Time Out critics’ picks for theater and Broadway in New York

Broadway review by Adam Feldman “Keep it light, keep it tight, keep it fun, and then we’re done!” That’s the pithy advice that the indignant 16th-century housewife Anne Hathaway (Betsy Wolfe) imparts to her neglectful husband, William Shakespeare (Stark Sands), as a way to improve his play Romeo and Juliet, which she considers too much of a downer. It is also the guiding ethos of the new Broadway jukebox musical & Juliet, a quasi-Elizabethan romp through the chart-toppers of Swedish songwriter-producer Max Martin. A diverting synthetic crossbreed of Moulin Rouge!, Something Rotten!, Mamma Mia! and Head Over Heels, this show delivers just what you’d expect. It is what it is: It gives you the hooks and it gets the ovations.  Martin is the preeminent pop hitmaker of the past 25 years, so & Juliet has a lot to draw from. The show’s 30 songs include multiple bops originally recorded by the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Katy Perry, as well as tunes that Martin wrote—or, in all but two cases, co-wrote—for Pink, NSYNC, Kesha, Robyn, Kelly Clarkson, Jessie J, Céline Dion, Ariana Grande, Justin Timberlake, Ellie Goulding, Demi Lovato, Adam Lambert, the Weeknd and even Bon Jovi. (Notably absent are any of his collaborations with Taylor Swift.) “Roar,” “Domino,” “Since U Been Gone”: the hit list goes on and on. As a compilation disc performed live, it’s a feast for Millennials; its alternate title might well be Now That’s What I Call a Musical! & Julietl | Photograph: Matthew...

If theater is your religion and the Broadway musical your sect, you've been woefully faith-challenged of late. Venturesome, boundary-pushing works such as Spring Awakening, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and Next to Normal closed too soon. American Idiot was shamefully ignored at the Tonys and will be gone in three weeks. Meanwhile, that airborne infection Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark dominates headlines and rakes in millions, without even opening. Celebrities and corporate brands sell poor material, innovation gets shown the door, and crap floats to the top. It's enough to turn you heretic, to sing along with The Book of Mormon's Ugandan villagers: "Fuck you God in the ass, mouth and cunt-a, fuck you in the eye." Such deeply penetrating lyrics offer a smidgen of the manifold scato-theological joys to be had at this viciously hilarious treat crafted by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, of South Park fame, and composer-lyricist Robert Lopez, who cowrote Avenue Q. As you laugh your head off at perky Latter-day Saints tap-dancing while fiercely repressing gay tendencies deep in the African bush, you will be transported back ten years, when The Producers and Urinetown resurrected American musical comedy, imbuing time-tested conventions with metatheatrical irreverence and a healthy dose of bad-taste humor. Brimming with cheerful obscenity, sharp satire and catchy tunes, The Book of Mormon is a sick mystic revelation, the most exuberantly entertaining Broadway musical in years. The...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Try to imagine this: a family-friendly Broadway musical based on a beloved cartoon character from the Great Depression. Maybe she has distinctive hair and a signature red dress. Maybe she’s looking to find out who she is, so she runs away and gets dazzled by the bright lights and bustle of NYC. Her best friends could be, I don’t know, a dog and an orphan girl. And this may sound crazy, but: What if her sunniness and can-do optimism had the power to inspire progressive political change?  It’d never work. Just kidding, just kidding! It worked like the dickens in the 1977 moppet musical Annie, and it works again—minus Annie’s more Dickensian elements—in Boop! The Musical. Directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell, this is an old-fashioned candy shop of a show, where tasty confections are sold in bulk. When Boop! is corny, it’s candy corn. Gorge on the multicolor gumdrops of its high-energy production numbers; chew the jelly beans of its gentle social-mindedness; let the caramel creams of its love story melt slightly oversweetly in your mouth. And above all, savor this show’s red-hot cinnamon heart: Jasmine Amy Rogers, making a sensational Broadway debut as the 1930s animated-short icon Betty Boop.   Boop! The Musical | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman In our world, Betty is the quintessential cartoon jazz baby, a Fleischer Studios flapper inspired by singer Helen Kane (famous for her "boop-oop-a-doop" tag in songs like “I Wanna Be Loved...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Buena Vista Social Club offers an irresistible tropical vacation. A celebration of Cuban musical history, it’s a getaway and a gateway: To attend this show—which premiered last season at the Atlantic Theatre, and has now moved to Broadway—is to enter a world thick with history that you’ll want to learn more about afterward, if you don’t know it already. While you’re there, though, you don’t need to think too hard. Just give yourself over to the sounds that pour out from the stage.  The 1997 album Buena Vista Social Club gathered an extraordinary group of elderly musicians to recreate the atmosphere and the traditional musical styles—son, boleros, guajiras—of a racially inclusive Havana nightspot before the Cuban Revolution. It became a worldwide sensation upon its release, and was the subject of a 1999 documentary film by Wim Wenders. Marco Ramirez’s stage version has a less factual bent. “Some of what follows is true,” says the bandleader Juan de Marcos (Justin Cunningham), who was instrumental in assembling the album’s participants. “Some of it only feels true.”  Buena Vista Social Club | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy The musical focuses on four of the album’s principal performers: vocalists Omara Portuondo (a regal Natalie Venetia Belcon) and Ibrahim Ferrer (Mel Semé), guitarist-singer Compay Segundo (Julio Monge) and pianist Rubén González (Jainardo Batista Sterling). Scenes from the album’s 1996 recording process alternate with...

