Tim Teeman

The Tony-winning (for Carousel) Mendez, Radcliffe and Groff share a terrific collective chemistry that roots and animates the show. That does not mean the transfer of this Sonia Friedman-directed show from New York Theatre Workshop is issue- or problem-free; oddly, it has sprouted unwelcome oddities in its upsizing. But it’s mainly still just as terrific it was in its luminous downtown incarnation. Even its newly spawned dents can’t shatter the whole, because the performances—not just the leads, the whole company—zing throughout. The lyrics and music are Sondheim at his most waspish and wise; days later, the songs are still buzzing in my mind, insisting on being hummed.

It is promising when a theater set gets its own round of applause, and David Zinn’s vibrant and ingenious imagining for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding (Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, booking to Nov. 5) on Broadway deservedly gets just that when the full interior glory of the imagined hair braiding shop in Harlem just off 125th Street reveals itself. Along with its bustling set of chairs, hair model posters, a Ghanian flag, and much, much Barbie-ish pink, Jocelyn Bioh’s play, set in the pre-pandemic summer of 2019 and produced by Manhattan Theatre Club, has all the energy and rich character interplay that her excellent award-winning 2017 play, School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play, possessed.

Etheridge says she knows her son would want her to live, and embrace life, and this is what she has tried to do. She ends the show with “Come to My Window,” encouraging her fans to sing along. They do. It’s a crowd-pleasing end to a show that resoundingly succeeds as a concert, rather than a piece of theater. As Etheridge sings in “Here I Am Again,” music is her lifeblood—both energy and salve. “The song,” she sings, “will never end.”

A modern audience, a 2023 audience, must travel to 1961—and to Davis’ very deliberate narrative balancing act—to meet the play not just when it was written, but how it was written. This wonderful cast does precisely that, playing the laughs for every ounce of hilarity to be gleaned from them, and then in a sudden turn confronting racism and white supremacy head-on. Ol’ Cap’n, and all he represents, are shown to be both vicious and ridiculous.

And yet, still, at the end, Bloom does make us laugh. But there is no easy reconciliation with Death; what we finally see, what Bloom finally imagines, is an uneasy tango to that “cum tree” song. The living, Bloom astutely concludes, don’t have a choice. Sorry for the downer, she intimates, but jokes can’t and don’t help. We must all live with Death.

Díaz’s skills as an illusionist are faultless, but the show feels off-kilter as a piece of theater. Díaz feels impressively in charge of his tricks, but not the show as a show. His audience interactions feel stilted and off. One little boy who was shepherded up on stage was lightly (not unpleasantly, but oddly) joshed with. Another amazing illusion required the participation of a female specifically, Díaz said. But, having watched the illusion (which really does have you rubbing your eyes in disbelief), this audience member was left thinking: that could have been a male. Why a female specifically?

“Do you really think people are going to be talking about this in fifty years?” he adds a moment later, showing his crystal ball is just as faulty as it is functioning. The final shot soon-to-be-completed, the men know giddily that freedom will soon be theirs. But what they don’t know is that Jaws will go on to become the cultural totem we know it as today—and it is in the humorous and profound gap of past and present, known and unknown, and ignorance and wisdom that The Shark Is Broken wittily excels not just as a clever time capsule, but as an examination of male bonding and competitiveness, ego, frailty, fame, and film-making. Which is to say: you don’t miss the shark for one second.

Sometimes a Broadway show just does what it needs to do, going big on songs, silliness, corn, and heart. And together those things work, even while some things frustratingly don’t work around them. The leviathan kicks into life, the audience jumps on and rides shotgun. Through the barrage of special effects, jokes, dramatic set-pieces, the stage-filling dancing and singing of the unsung heroes of the company—through all of it—the audience is visibly and audibly locked in, seduced, happy. And so, sure, Back to the Future: The Musical—at two hours forty minutes, first staged in London’s West End—is overlong (almost an hour longer than the 1985 movie it is based on) and its female characters and its straining to say something about civil rights under-drawn and underdeveloped. But the show (Winter Garden Theatre, booking to Feb 25, 2024) is also an amiably rollicking reanimation of a much-loved movie classic, and in no mood to address its flaws, which seem—ironically, given its preoccupation with time travel—stuck in another era.

