Jackson McHenry

“The scares in the stage version of Paranormal Activity are indeed applause worthy.”

“Once you lock into the rippling threats, alliances, and power shifts within this clique of homeowners, The Balusters plays out like a series of meetings of the Mafia.”

“It's exuberant, clever, eager to please, dexterously devised, and yet, with all that technique behind it, it lands in a place that's awfully unambitious.”

“But he’s so enamored with that bravado, that of his character and his own, that he only glancingly finds a dimension beyond it.”

“And yet, in placing new context and bodies inside the suit of ’80s excess, The Jellicle Ball reinvents it.”

“When Two Strangers does do that, it does achieve something magical, and those moments make you see what a smaller-scale musical can do successfully without a huge budget or soapy showmanship.”

“I couldn’t escape the nagging sensation, as I watched Samuel D. Hunter’s drama unfold, that the circumstances were all arrayed too perfectly for a Metcalf showcase, that they’re too custom-fitted to her skills—that there were diminishing returns to watching her do only what she does best.”

“For a few minutes of theater, some great barrier has fallen, and everything is possible and free.”

“The green flash that imprints on the back of your eyes, right as the sun dips into the horizon—that’s Ragtime.”

“I would not discourage anyone interested from attending Mamma Mia!.”

“But what it’s actually doing is risking nothing, repeating back at you that the world is scary, that a star you like is indeed likeable, and that the theater is the land of the grim and dutiful.”

“That Dead Outlaw so neatly reflects the zeitgeist as it transfers uptown is representative of the way David Yazbek, Erik Della Penna, and Itamar Moses’s deceptively small-scale musical follows the stream of the hyperspecific into deep and vast currents in the American psyche.”

“Only Lawrence, arriving on Broadway after The Sex Lives of College Girls, is able to briefly wrench the show’s center of gravity away from Groff, and only because her belt is so full it bursts through the theater like Alice expanding past the size of a house in Wonderland.”

“Once a deliciously hate-watchable prime-time NBC drama with a killer pilot and a steep drop-off in quality, Smash has gone through more than a decade of reworking, including attempts to stage the musical-within-the-show straight-up, and has finally arrived on Broadway overmasticated and gummy.”

“You can’t take offense at the concept — it accomplishes exactly what it aims to do, which is to remind you that Sondheim wrote some really great songs — but you do start to fantasize about it all slowing down and just committing to the dramatic frames that contained them.”

“The thing adds up to less than the sum of its bits.”

“All that adds up to a rousing evening at the theater, if also something less than a great musical.”

“He brings us to the threshold, lets us peer through at this family’s secrets, and then politely draws it shut.”

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

“The conceit’s cleverly nipped and tucked, the work of fine theatrical plastic surgery, hard to dislike and ultimately—as a medical examiner might say of these women—without a heartbeat.”

“It's an opportunity to spend Yuletide at a production with the primary goal of being as palatable and inoffensive as possible.”

“In the case of A Wonderful World, Louis Armstrong comes marching into Broadway aboard an overstuffed bio-musical.”

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

“There’s no there there: This is just gunk.”

“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.”

“Leon's production gets stuck in the sentimental and his approach is serviceable and too respectful.”

“That cleverness, however, has a domineering quality.”

“That gesture is typical of the understated yet gutting quality of this production of Mary Jane, which cuts the quotidian open to get to the bone of the existential.”

“In the moment, it’s easy to laugh along with The Heart of Rock and Roll’s relentless charm offensive.”

“If it’s a great spectacle of music and motion on its own, it’s also less than you might hope for from a musical.”

“The effect was, as with so much of the revival, of missing out on a moment that could have been great, if only given more care and fine tuning.”

“Much of the second act, especially, is at the point where the authors get so concerned with underlining a message that the characters stop sounding like actual people.”

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

“That extra-textural dramatic irony gnaws at The Shark Is Broken, which has less integrity as a play than as a thoroughly researched dress-up presentation for a history-of-film class.”

“If this is the future arriving on Broadway, it looks way too much like another medium’s past.”

“Over the course of an evening, the characters’ continual wink-and-nudge reminders of the goofiness of their world make it harder to maintain investment.”

“The resulting music is irresistible to a totalitarian degree.”

“This is a crowd-pleasing, often hilarious show, with a time bomb labeled ‘Is it good that I am here making you laugh?’ at its center.”

“Instead, it’s reductive and pandering, hitting all the expected marks without any unique spark.”

“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.”

“For all the musical’s insistence on the city’s vitality, it’s glassy-eyed and complacent.”

“The key pleasure of Summer, 1976 comes from listening to Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht talk.”

“The play, structured around Oscar Levant’s appearance on The Tonight Show With Jack Paar in 1958, idles in neutral for the bulk of its run time.”

“It’s an incredible breakneck feat, in which Comer achieves escape velocity from the script of Suzie Miller’s unsteady play and exerts a thrilling and devastating gravitational force of her own.”

“The problem is that The Thanksgiving Play intentionally hurtles its characters toward a dead end — like Wile E. Coyote toward a tunnel entrance that’s just drawn on the side of a rock — and it gets stuck once they crash.”

“The bread and butter of Peter Pan’s humor is broad and full of grievous injuries. Like most carb-and-fat combinations, that means it goes down easy but risks leaving us too sated too soon.”

“The revival makes you want to believe in a great musical called Camelot, even if such a thing never did exist.”

“Conceptually, I’m right there with what Ijames is cooking up, but by the time that finale came around, I was left a little cold, craving some pulled pork but, instead, getting a takeout sandwich encased in too many layers of cling wrap.”

“The proof is in the (corn) pudding and the fact that everyone around you does end up laughing.”

“It’s a pity that he’s stranded in a story awash with platitudes.”

“Kail, riding high after directing Hamilton, aims to ratchet Sweeney all the way back up, deploying a cast of 25, a two-level set by Mimi Lien with a towering crane — going big and crucially, expressionistic.”

“It attempts to say barely anything, and it succeeds.”

“This is a show hell-bent on making sure that you have fun, laughs, good times at any cost.”

“Waiting for an action that’s so clearly foreshadowed pinches the emotional effect.”

“Parade gets the wrong melody stuck in your head, intentionally.”

“The effect is somewhere between stately and stasis.”

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

“Henderson’s Walter belongs on Broadway, and it’s a pity it took this long for the production to transfer.”

“By the end of it, all I could think is, Well, this is most of the way to being an incredible musical.”

“You are left with the feeling of wishing for something stranger, and also of seeing those accommodations more clearly.”

“The thing is, there’s just not much of a show there.”

“It’s a delight to have Jordan E. Cooper kick down the door of Broadway in heels and storm onstage with something as raucous as Ain’t No Mo’.”

“It feels as if the show has rushed out into the open water of Broadway and then gotten stuck, like a ship unable to catch the wind.”

“If you were to adapt the feeling of getting day-drunk on cheap rosé for the stage, you’d get & Juliet.”

“The chaos of Kimberly Akimbo clicks into place, and the show reveals that it’s been dealing in simple, unbearable truths all along.”

“It so desperately wants to remind you of something else you might’ve loved that the presiding emotional affect ends up being melancholy.”

“That’s the nature of The Piano Lesson: It’s a play so much about the possibilities of the present that are cut off when other demands, like those of the past, make themselves known.”

“You may flinch at the dorkiness, but if you’re in the mood to join in and let the t.p. fly, there’s fun to be had.”