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NYPost columnist Michael Riedel opines on the upcoming nominations: 2019 Tony Awards predictions: Which shows will be nominated or snubbed? “Tootsie” and “Ink” scurried in this week to make the Tony deadline and have upset everyone’s brackets. The nominations come out Tuesday, and you can bet both shows will be uncorking the Veuve Clicquot. Given its strong reviews and box office, “Tootsie” is now the front-runner for Best Musical. Its competition will be “Hadestown” (arty), “Ain’t Too Proud” (big crowd-pleaser about the Temptations)and “The Prom” (a nifty little show that needs a boost). Fighting for the fifth slot will be “Be More Chill,” “The Cher Show” and “Beetlejuice.” I’ll give the edge to “Cher.” Two of the people behind it — writer Rick Elice and costume designer Bob Mackie — have a lot of fans around Shubert Alley. “Ink,” a gripping show about the rough-and-tumble world of newspapers, will be in the running for Best Play, as will “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Ferryman” (about the Troubles in Northern Ireland) and “What the Constitution Means to Me,” which boasts nice lefty credentials. The fifth slot should go to “Choir Boy,” although it could be edged out either by “The Lifespan of a Fact” or “Hillary and Clinton.” The real race is between “Mockingbird” and “Ferryman.” The Drama Desk snubbed “Mockingbird” Thursday, which had the folks at “Ferryman” doing a little jig — probably Irish-style, without moving their arms. But “Mockingbird” has the Tony edge: It’s a celebrated title and a major hit, and will have a national tour. Nominees for Best Revival of a Play will be “The Waverly Gallery” and the star-studded “The Boys in the Band.” Both are long gone, but nominators remember them fondly. The uneven “All My Sons” should slip in — it’s an Arthur Miller play, after all — as will “Torch Song.” Should there be a fifth slot, “True West” should nab it. “King Lear” will be recognized for its star, Glenda Jackson, who won the Tony last year for “Three Tall Women.” There are only two musical revivals — “Kiss Me, Kate” and “Oklahoma!” — so both get nominated. The vote here will be a referendum on updating classics. This “Oklahoma!” is against guns and cowboys who robbed Native Americans of their land, issues Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II didn’t have in mind when they wrote “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top.” There are performances this season that are among the best I’ve seen in my 40 years of theatergoing. Bryan Cranston (“Network”) and Jeff Daniels (“Mockingbird”) lead the field for Best Actor in a Play, but how magnificent was Paddy Considine in “Ferryman”? (He’s since left the show, but will be remembered.) And don’t discount Adam Driver, who won raves in “Burn This.” Jackson is formidable, as is Annette Bening (“All My Sons”), but they’re up against Elaine May (“Waverly”). May played a woman suffering from dementia, and you couldn’t see the acting. When her character tried yet again to remember where she put her house keys, I wanted to scream, “They’re on your wrist!” Joan Allen, as the daughter, said just that, and will be nominated. As for musical performances, “Tootsie” star Santino Fontana is the Best Actor (or Actress?) to beat. But a round of applause, please, for the sensational hams in “The Prom”: Beth Leavel, Christopher Sieber, Angie Schworer and Brooks Ashmanskas. A nod as well to Caitlin Kinnunen, who grounds this delightful romp of a show with a subtle, dignified performance. All will be nominated. And, at least in my book, all should win.

Extended till June 23. JOHNNY OLEKSINSKI in today's NYPost gave it 4 Stars. ‘Ink’ review: Broadway’s latest is a scrappy, seductive tabloid tale “Sexy” is not a word you’d use to describe the founding of most newspapers. More accurate descriptors might include: “formal,” “dusty” and “self-important.” The Sun, however, is not like most newspapers. The tabloid — Britain’s most popular daily — is bold and brassy, covering the TV show “Love Island” with the same gusto as it does Brexit. After last month’s big jewel heist in London, the Sun’s front page read “Demon Burglar of Fleet Street.” Unlike the Guardian, the Sun is fun. And so is the exciting new play about it, “Ink,” which opened on Broadway Wednesday night after its West End run. James Graham’s down-and-dirty dramedy tells the story of the 1969 purchase of the struggling paper by a scrappy Australian named Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch (who also owns The Post) had acquired London’s News of the World a year earlier, but the Sun was his biggest prize yet. Bertie Carvel, last seen on Broadway as Miss Trunchbull in “Matilda,” plays him as a lively gate-crasher, determined to infiltrate the clubby, pretentious world of UK paper owners. Not to join it, but to conquer it. Larry Lamb (Jonny Lee Miller), a working-class editor from northern England, is recruited to lead a merry band of misfits. Lamb’s mission: to transform the Sun from a boring, stodgy broadsheet into a throbbing, popular tabloid. “Make it loud!” Murdoch commands, and gives Lamb one year to make the Sun the top paper in Britain. Considering its circulation then — under a million, compared with the Daily Mirror’s 5-million-plus daily readers — the Mirror’s Hugh Cudlipp (Michael Siberry) and other rival editors don’t give it a chance. Those chumps are soon left choking on their cigar smoke. How will Lamb turn things around? One of the funniest scenes starts as a brainstorming session on potential features that spirals into a rebellious free-for-all, as staffers lose their inhibitions and scream their guiltiest pleasures. Sex! Gossip! The weather! The telly! Their instincts, considered down market at the time, pay off. The Sun takes off — after which there are major consequences and big drama. Nothing about Graham’s unexpectedly seductive play — the smoky newsroom meetings, back-room deals, even a lesson on how the printing press functions — is ever less than rousing. The show is hoisted even higher by director Rupert Goold, doing his best work since the similarly irreverent “King Charles III,” by mixing in music and dance for a raging party vibe. Embodying that uproarious spirit is Carvel, who makes Murdoch into a magnetic, eccentric Confucius of the news business. Just as good is Miller, who, as the intrepid and inspired Lamb, challenges his staff to inject “a bit of fun” into their new creation. “Ink” is way more than just a bit of fun. Other reviews here: http://www.playbill.com/article/read-reviews-for-rupert-murdoch-drama-ink-on-broadway

Great reviews! Once again, I enjoyed it very much. Ben Brantley in today's NYTimes says: Review: In ‘Ink,’ a Mephistopheles Named Murdoch Takes Charge Did you hear the one about the guy who sells his soul to the devil? How about the story in which an entire country does the same thing? These cautionary tales intersect to highly invigorating effect in James Graham’s “Ink,” which opened on Wednesday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. And don’t worry, uneasy Americans, it’s not about you. Except that it is. Directed with vaudevillian flair and firecracker snap by Rupert Goold, “Ink” is set in London, in the gory glory days of a quaint phenomenon: print journalism. The show begins in 1969, with the purchase of a dying newspaper. Old, er, news, right? On the contrary. Mr. Graham’s account of the resurrection of that paper — into a tabloid behemoth that hypnotizes its readership while forever altering its competition’s DNA — foretells the age of populist media in which we now live and squirm. As for the Mephistopheles who sets this process into motion, he is still very much alive and reigning over a robust empire that probably reaches into your own home. His name is Rupert Murdoch. As drawn with Dickensian relish by Bertie Carvel, this Murdoch is indeed a man of wealth and taste, with a surprising touch of the prig. And by artfully tapping into the most primal instincts of those he would have do his bidding, Mr. Carvel’s Murdoch is someone to whom it is all but impossible to say no. First staged at London’s hit-incubating Almeida Theater in 2017, “Ink” charts Murdoch’s seduction of one Larry Lamb (Jonny Lee Miller), an editor steeped in the old-school values of Fleet Street, then the main artery of British journalism. It is Lamb whom Murdoch, freshly arrived from Australia, chooses to oversee the rebirth of his new purchase, The Sun — a “stuck-up broadsheet,” as he describes it — as a tabloid for the masses. As embodied by a terrific Mr. Miller, Lamb is a natural-born Faust, the son of a Yorkshire blacksmith itching to join the exclusive club of masthead-topping titans. More than Richard Coyle, who brought a brooding ambivalence to the same part in London, Mr. Miller’s Lamb blazes with ambition and class resentment. As embodied by a terrific Mr. Miller, Lamb is a natural-born Faust, the son of a Yorkshire blacksmith itching to join the exclusive club of masthead-topping titans. More than Richard Coyle, who brought a brooding ambivalence to the same part in London, Mr. Miller’s Lamb blazes with ambition and class resentment. It is indeed fun to watch Lamb and his crew brainstorming in meetings about how to best their rivals, while pondering what “people really like.” The answers include television, gossip and sex — obvious, perhaps, but nonetheless waiting to be exploited with a new, unapologetic directness. Factual accuracy becomes secondary. As Murdoch tells the staff just before the first edition of the revamped Sun goes to press: “You’ve decided to give people what they want. Something so radical — and yet so simple. To hold up a mirror … to ourselves. And to hell with the consequences if we don’t like what we see. It’s who we are.” Or as Murdoch urges Lamb, “Get the readers to become the storytellers.” He adds, “Isn’t that the real end point of the revolution? When they’re producing their own content themselves?” Those words might be the credo of any number of latter-day moguls, including Mark Zuckerberg. “Ink” proposes that the sensibility that would generate today’s tidal wave of social media originated with early London-era Murdoch. Those words might be the credo of any number of latter-day moguls, including Mark Zuckerberg. “Ink” proposes that the sensibility that would generate today’s tidal wave of social media originated with early London-era Murdoch. The largely American, multicast ensemble deploys varyingly confident British accents. But it does well in sustaining the play’s propulsive momentum. Its members include Andrew Durand as an awkward young photographer, David Wilson Barnes as Lamb’s lieutenant and a first-rate Michael Siberry as the gentlemanly rival editor Hugh Cudlipp, the personification of the tottering old regime. The show’s most potent chemistry is, as it should be, between Mr. Miller’s Lamb, as he becomes increasingly drunk on the thrill of success at all costs, and Mr. Carvel’s exquisitely manipulative Murdoch. Previously seen on Broadway as the demonic headmistress of the musical “Matilda,” Mr. Carvel once again delivers a balletically precise study in power incarnate.

