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☆ ‘Infinite Life’ Review: Is There a Cure for Pain and Desire?
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-12 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

But if you think you see where that’s going, you will be both right and wrong; Baker’s structures are so strong and yet open that, within them, anything or its opposite may happen at any moment. “Infinite Life” (a co-production with Britain’s National Theater) gets that and more from James Macdonald, who has notably staged plays by Baker in London and by the British playwright Caryl Churchill here in New York. Indeed, “Infinite Life” most closely reminded me of Churchill’s great “Escaped Alone,” in which four women sit in a garden chatting into the apocalypse. They are all expressions of Baker’s refusal to reduce the world to a unitary lesson; “Infinite Life” offers moral philosophy but no moral. Which, by the way, is what “Daniel Deronda,” past page 152, is about — and “Infinite Life” is always.

Persons: James Macdonald, Baker, Caryl Churchill, “, Macdonald, Tennessee Williams, Albee, Nielsen, Ásta Bennie Hostetter, Birdsong, Bray, Isabella Byrd’s, ” Sofi, Daniel Deronda, Linda Gross Organizations: Britain’s, New York, Linda, Linda Gross Theater Locations: London, British, New York, Tennessee, Manhattan

☆ Have You Met My Collaborator? He’s So Classic, He’s Dead.
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-05 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

On Broadway, Off Broadway, in special events and out of town, living authors are collaborating with dead ones. Some otherwise viable shows, like “Annie Get Your Gun,” need surgery because their racial or gender assumptions are now unacceptable. Others, like “Show Boat,” are merely falling out of copyright, with heirs eager to find a way to remonetize their property. And some — well one — are “Here We Are,” the musical Stephen Sondheim was working on when he died in November 2021. Directed by Joe Mantello and with a book by the comic playwright David Ives, it will reflect a very unusual collaboration indeed.

Persons: Amber Ruffin, Oz, Richard LaGravenese, Daniel Koa Beaty, John O’Hara’s, “ Pal Joey ”, Rodgers, Hart, John Weidman’s revisal, Annie, Stephen Sondheim, Michael Paulson, Sondheim, Luis Buñuel, ”, Joe Mantello, David Ives

☆ Review: In Central Park, ‘The Tempest’ Sings Farewell to Magic
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-31 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

“The isle is full of noises,” sings Caliban, and on Tuesday night it certainly was. Yet all of them melted away, as they usually do, at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where the Public Theater’s new musical version of “The Tempest” was giving its opening-night performance. “The Tempest” makes for a fitting farewell, having opened the series, in a different adaptation, in 2013. That “Tempest” introduced the innovative Public Works idea: civic theater made for everyone, with members of local community organizations performing alongside professional actors. He must also release from servitude his chief sprite, Ariel, and his monstrous slave, Caliban.

Persons: ”, birdsong, Benjamin Velez, Laurie Woolery, pang, Shakespeare, Prospero, Miranda Organizations: Helicopters, Public Locations: Manhattan, Central Park

☆ Review: Is William Finn’s ‘A New Brain’ a Stroke of Genius?
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-24 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

First comes the piano, then the bed. In between, in Barrington Stage Company’s revival of “A New Brain,” a dejected man named Gordon Schwinn plunks out the first halting notes of a song he’s writing. In this musical, with songs by William Finn and a book by him and James Lapine, the prominence of the piano and the bed is no accident; they are the poles of Schwinn’s, or any artist’s, existence. For “A New Brain,” first seen at Lincoln Center Theater in 1998, Finn shaped the givens of his idiosyncratic songwriting style and of the stroke that nearly killed him in 1992 into a show that somehow transcends both. If you could never mistake its silliness and sadness for anyone else’s work, you could never miss, in its intimations of mortality, how it inevitably speaks to everyone.

Persons: ”, Gordon Schwinn plunks, William Finn, James Lapine, Finn, givens Organizations: Lincoln Center Theater Locations: Barrington

☆ Review: A Bloodless Postscript to ‘Jaws’ in ‘The Shark Is Broken’
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-10 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

For nine weeks in 1974, off the shore of Martha’s Vineyard, the shooting of “Jaws” was repeatedly delayed by the whims of its temperamental stars. Bruce was the name given to the three mechanical predators built to simulate the great white shark at the heart of the story. Occasionally they wondered if it might not have been better to train an actual great white for the role. After seeing “The Shark Is Broken,” a play about that disastrous shoot, you may wonder the opposite: whether it might not have been better to cast the movie with mechanical humans. All of that is faithfully rendered in “The Shark Is Broken,” which opened on Thursday at the Golden Theater, in a production directed by Guy Masterson.

