Things to do in New York this week: Critics' picks

Theater review by Raven Snook Lick it up, baby: The high-school-is-hell musical Heathers is back to take another shot at being popular. In case you are unfamiliar with either the 1989 movie or its 2014 musical adaptation, the story centers on not-so-mean girl Veronica Sawyer (played here by & Juliet's Lorna Courtney), who's doing her best to survive the indignities of 1980s adolescence in Ohio. In a bid for social stature, she falls into the orbit of three beautiful bullies, all of whom are named Heather. But when Veronica meets J.D. (Casey Likes)—a mysterious rebel in a trench coat and mullet—she starts dreaming of freeing Westerburg High School from the Heathers’ well-manicured talons. What she doesn’t know, at least at first, is that J.D. is not just a bad boy, but a truly bad seed. Like the film, which developed a fervid Gen X cult following, Heathers The Musical needed time to catch on. Although its initial Off Broadway run at New World Stages lasted only a few months, it has since become a hit in the U.K., where it has had multiple West End productions; and thanks to a decade of cast recordings and TikToks, it has spawned legions of Gen Z fans, dubbed Corn Nuts after one character's dying words. The musical has even managed to win over some cynical fans of the darker-hued film, including me, who didn’t like it at first pass; I've come to appreciate its lighter, pop earworm–driven take. (Veronica and J.D.'s teenage angst still has a body count, but when the victims...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  [Note: Jinkx Monsoon plays the role of Mary Todd Lincoln through September 30, joined by new cast members Kumail Nanjiani, Michael Urie and Jenn Harris. Jane Krakowski assumes the central role on October 14.] Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! is not just funny: It is dizzyingly, breathtakingly funny, the kind of funny that ambushes your body into uncontained laughter. Stage comedies have become an endangered species in recent decades, and when they do pop up they tend to be the kind of funny that evokes smirks, chuckles or wry smiles of recognition. Not so here: I can’t remember the last time I saw a play that made me laugh, helplessly and loudly, as much as Oh, Mary! did—and my reaction was shared by the rest of the audience, which burst into applause at the end of every scene. Fasten your seatbelts: This 80-minute show is a fast and wild joy ride. Escola has earned a cult reputation as a sly comedic genius in their dazzling solo performances (Help! I’m Stuck!) and on TV shows like At Home with Amy Sedaris, Difficult People and Search Party. But Oh, Mary!, their first full-length play, may surprise even longtime fans. In this hilariously anachronistic historical burlesque, Escola plays—who else?—Mary Todd Lincoln, in the weeks leading up to her husband’s assassination. Boozy, vicious and miserable, the unstable and outrageously contrary Mary is oblivious to the Civil War and hell-bent on achieving stardom as—what else?—a cabaret singer.      Oh,...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman “Keep it light, keep it tight, keep it fun, and then we’re done!” That’s the pithy advice that the indignant 16th-century housewife Anne Hathaway (Betsy Wolfe) imparts to her neglectful husband, William Shakespeare (Stark Sands), as a way to improve his play Romeo and Juliet, which she considers too much of a downer. It is also the guiding ethos of the new Broadway jukebox musical & Juliet, a quasi-Elizabethan romp through the chart-toppers of Swedish songwriter-producer Max Martin. A diverting synthetic crossbreed of Moulin Rouge!, Something Rotten!, Mamma Mia! and Head Over Heels, this show delivers just what you’d expect. It is what it is: It gives you the hooks and it gets the ovations.  Martin is the preeminent pop hitmaker of the past 25 years, so & Juliet has a lot to draw from. The show’s 30 songs include multiple bops originally recorded by the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Katy Perry, as well as tunes that Martin wrote—or, in all but two cases, co-wrote—for Pink, NSYNC, Kesha, Robyn, Kelly Clarkson, Jessie J, Céline Dion, Ariana Grande, Justin Timberlake, Ellie Goulding, Demi Lovato, Adam Lambert, the Weeknd and even Bon Jovi. (Notably absent are any of his collaborations with Taylor Swift.) “Roar,” “Domino,” “Since U Been Gone”: the hit list goes on and on. As a compilation disc performed live, it’s a feast for Millennials; its alternate title might well be Now That’s What I Call a Musical! & Julietl | Photograph: Matthew...

