Most popular New York theater and Broadway shows

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime is set in the 2060s, and it imagines a world in which artificial intelligence has been modeled into realistic holographic forms: companion robots who look and sound like figures from their owners’ pasts, and thus serve as triggers for—and repositories of—those owners’ fading memories. The octogenarian and increasingly addled Marjorie (June Squibb), for example, can spend time with a reincarnation of her late husband, Walter (Christopher Lowell), as she remembers him in his prime: young, handsome, romantic. This android learns quickly; the question is what to teach him. The more this purified Walter knows about their shared history, the more fully he can inhabit his role as her emotional caregiver. The less he knows, on the other hand, the better he can stick to the stories she wants to hear.  Marjorie Prime | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus “Time will tell if A.I. ever becomes a reality,” wrote Time Out’s David Cote in his review of the play’s 2015 premiere at Playwrights Horizons, “but the human parts of Harrison’s smart, lovely play are built to last.” He was certainly right about the latter: Harrison’s drama is currently on Broadway, in a Second Stage production directed once again by the needle-sharp Anne Kauffman, and if anything it feels even deeper and more moving than it did the first time around. But it’s slightly shocking, when one reads what Cote wrote, to realize how quickly the play’s vision...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Vulnerability comes hard to Ethan (Micah Stock), a blocked gay writer in his 30s. He is a wounded soul, prickly and sour, with a defensive armor forged from serial abandonment: by his mother, who left when he was a child; by his father, a meth addict; and by his aunt, Sarah (Laurie Metcalf), whom he resents for not having done more to help. Sarah is a fortress unto her own: a gristly nurse at the end of her career who has moved to a very small town to be alone. (“Just—suits me better. Not being around—people.”) But when the two wind up sharing a home during the 2020 Covid shutdown, their mutual tenderness grows as they tough it out, filling time and space that otherwise feel emptier than ever.  Little Bear Ridge Road | Photograph: Julieta Cervantes This is the universe of Samuel D. Hunter’s Little Bear Ridge Road, a gorgeous new drama whose touching central relationship coexists with a larger exploration of the intimate and cosmic. Hunter's clear-eyed portraits of pain and grace—including Greater Clements, Grangeville, The Few, The Harvest and The Whale—have consistently brightened Off Broadway seasons for the past 15 years. This production, directed with superb acerbity by Joe Mantello, marks the playwright's overdue Broadway debut, and it doesn’t disappoint. The play is a multifaceted gem, exquisitely shaped and cut, that shines out from the simplest of settings (designed by Scott Pask): a large greige recliner couch, set on a disc...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The story of Chess dates back to the 1980s, and so do the efforts to fix it. This overheated Cold War musical, by lyricist Tim Rice and ABBA songsmiths Benny Anderson and Björn Ulvaeus, began as a 1984 concept album (which yielded the unlikely radio hit “One Night in Bangkok”). But its original London production was a mess, and its 1988 Broadway incarnation, which framed the songs in a completely new book, closed in under two months. The script has been reworked countless times since then, as different writers keep moving its pieces around, trying to solve the large set of Chess problems. None have cracked it yet, and the show’s latest revisal, with yet another completely new book, inspires little hope that anyone will.  Chess | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy “No one’s way of life is threatened by a flop,” sings the chorus in what is now the show’s opening number, and while that sentiment has a ring of wishful thinking here, it does speak to a certain strain of showtune culture. Many musicals that are not initially successful attract passionate fandoms—perhaps all the more passionate for their underdog spirit—and subsequent versions of such shows are sometimes markedly better (like the recent revival of Merrily We Roll Along or the charming current production of The Baker’s Wife). That is not the case with Chess. The production at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre, directed by Michael Mayer, has plenty of good moves. Memorable and tuneful...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  [Note: Jinkx Monsoon plays the role of Mary Todd Lincoln through September 30, joined by new cast members Kumail Nanjiani, Michael Urie and Jenn Harris. Jane Krakowski assumes the central role on October 14.] Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! is not just funny: It is dizzyingly, breathtakingly funny, the kind of funny that ambushes your body into uncontained laughter. Stage comedies have become an endangered species in recent decades, and when they do pop up they tend to be the kind of funny that evokes smirks, chuckles or wry smiles of recognition. Not so here: I can’t remember the last time I saw a play that made me laugh, helplessly and loudly, as much as Oh, Mary! did—and my reaction was shared by the rest of the audience, which burst into applause at the end of every scene. Fasten your seatbelts: This 80-minute show is a fast and wild joy ride. Escola has earned a cult reputation as a sly comedic genius in their dazzling solo performances (Help! I’m Stuck!) and on TV shows like At Home with Amy Sedaris, Difficult People and Search Party. But Oh, Mary!, their first full-length play, may surprise even longtime fans. In this hilariously anachronistic historical burlesque, Escola plays—who else?—Mary Todd Lincoln, in the weeks leading up to her husband’s assassination. Boozy, vicious and miserable, the unstable and outrageously contrary Mary is oblivious to the Civil War and hell-bent on achieving stardom as—what else?—a cabaret singer.      Oh,...

