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      ‘Phantom of the Opera’ to Delay Broadway Closing After Sales Spike

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      Last week was the highest-grossing in the show’s 35-year history.“The Phantom of the Opera” is going to continue haunting Broadway a while longer.The musical — the longest-running show in Broadway history — announced in September that it would close in February, ending a storied run shortly after celebrating its 35th anniversary.But immediately after the closing was announced, ticket sales spiked. And last week, when Broadway was bolstered by Thanksgiving travelers, “Phantom” enjoyed its highest-grossing week ever: $2.2 million.So on Tuesday the show’s producer, Cameron Mackintosh, plans to announce an eight-week extension of the run, to April 16.“What a phenomenal response there has been to the show ending,” Mackintosh said in a telephone interview on Monday. “We’ve sold out virtually everything that we have on sale.”And why not run forever? The answer is simple: Until the closing announcement, the show was not selling enough tickets to defray its rising running costs. The slow return of audiences to Broadway following the pandemic and inflation were both contributing factors.“For most of last year, we were losing every week,” Mackintosh said. “There comes a point when you become theatrical wallpaper. People took it for granted that it’s going to run forever.”Those driving the surge in sales include fans hoping to catch the show before the closing.George Etheredge for The New York TimesThe turnabout at the box office has been significant. The week before the closing plan was announced, the show grossed $867,997. After the announcement, the numbers began to climb.Broadway is gradually rebuilding following the lengthy pandemic shutdown and last winter’s Omicron slump, which forced a number of shows to close.Thanksgiving week — traditionally one of the biggest of the year for Broadway — saw a modest uptick in grosses from last year. The 33 shows running this year grossed $37.5 million last week, up from the $32.5 million that the 33 shows running last year earned during the same period. But Broadway has yet to return to prepandemic levels: in 2019 there were 35 shows running, and they grossed $41.7 million.Those driving the surge in “Phantom” sales include people who have seen the show before but want to catch it again before the closing, as well as those who have never seen it and realize it’s now(ish) or never.“The reason it is sold out is because it’s coming off, absolutely,” Mackintosh said. “We know that one of the reasons that it’s doing it is because this is your last chance to see the great show.”Among the recent patrons: Lucas Perez, a 37-year-old smoke shop worker from Manalapan, N.J., who bought a pair of tickets as soon as the closing was announced. He had seen the show twice before — once as an elementary school student, and once as an adult — but wanted to bring his mother, who had never been. They went in mid-October.“It felt like I was saying goodbye to an old friend, to someone I’ll never see again,” Perez said. “I was very nostalgic the whole time. There’s something about the experience of ‘Phantom’ that other shows don’t have.”Featuring soaring music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, “Phantom” is a Gothic melodrama about a masked music lover who haunts the Paris Opera House and becomes fixated on a young soprano. The Broadway production, directed by Hal Prince, is a large-scale spectacle, with a 27-person orchestra and a famously crashing chandelier, emblematic of an earlier era of hyper-romantic musical theater. In 1988, the year the show opened, it won seven Tony Awards, including the one for best musical.Christina DiCillo, a 31-year-old Queens resident who works in the advertising department at the website TheaterMania, is a “Phan” — what the show’s superfans call themselves — who has seen the show 46 times so far, and hopes to hit 50 before it closes. She and her twin sister saw a touring production of the show when they were growing up in Buffalo; now they have each seen it repeatedly in multiple locations. (Christina has seen it in London, Las Vegas and South Korea, among other places.)“I feel bad for people that are just discovering it now,” she said. “The music always gets me, and when I’m there I’m transported. I keep thinking, ‘Maybe this time is the time it won’t feel as magical,’ but every time the chandelier rises you get the chills down your spine. I see a lot of Broadway shows for fun, and some of them are better and some of them are worse, but that’s one I know I’m going to love every time.”The Broadway run has been seen by 19.9 million people and has grossed $1.3 billion; at the time of its closing it will have had 13,981 performances. According to the production, it has employed about 6,500 people, including 400 actors.Mackintosh said there would be no further extensions. Following the show’s closing, he said, the Shubert Organization is planning a renovation of the Majestic Theater, where “Phantom” has run since its opening. The show will mark the end of its Broadway run with an April 14 benefit performance to raise money for charities, and a final performance with an audience including alumni and friends of the show.