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Broadway

Chess

November 23, 2025

Strong’s book belies his name, its overlong (two hours, 40 minute) narrative, with all its scheming realpolitik, being more formulaic than authentic. Its points about the individual vs. the state, personal ambition vs. national loyalty, truth vs. propaganda, the pressures of celebrity, and so on, are clear, but Chess is too addicted to larger-than-life histrionics to make us more than cerebrally grateful or deeply invested in the choices the characters must face. [more]

Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)

November 22, 2025

With its big, if economical, imagination, "Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)" also seemingly contains a metropolis of non-digital humanity, thanks, in particular, to Tony Gayle's robust and amusingly familiar sound design ("stand clear of the closing doors, please"). But Robin and Dougal are the only people ever actually present onstage, which is enough. As they repeatedly scale the twin mounds of literal baggage on Soutra Gilmour's circular treadmill of a set--rotating away from and towards each other--the metaphoric intent is obvious. Still, it's the promptly endearing Pitts and Tutty who must translate that visual meaning into a palpable bond, so that the audience cares deeply when it is eventually threatened by both past and future complications. [more]

The Queen of Versailles

November 17, 2025

Reunited with Chenoweth for the first time since "Wicked," Schwartz once again benefits tremendously from a genuine member of Broadway royalty who, roughly two decades ago, as the original Glinda, turned a bunch of prosaic songs into popular ones (critic takes ostentatious bow). While the score for "The Queen of Versailles" will not survive in our collective memory (please, no!), Chenoweth, as always, gives it her considerable best, particularly when showing off her coloratura soprano to Marie Antoinette (Cassondra James). That would be worth a severely reduced price of admission, if not for the frustrating inconsistencies of Schwartz's lyrics and Lindsey Ferrentino's book, which eventually turn unconscionable. [more]

Just in Time

May 9, 2025

Groff is simply sensational in both his roles, charming as himself and astonishing in his revelatory Darin.  He confesses to being “a wet man.”  He proves it with his near aerobically paced performance, which included much singing and dancing and even a touch of beefcake.  (Well, if you got it—and Groff got it—flaunt it!) [more]

Real Women Have Curves

May 9, 2025

Not only is the show authentically written with Spanish sprinkled throughout, (much of it perfectly obvious as to its meaning,) but Sergio Trujillo’s superb production which he has both directed and choreographed, has been cast with an almost entirely Hispanic cast who are utterly engaging. Best is Justina Machado, a Broadway veteran of "In the Heights" and "A Free Man of Color," as the indomitable Carmen who can only imagine one path – though she herself left everything behind in Mexico to come to the United States. Following a close second are Broadway debuting Tatianna Córboda as the feisty Ana who has learned how to run rings around her elders and also debuting Florencia Cuenca as her weary sister Estela who has the weight of everyone’s aspirations on her shoulders. [more]

Pirates! The Penzance Musical

May 6, 2025

Not seen on Broadway since 1982 but racking up 26 productions up to that time since its New York premiere in 1879, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s new version of the Gilbert and Sullivan classic operetta, "The Pirates of Penzance," has been given a delightful facelift: retitled "Pirates! The Penzance Musical" is has now been Americanized and reset in a jazzy 1880 New Orleans by the team of director Scott Ellis, adapter Rupert Holmes, choreographer Warren Carlyle and music director and co-orchestrator Joseph Joubert. The energetic cast is led by Ramin Karimloo as the Pirate King, Jinkx Monsoon as Ruth and two-time Tony Award-winner David Hyde Pierce as Major-General Stanley, backed by a lusty crew of singers and dancers. [more]

Floyd Collins

April 29, 2025

Unfortunately, while the carnival atmosphere in the field above the cave increases, the musical is mostly a waiting game: if and when Floyd Collins will be brought up from the deteriorating cave. The emotions that you would expect as time begins to run out as passageways become either waterlogged or impassible are not in evidence except for Floyd’s father who is more concerned with finances that his son’s life. Floyd himself is often depicted as delirious or depressed so that we don’t get much of an arc of his emotions. [more]