NYPost also raves; THEATER REVIEW TOOTSIE Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes, one intermission. Marquis Theatre, 210 W. 46th St.; 212-239-6200. Meet Dorothy Michaels: Renowned stage actress and chanteuse. A brutally honest feminist who’s built like a Hummer, she lives in New York, and — oh, right — she’s really a he. Dorothy is the memorable main character of Broadway’s funniest new musical, “Tootsie,” which opened Tuesday night. Once again, it’s taken a drag musical to drag us out of the doldrums. “Tootsie” is nothing like “Kinky Boots” or “La Cage aux Folles,” however. For one, Dorothy ain’t pretty when she dons her wig and iconic red dress. Take this classic line from the 1982 Dustin Hoffman movie on which this show is based. “I’d like to make her look a little more attractive. How far can you pull back?” the soap opera producer asks a cameraman. “How do you feel about Cleveland?” he responds. Not that you’ll hear that line onstage: Book writer Robert Horn has smartly moved the action from TV soap to Broadway stage. Even with a score by Tony winner David Yazbek, “Tootsie” doesn’t feel so much like a razzmatazz musical as it does a sitcom in its prime. With a slate of mean, neurotic New York characters getting themselves into impossibly wacky scenarios, it’s practically “Seinfeld: Live!” With killer jokes to match. The plot kicks into gear when struggling actor Michael Dorsey (Santino Fontana) can’t land a part in a show — not because he’s lousy, but because he’s a jackass. He has frequent outbursts, often telling directors that their musicals stink. So he’s a bad employee, but he’s a killer teacher. One day, while he’s telling a friend and fellow performer, Sandy (Sarah Stiles in Teri Garr’s part in the film), how she should be reading her lines, she says through tears, “You’re even a better woman than I am!” And thus Dorothy Michaels is born. Inspired, Michael arrives at New 42nd Street Studios with a wig and a prayer, ready to audition for a role in “Juliet’s Curse,” a sequel to “Romeo and Juliet.” If Fontana isn’t as instantly convincing a woman as Hoffman was, due to the limitations of onstage quick changes, wait till you hear him sing. He croons the tuneful audition song, “I Won’t Let You Down,” in a remarkably high, seismic voice that leaves no doubt in your mind that she’s our girl. Dorothy charms the producer (an utterly perfect Julie Halston) with her assertiveness and lands the role of the Nurse. The rest of “Tootsie” sees the brash broad unexpectedly rise in fame and nearly become romantically involved with a co-star (Lilli Cooper) as Michael and his Pigpen-like roommate Jeff (Andy Grotelueschen) frantically work to keep Dorothy’s little secret. That farcical setup — and Horn’s extraordinary new book, which is even funnier than the movie — delivers the finest collection of character actors onstage right now. Reg Rogers makes hay out of a cliché as a narcissist director who can’t quite wrap his head around #MeToo. Showing an actress where to stand, he mutters, “I’m moving you, not touching you.” And Stiles cranks up Garr’s Sandy’s insecurity to 11 when she sings a patter song about how horrible auditions are. There are many more, but to list them would read like an Oscars speech. While Yazbek’s jazzy score doesn’t reach the heights of his work in “The Band’s Visit,” there are a few really terrific numbers. You won’t leave “Tootsie” humming, but you will leave laughing — which is even better.

It's a hit! Great reviews and a sure leader for the Tony? I have a ticket for the May 9th performance and I'm now looking forward to it. NYTimes critic Jessie green writes: Review: ‘Tootsie,’ a Musical Comedy That Fills Some Mighty Big Heels As a critic, I feel it’s my responsibility to tell you what’s wrong with “Tootsie,” the musical comedy that opened on Tuesday at the Marquis Theater. But nah. Let me tell you instead what’s right. It’s a musical. And it’s a comedy. That might seem like faint praise. But over the decades, the genre that brought us “Guys and Dolls” has withered into a damp tangle of wan jokes floating in a slick of ditties. With few exceptions — including, this season, “The Prom” — musical comedies today are comedic only in the sense that the protagonist doesn’t croak, and musical only in the sense that he does. “Tootsie” could so easily have been one of those. Based on the first-rate movie starring Dustin Hoffman, it might have made any or all of the mistakes such adaptations typically do. Infidelity. Overfidelity. General witlessness. A central performance unhappily unequaling the original. A borrowed score or one that sounds nothing like the story. Or, most damagingly: a story so denatured it’s no longer worth the trouble. “Tootsie,” with a book by Robert Horn and songs by David Yazbek, has somehow avoided all those traps. Though it retains , it diverges smartly in both plot and milieu. Michael Dorsey, a New York actor who can’t get a job because he’s so difficult, still finds success after retooling himself as a Southern lady named Dorothy Michaels. But it’s no longer a bad soap opera that Dorothy stars in; naturally, it’s a bad musical comedy. How bad? “Juliet’s Curse” is a sequel to “Romeo and Juliet” in which the resuscitated heroine falls for Romeo’s ripped brother, Craig. So instead of camera angles and lechers with comb-overs, this is a world of Fosse hands and himbos. Hired to play Juliet’s nurse, Dorothy (Santino Fontana) quickly clocks the show’s ludicrousness and, undermining the toxic director, Ron Carlisle (Reg Rogers), sets out to revamp it. In the process, Michael (also Mr. Fontana, obviously) falls for Julie (Lilli Cooper), who plays Juliet, even as dim Max Van Horn (John Behlmann), who plays Craig, falls for Dorothy. So far the plot tracks the movie’s closely enough to raise, in a new era, the issues that made it fascinating in the first place. What does a man learn from pretending to be a woman? And what remains masculine about him no matter how thick his makeup? But exactly because this is a new era, and because an adaptation has to spring its own surprises, the musical develops these issues quite differently. Julie in particular is a far cry from Jessica Lange’s delicate flower; she’s independent, confident and up for anything. (Ms. Cooper makes her tremendously appealing.) So when her friendship with Dorothy stumbles into something more physical, it isn’t the end of the world; it’s just the end of Act One. Mr. Fontana, in the difficult dual role, gets just about everything right. Visually, his Dorothy is still dowdy — “Faye Dunaway as a gym coach,” a character says — but seems younger and hipper than Mr. Hoffman’s. The persistence of Michael even in Dorothy drag, and later vice versa, is charmingly handled, helping us get past both Michael’s obtuseness and Dorothy’s unlikeliness. Mr. Fontana sings beautifully, in a novel tenor-falsetto blend, and nails every joke. If his comic timing is impeccable, it helps that he has such great lines to deliver. But even though Mr. Horn’s book bristles with zingers, a lot of the humor is so rooted in story it doesn’t need words. Andy Grotelueschen as Michael’s laconic roommate, Jeff, gets huge laughs just from pauses. He is topped at one point by a door cracking open. Comedy rarely flows as smoothly as it does here. The secret is more than the book; it’s the songs. Mr. Yazbek is one of the few composer-lyricists working today who can set jokes to music and make them pay. The most obvious instance in “Tootsie” is “What’s Gonna Happen,” a showstopping patter number for Michael’s ex-girlfriend, the neurotic Sandy (Sarah Stiles). In a tumble of words reminiscent of “Model Behavior” from Mr. Yazbek’s underrated score for “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” she goes well past that verge. But even though his trick rhymes glitter — how he manages to pair “see ya” and “Scalia” is priceless — it’s the complexity of his characterization that really keeps “Tootsie” sparking. Fittingly for a tale of duplicity, everything has to do double duty. The opening number, called “Opening Number,” is somehow an example of both a bad one (for an earlier Ron Carlisle show) and a good one (for “Tootsie”). A vapid audition song (“I Won’t Let You Down”) transforms into a moving anthem when Dorothy uncovers new meaning in it. To support so much lyrical cleverness, Mr. Yazbek has largely dialed back his music. Its angular, brassy New York sound — I imagined Frank Loesser in a traffic jam — has more in common with his earlier movie adaptations (“The Full Monty” and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”) than with his haunting, Tony-winning score for “The Band’s Visit.” As “Tootsie” is a comedy, that makes perfect sense, but when Mr. Yazbek switches modes — in sincere, never maudlin, songs like “Who Are You?” — the relief is palpable. Though his mocking pastiche is always better than what it mocks, there’s simply too much of it here. Which brings me back to my critical duty. To pull the Band-Aid off fast: The staging and physical production of “Tootsie” are so trite and vanilla they could pass for the work of Ron Carlisle on “Juliet’s Curse” — or perhaps George Abbott in 1965. (Scott Ellis is the director.) The theory that musical comedy requires a flat, conventional environment to let the jokes stand out is evidently being heeded here. But though “Tootsie” is hardly avant-garde, it need not have been a throwback. It wasn’t one in 1982, even though some critics already questioned the movie’s gender politics. That was a sign the comedy was working; the ideas buried in the jokes got people thinking. Now, as if spooked, the musical exhumes those ideas too insistently. That a man might enhance his masculine power by masquerading as a woman is a premise, not a platform. One joke about it is plenty; two is diminishing; three plus two speeches and a song is nearly a comedy killer. Happily, “Tootsie” recovers, thanks in part to its excellent cast, which includes Michael McGrath as an agent and the delicious Julie Halston as a producer. It also benefits from its mastery of a paradox built into the genre. Musical comedy only soars when it’s fully grounded, and “Tootsie,” however unbelievable, has its feet on the ground — in a modest Size 13 heel.