“Phantom” had a lengthy North American touring life, playing 14,500 performances in 77 cities, and productions are currently onstage in London (where running costs were lowered by reducing the orchestra size) and in Melbourne, Australia. A version in Mandarin is scheduled to open in China next year, and the actor Antonio Banderas is working on a new Spanish-language production.“It’s not like the show is going anywhere — the show will be done and is being done all over the world, and I’m sure it will come back to America and we’ll do a tour in the future,” Mackintosh said.And will it return to Broadway? “I’m sure at some point it will,” he said. “It’s a great show, and the great classics do come back.” More

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      Review: In ‘KPOP,’ Korean Pop and Broadway Meet (Too) Cute

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      The worldwide sensation and American-style musical theater form an awkward alliance onstage.“A lot of people come to these things and they don’t even understand the language,” says Harry, a filmmaker who passes for the villain in the noisy yet skimpy new musical “KPOP.” “So what are they watching for?”Good question.For the record, the answer provided by Tiny, a member of a Korean pop group called RTMIS, is delivered, unlike a lot of the show, in English: “Perfection, Mr. Harry. OK?”And it’s true that if you enjoy the precision-drilled dancing, meticulous melisma and auto-tuned sentiments that have turned K-pop into a worldwide sensation over the past 10 years, you are likely to be among those cheering the musical’s Broadway incarnation, which opened on Sunday at Circle in the Square.But those who aren’t hard-core fans of the genre or don’t understand Korean — let alone those who saw the radically different and far superior Off Broadway version in 2017 — will have a harder time enjoying this one. For them, the musical is less an eye-opener than an ear-pounder, assiduously drowning out any ambitions it may once have had to be more.It can’t be lost on the creative team that in adapting their Off Broadway hit for a bigger and more conventional audience they courted the same fate as their fictional counterparts. Both then and now, the book of “KPOP,” by Jason Kim, concerns the efforts of a Seoul hit factory to push its stable of custom-groomed artists into crossover success in the United States. To do so, they are willing to sacrifice almost anything.That theme was given edgy, immersive expression in Teddy Bergman’s 2017 staging, produced by the experimental theater incubator Ars Nova in association with Ma-Yi Theater Company and Woodshed Collective. It imagined the audience as members of an itinerant focus group who, serving as emissaries of American taste, were led in small packs from space to space and given glimpses of what those sacrifices might mean.If some seemed silly, others were trenchant; an especially disturbing encounter involved a plastic surgeon. But by the time everyone assembled in one last room for a concert-cum-party, the giddy fun of the bubble-gummy songs (by Helen Park and Max Vernon) felt earned — even if the reversal was dramatically perplexing. Were we now celebrating what the rest of the show had encouraged us to disparage?That problem remains, with new ones added. To begin with, Bergman, directing again, faced an overwhelming difficulty in the fact that no Broadway theater could accommodate the immersive concept. Gabriel Hainer Evansohn’s set provides a partial solution: Instead of the audience moving, a tongue-shaped stage does, sliding back and forth bearing performers. And video screens mounted everywhere (Peter Nigrini is the projection designer) allow us to eavesdrop on the backstage action captured when Harry the filmmaker (Aubie Merrylees) goes rogue.Instead of the audience moving, a tongue-shaped stage does, sliding back and forth with the performers. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe narrative frame was rebuilt less successfully. The audience, no longer a focus group, merely watches as a K-pop impresario named Ruby (Jully Lee) prepares for a concert that will introduce her stable of acts to America. There are three of them: the five-woman RTMIS (pronounced Artemis), the eight-man F8 (pronounced fate) and the solo diva MwE (pronounced mu-WEE) — an orphan Ruby has raised, Mama Rose-style, for stardom.MwE (played by the actual K-pop star Luna) has been reconfigured entirely. Her problem is no longer that she is aging out of pop credibility but that she wants creative freedom and a normal life with her boyfriend (Jinwoo Jung). Ruby ruthlessly tries to quash those dangerous ideas — love and creativity are not things a K-pop star can afford, she says — even as she complains about MwE’s failure to perform from the heart.This is familiar material, thinly delivered, and so is the dissatisfaction of the members of RTMIS, which