‘Our Town,’ ‘McNeal’ and 4 More Shows Our Critics Are Talking About

Critic’s Pick

Identity politics, funny at last.

‘Yellow Face’

David Henry Hwang’s 2007 satire, directed by Leigh Silverman, arrives on Broadway starring Daniel Dae Kim as an Asian American playwright who protests yellowface casting only to inadvertently, and hilariously, cast a white actor as the Asian lead in his own play.

From Jesse Green’s review:

A smart thing about “Yellow Face,” aside from the authorial self-defamation, is that as it gets more hopelessly tangled and thus funny it also gets more serious and thus damning. The questions of identity considered as cultural matters in the first half become personal and political in the second.

Through Nov. 24 at the Todd Haimes Theater. Read the full review.

Critic’s Pick

A brutal classic with an ideally shrewd Jim Parsons.

‘Our Town’

Kenny Leon directs Jim Parsons, Katie Holmes and others in a revival of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 classic about two families whose ordinary life events, from birth to death, are consecrated by a kind of communal love.

From Jesse Green’s review:

In any good enough production, “Our Town” is titanic: beyond time and brutal. The revival that opened Thursday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, the fifth on Broadway since the play’s 1938 debut, is more than good enough. To use this word in the only positive sense I can imagine, it’s unbearable: in its beauty, yes, but more so in its refusal to offer beauty as a cure when it is only, at best, a comfort.

Through Jan. 19 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. Read the full review.

Critic’s Pick

Alive with the sound of music.

‘The Hills of California’

In Jez Butterworth’s dying-parent drama, directed by Sam Mendes, four sisters trained by their determined mother (Laura Donnelly) to sing close harmony reunite 20 years later as acrimonious adults.

From Jesse Green’s review: