Category: Theater

In almost every TV comedy special, there’s a telling cutaway that the director felt obliged to insert. It shows spectators in the theatre rented for the occasion—usually a half row, half a dozen people—erupting in laughter at something outrageous that the comedian has just said while turning with quick, happy complicity to exchange a guilty glance for having done so. As often as not, someone in the row covers her face or offers an abashed look, before rocking back and forth with renewed delight. It is a heightened emotion and clearly meant to allow us, watching, to join in. Can we laugh at that? they ask one another, giving us permission to laugh as they laugh.

It is, in a way, a version of the canned laughter that once enwrapped every situation comedy, and which, when now encountered on ancient shows on TV Land, sounds downright eerie in its mechanical, obviously overlaid quality. The two practices arise from a common idea: that laughter is a shared, not a solitary, experience, and needs a little kindling of collectivity to catch fire.

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Mere physical, unmediated laughter might be a good place to begin exploring the higher morality of comedy—for comedy, like pornography, is the rare form that has a physical end, either achieved or not. The flutter in our heart we say we feel upon viewing a great painting is largely metaphoric; the laughter in our chests which comedy elicits is not. We can easily imagine an actor who is deeply “moving” but never makes us cry; it’s a different kind of moving, we say. (Daniel Day-Lewis is like that.) But a clown who makes no one laugh is not a clown, or else is stuck in a Beckett play.

The harder question, these days, is what lines the clown may cross. It’s easy to complain about neo-puritanism, but neo-puritanism does have the virtue of indicting comedy that is merely snickering cruelty. Yet the urge to make comedy “positive” runs up against the truth that comedy has always been a series of transgressions against piety and high-mindedness, stretching back to Aristophanes mocking Socrates’ pretensions in “The Clouds,” while Socrates sat there in the theatre, laughing at the mockery. So how to explain this urge: has comedy changed dramatically in purpose in our era? Or have its ideological trappings gone pious in ways that are at odds with what comedians have always done?

Kliph Nesteroff’s “Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars” (Abrams) comes with significant recommendations from various comedy worthies, including Judd Apatow, but it is essentially a history of American censorship of all kinds of popular culture. Many examples are drawn from obscure century-old sources. When someone with a provincial printing press attacks a form of American popular culture (“The so-called jazz music is an abomination,” the Greeley Daily Tribune pronounced in 1920), Nesteroff sees proof that the form was under relentless assault, even though the assault was coming from the small-town paper exactly because the art form was becoming so successful outside the small town. Despite the notorious attempts, which Nesteroff documents in detail, to suppress Elvis’s hips and Mick Jagger’s lips, the final score in that battle was Rock and Roll: 100, Censorship: 0. (The real early rock-and-roll scandals—Chuck Berry’s imprisonment for having sex with an underage girl and Jerry Lee Lewis’s notoriety for having married one—look worse by contemporary standards than they did in their time.)

When it comes to comedy, Nesteroff describes American attempts to censor theatre and vaudeville and burlesque which date almost to the beginning of the Republic, along with all the misbegotten efforts to purge “vulgarity” from popular entertainment. Though he’s generally cheerfully contemptuous of the censors, he is himself rather censorious about the indulgence back then of what is unacceptable to us now: not just blackface but also ethnic stereotyping of the kind produced by Jewish- and Italian-dialect comedians. “The Topeka Daily Capital argued that vaudeville’s greatest sin was not insult comedy nor blackface caricature, but references to unwed mothers,” he marvels.

“Vaudeville largely consisted of assimilated immigrants who held contempt for newer arrivals,” he goes on. “And yet, the more established the immigrant group, the less patience they had for being insulted. By the end of the 1890s, Irish and Italian immigrants were objecting to portrayals of intoxicated leprechauns and moronic organ-grinders.” He might have noted that the best and longest-surviving of all vaudeville acts, the Marx Brothers, depended on dated dialect comedy well into the nineteen-forties, with Chico Marx persisting in what are still some of the funniest of all American comedy routines—try the “Sanity Clause” bit, from “A Night at the Opera,” sometime. What renders it harmless is the fact that its “ethnic” quality is dissolved into general commedia-dell’arte stylization, so that it can no more be taken as a stereotype of the Italians than Pierrot can be taken as one of the French.