Openned last night....NYTimes review "mixed." ANYONE CARE TO WEIGH IN ON THE "DEAD PENIS DANCE"? Review: Taylor Mac’s ‘Gary’ Finds Hope and Humor on a Pile of Corpses Nothing says Broadway like a luscious red show curtain. But look closer: This one, designed by Santo Loquasto, isn’t merely red. It’s blood red speckled with filth and bedazzled with sparkly rosettes. Welcome to the world of “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus,” where carnage and camp coexist — if not exactly in peace, then in a constructive dialectic. Taylor Mac’s new play, which opened on Sunday at the Booth Theater in a production starring Nathan Lane, is the unlikeliest bird to land on Broadway in many a year. Much like Mr. Mac himself at the end of “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” his epic revision of American culture, it is fabulous and bedraggled: a defiant and beautiful mess. Mess is both the aesthetic and the subject of “Gary,” which picks up the story of “Titus” shortly after its finale, among the grisliest in dramatic literature. You don’t need to know Shakespeare’s play to understand “Gary”; when the show curtain rises on George C. Wolfe’s production, you see its result. Mounds of corpses mount toward heaven from the blood-slicked floor of Titus’ opulent banquet room. In this makeshift morgue, two maids have the task of preparing the bodies for disposal. One, an old hand at cleaning up after powerful people, is Janice (Kristine Nielsen). With the practical amorality of Mrs. Lovett baking human meat pies — which, relevantly, is a plot point in “Titus” — she sets about removing the corpses’ clothing and accouterments, then draining them of fluids and gases with a ludicrous contraption involving hoses and hand pumps. Gary (Mr. Lane) is her new trainee. Although the character appears briefly in “Titus” as a clown quickly sentenced to hang in Act IV, Mr. Mac has imagined him escaping that fate by volunteering for the post-coup janitorial crew. Changed by his brush with death, and swaggering over his promotion to maid, Gary begins to sense even bigger possibilities for advancement in the midst of calamity. Could he not now rise to the level of fool? A clown, he tells us, merely “encourages the idiotic” with low antics — much as “Gary” does, with its bug-eyed bits and endless flatulence arias. But fools, who “tease out our stupidity with brain,” aim to save the world by speaking truth to power. Mr. Mac, a maximalist who says “subtlety is a privilege,” wouldn’t accept Gary’s oppositional cosmology. His is a “both/and” stance, not “either/or.” Fool and clown at once, he throws all kinds of seemingly incompatible ideas into the mix, confident that if they are all true they will make something even truer together. And so, in what amounts to a philosophical vaudeville performed by Gary and Janice, we get sketches depicting the savagery of elites, the pettiness of proles, the foolishness of dreamers. Then the traits get reassigned. Soon, the battle lines are drawn between those, of whatever class, who would try to save the world but fail — the comedians, that is — and those who won’t try at all: the tragedians. A third character complicates the class considerations. Higher born than the others — under the name Cornelia she is mentioned as a midwife but not seen in “Titus” — Carol (Julie White) speaks in the tones of a BBC announcer. (Gary and Janice are cockneys.) And though she dies spouting fountains of blood while reciting the play’s prologue, she returns in time to endorse Gary’s dream of retooling the horror around them as provocative political entertainment. Janice, fearful of retribution, resists this project, which Gary calls a “fooling.” We do get to see it; you could describe “Gary” as a play in which we get to see everything. I’ll just give you three words to mull: Dead Penis Dance. But getting to see everything, however wonderful that may be as a moral proposition, is a difficult thing to stage. And characters at constant contradictory extremes are almost impossible to act. Here is where “Gary” is messy in a way I don’t think it wants to be. I don’t mean in its design, which aptly puts the gore in gorgeous. How wonderful — after his somewhat different work on “Hello, Dolly!” — to see Mr. Loquasto turning massed corpses into baroque sculpture. How smart, of all the periods Ann Roth might have chosen for her evocative costumes, that she ended up going late Elizabethan, as if “Gary” were the midnight show after “Titus” at the Rose. The high, frizzled wigs (by Campbell Young Associates) are punch lines in themselves. But though Mr. Wolfe does everything in his considerable power — he, too, is a maximalist — to pull the look and the argument together, the argument keeps wandering off. Or perhaps it is being chased away by the actors’ need to connect with the audience. Mr. Lane and Ms. Nielsen, natural clowns, at times push the clown side of the equation too hard, at the expense of the fool. (Ms. White beautifully escapes this trap.) And yet the play isn’t as funny as you hope. Even if the blood is obviously fake and the corpses cartoons, it is hard to keep both your sense of humor and horror engaged at once. So for me, at least, the most convincing and powerful moments came when the performances aligned with the gravity of the premise. Gary’s speech about the power of art to create new realities was one such moment for Mr. Lane: You could feel the hope in the hyperbole he spoke of. Another was Janice’s soliloquy about the stupefying human habit of survival: “Ya pick things up to not see what you’ve dropped/To start again before you’ve even stopped.” Spoken (like much of the rest of the play) in rhymed couplets, these lines draw from Ms. Nielsen a pathos that honors their Shakespearean model. I don’t know whether “Gary” will last as long as “Titus Andronicus” — a play I don’t like but that has hung around for more than 400 years. I don’t even know whether “Gary” will last a month in the hostile ecosystem of Broadway. But, strange bird or not, I’m glad it’s here. Not everything perfect is true, and not everything messy isn’t. Other reviews are also "fixed." http://www.playbill.com/article/read-reviews-for-gary-a-sequel-to-titus-andronicus-on-broadway

Couldn't get a ticket at the Public, so perhaps this time around....always nice to watch Jake!

I've been doing the NYTimes crossword for decades. It's part of my morning routine. A great cup of coffee and the crossword helps start the day. The NYTimes crossword starts out easiest on Monday and progress in difficulty throughout the week. Sometimes the Friday and Saturday puzzles are killers. Practice and repetition will help you develop your crossword skills. Many clues are often repeated. A little hint...sometimes you have to put it down and move on to other things and you'll find that when you return to the puzzle some of the clues you couldn't get are easier to solve.

It was next to impossible to get a ticket! I gave up and prices went through the roof! It'll be cheaper to buy a RT ticket to London and see it this summer. Lehman brothers play tracks fraud collapse, bankruptcy You have only Friday night and Saturday to see the hottest play in town: “The Lehman Trilogy” at the Park Avenue Armory. Alas, you’re going to need Lehman brothers money (well, before the firm’s bankruptcy) to buy a ticket. The remaining few are going for as much as $1,300 on Stubhub. No show is worth that kind of money, frankly, but “The Lehman Trilogy” is remarkable. A stage biography, it follows the three Lehman brothers as they arrive from Germany in the 19th century with no money, build up a business in the South and go on to create what becomes one of the most powerful financial institutions in the world. It’s a giant Wikipedia entry that manages to become compelling theater thanks to three sensational actors — Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles — and Sam Mendes’ whirling direction. The glass office of Lehman Brothers spins, while a cyclorama depicts the sea, New York Harbor, a burning cotton field and the Manhattan skyline of the 19th century. The show runs 3 ¹/₂ hours but never lags. If you miss “Lehman” now, can you catch it later? Sources say that Mendes and London’s National Theatre, where the show originated, desperately want to bring it to Broadway. But the actors have to do the show in the West End for 12 weeks this summer, and may not want to commit to at least a six-month run in New York. If they’re game, “The Lehman Trilogy” will open on Broadway in the fall. “It’s entirely up to them,” says a source. “Sam is not going to rehearse three new actors. That will take too much time.” If the play does land on Broadway, it’s the immediate front-runner to win the Tony in 2020. And what about the winner for Best Play in 2019? I’m happy to report that an interesting race is shaping up. In the lead is “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a massive hit grossing $1.6 million a week. Adapted by Aaron Sorkin from Harper Lee’s beloved novel, the show has recouped, so it’s got many happy investors, lots of them Tony voters. And there will be a national tour, meaning there will also be a nice chunk of votes from road presenters who’ll get the show in their markets. But “Mockingbird” has a rival: Jez Butterworth’s “The Ferryman.” Its weekly gross has fallen from a high of $1 million in December to over $500,000 now, but the critically acclaimed production has many champions among Tony voters. There’s talk that Heidi Schreck’s “What the Constitution Means to Me” could be a spoiler, but I sense its prospects have dimmed after losing the Pulitzer Prize this week to “Fairview.” “It’s certainly engaging, but it’s predictable in the age of Trump, and it’s not epic the way ‘Mockingbird’ and ‘Ferryman’ are,” one Tony voter says. Another show to keep an eye on is “Ink,” a deliciously fun look at the rise of media mogul (and Post owner) Rupert Murdoch. If Tony voters were newspaper people, “Ink” would win, hands down. They’re not, so it’s a long shot. If you see it Tuesday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, stick around afterward for a chat I’m having onstage with playwright James Graham. We won’t pull any punches about the world of tabloid journalism.