is so vague and hastily resolved I barely caught what it was. Only among the members of F8 does the conflict feel fresh and worthy of exploration in song: Its seven longtime members resent the “new kid,” Brad, brought in to juice their American rollout. Biracial and Connecticut-raised, Brad (Zachary Noah Piser) is seen by the others as inauthentic; he isn’t even fluent in Korean.The songs, unfortunately, do not take up the challenge of investigating that issue, or any other. They are all diegetic — actual numbers performed by the characters — and are thus connected to the story, as in a jukebox musical, by only the feeblest of threads. When Brad tells the filmmaker that he grew up neither Korean enough for some nor American enough for others, and proceeds to sing a song called “Halfway,” we may expect an exploration of those feelings. But no, it’s a love ballad, addressed to a girl: “Can you meet me halfway, baby?”The same problem derails “Korean Man,” a song for F8 that you may think from the setup will express their assertion of national pride. As we learn from the parts of it that are performed in English, though, it’s mostly about having the “baddest swagger” and “bein’ a bad, bad boy.”Jully Lee, left, plays a K-pop impresario named Ruby, and the real-life K-pop star Luna plays MwE.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith their link to the drama severed, and the drama in any case attenuated, the songs cease to function as they normally do in musical theater and collapse into a concert. That’s true even before the final 20 minutes of the show, when the filmmaker plot is summarily abandoned and, with it, any pretense of plot.So that flashback scene in which Ruby tells MwE, at 13, that she’s a “disaster” with “tree trunk legs,” and a choreographer shouts that she’s shaming her parents? Forget about it. Come hear the band. (Actually, there are only three instrumentalists.)By then, if you are not a fan, you may feel worn out by the aggressive mimicry of the K-pop performance style, not just in the mostly electronic arrangements but also in the minutely detailed choreography by Jennifer Weber, the squint-inducing lighting by Jiyoun Chang and the hundreds of can-you-top-this costumes by Clint Ramos and Sophia Choi. In that environment it’s hard to say whether Brad’s “Halfway” and MwE’s “Mute Bird” — acoustic songs simply staged and feelingly delivered — are actually lovely or merely a relief.In its remaking for Broadway I wish “KPOP” had preserved more moments like that: moments that allow you to consider what the excitement of K-pop (for those who feel it) and the expressiveness of American musical theater (likewise) can profitably say to each other. Both have their fans and no doubt their glories, as well as their limitations. But it seems to me that in introducing the two, a good place to have met would have been, well, halfway. “KPOP” still has far to go to get there.KPOPAt Circle in the Square, Manhattan; kpopbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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      After a 70-Year Run in London, ‘The Mousetrap’ Heads to Broadway

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      The enduring Agatha Christie whodunit, which has stumped West End theatergoers since 1952, will come to New York next year. (No spoilers, please.)For the past 70 years, London theatergoers have enjoyed trying to figure out the identity of the murderer in “The Mousetrap,” Agatha Christie’s enduring whodunit.Now, Broadway audiences will get a chance to try to solve it.On Friday, keen-eyed theatergoers discovered a website for the Broadway iteration, which announced that the murder mystery, whose London production holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s longest-running play, would make its Broadway debut some time in 2023.The website did not give details about the run’s start date, location or cast, but said the production’s set would be “a loving recreation” of the chintzy West End design and even borrow its wind machine, which is used to create a storm.On Friday, Adam Spiegel, the show’s British producer, confirmed the transfer of the show in a telephone interview from St. Martin’s Theater in London, where he was hosting a special matinee of “The Mousetrap” to celebrate its 70th birthday.Spiegel said he “was not ready” to provide any details of the Broadway run, but insisted it was going ahead. “Oh God, yes, it will happen in 2023,” he said.He is producing the show with Kevin McCollum, the Tony Award-winning producer who recently helped take “Six,” the hit musical about the wives of Henry VIII, from London to Broadway.It is unclear why “The Mousetrap,” which began as a radio play, has never reached Broadway before. For decades — even when it was merely middle-aged, and still far from becoming a septuagenarian — some critics have called it an anachronism, noting its old-fashioned staging, with creaking windows the closest thing to a special effect.A New York production did open Off Broadway in 1960, at the Maidman Playhouse. “‘The Mousetrap’ will not exactly shake you up, but