Alexis Soloski

“This is a thriller, not a philosophy seminar, quick to switch out currency for timelessness.”

“With dazzling imagination and sublime control, the show’s cast and crew conjure a delirious, dynamic, highly pettable world.”

“It’s a close-shave approach to the role: clean and precise, it doesn’t pierce the surface.”

“And in this silly, woozy, pretty show, with its endless tap numbers, it doesn’t exactly fit.”

“This ‘Carol’ is a breathless entertainment.”

“And yet, the transition from page to stage feels undermotivated, incomplete.”

“Majok’s sensitive drama about four characters on the margins is empathetically acted and unusually compassionate.”

“For long stretches, The Minutes, is dull, which Letts seems to intend as a feature, not a bug.”

“But they have a flagrant enjoyment in playing opposite each other, which is the best and maybe the only reason to book in.”

“The new version, which opened on Tuesday, does feel smaller — its themes starker, its concession to fandom more blatant. But as directed by Tiffany and choreographed by Steven Hoggett, with an essential score from Imogen Heap, it remains diamond-sharp in its staging and dazzling in its visual imagination, as magical as any spell or potion.”

“A Christmas Carol is a pleasant evening and easily digestible.”

“But Moulin Rouge is one of those shows that is not only critic-proof, but maybe also story-proof.”

“And yet somehow, impossibly, Beetlejuice is pretty fun.”

“Taylor Mac’s Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus is a very good idea, but not, unfortunately, a very good play.”

“And yet the play feels too fantastical to really wound or ravish.”

“Running three and a half hours (padding out the folio with bits of the quarto, like the mock trial scene), the production brings avant-garde techniques to Broadway with variable success.”

“For the songs, of course, and the undiluted pleasure of watching five superb singers and dancers perform them.”

“For this production, the Roundabout, under James Macdonald’s direction, has brought together Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano, who somehow produce all the great upheaval of a 10-gallon hat left out in a drizzle.”

“The tension between the richness of the characters and the thinness of the story isn't always held with grace.”

“If you can put these concerns aside, this Mockingbird is a superbly entertaining and handsomely acted event.”

“The exuberant, occasionally tacky jukebox musical that tells her life story is more faltering.”

“It is a play to make you feel sick and sad and mad and genuinely worried about how long it will take to make a story like this less excruciatingly relevant.”

“In May’s extraordinary performance, Gladys’s deterioration feels absolutely and terrifyingly real, fully embodied rather than merely acted.”

“An intriguing premise and a confident assemblage of ideas fall apart onstage despite a trio of strong performances.”

“The dated gender politics of the Julia Roberts hit fail to receive an upgrade in a shallow musical that falls apart on stage.”

“This appears to be written around weak songs trying to take advantage of ABBA’s Mama Mia.”

“As the play revs up, under Anna D Shapiro's brisk, lucid direction and the company's spry, self-aware acting, the drama's engine starts to overheat.”

“When it works best, it’s hilarious and vicious, like the subtext of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf had split for New York City and decided to throw its own shindig.”

“Here, the punches are sometimes packed and sometimes pulled.”

“The staging and special effects are top notch and really well done but the plot is dreadful fanfic that feels like something a 13 year old would write on fanfiction.net in 2007.”

“That this My Fair Lady offers us this depth of character – and jokes and ball gowns and song after glorious song – suggests why it’s worth reviving, in this moment or any other.”

“That doesn't make the sprightly show a failure or a flop or a swing and a miss, but it's no hit either.”

“His Bill, a fine cop and a lousy human, is a monster you can often empathize with.”

“Without the gorgeous distractions of computer animation, the story feels thin.”

“As charming and lazy as a beachside siesta, it sticks 27 Buffett hits into a paint-by-numbers plot, pulls a Hawaiian shirt and a grigri necklace over the top and calls it a day.”

“So it is both a pleasure and a disappointment to find him doing something as aggressively ordinary as this one-man show.”