I'm seeing this next week. Review: In ‘Hillary and Clinton,’ Codependence, and, Yes, Camaraderie A mighty sigh — equal parts frustration and resignation — seems to animate “Hillary and Clinton,” Lucas Hnath’s piquant, slender new play about … well, it’s about exactly what, and whom, its title suggests. This production, which opened on Thursday night at the Golden Theater under the suave direction of Joe Mantello, is indeed a portrait of a marriage between two extremely well-known American politicians. As for that propulsive sigh, it emanates from the title character called Hillary, who spends the surprisingly airy 90 minutes of this show in what might be called a state of angry wistfulness. It is our very good fortune that Hillary is portrayed by Laurie Metcalf, an actress who does being thwarted better than anyone. And make no mistake. Though “Hillary and Clinton” features an excellent John Lithgow as the male half of this power couple, Mr. Hnath’s latest offering is ultimately all about Hillary. It is asking us to see the world through the eyes of a woman who ostensibly has all the right stuff to be president and yet is never allowed to win. Staged in an earlier version in Chicago in April 2016, when it seemed likely that the real Mrs. Clinton would be the next resident of the White House, “Hillary and Clinton” has acquired a fresh topicality since her loss in that year’s presidential election to Donald J. Trump. You can feel the audience at the Golden nodding in collective agreement when Mr. Lithgow’s Bill Clinton — in a New Hampshire hotel room during the 2008 Democratic primary — explains the importance of grabbing the electorate by their hearts, not their minds. “People don’t vote with their brain,” he says. “They don’t, even people who think they do, don’t. It’s never not emotional.” He continues: “Feelings — people think you don’t have them.” The bone-tired, exasperated expression on Ms. Metcalf’s face at that moment suggests that Hillary has been living with such observations for way too long. And that if a person hears comments like that about herself often enough, she may begin to wonder what her real feelings are. That’s a tricky state of mind for any performer to convey, and especially tricky if the character being portrayed is as well known — and as regularly parsed by pundits and plebeians alike — as the real Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Hnath’s play doesn’t presume to be an authoritative view of the woman behind the mask, or even of the mask itself. Instead — and this is what makes this play something more than a receptacle for recycled observations about its famous subjects — “Hillary and Clinton” strips its protagonist down to her most ordinary self. And it invites us to look at her with the easy familiarity with which we might regard someone living next door, or in our own family. Or even our very selves, as we could be in an alternative universe, such as the one this play presents. That’s the sort of leap of imagination that Mr. Hnath made in his superb “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” (2017), which envisioned the life of Nora Helmer after she walked out on her husband in Ibsen’s epochal drama. Nora was portrayed by Ms. Metcalf, who won a Tony for that performance. It is not a criticism to say that Ms. Metcalf’s Hillary looks and sounds a lot like her Nora, even if in this case she’s wearing sweatpants and fleeces (Rita Ryack did the costumes) instead of a corset and floor-sweeping skirts. Ms. Metcalf becomes other people not by putting on disguises. Instead, she turns her own distinctive face and form into a polished, utterly transparent magnifying glass for the — you should pardon the word — feelings that define the character she’s playing. It is appropriate that she makes her entrance in “Hillary and Clinton” as herself, more or less, while the house lights are still up. She strolls in from the wings, acknowledges the audience casually and notices that her microphone stand lacks a microphone. She shakes her head with the irritation of someone who might have expected this and schleps the stand offstage, to return with a hand mic to address the audience. This throwaway vignette is the perfect prologue to what follows. Our heroine — this Laurie/Hillary amalgam — begins her time in our company by dealing with an obstacle. She is here to speak, yet she is denied the means of amplifying her voice. Tossing a coin while delivering a Tom Stoppard-esque meditation on chance and causality, this woman makes it clear that what we will be observing is not intended as a simulacrum of reality past or present. We should instead pretend, she says, “that light years away from here on one of those other planet Earths that’s like this one but slightly different that there’s a woman named Hillary.” That universe will be recognizable to anyone who has read insider campaign books like “Game Change” or even Mrs. Clinton’s autobiography. The play proper is set in a naked motel room (the set designer is Chloe Lamford), both the essence of blank anonymity and — it turns out (with some help from Hugh Vanstone’s lighting) — a threshold to the cosmos. More reviews at: http://www.playbill.com/article/read-reviews-for-hillary-and-clinton-on-broadway-starring-laurie-metcalf-and-john-lithgow

NYPost didn't like it.... ‘Hadestown’ review: Broadway douses the fires of hell with folk music For a show about hell, “Hadestown” doesn’t have much heat. Yes, composer Anaïs Mitchell’s musical retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, which opened Wednesday on Broadway, sounds pleasant and looks more expensive than it did in 2016 at New York Theatre Workshop. But this classic tale of love — he looks back, she gets trapped in the underworld for all eternity — is still too slick and sterile for us to give a damn about her damnation. The sluggish musical mostly honors the framework of the ancient Greek tragedy. Orpheus (Reeve Carney) is a poor, dreamy musician working on one great song — Roger from “Rent,” basically. He meets pretty Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) at a bar, falls in love instantly and they get married. Good so far. And then come some misguided modern touches that rob the myth of its magic. Hell, for one, has been rendered as a mining town, lorded over by a Trump-y mogul named Hades (Patrick Page). Minus any fire and brimstone, Hadestown doesn’t seem all that bad a place to be. Sure, Hades makes his denizens work nonstop, but to the tune of Page’s soothing, deep baritone and up-tempo dance numbers sung by his wife, Persephone (Amber Gray). Enjoy your stay at Club Dead, Eurydice! Eurydice’s death, by the way, wasn’t caused by a serpent bite: Rather, she “buys a ticket” and hops aboard the train. Her earthly demise is so metaphorical that it’s a non-event. Suddenly, we’re no longer at a musical about battling the gods in pursuit of undying love — we’re at a musical about a hipster moving to Kentucky. Orpheus, nonetheless, is bummed she’s gone, and with the help of his trusty narrator friend, Hermes (a sassy André De Shields), he sneaks down to Hadestown to retrieve his lady love from the underworld. That’s when Carney wails the show’s best song, “Wait for Me.” On the whole, Mitchell’s sung-through bluesy score is quite beautiful, if a better fit for a Starbucks than a Broadway theater. Filled with narration and folksy twang, it sounds like a slowed-down “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” However, while her melodies are eerie, the lyrics grate. A trio of bouncy-voiced Fates sing, “Way down to Hadestown, way down under the ground” so many times, you want to shout, “We know where hell is!” The leads are at their best when director Rachel Chavkin lets them be still instead of forcing them to shuffle around tables and chairs for no apparent reason. Noblezada brings the same soulful voice to Eurydice that lifted the recent revival of “Miss Saigon,” in which she played Kim. Page’s devil is low-key, but imbued with Darth Vader gravitas, and Gray plays Persephone like a boozy madame. The weak link is Carney, last seen here in “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.” He has an angelic voice, but his acting is flat and colorless. His guitarist-on-a-stool bit sums up the overriding problem of “Hadestown,” which turns one of the world’s greatest love stories into a concert at the back of a West Village wine bar.