neither will it let you down,” Lewis Funke wrote in The New York Times. But it never moved to Broadway.The original 1952 production starred Richard Attenborough and Sheila Sim, who were married. All told, the show has been performed over 28,915 times in London, the production said on Friday in a news release, and has been seen by over 10 million people. Queen Elizabeth II attended its 50th anniversary performance in 2002.A decade ago, when the show was celebrating its 60th anniversary, Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times that seeing it in London was like “being part of a field trip to a historic site,” because he found himself surrounded by so many tourists and schoolchildren. But he loved its cozy mystery. “Oh, bliss, it’s a living Clue board,” he said.“So, yes, ‘The Mousetrap’ creaks,” he wrote, “but old houses do; that’s part of their charm.”The show’s long West End run was interrupted by the lengthy coronavirus shutdown. Spiegel said the idea for the transfer to Broadway arose soon after “The Mousetrap” reopened in May 2021. Ever since, it “has probably had the most successful run of its life,” Spiegel said, “so suddenly we got a renewed sense of purpose about where else it might work, and New York seemed a good place.”“The Mousetrap” is set for a limited engagement, according to the website. Asked if that could end up actually being for 70 years, like in London, Spiegel demurred. “That might be a bit ambitious,” he said, “but we might as well aim for the moon.”Wherever “The Mousetrap” ends up being staged on Broadway, one thing about the production is guaranteed: Spiegel said that it would “of course” end every performance just as it does in London, with a member of the cast asking the audience to keep the identity of the killer to themselves. The no-spoilers plea has helped keep the ending a surprise for 70 years. More

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      Corey Hawkins, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in ‘Topdog/Underdog’ and the Art of Deception

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      “I know we brothers,” Lincoln tells his younger sibling, Booth, in Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog.” With a slight hesitation, he then asks, “but is we really brothers, you know, blood brothers or not, you and me, whatduhyathink?”The question, posed late in this dynamic two-hander, is both a catalyst and crisis for Parks’s most famous characters: Lincoln, or “Link,” a three-card monte con artist turned whiteface-wearing Abraham Lincoln impersonator, and Booth, a shoplifter and ladies’ man. And for the actors starring in the play’s Broadway revival, Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, the question takes on an even deeper meaning given their electrifying chemistry onstage.“What I love about this experience is that there’s so much respect back and forth between Corey and me,” Abdul-Mateen, 38, who portrays Booth, said. “It’s no ego, just respect.”Hawkins, 34, playfully quipped, “I have a little bit of ego.”In his review, Jesse Green praised both actors, noting Hawkins’s “astonishing verbal and physical performance” as Lincoln and how Abdul-Mateen, in his Broadway debut, “fully meets the challenge, banking sympathy with his sweetness.”Hawkins, left, as Lincoln and Abdul-Mateen as Booth in the acclaimed production, directed by Kenny Leon.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor those familiar with his more debonair roles in movies like “In the Heights” or “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Hawkins, a Tony nominee for “Six Degrees of Separation,” has so thoroughly transformed himself into a man downtrodden by bad choices and racism that he is virtually unrecognizable. Abdul-Mateen, who won an Emmy for “Watchmen,” intoxicates with his exuberant Booth, both flashy and naïve. We realize, too late, that his character has also been changing, and though his metamorphosis might be slower, it is even more jarring.Under the direction of George C. Wolfe and starring Jeffrey Wright and Yasiin Bey (the rapper formerly known as Mos Def), “Topdog/Underdog” first appeared on Broadway 20 years ago. That year, Parks became the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the play, and in 2018, The Times named it the best American play of the previous 25 years.Kenny Leon’s new production of “Topdog/Underdog” was a bit of a risk at a time when young Black playwrights are getting more opportunities on Broadway, and pioneers like Alice Childress and Adrienne Kennedy are finally getting their due. I’ve always considered Booth and Lincoln shaped by the language, swagger and blunted ambition of our earlier hip-hop generation, a sentiment that the show’s sound designer, Justin Ellington, underscores with songs by Pete Rock & CL Smooth, Lupe Fiasco, Kendrick Lamar and Nipsey Hussle.As a result, I wondered how Lincoln and Booth would appear as millennials and in a moment of greater gender fluidity and more nuanced masculinity than the one in which Parks originally conceived them. In an interview this month before one of their performances, Hawkins and Abdul-Mateen described their first encounters with “Topdog/Underdog,” why they think their characters struggles with masculinity still resonate, and how they care for each other as actors and friends in this industry.Unlike the sibling rivalry they’ve perfected onstage, the two men were genuinely excited to be together offstage, often ending their answers with a compliment for their co-star or by finishing each other’s sentences. