Booth Theatre, New York
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Here’s hoping this one-woman show is the first step in Bette Midler’s “reconquest of the New York stage,” said Elisabeth Vincentelli in the New York Post. To be fair, the actress’s role here isn’t all that different from her own outsize persona. She’s playing another “Divine Miss M”—in this case, real-life movie agent Sue Mengers. Midler’s Mengers passes the 90-minute show lounging on a couch, puffing on a joint, “pumping out profane one-liners,” and coming to terms with the defection of her Rolodex’s crown jewel, Barbra Streisand. So what if the role isn’t a bold departure? The show proves “wickedly entertaining precisely because performer and material are so perfectly matched.”
It’s certain to elicit one of two reactions, said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. If you love Hollywood gossip, you’ll “eat up this stuff as if you were a star-struck caterer.” But you also might find Sue and her problems insufferably petty, “the consequence of too much money sloshing around the wrong priorities.” Still, as we witness a player in decline, writer John Logan “does not force-feed us pathos,” said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. Mengers laments the rise of a new breed of bottom-line agencies, but it’s clear that’s not her only problem. “Midler subtly conveys that Sue has begun to feel the soft sting of her feisty heedlessness beginning to bite back.” In doing so, she gives Broadway audiences “the most lusciously entertaining performance” of the season.
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August 24 editorial cartoonsCartoons Sunday's political cartoons include Putin at Donald Trump's circus, gallons of whitewash, and a foldable cartoon
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5 Post Office-approved cartoons about mail-in votingCartoons Artists take on reverse logic, Putin's election advice, and more
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The battle of the weight-loss drugsTalking Point Can Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly regain their former stock market glory? A lot is riding on next year's pills
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If/Thenfeature Tony-winning Idina Menzel “looks and sounds sensational” in a role tailored to her talents.
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Rocky
feature It’s a wonder that this Rocky ever reaches the top of the steps.
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Love and Information
feature Leave it to Caryl Churchill to create a play that “so ingeniously mirrors our age of the splintered attention span.”
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The Bridges of Madison County
feature Jason Robert Brown’s “richly melodic” score is “one of Broadway’s best in the last decade.”
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Outside Mullingar
feature John Patrick Shanley’s “charmer of a play” isn’t for cynics.
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The Night Alive
feature Conor McPherson “has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension.”
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No Man’s Land
feature The futility of all conversation has been, paradoxically, the subject of “some of the best dialogue ever written.”
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The Commons of Pensacola
feature Stage and screen actress Amanda Peet's playwriting debut is a “witty and affecting” domestic drama.