What to See on (and Off)(and Off-Off) Broadway

Gutenberg! The Musical

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In Previews
Running time: 2:00 with intermission
James Earl Jones Theatre (138 W. 48th St.)
Opens October 12. Through January 28, 2024.

A long-running early-aughts Off Broadway success by Beetlejuice’s Anthony King and former New York critic Scott Brown, now on Broadway starring Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells. It’s a meta musical comedy about two hapless guys who really want to put on a show about Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of movable type; never mind that they haven’t done much research or figured out how to make a show or, y’know, developed much in the way of actual skills.

Merrily We Roll Along

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In Previews
Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Hudson Theatre (141 W. 44th St.)
Opens October 10. Through March 24, 2024.

Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s backward-through-time musical—an epic flop in 1981 despite its gorgeous score, well-wrought characters, and run of world-class songs — is mythic among musical-comedy enthusiasts: When on earth will this show get the production it deserves? When this version ran last year at New York Theatre Workshop, starring Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez, and Daniel Radcliffe with an eye toward transferring uptown, most signs suggested that it could finally be the one (especially because of Mendez, who was excellent as the saddening, difficult Mary Flynn). Is this Our Time?

➼ Review: What’s to Discuss, Old Friends? Merrily We Roll Along Is Back.

Melissa Etheridge: My Window

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Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Circle in the Square Theatre (235 W. 50th St.)
Opened September 28. Through November 19.

Melissa Etheridge, genially self-deprecating in leather pants, kicks off her solo show My Window by announcing that she’s going to “tell you a story about how the hell I got here,” leaning into the aesthetic frisson of a folk-infused rock star taking over a Broadway house. Instead of glamming it up for the Great White Way, she pokes light fun at the grandeur of it all. Over the course of My Window, as Etheridge travels through own biography, she alternates between the approachable and the glamorous, switching between the modes of an extremely lucky and talented star and the kind of chatty aunt who might slip you a weed gummy and tell you mildly salacious stories at a family Thanksgiving. She spins a tale well, and is great with specific detail — she describes a girl she had a crush on in high school’s rust-tinted green eyes — though as her series of loosely-strung anecdotes progresses, it becomes harder for her to make them all cohere. Whenever she goes all out and really lays into a song, everything clicks together.

➼ Review: Melissa Etheridge Takes the Aw-Shucks Road to Broadway

Back to the Future

Running time: 2:40 with intermission
Winter Garden Theatre (1634 Broadway, nr. 49th St.)
Opened August 3, 2023

The three Back to the Future films are completely infused into American moviegoers’ consciousness. The musical and its actors labor under that weight, and instead of commenting on the originals, they deliver a beat-by-beat translation of its set pieces. Big projection screens dominate the set, providing for cuts between Doc and Marty, the score is basically the one you know, and the actors are really there only to sit in a car and on a ledge and shout lines you’ll recognize. But let’s be clear: Ticket sales, in the early going at least, have taken off like a flying DeLorean.

➼ Review: You Made a Musical … Out of a DeLorean?

Here Lies Love

Running time: 1:30, no intermission
Broadway Theatre (1681 Broadway, at 53rd St.)
Opened July 20, 2023

On the dance floor of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s Here Lies Love, for which the Broadway Theatre was remade into a disco, you’ll often find yourself just a few feet away from the the characters of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, who perform on platforms above the audience, singing songs built from political sloganeering and interacting with the crowd. In part because of that immersion, Here Lies Love is a great, unsettling time, its music irresistible to a totalitarian degree. The point is to get the audience grooving to the synthy, catchy messaging of dictatorship with enough moral dissonance to make your stomach churn as your feet keep moving — a That’s how they get you parable.

➼ Review: Here Lies Love Is an Unsettlingly Good Time
➼ How Here Lies Love Turned Broadway Theatre Into a Disco
➼ Imelda Is More Than a Woman in Here Lies Love

Shucked

Running time: 2:15 with intermission
Nederlander Theatre (208 W. 41st St.)
Opened April 4, 2023

It’s a musical about … corn. There are jokes about corn and songs about corn and puns about corn often containing even more jokes about corn, and Shucked succeeds by keeping so hyperfocused on its aims that you can’t think about anything else. Led by a creative team that includes Nashville songwriters Shane McAnally and Brandy Clark and New York theater folk including book writer Robert Horn (of Tootsie) and director Jack O’Brien (whose career covers everything from Hairspray to lot of Tom Stoppard), Shucked is, broadly, a parable about city folk learning to appreciate the corn-fed wisdom of people in the heartland (and vice versa). Shucked wants to bring the country together over corn — both the food and type of comedy. To that end, it goes in one end and out the other wholly itself.

