Hudson Theatre

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Romantic comedies, once a Broadway staple, have lately been in short supply. To some extent, All In fills that vacuum. The show is not a comedy per se, but an anthology of comedy writing: short humor pieces by Simon Rich, performed script-in-hand by a rotating cast of actors. And while all of these pieces touch on awkward modern love in some way, that love is not always romantic; it can also be parental or familial or universal. But although the stories tend to resolve on awww-inspiring notes, All In is first and foremost funny—often very, very funny.   All In: Comedy About Love | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid Director Alex Timbers gives All In the air of a live reading of The New Yorker, where much of Rich’s text first appeared: Set designer David Korins evokes a high-toned literary-bohemian atmosphere that is offset by Emily Flake’s adorable illustrations, projected on exposed brick. If you read The New Yorker regularly, you may remember some of the works collected here; Rich’s writing is memorably sharp and well-crafted. But their comic surprises are refreshed in performance. Three of the pieces are delivered to wryly emphatic perfection, in the production’s opening cast, by the charming stand-up star John Mulaney: “Guy Walks Into a Bar,” which expands hilariously on a hoary joke about a half-deaf genie; “Learning the Ropes,” a tale of pirates on an unexpected adventure; and “The Big Nap,” in which a toddler affects the hardboiled...

This 2002 he-sang, she-sang musical by the gifted Jason Robert Brown (Parade) tracks soon-to-be exes along different lines of an X-shaped structure, in which his story moves forward in time and hers is told backward (in the sliced vein of Merrily We Roll Along). The callous rising novelist Jamie is played by pop pin-up Nick Jonas, and his "shiksa goddess" Cathy, an aspiring actress, is essayed by Tina idol Adrienne Warren. Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding) directs the show's belated Broadway premiere.