I had to give up a ticket for this one due to illness. I was hesitant about seeing it since I am not a fan of Greek Tragedy, and although I liked “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” I wasn't overwhelmed by it . Jesse Green's review in the NYTimes is tantalizing enough to perhaps give it a second try. Review: The Metamorphosis of ‘Hadestown,’ From Cool to Gorgeous All your favorite Greeks are heading somewhere in “Hadestown,” the sumptuous, hypnotic and somewhat hyperactive musical that opened on Wednesday night after its own twisty 13-year road to Broadway. Eurydice descends to the underworld; Orpheus follows to retrieve her. Persephone spends six months aboveground living the good life of summer and song before returning for six months below with Hades. (He’s her husband.) Hermes, of course, has wings on his feet. And the Fates (at least in this version) are always darting about, minding everyone’s business. But watching “Hadestown” unfold so gorgeously at the Walter Kerr Theater, I found myself thinking of other Greek characters: those lucky few saved from heartbreak by radical metamorphoses. That’s because “Hadestown” — written by Anaïs Mitchell, developed and directed by Rachel Chavkin — has itself been radically transformed. What’s onstage at the Kerr is almost unrecognizably different from the version I saw at New York Theater Workshop in 2016. There, it was garbled and precious, too cool for its own good, let alone Broadway. The gods, or more likely Ms. Chavkin and her creative team, have saved “Hadestown” on its way uptown — via Edmonton and London — by turning it into something very much warmer, if not yet ideally warm. The story is clearer, the songs express that story more directly and the larger themes arise from it naturally rather than demanding immediate attention like overeager undergraduates. All this has been done with hardly a change to the plot, which cleverly grafts its two myths into one. In Ms. Mitchell’s telling, Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) winds up in hell because of the frost and famine that follow when Persephone (Amber Gray) pays Hades her annual conjugal visit. (Classically, Eurydice just dies of a snakebite.) And because Hades (Patrick Page) now has a thing for Eurydice, it’s the jealous Persephone who convinces him to let Orpheus (Reeve Carney) take her back. Even Hermes, who doesn’t really belong in either story, has been recruited to narrate, contextualize and kibitz. And why not, if it gives the great André De Shields a chance to slide around in silver sharkskin? It’s he who tells us — in what is now, correctly, the opening number — that what we’re about to hear is “a sad song” no matter how jaunty it sounds. Also that he’s “gonna sing it anyway.” That’s a pretty good précis of the original myths, but Ms. Mitchell, fascinated by them since childhood, has taken them further as she expanded the material from song cycle to concept album to show. In the story of Orpheus and Eurydice she tugs on the tension between art and domesticity: What good is beauty if you’re hungry? And the struggle between Hades and Persephone naturally becomes a parable of climate change, in which the despoiling of the earth is akin to infidelity. To make these points, “Hadestown” moves the tale to an earth that resembles sassy New Orleans, with hell a demonic foundry. As such, Ms. Mitchell’s score combines folk, pop and Dixieland with rhythmic work shanties and, for the lovers, ethereal arias. All of it sounds great in swinging arrangements for a terrific seven-piece onstage band. Other than some reordering, that’s mostly just as it was three years ago — at least on the surface. But if there’s one thing this “Hadestown” is pushing, it’s the idea that what really matters is happening where you can’t see it. Underneath the hood, a million small adjustments have been made, especially to the lyrics, which have shed some of their pop haze in favor of specificity. The Fates, a girl-group trio, now feel more integral to the action, not just witty commenters on it. And a new chorus of five hunky workers expands not only the sound but also the theme of security attained at the expense of freedom. Yet the most obvious transformation is visual: “Hadestown” is now performed on a proscenium stage instead of in a miniature Greek amphitheater. Though still high-concept, Rachel Hauck’s single set depicts a recognizable idea of place: a basement jazz joint that miraculously turns into the furnace room of Hades’ factory. This is emblematic of the production’s choice to deliver the story to the audience in as close to the Broadway manner as the material can accommodate. In truth, it can only accommodate so much. “Hadestown,” even with the heat turned up, is still a somewhat abstract experience, mediated by several layers of narration from Hermes, the Fates and many of the songs. A feeling is as likely to be described as enacted, and Ms. Mitchell develops her larger themes mostly through metaphor. This can get tiring; even though so much of what happens happens beautifully, I began to feel it would be better shorter. The main story suffers most from this problem: Outside of their arias, Orpheus and Eurydice are blandly written and thus performed. What starts off as a smart riff on “Rent” — poor bohemian girl falls for musician who can’t finish his song — soon becomes vague and merely pretty. Attempts to complicate the characters’ psychology backfire, and their climactic ascent from the underworld, the one thing that worked perfectly downtown, now doesn’t. They merely walk in circles. Luckily, the second story is direct and vivid throughout. Mr. Page, , makes an electrifyingly maleficent Hades, even without playing up the Trumpian parallels that have overtaken the material. (One of his songs, written more than a decade ago, is called “Why We Build the Wall.”) And Ms. Gray, never better, makes something quite brilliant out of Persephone: a free spirit, a loose cannon, a first lady co-opted by wealth yet emotionally subversive. When, as part of the curtain call, she sings the score’s loveliest number — “I Raise My Cup” — you at last wish the show would slow down so you could live in the glowy moment forever. Along the way there, Ms. Chavkin has probably come as close as anyone could to selling a cerebral downtown story as state-of-the-art Broadway entertainment. Like the sets and musical arrangements, the costumes (by Michael Krass), the lighting (by Bradley King) and the sound design (by Nevin Steinberg and Jessica Paz) are as good as it gets. The result is just as busily beautiful as Ms. Chavkin’s production of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” — and more coherent. Which almost gets you over the hiccup that a show so fundamentally despairing (“It’s a sad song”) is now so aggressively welcoming. Don’t let that distract you, though, from its quiet point, buried in a lyric near the end: that we sing the sad song again and again the way we play solitaire: “as if it might turn out this time.” For “Hadestown” — if not yet for us — it has.

Ben Brantley, NYTimes, also has good things to say.. Review: Adam Driver Heats Up a Wobbly ‘Burn This’ Adam Driver is a great disrupter. This volcanic actor’s entrance in the lopsided new revival of Lanford Wilson’s “Burn This,” which opened on Tuesday at the Hudson Theater, is prefaced by a fanfare of violent pounding. It is 5 a.m., in a loft in Lower Manhattan. And it sounds as if the Incredible Hulk, feeling very impatient, is in the hallway — or maybe a runaway cyclone. When the door opens, what is revealed behind it does not disappoint. With long, flailing limbs and a face molten with anguish, Mr. Driver explodes into view with an outsize fury that makes everyone and everything around him seem Lilliputian. And a production that has so far felt pleasant and prosaic is flooded with the anarchy of life in extremis. The last time I can recall such an impressively violent Broadway entrance was more than 30 years ago, when a rising actor named John Malkovich appeared in the same part. Playing a coked-to-the-gills restaurant manager named Pale, Mr. Malkovich seemed to morph overnight from quirky character actor into a leading man of dangerous sex appeal. Theater lovers still talk about the excitement of that performance. And I would wager that decades from now, people will be speaking with the same gratified wonder of Mr. Driver’s very different but equally compelling Pale. Though he has appeared on Broadway before, it has been in supporting roles in period British dramas — “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” (2010) and “Man and Boy” (2011) — that fitted him like genteel straitjackets. With “Burn This,” directed by Michael Mayer and co-starring Keri Russell, he is finally allowed to unfurl onstage the distinctive energy and insight that have characterized his subsequent performances in film (the current “Star Wars” series) and television (HBO’s “Girls”). That unleashed force is plied most artfully here to create a portrait of how grief unhinges, disarranges and heightens everyday life. Set in the late 1980s, “Burn This” assesses the impact of the death of a young dancer named Robbie, Pale’s brother, in a boating accident. The tragedy brings Robbie’s roommates, Anna (Ms. Russell, in the part for which Joan Allen won a Tony in 1988) and Larry (Brandon Uranowitz), as well Anna’s boyfriend, Burton (David Furr), into contact with someone they might otherwise never have met. That’s Pale, a product of working-class New Jersey who has had little recent contact with the much younger, artistic-minded and gay Robbie. [Adam Driver and Keri Russell on the appeal of ‘Burn This.’] The play begins shortly after Robbie’s funeral. Anna, who has recently made the transition from dancing to choreography, has returned to their apartment, a loft space as open as a dance studio and as lonely as a desert. (Derek McLane designed the set, lighted with a brooding clarity by Natasha Katz.) Having just met Robbie’s family for the first time, she’s marveling at how she could have known so little about someone she thought she knew so well. The opacity of people — even to themselves — is a leitmotif in “Burn This.” So is the hunger to reach beyond the ordinary, to see and feel on an epic scale. Burton, a rich-boy screenwriter, and Anna speak of creating work that wrests them from the rut of what they’ve always done. They need, in Burton’s words, “to reach for the sun.” As embodied by Mr. Driver, Pale isn’t reaching for the sun; he’s a solar entity unto himself. You believe him when he says his normal body temperature is about 110 degrees and that “I got like a toaster oven that I carry around in my belly someplace.” Addled with drug and drink, rabid with grief and guilt, Pale arrives — in the play’s second scene, to collect his brother’s belongings — as a flesh-and-blood example of life lived large. He’s an alien in the civilized Bohemia of the others. He’s even an alien to himself, wrestling in exasperation with his own body, which registers emotions as physical pain, and the Armani-style duds he always wears. (Clint Ramos did the era-appropriate costumes.) Even more than Mr. Malkovich did, Mr. Driver makes us aware that real grandeur doesn’t always come in the expected, esthetically pleasing packages. If Mr. Driver bestrides “Burn This” like a colossus — could he really be only 6-foot-2, as Wikipedia has it? — everyone else seems to shrink beneath his shadow when he’s onstage. You could argue that this is appropriate. But earlier productions — including the 2002 Signature Theater revival, which starred Edward Norton and Catherine Keener — made it clear that this drama is indeed a “pas de quatre,” to use the language of dance, about the distance among people. In Mr. Mayer’s version, the play might be titled “Waiting for Pale.” This is partly because Ms. Russell, a first-rate television actress never seems in any way undone — not by sorrow, not by creative frustration and not by her character’s gravitational attraction to Pale, with whom she falls into bed almost immediately. She tells Pale that he scares her. Yet despite her physical daintiness in comparison to Mr. Driver’s looming heft, her Anna always seems in charge, like a nanny with an unruly, overgrown toddler. To borrow from Lady Gaga, Ms. Russell’s performance remains comfortably “in the shallow,” instead of in the deep end into which Anna is plunged. [What’s new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter] When she deftly swaps chummy barbs with Mr. Uranowitz — who ably fills the now shopworn role of the sardonic but ultimately wise and caring gay confidant — “Burn This” can feel like a dry run for the long-lived TV series “Will and Grace.” And the most intriguing erotic chemistry here isn’t between Pale and Anna, but between Larry and Mr. Furr’s straight (and very good) Burton. This is partly because Ms. Russell, a first-rate television actress never seems in any way undone — not by sorrow, not by creative frustration and not by her character’s gravitational attraction to Pale, with whom she falls into bed almost immediately. She tells Pale that he scares her. I hasten to add that Mr. Driver isn’t grandstanding at the expense of the rest of the cast. Part of the pleasure of watching him comes from seeing how this overwrought lug relates so awkwardly and unnaturally to others. When he kisses Anna goodbye, it’s with the stiffness of a little boy unaccustomed to displays of affection. But this “Burn This,” which is steeped in the rich compassion for the lonely and lost that is the hallmark of works by Mr. Wilson (1937-2011),only rarely stirs the heart. In the ideal production, it creates the sense of fire meeting fire in a folie à deux between two ill-matched yet inexorably bound lovers. What we have in this case is a one-man conflagration.