What about the more overt persecution of comedy that Nesteroff traces? It’s true that various comedians have been arrested for obscenity—and that for a long time the range of acceptable comedy was very limited—and yet none of them, in historical perspective, truly suffered for their transgressions. Lenny Bruce famously underwent a series of trials; his disciple George Carlin, who was present at one of Bruce’s arrests and, allergic to authority, refused to show I.D., once travelled to the police station with him. But Bruce never went to prison, and the demons that tormented him were mostly personal. Carlin himself was arrested a few times for onstage performances of his famous “seven dirty words” routine, in which he itemized the words forbidden on the radio. But he, too, spent no time in prison, or even stood trial.

The fact is that, historically, censorship in a more or less open society has had little permanent impact on art or on entertainment. Bruce was put through hell by (mostly Catholic) prosecutors, but nobody had any trouble buying his albums, and he died of an overdose, not a broken heart. While absolutist states can imprison their authors and performers, as in contemporary Iran, this hasn’t really happened in America, for all its Watch and Ward Societies and Hays Codes. The list of would-be censors is long, but one need only consider Tipper Gore’s efforts to regulate rap to recognize a losing cause when one sees it. The Moral Majority was never a majority. Had Lenny Bruce not killed himself with morphine, he would be a grand old man of comedy, taking bows and grumbling about social media.

Nesteroff eventually goes from documenting, skeptically, the efforts that people have made to condemn comedy they deemed an affront to decency to joining those condemning comedy they deem an affront to decency, albeit from a progressive perspective. He endorses the assaults on the genuinely tasteless nineties standup Andrew Dice Clay, quoting the sainted Carlin: “Comedy traditionally has picked on people in power, people who abuse their power. . . . Women and gays and immigrants are kind of, to my way of thinking, underdogs.” Henny Youngman himself gets to take a swing at Clay: “You’re wrong if you think poking fun at helpless people makes you a comedian. My second opinion is that your jokes aren’t jokes, they’re ugliness.” Even if the critics have a point, it’s a little awkward to see this piling on after we’ve been instructed in the preceding pages to mistrust all moral censoriousness.

But social consensus can alter swiftly. A dozen years ago, an episode of HBO’s “Talking Funny” showed three comedians (Ricky Gervais, Louis C.K., and Chris Rock) throwing the N-word around, as if to establish their sophistication and fearlessness. Jerry Seinfeld, who was seated with them, said he “wouldn’t use it anywhere.” At the time, he might have seemed unduly cautious and commercial; he now sounds like the voice of common sense and courtesy. The square becomes the sage.

It is similarly easy to forget that Chris Rock preceded Donald Trump in deriding John McCain for having been captured, during a 2008 performance in defense of Obama: “There’s a lot of guys in jail that got captured. I don’t wanna vote for nobody that got captured—I wanna vote for the motherfucker who got away!” What seems daring and courageous at one moment can seem cruel and unregarding at another; what’s perceived as merrily provocative and what’s perceived as mortally dangerous to the polity can shift overnight. Go ask Socrates.

Nesteroff’s somewhat censorious study of censorship provides a useful reminder that censorship and censoriousness are significantly different things. Censorship is the actual government interdiction of forbidden speech, and in liberal-democratic countries there’s essentially none of this when it comes to culturally contested zones. It’s just that we’re inclined to voice emphatic disapproval about certain forms of speech, which, though disconcerting for the subject of our disapproval, is not at all what we mean by censorship. Organized boycotts are unpleasant, and illiberal in their effects, but they have no resemblance to the actual government interdiction of free speech. Any user of Twitter (oh, fine, X) in its Musk era can see what happens when common sense and caution are removed from conversation. Censorship may be doomed; censoriousness has its uses.

