Helen Shaw

“The Lost Boys contains the finest spectacle I have seen this season outside of the Met Opera.”

“Wilson’s language rushes past and over every barrier.”

“The point of "Rocky Horror" is to lose control.”

“A slippery, sensitive, clever play about how we reveal ourselves by what we choose to bristle over and what we find funny.”

“Edebiri, on the other hand, plays Catherine as a sane but furious woman under a terrific tension, a level of silent agitation that we see even when she turns away.”

“But at the James Earl Jones, which is four times the size, the distance makes those wrong notes echo.”

“A gorgeously realized production, full of exquisitely calibrated performances.”

“In Rosenblatt’s play, he is a BFG (Big Fractious Giant): The real man was 6-foot-6, while Lithgow is 6-foot-3. The director Nicholas Hytner keeps Dahl’s height in reserve, almost as if it’s a special effect. When the curtain rises, Lithgow is seated.”

“Radcliffe doesn’t just do away with the fourth wall, he manages to expand his magical aren’t-people-wonderful optimism to include the whole orchestra, mezzanine and balcony.”

“But it does, for a moment, penetrate the fog.”

“Hunter captures how slippery time felt in that period—infinity measured out in season finales.”

“Gilmour’s set—simultaneously a gesture to Fascist architecture, a conduit to nowhere, and a scatological joke—shores up the production in several ways.”

““Art” was a mile marker in the last quarter-century’s march toward bad-faith argument as popular entertainment, which is another way of saying—I can’t laugh at it now.”

“Skinner’s dissection of the red-pilled male mind-set does not seem particularly sharp to me: she is deft at showing how a “just asking questions” manner actually masks deep resentment, but she’s less careful with the specifics.”

“The director, Kenny Leon, is uninterested in clarity, though, and the vibe is mild depression: a pre-show projection reading “The Near Future” doesn’t turn out to be particularly useful, and the dreary, gray-columned set, designed by Derek McLane, looks like a parking garage.”

“And so a finely made blade has become a blunter object.”

“And so a finely made blade has become a blunter object. But we are in a time when a hammer may be more useful than a knife.”

“Here is the ideal of a Chekhov company, in which even the tiniest part is being played by the best actor onstage.”

“The actual show, then, is a surprise: a gentle, subtle experience that calibrates our ears to shifts in pedagogy and understanding.”

“It also signals that what we’re about to see is glossy—and a little false.”

“But by that point, harmony itself looks like a very dangerous thing to chase.”

“We would spend another hundred hours with these gals if given the chance, so why would they blink at eternity?”

“Gold and his company seem most comfortable in these swoony sections. The fights are silly; the final scene in the tomb is bizarrely quick and awkward.”

“You are in for an evening that is altogether too pleasant for its own good.”

“Echoes of those parts in Parsons’s excellent performance stir up a host of greater resonances.”

“It may be given a glossy sheen and a smattering of good punch lines in The Roommate, but it sends us out into the night with the dull sensation of wondering what exactly we were clapping for.”

“Cole Escola's deliriously funny play imagines Mary Todd Lincoln as a drunk, horny, pill-popping wannabe cabaret star, and it's exactly as glorious as it sounds.”

“Whatever Stevens’s personal background, whatever the spiritual vocabulary of his writing, his art reaches for a sense of worship and possibility that eschews labels, limits, and exclusions.”

“But McAnuff and Townshend’s dramatization insists we’re watching a story that does make sense, and then refuses to create that sense.”

“But if I had to take bets on how many actual tears The Musical manages to jerk — well, I wouldn’t advise anyone to bring a bucket.”

“Friedman and her ensemble render the show exquisite.”

“The show — basically a fable — doesn’t meet the moment as much as the moment crashes over it.”

“For the most part—thanks to its completely winning stars, and to the play’s own best stretches of joyful buffoonery—yes.”

“Copying has its costs; certain kinds of reverence are corrosive.”

“The show as a whole may have wobbled from such instability, but at least for Ireland the resulting flexibility made her Sonya into something I’d never seen before.”

“The production makes a good case for more full-on spookiness onstage, even if it’s a less convincing one for this play in particular.”

“But too often the complexity of Sultan’s photographs and words has been downgraded, by White and by the actors’ audience-courting ingratiation, to a sugary, formulaic family comedy.”

“This is the kind of static bio-play that brings two famous figures to the stage and then stalls out.”

“How sweet or inspiring is it, though, when we know that the thirteen-year-olds aren’t allowed to eat cake?”

“America won’t let these men out; Emancipation won’t let these men out; the grim, violent preoccupation with male potency won’t let these men out.”

“That the line is spoken during a climactic scene is a good example of Majok’s adroitness at marrying the mundane to the profoundly, terrifyingly human.”

“In the end, much of what I found moving about “Leopoldstadt” was not onstage.”

“LaTanya Richardson Jackson’s star-studded Broadway revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” is, in a word, magnificent.”

