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BROADWAY PLAY REVIEWS (The Hills of California; Oh, Mary!; Yellow Face; The Roommate)
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Mickie Jo
Let us talk about plays from Broadway. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back. My name is Mickie Jo and I'm obsessed with all things theater. I am a theatre critic here on social media. Perhaps you are watching me on my theatre themed YouTube channel. Hello to you. Make sure you're subscribed. Perhaps you are listening to me on a podcast platform. Hello to you as well. So usually what I do here on social media is after I've been invited to go and see a show, whether that's in the West End here in the United Kingdom or whether it's on Broadway on one of my occasional trips to New York, I will usually make a video review of that show and that show alone, either on YouTube on a podcast platform or a slightly shorter version on my TikTok or Instagram pages. And as you may have noticed, my coverage tends to lean more heavily towards the musical theater than the straight play. That is principally where my passion lies. But I've seen a lot of great plays and I continue to see a lot of great plays and I would love to talk about them on my largest platform, that being YouTube. But I find often that those videos don't really draw a lot of interest. However, I know there are many of you who are very interested in the the fantastic plays of the West End and Broadway. So I like to talk about them anyway. And so today I'm going to do a roundup reviewing multiple plays in one video. We are talking through four different productions, all of which are running on Broadway, all of which I saw on my most recent trip to New York. I was there for two and a half weeks with a vlogging camera in my hand. If you want to see the entire trip and live vicariously through myself and my stagey fiance, Erin James, you can go and check out those videos. Technically, I saw five Broadway plays on that trip because I also saw Romeo and Juliet. But I had so many thoughts about that production and the performances and the creative choice choices that I made a standalone review for that one that you can go and check out if you would like to. I will, however, be talking about all of the other plays that I saw on Broadway. There are a couple I decided not to check out. McNEIL I had heard pretty unanimously poor things about similarly for left on 10th, just that it was either not great or non essential. And I had been considering going to see Our Town. And though this is a very star studded cast, I've also heard that this is a very reduced version of the show in terms of its duration. And I've never seen Our Town before. It's not produced nearly as much here in the UK as it is in the US and I feel like I'd like to see a more traditional staging of it first. In any case, these are the four alongside Romeo Juliet that I did end up seeing. We have the Roommate at the Booth Theater starring Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone. We have the Hills of California, the Broadway transfer of the Jez Butterworth play directed by Sam Mendes. I reviewed it when it was here in London, but the ending has substantially changed. We also have a revival of David Henry Wang's Yellow Face, currently playing at the Todd Haymes Theater, courtesy of the Roundabout Theater Company. And perhaps the surprise hit of the season, a Broadway transfer, Colescola's O Mary, which just today announced an extension through the 2025 Tony Awards. Now if you're curious to know what I thought about all of these, stay tuned. But if there is only one of these shows specifically that you would like to hear my thoughts on right now, and if you don't want perhaps spoilers for some of the others, we will be talking spoilers especially for Hills of California. Feel free to use the chapter feature here on YouTube or check out the description on a podcast platform to skip to the relevant section so you don't have to listen to me talk about all of these plays if you don't want to. Finally, I would love to know what you all thought as well. Make sure to weigh in with your thoughts about all of these product the comments section down below. Make sure you are following me wherever you are encountering these reviews. And let's get into it, starting with the first play that I saw on this trip, the Roommate. Now I'll preface this review by saying that I saw this one on a Thursday matinee and I had a delightful time. And I think those are kind of the perfect conditions in which to see a play like this. If I'd seen it on a Friday evening, I might have thought it was a little bit insubstantial or wondered what the point was. If I had trekked out to see this and this alone and traveled some kind of a great distance, then it might raise those questions. But on an afternoon. On a Thursday afternoon. Perfect. So what this is is a two hander play. Call it an odd couple premise. Call it a buddy comedy. We have Sharon, played by Mia Farrow, who has put out an ad online for a roommate. This ad has been answered by a woman from a different state named Robin. She's played by Patti lupone And we learn very quickly that the two of them have very different sensibilities. The whole thing is taking place in Sharon's home in Iowa. And though she is eager to eschew the stereotypes about that particular location and say that she's not necessarily like that, we can immediately tell that she is a good deal more conservative, a little more socially repressed perhaps, than Robin, who is from New York. Now, the finer details about the life that Robin appears to be fleeing from will emerge to us a little later on. But it's the slow relationship building between these two characters that becomes the focus