‘How I Learned To Drive’ Broadway Review: Mary-Louise Parker & David Morse Revisit Roles After 25 Years

Reactions are coming in to this morning’s Tony Award nominations, an event that feels like a reassuringly familiar sign of springtime after two-plus years of Covid upheaval on Broadway.

Trouble in Mind” was big news last season. Her “Wedding Band” is even bigger news this theater season.

Manchester United have been in bad form this season, but one player who seemed to have come out of this season with his reputation intact, if not increased, has been David de Gea. The Spanish keeper had been in great shot-stopping form earlier in the season and seemed to have improved after a number of poor seasons at Old Trafford.

[Warning: Potentially Triggering Content]

Mary-Louise Parker doesn’t have a lot of confidence in her driving skills.

Is this a Walther PPK which I see before me? Almost! It’s former James Bond actor Daniel Craig, who’s starring as the Scottish king killer in “Macbeth” on Broadway. His uninvolving and ponderous production (it opened Thursday night at the Longacre Theatre, but barred critics from publishing reviews till midday Friday for reasons that will soon become obvious to you) is a real Blunderball.Two hours and 20 minutes, with one intermission. At the Longacre Theatre, 220 W 48th Street.

A very busy Broadway season comes to a close with its final production, and Sam Gold’s staging of Macbeth starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga is nothing if not a dynamic attempt to cap an unusual and often extraordinary theater season. Uneven – if not so much as Gold’s 2019 King Lear with Glenda Jackson – and peppered with choices both curious (what, no “double double toil and trouble?”) and captivating (a brief prologue that’s as funny as it is timely), this iteration of The Scottish Play, which opened last night at the Longacre Theatre, nearly holds up to the unavoidable hype of its starry cast.

You might feel like you’ve already seen Mr. Saturday Night the musical even if you’ve never seen Mr. Saturday Night the movie, and whether you find that comforting – Billy Crystal certainly is one of the most likable presences in all of show business – or disappointing might depend entirely on your taste for well-delivered Borsht Belt comedy.

If “The West Wing” was made into a live stage show, banned all men and snorted a line of coke before the curtain went up, it might look something like “POTUS,” the hyperactive new farce that opened Wednesday on Broadway.One hour and 45 minutes, with one intermission. At the Shubert Theatre, 225 W 44th Street.Selina Fillinger’s weird and wired comedy imagines a White House fiasco, in which the president — we never meet him or anyone else with a Y chromosome — publicly makes a crass remark about the first lady (Vanessa Williams) and leaves a crew of panicked women staffers to clean up his PR mess.And what a mess it is.

Like some strange brew blend of VEEP, Noises Off and one of the late Charles Ludlam’s outrageously vulgar (and still sorely missed) Ridiculous Theatrical Company follies, Selina Fillinger’s all-female, star-packed political satire POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive is an occasionally glorious mess of a farce, sometimes chaotically funny and other times as what-were-they-thinking?? goofy as the last segment of a Saturday Night Live episode.

Allow Usher, the central – only? – character of Michael R. Jackson’s scathingly funny and Pulitzer-Prize-winning musical A Strange Loop, to introduce himself.

A British couple found dead in a suspected murder suicide at their property in France have been named by police.

A Brontosaurus and a Woolly Mammoth taking up residence among the mid-century modern trappings of a middle-class New Jersey household will now and forever make a theatrical impact – that, at least, hasn’t changed since playwright Thornton Wilder’s days – but so much else has, not least of all the ability of The Skin of Our Teeth, a seminal post-modern avant-garde winner of the 1943 Pulitzer Prize, to beguile merely on the strength of the post-modern avant-gardeness of it all.

Smartly sidestepping the obvious comparison from the start – the line-reading of “Hello gorgeous” sounds more conversational, less sing-songy than the one etched in our brains for all these decades – Broadway’s new Funny Girl revival doesn’t so much make a grand play for replacement as a peaceful offering for coexistence: The show that made Barbra Streisand a musical theater icon likely won’t do the same for its latest star, but neither is it cause for grumbling how-dare-shes.

Sneaky, menacing and funny are descriptions that come up more than once in Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen, but not one of the three words quite does justice to this irresistibly pitch-black comedy, opening tonight at the Golden Theatre on Broadway.

Director and choreographer Camille A. Brown and her cast of seven female singer-dancer-actors breathe life and vitality into Ntozake Shange’s still-potent mid-1970s touchstone for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf. Opening tonight at the Booth Theatre on Broadway, Shange’s fantasia of poetry, dance and stories of confession, defiance, sisterhood and, above all, perseverance, holds a power that’s not been weakened either by decades or the loss of a once startling newness.

Marilyn Stasio Theater CriticMommas, don’t give your daughters the kind of nicknames that would appeal to their pedophile uncles. Cursed with a cutesy moniker like “Li’l Bit,“ what do you think might happen to a supposedly worldly but ever so innocent teenager like the one played to shattering perfection by Mary-Louise Parker? The actor and her equally brilliant co-star, David Morse, originated these roles in playwright Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer-winning play “How I Learned to Drive” a quarter-century ago — and after all these years, they still own them.“I’m not gonna do anything….” kindly Uncle Peck promises his buxom 17-year-old niece as he undertakes her first perilous driving lesson. Huge sigh of relief.