Maybe Happy Ending review

Helen J. Shen and Darren Criss in Maybe Happy Ending

As the world ponders the impact that artificial intelligence will have on humans, Maybe Happy Ending, a charming, whimsical new Broadway musical inverts that premise, exploring the harm that well-meaning yet inconsistent mortals could cause their devoted robotic pals. Now playing at the Belasco, it's easily the most enchanting new musical to arrive on Broadway this year.

It's set in South Korea, where Will Aronson and Hue Park's musical already had a successful run. This English-language version stars Emmy winner Darren Criss as Oliver, a humanoid model 3 Helperbot merrily passing the days in his room. He listens to jazz, talks to his plant and waits for his owner to send for him.

Oliver's orderly world is thrown into chaos when model 5 Claire (sensitively played by Helen J. Shen) shows up at his door in need of a charger. Because she's a newer model, Claire is a bit more advanced when it comes to understanding humans — and she realizes they've both been "retired," aka sent to live out their days in a community for old tech until their batteries run out because replacement parts have been discontinued.

Claire doesn't have the heart (or any heart for that matter) to shatter Oliver's sunny illusions, but she does join him on a journey to visit his former owner, James (Marcus Choi), which proves life-changing for both. And yes, it's clear that Oliver and Claire have the capacity to love.

Aronson's music and Park's lyrics are at their best when they're penning jazz numbers for Oliver's favorite musician, Gil Brentley (Dez Duron). Under the direction of Michael Arden, both Criss and Shen deliver touching, evocative performances. Criss, in particular excels at maintaining Oliver's stilted movements throughout the show'a hour and 45 minutes. 

And the show looks beautiful thanks to set, video and projection design by Dane Laffrey and George Reeve. Oliver's and Claire's worlds begin small, with both confined to their small studio apartments. But as they venture out into the open, and experience the beauty of nature, the set expands to fill the stage as their emotions are released.

How ironic that such humanity should occur in a show with a pair of robots as its main characters!

Yellow Face review

Daniel Dae Kim and Ryan Eggold in Yellow Face

As debates about identity and representation abound in the entertainment industry, Yellow Face, David Henry Hwang's 17-year-old play centered on those subjects, is getting its Broadway premiere courtesy of the Roundabout Theatre Company, with a pair of TV stars leading the cast. Semi-autobiographical and broadly funny, it touches on topics that seem even more timely today, although some of its explorations are only skin deep.

Hwang even writes himself into the play. Daniel Dae Kim (of Lost fame) stars as a semi-fictious version of the playwright — who got himself embroiled in one of Broadway biggest brouhahas of the 1990s: the casting of white actor Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian character in the Broadway musical Miss Saigon. Hwang, who had recently made his own Broadway breakthrough, winning the Best Play Tony Award for M. Butterfly in 1988, was one of the artists who publicly spoke out against producer Cameron Mackintosh's decision to have Pryce play the role he'd originated in London, and what unfolds over Yellow Face's one-hour-45-minute run time is an exploration of racial identity and the American dream in a country that's anything but color-blind.

Kim narrates a tale that begins as farce but develops into something deeper. In the wake of the Miss Saigon saga, "David" writes a play and accidentally casts a white actor, Marcus, played by former New Amsterdam lead Ryan Eggold, to play an Asian character.   

As David tries to cover up, and then extricate himself from, this dicey situation, we're introduced to his father, Henry (Francis Jue, reprising the role he originated in the 2007 production), a banker who emigrated from China and appears to be the embodiment of the American dream, until a congressional investigation tries to cast doubt on his loyalty to the U.S. 

Director Leigh Silverman, who also helmed the Off Broadway production, adeptly blends the play's humorous moments with its more serious intent, using a diverse ensemble that crosses races and genders to play their parts. Hwang's exploration of how racial identity can still play a role in who is considered an American today remains a potent topic for discussion, and drama.

The Roommate review

Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow in The Roommate

So many questions linger after catching the star-studded Broadway production of The Roommate at the Booth Theatre. The chief one being: Why in the world would Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone, two septuagenarian acting giants, want to waste their talents on a play as mediocre as Jen Silverman's pseudo-dark comedic two-hander.  