Steve Cohen, billed as the Millionaires’ Magician, conjures high-class parlor magic in the marble-columned Madison Room at the swank Lotte New York Palace. Audiences must dress to be impressed (cocktail attire is required); tickets start at $125, with an option to pay more for meet-and-greet time and extra tricks with Cohen after the show. But if you've come to see a classic-style magic act, you get what you pay for. Sporting a tuxedo and bright rust hair, the magician delivers routines that he has buffed to a patent-leather gleam: In addition to his signature act—"Think-a-Drink," involving a kettle that pours liquids by request—highlights include a lulu of levitation trick and a card-trick finale that leaves you feeling like, well, a million bucks.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Elmer McCurdy wanted to be somebody. Born out of wedlock to a teenage mother in late-19th-century Maine, he grew up dreaming of infamy. (“I’m the outlaw Jesse James! Bang bang—!”) He got drunk, got in fights, moved out west; he joined a gang of Oklahoma train robbers, and he died in a shootout at the age 31. But that’s not where his story ended. McCurdy’s corpse got embalmed and wound up traveling the country as a ghoulish sideshow attraction. (“There’s something ‘bout a mummy that everybody needs.”) It changed hands for decades before landing in a California amusement-park ride, painted DayGlo red and hanging naked from a noose. In 1976, a crewman on TV’s The Six Million Dollar Man ripped an arm from it and only then discovered that this prop was once a man. Exactly which man it had been was by that point a mystery; by then it was just some body.  The weirder-than-fiction true story of McCurdy’s preservation and degradation is the subject of Dead Outlaw, a rowdy and darkly hilarious picaresque musical by the team behind 2016’s bittersweet The Band’s Visit: book writer Itamar Moses, songwriter David Yazbek (joined here by Erik Della Penna) and director David Cromer. These two shows couldn’t seem more different at first pass, but they share a deep curiosity and wry humanity; they embrace the complex and the unknown. “No one knows if it was cuz of that he started getting into trouble,” Dead Outlaw’s Bandleader (a perfectly gruff and rascally...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  There’s a big twist at the end of the first act of Death Becomes Her; the plot of the second includes a giant hole. And those are just two of the injuries that the vain actress Madeline Ashton (Megan Hilty) and the bitter writer Helen Sharp (Jennifer Simard) inflict on each other in this new Broadway musical, a savagely funny dark comedy about how the quest for beauty—in a misogynist world where the “F” word is fifty—can bring out the beasts in women. Its two central characters are old frenemies whose shared rage at age is understandable: They’re Mad and Hel, and they’re not going to take it anymore. The problem is how and on whom they take it out. Adapted from the hit 1992 movie, Death Becomes Her introduces Madeline in a delicious show-within-a-show production number that sets up the musical’s themes with a giant wink. As the star of a Broadway musical called Me! Me! Me!, she wonders why she stays in “the chase to stay young and beautiful”—“Is it the fact that I’m attracted / To each kernel of external validation?” she sings, with nifty internal rhymes—before launching into a punning answer: “Everything I do is for the gaze.” The song then morphs into a pull-the-stops-out campfest, staged by director-choreographer Christopher Gattelli and costumed by Paul Tazewell as a spoofy tribute to Liza Minnelli in The Act. As colorful streamers fly into the audience, you might worry that Death Becomes Her is peaking too soon. It’s not: Having popped...

Role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons are inherently theatrical: The players are all playing roles, after all. But the idea of building an actual stage show around the game—an entirely improvised one, guided by audience suggestions and decisions—seems, well, a little dicey. As a D&D enthusiast myself, I didn't know what to expect from The Twenty-Sided Tavern, which is currently playing at Off Broadway’s cavernous Stage 42. But an element of the unexpected is one of the things that makes this goofy fantasy show such fun. Whether or not you know much about D&D going in, it’s an adventuring party you won't want to miss. The five actors in the cast lead the audience on a journey through the Forgotten Realms of the land of Faerûn. But it may be more accurate to say that the audience leads them. Via an interactive theater technology called Gamiotics, the spectators use their phones to determine much of what happens onstage, including which actors play which of the campaign’s three wacky members: a warrior, a trickster and a mage. This trio is joined by two other figures: David Andrew Laws (who goes by DAGL) as the Dungeon Master and Sarah Davis Reynolds as the Tavern Keeper.  As created by Laws, Reynolds and Gamiotics honcho David Carpenter, The Twenty-Sided Tavern puts the audience in control of where the story goes—which means every performance of the show is different, with new plot points and non-player characters. Each of the three adventurers is controlled by a...