I remember seeing the original production with John Malkovich and being blown away by the intensity of his performance. It's on my "never to forget' theater moments. I looked for tickets for this production a while back but good seats, at a reasonable price, were hard to find. I might go back and look again. Anyway, good reviews... ‘Burn This’ review: Adam Driver, Keri Russell sizzle in love dance If you come to “Burn This” expecting fireworks from Adam Driver and Keri Russell, be patient: The play that opened on Broadway Tuesday night takes a while to combust. Fresh from “The Americans,” Russell plays Anna, a dancer-turned-choreographer who’s mourning the freak-accident death of Robbie, her creative partner, roommate and gay BFF. Just back from his funeral, she rails against his family, who had never seen him dance, while her screenwriter boyfriend, Burton, drones on about his latest project. Her other gay roomie, Larry, serves up one quip after another — Robbie’s ornate casket, he says, “looked like a giant Spode soup tureen.” We laugh, but wonder: When will Lanford Wilson’s 1987 play finally ignite? It does some 20 minutes on, when Driver bursts in ranting as Pale, Robbie’s older brother. Menacing, profane and sexist — at least until we see what lies underneath — the New Jersey restaurant manager first comes to collect Robbie’s belongings, only to return for more of Anna. Amid grief, guilt and desire for fresh starts, opposites attract. But love never comes easy in plays by Wilson, the late Pulitzer Prize winner whose work specializes in funny, sad, warts-and-all stories of idiosyncratic men and women. This show has all that, as well as contrivances and speeches more colorful than convincing. Michael Mayer’s fine cast plays up the humor, and then some. By hinting at the loneliness underlying Larry’s one-liners, Brandon Uranowitz makes the character more than a pre-“Will & Grace” sidekick, while David Furr, dashing and confident, holds his own in the fairly thankless role of Burton. And Russell? She’s just plain beautiful in a star turn filled with the rich, emotional honesty that made her irresistible in TV’s “Felicity.” Her toned legs and exquisite arches make her look like the dancer she plays. Driver, a theater actor long before he starred in TV’s “Girls” and started his Kylo Ren tour in “Star Wars,” gives a performance as wonderfully weird as it is vanity-free. He’s game for anything, emerging at one point in little more than some cheesy black BVDs. He and Russell have palpable chemistry, even as the prospect of becoming a couple terrifies Anna and Pale. “I don’t want this,” each one says. That we want it for them is a sign that “Burn This” isn’t just blowing smoke. NYTimes to follow in separatenb post.

Today's NYPost reports that Laurie Metcalf already has her next Broadway show lined up! Wouldn't be nice if the NYPost editors actually ran a spellcheck! Laurie Metcalf to continue Broadway run with ‘Who’s Afraid of Virigina Woolf? Laurie Metcalf and Eddie Izzard will star on Broadway together next year in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” to be produced by Scott Rudin and directed by Joe Mantello. The legendary show centers on the volatile, boozy couple George and Martha, over the course of an increasingly contentious evening. The 1966 film version that won five Oscars was directed by Mike Nichols, and starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It’s been performed on Broadway with casts including Tracy Letts and Amy Morton, Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin, Colleen Dewhurst and Ben Gazzara, and Diana Rigg and David Suchet. The latest revival will have an opening night of April 9, 2020. It also marks “Roseanne” star Metcalf’s fourth recent big starring role on Broadway after her work in “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” “Three Tall Women” and her current show, “Hillary and Clinton,” also with Rudin and Mantello.

Another UK transplant. On the heels of a critically acclaimed run in the West End, this play tells the tale of tabloid czar Rupert Murdoch's (brilliantly played by Bertie Carvel) purchase of the Sun newspaper in the late 1960's in London. The Sun was a failed and little read newspaper until Murdoch bought and hired a team to revamp the paper and make it the top selling tabloid in the UK. Hiring editor Larry Lamb (brilliantly played by Johnny Lee Miller), Murdoch and Lamb proceed to upend the notions of British journalism, while winning readers along the way. There are hectic and zany moments of cabaret and brilliance in this production as Larry Lamb proceeds to break the norms of his profession to push the Sun to the top. The direction is terrific and the script top notch. A fantastical set piled high with gray metal desks and typewriters, and phenomenal cast of character actors playing working girls, flower children, stone-smiting chapel fathers, booze-hounds and hacks round out this production. I cannot express my admiration of Miller and Carvel. Their acting is superb. Opens April 24. The show has been available on TDF. My one quibble is that the show is perhaps about 15 minutes too long.

Proud Mary will keep on rolling into midtown this fall as Tina—The Tina Turner Musical makes its Broadway premiere. The show will begin performances October 12 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, with opening night set for November 7. As previously announced, Tony nominee Adrienne Warren will take on the title role of the rock legend, having recently earned an Olivier Award nomination for her performance in the musical's world premiere in London's West End. Additional casting will be announced at a later date.

2 parts, 6 and 1/2 hrs....another theater marathon/endurance production! ‘The Inheritance’ Triumphs at Olivier Awards, and So Does a Gender-Swapping ‘Company’ LONDON — “The Inheritance,” a two-part, six-and-a-half-hour play about the legacy of AIDS in New York, dominated the Olivier Awards on Sunday night, winning four trophies at the British equivalent of the Tony Awards. At the Royal Albert Hall in London, the play, by Matthew Lopez, won best new play, best director for Stephen Daldry, best actor for Kyle Soller, and best lighting design for Jon Clark. It beat strong competition, including “The Lehman Trilogy,” the acclaimed family saga about the founders of the financial firm, which is playing at the Park Avenue Armory until April 20, and “Sweat,” Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play set in working-class Pennsylvania. Mr. Lopez said in an interview that he hoped “The Inheritance” would transfer to Broadway, especially given the play’s setting. “We’ve seen a lot of Brits come over and take home Tonys, so I think it’s only fair really,” Mr. Lopez said, when asked about the play’s success. “The Inheritance” received rave reviews in Britain after opening last year at London’s Young Vic. Dominic Cavendish, writing in The Daily Telegraph, called it “a theatrical marathon that instantly looks like a modern classic,” adding that it was “perhaps the most important American play of the century so far.” The play “pierces your emotional defenses, raises any number of political issues and enfolds you in its narrative,” wrote Michael Billington in The Guardian. It had been nominated for eight awards, the most for any play. Mr. Soller, in his acceptance speech, referred to a new law in Brunei that makes gay sex between men punishable by death. “For those that continue the fight in a world where you can still be stoned to death for loving who you love, thank you,” said the London-based American actor. Last week, numerous celebrities, citing the law, called for a boycottagainst hotels owned by the Sultan of Brunei. Those include the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles and the Dorchester in London. The success of “The Inheritance” was matched by only two musicals: a gender-swapping version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company,” and “Come From Away,” the musical about residents of a small Canadian town who had to accommodate 6,700 travelers whose planes were diverted there after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The remaining reviews seem to be mixed: https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Review-Roundup-OKLAHOMA-on-Broadway-Did-the-Critics-Have-a-Beautiful-Day-at-the-Circle-in-the-Square-20190407

