Chris Jones

“The show now possesses a spirit so exuberant as to enthrall for its joyous 80 minutes of running time.”

“‘Paranormal Activity’ knows what it wants to pull off and the execution is first-rate.”

“This take-down of the literary efforts of the likes of Carol Channing or David Hasselhoff or Whatever Kardashian offers a slight, but intermittently amusing summer attraction for anyone who has snagged a ticket, sufficiently affordable so that you are not constantly questioning your value for money for the entire 90 minutes.”

“The Palace is a big venue of course and, for many hinterland punters, ‘The Lost Boys’ will deliver an epic Broadway blast, an amped-up escape from their prosaic realities and that will do it for a vampire musical.”

“Allen’s production starts gently, as does the play, and it honors the other side of Wilson, which is to write about how Blacks found spaces, even in 1911, for humor and community with each other.”

“Neither side seemed fully happy with the compromise.”

“Enough for a nice matinee with a bestie, no?”

“Lindsay-Abaire has created a bunch of witheringly annoying and yet highly entertaining characters.”

“‘Schmigadoon!’ has scaled the pinnacle of pastiche!”

“Director Scott Ellis understands all this, and thus the admirably specific physical business and slurred verbosity in his gently outré revival really makes for quite the amusing diversion.”

“It’s a lovely Chicago play, brought thrillingly back to Broadway life.”

“And I found this great American actor to be deeply affecting at the core of Cromer’s powerful production, his lean body and craggy features contorting into a complicated, scarred and fundamentally likable character who constantly has to motivate himself to draw another breath.”

“Mindelle clearly adores her subject in all of its Francophone campery and that sets the tone for a show that is impossible not to find amusing and that deftly manages to avoid reminding you even for a second that this was a disaster that killed hundreds of people.”

“And as played by Nathan Lane and John Drea in Joe Mantello’s exquisitely directed Broadway revival, which has several Steppenwolf Theatre influences, it will sock you in the gut.”

“This is a highly original concept, albeit with every note of the score intact.”

“This keenly observed and highly entertaining play, now on Broadway at 2nd Stage's Theatre under the unpretentious but lively direction of Trip Cullman, seems to have been lying in wait for this particular moment.”

“But they have to fight through too much else for attention.”

“In this case, of course, recent events in Iran only have made the play seem more timely.”

“Clearly, everyone here understood all that what was really needed was Radcliffe and what he means to people.”

“Smallwood, who is not well known in New York, will be a revelation to many.”

“Nixon turns on a dime when her character realizes, as I think many of us have or will, that this brave new world of now is short on both guardrails and moral principles.”

“So while this show held me for Act 1 with its considerable charm, by Act 2, it was hitting turbulence.”

“This is the Broadway show of the fall that some will claim to dislike and yet most everyone will enjoy, even if that has to be in secret.”

“Aristotle called ‘Oedipus the King’ the perfect tragedy and that still applies in my book, 2,500-odd years later.”

“It’s an honest effort to explore why some people just keep wanting more stuff, which most of us of a certain age learn is clearly pointless, while also admiring the force of personality it takes to procure them.”

“Even by Metcalf’s lofty standards, this is one stunner of a performance.”

“She makes everyone care about the questions she has herself and that’s exactly what a playwright should be doing.”

“In the end, it was the anthemic score of ‘Ragtime’ (ah, the 1990s) that endeared it to so many theatergoers and that is where the solid new Lincoln Center revival wisely places its focus.”

“Frankly, it’s hard to believe anyone in the theater will crave another half hour beyond the available two and I doubt this revival will loom large in anyone’s long-term memory, notwithstanding the plethora of interesting takes.”

“This very fun revival at least makes the case that forgettability can be an asset and “Art’ enjoyed over and over again.”

“I can’t overstate my respect for the show; it’s a masterpiece of its populist kind, much imitated but never equalled.”

“Smart does her considerable best to find it for him, but she didn’t write the play.”

“If you choose the one with the corpse, know that this weird show is very much alive.”

“This show, which has a genial, populist score of entertaining and empowering numbers, is not really about that plot anyway.”

“The effect is to summon a retro room so rich in hue and seductive in ambiance that you find yourself not wanting to go back outside.”

