Theater

The London premiere of Leopoldstadt in 2020 made this decade the seventh in which a new Tom Stoppard play has been delivered unto the world, and since the playwright has suggested it may be his last, some words about his legacy seem to be in order. Stoppard is often regarded as the greatest English playwright of the later twentieth century. Harold Pinter is the other popular choice. Both men picked up where Pirandello, Beckett and the absurdists left off. Their respective approaches form two sides of the same post-existentialist coin. Stoppard made his name with the expanded footnote: plays in which a sidelight takes center stage, often bristling with comedy, like the metatheatrical Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) or The Real Inspector Hound (1968).

It was probably inevitable that the culture wars would come for Hamilton. The show had something for everyone — parents and kids, pop-culture enthusiasts and history buffs, right and left. It was the unifying, twenty-first-century Great American Musical, if we could keep it. We couldn’t, of course, and the dustup over a rogue Hamilton production in early August at The Door Christian Fellowship Church of McAllen, Texas, gives one indication why. The non-denominational church, situated not ten miles from the Mexican border at the very southern tip of Texas, presented a modified version, censoring risqué sections and making secular bits Jesus-centric. One scene has our hero Alex repenting his sins (his capitalism?

The new Macbeth on Broadway starring Daniel Craig ends up about where you’d expect: a Macbond unhinged and raving about Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane, splattering the castle walls with the gore of his enemies and pummeling Macduff mercilessly until the showstopping reveal that the latter was “of no woman born” but, in fact, “from his mother’s womb/ untimely ripped.” Omit the full-cast kumbaya circle at the end (a too-sweet cherry atop a bloody sundae), and the denouement essentially gives you Shakespearean drama at its most unimaginative — as a Hollywood action blockbuster. This isn’t to say that Shakespeare cries out for bold reimagining. Nor is there anything wrong with giving people what they came to see. It is Daniel Craig, after all.

"This mob is not the people,” declared Henry J. Raymond in his paper, the New York Times, about the Draft Riots in July 1863. Blue-collar workers in New York, mostly Irish, had begun by protesting a new conscription law, but anti-war sentiment quickly became a pretext for widespread destruction, looting and racial violence. Blacks were hunted, their homes and businesses trashed, and scores of them lynched. Raymond wanted no quarter for the rioters: “Give them grape[shot] and plenty of it.” The new musical Paradise Square imagines a “little bit of Eden” in the Five Points slum of downtown Manhattan, July 1863, where, we are told, blacks and Irish did not just coexist peacefully for a time but flourished.

On the same Broadway block as MJ: The Musical is the tale of another song-and-dance man hailing from Gary, Indiana: Harold Hill, doctor of music, huckster of band equipment and Meredith Willson’s titular Music Man (1957). Well, that’s not quite the case: Professor Hill is a lying crook, and his Hoosier backstory is a fabricated ruse. He claims to be a graduate of the Gary Conservatory of Music, class of ’05, but the town of Gary was only incorporated in 1906. Played by Hugh Jackman, this smooth criminal sails into River City, Iowa, promising the Ewarts and Eulalies of the town he’ll make disciplined bandspeople out of their darling Winthrops and Amarylisses.

The Venerable Bede writes of a pagan priest in seventh-century England who, sizing up the meager life of man, compares it to a sparrow flying through a well-warmed dining hall on a stormy winter night. The priest admits to knowing nothing about the cold darkness before or after the brief passage. He can only speak to the time the bird spends in the light. In Girl from the North Country (open run at the Belasco Theatre), the season is the Great Depression in 1933, and the dining hall is a flophouse in Duluth, Minnesota, where down-and-outers blow through like so many birds on the wind. The innkeeper, Nick Laine (Jay O.

Six, a British musical about the wives of Henry VIII, is a scrupulously specious masterclass in frivolity. These onetime queens, blinged and bedazzled as fabulous pop-diva Kweens, undertake a six-way singing competition to decide who had “the biggest, the firmest, the fullest... load of B.S. to deal with” from their kingly husband. Backed by a live band, the sextet’s set amounts to the love child of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Super Bowl halftime show. Those hoping for revisionist revenge fantasy will leave disappointed. Those seeking dramatic tension, character development, tragedy — anything having to do with the second half of the phrase “musical theater” — won’t find it here.