theater reviews: Last News

a hilariously scheming Mary Todd Lincoln who dreams of returning to her cabaret roots, but she’s stuck aimlessly wandering around the White House while unhappily married to Abe Lincoln.The deliciously demented mind behind this inspired lunacy is Cole Escola (who uses they/them pronouns), who wrote and stars as the titular subject opposite Broadway star Conrad Ricamora.In a recent interview, Escola, 37, told the New York Post that the genesis for “Oh, Mary!” came about over a decade ago in 2009.“I loved the idea so much that I was scared to write it,” they shared. “Because I wanted it to be as perfect as I had it in my mind.”But the COVID-19 pandemic helped the writing process along.“I had nothing going on,” Escola continued.

LOS ANGELES — As Universal Pictures prepared for a big night at the Academy Awards with “Oppenheimer,” the studio also celebrated the No. 1 debut of “Kung Fu Panda 4,” which collected $58.3 million in domestic theaters over the weekend, according to estimates Sunday.“Kung Fu Panda 4,” the first film in the DreamWorks Animation franchise since the third installment in 2016, got off to a better start than all but the 2008 original.

John Patrick Shanley’s scorching drama about a nun who suspects the parish pastor of being a child molester.90 minutes with no intermission. At the Todd Haimes Theater, 227 W.

How am I laughing so uncontrollably at a play about Mary Todd Lincoln?Yes, Abraham Lincoln’s wife is the subject of this riotous new comedy at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, written by and starring Cole Escola, that definitely does not aim to teach your anything or challenge your brain cells. Rather, the campy “Oh, Mary!” is too busy daring your lungs to stay full of air for more than a few seconds.

the streamer’s freshman attempt at a stage play is a huge, insufferable embarrassment.Mega-fans of the TV series, like me, will be extremely disappointed by how the live show, which opened Thursday night at the Phoenix Theatre in London, epically fails to conjure the magic and small-town charm of the Duffer brothers’ popular creation. Three hours, plus an intermission.

about the dance. Instead, that climactic event allows the viewer to meet the documentary’s extraordinary subjects and gain a deeper, more human understanding of what their daily lives are like. Unlike the overblown musical, the doc is not excessively and damagingly weighty.

To watch “Hell’s Kitchen,” the new off-Broadway musical by Alicia Keys that opened Sunday night at the Public Theater, is to experience euphoria followed by enormous frustration over and over again. How can we not feel elated being there for the star-is-born moment of actress Maleah Joi Moon, who makes an earth-shaking professional debut as 17-year-old Ali, a fictional stand-in for Keys?Two hours and 30 minutes, with one intermission.

Monty Python would often dryly announce, “and now for something completely different.”Well, not much is different about the revival of “Monty Python’s Spamalot,” the musical that’s based on their 1975 film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” that opened Thursday night at the St. James Theatre.

the musical “Parade” and Tom Stoppard’s play “Leopoldstadt.” The problem is that while “Harmony” is about a sextet of singers whose voices blend like milk and coffee, its elements do not similarly fuse into a cohesive and satisfying musical.The show, directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, has been tinkered with by Manilow and lyricist/book-writer Bruce Sussman for nearly 30 years, but on its largest stage yet it still doesn’t quite work.Structural flaws that were mostly forgivable when the production played the more intimate Museum of Jewish Heritage downtown last year are detrimentally exacerbated by Broadway’s imposing size. The musical, therefore, is lopsided.

Merrily We Roll Along,” “Sweeney Todd” and final show “Here We Are” are all playing at the same time. Over in London is a sublime revue of favorite Sondheim standards called “Old Friends” at the Gielgud Theatre that’s led by a deep-feeling Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga.Two hours and 30 minutes with one intermission. At the Gielgud Theatre in London.

won Brendan Fraser the Oscar for Best Actor, was about an obese man who never left his home and was visited by his daughter and friend. Its stakes were instantly sky-high, its characters deeper, its jokes funnier and its ending devastating.

What’s missed everywhere is passion. In Sondheim’s other experimental musicals — “Assassins,” profiling presidential killers, and “Sunday In The Park With George,” about Georges Seurat’s famous painting — heat arrives in the most unexpected ways and places.

bigger.Of course, Lloyd, who directed “A Doll’s House” on Broadway last season with Jessica Chastain, isn’t this wildly imaginative production’s only risky choice.Scherzinger, from the Pussycat Dolls, is about as far away from Norma type-casting as you can possibly get. She has little in common with the Martian-esque Swanson or Glenn Close and never bothers with an eccentric turban.But her breathtaking, feral Norma is, nonetheless, a grand creature of showbiz who’s been shunned by Hollywood’s cruelly short attention span by just 40 years old.