Self-described “bubble scientist” Fan Yang's blissfully disarming act (now performed in New York by his son Deni, daughter Melody and wife Ana) consists mainly of generating a dazzling succession of bubbles in mind-blowing configurations, filling them with smoke or linking them into long chains. Lasers and flashing colored lights add to the trippy visuals.—David Cote   TIME OUT DISCOUNT TICKET OFFER:THE GAZILLION BUBBLE SHOWIt will blow you away!!!Tickets as low as $49 (regular price $79) Promotional description:After twenty years as a Master of Bubbles, Fan Yang brought his unique brand of artistry to the Big Apple in 2007 and has since wowed bubble lovers of all ages. The Gazillion Bubble Show truly is a family affair for Fan: His wife Ana, son Deni, daughter Melody and brother Jano all can be found on stage in New York and around the world performing their bubble magic. Audiences are delighted with an unbubblievable experience and washed with a bubble tide; some even find themselves inside a bubble. Mind-blowing bubble magic, spectacular laser lighting effects and momentary soapy masterpieces will make you smile, laugh and feel like a kid again.THREE WAYS TO BUY TICKETS:1. Online: Click here to buy tickets through Telecharge2. By phone: Call 212-947-8844 and mention code: GBTONYF453. In person: Print this offer and bring it to the New World Stages box officePerformance schedule: Friday at 7pm; Saturday at 11am, 2pm and 4:30pm; Sunday at 12pm and 3pm Running time: 1hr....

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  How is she? Ever since May, when it was confirmed that Audra McDonald would star in the latest revival of Gypsy, Broadway fans have speculated about how Audra would be as Mama Rose—or, more nervously, whether Audra could be Mama Rose, the implacable stage mother who sacrifices everything to make her two daughters into stars, including those two daughters themselves. The casting seemed inevitable: the pinnacle role for a woman in musical theater, essayed by the most accomplished musical-theater actress of her generation. It’s Audra’s turn. Yet to some, the casting also seemed unlikely: Rose has traditionally been played by big belters, from Ethel Merman in 1959 through Patti LuPone in 2008, not dramatic sopranos like McDonald. So let’s get that question out of the way up front. How is Audra as Rose? She’s a revelation.  So, too, is the rest of George C. Wolfe’s deeply intelligent and beautifully mounted production, which comes as a happy surprise. Gypsy is a model musical in every regard, from Arthur Laurents’s airtight book, inspired by the memoirs of striptease queen Gypsy Rose Lee, to Jule Styne’s thrilling music, which grabs you at the overture and doesn’t let go, to Stephen Sondheim’s dazzlingly witty and insightful lyrics. But this is the show’s fifth Broadway revival, and its third in the 21st century alone. One might reasonably wonder what is left to reveal in a show as well-known as this one. But like the monster some people believe...

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Here’s my advice: Go to hell. And by hell, of course, I mean Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell’s fizzy, moody, thrilling new Broadway musical. Ostensibly, at least, the show is a modern retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy goes to the land of the dead in hopes of retrieving girl, boy loses girl again. “It’s an old song,” sings our narrator, the messenger god Hermes (André De Shields, a master of arch razzle-dazzle). “And we’re gonna sing it again.” But it’s the newness of Mitchell’s musical account—and Rachel Chavkin’s gracefully dynamic staging—that bring this old story to quivering life. In a New Orleans–style bar, hardened waif Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) falls for Orpheus (Reeve Carney), a busboy with an otherworldly high-tenor voice who is working, like Roger in Rent, toward writing one perfect song. But dreams don’t pay the bills, so the desperate Eurydice—taunted by the Fates in three-part jazz harmony—opts to sell her soul to the underworld overlord Hades (Patrick Page, intoning jaded come-ons in his unique sub-sepulchral growl, like a malevolent Leonard Cohen). Soon she is forced, by contract, into the ranks of the leather-clad grunts of Hades’s filthy factory city; if not actually dead, she is “dead to the world anyway.” This Hades is a drawling capitalist patriarch who keeps his minions loyal by giving them the minimum they need to survive. (“The enemy is poverty,” he sings to them...