It certainly gives both ladies ample opportunity to be bad gals, which may have been part of the attraction. What begins as a monetary arrangement when Bronx gal Robyn (LuPone) moves into the Iowa home of Sharon (Farrow) becomes an off-kilter relationship. Sharon, a mousy divorcee soon becomes entranced by the colorful Robyn. (She's a lesbian! She smokes —and grows her own — pot.)

At this point it sounds like it's going to be one of those female friendship stories. But this dramedy, directed efficiently by Jack O'Brien, soon takes an incomprehensibly dark turn: When Sharon learns about Robyn's criminal criminal past, instead of being repelled, she's mesmerized — and wants to get in on the action?!

And we're not talking naughty acts of vandalism or petty thievery — but concocting phone scams to defraud people. Soon Sharon is buying a rifle from Walmart, and any semblance of character development is shot. It's a shame because Farrow, at age 79, imbues a character that, on the surface, could be as dull as Midwestern dirt with heartfelt emotion and the soul of someone yearning for connection. 

LuPone, at 75, is fine as Robyn, a woman who longs to right her old mistakes instead of making more of them, but both are hampered by writing that makes these characters increasing two-dimensional as the play's hour and 40 minutes drag on.  

Sharon starts off as a sad, pathetic creature and for all that she goes through in the month she lives with Robyn, remains the same as the end. That's an interesting premise, but instead of getting there with real character development, The Roommate takes the easy way out with crime drama cliches. Both Farrow and LuPone deserve better. 

Table 17 review

Eisen-Martin and Young in Douglas Lyons' new play.

A talented cast trods over tired territory in the world premiere of Table 17, Douglas Lyons’ darker twist on Black romantic comedies. This 85-minute play with a cast of three, which kicks off MCC Theater’s new season, boasts an excellent cast, notably recent Tony winner Kara Young (Purlie Victorious), but ultimately, only the close friends and family of these characters will really be concerned about what happens to them.

In a program note the playwright encourages audience involvement. Characters like Young’s bouncy Jada not only talk to the audience, they ask for our feedback about matters ranging from what they’re wearing on a date to whether they said or did the right thing. The actor-audience connection is enhanced by placing some theatergoers at tables that surround the main playing area, on which the titular one sits.

It’s at a restaurant where Jada and the more pragmatic Dallas (Biko Eisen-Martin) meet long after their breakup. The present gives way to the past as they talk about old times, and the actors replay their characters’ history, from chance meeting to cheating. How did they get engaged only to end up apart? The answers aren’t terribly scintillating. He worked too much trying to jump-start his music career; she had an affair with a flight-attendant coworker, played by Michael Rishawn, who also garners a load of laughs playing the beleaguered restaurant host.

Eisen-Martin may have the least colorful character to play, but his grounded performance gives Dallas’s struggles resonance. Director Zhalion Levingston spearheads a lively production that at times appears to be trying too hard to make up for a slim script. To Lyons’ credit, his story isn’t neatly wrapped up at the end like in the rom-coms of the Hallmark Channel, but it plays like the theatrical equivalent of a grazing plate rather than a full-course meal. 

Presidents and Prime Suspects

Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison

Jane Tennison got me thinking about Hillary Clinton. In the days before the U.S. presidential election, I've been watching some of the old Helen Mirren Prime Suspects, and it's striking how similar the sexism she faced in Britain in the 1990s -- as she rose through the ranks as a detective chief inspector and detective superintendent -- is to what Clinton's experiencing as she fights to become the first female president.

Tennison had to supervise and be supervised by men who subtly and overtly weren't comfortable working with a smart, competent, pushy, ambitious high-ranking woman.

I sympathize with her and admire her tenacity, yet, as with Clinton, am exasperated by some of the things she does. In Clinton's case that means everything from her "basket of deplorables" line to those email problems you may have heard something about. In Tennison's it can be her refusal to explore a line of inquiry in a homicide because she doesn't want to consider that she might have put someone away for a crime he didn't commit and her subsequent behavior when she's taken off the case (even if she ends up saving a life in the process).

Hillary Clinton as herself

Like Tennison, Clinton isn't just a victim of sexism. Yes, that plays a role, but she also a flawed individual who makes mistakes that hurt her. Would she make the same choices, and would her mistakes have quite same force if she were one of the boys? Would things be different if both women had sunnier dispositions and were more "feminine"? In Jane's fictional world, those questions make for great drama. In Hillary's real world, they scare the crap out of me because they could put Donald Trump in the White House (though that seems increasingly unlikely).