of this play. And it's a heck of a slight slow burn, I will confess, as they gradually get to know each other a little better and tentatively find out details about each other's lives. Principally, this is, call it curiosity, call it nosiness from Sharon about Robin. The pacing and the intrigue of this play feel a little reminiscent of Casey Jr. From Dumbo, where it's this slow climb up this hill. And then once we reach this point of revelation where Sharon comes to find out that Robin has put behind her this past of criminal activity, of fraud, of calling people up and scamming them and finding out their bank details, then we move into, if not adrenaline, then a great deal of excitement as Sharon, perhaps surprisingly, confesses that she wants to find out how to do this and she wants to get involved. And a huge deal of comedy arises from this, largely because of the magnetic performance of Mia Farrow. She is delightfully, charmingly wonderful in this. You cannot take your eyes off her. She is grippingly enthusiastic, and she plays this sort of emotionally desperate, evidently lonely character who is so determined to forge this friendship with a clearly reluctant woman. There's something of a social cluelessness in the way that she speaks about the other people in her life and the way that she speaks about Robin's life to her. And Patti, meanwhile, is the most brilliant foil to that. If you're going expecting to see a grand Patti LuPone diva performance, you are not necessarily getting one in this show. It's considerably more tame than a lot of the turns she's taken on Broadway previously, but it's so realized. It is so human. It has such depth and nuance. She's such a real person. You can see every decision that she is making. In this play, you can see what she is wrestling with. Some of the most beautiful depth in each of their characters comes from their fraught relationships with their children. For Sharon, this is a son who has moved on with his life, who has moved away who is living in New York and doesn't seem that interested when his mother calls him to make conversation. And for Robin, this is a daughter who used to be complicit in her criminal activity and now wants nothing to do with her. And the two of them are slightly estranged for that reason. Jack O'Brien directs and keeps us skillfully locked in the orbit of these characters and of this relationship. Pacing wise, it does feel awfully steady. It feels like something, you know, befitting the older generation of theater goer. And certainly I think there's a lot for them to enjoy about this. I love the emerging theme of this idea of life not having to end at a any particular age, of life being full of exciting possibility that can continue through retirement, through older years, whatever that might look like. Not only that, the very poignant exchanges via telephone between both of these women and their children, I think made this the perfect show for you to go and see with your mother. I think that would have been a really great way to experience this. And it was definitely a little longer than it needed to be. It was definitely a little slower than it needed to be. It was charming, if not thrilling, if not hugely purposeful and necessary. It didn't have quite as much to say as a lot of other plays, but it took us to some surprising places, some pleasantly surprising places, and offered a very touchingly sentimental conclusion that I had a lot of time for that had me leaving the theater with a big smile on my face. So, a three star review for the Roommate. A perfectly nice and charming afternoon spent on Broadway with a particularly mesmerizing performance from Mia Farrow. Next, it was time to see the Hills of California. Now, as I've mentioned, I've reviewed this before with a full review dedicated just to this production. But my feelings have evolved slightly. I saw this twice in London and it was after the first visit that I sat down here in front of a camera and I said that a lot of it felt like inessential padding. And then I went back to the show and realized how many of those early details are in fact very valuable foreshadowing. But I was ill equipped the first time around to realize that because I didn't know the revelations that were coming later on. And this play has an awful lot of revelation in store. So let's talk about what happens in the Hills of California. These are going to be substantial spoilers both for current and previous iterations of this show. We find ourselves in a bed and breakfast hotel in Blackpool where a young woman is Caring for her mother, who is on the precipice of death. She is receiving end of life treatment at home. And this woman's other three daughters are also set to return to the family home for the occasion. As each of them arrives, we see this initially tense and subsequently argumentative family reunion unfolding. And we then flashback to scenes from their childhood which provide us all of the answers to the curiosity of the present day. Because when the four of them were young girls, they were being trained by their mother, by their very pushy and determined stage mother, to become this Andrew Sisters esque singing girl group. And her main objective and mission in life was to find excellent, extraordinary success for them. This role was played by Laura Donnelly in one half of a stunning tour de force performance. Hugely powerful. I say one half of a performance because she would then appear in the show's final act playing the role of Joan, the oldest of the four daughters, who had been the first to leave the family home under very dark circumstances. Such was Veronica, their mother's determination that they would be successful. She allowed a talent agent who was visiting them in the hotel, which was also there