Hamilton: Theater review by David Cote What is left to say? After Founding Father Alexander Hamilton’s prodigious quill scratched out 12 volumes of nation-building fiscal and military policy; after Lin-Manuel Miranda turned that titanic achievement (via Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography) into the greatest American musical in decades; after every critic in town (including me) praised the Public Theater world premiere to high heaven; and after seeing this language-drunk, rhyme-crazy dynamo a second time, I can only marvel: We've used up all the damn words. Wait, here are three stragglers, straight from the heart: I love Hamilton. I love it like I love New York, or Broadway when it gets it right. And this is so right. A sublime conjunction of radio-ready hip-hop (as well as R&B, Britpop and trad showstoppers), under-dramatized American history and Miranda’s uniquely personal focus as a first-generation Puerto Rican and inexhaustible wordsmith, Hamilton hits multilevel culture buttons, hard. No wonder the show was anointed a sensation before even opening. Assuming you don’t know the basics, ­Hamilton is a (mostly) rapped-through biomusical about an orphan immigrant from the Caribbean who came to New York, served as secretary to General Washington, fought against the redcoats, authored most of the Federalist Papers defending the Constitution, founded the Treasury and the New York Post and even made time for an extramarital affair that he damage-controlled in a scandal-stanching...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Reducio! After 18 months, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has returned to Broadway in a dramatically new form. As though it had cast a Shrinking Charm on itself, the formerly two-part epic is now a single show, albeit a long one: Almost three and a half hours of stage wizardry, set 20 years after the end of J.K. Rowling’s seven-part book series and tied to a complicated time-travel plot about the sons of Harry Potter and his childhood foe Draco Malfoy. (See below for a full review of the 2018 production.) Audiences who were put off by the previous version’s tricky schedule and double price should catch the magic now.  Despite its shrinking, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has kept most of its charm. The spectacular set pieces of John Tiffany’s production remain—the staircase ballet, the underwater swimming scene, the gorgeous flying wraiths—but about a third of the former text has been excised. Some of the changes are surgical trims, and others are more substantial. The older characters take the brunt of the cuts (Harry’s flashback nightmares, for example, are completely gone); there is less texture to the conflicts between the fathers and sons, and the plotting sometimes feels more rushed than before. But the changes have the salutary effect of focusing the story on its most interesting new creations: the resentful Albus Potter (James Romney) and the unpopular Scorpius Malfoy (Brady Dalton Richards), whose bond has been reconceived in...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Hell’s Kitchen, whose score is drawn from the pop catalog of Alicia Keys, could easily have gone down in flames. Jukebox musicals often do; songs that sound great on the radio can’t always pull their weight onstage. But playwright Kristoffer Diaz, director Michael Greif and choreographer Camille A. Brown have found the right recipe for this show—and, in its vivid dancers and magnificent singers, just the right ingredients—and they've cooked up a heck of a block party.  Inspired by Keys’s life, Hell’s Kitchen has the sensibly narrow scope of a short story. Newcomer Maleah Joi Moon—in a stunningly assured debut—plays Ali, a beautiful but directionless mixed-race teenager growing up in midtown’s artist-friendly Manhattan Plaza in the 1990s, a period conjured winsomely and wittily by Dede Ayite’s costumes. The issues Ali faces are realistic ones: tensions with her protective single mother, Jersey (Shoshana Bean); disappointment with the charming musician father, Davis (Brandon Victor Dixon), who yo-yos in and out of their lives; a crush on a thicc, slightly older street drummer, Knuck (Chris Lee); a desire to impress a stately pianist, Miss Liza Jane (Kecia Lewis), who lives in the building.  Hell’s Kitchen | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin The show’s chain of Keys songs is its most obvious selling point, but it could also have been a limitation. Musically, the tunes are not built for drama—they tend to sit in a leisurely R&B groove—and...

Broadway review by Raven Snook It is 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, and an 11th-grade honors English class in small-town Georgia is studying The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s classic drama about the Salem witch trials. Their popular and engaging teacher is Mr. Smith (Gabriel Ebert), who sparks many a teenage crush. Goofy, empathetic, devout and married with a baby on the way, he's supportive of the girls in his class; in fact, when they decide to start a feminist club, it's Mr. Smith—not their inexperienced and fainthearted female guidance counselor, Miss Gallagher (Molly Griggs)—who champions the idea. He’s an ally, a friend and a sounding board: in other words, a good guy.   But who gets to be called a good guy—and, conversely, who gets called a bad girl? That’s the subject of John Proctor Is the Villain, Kimberly Belflower’s explosive response to sexism on and beyond the stage. The play’s fuse is lit by Shelby (Sadie Sink), a student who returns to school after leaving it abruptly months earlier in a cloud of gossip and rumor. As the alleged sexual misconduct of multiple men in their rural community comes to light, Shelby encourages her peers to challenge the conventional view of The Crucible’s protagonist, John Proctor, as a hero. In Miller’s allegory of McCarthyism, Proctor stands for integrity and honor: "How may I live without my name?” he asks when refusing to give the false confession that could save his life. “I have given you my soul; leave me my name!"...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  First things first: Just in Time is a helluva good time at the theater. It’s not just that, but that’s the baseline. Staged in a dazzling rush by Alex Timbers, the show summons the spirit of a 1960s concert at the Copacabana by the pop crooner Bobby Darin—as reincarnated by one of Broadway’s most winsome leading men, the radiant sweetie Jonathan Groff, who gives the performance his considerable all. You laugh, you smile, your heart breaks a little, you swing along with the brassy band, and you’re so well diverted and amused that you may not even notice when the ride you’re on takes a few unconventional turns.   Unlike most other jukebox-musical sources, Darin doesn’t come with a long catalogue of signature hits. If you know his work, it’s probably from four songs he released in 1958 and 1959: the novelty soap bubble “Splish Splash,” the doo-wop bop “Dream Lover” and two European cabaret songs translated into English, “Beyond the Sea” and “Mack the Knife.”  What he does have is a tragically foreshortened life. “Bobby wanted nothing more than to entertain, wherever he could, however he could, in whatever time he had, which it turns out was very little,” Groff tells us at the top of the show. “He died at 37.” Darin’s bum heart—so weak that doctors thought he wouldn’t survive his teens—is the musical’s countdown clock; it beats like a ticking time bomb.  Just in Time | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s agile...