In the Prime Suspect where it looks like she might have put the wrong man behind bars, Jane becomes the subject of an internal affairs investigation courtesy of her nemesis Thorndike (Stephen Boxer), who even visits the man she's seeing, a psychologist, to try to get dirt on her. After Jane's reputation has been restored, she dances with Thorndike at an official function and lets him know she's on to him. It ends with a drink being tossed in someone's face in response to a sexist comment.

When Hillary wins the election on Tuesday -- and I'm thinking of it more as a when than an if -- how I would love to see her do some drink tossing!

The Quirks of Search

Maryann Plunkett, Jay O. Sanders, Lynn Hawley and Amy Warren in Richard Nelson's What Did You Expect?

Here's an interesting discovery I made the other day — at least it's interesting if you enjoy searching for things on the internet and uncovering tricks to find what you're looking for.

I wanted to see all the articles The New York Times had written about Richard Nelson's trilogy The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family, so I began by using the Times site to search for "Richard Nelson" for the past 12 months, putting his name in quotes so that I wouldn't get results in which a "Richard" and a "Nelson" weren't next to each other. (They're both common names, and I didn't want any reviews of, say, Judd Nelson in a production of Richard III.)

But the only two articles relating to Richard Nelson the playwright that came up were a review of the first play in the series, Hungry, and a story about the Public Theater's 2016-17 season that mentioned the other two plays, What Did You Expect? and Women of a Certain Age. That was odd, because by this time What Did You Expect? had opened and the review should have shown up.

So I tried searching for "Richard," "Nelson" and "Gabriels" separately, no quotes involved, and this time the What Did You Expect? review came up. When I read it, I understood why. In critic Ben Brantley's first mention of Nelson's full name he writes, "the title clan of Richard Nelson's The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family has returned..." The apostrophe "s" is the problem. If you search for "Richard Nelson" (in quotes), the search engine will not give you any "Richard Nelson's."

At other points in the review the author-director is referred to by his last name, which is why the article came up when "Richard" and "Nelson" were used separately in the second search.

Still, if I hadn't known something was missing I wouldn't have done the second search, and I would have missed it. If you're searching the site for research — how many times did The New York Times mention this person or that company? — you have to look out for these quirks to get an accurate measure. One solution: Search the Times site via Google. In this case you would use the terms: "richard nelson" site:nytimes.com. You will get the complete results — whether the name is attached to an apostrophe "s" or not — without having to sift through lots of useless ones.

More Morse as Endeavour and Lewis Return

Shaun Evans and Roger Allam in Endeavour

I'm always excited for the return of PBS's Oxford-set Morse spinoffs, Endeavour and Inspector Lewis, which make up this summer's Masterpiece Mystery! season beginning June 19. Kevin Whately will be saying goodbye to Robbie Lewis, a character he first played in 1987, when Lewis was a sergeant to John Thaw's Inspector Morse. But Shaun Evans, Roger Allam and the cast of Endeavour is already filming the series's fourth installment, set in 1960s Oxford, when Morse was just detective constable.

Small confession: I've already watched and enjoyed all of season three, and it's quite a bit quirkier than previous seasons. Here's what to expect...

1) The show owes a debt to Hollywood. Each of the four self-contained 90-minute episodes ("Ride," "Arcadia," "Prey" and "Coda" ), all written by Russell Lewis, references a classic Hollywood film: The Great Gatsby, The Graduate, Jaws and Dog Day Afternoon.

2) Not all of the regular cast members will last through all four episodes. To avoid spoilers, the less said about this the better.

3) There's a new girl on the force. Add to a show that already has characters named Thursday, Bright and Strange, WPC Shirley Trewlove. Played by Dakota Blue Richards, she shows up in the second episode.

4) The colorscape is getting brighter. And warmer. As the series movies into 1967, the sets and costumes are becoming a kaleidoscope of reds, yellows and oranges. Also, previous seasons were filmed in fall or winter; this one was shot in the summer, so things are decidedly greener.

5) But the detectives still have their dark colors. That's literally and figuratively. Season two ended with Endeavour Morse (Evans) arrested for murder and his commanding officer, DI Fred Thursday (Allam), fighting for this life after being shot, so they're still carting around plenty of baggage — and still wearing those oppressive suits. 

Fortunately, they're also still living in an era when lunch in a pub could be accompanied by cigarettes and afternoon beers...