for family home, to go into a room unsupervised alone with Joan, her young daughter, where he used his power and authority to manipulate the situation. So by the time that Joan is returning for the first time after having been forced to flee to America, she is bringing with her an extraordinary amount of baggage. Now, she's not bringing quite as much baggage with her in the Broadway production of the show as she was in the West End. Now, this is the same creative team, it is largely the same principal cast, but because the play went straight to the West End, Jez Butterworth's plays normally have some sort of a pre West End venue where he tinkers with them a little bit, somewhere like the Royal Court. Historically, he hadn't had the chance to do that fine tuning. So in the transatlantic transfer time, he adjusted the third act substantially, because back in London, halfway through that final act, we found out that Joan had brought with her a baby. And this was the moment where, though we'd been finding out details about Joan's cool and calm life and this rockstar demeanor that left her completely unfazed by the aggressive interrogation of the eldest of her three younger sisters, Gloria. When the second youngest, Ruby, steps outside after having a panic attack, she returns afterwards holding a baby that had been left on the porch. This is Joan's daughter that she had brought with her. And this was the real reason that she was coming back to the Family home. She had no intention to go and see her mother on her deathbed and make amends and forgive her. The only reason she had come was in the hope that one of her sisters would be able to take care of the baby so she could go off on a music tour as a backing vocalist. And the way that she would deliver that admission was so veiled and so, you know, trying to play it off as not a big deal whatsoever. And this is where we could see the impact that this thing from her childhood had really had on Joan. The way that she had been parented left her unable to be a parental figure. Her mother had made it so that she could never be a mother herself. In the Broadway production, however, none of that happens. Joan is not arriving with a baby, and she seems to consider going upstairs to see her mother. But then we have one of the most striking visual moments of the play, where the actress playing young Joan, who also does a fantastic job by the way, descends the staircase to meet Joan and stop her. And as she is walking up the stairs, as she did fatefully those decades ago, she is haunted by that memory. And they've added in a little more dialogue about this where she says, the girl who walked up those stairs never came back down. She also more directly addresses this with her sister Gloria, who also carries a lot of resentment from that time, because from her perspective, Joan did this for very knowingly and betrayed the rest of her sisters to achieve fame and success in the music industry for herself. I think the whole play is better served by these changes. I think it works better here. I think the Arc of Joan and that moment of reveal with the baby might have been that little bit more satisfying in the West End, but it didn't serve the overall narrative of the play quite as well in this version. It also doesn't seem like Joan is necessarily getting ready to leave at the end. It feels like we're in a place where these four sisters could come back together. Maybe it took the death of their mother for that to be able to happen, but they all just regressed slightly. One of my favorite details, and I said this in my other review as well, but one of my favorite details in the play is the way that each of their personalities and attitudes shift based on who is around and who has returned to the home. Because we start with the two youngest, where Ruby is very much acting like the older sister. But when Gloria arrives, Ruby turns into being a middle sibling, and Gloria is immediately the authoritative one. And we see Jill, the youngest, who has been taking care of the family home. She was the only one who stayed behind. We see her regressing a little bit and becoming a little bit more submissive. Then when Joan arrives, everything goes up in the air and changes completely because Gloria is reluctant to cede that power. And Ruby is so enamored with her older sister. So is Jill. The young performers in this cast do a fantastic job. The adult performers in this cast do a fantastic job. There are still moments where it's longer than it needs to be. That start of the third act where we. We have the two husbands talking about their understanding of what happened between all the sisters years ago while he's trying to fix the record player. I like the scene. I like that we get that kickass rockstar entrance for Joan afterwards when the record player suddenly turns on in the darkness and the stage is in revolution as she's entering in this cool silhouette. I just don't think the scene needs to be as long as it is. But this is Jez Butterworth. The man loves detail and just really fleshing out environments and providing atmosphere. I will say it's a very compelling play to watch a second time because like I said, there is so much foreshadowing. And knowing the things that you know by the end of the first watch as you go into certain scenes makes them all the more painful for those of you who see more musical theater. There is also a great deal of music featured in this place. So it's a great gateway play in that way. But I thought it was terrific. I loved it in the West End and I loved it again on Broadway in what I thought was a slightly tighter version. Next up, I got last minute tickets to go and see Yellowface at the Todd Haymes Theater, previously the American Airlines Theater, one of the