Director-designer Julie Taymor’s visionary reimagining of Disney’s animated movie is an expedition through gorgeous new terrain. The parts of the show involving comic relief remain tethered to a theme-park aesthetic, but the production is otherwise remarkably beautiful. Through elegant puppetry and stagecraft, Taymor populates the stage with a menagerie of beasts, and surrounds the movie’s mythic plot and Elton John–Tim Rice score with African rhythm and music. Decades after its 1998 premiere, the show is still delighting kids and adults alike; Taymor's staging has expanded a simple cub into the pride of Broadway. RECOMMENDED: Guide to The Lion King on Broadway  Minskoff Theatre (Broadway). Music by Elton John. Lyrics by Tim Rice. Book by Roger Allers and Irene Mecchi. Directed by Julie Taymor. With ensemble cast. Running time: 2hrs 40mins. One intermission.

Theater review by Adam Feldman  [Note: Milo Manheim currently plays Seymour opposite Elizabeth Gillies as Audrey, with Jeremy Kushnier as Orin.]  Little Shop of Horrors is a weird and adorable show with teeth. Based on Roger Corman’s shlocky 1960 film, Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s 1982 musical tells the Faustian story of a dirt-poor schlub named Seymour (Jonathan Groff), a lowly petal pusher at a Skid Row flower shop, who cultivates a relationship with a most unusual plant. What seems at first a blessing—a way for the lonely Seymour to earn money and to get closer to his boss, Mushnik (Tom Alan Robbins), and his used and bruised coworker, Audrey (Tammy Blanchard)—soon turns sinister. The plant, whom he names Audrey II (designed by Nicholas Mahon and voiced by Kingsley Leggs), requires human blood to grow, and Seymour doesn’t have enough of his own to spare. He doesn’t want to feed the beast, but he can’t resist the lure of the green. Arguably the best musical ever adapted from a movie, Little Shop does for B flicks what Sweeney Todd does for Grand Guignol. Librettist Ashman and composer Menken—who, between this show and their Disney animated films, did more than anyone to return musical theater from its mass-culture exile in the late 20th century—brilliantly wrap a sordid tale of capitalist temptation and moral decay in layers of sweetness, humor, wit and camp. Their extraordinary score bursts with colorful rock & roll, doo-wop, girl-group pop and R&B; Ashman’s lyrics...

Once a week, after closing time, 10 people convene at the city’s oldest magic shop, Tannen’s, for a cozy evening of prestidigitation by the young and engaging Noah Levine. The shelves are crammed with quirky devices; there's a file cabinet behind the counter, a mock elephant in the corner and bins of individual trick instructions in plastic covers, like comic books or sheet music. The charm of Levine's show is in how well it fits the environment of this magic-geek chamber of secrets. As he maneuvers cards, eggs, cups and balls with aplomb, he talks shop, larding his patter with tributes to routines like the Stencel Aces and the Vernon Boat Trick—heirlooms of his trade that he gently polishes and displays for our amazement.

Dan White is something of a local sensation and a regular guest on Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show, and it's not hard to see why. His show, which sells out weeks in advance, is an ideal fancy-date night. Handsome and smooth, White offers modern variations on classic routines, blending multiple kinds of magic (mentalism, card tricks, illusionism) into an admirably variegated evening of entertainment. If a few of the effects don't fit the intimacy of the room—when I saw the show in its previous incarnation at the Nomad Hotel, a transformation illusion didn't quite come off—most of the tricks leave you happily agape, especially when performed in such cosy quarters. You'll probably never see a levitation act at such close range, and you may leave feeling a few feet off the ground yourself.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Oliver (Darren Criss) is a Helperbot, and he can’t help himself. A shut-in at his residence for retired androids in a near-future Korea, he functions in a chipper loop of programmatic behavior; every day, he brushes his teeth and eyes, tends to his plant and listens to the retro jazz favored by his former owner, James (Marcus Choi), who he is confident will someday arrive to take him back. More than a decade goes by before his solitary routine is disrupted by Claire (Helen J Shen), a fellow Helperbot from across the hall, who is looking to literally connect and recharge. Will these two droids somehow make a Seoul connection? Can they feel their hearts beep? That is the premise of Will Aronson and Hue Park’s new musical Maybe Happy Ending, and it’s a risky one. The notion of robots discovering love—in a world where nothing lasts forever, including their own obsolescent technologies—could easily fall into preciousness or tweedom. Instead, it is utterly enchanting. As staged by Michael Arden (Parade), Maybe Happy Ending is an adorable and bittersweet exploration of what it is to be human, cleverly channeled through characters who are only just learning what that entails. Maybe Happy Ending | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman In a Broadway landscape dominated by loud adaptations of pre-existing IP, Maybe Happy Ending stands out for both its intimacy and its originality. Arden and his actors approach the material with a delicate touch; they...

