Greg Evans — Theater Critic

The phrases “low hanging fruit,” “hit or miss” and “luck of the draw” come to mind as one not very funny moment after another counts down to the end of the 90-minute Celebrity Autobiography, the much-staged oddity finally making its Broadway debut tonight.

The Lost Boys even has one up in the gumption category over First Shadow and Cursed Child: Music. The prospect of a chorus full of undead breaking out in song certainly runs the risk of cringy absurdity, but The Lost Boys sails over those traps: The driving score by L.A. indie band The Rescues (Kyler England, AG, Gabriel Mann) puts one in mind of the rock-based sounds of Dead Outlaw, sometimes even Stereophonic. Not bad company at all. (There’s a rambunctious dash of the wildly popular The Outsiders here, too, for those keeping count).

Rare is the Broadway season that hasn’t been bettered by an August Wilson revival, and this very busy spring is no exception. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, lovingly and astutely directed by Debbie Allen with a no-weak-link cast headed by Taraji P. Henson (in a superb Broadway debut), Cedric The Entertainer and Ruben Santiago-Hudson, is nothing less than a full-on reminder of Wilson’s singular genius for blending naturalism with more-things-in-heaven-and-earth marvels.

Ok, so maybe the times haven’t changed all that much. More’s the reason we need a little jump to the left and a step to the right and, most of all, a pelvic thrust that really drives you insaaa-yaa-yaane. Roundabout has gifted us a wonderful time warp, and we’d be assholes not to stay for the night.

Kelli Barrett, as the adult Bertie, is suitably prim and proper, pitched to a more human level than CeeCee but not significantly more convincing. We can only imagine what each of these characters sees in the other aside from plot mandates, with an audience’s sense of ’80s nostalgia required to do some very heavy lifting. The men in the cast – Ben Jacoby and Brent Thiessen – are suitably smarmy in their stick-thin roles, with the supporting adult actresses – Sarah Bockel and Lael Van Keuren – playing the mothers with caricature zeal. Zurin Villanueva, as a late-in-the-show hospice caretaker, has a refreshing natural ease hinting at a sturdier Beaches that might have been.

While The Balusters is never less than entertaining, the play suffers in comparison to similar recent Broadway works, notably The Minutes and, especially, Eureka Day, both of which had sharper laughs and singular executions. Eureka Day, in particular, found its universality in the specificity of its liberal, well-to-do day-school officials and the panic that the hot topic of vaccines unleashed. The characters in The Balusters, despite an unassailable cast led by Richard Thomas, Anika Noni Rose, Margaret Colin and the delightful Marylouise Burke, never reach that level of pinpoint precision, its characters as often as not seeming little more than voices for their demographics, as uni-dimensional as the poster board demonstrating exactly where that stop sign should go regardless of which hypocrite stands to benefit.

The cast, under Christopher Gattelli’s spirit-matching direction and choreography, seem to be having the time of their lives, and why not? Gasteyer’s comic chops have diminished not an iota since her long-ago SNL days, and her uptight Elmira Gulch prickliness is as flawless as her “Trouble in River City,” I mean, “Tribulation in Schmigadoon” delivery. If Cinco Paul ever gets around to a stage sequel advancing his Broadway timeline, Gasteyer needs “Last Midnight” like Mandy Patinkin needed to finish that damn hat.

Under the sure direction of Scott Ellis and given a lush, gorgeous staging by Roundabout and some of Broadway’s best designers – David Rockwell, sets, sumptuous; Jeff Mahshie, costumes, deep oppulance; Kenneth Posner, ever-so-flattering lighting – Fallen Angels is a most welcome springtime treat, a smart, breezy entry in Broadway’s chaotically busy pre-Tony season.

You don’t have to come equipped with a knowledge of super-advanced mathematics, or even know what two-plus-two equals, to grasp, from the very start of Thomas Kail’s new revival of David Auburn’s Proof, that Ayo Edebiri, so good on TV’s restaurant drama (or comedy?) The Bear, and the Oscar-winning Don Cheadle are about to make something special of their Broadway debuts.

Still, when The Fear of 13 finally arrives at something close to Nick’s Rosebud revelation, we’re meant to connect the dots between past trauma and current predicament, and it is a tenuous connection at best, a possible cause for an effect we’ve been told repeatedly to distrust. The climactic scene, set amidst a downpour evocatively conveyed on the moody, spare, grid-like and often pitch-dark set (Arnulfo Maldonado is the scenic designer, with lighting design by Heather Gilbert), does provide a deeper meaning to the play’s title beyond the word – triskaidekaphobia – that Nick taught himself in prison (no spoilers), but if it’s meant, as it seems to be, to somehow explain the beginnings of outlaw behavior and character faults that got Nick in deeper water than he ever could have imagined, we’re left with the unsettling feeling that The Fear of 13 is asking the victim to shoulder at least a modicum of the blame that should fall entirely on a grossly unfair system, and there’s no justice in that.

Campier than the campy Cats: The Jellicle Ball but no less generous in its embrace of queer heritage’s seismic impact on American culture, Titaníque on Broadway is bigger than a mere hoot. It’s a riotous, high-cresting celebration just when we need it most.

But first and last, Salesman is Willy’s story, and generation after Broadway generation has thrown its best into the role, from Lee J. Cobb, Fredric March (in the 1951 film), George C. Scott, Brian Dennehy and Dustin Hoffman to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Wendell Pierce. Lane takes his place among the best, his Willy Loman a powder keg of frustration and disappointment and deep, deep sadness. Lane uses his loud, outside voice to excellent effect, his shouts of exasperation and anger giving way to instant regret and recrimination. Watch, future Willys, and pay attention.

