Christopher Kelly

“Maybe it’s asking too much of an already terrific play to tackle these questions, too.”

“For the rest of us, 'Sylvia' ends up feeling like the proverbial dog that won't hunt.”

“At 80 very funny, very fast minutes, it's also something close to perfect.”

“But it’s better appreciated as a live‑wire artifact of a writer finding his voice and seeing what buttons he could push.”

“Craig identifies a core of thuggery in Macbeth — he's a lunkish, perhaps even dimwitted soldier of fortune who quickly gets drunk on ambition and power, until he's literally an axe-wielding maniac.”

“At age 63, ‘West Side Story’ has been gloriously reborn.”

“It’s mostly just an enjoyable night at the theater.”

“That 'Ink' keeps and at times rivets our attention is because — like the recent 'Lehman Trilogy,' another UK import — it turns the details of the business world into the stuff of rip-roaring melodrama.”

“This is how to adapt a movie to the stage and give it entirely new life.”

“What previously felt otherworldly and jarring — a journey from a sweaty, smoky Southern bar straight into the bowels of hell — now comes across as overly Broadway-ified and occasionally pandering.”

“A 'King Lear' that wholly captures the complexities and contradictions of its title character, a still-roaring lion who refuses to accept that winter has dawned. Gold’s production is at once a clever reflection of a culturally diverse modern world and a renunciation of the way ossified power structures are sustained...”

“It’s a farce without spark or any real point of view.”

“‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ on Broadway is a wonder and tickets are going to be tough to come by.”

“That's a legitimate choice for a show that was first mounted in 1945, and which is set in the 1870s and 80s -- long before our current cultural reckoning over sexual assault and harassment.”

“The effect is to make an already thin, lighthearted story seem painfully threadbare, and to drown out the story's central message about the importance of female unity.”

“By the time the stage literally cracks open near the end of the second part, and the main character Prior Walter (Andrew Garfield) ascends a neon staircase to heaven, this ‘Angels in America’ has placed its audience in a sustained state of exhilaration.”

“For a show about magic and wonder, there's shockingly little on display here.”

“This pantomime might be distracting, if there were anything worth distracting from, so instead it's more of a weird exclamation point on a run-on sentence of a musical.”

“Yet having now seen ‘The Band's Visit’ twice, I'm still not able to shake the feeling that it doesn't add up to much -- and that it certainly doesn't stick to the ribs.”

“For everyone else, though, the nuance-free, one-note ‘The Terms of My Surrender’ drifts dangerously close to self-parody.”

“The new Broadway revival, now playing at the Theatre and superbly directed by Anne Kauffman, does ‘Marvin's Room’ extraordinary justice -- it makes the case that a mostly forgotten play might just be a modern classic.”

“The result is that significant stretches of this ‘1984’ are plainly boring.”

“But almost from the start, director Trip Cullman (‘Significant Other’) turns up the dial on the farcical aspects of Guare's rapid-fire script, sending the story and the characters spilling (sometimes literally) into cartoonishness.”

“When a work is this deliberately vague and open-ended -- when it can mean anything -- it eventually comes to feel like a whole lot of nothing.”

“The new revival of Jerry Herman's 1964 ‘Hello, Dolly!’ starring Bette Midler is so surpassingly beautiful, propelled by such glorious razzle-dazzle, and crafted with such joy and intelligence that it deserves to be studied, emulated and above all celebrated.”

“The play's the thing -- and ‘Indecent’ is a very good one indeed.”

“Here's hoping it hangs around long enough to realize its full potential.”

“Yet if ‘Miss Saigon’ hasn't necessarily refined with age, this is nonetheless a handsome, accomplished production -- an artful application of lipstick on a pot-bellied pig.”

“Director Terry Kinney's extraordinary new revival of the show -- starring a dream team cast that includes Mark Ruffalo, Danny DeVito, Tony Shalhoub, and Jessica Hecht -- makes the convincing argument that the play deserves as much attention as any in the Miller canon.”