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“I felt seen,” Abdul-Mateen said of first encountering the play.Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York TimesHawkins said he views “the play as an ode or love letter to Black men.”Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York TimesDid you know each other before the show?YAHYA ABDUL-MATEEN II I used to say that I met Corey once at a party in 2012. But it just might not be true. But I was familiar with Corey for a very long time. I went to Yale, and he went to Juilliard, and you know who’s who in the New York circles.COREY HAWKINS We all knew of each other. Before I got to Juilliard, I knew how many Black folks were in the program. There were only a certain number of us. But this was my first time meeting him. Of course, I knew his work.When did you first learn about “Topdog/Underdog”?HAWKINS I was a junior in high school when the play first premiered at the Public Theater in 2001, so it wasn’t until I was at Juilliard that I came across the show in a student production. A friend of mine, the actor Sheldon Woodley, was directing Amari Cheatom and Johnny Ramey in a version of this play. I was in my first year, wearing what they call “theater blacks” and moving the set pieces around the stage, so I was in the orbit of the play. And then I read it and fell in love with it from there.ABDUL-MATEEN It might have been in 2010 for me. At Berkeley [where he received a bachelor’s degree], a student was doing a director’s showcase of 15-minute scenes. I had one scene from “Othello,” then I did one scene from “Topdog/Underdog,” and I played Booth. It was the first time I read anything contemporary that felt like it was made for me. There was a line from the play that just stayed with me, “She gonna walk in here looking all hot and [expletive], trying to see how much she can get me to sweat, how much she can get me to give her before she gives me mines.” That made me think of my family, my cousins, my people and my friends. And I felt seen, so I said, “Oh, I got to go investigate Booth some more.”Twenty years ago, we had less nuanced conversations about Black masculinity than we are having now. Do you think that changes how we see these characters?HAWKINS I think naturally those differences will be evident because Yahya and I are Black men who live in this era versus 20 years ago. There have been shifts in the conversations around men’s roles and responsibilities, but how I, as an artist, see those things might be different than how my character, Link, sees them. I have to be true to the intentions of what Suzan-Lori Parks wrote, but I do see the play as an ode or love letter to Black men. We can be raw, right, wrong, joyous, funny, heartbreaking and unapologetically Black onstage.ABDUL-MATEEN I think Booth imagines himself as a romantic who knows about women. He’s probably not in the social circles that are speaking about toxic masculinity, but, like a lot of people I know, he fashions himself a gentleman. But, the beautiful thing about this play is that we get to be masculine and also play husband and wife, be silly, immature and vulnerable. We cry, laugh, talk about being hurt in our family, and tell lies designed to make us seem bigger than we are. And then we call each other out when we can see that we’re not succeeding. The test of the play is who comes out on top, so masculinity is always on display within that room.“There are moments in the play where I just get to listen, and I’m just like, “Man, this brother’s killing this right now,” Abdul-Mateen said of Hawkins’s performance.Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York TimesYour characters’ arcs are subtle and then, especially in Booth’s case, suddenly explosive. How do you prepare for these transformations?ABDUL-MATEEN I make it my responsibility never to see it coming. Because we don’t see our transformations coming in life. As for Booth, I’m trying to keep it positive for as long as possible since he doesn’t know he has a change coming. And as an actor, I also want to stay ahead of the audience so they can be hopeful for as long as possible. And then they’re surprised or caught off guard at the end, which is what Corey refers to as the “three-card monte” trick within the play.HAWKINS With three-card monte, you’re just moving the cards around and trying to react to what’s in front of you. I have to hold off for as long as possible with Link as well. He has to fight the drug that is the cards because there is nothing as powerful as when he picks up those cards one more time. And that’s what begins the downward slippery slope for him. But until then, Link and Booth