Theater review by Raven SnookA modernized, female-forward reinvention of a 200-year-old protofeminist classic may sound like a bonnet on a bonnet. But Emily Breeze's Are the Bennet Girls Ok?, an irreverent riff on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, is a delight. Many of Austen’s plot points are more or less preserved, but the novel’s sense and sensibility are reframed: Using period dress and patriarchal rules but contemporary, profanity-laden dialogue, Breeze’s perceptive version celebrates sisterly, not romantic, love.The play kicks off with a blazing monologue by Mrs. Bennet (a hilariously high-strung Zuzanna Szadkowski), who is desperate to marry off at least some of her five daughters to save the family from financial ruin. The nubile and obedient Jane (Shayvawn Webster) seems like her best bet, but the blunt and headstrong Lizzie (Elyse Steingold) racks up unexpected proposals. Underage flirt Lydia (Caroline Grogan) is the likeliest to get in trouble; sensitive, botany-loving wallflower Mary (standout Masha Breeze, the playwright's sister) and horse girl Kitty (Violeta Picayo) seem like spinsters in waiting. Are the Bennet Girls Ok? | Photograph: Courtesy Ari Espay Though much of the girls’ alternately empathetic and uproarious chatter is sparked by the men in their lives, we encounter those men only rarely. All are played by a single actor, Edoardo Benzoni, who brilliantly delineates each character: four suitors—deer-in-headlights Darcy, awkward Collins, douchey...

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Stephen Schwartz was only in his twenties in 1976, when he wrote the score for The Baker’s Wife, but he already had three huge hits running on Broadway at once: Pippin, Godspell and The Magic Show. This latest musical—adapted from Marcel Pagnol’s 1938 French film about a village whose heartbroken baker quits making bread—was more modest and more conventional than Schwartz’s previous ones (or his future smash Wicked), and much less successful. The show was tested in a grueling pre-Broadway tour, during which its director and both leading actors were replaced, but it was never sufficiently proved; airless and half-baked, it closed out of town. But the story now has a happy ending in the form of director Gordon Greenberg’s luxuriously cast and thoroughly enchanting revival at Classic Stage Company. After fifty years and numerous rewrites, The Baker’s Wife has risen. The Baker’s Wife | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy While it is unrelated to the figure of the Baker’s Wife in the fairy-tale musical Into the Woods, this show does have the air of a fable. An expert and affable baker, Aimable (Scott Bakula)—his name means lovable–moves to a Provençal bourg in the 1930s, to the delight of its hungry inhabitants; beside him is his new bride, Genevieve (Ariana DeBose), an attractive woman decades his junior. For Genevieve—her name starts with jeune, i.e. young—Aimable is a rebound from a bruising affair with a married man. But although she has...

If theater is your religion and the Broadway musical your sect, you've been woefully faith-challenged of late. Venturesome, boundary-pushing works such as Spring Awakening, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and Next to Normal closed too soon. American Idiot was shamefully ignored at the Tonys and will be gone in three weeks. Meanwhile, that airborne infection Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark dominates headlines and rakes in millions, without even opening. Celebrities and corporate brands sell poor material, innovation gets shown the door, and crap floats to the top. It's enough to turn you heretic, to sing along with The Book of Mormon's Ugandan villagers: "Fuck you God in the ass, mouth and cunt-a, fuck you in the eye." Such deeply penetrating lyrics offer a smidgen of the manifold scato-theological joys to be had at this viciously hilarious treat crafted by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, of South Park fame, and composer-lyricist Robert Lopez, who cowrote Avenue Q. As you laugh your head off at perky Latter-day Saints tap-dancing while fiercely repressing gay tendencies deep in the African bush, you will be transported back ten years, when The Producers and Urinetown resurrected American musical comedy, imbuing time-tested conventions with metatheatrical irreverence and a healthy dose of bad-taste humor. Brimming with cheerful obscenity, sharp satire and catchy tunes, The Book of Mormon is a sick mystic revelation, the most exuberantly entertaining Broadway musical in years. The...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Buena Vista Social Club offers an irresistible tropical vacation. A celebration of Cuban musical history, it’s a getaway and a gateway: To attend this show—which premiered last season at the Atlantic Theatre, and has now moved to Broadway—is to enter a world thick with history that you’ll want to learn more about afterward, if you don’t know it already. While you’re there, though, you don’t need to think too hard. Just give yourself over to the sounds that pour out from the stage.  The 1997 album Buena Vista Social Club gathered an extraordinary group of elderly musicians to recreate the atmosphere and the traditional musical styles—son, boleros, guajiras—of a racially inclusive Havana nightspot before the Cuban Revolution. It became a worldwide sensation upon its release, and was the subject of a 1999 documentary film by Wim Wenders. Marco Ramirez’s stage version has a less factual bent. “Some of what follows is true,” says the bandleader Juan de Marcos (Justin Cunningham), who was instrumental in assembling the album’s participants. “Some of it only feels true.”  Buena Vista Social Club | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy The musical focuses on four of the album’s principal performers: vocalists Omara Portuondo (a regal Natalie Venetia Belcon) and Ibrahim Ferrer (Mel Semé), guitarist-singer Compay Segundo (Julio Monge) and pianist Rubén González (Jainardo Batista Sterling). Scenes from the album’s 1996 recording process alternate with...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  There’s a big twist at the end of the first act of Death Becomes Her; the plot of the second includes a giant hole. And those are just two of the injuries that the vain actress Madeline Ashton (Megan Hilty) and the bitter writer Helen Sharp (Jennifer Simard) inflict on each other in this new Broadway musical, a savagely funny dark comedy about how the quest for beauty—in a misogynist world where the “F” word is fifty—can bring out the beasts in women. Its two central characters are old frenemies whose shared rage at age is understandable: They’re Mad and Hel, and they’re not going to take it anymore. The problem is how and on whom they take it out. Adapted from the hit 1992 movie, Death Becomes Her introduces Madeline in a delicious show-within-a-show production number that sets up the musical’s themes with a giant wink. As the star of a Broadway musical called Me! Me! Me!, she wonders why she stays in “the chase to stay young and beautiful”—“Is it the fact that I’m attracted / To each kernel of external validation?” she sings, with nifty internal rhymes—before launching into a punning answer: “Everything I do is for the gaze.” The song then morphs into a pull-the-stops-out campfest, staged by director-choreographer Christopher Gattelli and costumed by Paul Tazewell as a spoofy tribute to Liza Minnelli in The Act. As colorful streamers fly into the audience, you might worry that Death Becomes Her is peaking too soon. It’s not: Having popped...