➼ Review: At Shucked, the Corniness Is as High as an Elephant’s Eye

Sweeney Todd

Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre (205 W. 46th St.)
Opened March 26, 2023

Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Victorian gothic masterwork has been revived on Broadway twice since premiering in 1979, both times on a smaller scale than Hal Prince’s megagrand original. Now director Thomas Kail has ratcheted Sweeney all the way back up with a cast of 25, an immense set overshadowed by a crane, and a 26-player orchestra. He’s not presenting social commentary as much as he’s enveloping us in a collective nightmare. His London is full of phantoms slipping in and out of the fog — especially Josh Groban’s Sweeney, who glints but does not gleam in the darkness. Annaleigh Ashford, as Mrs. Lovett, has gone completely feral, happily committing above and beyond whatever’s asked, and it works well within the context of Kail’s heightened staging.

➼ Review: A Sweeney Todd That Leans Into the Great Black Pit

A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical

Running time: 2:15 with intermission
Broadhurst Theatre (235 W. 44th St.)
Opened December 4, 2022

A Beautiful Noise is the latest in a run of bio-musicals about singer-songwriters that seem to say, Have no fear — if you tire of the plot, please know that the songs you recognize will be coming soon. The whole experience is framed by conversations between an older Neil (Will Swenson, who will be in the show through October 29) and his psychologist, who is pressuring him to open up by analyzing his lyrics. There’s poignancy to seeing a cloistered, depressive man like Diamond try to articulate how metaphorical storm clouds descend upon him whenever he’s not onstage. But because the focus here is really on the hits, there’s only so deep these analyses can go. And do they lead us around to “Sweet Caroline”? Oh yes, they do. Twice.

➼ Review: I Am, I Said (I Guess): A Beautiful Noise

Some Like It Hot

Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Shubert Theatre (225 W. 44th St.)
Opened December 11, 2022. Through December 30, 2023.

Director Casey Nicholaw (The Book of Mormon, Mean Girls) has fitted together the stage adaptation of Billy Wilder’s film so tightly it’s nearly vacuum-sealed. The production is relentlessly technically dazzling: Scene flows into song flows into scene flows into key change flows into dramatic set change flows into inevitable comedic tap-dance sequence flows into key change and on and on. It’s most of the way to being an incredible musical: It just needs to, you know, make you feel anything more than abstract admiration. Everything goes so smoothly that there’s hardly any friction at all — and you need friction to generate heat.

➼ Review: Well, Nobody’s Perfect: Some Like It Hot on Broadway

& Juliet

Running time: 2:30, with intermission
Stephen Sondheim Theatre (124 W. 43rd St.)
Opened November 17, 2022

We all know Juliet dies at the end of Romeo & Juliet, but what if she didn’t? If you were to take that idea and infuse it with the feeling of getting day-drunk on cheap rosé, you’d get & Juliet. The aggressively effervescent musical endeavors to wash you away in the blushy delights of pop feminism and hit singles and middle-school-level Shakespeare jokes. When someone belts the chorus of “Since U Been Gone” at you, it is impossible not to feel intoxicated. In other moments, such as when any character tries to explain any part of the show’s plot, you may feel as if the world has started to spin desperately out of control. You’ll have that ephemeral thrill of being alive on a dance floor and end up with a hangover.

➼ Review: In & Juliet, Verona Goes Pop!

Kimberly Akimbo

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Running time: 2:20 with intermission
Booth Theatre (222 W. 45th St.)
Opened November 10, 2022

A peculiar pleasure in watching Kimberly Akimbo comes from thinking the musical could not possibly pull off what it is trying to accomplish and being proved wrong. The premise is at once straightforward and surreal: A 16-year-old girl is in high school in 1990s New Jersey, living with a rare disease that makes her age at four to five times the normal rate. Upon that, there are layers of absurdity: her kookily self-involved parents, a Greek chorus of classmates in show choir, her deliriously criminal aunt. By the time the script has introduced a plot involving check fraud, it seems nearly unstable. But then it all syncs up: The chaos of Kimberly Akimbo clicks into place, and the show reveals that it’s been dealing in simple, unbearable truths all along.