roundabout theater companies Broadway spaces. This being a revival of the play by David Henry Wong. And I'm so glad I did because I thought this was really fascinating. It's self deprecatingly funny. It's semi autobiographical. It is about a period in the playwright's own life when he became outspoken in response to the casting of Jonathan Pryce in the Broadway transfer of Miss Saigon. This being a white actor performing in yellowface to play an Asian role. And there having been a big hoopla with Actors Equity around this casting and the legitimacy of it, with that being the starting point. What this play talks about is a semi fictionalized set of circumstances that took place subsequently with David Henry Wang developing a play that was not particularly successful, but casting in it a white man who, through Some initial confusion he mistook to be a mixed race Asian American actor. Once the playwright has found out his mistake, he is left in a difficult position. Can he fire this actor because he's found out that he is white? Would that involve him admitting that this isn't something that he had figured out in the first place? This actor, after that play is not particularly successful, goes on to have some success playing other Asian roles on stage. With a subplot to all of this exploring the vilification of various Chinese Americans by the American government, sort of scapegoating them, and a chain of events that would wreak havoc upon the life of the playwright's very optimistic father. Now, Daniel Dae Kim plays dhh, our insert for the playwright himself. The rest of the actors in the company largely play various different roles, but Francis Ju for the most part plays his father in a wonderful, charming, deeply funny and eventually incredibly moving performance. I sincerely hope that he gets a Tony Award nomination because it's a wonderful performance that he gives in this. But Daniel Dae Kim himself, also deeply funny, delivering this initially clumsy, farcical, embarrassing, self deprecating plot, one that metamorphosizes into this situation with much more real and dangerous implications. There's also the ever dispensable Kevin Del Aguilar, who plays a handful of roles, many of them being real people from within the theater industry. This is such a New York centric play because it's so in direct conversation with the figures of the time. We talk about producers in this very directly, very openly. We talk about other actors. Jane Krakowski is depicted in this play. She is portrayed by an actress while Jane Krakowski was off Broadway being in another place. Cameron McIntosh is talked about in this. We talk about critics, we talk about creatives. I can only imagine how thrilling and vital this play felt at the time when it was first seen because it's in such direct respons to events that took place in the theater community and it replies to them so specifically and so directly. There is no thinly veiled metaphor here. And I really applaud and celebrate the honesty with which the playwright is able to talk about himself. And he creates so many different points of conversation about the central issue explored here to do with representation on the American stage for Asian American performers and sort of how that fits into their larger cultural identity and patriotism that the play gets to have so many compelling necessary variations on that conversation. We explore it from so many different sides in so many different perspectives, and as intellectual as all of that sounds, it's also one of the funniest plays that I saw on Broadway. Just deeply witty of the direction by Lee Silverman. I thought we did a great job with the text and with that comedy and with the gradual tonal movement throughout the thing towards the end of the thing. I don't know if it had as compelling a visual identity as I might have liked in terms of the literal staging, but had a great time at Yellowface. Very glad that I bought a ticket. Finally we arrive at one of Broadway's hottest tickets. I am talking about O Mary, the runaway hit of the season currently playing at the Lyceum Theatre. In fact, they have just today announced that the show is going to be extending its run beyond the Tony Awards, and they have announced that Cola Scola, who both wrote the show and has been starring in it as Mary Todd Lincoln, will be leaving the show in early January, and the role of Mary will subsequently be played for a limited run by the actress Betty Gilpin. Now, I dare say Cola Scola may return to the role at some point, especially if there's any Tony Awards campaigning to be done, but it may also be the case that we get a handful of different exciting comedy stars in the role subsequently. Very intrigued to see what happens here, but this was actually my second time seeing O Mary because I caught it off Broadway and I enjoyed it so much and I had such a complete fulfilling experience. I didn't necessarily feel that I had to go and see it again, but they do 5 o'clock performances on certain days of the week, so I had the opportunity to, after I rushed a different show passed by the box office and they happened to have a pair of Rush tickets left for that evening's 5 o'clock performance. So I went to go and see it again. Now, I'd been intrigued by this one even before it started performances off Broadway because of the announced cast, including Conrad Ricamora, who I am a huge fan of. And at that point I'm sure it was described as this sort of historical comedy parody slash burlesque. I'm sure there was a burlesque element to it at that stage, or that was one of the many adjectives being thrown around, which is not really what it resembles. What this is is an extended comic sketch with a great concept that manages to play out for an entire Broadway comedy. The idea