“My one caveat on what is a highly entertaining and most genial evening of daffy, escapist Broadway, is that some of it feels a bit much, especially movement and new orchestrations-wise.”

“Terrifying and brilliant, both at the same time.”

“Simply put, the emotional waves that all musicals need to surf in order to fully work just seem here to stop at the surface; we understand the issues, but don’t feel all the feels underground.”

“I wish ‘John Proctor’ made its very fair point about girls forging their own narratives with more ambivalence and less certitude, especially in its less-than-credible last few minutes.”

“Despite best efforts from all, the whole thing feels like a burger smashed onto a grill manned by Father Time, a charred remnant of days fast gone by.”

“Indeed, this whole crew was mostly in the original creative kitchens; I say, catch ‘em while you still can.”

“Thus ‘Boop!’ builds and communicates its own optimistic world, inhabits it fully and makes no apology to anyone.”

“But in a musical, if you’re not pulling for said relationship to survive and if you don’t believe you are watching a real partnership that could live or die before your eyes, nothing works.”

“‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ felt like a custom-designed experience from Captain Murrow, launched from beyond the grave that very day.”

“Culkin, though, has a staccato delivery, a halting rhythm and an innate sense of vulnerability, all qualities that have made him a much-cherished star.”

“Snook’s performance in Kip Williams’s self-penned production is powerful in every way, an exquisitely crafted melange of determination, drive and cheekiness.”

“It’s interesting but it throws the play off.”

“This ripping yarn is a lot of fun and very clever to boot.”

“Bravura performances flow to the ear and eye from pretty much the entire company.”

“It’s a remarkably moving character, likely all too familiar to all scions of big personalities with even bigger flaws.”

“But, wow, is this clunky show on the nose with all that stuff.”

“To speak in English in order to function in a new place, the play argues, forces non-native speakers to live forever in that gap.”

“McDonald certain makes a good a case as anyone ever has for Rose qualifying as a tragic hero, and more power to both her and her director.”

“‘Eureka Day’ to be an amusingly observed, sharply penned and generally well-performed play with character types who will be all too familiar to anyone who has (or had) kids in such an exhausting kind of private school.”

“She argues here, and very well too, that to be loved is so fundamental a human need.”

“Whatever criticism gets hurled its way, nobody could reasonably say that ‘Death Becomes Her’ looks cheap or lacks entertainment value.”

“But it strikes me as a weird, sure, but also daring interpretation of a kind of music we only rarely hear on Broadway.”

“‘Tammy Faye’ feels like it comes from abroad, as indeed it does, because you never believe that any of the creators have any real skin in the game.”

“The whole shebang is quite the slow-burning charmer, honestly, and deserves to be a bit of a sleeper hit.”

“To showcase and to dissect always are tricky, twin ambitions for any jukebox show, and I think the main problem with ‘Wonderful World’ is that it worries too much about the latter, which gets in the way of fully delivering the former.”

“Alas, while the two leads are sincere, the show itself is (a) altogether too much of too much; (b) a bit of an ill-focused mess; and (c) less than engrossing.”

“At other times, you might well think that you could be lying in bed and reading the justly well-regarded source memoir and getting much the same benefits from the experience without paying for a theater ticket.”

“Scherzinger is fantastic. Sure, you're watching stylized acting. But Norma was a silent movie star, after all, and this was never a part screaming for modesty.”

“Weird as it may sound, ‘Yellow Face’ is a good time in the company of smart, self-aware people, critical thinkers willing to ponder the lessons and the follies of the past.”

“But he doesn’t seem to have a throughline upon which he can hang his hat.”

“And the characters Butterworth forges are so empathetic that I never wanted this three-act show to end.”

“I seriously doubt many audience members will regret their attendance at ‘The Roommate.’”

“She’s clearly having a good time and you either jump on the Good Ship Sutton, or you’ll keep falling overboard all night long.”

“‘Job’ is a very provocative and genuinely disrupting 85 minutes with acute observational powers; you won't be bored for a millisecond.”

“Point of fact, pretty much everything in this show is hilarious.”