➼ Review: Kimberly Akimbo Skates Uptown, Anagrams Intact

MJ

Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Neil Simon Theatre (250 W. 52nd St.)
Opened February 1, 2022

Is it possible to make a show about a man whose memory dwells under deep shadow? Of course. But you have to make it good. MJ, the Michael Jackson bio-musical, is on the defensive the entire time, making a pretense of telling the singer’s story while loudly and pointedly bracketing which parts of the story are available for sale. Jackson’s lyrics often contain complaint and justification, and the show picks up his frustration with the tabloids while using MTV journalists to frame and structure the story. The “plot,” so much as it exists, involves documentarians overhearing troubling conversations about Michael’s dependence on painkillers and their decision to use this information. Oh? It’s important to include the dark sides of a man’s character when you tell his story? The irony is so ripe here it has rotted.

➼ Review: MJ Exists in a Hyperbaric Chamber of Denial

Six

Running time: 1:20, no intermission
Lena Horne Theatre (256 W. 47th St.)
Opened October 3, 2021

Henry VIII’s sextet of wives perform in a battle set up like an American Idol competition in which the wife who suffered the most will win. To curry audience favor, each sings a song steeped in the style of one or more pop icons, like Nicki Minaj, Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne. In the process, they attempt to claw back their history from that of their shared rotten husband. The political message is a little Easy-Bake, a little shallow, a little wishful — claim your power, ladies! Even if your reality is the headsman’s block! — but nobody’s going to this show to ponder the complexity of history. The point of Six is its escapism, and even its sheer brightness is cheering. This is one liberation in which you don’t have to lift a finger. Queens are doing it for themselves.

➼ Review: Pop Renaissance! Six: The Musical Fans Lose Their Heads Over Broadway Opening

Moulin Rouge!

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Running time: 2:45 with intermission
Al Hirschfeld Theatre (302 W. 45th St.)
Opened July 25, 2019

For all its splashy, glittery, high-kicking, butt-cheek-baring, sword-swallowing maximalism, Moulin Rouge! is something more unsettling than not good. There’s a shapelessness about it, a weird enervation underneath the flash and bang. The show veers broadly away from its beloved-by-millennials-everywhere source material, which in itself is no crime. But the path its creators have taken is one long trip through the Kingdom of Pandering with multiple pit stops in the Meadows of Cutesiness and the Forest of Flat Characters. Everywhere it should be filthy, it’s scrubbed aggressively clean, yet somehow it’s still a hot mess.

➼ Review: Moulin Rouge! Is Broadway’s Biggest Karaoke Night

Hadestown

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Running time: 2:25 with intermission
Walter Kerr Theatre (219 W. 48th St.)
Opened April 17, 2019

Like so many of its mythic antecedents, Hadestown is the product of much metamorphosis: It began as Anais Mitchell’s suite of songs intertwining the myths of Orpheus and Eurydice and Hades and Persephone and grew into this production in collaboration with director Rachel Chavkin. The Broadway current manifestation is lush, vigorous, and formally exciting — and, in certain moments, witchily prescient. The show may read to some as a protest musical, and at times its stalwart “Do You Hear the People Sing?” earnestness is under-rousing. But as an intricate and gorgeous feat of songwriting, as a vehicle for dynamite performances, as a visionary and courageous experiment with form, Hadestown is cause for celebration.

➼ Review: The Songwriting and Storytelling Tours de Force of Hadestown
➼ 126 Minutes With Ani DiFranco

Hamilton

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Running time: 2:55 with intermission
Richard Rodgers Theatre (226 W. 46th St.)
Opened August 6, 2015

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s immense 2015 hit, reimagining the story of the American Revolution with mostly nonwhite actors and a unique cocktail of hip-hop and show tunes, is already a period piece—not of the late-18th century but the Obama era, when one could semi-seriously suggest that America’s racial wounds were healing. But even if its edge no longer gleams as it once did, and minus the uniquely talented original actors to whom the writing was custom-fitted, it’s still a breakthrough with a canonical set of songs and a closing number that reliably brings audiences to tears.