“Yet this ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ has a fatal flaw -- a miscast and uncomfortable-looking Liev Schreiber as Merteuil's ex-lover and fellow sexual mercenary, the Vicomte de Valmont.”

“Offers plenty to admire even if it never fully coheres or proves as affecting as it wants to be...Lapine directed this revival and my guess is that 'Falsettos' ultimately needed someone not quite so close to the material to make it resonate fully with a contemporary audience...”

“Even though 'Heisenberg' is directed with efficiency by Mark Brokaw and has its share of smart, charming dialogue, I grew weary.”

“Flaws and all, ‘Holiday Inn’ leaves you unreservedly happy -- these days, no small feat.”

“Either there's something funny in the drinking water in the U.K., or much got lost in the journey over the Atlantic — because it's impossible to imagine this frequently baffling, grindingly dull show connecting with American audiences.”

“This proudly flashy, impressively ambitious show is the very last production to open in the 2015-16 Broadway season.”

“Or to put it another way: What might have sounded on paper like an ill-advised stunt — ‘Let's make a show about a man losing his bearings and slaughtering dozens of people!’ — ends up being the timeliest, most trenchant show of the season.”

“If all of the disparate pieces of this ‘The Crucible’ never quite fit together — why, for instance, is Whishaw covered in so much mud in the final prison sequences that you can barely see his eyes?”

“Too bad show's story -- also conceived by Martin and Brickell -- doesn't display nearly as much flair.”

“Williams works continual wonders, such as her tour-de-force, nearly ten-minute monologue in which she recalls the day she was abused.”

“This creation of Sirius radio host Seth Rudetsky is the Broadway season's happiest surprise.”

“But that's about all this undercooked, altogether listless production has going for it.”

“The screws turn and turn and then turn some more in ‘Thérèse Raquin,’ a terrifically nerve-wracking, beautifully mounted new drama that also marks Oscar-nominated actress Keira Knightley's Broadway debut...this story of illicit love, murder and madness -- directed with intensity and great invention ...”

“Otherwise ‘Ripcord’ aims too low and still barely delivers.”

“What should culminate in devastation — a vision of life's potential to leave us all alone and abandoned —is played instead as the vaudeville of a couple of eccentric codgers.”

“Rockwell and Arianda gleefully tear into one another, generating palpable sexual tension and nailing the grimly comic underbelly of Shepard's dialogue.”

“Less than a revelation, this new ‘Spring Awakening’ mostly serves as a reaffirmation of the durability and emotional punch of Sheik and Sater's original conception...”

“It's a ‘Noises Off’ delivered straight over the plate, fast and clean -- a blast for the newbies in the audience, but perhaps overly familiar to those who already know this show's surprises.”

“Whether this fully hangs together as a Broadway show is another -- and highly debatable -- matter.”

“Director Lonny Price and his lead actress seem determined to force you out of the moment, overloading the production with so many ‘Major Theatrical Event’ moments and signposts that it all starts to sag beneath the weight of its own self-importance.”

“The result is a confused, flat and finally listless production.”

“But in exploring an aging man's descent into dementia, the playwright seems far more interested in theatrical trickery than psychological insight or emotional depth.”

“Coherent this production is not, but that hasn't yet (and probably won't) stop it from being the most buzzed-about show of the fall.”

“What's most impressive about this stage version, written by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell and Gordon Farrell and directed by Leigh Silverman (‘Violet’), is that it transforms something potentially insider-ish and wonky into a surprisingly funny and urgent drama.”

“But May's long absence from the stage is evident -- at times, it's a struggle to hear her; other times, her grasp of this complicated character feels uncertain.”

“Otherwise this musical feels like a few too many slices of a much too sugary pie.”

“‘War Paint’ attempts an alternative -- a portrait of competition between women that is nuanced, empathetic and maybe even exemplary.”

“The emotions are big — and after months of performances, this formally complicated show (mostly a monologue, sometimes a play, occasionally improvised) is now a beautifully-oiled machine.”