For more than two decades, this proudly old-school series has offered a different lineup of professional magicians every week. It's an heir to the vaudeville tradition: Many of the acts incorporate comedic elements, and audience participation is common. (If you have children, bring them; they make especially adorable assistants.) The show has recently moved to the private upstairs dining room at Monte's Trattoria, and the ticket package includes a three-course red-sauce Italian meal. You get a lot of value and variety for your magic dollar, and in contrast to some fancier magic shows, this one feels like comfort food: an all-you-can-eat buffet to which you’re encouraged to return until you’re as stuffed as a hat full of rabbits.

Theater review by Adam Feldman Red alert! Red alert! If you’re the kind of person who frets that jukebox musicals are taking over Broadway, prepare to tilt at the windmill that is the gorgeous, gaudy, spectacularly overstuffed Moulin Rouge! The Musical. Directed with opulent showmanship by Alex Timbers, this adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 movie may be costume jewelry, but its shine is dazzling.  The place is the legendary Paris nightclub of the title, and the year is ostensibly 1899. Yet the songs—like Catherine Zuber’s eye-popping costumes—span some 150 years of styles. Moulin Rouge! begins with a generous slathering of “Lady Marmalade,” belted to the skies by four women in sexy black lingerie, long velvet gloves and feathered headdresses. Soon they yield the stage to the beautiful courtesan Satine (a sublimely troubled Karen Olivo), who makes her grand entrance descending from the ceiling on a swing, singing “Diamonds Are Forever.” She is the Moulin Rouge’s principal songbird, and Derek McLane’s sumptuous gold-and-red set looms around her like a gilded cage. After falling in with a bohemian crowd, Christian (the boyish Aaron Tveit), a budding songwriter from small-town Ohio, wanders into the Moulin Rouge like Orpheus in the demimonde, his cheeks as rosy with innocence as the showgirls’ are blushed with maquillage. As cruel fate would have it, he instantly falls in love with Satine, and she with him—but she has been promised, alas, to the wicked Duke of Monroth (Tam...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! is not just funny: It is dizzyingly, breathtakingly funny, the kind of funny that ambushes your body into uncontained laughter. Stage comedies have become an endangered species in recent decades, and when they do pop up they tend to be the kind of funny that evokes smirks, chuckles or wry smiles of recognition. Not so here: I can’t remember the last time I saw a play that made me laugh, helplessly and loudly, as much as Oh, Mary! did—and my reaction was shared by the rest of the audience, which burst into applause at the end of every scene. Fasten your seatbelts: This 80-minute show is a fast and wild joy ride. Escola has earned a cult reputation as a sly comedic genius in their dazzling solo performances (Help! I’m Stuck!) and on TV shows like At Home with Amy Sedaris, Difficult People and Search Party. But Oh, Mary!, their first full-length play, may surprise even longtime fans. In this hilariously anachronistic historical burlesque, Escola plays—who else?—Mary Todd Lincoln, in the weeks leading up to her husband’s assassination. Boozy, vicious and miserable, the unstable and outrageously contrary Mary is oblivious to the Civil War and hell-bent on achieving stardom as—what else?—a cabaret singer.      Oh, Mary! | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid  Described by the long-suffering President Lincoln as “my foul and hateful wife,” this virago makes her entrance snarling and hunched with fury, desperate to find a...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s fantastical 1891 novel—a gothic meditation on the blurry lines that separate art from life, appearances from reality, body from soul—there's a curious moment when the barrier between Wilde himself and the novel he is writing briefly disappears. “Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not,” he says, departing from third-person narration for the first and only time in the book. “It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.” This revealing blink of an “I” does not make the cut in writer-director Kip Williams’s dynamic stage adaptation of the book, a solo performed with astonishing stamina and skill by Sarah Snook. But it everywhere informs the production’s clever embrace of artifice and self-reproduction as theatrical devices.  One can see the appeal of this show for Snook at this time in her career. It's dangerous for an actor to be too closely associated with a single role, as she is at risk of being for her cracking portrayal of Shiv Roy on HBO’s Succession. What better way to avoid being pigeonholed than to spread her wings across 25 parts at once? In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Snook incarnates the narcissistic title character, the ultimate demon twink, who models for a worshipful portrait by the idealistic painter Basil Hallward. “How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young,” he laments. “If it were only the...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  This show is of a kind that I shall dub an operettical: A British-Broadway hybrid that is cleverly synthetical.It starts with operetta of the comical varietyThat Sullivan and Gilbert wrote to tickle high society.The Pirates of Penzance, a pageant witty and Victorian, Premiered in 1880 on our calendar Gregorian. It still is entertaining but perhaps not in a date-night way; It seems a bit too fusty for revival on the Great White Way. So Rupert Holmes has come along to pump some Broadway jazz in it:To add a little spice and put some Dixieland pizzazz in it.And thanks to these injections, neither rev’rent nor heretical,We now have Holmes’s model for a modern operettical.  Pirates! The Penzance Musical | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus Best known for Drood (and also for his hit “Piña Colada Song”), He hasn’t wrecked the story or egregiously forgot a song. But to ensure the whole endeavor’s jazzier and bluer leans, He takes the show from Cornwall and resets it down in New Orleans.The Crescent City’s sass and brass have quite rejuvenated it As Joe Joubert and Daryl Waters have reorchestrated it.(They’ve also added melodies that never here have been afore,On loan from Iolanthe, The Mikado and from Pinafore.) With silliness and energy the show is chockablock, well-set Amid the brightly colored NOLA streets of David Rockwell’s set. And now that we have looked at questions musico-aesthetical, We move on to the plot of this diverting operettical. ...

