Tim Teeman

Invective, repetition, manly backchat: the Mamet staples are here, but truly what gives with the damn coins? The actors make as much sense as they can of the foggy mystery and verbal extremity Mamet has written for them around these misplaced little shiny objects, but the playwright's hot air-so visible on Fox News this week-barely seems to merit his characters' heightened tempers, much less our interest. Still, Rockwell rocks it.

Even after an uneven opening stretch, and even if you are not quite sure what is going on after that, it doesn't matter. The Little Prince is a meditative experience, a bath of colors and sounds, directed and choreographed by Anne Tournié. The show's shifting tableaux are best experienced as a kind of fairground for the senses, no illicit substances required. It is unusual to see something on a Broadway stage that is a visual treat, without overdoing the visuals-that conveys wonder but subtly. It feels experimental, unpolished, and ambitious, all in good ways.

What Shane embodies is before us in the many and varied current attacks on the LGBTQ community, and trans youth in particular. It may even explain the paucity of out sports-people 20-plus years after Take Me Out's debut. Yet finally, Take Me Out also offers a vision of inclusion, of both finding a place, finding friendship, and finding a home. It comes with costs, but it's there-a genuinely unexpected field of dreams.

What makes the show, directed by Moises Kaufman, so current is the villainous presence of New York politician Frederic Tiggens (John Dossett), who is worried by the alliances and potential power of two minorities coming together, and formulates a number of despicable schemes to wreck the bar, and the semblance of a multi-cultural community within. In Tiggens, we see Donald Trump and all his discontents down through history-right down to the casual betrayal of the angry and disaffected voters whose support he courts to gain power. The stories on the complicated, jumbled, and overcrowded set do intersect, but what resonates most acutely today is how those in power seek to turn the marginalized against each other in order to maintain power.

The stolen moments of the play-Messing letting Ernestine silently imbibe the world and events around her-make the most impact, as well as its affecting denouement (in which Finn, again, is a standout), when Ernestine attempts to finally finish the cake (and my, how you will panic over her lifting a container of flour). As it confronts the big and small questions of existence and time itself, Birthday Candles itself proves simultaneously over-baked and under-baked, but its performers ensure it is served warm.

There is nothing surprising in the show, which opens tonight on Broadway. This is a slickly corporate, officially sanctioned slice of legacy clean-up. Two and a half hours of glittery hagiography. If you expect a musical that examines Jackson's life, controversies, and legacy, forget it. If you want to see anything which even mildly challenges the deification of Jackson, or interrogates his celebrity and actions with depth and nuance, this is not the show for you.

Tony winner Rashad's performance in this Manhattan Theatre Club production is pristine, sharp, deeply felt, caustic, and warm. Faye is a bullshit-destroyer on contact, and Rashad immediately imbues her with such depth of personality-rigid bearing, direct eye contact with whoever she speaks with-she has created one of the most distinctive and engaging characters on the Broadway stage this winter.

I think what is most powerful about the show, as with Nottage's Sweat, is how convincingly epic it quickly makes the everyday feel. Here are very small lives which seem huge, thanks to brilliant writing and just-as-brilliant acting. It is also notable that Clyde's features a happy ending, for everyone. The temptation with a drama like this is to go 100 percent gray and scratchy realism, but Nottage does not do that. The end brings together all the themes in one sandwich. Until then, each character has struggled to make their personal best, but then the climactic sandwich-the sandwich that may yet undo Clyde-is a creation of them all. And with their signature ingredient deployed, they are free.

This musical is truly awful and truly nuts, but-intentionally or not-it neatly reflects straight back to the audience the cartoon and circus the royal family has become both in the eyes of the world, and in the world's own making. De Waal appears before us in front of a wall of flashing lights, and exits the same way-in the glare of the paparazzi. But the paparazzi aren't the villains here; they are merely fulfilling their editors' and audience's desire to see pictures and get the story. As the musical makes clear, the royal family -a fusty institution desperate for an injection of glamor-needed Diana too. Eventually Diana recognizes her own power, and uses the media for her own ends.

The collision of musical styles and Kushner's clever, witty lyricism makes Caroline, Or Change a haunting, unforgettable musical. This critic loved its ambition, even if it was occasionally perplexing and opaque. Like Angels in America, the material fleshes out detail and the personal-trousers, musical instruments, comic books, lost coins, and bank notes-while also being proudly political, and showing how centrally politics exerts itself as a force on people's lives.

It is not just lip-syncing, though, which implies a very basic act of impersonation or mimicry. For one, O'Connell masters every rustle, movement of the body, caught breath, laugh, rise of emotion. Every sound that is on tape, every pause, everything is replicated by her. But she also inhabits the character of Higginbotham commandingly too, sitting there, facing us.

While the play, directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, was not written in response to events of right now, it is a timely and sometimes moving interrogation of what it means to be a Black man at this moment. The play speaks bluntly and directly to an audience about what racism, inequality, aspiration, love, sexuality, tragedy, success, and happiness look like to a broad group of Black men in contemporary Brooklyn. It is unabashedly earnest.

