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    ‘You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah’ Review: She’s Growing Up

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    Sandler family members (plus Idina Menzel) lean on each other in this Netflix comedy about growing up.The comedy “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah” follows the debut of Stacy Friedman (Sunny Sandler), a preteen who is obsessed with the parties that accompany her Hebrew school cohort’s coming-of-age ceremonies.This joyride to adulthood is a real-life family affair: Sunny stars, and her father, Adam Sandler, amiably rides in the back seat as Stacy’s bewildered dad, Danny. But despite the support Stacy gets from her family (including Idina Menzel as Stacy’s mother, Bree, and Sadie Sandler as her sister, Ronnie), the friendship between Stacy and her best friend, Lydia (Samantha Lorraine), is the film’s emotional core.Stacy and Lydia have planned their parties and their lives around each other, but their friendship is tested by the most challenging trials of middle school: cute boys, cool girls and menstruation. When Stacy walks in on Lydia kissing their mutual crush, she can’t bring herself to consider her friend’s happiness with the mitzvah season’s rabbi-encouraged maturity. Instead, Stacy disinvites Lydia from her bat mitzvah, and she sets out to redefine what her first steps into womanhood should look like now that she intends to take those steps solo.The young cast proves deft with the film’s clever script, by Alison Peck (based on the 2005 novel by Fiona Rosenbloom), and the director Sammi Cohen indulges the virgin-mojito passions of preteens while avoiding nostalgia, thankfully. In one of the film’s best jokes, a partygoer requests a dusty mothball on the dance floor: Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” For a split second, the movie’s easygoing, contemporary appeal hangs in the balance. And then with delightful rudeness, the film’s middle-aged, disco-ball-helmeted disc jockey, DJ Schmuley (Ido Mosseri), rejects the song, spitting out, “Let Schmuley handle the vibe around here!” A Selena Gomez song fills out the score, and this goofy charmer of a movie bounces on.You Are So Not Invited to My Bat MitzvahRated PG-13 for language and middle-school bathroom humor. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?’ Review: Wickedly Talented

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      This Disney+ documentary uses a concert set list as a springboard to chronicle Idina Menzel’s musical achievements.Our expanding catalog of glossy celebrity bio-documentaries gains a new entry in “Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?,” which trails its subject on a national tour in 2018. The concerts saw Menzel performing musical highlights from throughout her career, including a medley of show-tunes, original pop numbers and singalongs.The director, Anne McCabe, uses these songs as springboards into Menzel’s past, and in between lengthy performance sequences — renditions of “Take Me or Leave Me” from “Rent,” “Defying Gravity” from “Wicked” and “Let It Go” from “Frozen” go on and on — the film races through an overview of career achievements. We are frequently reminded that Menzel’s tour ends at Madison Square Garden; in an effort to graft an arc onto this timeline, the documentary insists that playing the arena is Menzel’s lifelong dream.There is little dramatic tension or psychological depth to this cinematic biography, and even in sentimental moments, McCabe fails to elicit an emotional response from her subject or the audience. When, for example, the film touches on the sudden death of the “Rent” creator Jonathan Larson, McCabe includes an impersonal remark from Menzel, cuts to an archival clip of a different cast member and then moves on.Bursts of authenticity occur in scenes concerning Menzel’s preteen son, particularly when Menzel explores how shifting from mom time to work time can bring about both guilt and a measure of relief. We already know that Menzel can belt to the back row; a richer profile would have coaxed out a more intimate voice.Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      Review: ‘Wild: A Musical Becoming’ Is Finding Its Footing

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      Idina Menzel and a hummable pop score can’t camouflage the fact that this musical is half-baked. Still, it can make for an enjoyable evening, our critic writes.CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In the 13 years that Diane Paulus has been artistic director of the American Repertory Theater, she has used it as a laboratory for developing new musicals and re-envisioning old ones, then ushering them to Broadway success. “Waitress” and “Jagged Little Pill” had their premieres there; so did Paulus’s staging of “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” and her revival of “Pippin,” which won her a Tony Award for directing.But at Thursday’s opening night performance of “Wild: A Musical Becoming,” a climate-change eco-fable starring the Tony winner Idina Menzel, Paulus began her preshow speech by ratcheting down the audience’s expectations of this latest premiere.“Musicals take years to develop,” she said. “But the subject matter of this story tonight was so pressing that we felt we could not wait to share it with you.”The actors would perform with scripts in hand, she added. Our imaginations would be required to fill in the blanks of what the A.R.T. is calling a concert production.All of which is fair enough. But the charismatic lead and hummable pop score of “Wild” can’t camouflage the fact that this musical is very much in the awkward phase of becoming whatever it ultimately might be.Still, it can make for an enjoyable evening, depending on your willingness to overlook the ungainly book by V, the playwright formerly known as Eve Ensler, and get over your disappointment in a show that includes Javier Muñoz — a.k.a. Broadway’s sexy Hamilton — but gives him far too little to do, and dresses him dowdily. Actually, you may have to get over the other actors’ costumes, too.Directed by Paulus at the Loeb Drama Center, the story takes place in a town called Outskirtzia. Hard up for cash, the local farmers get an offer from corporate outsiders called the Extractacals: $50,000 apiece in exchange for drilling on their land.The community’s adults are tempted; the teenagers are alarmed. That strife is the primary tension of a show that, for all its ecological advocacy, is also a parable about understanding between parents and children.Menzel plays Bea, a farmer struggling with her mortgage who could use the windfall from the Extractacals. But her adolescent daughter, Sophia (the mononymous musician-actor Yde), is so terrified of the destruction of the planet and outraged by the adults’ complicity in it that she falls into a catatonic state, then disappears into the forest and transforms into a sea horse.It may or may not be a spoiler to say that other children in the town follow suit, each manifesting as a different kind of animal, each determined to save the earth from their parents’ recklessness.With the grown-ups in danger of selling their souls, “Wild” is partly a morality play, gesturing in the direction of Christopher Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” — and also toward Brecht, Dr. Seuss and “Urinetown.” All of it in two dimensions.Which is unfortunate, because the cast is packed with talent. Menzel, a disarmingly sympathetic not-so-evil stepmother in Amazon’s recent “Cinderella,” brings an appealing ease and playfulness to Bea, and adds a touch of country music to the richness of her voice (Menzel’s run in the show ends Dec. 23). And Yde opens a window to Sophia’s soul with a couple of striking solos, “Dear Everything” and “Human.”With music principally by the pop songwriters Justin Tranter and Caroline Pennell, and lyrics principally by Tranter, Pennell and V, “Wild” is a slickly produced work in progress. Rock-show lighting by the excellent Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew is remarkably effective in revving up the crowd during the more anthemic numbers.The cast of 10 is backed by a three-piece band (the music director is David Freeman Coleman) and members of the Boston Children’s Chorus, who add vocal depth and, by their presence, enhance the sense of a generation demanding action.But the show comes across as more pageant than musical, with politics paramount. Too often, the text bonks us over the head with its messaging, as when Sophia’s friend Forte (Paravi Das) explains that “all living things are now being seriously jeopardized by us humans — well, non-Indigenous humans, of course.”And does a debate over pronouns really need to erupt — around Possible (the very funny Luke Ferrari), a nonbinary teenager, and their unaccepting father, Mr. Custom (Muñoz) — during the crisis over Sophia’s disappearance? Might there be a more organic moment to make the same point?The only actor who briefly lucks into dialogue that lets whole characters emerge is Josh Lamon, as the excitable Minister Muddle and the ultra-tranquil therapist Dr. Projection.“Your children were traumatized by learning about the consequences of you leasing your lands,” Dr. Projection tells the parents of Outskirtzia. “Then you told them you didn’t care what they thought or felt. You made them feel unimportant and unseen.”Somehow, from Dr. Projection, this lesson doesn’t feel like a lesson — a rare sensation in “Wild.” The show’s creators frequently seem under the impression that virtue excuses lapses in artistry, as when a program note highlights the eco-consciousness of its costume construction.The designers, SiiGii, Roy Caires and Tommy Cole, write that they used “exclusively second hand, recycled and repurposed materials.” Yet the outfits, in nonsensical patchworks of denim and plaid, are unflattering — “Hee Haw” meets the apocalypse — in a way that seems condescending, as if being poor and rural meant having no sense of style.The show’s successful reuse of scenic elements from earlier this season — the set of the A.R.T.’s “Macbeth In Stride” (by Dan Soule), augmented with luxuriantly leafy sculptures (by Daniel Callahan) from its “The Arboretum Experience” — makes a worthier point: that recycled materials don’t need to feel penitential.