Theater review by Adam Feldman [Note: This is a review of the 2017 Broadway production, which moves Off Broadway to New World Stages in 2019 with a new cast.] Ah, the joy of watching theater fail. The looming possibility of malfunction is part of what makes live performance exciting, and disasters remind us of that; the rite requires sacrifice. There is more than schadenfreude involved when we giggle at, say, a YouTube video of a high-school Peter Pan crashing haplessly into the scenery. There is also sympathy—there but for the grace of deus ex machina go we all—and, often, a respect for the efforts of the actors to somehow muddle through. Mischief Theatre’s The Play That Goes Wrong takes this experience to farcical extremes, as six amateur British actors (and two crew members who get pressed into service onstage) try to perform a hackneyed whodunnit amid challenges that escalate from minor mishaps (stuck doors, missed cues) to bona fide medical emergencies and massive structural calamities.  Depending on your tolerance for ceaseless slapstick, The Play That Goes Wrong will either have you rolling in the aisles or rolling your eyes. It is certainly a marvel of coordination: The imported British cast deftly navigates the pitfalls of Nigel Hook’s ingeniously tumbledown set, and overacts with relish. (I especially enjoyed the muggings of Dave Hearn, Charlie Russell and coauthor Henry Lewis.) Directed by Mark Bell, the mayhem goes like cuckoo clockwork.  If you want to have a...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The Jasper family home in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s great American play Purpose announces what it is right away: the setting for a classic drawing-room drama. On one side is a dining table, where food is sure to come with a fight; an elegant doorway is on the other, and a giant staircase winds down the middle. Since the Jaspers are modeled closely on the family of Jesse Jackson, Todd Rosenthal’s set also serves as an exquisitely curated museum of Black pride: elegant African statues and textiles, historical photos on clay-orange walls, a painting of Martin Luther King Jr. presiding over all. This is the image the Jaspers present to the world, and to some extent to themselves. Entering their company, it’s hard, as one character observes, to avoid “being all dazzled by all the Symbolic Blackness before you—so blinded by the Black Excellence, Black Power, Black Righteousness.”  In his trenchant Appropriate, which was expertly revived on Broadway last year, Jacobs-Jenkins depicted a white Southern family with an outsider’s eye for the characters’ self-deceptions. This time, his call-outs are coming from inside the house. The Jaspers, like the Jacksons, have issues. The family patriarch, Solomon (Radio Golf’s tall, strapping Harry Lennix), is a major figure in Civil Rights history whose hopes for a dynasty have crumbled, and who now glowers like a lion licking his paws. As in medieval times, his elder son was groomed to inherit his mantle and his...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman Just when you think you’ve figured out what Broadway is throwing at you, along comes a late-breaking curveball. Real Women Have Curves is the final show of the 2024–25 season, and it really is a ball: a joyful night of music and celebration. In many ways, this is a traditional Broadway musical—energetic, melodious, familiarly constructed—that honors traditional American values like loving your family, helping your community and working tirelessly to succeed as an entrepreneur. But since most of its characters are undocumented Latina immigrants to Los Angeles, Real Women is also, unexpectedly, the most relevant musical of the year.  Inspired by Josefina López's 1990 play and its 2002 film adaptation, Real Women Have Curves is set in 1987, well before the recent anti-immigrant scourge of ICE storms. Ana (Tatianna Córdoba) is a bright young woman who has been accepted to Columbia University, but is afraid to tell that to her mother, Carmen (Justina Machado); as a natural born American citizen, Ana plays an essential role in navigating the law on behalf of the dressmaking business that her older sister, Estela (Florencia Cuenca), has started with the family’s life savings. Although she is confident about her brains, Ana is less secure about her heavyset body, and Carmen isn’t encouraging on either account. (“You know what your problem is? You’re too smart,” she says. “This is why she don’t got no boyfriend. This and maybe ten…fifteen pounds.”) ...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman Who doesn’t enjoy a royal wedding? The zingy Broadway musical Six celebrates, in boisterous fashion, the union of English dynastic history and modern pop music. On a mock concert stage, backed by an all-female band, the six wives of the 16th-century monarch Henry VIII air their grievances in song, and most of them have plenty to complain about: two were beheaded, two were divorced, one died soon after childbirth. In this self-described “histo-remix,” members of the long-suffering sextet spin their pain into bops; the queens sing their heads off and the audience loses its mind.  That may be for the best, because Six is not a show that bears too much thinking about. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss wrote it when they were still students at Cambridge University, and it has the feel of a very entertaining senior showcase. Its 80 minutes are stuffed with clever turns of rhyme and catchy pastiche melodies that let mega-voiced singers toss off impressive “riffs to ruffle your ruffs.” The show's own riffs on history are educational, too, like a cheeky new British edition of Schoolhouse Rock. If all these hors d’oeuvres don’t quite add up to a meal, they are undeniably tasty. Aside from the opening number and finale and one detour into Sprockets–style German club dancing, Six is devoted to giving each of the queens—let’s call them the Slice Girls—one moment apiece in the spotlight, decked out in glittering jewel-encrusted outfits by Gabriella Slade that are...