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Stephen Schwartz was only in his twenties in 1976, when he wrote the score for The Baker’s Wife, but he already had three huge hits running on Broadway at once: Pippin, Godspell and The Magic Show. This latest musical—adapted from Marcel Pagnol’s 1938 French film about a village whose heartbroken baker quits making bread—was more modest and more conventional than Schwartz’s previous ones (or his future smash Wicked), and much less successful. The show was tested in a grueling pre-Broadway tour, during which its director and both leading actors were replaced, but it was never sufficiently proved; airless and half-baked, it closed out of town. But the story now has a happy ending in the form of director Gordon Greenberg’s luxuriously cast and thoroughly enchanting revival at Classic Stage Company. After fifty years and numerous rewrites, The Baker’s Wife has risen. The Baker’s Wife | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy While it is unrelated to the figure of the Baker’s Wife in the fairy-tale musical Into the Woods, this show does have the air of a fable. An expert and affable baker, Aimable (Scott Bakula)—his name means lovable–moves to a Provençal bourg in the 1930s, to the delight of its hungry inhabitants; beside him is his new bride, Genevieve (Ariana DeBose), an attractive woman decades his junior. For Genevieve—her name starts with jeune, i.e. young—Aimable is a rebound from a bruising affair with a married man. But although she has...

Theater review by Marcus Scott As a subject in American mass culture, cults have moved well beyond a cult following. They are hard to escape these days, whether in horror films—from Hereditary and Midsommar to more off-angle offerings like The Menu, Opus and Him—or in the realm of nonfiction, where real-world sects like the Zizians, NXIVM and the cult of Mother God have fueled documentaries, exposés and bestsellers. And now contemporary theater is finally catching up to the Zeitgeist with Nazareth Hassan’s Practice, an incantatory deep dive into the sociologies of performance that is as disturbing as it is riveting. Expertly directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant, with electrifying movement by Camden Gonzalez and an extraordinary ensemble cast, the play’s world premiere at Playwrights Horizons conjures a theatrical experience in which the line between artistic rigor and psychic violation is perilously thin. Practice | Photograph: Courtesy Alexander Mejía In the play’s opening scene, a study in human pliancy, seven young performers stand on a bare stage, auditioning with the same monologue. With each take, they absorb direction unquestioningly: bending without breaking, desperate to prove themselves to a gaze they cannot see. The disembodied voice dispensing notes from the aptly named “God mic” belongs to Asa Leon (Ronald Peet), a critically acclaimed auteur whose MacArthur “genius” grant—“Not that I would label myself as a genius,” he protests coquettishly—has enabled him to...