Smash

April 26, 2025

At times the show directed by Stroman seems to be a satire or a parody, while the choreography by Bergasse mostly looks like ersatz Bob Fosse which seems inappropriate for the Marilyn Monroe story. As star Ivy Lynn playing Marilyn, Hurder seems to be doing a Megan Hilty impersonation from the TV series, rather than bringing anything new to the role. (Of course, Hilty is appearing around the corner in Death Becomes Her.) Bowman’s Karen is fine as far as she is allowed to go but the role seems underwritten. Nielsen ass The Actors Studio coach, (compared to Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West) is so unpleasant that you wonder why her character isn’t fired long before it happens in the story line. [more]

Boop! The Musical

April 15, 2025

But, top-notch as all of that is, the musical's unmitigated highlight is the Broadway newcomer Rogers as Betty Boop. While the character's trademark look and mannerisms certainly contour Rogers's performance, they do not obscure a wealth of touching flesh-and-blood emotions that all come out in an underwhelming eleven o'clock number, "Something to Shout About," that, because of Rogers, manages to overwhelm. It seems that "Boop! The Musical" has a new star rather than an old one.   [more]

Operation Mincemeat

March 31, 2025

The new musical attempts to out Monty Python "Monty Python" by creating a full-length show and story in their style, although its origins also go back to British Music Hall where there is also much cross-dressing (i.e. men playing women and women playing men). Those who love Monty Python will have a great time; those who don’t may find the two hour and 30 minute show heavy going. The show is also Very British and a great many of the jokes and gags don’t land for American audiences. However, the hard working cast is impressive playing many roles each and Robert Hastie’s fast paced direction doesn’t give a lot of time to think about the antics on stage. [more]

Redwood

February 24, 2025

With the same preternatural gusto she brought to "Wicked" and "If/Then," Idina Menzel is back on Broadway in "Redwood" to, once again, confront musicalized trauma, this time as Jesse, a middle-aged art gallery owner from New York who, after her twentysomething son Spencer (Zachary Noah Piser) dies of a drug overdose, manically speeds across the country to climb an exceptionally tall tree. Coinciding with the show's deterministic title, that's where grief pulls Jesse: to a California redwood to grapple high above the ground with soul-crushing sorrow while having nothing to hold onto except for the healing virtue of a trite metaphor. Though it's, of course, easy to sympathize with Jesse's brutal ordeal, unfortunately the creative team responsible for Redwood never takes Jesse as seriously as her suffering, instead relying on Menzel's soaring vocals to defy gravity despite the burden of a leaden score and book. [more]

Gypsy

January 14, 2025

Audra McDonald in a scene from George C. Wolfe’s production of “Gypsy” at the Majestic [more]

Tammy Faye

November 27, 2024

Katie Brayben in a scene from Elton John’s new musical “Tammy Faye” at the Palace Theatre [more]

Death Becomes Her

November 27, 2024

“Glitter and Be Gay” is not just a Leonard Bernstein aria from Candide, but the perfect description of the campily funny new musical "Death Becomes Her" which just hit the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre like a friendly tornado.  Double entendres explode in all directions.  Take the song titled “For the Gaze,” as a tongue-in-cheek example. Based on the 1992 film of the same name, the creators of the musical—Marco Pennette (book), Julia Mattison and Noel Carey (music and lyrics)—have taken the smarmy, star-studded film and turned it into an entertaining, equally star-studded musical. [more]

Swept Away

November 26, 2024

Besides the fact that many know the story of the Essex (later told in Melville’s "Moby Dick") or the Mignonette told in The Avett Brothers’ album of the same name, Logan has made his main characters totally generic without given names. We learn too little about each for them to be three-dimensional characters: the Mate, cynical and corrupt; the Captain, at the end of a long career, melancholy and philosophical; Big Brother, religious and judgmental, and Little Brother, innocent and curious. A knife is flashed soon after the survivors find themselves on the lifeboat and we know how that will end. Just like the voyage of the whaling ship, their time on the lifeboat is a waiting game: how long can they survive and who will be the first to go? [more]