Persons: ”, Bruce, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider bickered, Guy Masterson, There’s, Duncan Henderson, Adam Cork, John Williams’s Locations: Martha’s

☆ Can These Three Much-Loved Musicals Ever Be Truly Revived?
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-08 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Like the movie, it was a blast, even if its satire, coming from all directions, seemed to have no target. (Much of what it pokes fun at are the conventions of musicals themselves.) Last year at Stratford, “The Rocky Horror Show” suffered from a similar problem — but recent Stratford productions of “Chicago,” “The Music Man” and “Guys and Dolls” (all directed and choreographed by Donna Feore) did not. (We’ll have a chance to find out with the arrival of a completely different “Spamalot” revival on Broadway this fall.) Maybe comedy needs to skip a few generations until minds that know nothing of migratory coconuts can test its enduring worth.

Persons: ”, Donna Feore, Lezlie Wade, Jesse Robb, “ Spamalot ” Organizations: “ Locations: Stratford, “, “ Chicago

☆ ‘Back to the Future’ Review: The DeLorean Crash Lands on Broadway
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-03 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The brand-extension musical is a tough genre to game, demanding something new for newcomers yet fidelity for fans. “Back to the Future: The Musical,” based on the first of the time-travel films in the billion-dollar franchise, faces an additional hurdle: It hinges on a star performance that would seem to be irreproducible onstage. And by star, I of course mean the car. Alas, that also describes the rest of the show, directed by John Rando with Doc-like frenzy: mechanical, busy, distracting, foggy. Though large, it’s less a full-scale new work than a semi-operable souvenir.

Persons: ”, Marty McFly, Casey, Doc Brown, Roger Bart, John Rando Organizations: DeLorean

☆ Review: Young Bros and Maidens Harmonize in ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-27 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

And this production, directed by Amanda Dehnert for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, intensifies the youth-crush factor with 10 emo songs. Let’s start with the charming: The catchy songs, by Dehnert and the Chicago-based composer André Pluess, tap the sappy heart of summer and are danceable to boot. That the songs don’t match the story structurally is probably an insuperable problem. “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” with or without the British “u,” is a very youthful, disjointed text, its thin thread of plot repeatedly cut by clowns, dullards, puns, pomposities and noodling that goes nowhere. By the time you get to the masque near the end, featuring impenetrable spoofs of the nine classical “worthies,” you may doubt young Shakespeare’s judgment of worthiness.

Persons: Shakespeare, callow, Amanda Dehnert, Hudson, Dehnert, André Pluess, ” Organizations: Shakespeare Locations: Chicago

☆ Ato Blankson-Wood on Playing a Hamlet Who ‘Leads With Love’
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-26 | by ( Juan A. Ramírez | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

“I have my issues with this cut. A lot of the meta-theatricality is gone, and that’s one of the things I love about the character, like his line about holding a mirror up to nature. Born the middle of five siblings in Silver Spring, Md., to two Ghanaian immigrants, Blankson-Wood grew up watching movie musicals with his mother. While his home was “culturally, very traditionally Ghanaian,” he said musicals created a cultural bridge to his American interests, which led to acting. He studied acting at New York University and was soon cast as a member of the tribe in a production of “Hair” at the Delacorte — which, coincidentally, shared the 2008 summer season with another “Hamlet,” starring Michael Stuhlbarg.

Persons: “, Shakespeare, what’s, ”, Wood, Leon, Jesse Green, Michael Stuhlbarg, Lysistrata Jones Organizations: The Times, New York University, Broadway Locations: Md

☆ Review: Dancing With Dictators in David Byrne’s ‘Here Lies Love’
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-20 | by ( Jesse Green | More About Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Not that there isn’t plenty to praise in “Here Lies Love,” the immersive disco-bio-musical about Imelda Marcos that opened on Thursday at the Broadway Theater. Because the real star of this show is the astonishing architectural transformation of the theater itself, by the set designer David Korins. That she would probably adore the over-emphatic atmosphere of “Here Lies Love” — with its lurid lighting by Justin Townsend, skittering projections by Peter Nigrini and earsplitting sound by M.L. For here we are, at the place where irony and meta-messaging form a theatrical-historical knot that can’t be picked apart. Which is why, as you clap, you should probably wonder what for.