Is This A Room is a gripping, highly recommended piece of theater, and also an unexpectedly intricate ballet. The 70-minute, deservedly multi-award winning play, which opens on Broadway tonight at the Lyceum Theatre, is an enactment of the transcript of what was said when the FBI first came to the Augusta, Georgia, home of former Air Force linguist and intelligence contractor Reality Winner on June 3, 2017.

Ruben Santiago-Hudson is one person, but in Lackawanna Blues-the show the Tony Award-winning performer has written, performs and directs, opening tonight at Broadway's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre-he becomes a voice of many. And, thanks to Santiago-Hudson's dexterity of interpretation, the many characters he embodies immediately become familiar and intriguing to us.Ruben Santiago-Hudson is one person, but in Lackawanna Blues-the show the Tony Award-winning performer has written, performs and directs, opening tonight at Broadway's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre-he becomes a voice of many. And, thanks to Santiago-Hudson's dexterity of interpretation, the many characters he embodies immediately become familiar and intriguing to us.

Of course it's worth the wait. Of course anyone planning their own return to Broadway should buy a ticket. It is one of the cleverest, wittiest, flashiest musicals in town-and sets up home in New York after rave reviews wherever it has played, including the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it began life in 2017, and London's West End. On Sunday night, over 18 months later than anticipated, Six has its long overdue, much deserved moment to shine.

The first surprise is that Girl From the North Country, which marries the resonant, deeply felt playwriting of Conor McPherson and music and lyrics of Bob Dylan, doesn't major on Dylan's raw folkiness. You'd think it might. The play, opening Thursday night at Broadway's Belasco Theatre (booking to Sept. 27) and directed beautifully by McPherson, is a gorgeous, moving, thousand-times improved transfer uptown from the Public Theater. It is set in the threadbare, Depression-era year of 1934 in a boarding house in Duluth, Minnesota, full of characters variously luckless, desperate, loving, scamming, and scrabbling.

However, most shockingly, van Hove's West Side Story is not shocking; it is tame and impatiently brisk, having ejected songs like 'I Feel Pretty.' It is also a strange mélange of the good, bad, and baffling-especially in what it seeks to coherently say (or sing, when it comes to 'Gee, Officer Krupke') about the hot-button issues of 2020 it zeroes in on, like racism, immigration, and police brutality. Its engagement with those issues-more on this below-comes to feel lazy and manipulative, rather than shocking or shattering.

As Nancy, Alexander applies a wry, sometimes lacerating, perspective to everything around her. Grow up, she tells everyone around her, as she shucks off all the expectations of wife- and motherhood. This critic hopes Alexander earns a Tony nomination for Grand Horizons; her performance is a many-shaded joy to watch.

The Second World War rumbles on, overseas and unseen in Charles Fuller's A Soldier's Play, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1982. Within the play, another war on bodies and minds-still as corrosive today as it was then-plays out, as the poison of racism and oppression turns both inward and outward on a group of black soldiers. This Roundabout Theatre Production (opening tonight to March 15 at the American Airlines Theatre), almost 40 long years since the play's creation, is also its Broadway debut: an indictment of prejudice in and of itself.

The award-laden Laura Linney can spin gold from pretty much anything, as proven in projects as diverse as Tales of the City, Ozark, and The Big C. Not just that, she can make that gold intelligible, epic, and also everyday. Her latest Broadway play, My Name is Lucy Barton-opening tonight (to Feb 29, Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)-features a commanding solo performance (by Linney) in service of an underpowered play.

Sad to say, the passion promised in the Playbill, the love and reverence Connick Jr. claims to feel for Porter, doesn't translate or come alive on stage (the performance runs through Dec. 29). It flickers, but never roars, and often just feels lost and aimless. The big band, led by Andrew Fisher, sounds great. The dancer Aaron Burr gives us an amazing tap show. But it is Connick Jr. who seems off-kilter and disjointed in his performance. The very opposite of joy and reverence flows from him. The 90-minute concert feels like work, and hard work at that.

It's a double Christmas miracle. Broadway has a new star-Lauren Patten-and a jukebox musical that really is different and sets a standard for others to aspire to the same; and one that is as provocatively written as it is beautifully performed.

The Inheritance is big, it aims to be everything and say everything. For all its faults it gives its all to tell its stories, both big and small. It is about history and also love, but not of the romantic kind. In keeping with an earlier reference to the work and beliefs of the poet and activist Edward Carpenter, the love at the end of the play-the love The Inheritance wants its characters and us to aspire to-is fraternal and honoring.

The traditions of clowning in the show-where sitting at a chair at an angle, then falling off a chair multiple times, can seem puzzling and hilarious-are fascinating. The cast are marvelous. Not much happens, then a lot happens. If you find clowns endlessly enchanting, this is the show for you; if you find clowns unaccountably menacing, these preconceptions won't be entirely obliterated

The traditions of clowning in the show-where sitting at a chair at an angle, then falling off a chair multiple times, can seem puzzling and hilarious-are fascinating. The cast are marvelous. Not much happens, then a lot happens. If you find clowns endlessly enchanting, this is the show for you; if you find clowns unaccountably menacing, these preconceptions won't be entirely obliterated