Jesse Green

“This exhilarating Broadway production opened Tuesday at the Broadhurst Theater after its 2024 premiere at the Arts Center in Lower Manhattan.”

“Returning to Broadway after 25 years in “Call Me Izzy,” which opened Thursday at Studio 54, Jean Smart crushes it in the good way.”

“That’s the gorgeously perverse opening of “Dead Outlaw,” the feel-good musical of the season, if death and deadpan feel good to you.”

“Dismayed as I was to endure so much else, I have to admit he’s giving one of Broadway’s best performances.”

“Except for the central performance by David Hyde Pierce, marvelously underplaying the tongue-twisting Major-General, the production has a sweaty quality, bordering on frenzy, that's hopelessly at odds with the cool wit of the original.”

““John Proctor Is the Villain” is too urgently necessary about its one thing to make it worth wishing it were even a little different.”

“For the rest of us, a real musical comedy is a cause for celebration; most are either too tuneless to be musicals or too dull to be comedies.”

“Others are middling, a few are misfires.”

“Instead, one feels at all times the heavy hooves of a marketing imperative.”

“Sung by Jonas, it’s basically incomprehensible — to be fair, that’s at least in part because of the generally murky sound.”

““Good Night, and Good Luck” is a powerful and useful reminder that a demigod, or maybe it takes many whose names we don’t know, can still sometimes bring down a devil.”

“But in the weirdly limp revival that opened on Monday at the Palace Theater, something has flipped.”

“It’s that the technology dominates all other values, including Wilde’s, often denying the human contact, and contract, that are at the heart of theater’s effectiveness.”

“In short, as I felt the production’s blunt force more and more, I grasped its aura and aims less and less.”

“I enjoyed “Operation Mincemeat” well enough, but I would have enjoyed it much more if I thought that were true onstage.”

“That’s exciting while the story remains in midair in Act 1, less so upon landing in a heap in Act 2.”

“Luckily, it offers great pleasure along with its factoids.”

“McDonald is the star such a Rose hoped for. Doing a psychological striptease, showing more of the character's rage than her predecessors, she is stupendously affecting. So, if a bit intermittently, is the show.”

“Whether you can take seriously the good intentions of characters so hung up on what they say regardless of what they do is another matter.”

“It’s this cognitive dissonance, so widespread and so clamorous and so tragically American, that theater, by its very nature, is always addressing, and in Eureka Day that essential refutation takes on explicit and eloquent form.”

“The play, which opened Wednesday at the Hayes Theater, is a marathon of misery that somehow manages to be both overwrought and undercooked.”

“The chance to see two theatrical masterminds go at it for a few hours is sufficient justification for the effort.”

“That question pervades the 1992 film Death Becomes Her (written by Martin Donovan and David Koepp, and directed by Robert Zemeckis), which has just been turned into the funniest new musical comedy on Broadway.”

“I was not convinced, and yet I was fully entertained and harrowed.”

“The problem is that they ended up making her smaller than life.”

“Elton John's musical struggles to find its spiritual center amid the spectacle.”

““A Wonderful World,” treating its title as purely ironic, does not sufficiently encompass that complexity; it’s vague because it cannot reconcile Armstrong’s overflowing affections (for women, music and people of all stripes) with the rigid absolutes of our time.”

“That we nonrobots also connect, pair and empower one another to share a too-brief lifetime is the surprising double vision that makes “Maybe Happy Ending” a ravishing addition to the catalog of Broadway nerdicals.”

“Yet this play, trying so hard to keep things bright, is fearful of totality.”

“The play is thus less terrifying than teenifying — hence the plus sign instead of the “and” in the title.”

“In any good enough production, “Our Town” is titanic: beyond time and brutal.”

“Those questions, both as artistic choices and as problems of social identity, are powerfully and hilariously engaged in the revival of David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face” that opened on Tuesday at the Theater.”

“The problem is that this version of “The Roommate,” working backward from that fact, delivers a pair of very satisfying performances that cancels out the play.”

“When it comes to this particular couple, Urie and Foster make you believe in a happy future that may include all kinds of calisthenics.”