Review by Adam Feldman  The low-key dazzling Speakeasy Magick has been nestled in the atmospheric McKittrick Hotel for more than a year, and now it has moved up to the Lodge: a small wood-framed room at Gallow Green, which functions as a rooftop bar in the summer. The show’s dark and noisy new digs suit it well. Hosted by Todd Robbins (Play Dead), who specializes in mild carnival-sideshow shocks, Speakeasy Magick is a moveable feast of legerdemain; audience members, seated at seven tables, are visited by a series of performers in turn. Robbins describes this as “magic speed dating.” One might also think of it as tricking: an illusion of intimacy, a satisfying climax, and off they go into the night. The evening is punctuated with brief performances on a makeshift stage. When I attended, the hearty Matthew Holtzclaw kicked things off with sleight of hand involving cigarettes and booze; later, the delicate-featured Alex Boyce pulled doves from thin air. But it’s the highly skilled close-up magic that really leaves you gasping with wonder. Holtzclaw’s table act comes to fruition with a highly effective variation on the classic cups-and-balls routine; the elegant, Singapore-born Prakash and the dauntingly tattooed Mark Calabrese—a razor of a card sharp—both find clever ways to integrate cell phones into their acts. Each performer has a tight 10-minute act, and most of them are excellent, but that’s the nice thing about the way the show is structured: If one of them happens to...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  In the 1950 film masterpiece Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood glamour is a dead-end street. Stalled there with no one coming to find her—except perhaps to use her car—is Norma Desmond: a former silent-screen goddess who is now all but forgotten. Secluded and deluded, she haunts her own house and plots her grand return to the pictures; blinded by the spotlight in her mind, she is unaware that what she imagines to be a hungry audience out there in the dark is really just the dark.  One of the ironies built into Billy Wilder’s film, which he co-wrote with Charles Brackett, is that there really was an audience in the dark watching Norma: the audience of Sunset Boulevard itself, whom Norma is effectively addressing directly in her operatic final mad scene. That slippage between the real and the imaginary is even more pronounced in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1993 musical adaptation of the story, by dint of its being performed live onstage. And Jamie Lloyd’s very meta and very smart Broadway revival of the show—which stars the utterly captivating Nicole Scherzinger as Norma and Tom Francis as Joe Gillis, the handsome sell-out screenwriter drawn into her web—pushes it even further through the prominent use of live video. The tension between the real and the imaginary is expanded to include a mediating element: the filmic, whose form can range from documentary to dreamscape.  Thus described, Lloyd’s approach may sound academic—but in practice, it is often...

Theater review by Adam Feldman Some of the best ensemble acting in town is currently at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, which is remarkable not because of the material—Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya has always been a great piece for ensembles—but because it’s a one-man show. That’s perhaps slightly less surprising if you know that the man in question is the extraordinary Andrew Scott, who has played roles as varied as the wicked Moriarty on Sherlock, the titular sociopath on Ripley, the sensitive gay writer in All of Us Strangers and, of course, Fleabag's Hot Priest. But none of these performances, by themselves, can prepare you for the gorgeous finesse with which he shuffles the roles in Vanya. The dexterity of his hand is equaled by the gentleness of his touch.  In adapting Chekhov’s 1897 tragicomedy for solo performance, playwright Simon Stephens (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) has also moved its time and place, Anglicizing the characters’ names and transporting them, if not quite to the present, then to some point in the '80s (to judge by the tech they use). Many modern versions of Uncle Vanya—including last year’s revival at Lincoln Center and Richard Nelson’s in 2018—are set in recent times, but Stephens reimagines the world of the play more thoroughly than most, while retaining its essential qualities. For example: Aleksandr, the pompous and gouty professor of the original, is now Alexander, a pompous and gouty film director; the bitter title character,...

Wicked divided critics when it opened in 2003, but it's still transporting audiences today. A revisionist prequel to The Wizard of Oz, the show traces the radicalization of the green-skinned outsider Elphaba in a land where propaganda and repression are on the rise. Winnie Holzman's book, adapted from Gregory Maguire's much darker novel, smartly focuses on our witchy heroine's unlikely friendship with her more socially capable schoolmate, Glinda. Joe Mantello's direction is appropriately wondrous, and when Stephen Schwartz's pop-Broadway score flies, it flies high. The current cast includes Lencia Kebede as Elphaba and Allie Trimm as Glinda.