“Book of Mormon” duo now star in “Gutenberg! The Musical!,” a hyperactive two-hander that opened Thursday night at the James Earl Jones Theatre, and their old-school chops and boisterous chemistry are why the cute off-Broadway gem has improbably wound up, as Gad’s Bud accurately puts it, “on the weird side of 7th Avenue.”“Gutenberg!” is on the weird side, all right.The appealingly nerdy show by Scott Brown and Anthony King has two equally wild identities. Call it “Mr. Hyde and Mr.

Stephen Sondheim’s 1981 show, which was a 16-performance flop when it began its life, has, against all odds, only improved as the years have rolled on. It’s better and more youthfully optimistic now than it ever was before.

during the making of “Jaws,” frequently asks whether Steven Spielberg’s seminal blockbuster is art or entertainment.History has determined that it’s both — a monster movie, yes, but one overflowing with cinematic innovation and panache that amounted to a well-deserved Best Picture Oscar nomination and enduring worldwide fame. 1 hour and 30 minutes with no intermission.

plopped a boxing ring in the middle of the orchestra nearly 10 years ago.But Huey Lewis did not sing “Power of Car,” he sang “Power of Love.” And heart is completely absent from director John Rando’s shiny and serviceable staging of the beloved 1985 science-fiction movie.Coursing emotion, teen angst and can-do scrappiness are what set director Robert Zemeckis’ original film apart from other entries in the time-travel genre. “Back To The Future” wasn’t HG Wells or “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.” And it’s hardly remembered as a flashy spectacle, either.

my ear. The gist, without revealing specifics, is that everybody is cheating on everybody else. In a 1923 English countryside abode, erudite Beau (Eric McCormack) and Sylvia (Laura Bell Bundy) are not-so-classily getting it on, when gradually they’re intruded upon by Marjorie (Lilli Cooper), Clarke (Alex Moffat), Dierdre (Dana Steingold) and Richard (the role normally played by Neham Joshi was understudy Tony Roach on the night I saw it). The group is made up of husbands, wives, exes, secret lovers and, shall we say, secret professionals, all of whom have repressed desires and grievances to air.What unravels is not so much a jolly farce of slamming doors and shocking surprises (there are a few), but a two-act parlor scene of admitted sexual indiscretions screamed so the bartenders at Sardi’s next door can follow along. You miss the old farces. There isn’t much of the hiding-in-closets fun that has long been the meat of similar comedies such as “Boeing-Boeing” and Coward’s “Present Laughter.” That’s why the amped-up energy is so jarring — for the most part, these characters simply stand together and yell. That tried-and-true farce structure — low-key witty first act, madcap second, wrapup third — is abandoned by Rustin in favor of high-energy antics from start to finish, much like Broadway’s 2021 play “POTUS” that similarly ran out of gas halfway through.Steingold, as the loopy Dierdre, runs away with “The Cottage.” Her persona, with a voice somewhere between a ghost and a drunken bridesmaid, is hilarious.

West Side Story” and “Fiddler on the Roof” in is totally unrecognizable.Once we’re acclimated to the changed space, however, we start to ask more of the story. Broadway, after all, is a vastly different place than the Public Theater where I first saw the musical in the smaller LuEsther Hall 10 years ago and liked it a hair more.

Once Upon a One More Time” — an even worse Cinderella.Two hours and 30 minutes with one 15-minute intermission. At the Marquis Theatre.The dreadful show, which opened Thursday night at the Marquis Theatre, takes the pop songs of Britney Spears and plops them willy-nilly in a feminist Cinders in which the main character realizes there’s more to life than falling in love with a prince.Good for you, Cindy, but wouldn’t it be nice if you were both a freethinking, independent woman and your musical’s story made a lick of sense?It’s bibbidi-bobbidi-brainless.

opened this week at the Lyceum Theatre, attempts to be a new horror movie on an old Broadway.Such a merger sounds smart in theory, with the genre doing reliably big business at cinemas and boasting hoards of ready-made fans. Why not produce “M3GAN Live,” or “The Nun” in two acts?Well, for one simple reason: because the kind of paralyzing fear and gruesome death that fuels horror films is just about impossible to satisfyingly replicate at the theater. 1 hour and 40 minutes with no intermission.