“If you don’t mind that the thrill is pointless, this one’s for you.”

“Rather, the play, which opened on Thursday at the Lyceum Theater, is one of the best crafted and most exactingly directed Broadway comedies in years.”

“"Illinoise" makes me wonder why so many musicals, even those that feature dance heavily, are so leadfooted in their storytelling conventions.”

“That’s what “Mother Play” is, a balm that comes in cardboard boxes and packing tape.”

“If Vanya is properly no hero in this amusing but rarely deeply affecting production, it’s because he’s no one at all.”

“It’s McAdams, with her fetching warmth, who alters the temperature.”

“These charmless characters are broadly outlined, psychologically shallow and simplistically played.”

“Rupert Goold's entertaining if overcaffeinated production”

“Onstage, it’s a recipe for information overload — a treatment that is both crowded and shallow.”

“Too often I thought the same of the show itself.”

“The play is a staggering achievement, and already feels like a must-see American classic.”

““Suffs” on Broadway is vastly improved.”

“Its easygoing good spirits are bolstered by solid craftsmanship, and it'd be silly to turn up our noses at that.”

“Too often history gets the airbrush here, inviting the same criticism that Marinetti lobbed at Lempicka: decorative.”

“And yet the musical version of “The Outsiders” that opened on Thursday has been made with so much love and sincerity it survives with most of its heart intact.”

“However loudly and well the performers sing, however frenziedly they dance Lorin Latarro’s dystopian choreography, they rarely surface from the production’s flooding of the senses with any expressiveness intact.”

“In building such a huge and heart-filling musical one image at a time, the creators of “Water for Elephants” have disproved the old circus adage behind the title, which holds that you can never deliver enough sustenance for a creature so large and thirsty.”

“Sam Gold's crackling and persuasive production, which drove those views home despite having to regroup once the protesters were ejected.”

“Or maybe, seen with a cold eye, meretricious.”

“I want plays to manipulate me, and it is often truly the case that we cannot know the truth.”

“Deeper, wiser and warmer than it was in its premiere at Off Broadway’s Atlantic Theater Company last year, it is no longer so wary of melodrama that it’s afraid of feeling, too.”

“By the third act, the arguments have stripped their gears completely, and the play ends in sentimental exhaustion.”

“Recalling yet somehow outstripping the thrilling vileness of theatrical viragos like Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and Violet in “August: Osage County,” she is the burned-out core of a nuclear family reactor, taking no prisoners and taking no blame.”

“Generically staged by Sammi Cannold, How to Dance in Ohio was clearly made with love and will touch some hearts—on the spectrum or not—but feels synthetic and patchy when not outright tacky.”

“Just as the characters struggle to conform to the expectations of a neurotypical world, you feel the musical doing a similar thing, looking to traditional models (like “The Prom”) instead of offbeat ones (like “Kimberly Akimbo”) that would be a better fit.”

“This one, directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes, gives the “ni”-sayers what they want.”

“Neither the guys nor the grim and eventually bludgeoning show have a gift for levity.”

“In a superb performance, Coon provides the alpha energy this time.”

“Here the problem is not excess but triteness; the tropes of sincere incompetence and pathetic ambition are too familiar, if expertly carried out.”

““Jaja’s” is full of such treasurable moments, when the drama feels tightly woven with the comedy.”

“The “Purlie Victorious” that opened on Wednesday at the Music Box — unaccountably its first Broadway revival — is every bit as scathingly funny as the 1961 reviews said it was.”

“Were it not for its curious meta-story, the play would be little more than a pleasant diversion: 95 minutes of bloodless, toothless, Hollywood-adjacent dramedy.”

“Though large, it’s less a full-scale new work than a semi-operable souvenir.”

“Alexander’s trick-filled production, which opened on Monday at the Theater, cannot hide that the stakes are too low.”

“That she would probably adore the over-emphatic atmosphere of “Here Lies Love” — with its lurid lighting by Justin Townsend, skittering projections by Peter Nigrini and earsplitting sound by M.L. Dogg and Cody Spencer — is, however, equivocal praise.”