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Here’s my advice: Go to hell. And by hell, of course, I mean Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell’s fizzy, moody, thrilling new Broadway musical. Ostensibly, at least, the show is a modern retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy goes to the land of the dead in hopes of retrieving girl, boy loses girl again. “It’s an old song,” sings our narrator, the messenger god Hermes (André De Shields, a master of arch razzle-dazzle). “And we’re gonna sing it again.” But it’s the newness of Mitchell’s musical account—and Rachel Chavkin’s gracefully dynamic staging—that bring this old story to quivering life. In a New Orleans–style bar, hardened waif Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) falls for Orpheus (Reeve Carney), a busboy with an otherworldly high-tenor voice who is working, like Roger in Rent, toward writing one perfect song. But dreams don’t pay the bills, so the desperate Eurydice—taunted by the Fates in three-part jazz harmony—opts to sell her soul to the underworld overlord Hades (Patrick Page, intoning jaded come-ons in his unique sub-sepulchral growl, like a malevolent Leonard Cohen). Soon she is forced, by contract, into the ranks of the leather-clad grunts of Hades’s filthy factory city; if not actually dead, she is “dead to the world anyway.” This Hades is a drawling capitalist patriarch who keeps his minions loyal by giving them the minimum they need to survive. (“The enemy is poverty,” he sings to them...

Hamilton: Theater review by David Cote What is left to say? After Founding Father Alexander Hamilton’s prodigious quill scratched out 12 volumes of nation-building fiscal and military policy; after Lin-Manuel Miranda turned that titanic achievement (via Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography) into the greatest American musical in decades; after every critic in town (including me) praised the Public Theater world premiere to high heaven; and after seeing this language-drunk, rhyme-crazy dynamo a second time, I can only marvel: We've used up all the damn words. Wait, here are three stragglers, straight from the heart: I love Hamilton. I love it like I love New York, or Broadway when it gets it right. And this is so right. A sublime conjunction of radio-ready hip-hop (as well as R&B, Britpop and trad showstoppers), under-dramatized American history and Miranda’s uniquely personal focus as a first-generation Puerto Rican and inexhaustible wordsmith, Hamilton hits multilevel culture buttons, hard. No wonder the show was anointed a sensation before even opening. Assuming you don’t know the basics, ­Hamilton is a (mostly) rapped-through biomusical about an orphan immigrant from the Caribbean who came to New York, served as secretary to General Washington, fought against the redcoats, authored most of the Federalist Papers defending the Constitution, founded the Treasury and the New York Post and even made time for an extramarital affair that he damage-controlled in a scandal-stanching...