If/Then

Richard Rodgers Theatre, New York City

(877) 250-2929

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If Idina Menzel weren’t in it, Broadway’s newest hit musical “would be pretty much unwatchable,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. Ten years after her last bow as Wicked’s Elphaba—and just several weeks after John Travolta accidentally rechristened her “Adele Dazeem” during this year’s Oscars ceremony—the Tony-winning supernova “looks and sounds sensational” in a role tailored to her talents. Unfortunately, the show’s story about a 38-year-old divorcée and two paths her life might take “strings together platitudes in place of a plot.” Menzel is expert at “taking vanilla material and giving it nuance and even a sly, sardonic edge,” but she can’t prevent the songs and “banal” script from asking the same pseudophilosophical questions “again and again and again.”

The characters do talk a bit much about the choices they make, said Jesse Green in New York magazine. But real New Yorkers do the same, and Brian Yorkey’s “astonishingly clever” script also surprises again and again. From the moment that Menzel’s Elizabeth meets up with two old friends one Saturday and has to make the seemingly inconsequential decision of whom to follow for the afternoon, her very identity splits: On one path, she becomes known as “Beth,” a career-focused city planner; on the other, she’s relationship-focused “Liz,” who pairs up with an Army doctor played by James Snyder. For viewers, it’s work to follow which reality we’re in at times, but “every single thing that happens” is a surprise, and the ramifications of Elizabeth’s initial choice “keep subramifying in smart ways.” If/Then isn’t perfect, but “in its formal daring, and in the intelligence of its execution, it’s one of the most compelling new musicals in years.”

There’s no doubt Menzel’s young female fan base will identify with it, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Like Elphaba, Elizabeth is “prickly, smart-mouthed, loyal, and neurotic,” and she’s been given a clean, polished, almost antiseptic city in which to work out the big question of what kind of person she’s going to be. Menzel also gets an 11 o’clock number about thwarted love in which she lets go “a smashing climactic lament.” But until then, the drama feels lifted from a Lifetime movie, and the score’s folk-inflected pop songs are “pretty much interchangeable.” One’s titled “Some Other Me,” another “You Never Know,” and still another “What Would You Do?” You may not know what’ll happen next, but “you’ll never be in any doubt whatsoever as to what the central theme is.”