Persons: Imelda Marcos, David Byrne, Fatboy Slim, abetted, David Korins, “ King Kong ”, Marcos, impoverishing, Justin Townsend, Peter Nigrini, Cody Spencer — Organizations: Broadway Theater, Broadway Locations: “ King, Philippines

☆ Review: This ‘Hamlet’ Under the Stars Is No Walk in the Park
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-28 | by ( Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

For those who remember the 2019 Shakespeare in the Park production of “Much Ado About Nothing” — as I do, fondly — the sight that awaits them at this summer’s “Hamlet” in the same location is disturbing. The flagpole bearing the Stars and Stripes sticks out of the ground at a precipitous angle, like a javelin that made a bad landing. For the director Kenny Leon and the scenic designer Beowulf Boritt, both returning for this “Hamlet” — the Public Theater’s fifth in the park since 1964 and 13th overall — it’s a coup de théâtre, if an odd one. An approach that had been designed to welcome audiences to a new way of looking at Shakespeare in 2019 now seems destined to exclude them. But this “Hamlet” has been placed in a frame that doesn’t match what the production actually delivers, leaving me glad to have seen it but wishing for something more congruent.

Persons: ”, Stacey Abrams, Kenny Leon, Beowulf Boritt, théâtre, Jason Michael Webb, Wood Locations: Black, Atlanta, tatters

☆ Review: A Jew and 16 ‘Nerf Nazis’ Meet Cute in ‘Just for Us’
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-26 | by ( Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

It may be too much to ask a human hummingbird like Alex Edelman to try to stick to the subject. In “Just for Us,” his three-jokes-per-minute one-man show, he zooms from punchline to punchline almost as fast as he caroms around the stage of the Hudson Theater. (At 34, he’s part of what he calls the overmedicated ADHD generation.) And even though he’s telling a story about white supremacy, you are. Growing up a “proudly and emphatically” Orthodox Jew in “this really racist part of Boston called Boston,” he clocked the wariness between races but also within them.

Persons: Alex Edelman, ”, Ibsen, —, it’s, Edelman, Jason Zinoman, Jackie Mason, he’d Organizations: Hudson Theater, Broadway, Twitter Locations: London, Edinburgh, Washington, Boston, Queens

☆ Sheldon Harnick, Musical Theater’s Great Marriage Broker
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-23 | by ( Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The twilight golden years of the Golden Age of musical theater, which archaeologists date from about 1959 to 1981, produced three great lyricists. One, of course, was Stephen Sondheim, setting words to his own music with a neurotic complexity that defined that time and ours. Sondheim called his lyrics “impeccable.”As models of humor, elegance and compassion, they could stand to be more widely studied and imitated. That they aren’t is partly the result of the strange bifurcation of Harnick’s career into Bock and post-Bock eras. Another handful of his shows with Bock (“The Apple Tree,” “The Rothschilds,” “Tenderloin”) are just as pleasurable, if less profound.

Persons: Stephen Sondheim, Fred Ebb, John Kander, Sheldon Harnick, “, Jerry Bock, Sondheim, Bock, Harnick, ”, “ Fiorello

☆ Unscripted or Not, the Tonys Were Mostly Predictable
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-12 | by ( Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

No writers’ names crawled up the screen at the end of Sunday night’s telecast of the Tony Awards, and though the writers might not like to hear it, their absence made little difference. The names of the show’s producers and director were the same as always, and in television as in the theater, they call the game. Mostly those things bore out the predictions, and many people’s predilections too. “Kimberly Akimbo,” the sweet, intimate, tragicomic “nerdical” by Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire, won the most musical prizes, including one for its star, Victoria Clark, and one for the show itself. “Some Like It Hot” followed with a reasonable haul, and though “Parade” picked up just two, they were good ones: best direction of a musical and best musical revival.

