Peter Marks

“What emerges is a portrait of a family whose devotion to one another is both touching and toxic, a love so intense it threatens to consume everyone in its path.”

“Margulies brings a warm, conversational ease to the role that makes you feel as if you're sitting across from her at a coffee shop, listening to her recount the most important chapters of her life.”

“It’s a darling gem of a show with a big heart and a captivating sideways sensibility.”

“Rachel McAdams gives a performance of such emotional authenticity and raw power that you feel as if you're witnessing something deeply private and profound.”

“The show is a gorgeous, sprawling meditation on love, loss and the search for meaning, told through dance that is both earthbound and transcendent.”

“But ‘Patriots’ suffers from a slipperiness of both focus and scale, dramatizing historical incidents and backroom deals while only thinly sketching the characters behind them.”

“What we get in 'Stereophonic' is nothing short of a marvel: a play that captures the messy, intoxicating process of artistic creation with an authenticity that feels almost voyeuristic.”

“What ‘Suffs’ does capture is the excitement and urgency of being swept up in the fight for a just cause, and discovering yourself and your peers in the process.”

“Paula Vogel's 'Mother Play' is a memory piece that feels less like theater than like an extended therapy session, despite Jessica Lange's commanding presence.”

“The play's power lies in its ability to excavate the casual cruelties and unexamined privileges that families pass down like heirlooms, and this Broadway revival does so with searing precision.”

“This new ‘Spamalot’ arrives, beefed up, gussied up and yes, even funnier than in its birthing engagement earlier this year at the Kennedy Center.”

“As an act, though, the group lacks the intrinsic appeal that might sustain our interest through song after song.”

“It just seems false to suggest such an unhealthy mental condition as somehow romantic.”

“The only trigger warning required is one that cautions laughter ahead.”

“Director Maria Friedman, in league with stars Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe, burrow down to the musical’s theatrical core and discover not a shallow pool of glibness but a deep wellspring of emotionality.”

“Bioh — who notes in the program that she’s been wearing braids since she was 4 — has composed a character-rich play, bubbling with personality and marking Bioh’s Broadway debut as an occasion worth toasting.”

“This is the fine line that ‘Purlie Victorious’ walks so beautifully.”

“The immersive staging of 'Here Lies Love' transforms the Broadway Theatre into a glittering nightclub where audiences dance alongside performers in this musical about Imelda Marcos.”

“For anyone who appreciates the application of witty, transgressive intelligence to patently anti-social phenomena, his account is something sublime.”

“Little has been done to address its deficiencies.”

“But apart from Laurie Metcalf’s enjoyable portrayal of an inscrutable mountain woman, and a set by Scott Pask out of the Grimms’ grimmest fairy tale, the play itself exists in a sort of gray zone — neither particularly terrifying nor profound.”

“They paint a city of pink sunsets and bland cliches. And though they dance up a storm, all we get is a haze.”

“What Comer’s Tessa has to say about her experience must be said, and repeated and repeated, until the world has changed and ‘Prima Facie’ comes to feel like history, and not current events.”

“What this unhappy queen truly wants is the one intriguingly unsettled mystery in a ‘Camelot’ that conjures anything but wonder.”

“The musical's appeal lies in its commitment to the ridiculous, its willingness to lean into the corniest possible jokes about corn and small-town life.”

“As such, the production is more striking than stimulating.”

“But it remains an evening of myriad irresistible moments, with a score that sings us into everlastingly blissful submission.”

“‘Bad Cinderella’ is the cheesiest and crudest of the lot.”

“In Chastain’s smashingly fine-tuned performance, the march to self-discovery has been gaining momentum, scene by scene, all night.”

“Diamond’s performance is indeed a gemlike asset, in a stately show that’s over-paved with good intentions.”

“‘Pictures From Home’ is a far richer experience when it doesn't shift into soft focus.”

“In the spate of shows that ring out Broadway in 2022, Henderson and ‘Between Riverside and Crazy’ provide the deepest satisfaction.”

“This fizzy adaptation of the Billy Wilder film classic is a crowd-pleasing musical that knows how to work an audience”

“This 'Christmas Carol' is a lavish, old-fashioned spectacle that delivers the holiday goods with impressive technical wizardry and heartfelt performances.”