Jesse David Fox’s baldly named “Comedy Book” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is an attempt to study laughter as a common enterprise, as is suggested by its subtitle, “How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work.” In Fox’s view, comedy conquered culture only starting in the nineteen-nineties, with the success of “Seinfeld.” The sum of his historical perspective is conveyed in this sentence: “Comedy has steadily grown in cultural relevance, from vaudeville around the turn of the twentieth century to Seinfeld.” What preceded the nine-season NBC comedy was, he evidently thinks, a form “still in its nascency.” Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields, S. J. Perelman, Jack Benny, Gracie Allen, Sid Caesar, Godfrey Cambridge, Bob Hope, Nipsey Russell, Carol Burnett—none of them gets so much as a mention. Comedy was marginal, now it’s central, and “Seinfeld” and “The Simpsons” made it so. This is odd. In your book about baseball, even if the point you are going to make is that Babe Ruth’s way of playing baseball is not our way of playing baseball, it would still seem wise to include Babe Ruth. Fox genuinely seems to have zero historical sense of comedy—and by historical sense here one doesn’t mean some excursus into the Lord of Misrule figures who preceded Falstaff. One means Bob Hope.

What’s curious about this is that Seinfeld, his hero and central figure, has a sharp sense of comedy history, and has devoted himself to producing a documentary tribute to Abbott and Costello—demonstrating a slightly perverse anti-arty taste—and cannot praise his observational predecessor Robert Klein often enough. More important, when a chronicler lacks a sense of history, everything old seems new. The famous line about Seinfeld’s comedy being about nothing, which Fox gives an existential twist, saying it’s really about “nothingness,” changes meaning when you reflect that much great comedy, from Congreve to Wilde, has been about nothing—that is, it’s about manners, how they change and how they serve to soothe and enrage us at the same time. Samuel Johnson called these kinds of manners “fictitious benevolence”—all the things we say to ease our lives with other people, even if we do not mean them for a moment. In the work of both Molière and Larry David, the comedy lies in the main character’s extreme self-awareness about the fictitious nature of the benevolence. You are expected to praise a friend’s poem when it is passed to you, even if it’s terrible; you should thank both members of the couple who have picked up the tab at a restaurant, even if only one earned the money being spent; you should seem bewildered if upbraided for having sex with a cleaning woman on the desk at your new job. Once you become aware that benevolence is fictitious, it’s funny.

What people call “woke” is, in large part, just a more exquisitely attenuated system of fictitious benevolence, focussing on things you shouldn’t say or perform because they might injure someone. We all recognize how fictitious it is—how could we not?—but we have a sense of its benevolence, too. Satiric comedy may have particular targets, but a comedy of manners—as in “situation comedy,” a revolving set of people and predicaments responding each week to small social pressures—is always about nothing important and about everything human all at once. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” in the nineteen-seventies, was about the manners of its time, and so about “nothing,” in the same way as “Seinfeld” was. The episodes depicted struggles with fictitious benevolence, inspecting the rules of decorum which insist that, say, a funeral can never be funny, even when the deceased was crushed by an elephant while dressed as a peanut. Those who don’t know the comic past may not be condemned to repeat it, but they’ll miss the chance to laugh at it.

On the question of the “magic that makes it work,” Fox has more interesting things to say, or, at least, to summarize. He reviews all the prominent theories of comedy, including Freudian theories of tension and release (we’re letting out psychic energy connected with a repressed topic), classical superiority theory (we laugh at others’ misfortunes to feel better about ourselves), structural theories of incongruity (the setup points one way, the punch line another), and ends favoring a theory that roots our need for comedy in an instinct to play, a theory whose fulfillment lies in the uses of comedy to create community. It is this ability to gather unlike listeners into an empathetic space that makes comedy worth celebrating, he proposes.

In this spirit, Fox recounts watching the wonderful John Mulaney performing, at Madison Square Garden, a show devoted to his experience with rehab. Mulaney observed, at a certain point, that his relationship with his audience was “the longest-lasting, most intimate one of his life.” Fox was dismayed by the audience’s response: “Many began to clap. He cringed and asked them to stop—he hadn’t meant it was a good thing. Probably even more than Mulaney, I grew frustrated as the show wore on. I had felt connected to Mulaney and his process, but at the same time felt the audience wasn’t giving him what he needed from us and, in turn, what we needed to give each other.” It was supposed to be “a collective moment of healing,” Fox tells us, but the audience fell down on the job. Only connect, he’s saying.

The spirit of play, he suggests, is the spirit of connection. “The feeling of mirth one experiences watching comedy is similar at the most basic neurological level to the feeling one has joking around with one’s friends and family,” he writes. “Similarly, as we mature, we search for ever more sophisticated versions of laughing at a funny face a relative makes when we’re a child. Comedians are able to artificially create that state of play by generating the same feelings of trust and safety that free you up to laugh most easily.”

