Things to do in New York this week: Critics' picks

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...

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...

Theater review by Adam Feldman  [Related: An in-depth discussion of Masquerade wth director Diane Paulus on Time Out's theater podcast, Sitting Ovations.] Ever since the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical The Phantom of the Opera hung up its mask in 2023, after a record 35-year run on Broadway, the show’s ardent admirers (there are packs of them) have been wishing it were somehow here again. And now it is—with an emphasis on somehow. The revisal of Phantom now playing Off Broadway as Masquerade has been significantly altered to fit a very different form: an immersive experience, à la Sleep No More, in which audiences are led en masque through multiple locations in a midtown complex designed to evoke the 19th-century Paris Opera House where soprano Christine Daaé is tutored and stalked by the facially misshapen serial killer who lives in the basement. The very notion of this reimagining—created by Lloyd Webber and director Diane Paulus, from a concept by Randy Weiner—is surprising; perhaps even more surprising is that, somehow, they pull it off.  Masquerade | Photograph: Courtesy Oscar Ouk The complexity of the enterprise is staggering. Six groups of 60 spectators at a time enter the building at 15-minute intervals; each group gets its own Phantom and Christine, but the other actors repeat their roles multiple times a night. The spectators are guided by the stern ballet mistress Madame Giry through a multitude of discrete playing spaces on floors throughout the complex,...

Manhattan Theatre Club continues its long and fruitful relationship with the excellent playwright David Lindsay-Abaire (Kimberly Akimbo) by mounting the world premiere of his latest play: a comedy about a neighborhood association thrown into internecine turmoil when a newcomer suggests adding a stop sign to one of the local corners. The killer emsemble cast—directed by Kenny Leon (Purlie Victorious)—comprises Richard Thomas, Anika Noni Rose, Margaret Colin, Ricardo Chavira, Michael Esper, Maria-Christina Oliveras, Carl Clemons-Hopkins, Jeena Yi, Kayli Carter and the priceless Marylouise Burke. Read the full review here. 

One salutary recent trend has been the Broadway premieres of major 21st century plays that had previously only been seen Off Broadway. The latest is Gina Gionfriddo's blind-date-gone-wrong comedy, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer that was initially mounted in New York by Second Stage and that is returning in a larger venue under the aegis of the same company. The cast of five, directed by Trip Cullman (Significant Other), includes Madeline Brewer, Lauren Patten, Alden Ehrenreich, Patrick Ball and stage marvel Linda Emond. Read the full review here.

Theater review by Raven Snook Lick it up, baby: The high-school-is-hell musical Heathers is back to take another shot at being popular. In case you are unfamiliar with either the 1989 movie or its 2014 musical adaptation, the story centers on not-so-mean girl Veronica Sawyer (played here by & Juliet's Lorna Courtney), who's doing her best to survive the indignities of 1980s adolescence in Ohio. In a bid for social stature, she falls into the orbit of three beautiful bullies, all of whom are named Heather. But when Veronica meets J.D. (Casey Likes)—a mysterious rebel in a trench coat and mullet—she starts dreaming of freeing Westerburg High School from the Heathers’ well-manicured talons. What she doesn’t know, at least at first, is that J.D. is not just a bad boy, but a truly bad seed. Like the film, which developed a fervid Gen X cult following, Heathers The Musical needed time to catch on. Although its initial Off Broadway run at New World Stages lasted only a few months, it has since become a hit in the U.K., where it has had multiple West End productions; and thanks to a decade of cast recordings and TikToks, it has spawned legions of Gen Z fans, dubbed Corn Nuts after one character's dying words. The musical has even managed to win over some cynical fans of the darker-hued film, including me, who didn’t like it at first pass; I've come to appreciate its lighter, pop earworm–driven take. (Veronica and J.D.'s teenage angst still has a body count, but when the victims...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  [Note: Maya Rudolph plays the role of Mary Todd Lincoln through June 20, joined by Phillip James Brannon, Cheyenne Jackson and original cast members Bianca Leigh and Tony Macht.] 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...

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...

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...

Theater review by Raven Snook If you feel stressed and overworked, the members of the Australian performance collective Pony Cam can relate. Burnout Paradise is their way of transforming the Sisyphean hamster wheel of modern life into exhilarating entertainment. As an onstage clock ticks down, four athletic actors—some of them noticeably injured—attempt to complete a series of tasks while running on treadmills. Their assignments range from the everyday (shaving, waxing, shampooing) to the much more ambitious (performing Shakespeare, filling out a grant application, cooking a three-course meal). Straining to do it all, they depend on audience volunteers to help out by retrieving stray tomatoes, playing bingo, shooting hoops, even dancing at an impromptu rave. Burnout Paradise | Photograph: Courtesy Austin Ruffer On paper, Burnout Paradise may seem like a show that, as though on a treadmill itself, is fated to go nowhere. But in practice, it is both an amusing indictment of our soul-crushing go-go-go ethos and a gleeful conjuring of community. Those who choose to take part in the challenges seem to have a blast; even just watching, you find yourself surprisingly invested in the ever-mounting chaos. Organized into four 12-minute rounds, the show has the electric suspense of a sporting event: Will the performers complete their assignments and beat their record mileage before the buzzer sounds? If they don't, you can ask for a full refund, though it’s hard to imagine you’ll...