“What Kenny Leon's production delivers most potently is Morrison in full command of her towering gifts, spinning out her story with the mesmerizing authority of a master storyteller.”

“Or askew in this lovely, embraceable show.”

“And the stage version is so less good.”

“Majok's beautiful play is an exploration of intimacy and interdependence, anchored by four exceptional performances that illuminate the complex dynamics between caregivers and those who need care.”

“Under the direction of Kenny Leon — a longtime Broadway hand here masterminding the best production of his career — the fierce rivalry and protectiveness binding this Lincoln and Booth convulses in a shattering denouement.”

“That sense of new ownership joyfully pervades this splendid production, which opened officially Thursday night at Broadway’s Theatre.”

“Alongside the virile actors playing their disappointing sons, Biff (Khris Davis) and Happy (McKinley Belcher III), Clarke and Pierce set a humble Brooklyn abode to quaking with all the disquieting power of shifting tectonic plates.”

“Across the board, the performances earn your compassion — clearly, a family album in which Stoppard wanted us to invest our most profound sympathies.”

“The scintillating new revival of ‘Into the Woods’ is rendered so harmoniously and meticulously, you’ll swear you even hear the punctuation marks in the lyrics.”

“You’ll be relieved to know Billy Crystal is still a stand-up guy — stand-up in the sense that the jokes in 'Mr. Saturday Night,' the 1992 film comedy he and other showbiz pros have turned into a slender but agreeable Broadway musical — are old-school funny, polished and impeccably timed.”

“You’ll have to book a seat at the Shubert Theatre, where the play had its official opening Wednesday night, for all the frenzied shenanigans that slake one’s thirst for sweet political revenge — a dish here served hilariously superheated.”

“That’s only just, for the best Broadway musical of the season.”

“Rather than incandescent, though, Feldstein’s star turn is an earthbound affair, best when she’s executing the comedy aspect of musical comedy, and less compelling at the music part.”

“The comedy-drama has been buffed to a scintillating sheen by director Scott Ellis and his lineup of pro designers.”

“The production brings a masterful delicacy to Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize-winning memory play.”

“It makes for an ugly and shocking — but also wholly appropriate — adjournment to an electrifying meeting with America’s shame.”

“The revival of David Mamet's 1975 drama about three small-time crooks plotting a coin heist is a master class in profanity and paranoia, with Sam Rockwell, Laurence Fishburne and Darren Criss delivering performances that crackle with desperate energy.”

“The disappointment on this evening is in trying to say it all.”

“The enterprise is a golden-age opportunity squandered.”

“That’s sort of what you experience with ‘Flying Over Sunset.’”

“These aren’t nullifying dissents by any means, not when the production itself keeps Sondheim’s flame so imaginatively alive.”

“It’s a wholly admirable, workmanlike performance: technically impressive if not charismatically embraceable.”

“The fun of ‘Clyde’s’ is waiting to see which way that realization cuts.”

“Devoid of insight and ricocheting between dull vulgarity and vacuous hero worship, the show, which had its official opening Wednesday at the Longacre Theatre, is less edifying than a scroll through the archives of the tabloids.”

“It’s feel-good entertainment on a mission.”

“‘Is This a Room’ in its understated way expresses with full-throated clarity something seriously out of whack in our political system.”

“One of the triumphs of ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ is that all those numbers add up to such an exhilarating human equation.”

“‘Six,’ the first new musical of the 2021-2022 season, spreads exactly the kind of energizing, inspirational illumination this town aches for.”

“At 95 minutes — roughly half the length of Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece — the play is a smart, sleek commentary on being young and Black and craving the peace of mind that comes with not feeling there’s a target on your back.”

“In streamlining the script and finding his Tony and Maria, van Hove has, like an artist with a degree in cardiology, operated on ‘West Side Story’ and freshly exposed its passionate, throbbing heart.”

“A magnetic Underwood holds the proceedings together smartly.”

“Yet, even at an economical 90 minutes, ‘My Name Is Lucy Barton’ itself comes across as unfulfilling drama, as driven too transparently by novelistic formulas.”

“I could go on about the soapy predictability of ‘Jagged Little Pill,’ which had its official opening Thursday at the Broadhurst Theatre, with much of the cast intact from its 2018 premiere at Theater in Cambridge, Mass., where Paulus is artistic director.”

