‘Paradise Square’ Broadway Review: History Eludes Musical’s Big Reach

deadline.com:

Paradise Square makes quite the reach. A musical about the build-up to New York’s horrific Draft Riots of 1863 reaches to the past to tell us about the present.

It reaches across cultures to tell us about assimilation and appropriation. It reaches across styles of music and dance to celebrate diversity and commonality.

It reaches to contain both epic realism and mythical nostalgia. And somewhere along the line it reaches a point of no return, when all that reaching just wears itself out.The musical, opening tonight at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, is big in a way that calls back to the Cameron Mackintosh productions of the 1980s and their ’90s Broadway offspring like Ragtime and Kiss of the Spider Woman – those latter two courtesy of Garth Drabinsky, the producer attempting a comeback with Paradise Square after some financial flim-flam landed him in a Canadian prison; he was paroled in 2013 after serving 17 months.Directed by the great Moisés Kaufman, Paradise Square entices in its opening moments when projected film of modern-day New York gives way to the immense, multi-level 19th Century tavern and dance hall that gives the musical its name.Our guide to the past is the saloon owner Nelly O’Brien (Joaquina Kalukango, last seen on Broadway in Slave Play).

The Black wife of a white Irishman named Willie O’Brien (Matt Bogart), Nelly runs an establishment that seems to live up to its name, offering a sort of paradise where the Black and Irish neighbors of the rough-and-tumble Five Points area can find camaraderie and entertainment with seemingly little intrusion of the racism that’s elsewhere tearing the country in half.