Critic’s Pick
Andrew Scott, Andrew Scott, Andrew Scott …
‘Vanya’
Directed by Sam Yates and adapted by Simon Stephens, this one-man “Vanya” — in which Andrew Scott delivers a tour-de-force performance — arrives Off Broadway after a run in London, where it won an Olivier for best play revival. Though faithful to the original material, the production offers not just modern touches, but also “a new way of seeing into the heart of its beauty,” our critic wrote.
From Jesse Green’s review:
What makes the production exemplary, like the play itself, is the emotion. I hate to think why Scott is such a sadness machine, but the tears (and blushes and glows and sneers) lie very shallow under his skin. He only rarely raises his voice. As the feelings are evidently coming directly and carefully from his heart, he narrowcasts them directly and carefully at yours.
Through May 11 at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Read the full review.
Critic’s Pick
The lush sounds of Havana.
‘Buena Vista Social Club’
The joyous horns and full-bodied voices that make up the beloved 1997 album come alive in this Broadway musical, with a book by Marco Ramirez, direction by Saheem Ali and choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck. Though the show offers a fictional back story for these veteran Cuban musicians who shot to global fame after recording the album, the thrill here is the music, exuberant and expansive, which fills in the beats of Cuba’s history, both in sorrow and in revelry.
From Elisabeth Vincentelli’s review:
The spirit of the musical “Buena Vista Social Club” is evident in its opening scene. … The music is center stage, and we immediately understand its power as a communal experience that binds people. Therein lies the production’s greatest achievement. For a place where music so often plays a crucial role, Broadway hardly ever highlights the thrill of music making itself.
At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. Read the full review.
A ferocious Paul Mescal in a Tennessee Williams classic.
‘A Streetcar Named Desire’
Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran dance with violence and desire as Stanley and Blanche in Rebecca Frecknall’s gritty revival of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In the absence of beauty, brutality pervades in Frecknall’s darker production, which features a utilitarian set and exhilarating performances that ratchet up the fury.
From Jesse Green’s review:
Mescal is best known and deservedly praised for excruciatingly sensitive portrayals of hurting hunks who can barely acknowledge their pain. (I can’t speak for “Gladiator II,” but he is superb in “Normal People,” “Aftersun” and “All of Us Strangers.”) It was therefore not immediately evident that he could do justice to a character, first played by Marlon Brando, that Arthur Miller described as a “sexual terrorist.” I am sorry to report that he can.
Through April 6 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music. Read the full review.
Critic’s Pick
The vicious nature of the truth.
‘We Had a World’
Joshua Harmon follows up last seasons’s “Prayer for the French Republic” with this “wonderfully textured” new play, whose protagonist, Josh (Andrew Barth Feldman), breaks the fourth wall to guide the audience through notable incidents of his childhood and adult life relating to his mother and grandmother.
From Maya Phillips’s review:
Harmon’s script … strikes an impressive balance of negotiating a story with many adverse emotional perspectives and moving parts while also maintaining a sense of honesty. I don’t just mean honesty in the sense of facts — though the verifiable biographical facts in Harmon’s story, and a bit of recorded material at the end, lend a gravitas to the characters and occurrences. I mean honesty in the sense of emotional transparency, the very real mix of love and resentment and insecurities and doubts that define all relationships, especially those within a family.
Through April 27 at New York City Center. Read the full review.
Critic’s Pick
Unearthing more than ancestry.
‘The Great Privation’
You’ll have to act fast if you want to catch Nia Akilah Robinson’s time-hopping historical drama before it closes next week. Directed by Evren Odcikin, the play takes place on the same plot of land two centuries apart, and draws from the real-life history of grave robbing Black corpses in a disturbing recall of the more nefarious side of medical research.
From Laura Collins-Hughes’s review:
“The Great Privation” rummages around in the tainted soil of the United States and pulls up some shameful old skeletons for inspection. From the start, though, a defiant light radiates through this tale, and comedy shares space with disquietude. Warm, dexterous central performances from [Crystal] Lucas-Perry and [Clarissa] Vickerie (a graduate student at Juilliard making her Off Broadway debut) have a lot to do with that.
Through March 26 at Playwrights Horizons. Read the full review.
A merciless dissection of hypocrisy.
‘Purpose’
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins knows how to write about a reckoning. In “Appropriate,” a father’s death leads the Lafayettes home to their Arkansas estate, where they reckon with the buried secrets lurking in a dark family history. In “The Comeuppance,” a group of reunited millennials reckon with the world of mass shootings, pandemics and generational malaise they’ve inherited. Now, in “Purpose,” directed by Phylicia Rashad, a high-profile family must reckon with their tangle of social, political and theological trespasses.
From Jesse Green’s review:
You may have trouble catching your breath from laughing so hard during the first act of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s sophomore Broadway outing, “Purpose,” which opened Monday at the Helen Hayes Theater. Deeply imagined and grave beneath its yucks, it unspools like a brilliant sitcom. Then, also like a sitcom, it jumps the shark.
Through July 6 at the Helen Hayes Theater. Read the full review.
Counterintelligence with comedic timing.
‘Operation Mincemeat’
Laughter abounds in this satirical comedy about a fantastical but real World War II spy mission involving a planted corpse to deceive the Nazis. The show was a hit in London, winning an Olivier last year, and though it was updated for Broadway to rework its Britishisms for a New York audience, humor, our critic writes, isn’t so translatable.
From Jesse Green’s review:
In short, Operation Mincemeat, as this real World War II operation was called, works. But is it funny? Whether “Operation Mincemeat,” the diverting if irksome musical comedy about the plan, works as well will depend a lot on your answer to that question. … At more than two-and-a-half hours, the show is hardly svelte. Nor, with its aim so scattershot, is it clear what it is satirizing.
Through Aug. 18 at the Golden Theater. Read the full review.
Haunted and haunting.
‘Ghosts’
Ghosts, restless and doomed, alive and dead, haunt the stage in this Off Broadway production of Henrik Ibsen’s 1881 drama about medical and moral contagion. Directed by Jack O’Brien, Mark O’Rowe’s adaptation of the relentless drama, where depravity is passed on from generation to generation like an inheritance, stars a riveting Lily Rabe as Mrs. Alving.
From Jesse Green’s review:
Written just after “A Doll’s House” and before “An Enemy of the People” — each recently revived on Broadway — “Ghosts” is in some ways the most unsparing, neither offering its heroine escape nor, in the end, leaving her a heroine at all. … It’s good drama, and “Ghosts” remains a provocative, engrossing work, to which O’Brien’s production does justice.
Through April 26 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. Read the full review.