➼ Review: The Book of Mormon and Hamilton Already Feel Like They’re From Another Time
➼ A Long Talk With Lin-Manuel Miranda
➼ Brian d’Arcy James, Jonathan Groff, and Andrew Rannells on Playing Hamilton Fan Favorite King George III
➼ In the Room Where It Happens, Eight Shows a Week
➼ Nerding Out With Hamilton Musical Director, Alex Lacamoire

Aladdin

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Running time: 2:30 with intermission
New Amsterdam Theatre (214 W. 42nd St.)
Opened March 20, 2014

For Aladdin, Disney’s team built on the take-no-chances, take-no-prisoners lessons of its Broadway predecessors to all but guarantee a quality hit. And Aladdin, for all its desert emptiness, plays by the rules. The trademark Disney tone is established as soon as the gorgeous curtain disappears, when Genie — a Cab Calloway type in spangly harem pants — arrives to host what amounts to a variety act at the Sands. (“Come for the hummus, stay for the floor show!”) Within seconds, the song “Arabian Nights” is setting the scene in the city of Agrabah (where “even the poor look fabulous”), introducing the main characters (urchin and princess), offering a plot synopsis (urchin loves princess), and demonstrating the Disney trick of kicking down the fourth wall with anachronistic jokes that bypass the kiddies on their way to adults.

➼ Review: Disney’s Same Old World, Back in Aladdin

The Book of Mormon

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Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Eugene O’Neill Theatre (230 W. 49th St.)
Opened March 24, 2011

Elder Price, a seemingly perfect young Mormon man, gets teamed up with the dorky and clingy Elder Cunningham for their mission assignment — an odd couple that proselytizes together. They practice ringing doorbells (the bravura introductory song “Hello”) to share the beliefs of the Latter Day Saints, but when they get shipped to Uganda, they find that they’re extremely unprepared for the (a) local warlord, (b) local indifference, and (c) local AIDS epidemic. Created by Matt Stone and Trey Parker of South Park and Robert Lopez, who wrote Avenue Q, the show at first occasioned questions about whether it was hostile to Mormonism; in fact it’s quite generous to the LDS church, though it has not aged well in another regard. Until the plane lands in Uganda, the show is still hilarious, but the sequences in Africa are grimly unfunny, especially as black actors are forced to sell jokes about curing AIDS by sodomizing babies.

➼ Review: The Book of Mormon and Hamilton Already Feel Like They’re From Another Time
➼ Andrew Rannells Is Happy to Play Gay Men (As Long As They’re Not Too Relatable)

Wicked

Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Gershwin Theatre (222 W. 51st St.)
Opened October 30, 2003

Stephen Schwartz’s prequel to The Wizard of Oz, with a book by Winnie Holzman from Gregory Maguire’s novel, turns out to have been not only a cash machine (still at near capacity most weeks, 20 years in) but also unlocked a winning formula that so many new Broadway musicals have followed: It’s threaded through with themes of girl power and friendship that hit a young, mostly female audience at an atavistic level. Knock it if you will for its showy glitz, but you’ll need a pretty hard heart not to be won over by “For Good” or “Popular,” let alone not to be swept up when “Defying Gravity” comes roaring out at you.

The Lion King

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Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Minskoff Theatre (200 W. 45th St.)
Opened November 13, 1997

The rare kids’ show that adults can feast on, mostly because of the wonders wrought by Julie Taymor, who designed and directed. The animals, large and small, are re-created with unparalleled imagination, underpropped by costumes that artfully blend realism with fantasy: The prancing giraffes and leaping antelopes, the nodding elephant and barreling warthog, all keep you marveling despite the really pretty basic story line and by-now-ultrafamiliar tunes, principally by Elton John and Tim Rice.

Chicago

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Running time: 2:30 with intermission
Ambassador Theatre (219 W. 49th St.)
Opened November 14, 1996

The John Kander–Fred Ebb–Bob Fosse musical, a modest success on its first run in 1975, became a juggernaut on its second try two decades later. Since Ann Reinking and Bebe Neuwirth got the revival going in 1996, the slinky dances and arch dialogue about cheerily amoral murderesses in the Prohibition era have been reinhabited a hundred times over, turning the show into something of a parade of stars in short-turn stunty gigs (for a limited time, see Jennifer Holliday! Here’s Michael C. Hall! How about … Pamela Anderson?). Most recently, Drag Race’s Jinkx Monsoon stepped in as Mama Morton, to big applause.