“Wild” is meeting the world before it’s ready, but there is something ultimately affecting in it about parents and teenagers, and something commendable, too, about theater that tries to respond to the urgent concerns of the day.“We want you to panic, we want you to act,” the children sing, indicting their elders. “You stole our future, and we want it back.” However clumsily, “Wild” is on the side of the kids — an offering of respect and contrition from the grown-ups, while there’s still time.Wild: A Musical BecomingThrough Jan. 2 at the Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, Mass.; americanrepertorytheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      The Best and Worst Moments of the Tony Awards

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      Despite an evening split between streaming and TV, the message on Sunday night was clear: Broadway is back.Jennifer Holliday performing “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” from “Dreamgirls,” at the 74th Tony Awards.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBest: Obviously, Jennifer HollidayThere were lots of great numbers during the first half of the Tonys, and even a few in the second half. But no one else did what Holliday did when she planted herself center stage and let rip with “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.” It’s not just that she sings her signature song like no one ever sang anything. It’s that the singing is secondary, merely the outward expression of something much larger within her. Musical theater at its best delivers the human soul, in joy or agony or confidence or shame, to an audience willing to receive it; it’s a communion. For a few minutes, 40 years after she first bowled us over, she did it again, in joy, agony, confidence and shame. JESSE GREENDavid Byrne, whose “American Utopia” received a special Tony Award.Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated PressJeremy O. Harris, whose “Slave Play” was nominated for best play.Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Tony Awards ProductionsBest: A Red Carpet With HeartAs red carpets go, the one at the Tony Awards is often defined by what it doesn’t have: an hour of commentary from E!, high fashion affiliations and monthslong angst about who will wear which designer. But what it lacks in commercialization, it makes up for in heart, especially this year, with Broadway having just reopened after the devastation of the pandemic shutdowns. Instead of action heroes in penguin suits, you get David Byrne in a royal blue get-up, no tie and white brogues. And wherever the golden-boy Jeremy O. Harris goes, the carpets sparkle a little brighter. STELLA BUGBEEThe choreographer Sonya Tayeh, who won for “Moulin Rouge! The Musical.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBest: Sonya Tayeh’s Energy and MessageSonya Tayeh’s striking goth-goddess look at Sunday night’s Tonys — a shiny black tux with a cummerbund and no blouse; sleek hip-length black hair on one half of her head, the other half shaved; large, shimmering hoops and a lip piercing — would have been enough to land her on any list of bests. But it was her moving acceptance speech for best choreography, for “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” that shook me. Delivered so calmly and thoughtfully, it shifted the energy of the room. Tayeh, 44, said: “As a brown, queer, Arab American woman, I wasn’t always welcomed. It takes graceful hands to lead people like me to the door.” Her mother is Lebanese; her Palestinian father, who was not part of her upbringing, died when she was young. “It’s been 10 years since a woman has won this award,” she continued. “Though I’m honored to be part of this legacy, this legacy is too small.” MAYA SALAMThe 74th Tony Awards were at the Winter Garden Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWorst: The Confusing, and Unnecessary, Streaming SetupIn an industry that is constantly working on — and scrutinized for — its level of accessibility, why are they making it harder for audiences to watch the vast majority of awards? All but three honors were given exclusively on Paramount+, not to mention some of the best performances of the evening. I have internet access and the bare-minimum streaming savvy to sign up (and to cancel my free trial at the end of the week), but plenty of interested theater fans don’t. Paramount+ also lacks the ability to rewind and pause its stream — how else am I supposed to go back to the beginning of Jennifer Holliday’s stunning performance and watch it ad nauseam? NANCY COLEMANLois Smith won best featured actress in a play for “The Inheritance.