“Kittles' superb performance ranges deep and wide and it comes with an intensity that has stuck with me these last couple of days, locking in as it does on why this man, like so many others in his situation, has a palpable magnitude.”

“It’s not a show for all tastes but it certainly makes the case that it belongs on Broadway.”

“It's a measure of the superb acting in Tina Landau's production that you easily believe the middle-aged Keenan-Bolger and Parsons as high-schoolers, just as you do the 74-year-old Lange as a woman in her 30s.”

“Without that, stuff still happens but little in this show helps an audience put it in any kind of fresh context.”

“‘Uncle Vanya’ never works without a strong, clear point of view and this one is just too hard to track.”

“Hard to think of another play that understands so well.”

“‘The Heart of Rock and Roll,’ which does not look like it cost $30 million and is all the better for that, feels happy to play to its target audience of Huey fans who prefer a decent beer to Moët & Chandon any night of the week.”

“‘Patriots’ is a helpful, cautionary tale of unintended consequence.”

“Here you have one of the sexiest shows ever written as weirdly afeared of eroticism as it is of actual vulnerability.”

“There's a great deal to enjoy here, including a phenomenal performance by Lewis, not to mention how the director Michael Greif adds his signature steely edge to what is otherwise deeply sentimental material.”

“What a brilliant piece of must-see Broadway. It's Chekhovian, babe.”

“That’s not entirely inaccurate: The historical figures in the way of the likes of Alice Paul (Taub), Carrie Catt (Jen Colella) and Ida B. Wells (Nikki M. James) are buffoonish paper tigers devoid of argument or veracity....”

“The cast has some other familiar faces, including no less than Deborah Cox as Glinda, an L. Frank Baum character that might have morphed into the star of ‘Wicked,’ but who was woefully underwritten in ‘The Wiz.’”

“Shoving de Lempicka so aggressively through today’s ideological and aesthetic filters, unconscious as the act may be, has the effect of nullifying her singular ambivalence and complexity.”

“The show loses its narrative thread in a second act where the requisite narrative tension dissipates instead of intensifying and the show, which lacks the humor of the structurally similar ‘Newsies,’ gets stuck in an overly introspective and melancholic loop.”

“‘Tommy’ offers the flip side, a musical explanation of what parents, or a wicked uncle, or a bullying cousin did to us at a vulnerable age.”

“The result is one of the most authentic circus-themed shows to make it to Broadway.”

“Strong is one of the great American actors of his generation.”

“To the great credit of everyone involved, ‘The Notebook’ also delivers unexpectedly sophisticated theatricality with the requisite supercharging of the tear ducts, notwithstanding an archly familiar narrative.”

“Ryan, whose performance is tart, vulnerable, and unstinting, shows us a character slowly realizing that her unswerving belief in the hierarchy she serves — heck, the way she has ordered her entire life — is incompatible with her moral and practical quest. The similarly excellent Kazan, whose teachin...”

“‘Days of Wine and Roses,’ a ‘beautifully’ executed musical”

“Whatever your identity, rarely in a Broadway theater will you have so powerfully felt your own vulnerability.”

“‘Appropriate,’ which I predict will be an unexpectedly big hit for Second Stage, has aged like moonshine, its bitterness and rankle now perfectly matching the American moment.”

“The main achievement here is the long overdue empowerment of a group of folks on whose varied accomplishments an entire nation relies on far more than it realizes.”

“Idle’s comic genius remains entirely evident here and he and Du Prez came up with the kind of brassy, swirling score that screamed Big Night Out on Broadway, even as it lampooned everything from scantily clad choruses to divas devolving in Act 2.”

“Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman's musical about the Comedian Harmonists, a German singing group that was torn apart by the Nazis, is deeply sincere but dramatically inert.”

“Overall, this piece doesn’t land at the top of Rebeck’s impressively diverse oeuvre, and I’d wager you’ll see some things coming far faster than any fire department.”

“Broadway never saw a better triple-act than Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe, the triumphant triumvirate at the heart of the gorgeous new revival of ‘Merrily Along’ directed by the famed British musical theater star Maria Friedman.”

“This is an ensemble piece, a collection of character studies, a bubbly slice of the uptown hair-braiding life.”

“Magnificent, if there is any justice in the world.”