The Cottage is not a dud; its momentary outbreaks of hilarity thankfully break up stretches of conversation about characters’ tangled pasts, and restatements of the comic setups in front of us. But, as wittily complicated as those summaries can sound, we’ve already got it. It’s been unpacked for us in the moment, over and over again. If The Cottage isn’t a farce, what is it? This critic couldn’t tell you, and—as presented—the production doesn’t seem to know the answer either.

The 90-minute musical is about the rise and implosion of the Marcos regime in the Philippines, and given the scale and brutality of their crimes against an entire country, the musical sings and dances up a storm, while not making much of a case there is much to sing and dance about. There is a lot of concept and dazzle in Here Lies Love, but not much consideration given to what it’s all for.

It says much about the genius—and Alex Edelman’s rollicking, must-see Broadway debut show Just for Us (Hudson Theatre, to Aug 19) is a work of true genius—that at the end of this superlative 75-minute solo comedy show, after his identity as a Jew has been revealed to the group of New York City Nazis whose evening meeting he has infiltrated, that their boiling-over anger at his subterfuge and his eventual ejection from the room leaves him feeling downcast.

How do you not get “Baby One More Time” right? That is the first mystery—and the first warning that all may not be well—with Once Upon a One More Time, the musical filled with Britney Spears’ music that opened on Broadway Thursday evening (Marquis Theatre, booking to Nov 19). Truly, if you’re doing this magnificent banger, don’t kick off your big Broadway jukebox musical with it feeling as messy as this musical does. Frankly, this may not matter to the Spears faithful having the time of their lives at this show. Seeing the fans crowd the foyer is one of the most unexpected, life-giving joys of the New York summer. The Marquis has made the musical into a fun night out, complete with themed photo booths, and the audience this critic attended were bubbling with joy just to be there, dressed up in sparkly tops and their Britney finest. But even for them, one sensed—given the audience responses—the musical hit big at some moments, but did not hit big throughout.

Unusually, but actually very helpfully, an email from the production landed after this critic had attended the play explaining what Grey House was really about. That is a first for this critic and—while welcome in this instance—perhaps not a good sign. If you have to send explanations of a play, it suggests some awareness within the production that the play is not being understood. This critic will not reveal the contents of that email—spoilers and all that—but the production itself does not make itself as crystal clear as the paragraphs later explaining it. That is not to say a bad time was had, but rather, for good and ill, Grey House is the strangest show on Broadway.

The families mingle and bustle, but-without camera close-ups and cuts-it all feels stiff and belabored on stage. There is no sense of high-stakes, or even low-stakes for Aditi, Hemant, or their families; no narrative grist around them making this decision for a set of truly convincing reasons, or asking what they really want. Theirs is a woefully under-conceived central relationship to base a musical around. When they sing the duet “Could You Have Loved Me” it rings not just implausible but pointless; they never seemed that into each other. There is no yearning or mystery or intrigue. They seem pretty dullsville as a couple.

“Mavis, the world is about to crack right down the middle. We’ve gotta change—or fall in the crack,” Sidney says to his judgmental sister-in-law. But how would running a non-political arty newspaper do to substantially counter any of that? And why does Sid talk about politics way more than art—given that he initially professes to embrace the latter and shun the former, and then spend hours lecturing people about politics and social change. Perhaps the play is a satire about white liberal intent and confusion, as embodied by Sidney and the other characters on stage. Whatever, time has outpaced it, and so just like Sidney, Iris, and the others, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window sadly ends up feeling stuck.

If the show's love for its city is fervent and shared by many in the audience, the dramatization of it is muddier and filled with stereotypes and story echoes of other New York stories. Very little feels original in New York, New York; instead, this musical, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, feels like a reheated casserole of so many other New York romanticized narratives, stereotypes, and well-worn signifiers. The big numbers don’t feel that big, the joints linking story and music—by Kander and Ebb, with additional lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda—are creaky.