are just bouncing up against each other, pushing until they can’t anymore. That makes it heartbreaking, tragic and surprising for me every night.Are there any instances in which you’ve been astounded by the other’s performance?ABDUL-MATEEN It happens all the time.HAWKINS All the time.ABDUL-MATEEN Show to show.HAWKINS Moment to moment.ABDUL-MATEEN There are moments in the play where I just get to listen, and I’m just like, “Man, this brother’s killing this right now.”HAWKINS Yeah, at the end of the play, every single show, night after night, I feel like I’m just sitting there watching you give a master class, and I wonder what you will do next. And that’s so exciting, man, because there’s not too many people who can access that range of emotion.Ultimately, this is a tragedy, but I was struck by the handshake and hug that you give each other onstage after the show ends. Why is that important for the audience to see?HAWKINS I know we’re both going through it, so I just think it’s a matter of knowing that I got another brother in the fight. We make it look easy, but it isn’t easy going up there. But, for me, I have to let Lincoln go and literally leave him on the floor. So, when I get up, I’m able to reset.ABDUL-MATEEN I am not Booth, and Corey is not Lincoln. When we take a bow, I am being myself. But, at the beginning, when that curtain goes up, only Corey and I are out there and putting on this show for two and a half hours. I have an obligation to get as close to my character’s truth as possible, and when I want to get that hurt out, I got to give it to Corey’s character. That’s my job. And it’s his job to do the same thing back to me. So, when we take our bows, I get to say, “I appreciate you for taking care of me and that this was a pleasure to do this.” More

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      Review: In This Solo ‘Christmas Carol,’ the Night Is Never Silent

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      Jefferson Mays stars in a Broadway adaptation of the Dickens classic, a one-man production that was originally live-captured for streaming.Has Jefferson Mays ever met a role — or a root vegetable — that he hesitated to take on? In the noisy, excitable one-man version of “A Christmas Carol” on Broadway, in a production that opened Monday at the Nederlander Theater, Mays stars as Ebenezer Scrooge, spirits of Christmas, assorted Cratchits, street folk, partygoers. He even plays a boiling potato, straining against a pot lid. At the festive board, Mays is side dish, main course, everything.Creepy and antic, gloomy and giddy, Michael Arden’s production capitalizes on every trick in Dickens’s story and then pulls a few new ones out of Scrooge’s top hat. Peace on earth? Mercy mild? Please. There are moments when you would swear that Mays couldn’t possibly be unaccompanied, so raucous is this “Carol.” But he is, more or less. (Danny Gardner briefly joins as a wordless specter.) Happily, Mays — who has also triumphed in multiple roles in “I Am My Own Wife,” for which he won a Tony Award, and “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” — is a master of manifold parts. If he were left alone, without lights, sound, projections or Dane Laffrey’s curving, swerving set, he might put across this fable even more convincingly.Dickens’s story was last seen on Broadway in 2019, in a production that had originated in London at the Old Vic. That version wasn’t perfect. (Jack Thorne wrote a script freighted with his usual psychologizing.) But under Matthew Warchus’s direction, that version emphasized community, how we might all join together — actors, audience members, even the people in the cheap seats — to furnish the holiday table. The show emphasized giving and receiving, literalizing the story’s message of generosity and care.This “Carol,” adapted by Mays, Arden and Mays’s wife, the actress Susan Lyons, and live-captured for streaming two years ago, is a lonelier affair. The script hews closely to the version that Dickens himself toured, with passages of prose narration that cut the goose-fat sentimentality with keen wit and gimlet detail. The broad outlines remain familiar: On Christmas Eve, Scrooge, an ungenerous money lender, is visited by several spirits who help him to understand the boy he was, the man he became and the ways in which his miserliness may reverberate into the future. It’s a kind of spectral exposure therapy. And fast-acting, too. A lone night cures him. In place of a communal gathering, we have one man’s journey toward self-actualization. Scrooge, at last, becomes an integrated person.Mays has always been a performer of incandescence and originality, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCan we say the same of Mays, a man who makes multiple personalities seem like a boon rather than a disorder? He has always been a performer of incandescence and originality. His red-cheeked flame typically burns too bright for realism, though he does sometimes adapt to a slightly lower voltage, as in the fact-based political drama “Oslo.” With his wide forehead and a broad, elastic face, he is an