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Rookies of the year
Evidently there was a backlog of interesting plays prevented from reaching the stage, first by the pandemic, and then by a spastic blurt of race and gender obsession. Good news: the quality level,...
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Misshapen identities
Mediocrity has a new name on Broadway and it’s McNeal (at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center through November 24), which marks the Main Stem debut of Robert Downey Jr., who in several recent...
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Circular views
King Lear typically runs three and a half hours or so, and as Dr. Johnson said of Milton’s Paradise Lost, none ever wished it longer than it is. The latest production (at the Griffin Theater at The...
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Beneath the surface
“We gave the world new ways to dream,” backed by a lilting, repeated musical phrase, is the defining refrain of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard (at the St. James Theatre, and styled “Sunset...
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Harmony & discord
Maybe Happy Ending (at the Belasco Theatre) took a leisurely route from Brooklyn to Broadway, making a brief detour by way of Seoul, Tokyo, and Atlanta. Though initially inspired a decade ago by a song...
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Three divas & a damsel
Gypsy (at the Majestic Theatre) is a nearly perfect show. The drama is engrossing, the Fifties jokes are still funny even if you’ve heard them before, and two characters get to undergo gobsmacking...
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Parentally challenged
An early highlight of Broadway’s just-underway spring season is the finely wrought family drama Purpose (at the Hayes Theater through July 6), from the forty-year-old playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins....
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Recurring themes
Buena Vista Social Club (at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre) isn’t the first Broadway musical whose lyrics I found difficult to make out, but it turns out that the songs in this one are in a different...
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Television sets
One of the more peculiar sights on the Broadway stage this spring was that of the Muppet-like Kieran Culkin attempting to bellow. Culkin, fresh off an Oscar for playing a manic-depressive jerk who...
View ArticleDated angst
T-shirts for sale in the lobby at Angry Alan, the new play by Penelope Skinner (at the Studio Seaview through August 3) are printed with the legend “Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre...
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