On the other hand, NYTimes Ben Brantley raves...He called it "astonishing!" Review: A Smashing ‘Oklahoma!’ Is Reborn in the Land of Id How is it that the coolest new show on Broadway in 2019 is a 1943 musical usually regarded as a very square slice of American pie? The answer arrives before the first song is over in Daniel Fish’s wide-awake, jolting and altogether wonderful production of “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!,” which opened on Sunday night at the Circle in the Square Theater. “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” is the title and the opening line of this familiar number, a paean to a land of promisingly blue skies and open spaces. But Curly, the cowboy who sings it, isn’t cushioned by the expected lush orchestrations. Nor is the actor playing him your usual solid slab of beefcake with a strapping tenor. As embodied by the excellent Damon Daunno, this lad of the prairies is wiry and wired, so full of unchanneled sexual energy you expect him to implode. There’s the hint of a wobble in his cocky strut and voice. Doing his best to project a confidence he doesn’t entirely feel, to the accompaniment of a down-home guitar, he seems so palpably young. As is often true of big boys with unsettled hormones, he also reads as just a little dangerous. He’s a lot like the feisty, ever-evolving nation he’s so proud to belong to. That would be the United States of America, then and now. Making his Broadway debut as a director, Mr. Fish has reconceived a work often seen as a byword for can-do optimism as a mirror for our age of doubt and anxiety. This is “Oklahoma!” for an era in which longstanding American legacies are being examined with newly skeptical eyes. Such a metamorphosis has been realized with scarcely a changed word of Oscar Hammerstein II’s original book and lyrics. This isn’t an act of plunder, but of reclamation. And a cozy old friend starts to seem like a figure of disturbing — and exciting — depth and complexity. Mr. Fish’s version isn’t the first “Oklahoma!” to elicit the shadows from within the play’s sunshine. Trevor Nunn and Susan Stroman’s interpretation for London’s National Theater of nearly two decades ago, while more traditionally staged, also scaled up the disquieting erotic elements. But this latest incarnation goes much further in digging to a core of fraught ambivalence. To do so, it strips “Oklahoma!” down to its skivvies, discarding the picturesque costumes and swirling orchestrations, and revealing a very human body that belongs to our conflicted present as much as it did to 1943 or to 1906, the year in which the show (based on Lynn Riggs’s “Green Grow the Lilacs”)takes place. Laura Jellinek’s set suggests a small-town community center that might double as a polling station, decorated with festive banners, colored lights — and a full arsenal of guns on the walls. It’s made clear that we the audience are part of this community. The house lights stay on for much of the show, in a homogenizing brightness, that is occasionally and abruptly changed for pitch darkness. (Scott Zielinski is the first-rate lighting designer.) There’s chili cooking on the refectory tables onstage, for the audience’s consumption at intermission. A seven-member hootenanny-style band sits in plain view. The well-known melodies they play have been reimagined — by the brilliant orchestrator and arranger Daniel Kluger — with the vernacular throb and straightforwardness of country and western ballads. The cast members — wearing a lot of good old, form-fitting denim (Terese Wadden did the costumes) — are just plain folks. Singing with conversational ease, they occasionally flirt and joke with the audience seated on either side of the stage. We are all, it would appear, in this together. Though the cast has been whittled down to 11 speaking parts (and one dancer), the key characters are very much present. They include our scrapping leading lovers, Curly McLain and Laurey Williams (Rebecca Naomi Jones); their comic counterparts, Will Parker (James Davis) and Ado Annie (Ali Stroker); that bastion of homespun wisdom and stoicism, Aunt Eller (Mary Testa) and the womanizing peddler Ali Hakim (Will Brill). Oh, I almost forgot poor old Jud Fry (Patrick Vaill), the slightly, well, weird handyman who’s sweet, in a sour way, on Laurey. Everybody forgets Jud, or tries to. Not that this is possible, with Mr. Vaill lending a charismatic, hungry loneliness to the part that’s guaranteed to haunt your nightmares. These people — in some cases nontraditionally yet always perfectly cast — intersect much as they usually do in “Oklahoma!” They court and spark, fight and reunite. They also show off by picking up guitars and microphones and dancing like prairie bacchantes. (John Heginbotham did the spontaneous-feeling choreography.) They use household chores, like shucking corn, to memorably annotative effect. Ms. Stroker’s boy-crazy, country siren-voiced Ado Annie, who rides a wheelchair as if it were a prize bronco, and Mr. Davis’s deliciously dumb Will emanate a blissful endorphin haze. Mr. Brill is a refreshingly unmannered Ali Hakim, and Ms. Testa is a splendid, wryly authoritative Aunt Eller. But there’s an abiding tension. This is especially evident in Ms. Jones’s affectingly wary Laurey, who regards her very different suitors, Curly and Jud, with a confused combination of desire and terror. That her fears are not misplaced becomes clear in an encounter in Jud’s dank hovel of a home. Curly sings “Pore Jud,” in which he teasingly imagines his rival’s funeral with an ominous breathiness. The scene occurs in darkness, with a simulcast video in black and white of the two men face to face. And the lines between sex and violence, already blurred in this gun-toting universe, melt altogether. I first saw Mr. Fish’s “Oklahoma!” at Bard College in 2015, and again at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn last year. It was an exciting work from the get-go, but it just keeps getting better. The performances are looser and bigger; they’re Broadway-size now, with all the infectious exuberance you expect from a great musical. At the same time, though, this production reminds us that such raw energy can be harnessed to different ends, for ill as well as for good. In the earlier versions, I had problems with its truly shocking conclusion — the scene that takes the most liberties with the original. In its carefully retooled rendering, it’s disturbing for all the right reasons. The other significant change here involves the dream ballet, which in this version begins the second act and has been newly varied and paced. It is performed by one dancer (the exquisite Gabrielle Hamilton) with a shaved head and a glittering T-shirt that reads “Dream Baby Dream.” What she does is a far cry from the same sequence as immortalized by Agnes de Mille, the show’s legendary original choreographer. But on its own, radically reconceptualized terms, it achieves the same effect. As she gallops, slithers and crawls the length of the stage, casting wondering and seductive glances at the front row, Ms. Hamilton comes to seem like undiluted id incarnate, a force that has always been rippling beneath the surface here. She’s as stimulating and frightening — and as fresh — as last night’s fever dream. So is this astonishing show.

NYPost HATED it! ‘Oklahoma!’ review: Anti-gun revival of classic shot to hell The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye, and so is my blood pressure, thanks to the revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” In director Daniel Fish’s pretentious production — which opened Sunday on Broadway, fresh from Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse — everything you cherish about this classic has been taken out behind the barn and shot, replaced by an auteur’s bag of tricks and a thesis on gun control and westward expansion. Here, the West was won by a culture of violence and toxic masculinity — what fun! The audience at the Circle in the Square Theatre sits on three sides of the stage, the plywood-covered walls plastered with rifles. The pit orchestra’s more like a seven-person bluegrass band, decked out in plaid, and the house lights are cranked all the way up. This looks like a hootenanny, you think. Well, hold your horses. The lights stay on in the house for most of the show, maybe to create intimacy. But the almost constant brightness, which changes only a handful of times to neon green or red and at one point goes dark entirely, muddies the storytelling. No scene seems any different from the next, and the whole thing is a mostly joyless chore. The story remains the same. Two potential suitors, cowboy Curly (Damon Daunno) and farm hand Jud (Patrick Vaill), both dream of accompanying Laurey (played with a furrowed brow by Rebecca Naomi Jones) to the box social and beyond. You may recall Curly as a heroic Hugh Jackman type, who grins through “Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin,’ ” and Jud as an Andre the Giant type. No longer. Now, both of them are stick-thin creeps with greasy hair. Lucky for us, they have awful purty singing voices. So does Ali Stroker, who plays Ado Annie, the gal who can’t say no, opposite James Davis’ doofy Will Parker. The funny, sexier-than-usual pair tries their best to keep things light in this giant frown of a staging, as does Will Brill as their third wheel, oily peddler Ali Hakim. In fact, they and Mary Testa’s pushy Aunt Eller would be a fine addition to any other production of “Oklahoma!” But their instruction here would seem to be “have a lousy time.” The actors lounge around on benches, speaking quietly with no particular investment in the scene. When we arrive at the should-be showstoppers — the title song, “The Farmer and the Cowman” — choreographer John Heginbotham has the cast lazily amble around as if drunk. Agnes De Mille’s famous Dream Ballet has been ditched for an overlong, gymnastics floor exercise danced, with admirable muscularity, by Gabrielle Hamilton in little more than a sparkly T-shirt reading “Dream Baby Dream.” Lovely. Some of Fish’s ideas are fun. The chili and cornbread doled out to the audience at intermission is tasty, and the women snapping ears of corn during “Many A New Day” gives the scene rebellious energy. But in putting his actors in modern dress, making guns his wallpaper and forcing every moment that a gun is brandished or even mentioned to have bombastic significance, Fish clearly is saying he’s not a great fan of the culture of the Great Plains — of yesteryear or yesterday. In a preposterously heavy-handed sequence, he even has Jud present Curly with a pistol, rather than the usual knife, which leads to a shocking but inane conclusion. All this, in a hokey old show that includes the lyric, “Gonna give ya barley, carrots and potaters.” Listening to the New York audience applauding their own virtuosity makes a guy want to put this “Oklahoma!” out to pasture.

Michael Reidel I today's NYPost writes that this production has Broadway audiences divided into "Hate It" and Love It camps. Ben, I found good reasonable priced tickets but I am hesitating....we'll see. Some performances have been available on TDF, but tickets go really fast. Is Broadway’s edgy ‘Oklahoma!’ revival brilliant or just bizarre? Who’d have thought the most controversial show this spring would be . . . Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!”? A revival of the 1943 musical opening Sunday is dividing audiences and Tony voters. Partisans think it’s a brilliant updating of a chestnut. Detractors say it’s an abomination against a beloved classic. Directed by Daniel Fish, this “Oklahoma!” is tuneful and funny, brutal and dark, but still bright: The house lights stay on throughout most of the show. Curly is no longer a sunny hero, but an arrogant force for all that the white man will do to Native Americans while settling the West. Jud Fry is no longer an ugly weirdo, but a sensitive, sexy and troubled farm hand, evoking at turns sympathy and terror. Guns line the walls of the theater. An actress in a wheelchair — Ali Stroker, getting raves — plays Ado Annie. And the show ends with Laurey and Curly drenched in blood on their wedding day. When the production played Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse, the Times critics loved it. They can’t be seen as aging white guys out of touch with theater for hipsters. (The Times is so “woke” these days, I’m dying to drop an Ambien in its martini.) But the Hollywood Reporter, whose critic is another aging white guy, was skeptical: “It’s when the director most imposes himself on the material that you want to run screaming for the exits.” Tony voters are equally divided. A few told me they hated every minute of it. Others thought it was thrilling and original. But most agree that the dream ballet is way too long. Even some people on the show wish the director would cut it. Behind the scenes, the producers are trying to figure out how to sell it. They’ve divided potential audiences into “Oakies” and “Nokies.” “Oakies” are traditional theatergoers who love the “Oklahoma!” of Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones. Give them a revival that says America is racist and gun-mad, and they’ll opt for “Kiss Me, Kate.” “Nokies” are younger theatergoers for whom “Oklahoma!” is something their grandmothers still play on a turntable. Reared on “Rent,” they have little use for butter churning and song titles that end in exclamation points. This experimental, edgy version is something they’d probably enjoy. A marketing campaign has been tailored to each, with the idea that the “Oakies” and the “Nokies” should be friends. Wherever you come down, “Oklahoma!” is sure to be in the mix for the Tony Awards. It will square off against the Roundabout’s dandy but more conventional revival of “Kiss Me, Kate.” (If the Yiddish revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” had gone to Broadway instead of Stage 42, it would be the revival to beat.) If this “Oklahoma!” succeeds at the box office, expect even more radical revisions of the classics: an “Annie Get Your Gun” that overturns the Second Amendment; an “On the Town” where the sailors end up in Julius in the Village, and an “Oh! Calcutta!” in black tie.