Linney and Hecht are excellent and generous scene partners, and though Summer, 1976 has none of the explosive bells and whistles of some of its Broadway compadres, it has its own gentle, unassuming power. We see the flipsides to Diana’s apparent control and superiority, and the steelier side of Alice. We yearn for them to hit the road together, to build a new life with their daughters away from this stultifying place. And at first it seems they may do just that. And then… well, life.

Theater-goers should not expect “Just Jack!” when they take their seats. The play, directed by Lisa Peterson, is a very slow, low burn, whose ultimate conflagrations of both humor and music—care of a bravura, piano-playing Hayes—are dazzling. However, the play takes time to locate its drive and punch. For a sludgy opening stretch, Good Night, Oscar—set in two dressing rooms and eventually The Tonight Show studio, all simply and beautifully designed by Rachel Hauck—is mostly plodding exposition.

Bar one pause in the intermission-less 100 minutes, Killing Eve star Comer is on stage throughout, inhabiting Tessa and a gallery of other characters—including her mother, best friend, and rapist. But most stunning is her presentation of Tessa who both goes through so much, and seems so much. The play is a blunt polemic against a patriarchal legal system weighted against female victims of sexual violence; Comer’s performance and Martin’s staging deepens the text into a one of the most electrifying pieces of theater on Broadway this season.

Bang, crash! Watch out for the falling light! Don't stand under that toppling tree! Those trapeze wires don't look very reliable! There should be at least one special Tony Award for Mischief Theatre's Peter Pan Goes Wrong (Ethel Barrymore Theatre, booking to July 9)-not just for its technical brilliance, and the raucous, daffy, side-splitting pleasures it delivers to the audience, but also as a badge of proof that the British may have finally, successfully exported pantomime to America.

The Thanksgiving Play makes fun of earnest white liberals acting in overly socially conscious ways, in much the same way as Bill Maher does every Friday night. Sure, have at it. But the shared derision is, in essence, no different to the fulminations against “woke” and “political correctness” of the right wing. The end result is the same: the “woke” and “politically correct” end up as being seen as the villains, rather than those brazenly and unapologetically attacking and destroying the rights of minorities. Are the white liberal “woke” the enemy of progress at this cultural moment, or do they just make for an easier comedy target than those succeeding in their efforts to attack the most marginalized groups in society? Perhaps playwrights will focus on their imaginations on bigger, clear and present monsters—and quit the lazy shooting of fish in the barrel. In the climate of now, these jokes are just adding to a depressingly destructive chorus.

Then we hear some guards talking to the man she has been talking to. It’s King Arthur. Guenevere visibly wilts under her hooded disguise. She is briefly mortified. The surreally fascinating thing in this Broadway revival of Camelot, directed by Bartlett Sher, is watching this meet-cute curdle into a stultifying, grizzly marriage of two characters with zero chemistry, and then watching that relationship implode entirely—and not really care about its destruction, because this new Camelot doesn’t make us care. Even the swaggering introduction of romantic fly-in-the-ointment Lancelot du Lac (Jordan Donica) doesn’t inject any life.

The play is a compact 95 minutes, but it’s as dense and thoughtful as it is light on its feet and irreverent. Tio (Chris Herbie Holland), a modern-day echo of Horatio, begins the play by trying to figure out if the world of porn is for him, and later delivers an extremely passionate soliloquy-when-high about the sexual pleasures of getting down with gingerbread men.

How many jokes—really good jokes, really good funny jokes, really good terrible jokes, really excellent silly jokes—can you stuff into a Broadway musical? In Shucked (Nederlander Theatre, booking to Sept 3), they are deliciously relentless. Accompanying their shameless deployment—Robert Horn is responsible for the musical’s hilarious book—are Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally’s songs, which are not only just as funny as the jokes but also immediately hummable ear-worms.

Life of Pi, directed with a restrained sense of wonder by Max Webster, is a very simple story: will Pi and Richard Parker be rescued from the sea; and will Pi’s rescuers believe his story? Is it true? And if it isn’t, does it matter if it is as enchanting as the theater-makers attempt to make it?