Things to do in New York this Saturday

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Smash, adapted from the non-hit TV series of the same name, begins with a canny feint. Its opening number is a fully staged song, “Let Me Be Your Star,” from Smash’s show-within-a-show, Bombshell, a Broadway biomusical about Marilyn Monroe. Robyn Hurder—as Ivy Lynn, the actress cast as Marilyn—sounds great singing it, and she hits all her marks as she rushes through the motions of the screen star’s best-known imagery: laying handprints at Grauman's, holding a white dress as it billows up around her, cooing “Happy Birthday” to JFK. Yet something is off; the number feels corny and busy. Doubts about Smash creep in: Is this supposed to be…good? But then the show’s focus pulls back, and we are in a fluorescent-lit studio where Bombshell is being rehearsed, and Bombshell’s director, Nigel—played, in full comic bloom, by Brooks Ashmanskas—has notes. “Is the tempo too bright?” (Yes.) “Are there too many bits?” (Yes.) Does our star have time to breathe?” (Not enough.) For a moment, you feel relief: Phew! They know. But knowingness, it turns out, is not the same as knowledge, and it certainly isn't power.  Smash | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy The TV version of Smash, which ran on NBC in 2012 and 2013, was a series that many theater fans loved to hate-watch. The same people who were grateful to see backstage-Broadway representation in mass culture at all were also highly sensitive to its potential for embarrassment, of which there was plenty....

Broadway review by Raven Snook It is 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, and an 11th-grade honors English class in small-town Georgia is studying The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s classic drama about the Salem witch trials. Their popular and engaging teacher is Mr. Smith (Gabriel Ebert), who sparks many a teenage crush. Goofy, empathetic, devout and married with a baby on the way, he's supportive of the girls in his class; in fact, when they decide to start a feminist club, it's Mr. Smith—not their inexperienced and fainthearted female guidance counselor, Miss Gallagher (Molly Griggs)—who champions the idea. He’s an ally, a friend and a sounding board: in other words, a good guy.   But who gets to be called a good guy—and, conversely, who gets called a bad girl? That’s the subject of John Proctor Is the Villain, Kimberly Belflower’s explosive response to sexism on and beyond the stage. The play’s fuse is lit by Shelby (Sadie Sink), a student who returns to school after leaving it abruptly months earlier in a cloud of gossip and rumor. As the alleged sexual misconduct of multiple men in their rural community comes to light, Shelby encourages her peers to challenge the conventional view of The Crucible’s protagonist, John Proctor, as a hero. In Miller’s allegory of McCarthyism, Proctor stands for integrity and honor: "How may I live without my name?” he asks when refusing to give the false confession that could save his life. “I have given you my soul; leave me my name!"...

There lived a certain man, in Russia long ago, who was big and strong (in his eyes, a flaming glow); most people looked at him with terror and with fear, but to Moscow chicks, he was such a lovely dear. We speak, of course, of the libertine faith healer Grigori "Rah Rah" Rasputin, the so-called mad monk who insinuated himself into the Romanov court in the waning years of imperial Russia until a conspiracy of aristocrats finally managed to have him killed. The female-led troupe Artemis Is Burning invites audiences—who are encouraged to wear black—to relive those heady days of decadence and treachery in an immersive performance in the atmospheric environs of Governors Island. Set Ashley Brett Chipman conceived the show and also directs it with former Sleep No More resident director Hope Youngblood, with assistance from Julia Sharpe; those three women also cowrote the script with David Campbell. James Finnemore is the choreographer. (The ticket price includes ferry trips to the island and back.) 