Persons: Awards, —, “ Kimberly Akimbo, Jeanine Tesori, David Lindsay, Abaire, Victoria Clark, ” Organizations: Writers Guild of America, Paramount, Broadway

Tony voters struck a perfect equilibrium with the awards for scenic design. Beowulf Boritt won for the musical “New York, New York,” a big, buoyant throwback of a show whose aesthetic is decidedly classic Broadway. “There’s no video wall in ‘New York, New York,’” he assured the audience, which sounded glad to hear it. Recognizing such different kinds of excellence, the Tonys gracefully embraced both tradition and tradition-breaking. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESSmall is beautiful

Persons: Tony, Beowulf Boritt, ”, “, ’ ”, Tim Hatley, Andrzej Goulding, LAURA COLLINS, HUGHES Organizations: “ Locations: York , New York, ‘ New York , New York

☆ Tony Awards Viewership Increases to 4.3 Million
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-12 | by ( John Koblin | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

(The writers had already successfully disrupted the MTV Movie & TV Awards last month, which prompted the cancellation of the live ceremony; MTV and CBS share the same corporate parent, Paramount.) The Tony Awards represent a vital marketing tool for Broadway as it still makes its slow recovery out of the pandemic. Given the relatively low viewership of the Tonys, the show has always been more of a prestige play for CBS than a profit machine. relented, and the end result was an awards show that went heavy on live performances and introductory videos, and went without scripted material or pre-written bits. Thank you to attendees wearing #WGAstrong pins, and to everyone who showed solidarity with the writers during last night’s unscripted awards show.”The unscripted ceremony, which was hosted by Ariana DeBose, was mostly well received.

Persons: W.G.A, Ariana DeBose, Jesse Green Organizations: CBS, MTV, Paramount, Writers Guild of America, The Locations: York

At this point, Audra McDonald is part of Tony Awards history. McDonald previously won four featured actress Tonys in the play and musical categories for her roles in “Carousel” (1994), “Master Class” (1996), “Ragtime” (1998) and “A Raisin in the Sun” (2004). She is the only person to win in all four acting categories. Despite the cascade of awards, she told The New York Times in an interview last month that the recognition remained special. “It’s an honor,” she said while on a lunch break from working on yet another project.

Persons: Audra McDonald, Tony, who’s, —, Suzanne Alexander, Adrienne Kennedy’s, McDonald, Chita Rivera, Julie Harris, Tonys, ”, Bess, Porgy, Bess ”, Billie Holiday Organizations: Sun, New York Times

☆ Review: In ‘This Land Was Made,’ Huey Newton Walks Into a Bar
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-07 | by ( Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In Oakland, Calif., in 1968, Huey P. Newton, the Black Panther leader, was convicted of killing a white police officer. In 1971, after two more trials and nearly two years in prison, he was cleared of all charges. That’s the question at the heart of “This Land Was Made,” the gutsy but murky new play by Tori Sampson at the Vineyard Theater. Most successful is the sitcom element, which could be titled “Trish’s,” an Oakland bar where everybody knows your name. For about 25 minutes, Sampson serves up something warm and piquant at Trish’s: an interplay of zingers, flirtations, spats and politics.

Persons: Huey P, Newton, Tori Sampson, Taylor, ”, Trish, Pugh, Antoinette Crowe, Sampson, Sassy, Matthew Griffin, Gail, Yasha Jackson, Drew, Leland Fowler, Ezra Knight Organizations: Panther, Vineyard, Mr Locations: Oakland, Calif, Libya, New Orleans, Trish’s, Troy

☆ Review: In ‘The Comeuppance,’ a Bigger, Chillier Big Chill
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-05 | by ( Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

School reunions, like work and family ones, are fertile ground for dramatists, offering an excuse to gather disparate characters with a catalog of ready-made conflicts. (There’s always someone who got dumped, dissed or disowned x years ago.) Branden Jacobs-Jenkins juggles all of these elements in “The Comeuppance,” which opened Monday at the Signature Theater. It’s an odd sensation to side with Death, but we want to know these people, too. Each has struggled to achieve maturity or happiness or just a sense of belonging — a problem that was already evident in high school when they bonded as members of MERGE, a “multiethnic reject group” with a problematic extra E.

