Things to do near the Empire State Building

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  How well do you know Sean Hayes? You probably think of him as a master of broad comedy, as he demonstrated in 11 seasons as Jack on Will & Grace (and as Jerry in Martin and Lewis and Larry in The Three Stooges). Maybe you enjoy his good-natured enthusiasm on the podcast Smartless. Maybe you saw him quip, scowl and play classical piano in his Tony-winning portrayal of Oscar Levant in Broadway’s Good Night, Oscar. Even so, you might still be surprised by how well he plays a basically regular guy in The Unknown: Elliott, a somewhat isolated, somewhat depressed, mostly sober middle-aged writer who has been having a hard time devising a screenplay, perhaps because his own life has so little drama.   David Cale’s one-man play whips some up for him. While clearing his head at a rural retreat, Elliott hears someone singing a love song about romantic disappointment—a song that Elliott wrote years earlier for a musical. When he returns to the city, a seemingly chance encounter with a handsome Texan at a West Village gay bar leads to a growing fear that he is being shadowed by a marginal figure from his past—and/or, perhaps, by that man’s identical twin. On Hayes’s old sitcom, this scenario might have been played for laughs: Jack and the Bein’ Stalked. Instead, it spirals into a dark-hued exploration of obsession and the porous line that separates life from art.  The Unknown | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid Elliott's journey, however, doesn’t...

Theater review by Adam Feldman  In times of tyranny, there can also be resistance, and in times of resistance, there is always Antigone. The title character of Sophocles’s ancient tragedy refuses to accept a decree by her uncle Creon, the king of Thebes, that the corpse of her rebellious brother should be left unburied for beasts to devour; and the unbending Creon, who thinks the young lady protests too much, confines her to die in a cave. This mythic tale continues to resonate, and it has now inspired two concurrent Off Broadway adaptations. The first of them, imported by the Shed after premiering at London's National Theatre, is Alexander Zeldin's The Other Place; the other play is Anna Ziegler’s Antigone (This Play I Read in High School), which hits the Public later this month.  Like Robert Icke in Oedipus and Simon Stone in Medea, writer-director Zeldin squeezes the old story into a mold of contemporary psychodrama. Creon is now Chris (Tobias Menzies), who has been working with his new wife, Erica (Lorna Brown), to renovate his late brother’s house; they have opened up the living room by knocking down one wall and installing sliding glass doors in another, filling a symbolically dark and secretive space with equally symbolic sunlight. He also plans to disperse his brother’s crematory ashes outdoors—a plan that does not sit well with his niece Annie (House of the Dragon’s Emma D’Arcy), a bisexual drifter who has gone off the grid and, apparently, her meds. Although...