A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical

November 22, 2024

Great in entirely predictable ways, especially its rich musical orchestrations and arrangements from jazz genius Branford Marsalis (he's assisted by Tony Award- winner Daryl Waters), "A Wonderful World" wastes its decided advantages by keeping Armstrong at a distance while incongruously tasking him with narrating his own life. An impassive witness to himself, Armstrong is also a bizarrely unreflective one as he meanders from place to place and wife to wife, before finally appearing with his wronged women to sing "What a Wonderful World" as an ethereal eleven o'clock number on Adam Koch and Steven Royal's protean set. To say the least, it's a lackluster concluding statement on the complexities of Armstrong's marriages, as well as his feelings about a world that, despite all of its "trees of green" and "red roses too," caused him so much pain. [more]

Elf the Musical

November 21, 2024

While incorporating the film's most memorable lines and story beats into their book, Bob Martin and the late Thomas Meehan also excised what they could to make room for composer Matthew Sklar and lyricist Chad Beguelin's brassy score, though it's not enough to prevent "Elf the Musical" from being about an hour longer than its cinematic version. Still, fret not accompanying adults, Sklar and Beguelin humorously reward persisting through the added length, with the laugh-inducing cleverness reaching its creative heights in the numbers that respectively kick off Acts I and II: "Happy All The Time," performed by a ridiculously high-spirited elven chorus line, and "Nobody Cares About Santa," a hilarious cry for appreciation from a despairing group of professional St. Nicks. Choreographer Liam Steel delightfully enhances the silliness, especially for the former number in which he cuts his impressively adaptable dancers down to an appropriate size. [more]

Maybe Happy Ending

November 20, 2024

Helen J Shen and Darren Criss in a scene from the new musical “Maybe Happy Ending” at the [more]

Sunset Blvd.

November 7, 2024

Now, director Jamie Lloyd has taken the clunky—but entertaining—Andrew Lloyd Webber musical "Sunset Blvd." (1993) and stripped it of all realistic scenery—and a few songs—hoping to get to the nitty-gritty of its Hollywood characters and period with enormous projections which suggest an expressionistic silent film. The results are decidedly mixed mostly due to a failure to settle on a tone plus some head-scratching additions that have nothing to do with the story. Lloyd, most recently represented by his dreary, stripped-down A Doll’s House and an equally spare production of Pinter’s Betrayal, has shepherded this production with a combination of brilliance and self-indulgence. [more]

Once Upon a Mattress

August 17, 2024

Foster is a joy as the princess from the swamps who can swim, lift weights, dance all night, commit multiple contortions as she tries to get a good night sleep, and field any disaster that comes her way including the queen’s disdain. She is quick on her feet and in her tongue. She also stops the show with her rendition of the score’s most famous song “Shy” (used as the title to Mary Rodgers’ memoir published in 2022) but she is also memorable singing “The Swamps of Home” and “Happily Ever After,” with their witty lyrics by Barer, who often collaborated with Mary Rodgers. Is there anything she can’t do and anything she can’t make funny? [more]

The Wiz

May 16, 2024

The eye-filling sets by Hannah Beachler and video and projection design by Daniel Brodie include subtle tributes to Black Culture that not all theatergoers may notice on a first look. When Dorothy first lands in Oz, the landscape and houses are reminiscent of Tremé, the Black neighborhood in New Orleans decimated by Hurricane Katrina. The overhead set piece is inspired by the arch in New Orleans’ Louis Armstrong Park as well as incorporating patterns found in quilts on the Underground Railroad. African symbols are carved into the bark of the trees along Dorothy’s path on the Yellow Brick Road as well as depicted on the sides of the theater proscenium arch. When Glinda enters, she comes out of house at the address 1804, commemorating the year of Haiti’s independence. The red and black sets and costumes (by Sharon Davis) for the sequence in the Castle of Evilene are a tribute to West African culture. [more]

Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club

May 13, 2024

The lead of the show is film star Eddie Redmayne, who won the Olivier Award for his performance as the Emcee in the London production and is also Tony nominated for this show. Director Rebecca Frecknall’s staging (with her British production team) is imaginative and innovative, quite unlike any Cabaret you have seen before. The new Sally Bowles is Scottish American actress Gayle Rankin who appeared as Fraulein Kost on Broadway in Sam Mendes’ 2014 Broadway revival of "Cabaret" which appeared at Studio 54. Frecknall’s interpretation is more dissolute and dissipated than most versions so that when American writer Clifford Bradshaw arrives in Berlin to get material for a novel the city is already deep in the throes of degradation and degeneracy when he meets second-rate singer Sally Bowles as the party girl par excellence and lead female singer of the Kit Kat Club. [more]

The Heart of Rock and Roll

May 13, 2024

"The Heart of Rock and Roll" at the James Earl Jones Theatre is one of the more pleasant entries in the jukebox musical derby.  Using the musical catalog of Huey Lewis and the News, Tyler Mitchell and Jonathan A. Abrams, (book by Abrams), have fashioned an amusing story of a working class Joe who is torn between his love of rock music and his need to make a living in business.  Heart began its Broadway-bound journey in 2018 at the Old Globe in San Diego, but is set firmly in the 1980’s. [more]

Hell’s Kitchen on Broadway

May 3, 2024

The new musical "Hell’s Kitchen" has made a successful transition to Broadway from The Public Theater and the new version seems to have corrected some of the flaws from before. This juke-box musical with a score by singer/songwriter Alicia Keys and a book by playwright Kristoffer Diaz (The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity), is a big ambitious show, a love letter to New York, and inspired by the coming of age story of Keys’ 17th year. It is no longer over-miked by sound designer Gareth Owen, characters seemed to have deepened, the plot seems to have gelled into a distinct coming of age story, and the redesigned set by Robert Brill has moved much of the action closer to the audience. It is a crowd pleaser with the iconic Keys’ songs “Girl on Fire,” “Fallin’” and “Empire State of Mind.” Excitingly performed by its cast made up of a handful of characters and a large ensemble of 15 singer/dancers, its most famous leads Shoshana Bean and Brandon Victor Dixon as Ali’s parents are given less to do as this is the daughter’s story. In the leading role of 17-year-old Ali, making their professional Broadway debut, is Maleah Joi Moon who proves to be an exciting musical personality who can hold a show such as this together. [more]

Suffs

May 3, 2024

The transfer to Broadway has brilliantly expanded the show.  The new production designed by Riccardo Hernández (scenery), Paul Tazewell (costumes), Lap Chi Chu (lighting) and Charles G. LaPointe (wigs & hair) brings Taub’s script to vivid life, much better than the more didactic and spare Public Theater rendering.  These artists put Taub’s script into historical context making the battle all the more vibrant. The new version also has rethought the casting, reshuffled and improved the songs and, more importantly, is more focused and effective in telling about the conflicts—internal and external—that plagued the suffrage movement.  These included dissonance between Catt and Paul; the thorn-in-the-movement’s side of the Black contingent led by the brilliant Ida B. Wells (a charismatic Nikki M. James); and the far left, Socialist ideals of the hothead Ruza Wenclawska (Kim Blanck, brilliantly avoiding caricature). [more]

The Great Gatsby: A New Musical

May 2, 2024

As for previous theatrical takes on the classic Jazz Age novel--and a few cinematic ones, too--the understandable allure of Fitzgerald's breathtaking sentences has represented a deathly siren's song for those tempted to dramatically interpret Fitzgerald by emulating him. Adopting a much smarter tack, book writer Kait Kerrigan avoids crashing into the tony shores of Long Island, where the story is mostly set, by remembering that imitation is not only the sincerest form of flattery but also usually very boring. Kerrigan still dutifully opens ("In my younger and more vulnerable years...") and closes ("So we beat on, boats against the current...") with the literary hits, also leaving in place the unhappy character arc of the novel's Midwestern narrator Nick Carraway (Noah J. Ricketts), but she lets the transplanted naif enjoy a friskier journey arriving at the disillusionment that he eventually feels from witnessing the cruel machinations of the East Coast elite. [more]