➼ The Name on Everybody’s Lips Is Jinkxie

Jaja’s African Hair Braiding

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In Previews
Running time: 1:30, no intermission
Samuel J. Friedman Theater (261 W. 47th St.) 
Opens October 3. Closes November 5.

Jocelyn Bioh’s one-act, set among the immigrant employees and clients of a Harlem hair-braiding shop on one summer day, explores the uncertainty in all their lives.

Purlie Victorious

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Running time: 1:45, no intermission
Music Box Theatre (239 W. 45th St.)
Opened September 27. Closes January 7, 2024.

Fast, fierce, and big-hearted, Ossie Davis’s wily 1961 farce set in the Jim Crow South crackles with the verve of its central performances, and the play feels wittier, braver, less careful and more caring than much contemporary writing. Both unflinching and generous, it’s just about as sharp as satire gets. Leslie Odom Jr. brings charisma for days to the title character; Kara Young, as Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins, gives the kind of comic performance that young actors should study.

➼ Review: A Vintage Satire That Still Has Sting: Purlie Victorious
➼ Leslie Odom Jr.’s Broadway Return in Purlie Victorious

The Shark Is Broken

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Running time: 1:30, no intermission
John Golden Theatre (252 W. 45th St.)
Opened August 10, 2023. Closing November 19.

Set during the infamously troubled 1975 production of Jaws, this play observes Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw (played by Ian Shaw, his son, who co-wrote the script with Joseph Nixon) as they wait for endless hours between takes. It’s really about everything that would happen after Jaws, and the script leans heavily on your assumed awareness, with winky audience-pandering jokes about Spielberg’s future inclinations (Shaw says, “UFOs! Aliens! Jesus! Whatever next? Dinosaurs?”) That extra-textural dramatic irony gnaws at The Shark Is Broken, which has less integrity as a play than as a dress-up presentation for a history-of-film class. Ian Shaw strongly resembles his father, and everyone is meticulously re-creating those familiar voices — Brightman in particular zips right through Dreyfuss’s manic cokie rants with gusto. But they all really do need, metaphorically speaking, a bigger boat.

➼ Review: The Shark Is Broken Goes Chumming for Your Affection

The Cottage

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Running time: 2:15 with intermission
Helen Hayes Theater (240 W. 44th St.)
Opened July 24, 2023. Closes October 29.

The Cottage is a riff on Noel Coward farce that’s full of explanations, light on mess. It aims to be fizzy but nobody remembered to shake the soda can beforehand. It’s also full of characters who are a little too aware of the genre they happen to inhabit. Things kick off with Sylvia and Beau in the afterglow of a tryst at the country cottage. She’s married to his brother, and she’s decided to telegram both their spouses and announce that she and Beau are really meant to be. The telegrams lead to the arrival of Sylvia’s husband (and Beau’s brother), the tweedy fop Clarke, as well as Beau’s very pregnant wife, Marjorie, both of whom have secrets of their own. Needless to say, complications ensue — yet, somehow, nothing here will surprise anyone.

➼ The Cottage Needs More Doors to Slam

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Running time: 3:30 with intermission
Lyric Theatre (213 W. 42nd St.)
Opened December 7, 2021

Mostly set 22 years after the end of the final novel in J.K. Rowling’s series, Cursed Child finds Harry a 40-something, overworked Ministry of Magic official, married to Ginny Weasly with three kids, working for his eternally type-A buddy, Hermione Granger. Packed with breakneck plot twists, mind-bending spectacle, and, perhaps more surprisingly, moments of theatrical whimsy that feel, amid the high-tech sorcery, delightfully simple, The Cursed Child is a remarkable and fitting addition to the Potter canon: It effectively weaves serious themes with bouncy adventure narrative, it’s heartfelt and sometimes a touch hokey, it could have used a more rigorous editor, and you’re probably willing to forgive its shortcomings as it sweeps you along in a rush of rip-roaring, good-natured imagination.

➼ Review: Harry Potter and the Broadway Spectacle
➼ How Imogen Heap Conjured Her Magical Tracks for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
➼ How Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’s Anthony Boyle Builds Sympathy for a Malfoy

Here We Are

In Previews
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Running time: 2:20 with intermission
The Shed’s Griffin Theater (545 W. 30th St.)
Opens October 22, 2023. Closes January 7, 2024.