Opening Night was scary! ‘Ain’t Too Proud’ preview features flying vomit, broken seat It was a wild night at Tuesday’s “Ain’t Too Proud”preview. The critics were in the house for the new The Temptations musical, so the producers and creators were on edge. They almost fainted when Washington Post critic Peter Marks took his aisle seat and it collapsed. The house crew rushed to repair it before curtain. Marks tweeted: “The saying ‘Please take your seat’ acquired new meaning at the Imperial Theatre … Mine fell apart.” There was another commotion during the first act, when Michael David, the Tony-winning producer of “Jersey Boys,” jumped out of his seat and ran up the aisle, followed by his wife and some of their friends. It turned out that an ailing theatergoer in the first row of the mezzanine vomited all over them. A Tony voter watching the scene unfold said, “If only the culprit had turned to the right, he would have hit a good deal of the New York Drama Critics Circle.” The ushers moved in and covered the seats with plastic wrapping. The wardrobe department also snapped into gear, outfitting David and his party with “Ain’t Too Proud” merchandise. When they returned to their seats they were wearing “My girl, my girl, my girl” T-shirts.

On the other hand, the NYPost was not so kind.... Temptations’ music elevates by-the-numbers ‘Ain’t Too Proud' https://nypost.com/2019/03/21/temptations-music-elevates-by-the-numbers-aint-too-proud/ Get ready — here they come! “Ain’t Too Proud” arrived on Broadway Thursday night buoyed by a surge of nostalgia and a slew of Motown hits. But anyone who’s seen the earlier jukebox shows “Jersey Boys” or “Motown: The Musical” is bound to feel a dull sense of déja vu. Subtitled “The Life and Times of the Temptations” and woven with golden oldies like “Get Ready,” “Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)” and “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” the show is based on a book by Otis Williams, the R&B supergroup’s founder — and its last living original member. While “ATP” packs some terrific performances, it’s a paint-by-numbers evening. The story traces the Detroit band’s rise to fame and its personal and political conflicts, which unfold efficiently, if mechanically, in an “and then we did this” fashion. Williams (Derrick Baskin) narrates and introduces fellow Temps. There’s his neighbor (no relation) Paul Williams (James Harkness), Melvin Franklin (Jawan M. Jackson), Eddie Kendricks (the phenomenal Jeremy Pope) and David Ruffin (Ephraim Sykes). Dominique Morisseau’s script essentially gives each man one main trait: Paul has the slick dance moves, Ruffin’s the one “addicted to the worst drug of all — the spotlight,” and so on. The women in their lives, either abused or left behind, hug the sidelines. Motown music mogul Berry Gordy appears now and then to act as the Temps’ Svengali. The thrill is watching the Temptations find their collective voice, tight harmonies and moves. “The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts,” Williams likes to say, and it’s true. When the group’s performing “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” on “American Bandstand” and “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” with the Supremes on an NBC special, or mourning the death of Dr. Martin Luther King in “I Wish It Would Rain” (a dramatic turn that helps establish an otherwise vague timeline), the songs light up the stage. That’s a good thing, since much of the production is drenched in gray. A lesson in the power of humor from “The Cher Show” could help. A big plus is Sergio Trujillo’s choreography, with its dazzling spins and splits and piston-precise steps. But a fog of familiarity hangs over Des McAnuff’s staging: The director of the hit “Jersey Boys” and the miss “Summer” relies on his usual go-to tricks: kinetic characters, concert lighting, scrolling graphics, bare stage. And things get somber very quickly after Ruffin’s expulsion from the group. “Ain’t Too Proud” is a polished tribute ride to an act that keeps on going, albeit with different singers: Williams notes there have been 24 Temps since the early ’60s, when the group started. Proud this show is — but distinctive, it ain’t.

Great review in today's NYTimes by Ben Brantley: Review: An All-Star Team in the Temptations Musical ‘Ain’t Too Proud’ https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/theater/aint-too-proud-review-the-temptations.html As befits a show about the Temptations, the most infectiously rhythmic of chart-topping R&B groups, “Ain’t Too Proud” keeps time in style. I don’t mean that solely in terms of a beat that makes you feel like dancing. Of course, as you watch this latest entry in Broadway’s ever-expanding jukebox musical sweepstakes, you will no doubt find your legs twitching, as if from muscle memory. That’s the urge being translated with such sublime grace by those five natty men on the stage, Platonic ideals of stepping high and looking fine. But it is also true that time, unforgiving and unstoppable, is cannily presented as the shaping element in “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations,” which opened on Thursday under the shrewd direction of Des McAnuff, with sensational choreography by Sergio Trujillo. As the show charts the changing fortunes of men who became synonymous with Motown’s glory days, the years keep moving forward with the relentlessness of a conveyor belt in an auto-making assembly line. It’s enough to wear a strong man down. And more than any of the (oh so many) pop-songbook shows that have befallen Broadway since the Abba-spouting behemoth “Mamma Mia!” opened in 2001, “Ain’t Too Proud” is a story of attrition. We watch as the core lineup of the original Temptations is whittled down to the last man standing. That’s the group’s leader and show’s narrator, Otis Williams, played with anchoring gravity by Derrick Baskin. Ultimately, though, it’s the music that’s the sole survivor. And that’s what’s being celebrated here — the collective miracle of a blissfully silken sound forged out of clashing egos, many misfires and life-wrecking hard work into numbers that keep playing in our memories. While honoring all the expected biomusical clichés, which include rolling out its subjects’ greatest hits in brisk and sometimes too fragmented succession, this production refreshingly emphasizes the improbable triumph of rough, combustible parts assembled into glistening smoothness. Dominique Morisseau, who wrote the show’s book, is the gifted author of a cycle of smart, tough-minded plays based in her native Detroit, where much of “Ain’t Too Proud” is also set. Her script, adapted from Otis Williams’s 1988 memoir, reminds us that the Detroit-based Motown Records — the crossover label run by Berry Gordy (Jahi Kearse) that revolutionized pop music — was indeed a factory of sorts, one that rigorously processed and refined raw talent for mass consumption. This means that unlike such current fare as “Beautiful” (about Carole King), and “The Cher Show,” “Ain’t Too Proud” isn’t focused on a single star, with the attendant by-the-numbers psychology. Instead, we have a study in group dynamics, in which the balance shifts in ways big and small, as the component parts keep changing. As Otis observes early on, after the firing of the group’s original lead singer, Al Bryant (Jarvis B. Manning Jr.), “Sometimes Temp stood for temporary.” This sense of interchangeability (and expendability) is given witty visual life in the second act, when a cavalcade of identically dressed Temptations, past and present fills the front of the stage. (Paul Tazewell did the delicious costumes.) Not that the audience is ever likely to confuse one Temp for another. The five-member group that most people know as the Temptations is embodied with piquantly detailed individuality by charismatic, supple-voiced actors who astutely convey the imbalanced equations of ego and accommodation in their characters. They are, in addition to Mr. Baskin, James Harkness (as Paul Williams), Jawan M. Jackson (as a Melvin Franklin who talks as well as sings in a thundering bass), Jeremy Pope (late of “Choir Boy,” who here plays Eddie Kendricks) and a smoking hot Ephraim Sykes (as David Ruffin). We meet them first as a team, singing “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” the Temptations hit from 1964, before Otis shepherds us back to the group’s starting point. That segue follows the formula established by “Jersey Boys,” the long-running Broadway hit from 2005 about the Four Seasons, also directed by Mr. McAnuff and generally considered the gold standard for jukebox biographies. (It has been reincarnated Off Broadway at New World Stages.) Like “Jersey Boys,” “Ain’t Too Proud” rapidly follows a fairly straightforward timeline through some pretty rough terrain. So in addition to seeing the Temps on (and back) stage, and in the recording studio — with mentors that include Smokey Robinson (Christian Thompson) and Norman Whitfield (Mr. Manning) — we are given quick-sketch glimpses of the grim personal and social problems that derail them. (Robert Brill’s set, lighted by Howell Binkley with projections by Peter Nigrini, neatly balances grit and glamour throughout.) Some of these synoptic moments can seem bizarrely perfunctory, as in a crack-smoking sequence and, worse, a party scene that portrays Ruffin’s abusive relationship with the singer Tammi Terrell (Nasia Thomas). And the attempts to portray the dawning social consciences of the singers — who became famous at the height of the civil rights movement — can feel strained. (On the other hand, I enjoyed the brief encounters with the women in the men’s lives, including the Supremes, led by Candice Marie Woods in a pitch-perfect evocation of Diana Ross, and Rashidra Scott makes the most of her onstage time as Otis’s neglected wife, Josephine.) Mercifully, the show mostly avoids the usual jukebox pitfall of jimmying in songs to reflect the plot in literal ways. Instead, the musical numbers generally register as a rippling, liquid mirror of societal and personal flux, especially in the ways they show the Temptations’ sound being calibrated to suit a mainstream (i.e., white) audience. As for the performance of those songs, orchestrated by Harold Wheeler with musical direction and arrangements by Kenny Seymour, they’re pretty close to perfection. They’re not entirely mimetic, which is a relief. These Temps (whose later additional members are ably incarnated by Saint Aubyn, E. Clayton Cornelious and Mr. Thompson) sound enough like their prototypes to satisfy hard-core fans. But the fabulous standards, which include “Cloud Nine” and “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” have been reimagined with a heightened Broadway flair that stops short of pandering. This is especially true of the sinuous synchronicity of Mr. Trujillo’s choreography, in which everyone is often doing the same moves, but with a subtle, stylish edge that sets each member apart. (Or not so subtle, though still highly stylish, in the case of Mr. Sykes’s spectacular scissor splits.) You’re always aware of the component parts in this well-oiled music machine. As its title suggests, “Ain’t Too Proud” promotes the virtue of humility, at least when it comes to keeping a team together. But it also makes sure that these men never become ciphers. The happy paradox of this group portrait is that everybody gets to be a star.