Hilton Als

“I have never liked Lane and White as wholeheartedly as I did watching them in “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus,” mostly because of their and Neilsen’s admiration for the script, and where it takes them as performers.”

“How the playwright, James Graham, and the director, Rupert Goold, achieved this effect accounts for what’s interesting about the nearly three-hour drama—and for why it fails.”

“But now, by trying to lampoon whiteness, she’s made a “white” play: shallow, soporific, and all about itself.”

“Like Stanley Kowalski with Stella, the sexual chemistry is too strong for Julie to give up, and when Billy’s wildness leads to the inevitable—or the inevitable for a musical—she prefers to live with the ghost of his power than do without it altogether.”

“As in much of his directorial work, Mantello reconfigures the script to emphasize the fire-and-brimstone moments that he thinks Broadway audiences will respond to: it’s very easy to choose between right and wrong.”

“Hnath actually wrote it, producing his strongest work yet.”

“It was very sweet to watch Midler walk to the center of the stage, turn her face up to the pin spot, and start addressing a lost love: the moment was filled with memories of Midler, Bette in a thousand and one previous incarnations, including herself.”

“Much of this production plays like a Mel Brooks parody of a drama about the working man.”

“With that false move, the show’s creators risk destroying what’s so spikily fascinating about Evan.”

“Harrower has the focus of a songwriter, and his exquisitely wrought monologues are like odes to Una and Ray’s power struggles, desires, and elisions.”

“Nothing significant happens in “Hughie” except theatre—and the creative lives of its actors.”

“The director, Anna D. Shapiro, moves bodies around the stage with little visible evidence that she’s concerned about their inner lives, and rarely steps outside the Broadway machinery to reënvision the dreck she’s stuck with.”

“The director, Anna D. Shapiro, moves bodies around the stage with little visible evidence that she’s concerned about their inner lives, and rarely steps outside the Broadway machinery to reënvision the dreck she’s stuck with.”

“During the intermission, I found myself wondering how Daly and her excellent director, Stephen Wadsworth, would keep all this intellectual and emotional splendor aloft. Though they’d captured my heart with the first half, there was the worry that exhaustion or lack of imagination would cause the acting or the directing to topple ...”

“Toby’s characterization is as offensive as the language used to describe him.”

“Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes have rendered a simple and not at all offensive world, and brought little that is new to the familiar Broadway spectacle of earnest, smiling immigrants singing and dancing for our delectation.”