actor of unusual precision, but there’s a vein of waywardness to him, too, a wildness only barely contained. He can sketch a character lightly, with only a half turn and a flutter of his lashes, or debauch himself in orgies of gesture and expression. Rarely can he leave the set or props alone. Cutlery, curtains, the belt of his dressing gown: He makes exuberant use of them all.The production, conceived by Arden and Laffrey, magnifies that exuberance. Reviewing the 2020 streaming version, Jesse Green described it as “vastly effective as spooky entertainment.” And it is. But in person rather than onscreen, the eerie production elements often overwhelm. It begins with a fog-shrouded coffin and then a thunderclap — an abrupt sound effect that set many in the audience laughing. It also frightened a baby that some parent had unwisely brought. (This is not that kind of “A Christmas Carol.” Leave the babies and the under-12s at home.) The baby screamed so lustily that I missed a lot of the first scene and then had to race to catch up, so swiftly did Mays move through the text, sometimes narrating, sometimes embodying.And yet the design outpaces him. Ben Stanton’s lighting, flashy and subdued, bathes the stage in crepuscular tones. Joshua D. Reid’s sound design, some of it effective, much of it redundant, rarely ceases. Lucy Mackinnon supplies both highly original production design, like a flash of a ghostly horse, and superfluous embellishments, like a video of party guests glimpsed through a window. (The hair, wig and makeup design are by Cookie Jordan, but as with Laffrey’s costumes, they are barely visible in the murk.) Laffrey’s set is a whirling turntable. Several turntables? Beds, banquets, staircases and cemeteries swing in and out of view — Victoriana at a gallop and a risk for anyone inclined toward motion sickness.This “Carol” is a breathless entertainment. Is breathing such a bad thing? It might have been nice to have had more respite to appreciate Mays’s closefisted Scrooge, his liberal Cratchit and sweet Fan. But even at this velocity — Mays must run miles each show — he manages to particularize each of the Cratchit children and most of the guests at the Christmas party of Fred, Scrooge’s nephew. At the curtain call, Mays appears spent, but also deeply contented. Like Scrooge, he has had his catharsis and a workout besides. He can rest merry. The rest of us can escape to the relative quiet of Times Square.A Christmas CarolThrough Jan. 1 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; achristmascarollive.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Review: On Broadway, ‘& Juliet’ (& Britney & Katy & Pink)

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      Shakespeare’s tragedy becomes a girl-power romp in a cotton candy jukebox musical, featuring songs by the Swedish hitmaker Max Martin.They don’t even bother to hide the jukebox. It’s right there, out in the open, before the show starts: a chrome Cyclops glowering at you from the stage of the Stephen Sondheim Theater, of all places.Are you daring me, “& Juliet”?I have done everything a critic can do to stamp out the jukebox musical. I’ve called it a cockroach, a straitjacket, a leech, a dead fish. I’ve argued that, with few exceptions, it’s a form that’s satisfactory neither as music nor as theater, let alone the combination. I’ve stood proudly, even among my colleagues, as a denier of everything that shows like “& Juliet” typically stand for.So shoot me: I liked it. It felt so wrong; it felt so right.This even though “& Juliet,” which opened Thursday on Broadway after establishing itself as a hit in London, trails the faint odor of carpetbagging and brand extension that makes other examples of the genre — “Motown: The Musical,” “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical” and the inexcusable “Escape to Margaritaville” — so dispiriting. The show’s entire reason for being, after all, is to exploit the back catalog of Max Martin, the Swedish hitmaker behind Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” and 24 other No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 since 1998.That the songs are good to begin with — chunky, hooky, belty, dancy — is neither here nor there; they generally are, in shows like this, or there would be no audience to pander to. Also par for the course is the way “& Juliet” wedges them into unlikely contexts, aiming for laughs that are little more than Pavlovian reactions to anticipated familiarity.What saves “& Juliet” from being a lowest-common-denominator corporate byproduct is something else, something I never expected: wit.The wit operates on many levels in the director Luke Sheppard’s super-poppy production, including hilarious hybrid Elizabethan costumes (by Paloma Young) that feature a codpiece the size of a snapping turtle, cotton-candy lighting (by Howard Hudson) and playful sets (by Soutra Gilmour) situating the story in a century somehow combining the 16th and ours.Stark Sands, left, as Shakespeare and Betsy Wolfe as Anne Hathaway in the musical. The couple’s marital issues play out alongside Juliet’s new story.