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  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, Mary! | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid  Described by the long-suffering President Lincoln as “my foul and hateful wife,” this virago makes her entrance snarling and hunched with fury, desperate to find a...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The scene most closely associated with David Mamet’s electric 1983 drama Glengarry Glen Ross is probably the “Always Be Closing” tirade delivered by Alec Baldwin in the 1992 film adaptation: a brutal dressing-down of the salesmen in his scammy real-estate operation, including some veteran sellers who may have forgotten their ABCs. The ongoing resonance of that movie, especially for straight guys, is surely one reason that Mamet’s play keeps returning to the stage in major productions. Glengarry is now being mounted on Broadway for the third time in 20 years; only Macbeth, another brief play about cutthroat ambition, has been revived on Broadway more often in this century. (The most revived musical, Gypsy, is also about strivers.) And it will keep coming back as long as there’s money to be made on it. Glengarry Glen Ross: Always be opening.  Funnily enough, Baldwin’s corporate-taskmaster character and his famous speech do not appear in the stage version of Glengarry Glen Ross; Mamet added them for his screenplay. If that’s a bit of a bait-and-switch for fans of the movie, well, that’s what Glengarry is about: Everyone in the real-estate office is peddling the unreal—trying to pull a fast one, sometimes more than one at once. I’ve occasionally wondered why Mamet hasn’t added the lecture scene to the play, which is not exactly too long as it stands; even including an intermission after the 35-minute first act, it’s still not much more than an...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s fantastical 1891 novel—a gothic meditation on the blurry lines that separate art from life, appearances from reality, body from soul—there's a curious moment when the barrier between Wilde himself and the novel he is writing briefly disappears. “Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not,” he says, departing from third-person narration for the first and only time in the book. “It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.” This revealing blink of an “I” does not make the cut in writer-director Kip Williams’s dynamic stage adaptation of the book, a solo performed with astonishing stamina and skill by Sarah Snook. But it everywhere informs the production’s clever embrace of artifice and self-reproduction as theatrical devices.  One can see the appeal of this show for Snook at this time in her career. It's dangerous for an actor to be too closely associated with a single role, as she is at risk of being for her cracking portrayal of Shiv Roy on HBO’s Succession. What better way to avoid being pigeonholed than to spread her wings across 25 parts at once? In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Snook incarnates the narcissistic title character, the ultimate demon twink, who models for a worshipful portrait by the idealistic painter Basil Hallward. “How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young,” he laments. “If it were only the...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Good Night, and Good Luck is a 2005 film about the 1950s TV journalist Edward R. Murrow and his contretemps with the red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, who have now adapted it—albeit barely—for the stage. The Broadway version, starring Clooney as Murrow and directed by the expert David Cromer, is in many ways unobjectionable. It is well designed and full of fine actors doing their jobs. Its subject is timely and its message is on point, and there’s no good reason to see it. Nevertheless: Because it stars Clooney, in his Broadway debut and his first professional stage appearance in 40 years, the production is now the highest-grossing show on Broadway, with a weekly take exceeding $3 million. The best third of the seats in the Winter Garden Theatre start at $799 a pop; the worst seats, with partial views on the far sides of the mezzanine, are a mere $176. Good night, nurse! Such is the nature of the marketplace, but consumers should be warned that nothing in this production is better than what you can get at home by renting the movie for $3.99.  Good Night, and Good Luck | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid That’s because, in nearly every regard, Clooney and Heslov have just plopped their screenplay onstage and called it a play. Presented live on Broadway, Good Night, and Good Luck is still a 2005 film about the 1950s TV journalist Edward R. Murrow. One central character has been cut for...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  When viewed in retrospect, at least, some matches are doomed from the start. That’s half the story in Jason Robert Brown’s he-sang, she-sang musical The Last Five Years, which looks at a failed relationship—between Jamie, a rising novelist, and Cathy, a plateaued actress—from both sides and in two temporal directions. It is also half the story in the show’s woefully uneven new revival with Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren, directed by Whitney White. The balance is broken: She has all the weight.  As its Playbill insert helpfully illustrates, The Last Five Years lays out the narratives of its two exes in the form of an X: His side of the story moves forward, starting at the end of their first date; hers unfolds in reverse, starting at the end of their marriage. They’re at cross-purposes, and aside from a wedding song at the intersection of their timelines—the lovely “The Next Ten Minutes,” which cleverly incorporates the words “I do”—their stories are never on the same page. Until the counterpoint finale, there’s only one duet in this whole two-person show; the rest of the score is apportioned into alternating solos.  The Last Five Years | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Brown’s structural choice suggests an insurmountable problem in Jamie and Cathy’s romance. If they can’t connect, maybe it’s because each of them puts the other on a pedestal. They love each other’s types. Jamie, who sees himself as a little Jewish nebbish, is excited by...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Try to imagine this: a family-friendly Broadway musical based on a beloved cartoon character from the Great Depression. Maybe she has distinctive hair and a signature red dress. Maybe she’s looking to find out who she is, so she runs away and gets dazzled by the bright lights and bustle of NYC. Her best friends could be, I don’t know, a dog and an orphan girl. And this may sound crazy, but: What if her sunniness and can-do optimism had the power to inspire progressive political change?  It’d never work. Just kidding, just kidding! It worked like the dickens in the 1977 moppet musical Annie, and it works again—minus Annie’s more Dickensian elements—in Boop! The Musical. Directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell, this is an old-fashioned candy shop of a show, where tasty confections are sold in bulk. When Boop! is corny, it’s candy corn. Gorge on the multicolor gumdrops of its high-energy production numbers; chew the jelly beans of its gentle social-mindedness; let the caramel creams of its love story melt slightly oversweetly in your mouth. And above all, savor this show’s red-hot cinnamon heart: Jasmine Amy Rogers, making a sensational Broadway debut as the 1930s animated-short icon Betty Boop.   Boop! The Musical | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman In our world, Betty is the quintessential cartoon jazz baby, a Fleischer Studios flapper inspired by singer Helen Kane (famous for her "boop-oop-a-doop" tag in songs like “I Wanna Be Loved...

Eliya Smith's new play, which spies on teenagers at a summer camp in Virginia, was scheduled for January before it got delayed by labor pains at the Atlantic.  Now it resurfaces with most of its original actors—Arjun Athalye, Maaike Laanstra-Corn, Jack DiFalco, Alden Harris-McCoy, Renée-Nicole Powell, Lark White and Danny Wolohan—now joined by Grace Brennan and Dominic Gross. Les Waters (Dana H.) directs the world premiere.