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Ever since the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical The Phantom of the Opera hung up its mask in 2023, after a record 35-year run on Broadway, the show’s ardent admirers (there are packs of them) have been wishing it were somehow here again. And now it is—with an emphasis on somehow. The revisal of Phantom now playing Off Broadway as Masquerade has been significantly revised to fit a very different form: an immersive experience, à la Sleep No More, in which audiences are led en masque through multiple locations in a midtown complex designed to evoke the 19th-century Paris Opera House where soprano Christine Daaé is tutored and stalked by the facially misshapen serial killer who lives in the basement. The very notion of this reimagining—created by Lloyd Webber and director Diane Paulus, from a concept by Randy Weiner—is surprising; perhaps even more surprising is that, somehow, they pull it off.  Masquerade | Photograph: Courtesy Oscar Ouk The complexity of the enterprise is staggering. Six groups of 60 spectators at a time enter the building at 15-minute intervals; each group gets its own Phantom and Christine, but the other actors repeat their roles multiple times a night. The spectators are guided by the stern ballet mistress Madame Giry through a multitude of discrete playing spaces on floors throughout the complex, including the roof. To help sustain the atmosphere and the sense of event, audience members must wear black, white or silver...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Sophocles’s Oedipus is a story of blind ambition: the cautionary tale of a proud ancient Greek ruler whose determination to avoid a terrible fate leads him into it headlong. There are no kings in the English playwright-director Robert Icke’s modernized 2018 adaptation of the play, written ”(long) after Sophocles,” as the script jokingly notes. Icke’s Oedipus (Mark Strong) is a star politician instead, with resemblances to several other 2010s leaders. Like Barack Obama, he is an inspirational family man derided by some as a foreigner; like Donald Trump, he’s a populist outsider who promises strong leadership; and like France’s Emmanuel Macron, he shares a scandalous past with his significantly older wife. On the verge of winning power, Oedipus presents himself as the bald, muscular, tough-talking hero-daddy his rudderless country needs: the reformist politician as badass motherfucker. Which in a tragic sense—spoiler alert—he already is.  Oedipus | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes Oedipus is not really about the fall of a great man; rather, it’s about a great man coming to realize that he has already fallen. It is election night, the TV screen blinks with news, and Oedipus is surrounded by his family: his studious daughter Antigone (the lovely and sympathetic Olivia Reis); his twin sons, the sweet Polyneices (James Wilbraham) and the rakish Eteocles (Jordan Scowen); his sturdy old mum, Merope (Anne Reid, tasty as a crust of bread),...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Ver-sigh. The biggest new musical of the fall arrives on a wave of high hopes, thanks to its promising main assets: music and lyrics by the veteran hitmaker Stephen Schwartz, in his first original Broadway score since Wicked; a starring role for Kristin Chenoweth, one of musical theater’s great leading ladies, as the Florida socialite Jackie Siegel, a walking symbol of American excess; the creative talents of director Michael Arden and set designer Dane Laffrey, who have been on quite a roll; and, in Lauren Greenfield’s 2012 documentary about the Siegel family, a source with rich potential for adaptation. Like the 90,000–square-foot, $100-million palace that the Siegels are determined to build for themselves in Orlando, The Queen of Versailles is nothing if not ambitious. But like that same palace, it also feels misguided and very much still under construction. The Queen of Versailles | Photograph: Julieta Cervantes The underlying problem is that QOV doesn’t have a clear POV. Greenfield’s film is always alert to the grotesque disconnect between the Siegels’ lives of wasteful extravagance and the financial struggles of the employees in their orbit, including the nannies who care for their eight children. It is also a cautionary tale: Midway through the movie, the financial crisis of 2008 pulls the ornate rug out from under the Siegels’ empire and plunges Jackie’s future into uncertainty. What happens to a trophy wife when the shelf...

The five-time Oscar nominee Michelle Williams returns to the stage in a revival of Eugene O’Neill's Pulitzer Prize–winning 1921 tale of a former prostitute and her troubled romance with a sailor. Hamilton's Thomas Kail directs the production, which also stars Tom Sturridge and that great Broadway everyman Brian d’Arcy James. 

Broadway review by Adam Feldman A little-known fact about the anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman is that she dabbled in theater criticism. In a series of 1914 lectures, collected in book form as The Social Significance of Modern Drama, she assessed such writers as Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and Shaw through the lens of their revolutionary potential. Modern drama, she opined, “mirrors every phase of life and embraces every strata of society, showing each and all caught in the throes of the tremendous changes going on, and forced either to become part of the process or be left behind.” That is a good description, as it happens, of the 1998 musical Ragtime, which is being revived on Broadway by Lincoln Center Theater in a first-class production directed by Lear deBessonet and anchored by the superb actor-singer Joshua Henry. The show is a vast panorama of American life in the turbulent early years of the 20th century, as illustrated by the intersecting stories of three fictional families—those of a moneyed white businessman, a Jewish immigrant and a successful Black pianist—as well as a clutch of real-life figures from the period, including Goldman herself. It is hard to know what she would make of this grand musical pageant. Perhaps she would admire the production’s epic sweep, stirring score and excellent cast; perhaps she might shudder at the lavish scale of its 28-piece orchestra and even larger ensemble of actors. Either way, this Ragtime is an embarrassment of riches. ...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Theater, they say, is the fabulous invalid, regaling visitors with tales of past glory as it sinks into its deathbed; conversation, they say, is another dying art. But don’t tell that to Bess Wohl’s Liberation, which has just moved to Broadway, with its exceptional cast intact, after a much-discussed run at the Roundabout earlier this year. A searching and revealing drama about the achievements and limits of 1970s feminism, Liberation weaves different kinds of conversation into a multilayered narrative—and, in doing so, serendipitously restores the very word conversation to its roots. As an adjective or noun, converse denotes opposition or reversal. As a verb, however, it stems from the Latin term conversare, which means “turning together.” In other words: Conversation may involve disagreement—and in Liberation, it often does—but it is not at its core adversarial. It’s literally about sharing a revolution.  Liberation | Photograph: Courtesy Little Fang The revolution in question here is second-wave feminism, the so-called “women’s lib” movement of the 1960s and 1970s that aimed to continue the advances toward sexual equality that had come earlier in the century. The play’s first level of conversation takes place over a period of years in the early 1970s in a smelly high school gym somewhere in the midwest. Lizzie (Susannah Flood)—a budding journalist whose editor won’t let her write anything but wedding announcements and obituaries, which...