Are feelings of trust and safety what we typically feel in the presence of a great comedian? The idea jars a little. Those cutaways don’t show moist exchanges of empathy; they show people checking to see if the redrawn boundary of the acceptable is indeed acceptable. Surely any relaxation that we feel, any release, has more to do with that sudden acceptance of our shared helplessness in the face of the comedian’s gift for naming our best-kept secrets. Comedy is more likely to involve shared shock than communal bonding; impiety is its theme far more often than is any collective “moment of healing.” In truth, the happiness we experience is the happiness of escape, however momentary, from the enforced good feelings that phrases like “a moment of healing” suggest. Piety is poison to comedy. A world in which comedy plays a healthy, constructive role in bridging social divides and making people share their feelings might be a good thing, but it would not be a funny thing. Bringing people together in high-minded community is the task of folk music.

If there is any kind of comic grammar that underlines comedy, it surely derives from the fact that our earliest experience of laughter comes when we are first tickled: laughter arrives at the moment when a baby grasps the difference between a real threat and a mock threat. If the baby senses she is in danger, she cries; recognizing that she is not, she laughs. This shift seems foundational to what comedy is. If comedy begins here, it rises to more complex forms, as this basic grammar encircles ever larger areas of experience. Comedy has a range as large as human feeling, and can express optimism (the Marx Brothers), pessimism (Jacques Tati), stoicism (Buster Keaton), and even humanism (Chaplin). But all comedians have to walk the line between real attack and mock attack as skillfully as lion tamers walk the line between the animal’s attack space and its escape space. They violate our norms and then offer new ones, while reminding us that the norms are ours to violate and to make. What separates Chris Rock from Donald Trump is that Rock knows the liminal space he’s in, poised between actual revelation and wicked hyperbole—a truth to which we are clued in as much by his performance style (his constant nervous pacing, his sidelong glances) as by his words. The impieties are to be taken as possibilities, not as actual truths. It may be that Trump intuitively understands this, too, and that one reason his sneers and terrifying invocation of cruelty are not taken as seriously as they should be is that some people think of Trump’s discourse as that of the insult comedian: He doesn’t really mean it. He does.

A double-holiday week on Broadway – the final week of 2023 – saw a surge in box office, with many shows posting record numbers.

Winner of the week? Disney’s The Lion King, which grossed a massive $4,316,629, not only setting a house record at the Minskoff but a Broadway record for the highest single-week gross ever, a big achievement even when noting that the long-running musical played nine performances, as did other productions over the holidays.

Broadway’s final week of the calendar year included both Christmas and New Year’s Eve, with tourists and high ticket prices sending the total weekly gross for the 27 shows to $45,413,789, a 36% increase over the previous week but about 13% lower than last year’s New Year’s Eve week tally when 33 productions were on the boards.

Total attendance for the week ending December 31 was 256,751, a 14% bump over the previous week (but down 18% from last year). About 96% of all seats were filled, an impressive figure.

A big contributor to last week’s good box office numbers was the average ticket price of $176.88, a holiday boom that reflects a $29 increase over the previous week (and an $11 increase over last year at this time). Here again The Lion King reigned, with a $286.61 average ticket besting the usual front-runner Merrily We Roll Along ($258.20).

Other shows posting various record numbers (for 8 performances unless otherwise noted) or production highs (in addition to The Lion King) were:

Also posting big numbers were The Book of Mormon ($1,530,926); Hadestown ($1,114,449); Merrily We Roll Along, ($1,995,358), Moulin Rouge! ($1,786,154); Shucked ($1,050,251), A Beautiful Noise ($1,114,630, 9 performances); Spamalot ($1,503,187); Hamilton ($2,404,967); Back to the Future ($2,109,424); Sweeney Todd, ($2,261,279, 7 performances); and Appropriate ($753,024).

Joining the roster last week was Prayer For The French Republic, playing five previews at the Friedman ($264,770). Opening night is January 9.

Only two shows played to less than 70% of capacity at their venues, inexplicably given their good (and in one case excellent) reviews: Harmony, the Barry Manilow-Bruce Sussman musical, grossed $555,200 (9 performances) with 69% of seats filled at the Ethel Barrymore; and Purlie Victorious, widely regarded by critics as one of the best Broadway production of 2023, grossing $601,535 (9 performances) with attendance at 59% of capacity at the Music Box.

