Things to do in New York this Friday

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  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...

Writers Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley and director Rory Pelsue are the Fake Friends gang behind 2020's uproarious Circle Jerk, a Charles Ludlam–style satirical farce about technology and white supremacy that was a surprise finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Expect wild things from their follow-up at the New Group: an original musical that envisions a trio of Gen Zers on a quest to track down a missing pop star from the 2000s. The cast of the world premiere includes Sara Gettelfinger, Natalie Walker, Patrick Nathan Falk, Keri René Fuller, Luke Islam and the distinctive Milly Shapiro, who shared an honorary 2013 Tony Award for Matilda and famously lost her head in Hereditary.

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...

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. ...

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  More than a century has gone by since an unfortunate Kentucky spelunker named Floyd Collins, in search of money and glory, made national headlines by getting trapped in a subterranean cavern. “I just know it’s my lucky day!” sings Floyd—played by a hale and hearty Jeremy Jordan—irresistibly tempting the gods of dramatic irony as he grapples through the dark at the start of the musical bearing his name. “There’s a kind of awe / You can’t catch in a photograph,” he continues. “S’like a giant jaw / It’s calling me.” But when he heeds that call, the jaw snaps shut: A passageway collapses and he’s pinned there by debris, all but sealed in a cave of wonders where no amount of wishing can save him. From this point on, there is nowhere for Floyd Collins, or Floyd Collins, to go.  Floyd Collins | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus Musical theater tends to be dynamic, but Tina Landau, as a writer, seems more interested in stasis. In her new musical Redwood, which opened on Broadway in February, grief drives a woman up a tree; in Floyd Collins, which premiered in 1996, dreams strand a man underground. (Landau wrote the show’s book and additional lyrics, and directed its original production as well as its current one at Lincoln Center.) Both pieces examine a person fixed in place within a vast natural world, but in neither case is the central figure’s interior journey compelling enough to justify the lack of plot. What this one has that the other one...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The scene most closely associated with David Mamet’s electric 1983 drama Glengarry Glen Ross is probably the “Always Be Closing” tirade delivered by Alec Baldwin in the 1992 film adaptation: a brutal dressing-down of the salesmen in his scammy real-estate operation, including some veteran sellers who may have forgotten their ABCs. The ongoing resonance of that movie, especially for straight guys, is surely one reason that Mamet’s play keeps returning to the stage in major productions. Glengarry is now being mounted on Broadway for the third time in 20 years; only Macbeth, another brief play about cutthroat ambition, has been revived on Broadway more often in this century. (The most revived musical, Gypsy, is also about strivers.) And it will keep coming back as long as there’s money to be made on it. Glengarry Glen Ross: Always be opening.  Funnily enough, Baldwin’s corporate-taskmaster character and his famous speech do not appear in the stage version of Glengarry Glen Ross; Mamet added them for his screenplay. If that’s a bit of a bait-and-switch for fans of the movie, well, that’s what Glengarry is about: Everyone in the real-estate office is peddling the unreal—trying to pull a fast one, sometimes more than one at once. I’ve occasionally wondered why Mamet hasn’t added the lecture scene to the play, which is not exactly too long as it stands; even including an intermission after the 35-minute first act, it’s still not much more than an...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Good Night, and Good Luck is a 2005 film about the 1950s TV journalist Edward R. Murrow and his contretemps with the red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, who have now adapted it—albeit barely—for the stage. The Broadway version, starring Clooney as Murrow and directed by the expert David Cromer, is in many ways unobjectionable. It is well designed and full of fine actors doing their jobs. Its subject is timely and its message is on point, and there’s no good reason to see it. Nevertheless: Because it stars Clooney, in his Broadway debut and his first professional stage appearance in 40 years, the production is now the highest-grossing show on Broadway, with a weekly take exceeding $3 million. The best third of the seats in the Winter Garden Theatre start at $799 a pop; the worst seats, with partial views on the far sides of the mezzanine, are a mere $176. Good night, nurse! Such is the nature of the marketplace, but consumers should be warned that nothing in this production is better than what you can get at home by renting the movie for $3.99.  Good Night, and Good Luck | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid That’s because, in nearly every regard, Clooney and Heslov have just plopped their screenplay onstage and called it a play. Presented live on Broadway, Good Night, and Good Luck is still a 2005 film about the 1950s TV journalist Edward R. Murrow. One central character has been cut for...