“The show is horrible; the worst theater mistake I have ever made.”

“It’s a comedy sketch that resets when it doesn’t know how to end, flaming out long before it hits the Booth stage.”

“But Junk would be worth a lot more if the audience was given a better sense of what drives Merkin.”

“Luckily, Hnath, whose formally inventive plays include Isaac’s Eye and The Christians, is no mean thinker.”

“‘Bandstand’ is an undercooked slice of apple pie, served with a dollop of anguish.”

“In ‘The Little Foxes,’ Manhattan Theater Club’s nimble, exhilarating revival of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 drama, Regina coerces, deceives, manipulates and maybe even murders.”

“Garry is a hollow character, but Kline puts him together with care and shrewdness.”

“Sympathetically directed and ardently acted, there’s much to enjoy in this Roundabout Theater Company revival.”

“John Tiffany’s staging of this intense episode is alone worth the price of a ticket.”

“Jitney, a masterful and garrulous piece of naturalism, is a play of rending and mending, an exploration of how we rip apart ourselves, each other, the fabric of a city, and how we might then go about patching what we have torn.”

“Mostly the piece is too convinced of its own easy dictums.”

“When the dancers are leaping, the accordions wheezing, the lights flashing, the skirts swirling, and the vodka flowing, then Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 feels thrillingly unlike anything else on Broadway.”

“This is an astute and intellectually provocative approach, but it doesn’t always serve the rather more salacious script and has the undesired effect of making a grandly hyped battle of the sexes into a first-round KO.”

“The years have not dimmed a vision of men and women that exquisitely details all of their faults – sometimes in rhymed couplets – and believes them worthy of life and love regardless.”

“His jubilant, giant performance injects a cantankerous vitality into Jack O’Brien’s otherwise pleasant and respectful revival.”

“Many spectators must sigh in sympathy as they brave this disarrayed take on the Chekhov comedy, produced by the Roundabout Theater.”

“It is also uproariously, stomach-achingly funny.”

“The songs are a zippy treat, but the clunky dialogue and air of old-time predictability may leave audiences with reservations”

“Even if his voice didn’t swirl through the audience’s heads, this performance would still captivate.”

“If Paramour has all the elements of a traditional Broadway tuner – songs, dances, conversation, characters – they are jumbled together in so topsy-turvy a fashion as to achieve a perverse originality, a three-ring circus of artistic muddle, miscalculation and mayhem.”

“Along is sometimes edifying and sometimes entertaining, but rarely do these twin aims coincide.”

“This adaptation of the Natalie Babbitt book has flaws – the songs are repetitive and the set is chaotic – but the show’s spirit is ultimately touching”

“Some of the jokes could be sharper...it is often strangely polite...But Ferguson is an actor of such irrepressible amiability...Under Jason Moore’s direction, a few of the actorly shifts could occur more quickly and not all the personae have a gestural specificity to match the vocal one.”

“But the resulting musical, based on the quirky film Adrienne Shelly completed not long before her death, is both sweet and bitter and only sporadically satisfying.”

“Langella responds to this dislocation with petulance, confusion, cruelty and anger...With the exception of a few unnecessary soliloquies, the dialogue is often powerful in its simplicity and Zeller effectively communicates a sense of existential horror lurking just below everyday chatter...Parts of the play can feel somewhat too pat...”

“The devil may be alive on Broadway; The Crucible isn’t quite.”

“Arriving on Broadway after several out-of-town tryouts, Bright Star is still suffering some issues of scale. The story it tells is a small and tender one and the staging and the music, playful and lovely, sometimes struggle to fill the house.”

“The current revival pays loving tribute to the strength of Masteroff’s book and Harnick and Bock’s songs while particularly celebrating the women of the cast...”

“There are no weapons on display here – no knives, no guns, no stage blood – but this is the most lacerating play on Broadway this season.”