Theater review by Raven Snook The Irish writer-performer Mary Kate O Flanagan calls storytelling her religion, and her life-affirming solo performance Making a Show of Myself is sure to win her some acolytes. A screenwriter and script editor by trade, O Flanagan was inspired to spin her own yarns by the storytelling group the Moth, under whose auspices she has become the only person to win GrandSLAM Moth championships on two continents. On a bare stage against a dark curtain, clothed in a casual black ensemble that offsets her unruly red curls, O Flanagan recounts true tales from her life with an openness and intimacy that invites the audience to lean in and listen. Making a Show of Myself | Photograph: Courtesy Carol Rosegg The six smartly chosen anecdotes that make up the show vary in length, tone and subject matter: dating, coming of age, human connection, death. Together they conjure an amusing and moving portrait of the artist and her tight-knit family. The sections about how her mother and, later, O Flanagan herself helped strangers in need are especially poignant; they serve as uplifting reminders of the power of compassion in times of oppression and violence. In deference to the oral tradition, and to keep her tales flexible and fresh, O Flanagan has not made her stories into a set script, which surely presented a challenge for Will O'Connell, her director and dramaturg. O’Connell has given O Flanagan a bit of blocking, especially during brief interstitial...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The story of Chess dates back to the 1980s, and so do the efforts to fix it. This overheated Cold War musical, by lyricist Tim Rice and ABBA songsmiths Benny Anderson and Björn Ulvaeus, began as a 1984 concept album (which yielded the unlikely radio hit “One Night in Bangkok”). But its original London production was a mess, and its 1988 Broadway incarnation, which framed the songs in a completely new book, closed in under two months. The script has been reworked countless times since then, as different writers keep moving its pieces around, trying to solve the large set of Chess problems. None have cracked it yet, and the show’s latest revisal, with yet another completely new book, inspires little hope that anyone will.  Chess | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy “No one’s way of life is threatened by a flop,” sings the chorus in what is now the show’s opening number, and while that sentiment has a ring of wishful thinking here, it does speak to a certain strain of showtune culture. Many musicals that are not initially successful attract passionate fandoms—perhaps all the more passionate for their underdog spirit—and subsequent versions of such shows are sometimes markedly better (like the recent revival of Merrily We Roll Along or the charming current production of The Baker’s Wife). That is not the case with Chess. The production at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre, directed by Michael Mayer, has plenty of good moves. Memorable and tuneful...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  [Note: Jinkx Monsoon plays the role of Mary Todd Lincoln through September 30, joined by new cast members Kumail Nanjiani, Michael Urie and Jenn Harris. Jane Krakowski assumes the central role on October 14.] 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,...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  “A paranoid might be defined as someone who has some idea as to what is actually going on,” said William S. Burroughs in a 1970 interview. Viewed from the outside, it might seem that Peter (Pass Over’s Namir Smallwood), an itinerant Army veteran, is out of his mind when he talks about the infinitesimal aphids hiding in his body and transmitting surveillance data to the government. But he knows what he knows. He can see the tiny insects. He can feel the hum of the machines at night. He has been through the sinister experiments; he has learned of the Oosterbeek consortium. And while most people don’t believe him, at least one does: Agnes (the riveting Carrie Coon), a fortysomething divorcée who lives in a seedy motel on the edge of Oklahoma City. Others may dismiss Peter’s knowledge as a disease, but not Agnes. Agnes gets it.  Bug | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Tracy Letts’s engrossing and unsettling 1996 psycho-thriller Bug—which ran Off Broadway in 2004 and has now returned at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre—puts social contagion under the microscope with a mounting sense of dread. The lonely and isolated Agnes is especially vulnerable to Peter’s totalizing suspicion. She has good reason to be afraid: Her violent ex-husband, Jerry (Steve Key), has just been sprung from prison, and has made it clear that intends to get her back. She spends her free time emptying bottles of wine and snorting or freebasing coke with...

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  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...

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 Adam Feldman  Deep into the new musical The Outsiders, there is a sequence that is rawer and more pulse-pounding than anything else on Broadway right now. It’s halfway through the second act, and the simmering animosity between opposing youths in 1967 Tulsa—the poor, scrappy Greasers and the rich, mean Socs (short for socialites)—has come to a violent boil. The two groups square off in rumble, trading blows as rain pours from the top of the stage, just as it did in the most recent Broadway revival of West Side Story. The music stops, the lighting flashes, and before long it is hard to tell which figures onstage, caked in mud and blood, belong to one side or the other. This scene succeeds for many reasons: the stark power of the staging by director Danya Taymor and choreographers Rick and Jeff Kuperman; the aptness of the confusion, which dramatizes the pointlessness of the gangs’ mutual hostility; the talent and truculent pulchritude of the performers. But it may also be significant that the rumble contains no dialogue or songs. Elsewhere, despite some lovely music and several strong performances, The Outsiders tends to attenuate the characters and situations it draws from S.E. Hinton’s popular young-adult novel and its 1982 film adaptation. Action, in this show, speaks better than words.  The Outsiders | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Like Hinton’s novel, which she wrote when she was a teenager herself, The Outsiders is narrated by the 14-year-old...