The late Stephen Sondheim’s slow-cooked final musical, with a book by David Ives, directed by Joe Mantello. It’s a free and somewhat experimental adaptation of the Luis Buñuel films The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel, and its story centers on a group of friends who cannot find a place to have dinner, then can’t leave once they do.

➼ Frank Rich on the Last Sondheim

Infinite Life

Running time: 1:45, no intermission
Atlantic Theater Company (336 W. 20th St.)
Opened September 12, 2023. Through October 14.

From the name onward, nothing in Annie Baker’s fearless new play Infinite Life is laboriously explained; everything is prismlike and expansive. The play — in which the characters are all residents at an unnamed “water fasting” clinic, facing chronic, indescribable pain — unfolds gently, gradually, through implication and deceptively casual conversation. Baker and her director, the superb and unshowy James Macdonald, share a grasp of tempo and dynamic so assured and expertly patient that your heartbeat at the end may well belie the fact that no one onstage has ever raised their voice. The ensemble, most prominently featuring Christina Kirke and Marylouise Burke, is wildly good across the board.

➼ Review: The Mortal Truths of Annie Baker’s Infinite Life

Mary Gets Hers

Running time: 1:30, no intermission
Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space (511 W. 52nd St.)
Opened September 11, 2023. Through October 14.

Emma Horwitz’s Mary Gets Hers is riffing on a medieval closet drama by Hrotsvitha, a 10th-century cannoness and an all-around badass who’s generally considered the first woman historian and the first Western dramatist since the fall of Rome. Her Christian morality plays were unusually strong on character and comedy, and those two C’s also anchor Horwitz’s work. Mary Gets Hers is wacky and winking, big on slapstick-and-clown-inspired physicality and, when it’s at its best, totally charming in its quirkification of Hrotsvitha’s dramatis personae. It’s also inconsistent. The unlucky irony of the play is that it sets out to center and humanize its title character, but the funniest and ultimately most human characters in Mary Gets Hers turn out to be its men. Mary’s story keeps trying to push itself to the fore — and missing the mark.

➼ Review: Slapstick and Plague: Mary Gets Hers

Dig

Running time: 1:55 with intermission
Primary Stages/59E59 Theaters (59 E. 59th St.)
Opened September 2, 2023. Closes October 22.

Theresa Rebeck’s play about a small-town plant shop comes with a lot of potted action, very little of it able to take emotional root. Roger is the grump who owns the titular shop; his friend Lou has a troubled daughter, Megan, who’s in recovery and recently left prison after being jailed for accidentally killing her infant son. He hires Megan, intending to help her save herself. As the plot keeps speeding forward, each new development clangingly obvious on the level of plot and baffling on the level of character, Rebeck introduces new information about the circumstances of Megan’s crime that potentially absolve her and invalidate the premise of the play. If we’re not here to watch a redemption plot, what exactly are we doing?

➼ Review: Little Shop of Blah-Blah: Theresa Rebeck’s Dig

Job

Running time: 1:20, no intermission
Soho Playhouse (15 Vandam St.)
Opened September 6, 2023. Closes October 8.

A play like Max Wolf Friedlich’s Job is specifically, methodically crafted to kick up emotional dust: It starts and ends with a gun in the white-knuckled grip of one of its characters, and in between are 80 minutes of pretty much pure tension — anxiety that gradually thickens, along with the plot, into dread and revulsion. Jane (Sydney Lemmon, as rigid and electrified as a third rail) is holding the weapon, and she’s pointing it at Lloyd, a therapist she’s been sent to see for company-mandated training, played by the excellent, absolutely at-ease Peter Friedman (Succession’s Frank). It’s a slick, cleverly crafted ride that shrinks in the mind somewhat once you’ve left the room — but while you’re there, it’s affecting and effective like a good TV crime drama.

➼ Review: Job Pays Off and Clocks Out

Harmony Ethel Barrymore Theatre, October 28 • I Need That American Airlines Theatre, November 2 • Monty Python’s Spamalot St. James Theatre, November 16 • Appropriate Helen Hayes Theater, November 29 • How to Dance in Ohio Belasco Theatre, December 10 • Days of Wine and Roses • Studio 54, January 6, 2024 Prayer for the French Republic Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, January 9, 2024 • Doubt American Airlines Theatre, February 2, 2024 • The Notebook Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, March 14, 2024 • Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club August Wilson Theatre, Spring 2024