Review by Adam Feldman  The low-key dazzling Speakeasy Magick has been nestled in the atmospheric McKittrick Hotel for more than a year, and now it has moved up to the Lodge: a small wood-framed room at Gallow Green, which functions as a rooftop bar in the summer. The show’s dark and noisy new digs suit it well. Hosted by Todd Robbins (Play Dead), who specializes in mild carnival-sideshow shocks, Speakeasy Magick is a moveable feast of legerdemain; audience members, seated at seven tables, are visited by a series of performers in turn. Robbins describes this as “magic speed dating.” One might also think of it as tricking: an illusion of intimacy, a satisfying climax, and off they go into the night. The evening is punctuated with brief performances on a makeshift stage. When I attended, the hearty Matthew Holtzclaw kicked things off with sleight of hand involving cigarettes and booze; later, the delicate-featured Alex Boyce pulled doves from thin air. But it’s the highly skilled close-up magic that really leaves you gasping with wonder. Holtzclaw’s table act comes to fruition with a highly effective variation on the classic cups-and-balls routine; the elegant, Singapore-born Prakash and the dauntingly tattooed Mark Calabrese—a razor of a card sharp—both find clever ways to integrate cell phones into their acts. Each performer has a tight 10-minute act, and most of them are excellent, but that’s the nice thing about the way the show is structured: If one of them happens to...

You’ll get a kick out of this holiday stalwart, which still features Santa, wooden soldiers and the dazzling Rockettes. In recent years, new music, more eye-catching costumes and advanced technology have been introduced to bring audience members closer to the performance. In the signature kick line that finds its way into most of the big dance numbers, the Rockettes’ 36 pairs of legs rise and fall like the batting of an eyelash, their perfect unison a testament to the disciplined human form. This is precision dancing on a massive scale—a Busby Berkeley number come to glorious life—and it takes your breath away. RECOMMENDED: How to get tickets to the Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes

Michael Cerveris, an expert at 19th-century glowering, stars as the miserly and humbug-bashing Ebenezer Scrooge in the returns of Jack Thorne's popular 2017 stage version of Charles Dickens's classic yuletide story. Director Matthew Warchus's 2019 Broadway production swept all four design categories (plus one for Best Score!) at that foreshortened season's Tony Awards; Thomas Caruso shares directing duties for its return engagement at the PAC. Nancy Opel and Crystal Lucas-Perry play two of Scrooge's ghostly guests; other notables in the cast include George Abud, Chris Hoch, Rashidra Scott and Dead Outlaw's Julia Knitel and Dashiell Eaves.

Steve Cohen, billed as the Millionaires’ Magician, conjures high-class parlor magic in the marble-columned Madison Room at the swank Lotte New York Palace. Audiences must dress to be impressed (cocktail attire is required); tickets start at $125, with an option to pay more for meet-and-greet time and extra tricks with Cohen after the show. But if you've come to see a classic-style magic act, you get what you pay for. Sporting a tuxedo and bright rust hair, the magician delivers routines that he has buffed to a patent-leather gleam: In addition to his signature act—"Think-a-Drink," involving a kettle that pours liquids by request—highlights include a lulu of levitation trick and a card-trick finale that leaves you feeling like, well, a million bucks.

Dan White is something of a local sensation and a regular guest on Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show, and it's not hard to see why. His show, which sells out weeks in advance, is an ideal fancy-date night. Handsome and smooth, White offers modern variations on classic routines, blending multiple kinds of magic (mentalism, card tricks, illusionism) into an admirably variegated evening of entertainment. If a few of the effects don't fit the intimacy of the room—when I saw the show in its previous incarnation at the Nomad Hotel, a transformation illusion didn't quite come off—most of the tricks leave you happily agape, especially when performed in such cosy quarters. You'll probably never see a levitation act at such close range, and you may leave feeling a few feet off the ground yourself.