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBest: A Nonagenarian WinnerLois Smith has done something no one else who has spent nine decades on this planet has achieved: Won a Tony Award for acting. Smith, who won best featured actress in a play for her role in “The Inheritance,” gave a sweet shout-out to “Howards End,” the E.M. Forster book on which the play is based, naming it her favorite novel. And then she quoted the novel’s famous two-word message, an apt one for live theater’s return: “Only connect.” SARAH BAHRPerformance by the cast of “Moulin Rouge! The Musical.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBest: The ‘Moulin Rouge!’ Performance We NeededI saw “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” — roughly a thousand years ago, if my math is right — and felt a bit of a sensory overload by the end. Tony viewers got a glimpse of it in the cast’s performance: Multiply those vibrant skirts, high kicks and brisk pop numbers by a couple of acts and an intermission, and you’ve got one of the most aggressively energetic musicals in recent Broadway history. I enjoyed it then, but Sunday’s effort — prerecorded at the Al Hirschfeld Theater, the show’s home base — felt like the musical had finally found the perfect setting. Watching any theatrical work from behind a screen can dim its intensity, and perhaps the initial vibe could use a bit of dimming. But what better time is there to revel in the adrenaline rush, and the vivacity, of going to the theater? Everything about “Moulin Rouge!” — or, at least, the upbeat parts performed on Sunday night — is brimming with celebration. It’s exactly the kind of splashy abundance we’ve so missed this past year and a half. NANCY COLEMANIn the second half, Leslie Odom Jr. and Josh Groban did a comedy bit.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWorst: Processed CheeseThe successful first half of the double broadcast fooled me into thinking the show’s writers and producers had at last seen the error of their past ways. There were no cute introductions, no fake patter, no pyrotechnical chyron curlicues, just sincerity, warmth and professionalism, modeled by Audra McDonald as the host. Then the second half arrived, reneging on the promise of the first. By the time its host, Leslie Odom, Jr., engaged Josh Groban in a hoary comedy bit — Odom lured the supposedly surprised Groban to the stage to perform an “impromptu” tribute to theater educators — you knew that the show had turned its back on the intelligence of theater it was meant to honor. There was nowhere to go but down. JESSE GREENKristin Chenoweth, left, and Idina Menzel reunited to sing “For Good” from “Wicked.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBest: Chenoweth and Menzel, On One StageThe roof of the Winter Garden Theater was just barely still attached after Jennifer Holliday’s searing rendition of “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” but Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel’s “Wicked” reunion once again threatened to blow it off. The actresses, who originated the roles of Glinda and Elphaba respectively, sang “For Good,” a duet that — with Chenoweth in a poofy pink dress and Menzel in a somber black number — reflected the extremes of Broadway’s pandemic shutdown and buoyant, four-hour return. And when they sang the line “I have been changed for good,” it felt like they were speaking for an entire industry. SARAH BAHRChristopher Jackson, James Monroe Iglehart, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr., Wayne Brady and Aneesa Folds performed an on-the-fly Tonys recapSara Krulwich/The New York TimesWorst: Didn’t These Guys Just Win a Tony?“Freestyle Love Supreme” has been around for nearly two decades, its Broadway run in late 2019 was strong enough to earn it a special Tony Award, and one of the musical improv troupe’s founders is a Broadway darling himself, Lin-Manuel Miranda. But instead of being a highlight of the night, the on-the-fly Tonys recap fell victim to its setting. “Freestyle Love Supreme” usually thrives off audience contributions. But the broadcast clock was ticking, and instead of interacting with the myriad stars in front of them — who wouldn’t want Andrew Lloyd Webber to describe his day for the sake of comedy? — these performers blandly reenacted the moments we’d just sat through, and with little extemporization. There was certainly plenty of talent onstage: theater-fan household names like Miranda, Chris Jackson and James Monroe Iglehart; and impressive rising members like Aneesa Folds and Kaila Mullady. That just made the end of the evening all the more disappointing. NANCY COLEMAN More