“Even appreciating the gratification of nostalgia and camp, Disaster! is an odd property to find on Broadway and doesn’t seem particularly at home here, with its cheap sets, shabby projections and understaffed chorus.”

“The Humans, which arrives on Broadway after an acclaimed off-Broadway run last fall, is a funny, mournful, richly detailed and deeply humane study of a beleaguered family celebrating Thanksgiving dinner in a tumbledown Chinatown apartment.”

“It’s hard to imagine an affair torrid enough to shake up a play this smug.”

“The production particulars, like Derek McClane’s set and Michael Krass’s suitably silly costumes, are spot on, but the actors don’t quite seem to be in the same play or even the same play within a play.”

“That red parka even lends a splash of color to Sher’s elegant, well-acted, if not especially distinct revival.”

“Hudson may have a marquee name, but make no mistake this is Erivo’s show.”

“School of Rock lacks for some of the mayhem of Matilda, the dash of Spring Awakening, the pathos of Billy Elliot.”

“If Pacino had not signed on, would anyone have bothered with this at all?”

“Willis, though well-cast (taciturn suffering has more or less become his thing), just doesn’t seem particularly endangered.”

“This is an exhilarating production, assured and perilous, abstract and concretely physical.”

“But its creators might have a made a richer and more particular pledge.”

“But there are few other enticements in On Your Feet!”

“Bartlett’s dark vision of a monarchy no longer content with being quite so ceremonial deserves a long Broadway reign.”

“So something has gone wrong with the Roundabout’s lugubrious and giggly adaptation, scripted by Helen Edmundson and directed by Evan Cabnet, which stars Keira Knightley as the haunted and yearning Thérèse.”

“There’s something sunshiny and genuinely irrepressible about her that transcends any species categories.”

“Coburn’s view of human life is condescending and dyspeptic.”

“Until its brilliant final 15 minutes, Aukin’s production doesn’t have that magnetic force.”

“What should feel haunting, upsetting, frightening and menacing never quite does.”

“It holds out hope that the music on the stage could have more to do with the music we hear in our cars or in the clubs.”

“It isn't perhaps as well-sung as the original one and in some cases not as well-acted, though in others, like Krysta Rodriguez's Ilse, it is perhaps acted better.”

“This is anthropology trying to disguise itself as drama and, for a while, under Joe Mantello’s relaxed direction, it’s enough.”

“But as long as it has taken to get here, The Visit still hasn’t quite arrived.”

“It’s softly vulgar – there’s a near rhyme of ‘penis’ and ‘genius’, to say nothing of those gluteal gyrations – but it settles for sweet when it ought to be scurrilous, comfortable when it ought to be really clever.”

“Maybe it’s the undistinguished book or Lara’s ridiculous wig or those silly icicles, but Doctor Zhivago seems a lot more overblown than overpowering.”

“The Broadway Fun Home still leaves a lot of those interrogatives unanswered, yet it’s remarkably gratifying, often heartrending, and fiercely humane.”

“Though most of the jokes are so tired you expect them to nod off by themselves, the cast delivers them with go-for-broke gusto.”

“But the music is so entrancing, the lyrics so enchanting, the characterisations so rich, that it’s no puzzlement why The King and I endures.”

“The result is a well-intentioned muddle, though it does offer the best use of stage glitter since Hedwig’s eye makeup.”

“As directed by the choreographer Christopher Wheeldon and starring the dancers Robert Fairchild and Leanne Cope, An American in Paris is a fine and fanciful entertainment.”

“Wolf Hall still feels incomplete. Because it is.”

“This is some very flat champagne.”

“But the puerile bits are particularly funny.”

“This Skylight still manages to suggest how right these two are for each other and how wrong, how much we want them to be together again even as we know they can’t.”

“The play’s politics seem retrograde, but maybe there’s some comfort in that.”

“Without a first-class score to bolster the madcappery, even an engine as forceful as the Twentieth Century’s sometimes runs out of steam.”