Nazism, Antisemitism, and bigotry—all points resoundingly and rightly made—feel imposed and didactic rather than flowing naturally from the source material.

To match the living circumstances of its lead character, the play feels a deflating mess, with puzzling performances and staging as if no one involved quite knows what it is—comedy, whimsy, or low-key tragedy? Of course, a play can be all those things, but I Need That jerks uneasily around many registers, never finding its heart, or dramatic or thematic purpose. The play is as muddled as Sam’s home, with characters not really speaking to each other. It grouches along, just as Sam and Foster mull the world around them, but—thanks to so many similar stories and characters on TV and film—we know where this is headed

You know a piece of theater has done something right when, many days later, it is still provoking pin-pricks of intrigue, revelation, and mystery in one’s mind. And so it is with Stereophonic (Playwrights Horizons, to Nov. 26)—one of the most original, stunningly designed, and technically dazzling plays in New York right now. Stereophonic is a must-experience, rather than simply a must-see.

Here We Are, mostly and regardless of some lovely performances, leaves no profound emotional impression at its end. It sure tries. When in its closing seconds the characters tell us what their experience meant to them, it feels like a stab at redemption and learning that comes across as more puzzling overshare, because for most of the production has not sketched any kind of ongoing emotional or psychological impact of their various trials and tribulations. It is so bizarre and rushed. Why do this now? What have they recognizably gone through, who have they been to each other in front of us, to suddenly reveal this stuff?