here is that Cola Scola plays the character of Mary Todd Lincoln like a guest on Saturday Night Live Weekend Update, or like someone out of a Queer Skin skit. Who is this rageful, drunken, passive aggressive resentful wife of a clearly closeted gay president who longs to return to her roots as a former cabaret star. We come to find out she's also painfully insecure, maniacal, and a terrible actress. All of which makes for fantastic gay comedy. And it really is a tribute to the warped, inspired and nefarious mind of Cola Scope that this brilliant thing has come to the stage. The circumstances around it becoming this Broadway hit are fascinating to me because it's not unlike a lot of queer comedy and queer media that has existed for some time. This may feel like revolutionary comedy to a, to a heteronormative audience, to a Broadway audience, a more traditional audience, to the queer community. It's not necessarily revolutionary, but it's certainly a great time. And we'll talk about cold. But the more I see it, the more I also want to celebrate a fantastic supporting cast. Here we have Conrad Ricamora playing the very frustrated Abraham Lincoln. Frustrated for a handful of reasons. He's sexually frustrated, but he's also navigating a war and dealing with his wife. He's basically just screaming at her the entire time when he isn't trying to carefully seduce one of his staff. James Scully plays the acting teacher hired by Mr. Lincoln Lincoln to help get his wife ready for a return to the theater. Only there is a secret agenda behind all of this. And once we come to find out the actual identity of this acting teacher, it raises a handful of other questions that lead us towards a high paced finale. And another really brilliant supporting performance is given by Bianca Lee, who plays Rose, Mary's chaperone, in which capacity she bears witness to many of Mary's more malicious misdeeds and atrocities and slights against her, be they personal, be they violent. And she has this sort of a hilariously inexplicable patience for all of that, where she's just this good natured conservative woman, very much the antithesis of our Mary Todd, but the perfect comic companion to Cole Escola's devilish creation and Cole's Mary Todd Lincoln. It's so, it's so hysterically funny. They can really go in any sort of insane direction with it. Immediate characterization that bursts into the Oval Office with such a maniacal fury, with such a determination simply to find a bottle of booze somewhere in the building and sneak it out upon her person. The authority with which she moved through the space and the absolute lack of authority that she has in the presence of her husband, Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States, is this wonderful juxtaposition from which we get a lot of laughs. This continues as the utter conv conviction with which she appeals to return to her roots doing cabaret is contrasted by her nervousness when trying to pursue a more legitimate acting career. When we see her auditioning and clearly being this trainwreck full of insecurity. There's so much in the characterization, the vocal delivery, but there's also fantastic physical comedy as well. There's a whole extended sequence where Coles Mary Todd just struggles to get down from a desk for a prolonged amount of time. And bafflingly. And perhaps this is the thing that's connecting to audiences as well. There's also an unusual amount of heart in it as well. As we see Mary Todd maybe fostering a little bit of a crush and then experiencing a little bit of heartbreak, we we surprisingly begin to feel for her. Even though she's been really personally dreadful to many of the people in her life, she becomes this level of unhinged diva that we can't help but applaud for as the whole thing culminates in a madcap medley cabaret performance. It's bizarre. It's the kind of thing that would be hysterically funny on something like a Saturday Night Live for seven minutes at a time. Inexplicably, they make it work for an entire one act Broadway play. I'm delighted it's having the extraordinary Broadway success that it's having. It does tickle me a little bit that mainstream audiences have taken to it so much. I think there's a wealth of queer media and stuff that Cole Scurler has been doing for years and stuff that has been around for years that hasn't necessarily enjoyed the same amount of mainstream affection. But this, for whatever reason, has become one of those lightning in a bottle shows that has done really well for itself. Which concludes my thoughts about these four plays that I saw recently on Broadway. As I said, let me know what you thought about any of these if you've had the chance to see them in the comments section down below. The Roommate and Yellowface and Hills of California are all limited runs, have been limited runs. But O Mary, if you would like to see it for yourself, is continuing into the new year. And I dare say at some point during a run, tickets will become a little bit easier to come by. But I hope each of them has the success they deserve at next year's Tony Awards, something we will be talking about very soon. And I will of course be making videos about right here on my channel. So if you want to keep up with all of that coverage. Make sure you're subscribed right here on YouTube with the notifications turned on so you don't miss any of my upcoming theater themed videos. I also have another review roundup from my recent New York trip coming soon where I tell you about the six different Off Broadway shows that I saw. I hope that you've enjoyed these reviews and I hope that everyone is staying, staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For 10 more seconds, I'm Mickey Joe Theater. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.