Persons: Branden Jacobs, Jenkins, Eric Ting, Jacobs, invisibly Organizations: St, Anthony’s Locations: Washington

☆ Review: In ‘Grey House,’ Broadway Gets an Expert Haunting
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-01 | by ( Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Four strange girls, somewhere between 12 and 200 years old, live in an isolated cabin in the woods. Marlow (Sophia Anne Caruso) is the alpha, bossing the others around — and also bossing the stranded outsiders, because of course there are stranded outsiders in a play that trades on the tropes of a million horror tales. In “Grey House,” the prime trope is coy creepiness. “Grey House,” at the Lyceum Theater, is certainly an in-your-face assault, more in the manner of John Carpenter movies than anything seen onstage since the age of melodrama. But mostly let’s go with the freak-out fun of the four telekinetic weirdos and their den mother, Raleigh, played by Laurie Metcalf in a stringy salt-and-pepper wig that’s almost as frightening as she is.

Persons: Marlow, Sophia Anne Caruso, coy creepiness, comfortingly, “, ”, John Carpenter, Levi Holloway, Joe Mantello, Laurie Metcalf Organizations: Lyceum Locations: —, Raleigh

Instead of pure dance, they substitute odd “scenarios,” which are just incomplete stories, excuses to insert classic Fosse bits and preoccupations. It becomes like a dance version of a jukebox musical, with many of the same problems. VINCENTELLI As with scores, I don’t think choreography necessarily needs to move the story or the characters: I’m all in favor of gratuitous moments. So what if there is no justification for a number or a song, as long as it looks or sounds good? My problem with “New York, New York” was basically the opposite: The dance was strong and effective in advancing characters who were otherwise too peripheral to demand it.

☆ Tony Awards 2023: Who Will Win (and Who Should)
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-10 | by ( Jesse Green | Maya Phillips | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

We love theater; theater awards, not so much. So take our annual Tony Awards “ballot” (though we don’t actually get to vote) with a shaker of salt — and these caveats. In the “Will Win” category, we guess what the 769 actual voters will choose. We don’t mean to suggest that the people and productions listed in the “Should Win” category are more deserving than those in the “Will Win” category. It salutes work that was eligible for nomination — but also, indicated by an asterisk, work that wasn’t.

☆ ‘Good Night, Oscar’ Review: Sean Hayes With Demerol and Cadenzas
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-24 | by ( Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Oscar Levant, the troubled midcentury musician and wag, often said he’d erased “the fine line between genius and insanity.”He says it again, or a version of it, in “Good Night, Oscar,” the unconvincing biographical fantasia that opened Monday at the Belasco Theater. But on the evidence of the character as written, and especially as impersonated by Sean Hayes in a gloomy if accurate performance, Levant doesn’t erase the line so much as fudge it. Certainly the play, by Doug Wright, fails to make much of a case for the genius part of the joke. Instead, it offers a spray of Levant’s most famous quips, like the one about Elizabeth Taylor: “Always a bride, never a bridesmaid.” And instead of dramatizing how marvelous Levant was, it just says so repeatedly. Mostly it’s just a cry; Levant doesn’t seem brilliant but ill.

☆ Review: In ‘The Thanksgiving Play,’ Who Gets to Tell the Story?
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In mesmerizing moments like this, FastHorse neatly sets up the tension between identity and the performance of identity — a tension she doesn’t resolve but upgrades over the course of the play to a full-scale paradox. FastHorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota nation of South Dakota, gradually introduces the horrifying undertow of that fact with filmed segments screened briefly between the live scenes. Distressingly, these segments are based on Thanksgiving projects that real teachers have posted online. In one, adorable young children performing “The Nine Days of Thanksgiving” are made to list the many things, like “six Native teepees,” that Indians “gave” the Pilgrims. Though this is crucial to the play’s project of undoing centuries of racist mythologizing, I was left a bit queasy thinking about the young performers.

☆ Review: Flying High and Falling Hard in ‘Peter Pan Goes Wrong’
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-19 | by ( Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Six years ago, the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society brought its production of “The Murder at Haversham Manor” from its home base in England to Broadway. After the leading lady was knocked unconscious by a door, she was replaced by the stage manager; when knocked unconscious as well, he was replaced by a sound technician and eventually, somehow, a grandfather clock. Barrie’s “Peter Pan.” Many of the same disasters happen chez Darling as happened at Haversham Manor, or close variations on them. Let’s just say that Peter doesn’t fly so much as flail while airborne. He, too, is knocked unconscious.

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