The Outsiders: A New Musical

April 22, 2024

The cast of "The Outsiders: A New Musica"l bring their own substantial charisma to the stage, but it's been dramaturgically constrained by Adam Rapp and Justin Levine's book, which sacrifices poetry for explanation. That unfortunate choice is abetted by a score from Levine, Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance (the latter two comprising the folk duo Jamestown Revival) that, influenced by "Oklahoma!" instead of pure sentiment, is far too Rodgers and Hammerstein, when it should have aimed for Rodgers and Hart. [more]

Lempicka

April 21, 2024

In telling the life story of Tamara de Lempicka, the show begins with a fascinating premise. Unfortunately, neither the score nor the book lives up to her high standards. Unlike "Sunday in the Park with George" which showed us the workings of the artistic process, "Lempicka" is more interested in the social aspects of the 1920’s and 1930’s Paris than in Tamara’s revolutionary paintings. The cast works hard to put over the new musical but they are defeated by commonplace situations, banal song lyrics, and over-used pronouncements. The musical of Tamara de Lempicka’s life still has to be told. [more]

Water for Elephants

April 8, 2024

Playwright/bookwriter Rick Elice has written the greatest jukebox musical (so far) in his 2005 Jersey Boys. In his adaptation of Sara Gruen’s bestselling novel Water for Elephants, he may just have written the best stage musical about circuses by making the animals as real as the human characters. The indie folk band Pigpen Theatre Co. has written a varied collection of songs, ingeniously orchestrated, that are always exciting as they both forward the story and reveal the emotions of the people who sing them. However, it is director Jessica Stone assisted with circus design by Shana Carroll who has done the most inventive and original work. [more]

The Who’s Tommy

April 8, 2024

But, as the book's co-writer with Townshend, McAnuff is self-aware enough to recognize that "The Who's Tommy" needs to blow one's mind through sensory overload. That way, thoughts can't interfere with the emotional gloss covering the bizarrely bleak world, replete with both Nazis and Nazi wannabes, the show's "deaf, dumb, and blind" protagonist must endure. Its cheeriest passage is, in fact, the British victory over Germany in World War II, which occurs early on and quickly curdles after Captain Walker (Adam Jacobs), an airman thought killed in action, returns home to London in 1945, to discover that Mrs. Walker (Alison Luff) already has found another fella (Nathan Lucrezio), who her rightful husband promptly murders. [more]

The Notebook: The Musical

April 4, 2024

While the characters age, the use of diversity here has them switch races, so that while one couple has a Black Allie and a white Noah, another has a white Allie and a Black Noah, as well as Allie’s parents being played by an interracial couple. Although it is easy to follow, it is somewhat distracting until one gets used to it. The setting has also been updated from the 1940’s to the 1960’s so that Noah fights in Vietnam now rather than World War II. Brunstetter’s book is faithful to both the novel and the movie, except that while the earlier two versions were recounted by the older Noah reading to his increasingly distracted wife from the notebook that she wrote in chronological order, here there are flashbacks within flashbacks, backtracking some of the events. Brunstetter has also made the ending more explicit than either the book or the film, as well as keeping much of the original sentimentality at bay. [more]

Days of Wine and Roses: The Musical

February 7, 2024

Reteaming with O'Hara and book writer Craig Lucas for the first time since the 2005 Tony-award-winning "The Light in the Piazza," Guettel's hodgepodge of a score equates jazz with blithe inebriation and opera with soul-crushing regret, a mostly tiresome juxtaposition that includes the gobsmacking discordance of Kirsten drunkenly bebopping around her apartment while vacuuming it. That O'Hara is never less than luminous, coordinated, and note-perfect during this ill-conceived pas seul fundamentally captures what's wrong with the musical: it's much too beautiful. [more]
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Copyright Jack Quinn, 2001-2023