Season to date, Broadway has grossed $940,307,885, about 3% lower than last year at this time, with total attendance at 7,421,232, steady with last season.

All figures courtesy of The Broadway League. For complete box office listings, visit the League’s website.

His pleas need spirit, if only of desperation, and Daly, in a verbally stumbling performance, does not convey someone with the power to seduce with ease. This hesitation extends to most of the ensemble, who struggle with the cadence of Williams’s writing, except for the unflinching DeLaria and, as a hippie-ish painter named Hannah, Jean Lichty.

Like Shannon, Hannah is a hustler with lofty spiritual ambitions, traversing the world trading watercolors and recitations for hotel rooms with her aging poet grandfather (Austin Pendleton, whose adequacy with the play’s rhythms is undermined by the brevity of his time onstage). Shannon and Hannah’s near act-length conversation in the show’s second half, as she attempts to calm him down from the ledge, comes closest to achieving its intended discourse on freedom and redemption thanks to the surety with which Lichty imbues her character.

It might be that, in trying to demystify Williams’s extravagance to get at its emotional core, Mann has thrown the priest out with the holy water. It’s possible to strip away the surfaces of the playwright’s worlds — a revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” last year did away with its Old South glamour and still got its point across — but not the excesses they need to reach their delicious boiling points.

Traces of those remain, like Jeff Croiter’s tropical lighting, Beowulf Boritt’s stilted, shabby-chic set, and Rubin-Vega’s unshakable earthiness. But they don’t compensate for the play’s weaker elements, like two giddy German tourists (Alena Acker and Michael Leigh Cook) whose sporadic, Nazi-praising appearances are a thudding example of the duplicity Shannon rails against, in this case aimed at Maxine for renting them rooms.

Williams wants it both ways in those moments, validating his protagonist’s gripes even as he condemns him. The gambit is not impossible, but is one that needs a production more convincing, more drunk on its own pretensions, to really win over a congregation.

The Night of the Iguana
Through Feb. 25 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; iguanaplaynyc.com. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes.

Perhaps no single theatrical image sums up Broadway‘s 2023 more effectively than Jessica Chastain’s Nora leaving her dreary, unfulfilled doll house life to exit directly into the unlimited possibilities of an honest-to-god New York City street.

Unless maybe it’s that huge tree that sprouts up smack dab in the middle of an abandoned Southern plantation home after the Appropriate cast has left the stage, a gut-punch reminder that the sins of a nation’s past don’t just wither away because we don’t want to see them.

Or maybe it was Leslie Odom Jr. delivering that eulogy-coda in Purlie Victorious, blessing his “Africanic brothers” — and the audience — with the words “Now may the Constitution of the United States go with you; the Declaration of Independence stand by you; the Bill of Rights protect you; and the State Commission Against Discrimination keep the eyes of the law upon you, henceforth, now and forever. Amen.”

Those moments illustrated what theater does best, and what so much of Broadway did this year: Provide an unflinching eye — and offer at least a modicum of hope — during very dark times. They, and others like them, make up much of my year-end Best of Broadway Top 10 List. And in keeping with the theme, we’ll look ahead to 2024, with anticipation and no small amount of hope.

Best Of Broadway 2023

1. Appropriate

Opened December 18 at the Helen Hayes Theater. Closes March 3.

Original review: “A blistering family drama directed by Lila Neugebauer (easily matching her exemplary work in 2018’s The Waverly Gallery), Appropriate is a wicked cacophony of nerve-wrenching mystery, old resentments and laugh-out-loud comedy — the latter all the more remarkable coming, as it does, within a story about the darkest horrors of America’s legacies.”

Second thoughts: Broadway saved its best for last this year. My appreciation for the show, written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and featuring an amazing cast headed by Sarah Paulson and pitch-perfect direction by Neugebauer, has done nothing but increase in the week or so since I saw a press preview earlier this month, a performance that one audience member, seated just a few rows behind me, loudly and grumpily exited the moment the house lights came up. I can only surmise that this play, written by a Black playwright, performed by an all-white cast and determined to exhume the skeletons (and other body parts) buried in America’s racist history, touched a nerve. Consider it a job exceedingly well done.

2. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Opened March 26 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.

Original review: “A prodigious theatrical event that aims for greatness and achieves it, this revival of the Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler masterpiece is not to be missed. With Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford leading a flawless, 25-member cast that also includes Stranger Things‘ Gaten Matarazzo (given one of the scores most beautiful songs in ‘Not While I’m Around,’ and nailing it), the revival, opening tonight at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, makes the case that Sweeney just might be Sondheim’s greatest work (at least until the next production of Sunday in the Park comes along).”

Second thoughts: Groban and Ashford delivered two of the finest musical performances of the year, but it’s Matarazzo who sticks in my mind. A Broadway baby since his 2011 performance in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, he’s best known, of course, for TV’s Stranger Things. His supporting role in Sweeney as the gullible (initially) orphan Tobias gave him more than enough room to shine, from his delicate take on “Not While I’m Around” to his bloody, anything-but-delicate rampage that caps this gorgeously dark musical, Matarazzo left me hoping he doesn’t wait another dozen years to hit the boards.

3. Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch

Opened Sept 27 at the Music Box Theatre. Closes February 4.

Original review: “Long before Slave Play, decades before Ain’t No Mo, there was Purlie Victorious, the Ossie Davis comedy masterwork that, like those descendant plays, fused broad comedy, satirical minstrelsy, racial satire and still-relevant social commentary to create a play that is so encompassing in its views of history and legacy, so generous in its humanity and pinpoint sharp in its take on debts long owed and now demanded that Kenny Leon’s revival, opening tonight on Broadway, feels as current and bracing as a folding chair… Starring a magnificent Leslie Odom Jr., in the title role, and featuring equally fine performances by an enchanting Kara Young, Billy Eugene Jones, Vanessa Bell Calloway and more, Purlie Victorious — full title (and one of the few signifiers of its 1961-era creation): Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch — has been given an urgent — and, oh yes, very, very funny — revival by Leon and his top-notch creative team.”

Second thoughts: Odom’s riveting performance came as no surprise — his breakthrough in Hamilton (and in this year’s otherwise disappointing film The Exorcist: Believer) — prepared the way. And even though I’d seen and enjoyed Young’s recent Broadway performances in Clyde’s and Cost of Living, her kooky star turn alongside Odom in Purlie was a thunderbolt, an I-Saw-Her-When moment to be cherished.

4. Parade

Opened March 16 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. Closed August 6.

Original review: “With a serendipitous advertising slogan — ‘This Is Not Over Yet’ — borrowed from one of the most powerful songs from a lovely score, the revival of 1998’s Parade arrives just when it’s needed most, providing an eloquent smackdown response to the rise in antisemitism made all too clear by the hate group protesting outside the show’s first preview (they haven’t been back). With a cast as fine as it is large, led by Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond — two of the best singers currently on Broadway — Parade, set in 1913 Georgia, scores its topical points with all the artistry and theatrical know-how to meet and exceed its noble intensions. Parade is as commanding as any musical revival to hit Broadway in years.”

Second thoughts: This production, along with Merrily We Roll Along (more about that show in a moment), pretty much defines the concept of theater second thoughts. A commercial flop when it originally opened on Broadway in 1998, Parade got the production its always deserved in director Michael Arden’s revival. Although it was a fairly scaled-down take that began as an Encores! production, Parade, in memory, doesn’t seem minimalist at all: The hit-the-heights performances of Platt and Diamond were perfectly matched by Dane Laffrey’s deceptively simple platformed set.

5. Merrily We Roll Along

Opened October 10 at the Hudson Theatre. Closes July 7.

Original review: “Troubled musicals, like troubled friendships, can often seem like defeats lying in wait, sponging up every last second of loving care, effort and good intention. So Maria Friedman’s smartly tended production of that most troubled of stage properties, the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth backwards musical Merrily We Roll Along deserves all the applause — and ticket-buying business — it’s getting at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre. Opening tonight, the musical is drawing rapturous audience responses, no doubt in large part because of the splendid performances by three very appealing stars — Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez.”

Second thoughts: Even those of us who don’t quite go along with the notion that Merrily is the great, lost Sondheim masterpiece would be hard-pressed to name a more endearing 2023 Broadway performance than Radcliffe’s showstopping number “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” Merrily might never get another turn in the spotlight quite as memorable. I’m fine with that.

