Charles McNulty

“And this bawdy crowd-pleaser at least has the courage of its crackpot convictions.”

“And this bawdy crowd-pleaser at least has the courage of its crackpot convictions.”

“And this bawdy crowd-pleaser at least has the courage of its crackpot convictions.”

“Yet launching a conversation around mental health with an audience magnet as powerful as Radcliffe is on balance an excellent thing.”

“Strong, who won an Olivier Award for his performance in Ivo van Hove's revival of Arthur Miller's 'A View From the Bridge,' exposes the boyish vulnerability within the sophisticated politician in his sympathetically beguiling portrayal.”

“She never looks less than perfectly photoshopped, but the production ultimately overtaxes her strengths.”

“Wanderingly weird, ‘Dead Outlaw’ retains its off-Broadway cred at the Longacre.”

“Unfortunately, ‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow,’ written by Kate Trefry from an original story she collaborated on with the Duffer Brothers (the series’ creators) and Jack Thorne, also shows that the theater can be just as careless as any hyperactive action movie when it comes to plot.”

“In ‘Gypsy,’ McDonald augments her unparalleled Broadway legacy by summoning America’s rueful history to the stage.”

“The play has urgent social concerns that are right at home at a theater like the Public, where it runs through Oct. 27, but pat resolutions and a little too much window-dressing prevent the conflicts from becoming uncomfortably real.”

“But the play falls victim to AI‘s chief limitation — its emotional deadness.”

“This has not been a banner year for new musicals on Broadway, but with ‘Illinoise,’ the final show I saw this season, I glimpsed the majestic future.”

“Redmayne is the reason to see this production, though as captivating as his performance is, he cannot rescue this misguided revival on his own.”

“His production, built for speed and farcical flamboyance, threatens to spin out of control but keeps its eye on the prize of social justice.”

“The fake poetry of it all becomes cloying, even for a native New Yorker who has sentimental leanings in this direction.”

“‘Good Night, Oscar’ provides a vehicle for Hayes to be snappy and tragic.”

“The actors are all fine individually, but their magic fails to coalesce.”

“Rising in tragic stature as the play barrels toward its shattering conclusion, these performers make the production unmissable.”

“Broadway has never felt so expansively welcoming.”

“The livestream version of ‘Clyde’s’ is the next best thing to being there.”

“I adore this production for making me feel so deeply the tragic waste of innocent love in a society still festering in hate.”

“I loved 'The Inheritance,' found it thoroughly absorbing and am grateful that it exists on Broadway, I don't think it's a dramatic masterpiece.”

“The urgency of this context is an inescapable part of a drama that is more impressive as a species of theatrical journalism than as a form of imaginative playwriting.”

“This ‘Tootsie’ yields more laughs per minute than any musical since ‘The Book of Mormon.’”

“One longs for the day when Miller’s drama will stop being so scathingly relevant.”

“But if this revival represents a step forward for Gold’s career, it is a step backward for Shakespeare’s play, which has lost much of its excruciating pathos in the directorial hubbub.”

“This unconventional work is a hybrid creation, part play, part performance piece.”

“Exhaustingly exaggerated, the show should consider an advisory that some material might not be suitable for adults.”

“For a musical with all the depth of a spread in Us Weekly, ‘The Cher Show,’ running nearly 2½ hours, seems ludicrously long.”

“That sound you’re hearing — the scream emanating from this review — is my response to the real horror trampling Broadway.”

“'American Son' isn't a play for the decades, never mind for the ages. But it speaks directly to our grievous times.”

“‘Pretty Woman: The Musical,’ a superficial Pygmalion salvaged as much as possible by its stars, is content to take this story straight to the bank.”

“Albee’s writing is sublimely searing, Mantello’s staging is magnificent to behold and these three larger-than-life actresses are nothing short of transfixing.”

“The show distills the mood-elevating properties of the American musical at its giddy best.”

“'Groundhog Day' has the narrative makings of a successful musical comedy. So what’s gone wrong?—or should I say only half right?...Matthew Warchus finds clever theatrical solutions to deal with the inherently cinematic nature of the material...The fundamental problem with the show has to do with the monotony of musical storytelling...”

“‘Shuffle Along’ is, after ‘Hamilton,’ the second best new musical of the Broadway year.”

“Lacking the ensemble dynamism that makes possible unforeseen discoveries, this O'Neill outing felt like an endless exercise in Beckettian waiting.”

“The emptiness at the heart of ‘American Psycho’ is the source of both its originality and its eventual tediousness.”