“For all the dumb jokes (but yes, I laughed at every one) it winds up as a critique of both dumbness and jokes.”

““I’ve seen this movie,” Henry says.”

“But on the evidence of the character as written, and especially as impersonated by Sean Hayes in a gloomy if accurate performance, Levant doesn’t erase the line so much as fudge it.”

“But the underlining and the advocacy do something odd to the drama: They make it disappear.”

“In short, these are ridiculous figures — and yet not so ridiculous as to be unrecognizable.”

“And so may you be, with laughter, especially if you did not see the earlier show, which despite its disguise of amateurism was a highly polished production called “That Goes Wrong.””

“Neither, it seems, is sufficient today.”

“Like Gordy, the audience may have difficulty extracting the gems from the corn.”

“Now comes a new special on the menu: the ravishingly sung, deeply emotional and strangely hilarious 'Sweeney' revival that opened on Sunday at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater.”

“Instead, it’s surprisingly vulgar, sexed-up and dumbed-down: a parade of hustling women in bustiers and shirtless pec-rippling hunks.”

“The show is a joy every time it puts down its ax.”

“With no affectation whatsoever, and a voice directly wired to her emotions, she makes Lucille our way into a story we might rather turn away from.”

“My only real quibble with this compelling, surgically precise revival is that it doesn’t seem to be interested in preserving that unity.”

“Though honorable, thoughtful and wonderful to look at, with crafty performances by Danny Burstein, Zoë Wanamaker and especially Nathan Lane, it caulks so many of the book’s expressive cracks that the best thing about it — its mystery — is sealed out.”

“Onstage, though, “The Collaboration” feels emptily formulaic — less like an insider’s view of its famous subjects’ lives than a kind of biographical tourism that gets into serious gawking in its second half.”

“Everyone should see it anyway, to experience the pleasure of a great cast making a shrimps-and-veal meal of the incredibly rich material, even as it flips between comedy and tragedy on its way to the truth in between.”

“With a sensitive ear for the language of New York and a keen sense of what makes each of his characters unique, Guirgis has written a play that is as complex and wondrous as the world we inhabit.”

“This Christmas Carol will send you out into the cold feeling warm, reflective, and maybe — maybe — just a little less cynical about the state of the world right now.”

“That’s a pretty high standard, after all, and in its staging (by Casey Nicholaw), its revamped plot (by Matthew López and Amber Ruffin) and especially its songs (by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman), “It Hot” clears the bar handily.”

“In “Ohio State Murders,” Kennedy, an avant-gardist who deserves a place among our most honored and produced playwrights, does it in many, each of them a bullet.”

“Ohio State Murders represents an extraordinary Broadway debut for Kennedy and a triumphant return for McDonald.”

“Cooper's play is a fierce, funny, and sometimes messy satire that uses the fantasy of Black exodus to examine the reality of Black existence in America.”

“For them, the musical is less an eye-opener than an ear-pounder, assiduously drowning out any ambitions it may once have had to be more.”

“What saves “& Juliet” from being a lowest-common-denominator corporate byproduct is something else, something I never expected: wit.”

“Birbiglia has become expert at finding the comedy in catastrophe, and the show builds to a climax that manages to be both hilarious and genuinely moving.”

“The version we do have is gratifying.”

“It’s not about a disease at all, unless it’s the one we all have: We grow up too slowly and then suddenly too fast.”

“That leaves dumb, and I’m sorry to say that despite the intelligence of the 2000 movie on which it’s based, and the track record of its creators, the stage musical misses every opportunity to be the sharp, smart entertainment it might have been.”

“Hinds proves himself a master storyteller, weaving together memories of his youth in Belfast, his relationship with his mother, and his journey as an actor with remarkable grace and authenticity.”

“How wonderful to experience again, in the hilarious, harrowing and superbly acted Broadway revival that opened on Thursday at the Golden Theater, Parks’s fearlessness.”

“In general, the balance of light and dark in this very dark play does not yet feel natural.”