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut that’s just the surface; more important are some fundamental choices about what a jukebox can and should be. For one thing, “& Juliet” is not — like “Jersey Boys” and “The Cher Show” — a biomusical, chronicling artists’ ups and downs no matter how jimmied or flat-out falsified. Martin having no taste for the spotlight, it instead opts for an original story, if you can consider a reboot of “Romeo and Juliet” original. Making that story a fable — not unlike “Head Over Heels,” the Go-Go’s romp from 2018 — smartly relieves it of the pressure of reality.But the book, by David West Read, aims higher than that. Because so many of Martin’s biggest songs featured singers like Perry, Britney Spears, Pink and Ariana Grande — Taylor Swift’s are mysteriously absent from the show — the choice to focus on a young woman made sense. Yet Juliet, as Shakespeare wrote her, comes with some baggage, including the fact that by the sixth line of the prologue she’s dead.Undoing that fate became the musical’s animating principle and spine. In Read’s telling, Juliet (Lorna Courtney in a blow-you-away performance) doesn’t die but rather wakes up confused and a little emo following Romeo’s suicide. Cue “…Baby One More Time,” which she performs, still in her funeral dress but also sporting headphones and a Walkman, in front of her lover’s sarcophagus.That’s as grim as “& Juliet” gets — not very — because, as the erasure of Romeo from its title suggests, this girl is getting a glow-up. Here the show moves into meta territory, introducing Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, as the force behind the revision. “I mean, what do I know,” Anne (Betsy Wolfe) slyly tells cocky Will (Stark Sands). “Maybe she doesn’t kill herself just because he killed himself?”When Will insists (to knowing chuckles) that he writes his plays completely by himself, Anne simply grabs the quill until he agrees to share authorship. To raise the meta ante, they also write themselves into the tale. “& Juliet” then proceeds to process the Shakespeares’s marital issues through Juliet’s new story, toggling between Anne’s feminist uplift and Will’s squirrelly, writerly (and perhaps patriarchal) need to complicate it.So when the scene shifts to Paris, where Anne provides Juliet with a new boy to enjoy, that boy — François du Bois (Philippe Arroyo) — turns out to have eyes for someone else, whom Will has contrived to throw in his path. The plot now twists its way through several typical Shakespearean tropes, including comic mismatches, reunited lovers (Paulo Szot and Melanie La Barrie) and the return of yet another character (I won’t spoil who, but you can probably guess) from the grave.Philippe Arroyo, left, as François and Justin David Sullivan as May in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe songs that illustrate these developments — “Oops! … I Did It Again” when Juliet agrees to marry François, “Blow” for a big Paris ball — are mostly apt enough, though with nearly 30 of them squeezed into the show’s 150 minutes they eventually dig an aural rut. (The sound design by Gareth Owen doesn’t help, with its arena-style reverb in a relatively small theater.) And some have the tang of reverse engineering, as when Juliet’s nonbinary best friend, May, is given Spears’s “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.”Nevertheless, May (Justin David Sullivan) is a typically clever modern gloss on Shakespeare — a playwright, as Anne points out, who is “basically synonymous with gender-bending.” And if three of the couples, liberated by Juliet’s liberation, achieve surprisingly normative happy endings, the girl herself ends the show uncommitted, still trying to “own her choices,” apparently by not making any.Most of the comedy derives from similar tensions; though “& Juliet” is jokey, and its authorship is entirely male, its feminist critique is real enough, winking alternately at Shakespeare’s assumptions and ours. At one point, Anne summarily up-ages Juliet by about a decade because she’s “not going clubbing with a 13-year-old” — nor (it goes unsaid) letting a 13-year-old marry.Indeed, it’s Anne who provides most of the wit, not just verbal but philosophical. And it’s Wolfe’s performance — capped with a roof-raising rendition of the Celine Dion hit “That’s the Way It Is” — that gives the show its heart, an organ too often unheard from in musicals entirely focused on the ear.I could have used a bit more brain, though; “& Juliet” sometimes seems suspicious of its own intelligence, like a nerd invited to the cool kids’ party, only to get drunk and vomit in the pool.The overcompensation — two confetti explosions? — is unnecessary. Jukebox musicals may still be bottom feeders, but, as “& Juliet” proves, there are sometimes small treasures to be found in the murk. And as long as they’re going to keep arriving regardless, I have to admit (citing Martin’s hit for those theater critics the Backstreet Boys) I want it that way.& JulietAt the Stephen Sondheim Theater, Manhattan; andjulietbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More