What wasn’t preordained is just how beautifully executed the entire venture turns out to be. You’d have to be a real stickler for tradition to begrudge Jellicle Ball its innovations, and one suspects even the stickliest will find joy in the tunes and story that remain in this show’s DNA. It’s all still here, fueling yet another life, familiar as an old tabby yet fresh as a kitten.

Lithgow’s remarkable Olivier Award-winning performance – at this point in the far-from-over Broadway season he and Every Brilliant Thing‘s Daniel Radcliffe seem headed for a showdown – is a terrifically nuanced affair, as indeed are Rosenblatt’s play and the note-perfect direction of Nicholas Hytner. Any cast of costars would be deemed successful merely for holding its own, and this one does so much more than that. Giant, thrilling and abrasive, is full of rewards.

Radcliffe is costumed (by Vicki Mortimer, who also designed the effective boxing-ring style set) in a purple sweatshirt that, at least during the reviewed performance, he was perspiring through by the show’s half-way point (there is no intermission). And that is the only way he lets us see him sweat, so seemingly easy does he move through all the moods and feels of what must be a taxing endeavor. Every Brilliant Thing is unsparing and clear-eyed in its presentation of the realities of depression and suicide, yet glows with a hopeful, life-affirming aura that convincingly depicts the value of struggle, and the beauty in tenacity.

But whatever its faults and near-misses, Ragtime has always been, like its ’90s contemporaries Titanic and Parade, an opportunity for rediscovery. DeBessonet takes the challenge and wins, rescuing a near-classic from the excesses of the 1990s to prove, once and for all, that Ragtime, imperfect as it may be, deserves a place among the most significant musical theater achievements of that decade.

Still, Punch doesn’t lack power, and that in large part is due to a fine cast. Playing on a mostly bare stage over which an arched bridge bares witness to all, Harrison (Daisy Jones and the Six, A Complete Unknown) convincingly morphs from dangerous, out-of-control terror to hollowed-out shell and, finally, a man who only gradually begins to take responsibility for himself. It’s a tremendously affecting performance.

As for the acting, there’s little doubt that Winter is the most natural (and more experienced) stage actor of the two, more versatile and, when necessary, capable to drawing real pathos from this grim, gorgeous work of art. You believe his every changing mood. Reeves, as they say, is Reeves, an exceedingly charming actor who projects more than he acts but always seems to have full control of an audiences’ attention (and affection). Yes, even when he seems to be trying too hard to be stentorian or angry or carrying out a bit of slapstick tantrum, he has us rooting for him.

Director Scott Ellis seems to know when to let his talented cast enjoy themselves, and if the pacing in the first half-hour or so feels a bit sluggish, well, that’s mostly on the playwright. The play’s conceits – about modern art, about interpersonal resentments, about something that might nowadays be called toxic masculinity – just don’t seem as novel as they might once have. As Art‘s three buddies set up their impending conflict, we know exactly where they’re heading. This production eventually rewards our patience, even if we sometimes wish for quicker brushstrokes.

The ninth-longest running Broadway show of all time, Mamma Mia! ran for 14 years at the Winter Garden following its opening shortly after the Towers fell. This touring production’s stop at the Garden has all the makings of a homecoming, and it’s a strenuously joyous one.

As grim as all this sounds – and the lighting design by Donald Holder and sound design by Beth Lake never let us forget Izzy’s captivity – Smart draws us in with an amazing grace and good humor that in real life would make for fine best friend material. No, she never dismisses the pain that underscores her existence, and when good things happen – she makes a friend in the trailer park, who encourages her to come along to an adult literature class at the local college, and to get a library card in secret that serves as a passport for imagination – we know the risk, but knowing doesn’t prepare us for the shocking “whack” that Smart verbalizes when the cruel husband learns at least one of her secrets.

But most impressive is what Durand and the entire production achieve in insisting on dignity for even the briefest and most unremarkable of lives. As absurd as true life, as macabre as a freak show, as blunt as a bullet to the gut, Dead Outlaw also manages to afford Elmer McCurdy something better than dignity, it offers remembrance. Yes, he’s dead. But so’s your mama, and so’s Abe Lincoln, and so’s Balzac, and so’s Anne Frank, and, inevitably, so are you. Say the names.

Unfortunately, there are too few other moments in Real Woman Have Curves that soar like that, that deliver the joy and delight of shaking off the many worries and fears that burden these eight women 24/7. Based on the same-named play and subsequent HBO movie, the musical set in 1987 focuses on the eight friends and coworkers who sew dresses in a small, hidden warehouse space, with all but one of the women – young Ana – undocumented. The Reagan era amnesty program, with its length-of-time requirements and insistence on records clean of even a driving ticket, seems to offer scant promise.

Early in the show, as the band vamps on “Beyond The Sea,” Gross, working the audience, says slyly, “I first heard this next song the way we all first heard this next song – twirling in our mother’s heels in Pennsylvania Amish country, listening to our father’s records…I never would’ve guessed I’d have anything in common with him, the playboy crooner and me in Mom’s pumps, but turns out I do. He loved – [gestures back and forth between himself and the audience] – this. It was the only relationship he was any good at. Honestly? Same.”

Borrowing “We’re All From Someplace Else” from Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore for the finale, Pirates! ends its tale with a generous plea for tolerance – swashbucklers are people too, after all – and having built up enough good well over the previous couple of hours the underlying earnestness at show’s end seems absolutely deserved.