“Stern looks do not, politically and artistically, get us very far, but great musical moments still have power: they win the signatures; they rally the troops; they ring the bell.”

“As a vehicle for recovered memories, and for interrogating the injustice of difference and persistent intolerance, Leopoldstadt is remarkable.”

“Spangler has not conceived The Kite Runner to function theatrically, and the production cannot overcome the foundational shortfall.”

“It’s a production that makes you think, but it did not make me feel.”

“Crystal is the kind of entertainer whose blade never dulls.”

“Watching Harriet searching for a euphemistic way to identify the physical affliction that is holding up POTUS's public appearances is heaven on steroids.”

“We know what happens to Usher because we know what happens to Michael R. Jackson. But the musical doesn’t know that yet — and at this point, the fabulous, piety-smashing 'Loop' still feels as exhilarating as your first trip on the merry-go-round.”

“It seems brutal to place a woman in such an exposed position, where a whole Broadway production rests on notes she can’t sustain.”

“Allen as Mooney hasn’t got the gravity, or the menace.”

“"Twenty-five years ago, Mary-Louise Parker played Li’l Bit, David Morse played Uncle Peck, and Mark Brokaw directed. Now all three are back for Broadway. Strange things happen when nostalgia gets wrapped up in the production, which is itself a cautionary tale about letting atmosphere (the night, the heat, the past) drug the senses.”

“Because American Buffalo works as it used to work (or at least every time I’ve seen it) as a vivid comic indictment of warped American posturing and language.”

“The more it tries for wonder — flying birds, whirls of blue cosmos, a field of roses — the more it turns into cheap greeting-card imagery.”

“Too much rests on Messing’s shoulders, and it’s simply the wrong play for her gifts.”

“It makes the virtuosic Black dancers seem unmusical — but really it’s the musical itself failing to listen.”

“Jackman is a generous performer, and his Harold Hill has a warmth that makes the character's eventual redemption feel earned rather than obligatory.”

“Only the music and movement in MJ work — the show’s Michael, Myles Frost, glides and hip-rocks through a physical impersonation that operates above and beyond the show’s own ugly logic.”

“In the drafty hall, Morisseau’s carefully banked fires start to flicker.”

“I hate to put so much pressure on a single line, but this gesture betrays the thinness of Elliott’s thinking.”

“The rest of the time, though, the songs dissolve into forgettability.”

“Many of the things that usually drive a play are absent in Clyde's. It's unclear about its stakes, and I couldn't always follow the way action leads to reaction — but as the play lifts off into its final minutes, it enters a realm where conventional dramaturgy doesn't apply.”

“The text still contains astonishing power; it could have been written yesterday.”

“This sameness proves, over time, to be difficult to bear.”

“The show can’t recover from this intensity; certainly, we cannot.”

“The breathless, brilliant show has somehow only gotten stronger in its Broadway transfer from the Vineyard Theatre, where its 2020 run was cut short by the pandemic.”

“In Tina Satter’s eerie, essential play about the NSA-leaker Reality Winner, the nature of everything seems to waver.”

“There’s a feeling at the end of this atmospheric show, gorgeous and intoxicating as it often is, of a mighty steel beam bending out of true — all its strength can’t travel so far unsupported.”

“Going to Chicken & Biscuits does feel like being fed by loving but overweening relatives. There's a bit too much of it — the published running time notwithstanding, this show lasts more than two hours with no intermission — but it's a meal full of comfort dishes, difficulties resolved, and love requited.”

“At these moments, the room itself seems to be crying, filled past bursting with weeping, laughing, explosive life.”

“You can actually hear how hard it is for Nwandu to build up joy, because the new section is so transparent about its aesthetic effort.”

“The Sparkle and Glow of 'Grand Horizons'”

“His performance has size and precision, monstrosity and humanity.”

“Thorne’s interest in father-son dysfunction already swallowed up the Harry Potter plays, now this voracious theme eats A Christmas Carol.”

“But although Graham labors hard to humanize Lamb with shadows of self-doubt, this psychological element is oversold and unconvincing, and we're left with a long show about a foregone conclusion.”

“All you'll be able to remember is a family of giants falling one after the other, like a stand of redwoods crashing down.”

“American Son is not well orchestrated or well made, but what Washington is doing is out of an older, more frightening ritual than the conventional Broadway play.”

“Still, the real magic of Angels is that somehow the Work does feel tangible to those who sit in the theater.”

“No wonder, then, that there's a tortured, often unintentionally hilarious quality to the current King Kong musical, a mish-mosh of Thorne's strangely empty text, Marius de Vries's cinematic score, and Eddie Perfect's color-by-numbers pop-inflected songs.”

“This spectacle-drunk spectacle—glitzy nonsense dressed up as thinking—is exactly what Chayefsky critiqued.”

“It’s a crowd-pleaser, a potboiler, a soap opera with a razor in its pocket.”

“This is theater’s “mirror held up to nature” in its most ruthless form.”