Broadway Reviews: August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” Gets a Respectable Revival, While “The Balusters” and “Fallen Angels” Are Both Funny Shows Focusing on Bad Behavior

Joe Turner's Come and Gone (c) Julieta Cervantes

Broadway: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone 
At the Barrymore Theatre 

I consider August Wilson’s 1988 Joe Turner’s Come and Gone his best play in his series on the African American experience, set across each decade of the 20th century. It’s his best use of magical realism, perfectly integrated in the fabric of the post-slavery lives of these characters. The play is set in 1911 in a Pittsburgh boarding house run by Seth and Bertha Holly (Cedric “The Entertainer” and Taraji P. Henson), where people come and go paying $2 a week, and that includes meals. Currently, the tenants are a young, construction worker who wants to be a blues guitarist, Jeremy (Tripp Taylor); a jilted woman, Mattie (Nimene Sierra Wureh), lost without her boyfriend; Molly Cunningham (Maya Boyd), a more confident single woman who relishes her independence (and hysterically likes to talk about herself in the third person); and Bynum (Ruben Santiago-Hudson) who is more or less a full-time resident. Bynum is a conjuring man, who people go to when they have problems, but he also claims that when he was at his lowest he met someone he calls the Shining Man, who gave him back his spirit and song. Entering into their midst are Herald Loomis (Joshua Boone) and his young daughter Zonia (played in alternated performances by Savannah Commodore and Dominique Skye Turner), renting a room while Loomis searches for his missing wife. (Director Debbie Allen doesn’t want the audience to miss the huge symbolism that Wilson intends for a character named Herald instead of Harold by giving us ominous music as he enters the house.) Seth is suspicious of the stranger, but he agrees to let him stay as Loomis hires Selig (Bradley Stryker), a door-to-door salesman, who is known to find people. 

Broadway Review: “Beaches” Outlook Is Mostly Schmaltzy With a Good Chance of Wind (Beneath My Wings), “Becky Shaw” Is Fun and Mean (in Equal Measures), and a Noble “The Fear of 13” Muddies the True Story of a Death Row Inmate

Beaches (c) Marc J. Franklin

Broadway: Beaches 
At the Majestic Theatre 

I will always remember the 1988 film Beaches as the end of a trio of enjoyable Bette Midler female friends-centric films, starting with the comedies Outrageous Fortune with Shelley Long and Big Business with Lily Tomlin. I was a big fan of the first two, and while I certainly enjoyed Beaches, the more serious one with Barbara Hershey, its overly sincere and weepy elements weren’t to my taste. However, they were exactly what made it popular with its fans, and there was certainly no doubt the musical adaptation would embrace them. But having Iris Rainer Dart, the original author of the book the movie based on, as the writer here (with the late Thom Thomas) may have doomed the stage version as the show kept too many extraneous plot points that bog down the emotional bond between two lifelong friends. The flashier and brasher Cee Cee Bloom is played by the talented Jessica Vosk, who is fighting to find her own voice in the role, while the production won’t let the audience forget the Midler of it all. Kelli Barrett has an easier job playing the more sedate and fussy Bertie, and the two leads feel comfortable and lived in together, although they occasionally fall into a more Mary Richards-Rhoda Morgenstern rhythm instead of creating a unique vibe of their own. 

Film Reviews: Catching up on Films, Including the Inventive and Spooky “Exit 8,” a “Normal” but Ordinary Version of a Current and Popular Action Genre, and an Intriguing Debate About Who Owns Art in “The Christophers”

Exit 8 (c) NEON

Film: Exit 8 
In Cinemas 

Our hero in the newest NEON horror movie, Exit 8, is only referred to as the Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya). At the start of the film, he feels like a lot of us who live in a big urban city (his is Tokyo), going through the same routine every weekday—getting on a crowded subway to go to a 9-5 job—which you can see is taking its toll on him. So, it’s not surprising he doesn’t realize he is soon alone in the faceless, sameness hallways trying to make his way out of the station through Exit 8. But he is stuck in a loop, and only after he reads a plaque in the hallway does he realize what he needs to do to get out: Notice the anomalies. There are doors, subway ads and lockers, a photo booth, and an unresponsive walking man (Yamato Kochi). Each time he walks the loop, he needs to notice if anything changes in the hall. If this feels like a video game set-up, it is because Exit 8 is based on the first-person RPG genre, officially known as The Exit 8. There’s no real story to the game, but director Genki Kawamura and co-writer Kentaro Hirase give the Lost Man characteristics like asthma, an ex-girlfriend who is in the hospital and a lot of apathy. The film also switches perspectives to another character (something the game never does) and adds other players like an effective Naru Asanuma as The Kid. I thoroughly enjoyed what’s essentially twitch gameplay turned into a film. Kawamura is a master of suspense and time, and while there are jump-scare moments, I wouldn’t really call it a horror movie. Ninomiya is the perfect everyman here, and he has the audience’s support from the get-go. It is repetitive and some might find it exhausting, but I had a lot of fun, and Exit 8, with its obvious use of the circular “Bolero” from Ravel in its soundtrack, stands out as something unique and quirky, something you can’t say for many movies in cineplexes nowadays. 

Broadway Reviews: IPs on Broadway Get Made Over With an Even More Hopeless “Death of Salesman,” an Engaging “Dog Day Afternoon,” Now Through the Lens of a Mamdani New York and “The Jellicle Ball”—a Fantastic Version of “Cats”

Death of a Salesman (c) Emilio Madrid

Broadway: Death of a Salesman 
At the Winter Garden Theatre 

Ten years ago, I saw my first stage production of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh at BAM with Nathan Lane as Hickey, and for over four hours, Lane embodied the optimistic salesman’s decline into hopeless pipeless dreamer. Now, on Broadway, Lane has taken on another iconic American salesman, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, director Joe Mantello’s excellent, if dour, portrayal of a man looking back on his life and seeing all the mistakes that led him to where he is now. Lane is simply astonishing as Loman, who has started to hate going on the road to make sales in the New England territory, with his mind wandering and his driving erratic. If you’ve seen the poster of the current revival at the Winter Garden, there’s a Chevy, which seems to be the centerpiece metaphor for Mantello’s production, as literally represented by Chloe Lamford’s cavernous haunted warehouse set when, as the play begins, that red car enters the stage and stays there as a reminder of Willy’s successful past and failures in the present. Like Iceman, this revival is actually my first time seeing Salesman, although I have seen plenty of TV incarnations: the 1966 version with original 1949 Broadway stars Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock, and the 1985 version with the celebrated Broadway revival cast that included Dustin Hoffman. Recent Broadway revivals delivered Philip Seymour Hoffman and Wendell Pierce. Lane certainly will be remembered in this pantheon of impressive actors. 

The Interested Bystander: Early 2025-26 Tony Award Nomination Predictions

Every Brilliant Thing (c) Matthew Murphy

It’s the last day of March, and Broadway has started to stir after a rather uneventful early 2026. But there are a dozen shows opening before the Tony Awards cut-off, most of which have started previews or will do so in the next couple of days. 

What better time to make so early (and blind) Tony predictions based on what has opened so far and making assumptions based on reputation of the creators or actors of the show we haven’t seen yet. And there’s the issue of the Tony Awards Committee to set who is eligible for what award, which doesn’t get announced until a couple of days before nominations are voted on. 

So, this is just fun. No disrespect to the shows that I left out. I probably wouldn’t have thought The Outsiders or John Proctor is the Villain was going to be the hits they turned out to be before they opened.   The cutoff date is April 28.  The nominations will be announced on May 5.

Enjoy.