“Well, ultimately, I’d say yes, but with some caveats.”

“Hers isn’t so much a performance as an eruption.”

“The drama is comprehensive without being compelling.”

“The three performers bring such emotional precision to Harold Pinter's reverse-chronology tale of adultery that you feel you're witnessing something profound about the nature of intimacy.”

“That, for many people, is worth the price of admission.”

“What’s left is a propulsive enchantment that, if you fell in love with the film, as I did, still allows you to fall in like with its follow-up.”

“The revival of Arthur Miller's 'All My Sons' at the Lyceum Theatre is a solid showcase for Jeremy Irons, who brings his considerable stage presence to bear on the role of Joe Keller.”

“The upgrades in 'Beetlejuice,' both aesthetic and textual, are all for the better, clearing out some extraneous material and thereby giving more prominence to the show's best two performances.”

“But it never quite resolves the central tension between comedy and enlightenment.”

“He’s such a natural force, in fact, that if you were wearing a hat, you would have to be holding on to it every time he entered.”

“It is a credit to Metcalf’s gifts that maybe, just maybe, we understand a little bit better why Nora left and Hillary stayed.”

“Yet ‘Hadestown’ never fulfills that essential mandate — revealing why a jazzy adaptation of Orpheus and Eurydice’s story should merit all this muscular stomping around.”

“Taylor Mac's 'Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus' is a brilliant, blood-soaked comedy that finds profound meaning in the aftermath of Shakespeare's goriest tragedy.”

“What’s best in this ‘Oklahoma!’ is the morally ambiguous cue Fish develops so smartly from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s own narrative impulses.”

“Like so much else in this aggravating scrimmage of a ‘Lear,’ the dimensions are off.”

“Schreck has fashioned a theatrical work of such personalized and pointed commentary that it manages to be both deeply intimate and powerfully political.”

“This pothole in my theatrical path has at last been filled, and buoyantly, by a new, first-class Broadway version that at times raises its sparkle quotient to incandescence.”

“‘Be More Shrill’ would be a better title for director Stephen Brackett’s heinously overamplified and overacted production, built on the story of a nerd played by the intrepid Will Roland, who takes a magic pill to become popular with the high school ‘in’ crowd.”

“The thing is, when these words are uttered by Jeff Daniels, you’re inclined to a conviction that kindness in the world is still possible.”

“A more fitting Broadway gift to Cher’s audience would have been a musical as dynamically irreverent as she is.”

“But the beast's magnificence only serves to highlight how disappointingly ordinary everything else about this production is.”

“Harvey Fierstein is back on Broadway and better than ever in '”

“And with her beautifully orchestrated portrayal of a woman who can’t quite figure out what of herself she’s losing, May compels audiences to the belief that they have found another great dramatic actress, at last.”

“The evening is a meticulous unfolding of plot and character by the author of ‘Jerusalem,’ the 2011 drama that won Mark Rylance a Tony, and that builds to one of the most ferociously rewarding climaxes of my playgoing experience.”

“The new musical adaptation of 'Pretty Woman' is a squeaky-clean, sanitized version that plays it safe and lacks the edge and complexity that might have made it more compelling.”

“Young Jean Lee's 'Straight White Men' is a wrenching, funny and ultimately devastating examination of what happens when good intentions collide with systemic inequity.”

“Washington’s arrival is an electrifying pinnacle of this elliptical, marathon play, which in this outing clocks in at almost four hours.”

“As you might imagine, the volume of detail about a fantasy world disgorged over two shows containing some redundant tricks could be particularly wearying to anyone not previously acquainted with Cedric Diggory, or Hagrid the half-giant, or the Ministry of Magic.”

“Theater's revival is a loverly thing, a meticulously crafted and handsomely appointed production that honors the musical's pedigree while finding fresh angles from which to illuminate its familiar story.”

“What Jack O'Brien has delivered is a sumptuous, emotionally coherent 'Carousel' that honors the show's complexities while making them feel organic to our moment.”

“Best of all, in a marketplace filled with mindless work about teens, here’s one that doesn’t insult their intelligence — or yours.”

“I’m here to tell you that your investment will come back to you in the capital gains of enlightenment and sublime entertainment.”

“The production, directed with a sure hand by Trip Cullman, benefits from four terrific performances that bring out the moral complexities in Lonergan's searching drama.”