“They fight to a draw, leaving us even more disturbed by a play that unsettles us not by telling us what to think but by provoking within us feelings that are impossible to reconcile.”

“That ‘Eclipsed’ is the Gurira play that made it to Broadway isn’t just history — it’s a promising sign of the future.”

“The Color Purple," I'm overjoyed to report, has finally found the freedom it needed to attain sublimity.”

“Nonetheless, were it not for Russo, MacKenzie, Niederauer, Dolan, Parker, Melucci and their knee-high-to-grasshopper compatriots, musical lovers wanting to watch Broadway school teachers interact with pupils might be better off right now at either Matilda or The King and I.”

“Transplanting the delicate weirdness of 'Old Times' to Broadway seems absurdist in all the wrong ways.”

“On the stage, however, the smallness and the shtickiness are clumsily magnified, as ‘Fish in the Dark,’ David's Broadway debut as writer and actor, uncomfortably reveals.”

“If this production of ‘A Delicate Balance’ teeters unsteadily at moments, it remains always fascinating to behold.”

“It's a pleasure to report that this tiptop production has realized much of the potential of this show”

“But the characters aren’t simply anonymous — they’re ciphers.”

“If the portrayal of this bromance, grounded in the frustration and resolve of shared creative work, can bring a new generation of theater people to Hart’s indelible memoir, then Lapine’s production will have been worth the effort.”

“This revival of ‘Of Mice and Men,’ I’m sorry to say, is just another quizzical episode of ‘The James Franco Show,’ that pop culture reality series growing vainer by the minute.”

“It's a shame that the rest of the production, directed by Michael Wilson, one of Foote's most reliable interpreters, isn't up to Tyson's level.”

“Her fierce virtuosity transforms Tóibín’s extended monologue into a full-blooded theatrical portrait.”

“If ‘Kinky Boots’ weren’t such a cheesy commercial mess, it might actually be fun.”

“The play, which opened Monday at the Broadhurst Theatre with a winning ensemble performance by Tom Hanks in his Broadway debut, magnificently conjures this lost era when ink-stained wretches ruled the world.”

“Butz practically ricochets off the walls of the simple Midwestern kitchen that’s the setting for ‘Dead Accounts,’ but not even he can transcend the contrived nature of a character who is really nothing more than a collection of manic playwriting impulses.”

“In tackling more than it can synthesize, the play often seems diffuse. But despite the flaw in its construction — a flaw that is really a conceptual one, stemming from Auburn's somewhat too passive relationship to his material — the work is engaging as cultural history and, to a lesser extent, as a psychological object lesson.”

“Broadway musicals spawned from movies are usually big, brash, bawdy affairs — think ‘Sister Act’ and ‘Priscilla Queen of the Desert,’ two giddy disco balls launched last season.”

“The Great Recession is the unbilled star of Mike Nichols’ Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ — the scene-stealing specter, invisible but ever-present, that gives the production its ferocious relevance more than 60 years after the play’s birth.”

“He's put himself at the drama's service, and if that means ceding the stage to Moayed, whose poignancy has only deepened, so be it.”

“Radcliffe gets an A for effort, but he doesn’t have the theatrical stature to pull together this choppy production.”

“‘The Book of Mormon’ is built for rougher pleasures.”

“‘Promises, Promises’ doesn’t exactly fulfill them, but its compensations are so vivid that it’s impossible to walk away feeling entirely cheated.”

“But basically, it’s an entertainment for hard-core Sondheim fanatics who would rather hear the Ethel Merman song that was cut from ‘Gypsy’ than the classic numbers that remain.”

“When a theater critic calls a play a sitcom, it's usually meant as a rap on the knuckles. But let's make an exception in the case of ‘Superior Donuts,’ the bracingly funny new play by Tracy Letts, and compare the work in a complimentary way to one of those Golden Age 1970s television comedies by Norman Lear — character-centered, socially and pol...”

“‘God of Carnage’ may have the feel of a play in which characters have no choice but to fall in line with their playwright’s nihilistic manipulations, but with actors this ferociously robust, human nature seems to have its own incorrigible agenda.”

“‘West Side Story’ blasts back to Broadway — kinetic, bloody and modern to the core”

“Broadway finally has in its over-hyped midst a major opening of road-show quality.”

“Patrick Stewart's suave performance can be scored a triumph, but it comes with a few provisos.”

“Too bad it's in the service of Hare's time-wasting curriculum.”

“Ultimately, the piece’s strength lies not in its storytelling but in its twisted pageantry.”