Things to do near the Empire State Building

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...

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo In the 1925 court case United States v. Cartozian, the U.S. government sued to revoke the citizenship of a man named Tatos Cartozian, on the grounds that Armenians like him weren’t white. The Armenian-American playwright Talene Monahon has now worked that story into Meet the Cartozians, a sprawling, fascinating work of historical fiction that examines ethnicity, history and family legacy.  Monahon’s century-jumping play begins in 1923—not long after the Armenian genocide during World War I—in a stately Oregon home where the Cartozians’ high-priced lawyer, Wallace McCamant (Will Brill), is meeting with the family: Tatos (Nael Nacer, wonderfully reserved), his proper daughter (Tamara Sevunts, excellent), his boisterous son (Raffi Barsoumian) and his judgmental mother (the incomparable Andrea Martin, whose first line, “Mmhmm,” nearly brings down the house). McCamant has found anthropologists who will trace the Armenians’ origins to the Caucasus mountains (“the origins of the white race”) and praise “to the terrific tendency of Armenians to intermingle and procreate with white populations all over the world.” McCamant also plans to bring in “excellent Armenians” from the East Coast, who have light blue eyes and speak perfect English: “These folks have married into society. They belong to golf clubs, their children attend good schools.” That strategy may seem ludicrous today—not to mention troubling—but with citizenship at stake, does it...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Sophocles’s Oedipus is a story of blind ambition: the cautionary tale of a proud ancient Greek ruler whose determination to avoid a terrible fate leads him into it headlong. There are no kings in the English playwright-director Robert Icke’s modernized 2018 adaptation of the play, written ”(long) after Sophocles,” as the script jokingly notes. Icke’s Oedipus (Mark Strong) is a star politician instead, with resemblances to several other 2010s leaders. Like Barack Obama, he is an inspirational family man derided by some as a foreigner; like Donald Trump, he’s a populist outsider who promises strong leadership; and like France’s Emmanuel Macron, he shares a scandalous past with his significantly older wife. On the verge of winning power, Oedipus presents himself as the bald, muscular, tough-talking hero-daddy his rudderless country needs: the reformist politician as badass motherfucker. Which in a tragic sense—spoiler alert—he already is.  Oedipus | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes Oedipus is not really about the fall of a great man; rather, it’s about a great man coming to realize that he has already fallen. It is election night, the TV screen blinks with news, and Oedipus is surrounded by his family: his studious daughter Antigone (the lovely and sympathetic Olivia Reis); his twin sons, the sweet Polyneices (James Wilbraham) and the rakish Eteocles (Jordan Scowen); his sturdy old mum, Merope (Anne Reid, tasty as a crust of bread),...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Ver-sigh. The biggest new musical of the fall arrives on a wave of high hopes, thanks to its promising main assets: music and lyrics by the veteran hitmaker Stephen Schwartz, in his first original Broadway score since Wicked; a starring role for Kristin Chenoweth, one of musical theater’s great leading ladies, as the Florida socialite Jackie Siegel, a walking symbol of American excess; the creative talents of director Michael Arden and set designer Dane Laffrey, who have been on quite a roll; and, in Lauren Greenfield’s 2012 documentary about the Siegel family, a source with rich potential for adaptation. Like the 90,000–square-foot, $100-million palace that the Siegels are determined to build for themselves in Orlando, The Queen of Versailles is nothing if not ambitious. But like that same palace, it also feels misguided and very much still under construction. The Queen of Versailles | Photograph: Julieta Cervantes The underlying problem is that QOV doesn’t have a clear POV. Greenfield’s film is always alert to the grotesque disconnect between the Siegels’ lives of wasteful extravagance and the financial struggles of the employees in their orbit, including the nannies who care for their eight children. It is also a cautionary tale: Midway through the movie, the financial crisis of 2008 pulls the ornate rug out from under the Siegels’ empire and plunges Jackie’s future into uncertainty. What happens to a trophy wife when the shelf...

Theater review by Adam Feldman  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 revised 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, including the roof. To help sustain the atmosphere and the sense of event, audience members must wear black, white or silver...

You’ll get a kick out of this holiday stalwart, which still features Santa, wooden soldiers and the dazzling Rockettes. In recent years, new music, more eye-catching costumes and advanced technology have been introduced to bring audience members closer to the performance. In the signature kick line that finds its way into most of the big dance numbers, the Rockettes’ 36 pairs of legs rise and fall like the batting of an eyelash, their perfect unison a testament to the disciplined human form. This is precision dancing on a massive scale—a Busby Berkeley number come to glorious life—and it takes your breath away. RECOMMENDED: How to get tickets to the Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes

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  Vulnerability comes hard to Ethan (Micah Stock), a blocked gay writer in his 30s. He is a wounded soul, prickly and sour, with a defensive armor forged from serial abandonment: by his mother, who left when he was a child; by his father, a meth addict; and by his aunt, Sarah (Laurie Metcalf), whom he resents for not having done more to help. Sarah is a fortress unto her own: a gristly nurse at the end of her career who has moved to a very small town to be alone. (“Just—suits me better. Not being around—people.”) But when the two wind up sharing a home during the 2020 Covid shutdown, their mutual tenderness grows as they tough it out, filling time and space that otherwise feel emptier than ever.  Little Bear Ridge Road | Photograph: Julieta Cervantes This is the universe of Samuel D. Hunter’s Little Bear Ridge Road, a gorgeous new drama whose touching central relationship coexists with a larger exploration of the intimate and cosmic. Hunter's clear-eyed portraits of pain and grace—including Greater Clements, Grangeville, The Few, The Harvest and The Whale—have consistently brightened Off Broadway seasons for the past 15 years. This production, directed with superb acerbity by Joe Mantello, marks the playwright's overdue Broadway debut, and it doesn’t disappoint. The play is a multifaceted gem, exquisitely shaped and cut, that shines out from the simplest of settings (designed by Scott Pask): a large greige recliner couch, set on a disc...

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  But is it art? That is the question, familiar to students of 20th-century aesthetics, that hangs at the center of the French playwright Yasmina Reza’s 1994 comedy of manners and men. Serge (Neil Patrick Harris) has paid a fortune for a large painting, by a celebrated artist named Antrios, that is almost totally white. His old friend Marc (Bobby Cannavale) is outraged by this purchase, which he considers a grave insult to common sense and, by extension, to his own good influence. Their perpetually flustered common pal Yvan (James Corden), caught in the middle, tries in vain to accommodate them both while retaining their love, as though mommy and daddy were getting a divorce.  Even in 1998, when Art debuted on Broadway, this framework was more than a little passé, rehearsing arguments about modern art that probably peaked around 1965. In the play’s current Broadway mounting, directed by Scott Ellis, those discussions seem even quainter—and all but irrelevant to the seismic gaps that have opened up in recent years. This iteration is ostensibly set in the U.S., so the francs of the original have been exchanged for dollars, but the names and the overall sensibility remain quite French (with a twist of British via Christopher Hampton’s translation). If you squint very hard, you may make out faint suggestions of contemporary American resonance—in Marc’s blustering contempt for elite tastes, for example, or Serge’s dismissal of him as a “nostalgia...