6. Fat Ham

Opened April 12 at the American Airlines Theatre. Closed July 2.

Original review: “Like that relative who picks through the chicken parts at a family picnic to find the leg or the breast or the thigh with just the right amount of crisp, playwright James Ijames has no reluctance to rummage through the bones of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to cook up the irresistible Fat Ham. Audacious at points, quietly amenable at others, the Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy carries the burden of our expectations more lightly than some other prize recipients who’ve made their way to Broadway recently, including Between Riverside and Crazy, Cost of Living and even A Strange Loop… Inspired by, and borrowing its groundwork from, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Fat Ham and its author swipe plot points, characters and, in a startling and lovely interlude, a soliloquy, to tell the tale of Juicy (Marcel Spears), a young, Black, queer man described as ‘thicc’ by his loving mom Tedra (Nikki Crawford), ‘soft’ by both his abusive, vengeance-seeking father’s ghost Pap and equally unlikeable uncle Rev (both played by Billy Eugene Jones), and ‘opulent’ by an admirer who shouldn’t be revealed for fear of a spoiler.”

Second thoughts: Nothing to add to my original review except disappointment that this sharp comedy and its excellent cast couldn’t have found a way to stay on Broadway for more than its too-short three-month limited engagement.

7. A Doll’s House

Opened March 9 at the Hudson Theatre. Closed June 10.

Original review: “At more than a few points during Jamie Lloyd’s hypnotic Broadway revival of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, you could swear that stars Jessica Chastain and Succession‘s Arian Moayed are confiding in you, whispering their secrets to no one else. This stark, sometimes chilly production is an eavesdropper’s paradise, so intimate and conversational that all but the most guarded among us will be susceptible to its frequent enticements.”

Second thoughts: I’d take back the word “chilly” in my description of this memorably minimalist staging, as the word suggests a certain bloodlessness. The performances of Chastain, Moayed, Michael Patrick Thornton and Okieriete Onaodowan were anything but bloodless. They were bracing.

8. Jodie Comer in Prima Facie

Opened April 23 at the Golden Theatre. Closed July 2.

Original review: “Killing Eve star Jodie Comer claims Broadway as her own in her tour de force performance of Prima Facie, a scalding indictment of the law and its limits opening tonight at the Golden Theatre. Comer plays Tessa, a young, working class Liverpool woman who has become one of London’s most promising defense lawyers through sheer intelligence and needle-sharp courtroom instincts. Her specialty — perhaps, or perhaps not, foisted upon her by the cynical male superiors who run things in ways Tessa only slowly comprehends — is the defense of men charged with sexual assault… Tessa’s perceptions change, and her well-assembled world crumbles, in a blink.”

Second thoughts: In my original review, I too-gingerly likened the final half of Prima Facie to a standard Law & Order: SVU episode, and in retrospect I should have hit the comparison a bit harder. But the might of Comer’s performance as a powerful lawyer devastated by rape and the upending of her belief in a system to which she’d devoted her life remains undiminished.

9. Alex Newell, “Independently Owned” In Shucked

Opened April 4 at the Nederlander Theatre. Closes January 14.

Original review: “Puns grow knee-high — and in bawdier moments a bit higher — in Shucked, the new musical comedy that combines the winking hayseed humor of Green Acres and Hee Haw with the decidedly urban, gently subversive camp that peppered the Off Broadway scene in the ’90s with kitschy fare like Ruthless!, The Real Live Brady Bunch and Theatre-A-Go!-Go!’s Valley of the Dolls parody.”

Second thoughts: The upcoming closure of the left-field crowd pleaser — maybe too left-field, certainly too few crowds — will no doubt spur lots of postmortems in the Broadway world, but the bottom line might be that the show’s bottom line could depend on an unexpected embrace by critics for only so long. What can’t be debated though is Alex Newell’s career-making, raise-the-roof performance as Lulu of “Independently Owned,” easily a rival to Radcliffe’s “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” for Showstopper of the Season. Newell, who along with Some Like It Hot‘s terrific J. Harrison Ghee became the first two nonbinary performers to win Tonys, was gifted by Shucked‘s songwriters Shane Mcanally and Brandy Clark with an insanely catchy, fiercely comic anthem of defiance and makes the absolute most of it. Just watch what Newell does with the line “This corn ain’t gonna shuck itself.” And by the time they got to the “operated, modulated, celebrated, liberated, calculated, educated, underrated, motivated, advocated” crescendo, a star was born.

10. Monty Python’s Spamalot

Opened November 16 at the St. James Theatre

Original review: “Spamalot opens on Broadway tonight, and it’s safe to say the Middle Ages haven’t been this funny since, well, the last time Spamlot opened on Broadway nearly 20 years ago. Perfectly cast and splendidly performed, with Josh Rhodes’ deceptively no-frills direction (and choreography) placing the irresistible goings-on front and center, the revival has lost none of the smart-dumb charm of either the original musical or its great source of inspiration — the beloved 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

Second thoughts: Why this musical isn’t storming the box office charts is anybody’s guess — I suspect Python may not have the cultural pull it once did, especially among younger generations — but whatever the reason, for shame. There isn’t a funnier show on Broadway, and the cast — particularly Christopher Fitzgerald, Michael Urie and Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer — are slaying it like so many killer rabbits every night.

Ten To Watch For In 2024

1. Prayer for the French Republic
In previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Opens January 9. Closes February 18.

Joshua Harmon’s wrenching play opened to universal critical acclaim Off Broadway last year, and the official synopsis — “In 1944, a Jewish couple in Paris desperately awaits news of their missing family. More than 70 years later, the couple’s great-grandchildren find themselves facing the same question as their ancestors: ‘Are we safe?'” — intriguing as it is, doesn’t begin to convey the production’s power. Much of the outstanding Off Broadway cast will make the transfer to Broadway, along with some new additions including Anthony Edwards. A limited engagement not to be missed.

2. Days of Wine and Roses
Begins previews January 6 at Studio 54. Opens January 28. Closes April 28.

Another Off Broadway transfer, this poignant, gorgeous and jazzy new musical by The Light in the Piazza team Adam Guettel (music and lyrics) and Craig Lucas (book) stars the terrific Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James, both at the peak of their powers, as that loving pair of ’50s-’60s-vintage alcoholics made famous in the 1962 film drama of the same name.

3. Doubt: A Parable
Begins previews February 2 at the American Airlines Theatre. Opens February 29. Closes April 14.

Those of us lucky enough to have seen the original 2005 Broadway staging of John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning tale of a hard-as-rosary-beads nun and the beloved priest she suspects of molesting a young Black boy haven’t forgotten the indelible performances of Cherry Jones and Brían F. O’Byrne, but if anyone can lead us into new temptations, it’s Tyne Daly and Liev Schreiber. I’ll be waiting and ready to go.

4. An Enemy of the People
Begins previews at February 27 at Circle in the Square. Opens March 18. Closes June 16.

Just imagine this Ibsen classic as adapted by A Doll’s House‘s Amy Herzog, directed by Fun Home‘s Sam Gold and performed by Succession‘s Jeremy Strong, The White Lotus‘ Michael Imperioli and You‘s Victoria Pedretti. New York in February has rarely seemed so inviting.

5. The Who’s Tommy
Previews begin March 8 at the Nederlander Theatre. Opens March 28.

Loved the music since ’69, was teenage dazzled by the absurd Ken Russell film in ’75, and had my affections rekindled by the original Pete Townshend-Des McAnuff Broadway staging in ’93. Who’d have guessed all these years later I could be so absolutely smitten once again by… a trailer. Granted, the Broadway trailer in question kicks off with Townshend’s magical acoustic strumming of “Pinball Wizard,” slides to the electric crunch of “I’m Free” and goes back to Wizard‘s two-chord windmill thrash. Yes, I think it’s alright.

A Bonus Five…

Lempicka, previewing March 19 at the Longacre, opening April 14; Hell’s Kitchen, the Alicia Keys musical previewing March 28 at the Shubert, opening April 20; The Wiz, previewing March 29 at the Marquis, opening April 17; Cabaret, previewing April 1 at the August WIlson, opening April 21; Mother Play, with Jessica Lange, Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger, previewing April 2 at the Hayes, opening April 25; and Suffs, Shaina Taub’s musical about the suffragist movement, previewing March 26 at the Music Box, opening April 18.