New York Theatre Workshop bakes up a new version of Molière's baguette-crisp comedy about religious hypocrisy and gullibility among the upper crust, freshly adapted by Lucas Hnath (A Dolls House, Part 2) and directed by erstwhile Soho Rep leader Sarah Benson. The cast is a murderers' row: Matthew Broderick plays the conning lead character and David Cross is his principal dupe; joining the fun are Amber Gray, Francie Jue, Emily Davis, Ryan Haddad, Lisa Kron, Ike Ufomadu and RuPaul’s Drag Race's acidulous Bianca del Rio. 

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Oliver (Darren Criss) is a Helperbot, and he can’t help himself. A shut-in at his residence for retired androids in a near-future Korea, he functions in a chipper loop of programmatic behavior; every day, he brushes his teeth and eyes, tends to his plant and listens to the retro jazz favored by his former owner, James (Marcus Choi), who he is confident will someday arrive to take him back. More than a decade goes by before his solitary routine is disrupted by Claire (Helen J Shen), a fellow Helperbot from across the hall, who is looking to literally connect and recharge. Will these two droids somehow make a Seoul connection? Can they feel their hearts beep? That is the premise of Will Aronson and Hue Park’s new musical Maybe Happy Ending, and it’s a risky one. The notion of robots discovering love—in a world where nothing lasts forever, including their own obsolescent technologies—could easily fall into preciousness or tweedom. Instead, it is utterly enchanting. As staged by Michael Arden (Parade), Maybe Happy Ending is an adorable and bittersweet exploration of what it is to be human, cleverly channeled through characters who are only just learning what that entails. Maybe Happy Ending | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman In a Broadway landscape dominated by loud adaptations of pre-existing IP, Maybe Happy Ending stands out for both its intimacy and its originality. Arden and his actors approach the material with a delicate touch; they...

John Kevin Jones goes to the Dickens in this one-hour account of the novelist's classic holiday ghost story, adapted with director Rhonda Dodd. The Merchant's House Museum, formerly the home of a wealthy 19th-century family, provides an atmospheric candlelit setting for Jones's 13th annual engagement. This year, Jones alternates performances with Vince Gatton. Select performances include an optional reception at which the audience sips mulled wine and Jones recites Clement Moore's “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”

Mrs. Claus, Vixen and some elves search set out on a quest to find Christmas spirit in New York City in a raunchy holiday show—with drag queens, puppets, dirty jokes and dirty dancing—directed and choreographed by burlesque artist Sassie LeFay and music directed by Stephen Murphy. Expect more naughtiness than niceness; something tells us there will be a lot of unwrapping involved. 

Theater review by Raven SnookA modernized, female-forward reinvention of a 200-year-old protofeminist classic may sound like a bonnet on a bonnet. But Emily Breeze's Are the Bennet Girls Ok?, an irreverent riff on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, is a delight. Many of Austen’s plot points are more or less preserved, but the novel’s sense and sensibility are reframed: Using period dress and patriarchal rules but contemporary, profanity-laden dialogue, Breeze’s perceptive version celebrates sisterly, not romantic, love.The play kicks off with a blazing monologue by Mrs. Bennet (a hilariously high-strung Zuzanna Szadkowski), who is desperate to marry off at least some of her five daughters to save the family from financial ruin. The nubile and obedient Jane (Shayvawn Webster) seems like her best bet, but the blunt and headstrong Lizzie (Elyse Steingold) racks up unexpected proposals. Underage flirt Lydia (Caroline Grogan) is the likeliest to get in trouble; sensitive, botany-loving wallflower Mary (standout Masha Breeze, the playwright's sister) and horse girl Kitty (Violeta Picayo) seem like spinsters in waiting. Are the Bennet Girls Ok? | Photograph: Courtesy Ari Espay Though much of the girls’ alternately empathetic and uproarious chatter is sparked by the men in their lives, we encounter those men only rarely. All are played by a single actor, Edoardo Benzoni, who brilliantly delineates each character: four suitors—deer-in-headlights Darcy, awkward Collins, douchey...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  There’s a big twist at the end of the first act of Death Becomes Her; the plot of the second includes a giant hole. And those are just two of the injuries that the vain actress Madeline Ashton (Megan Hilty) and the bitter writer Helen Sharp (Jennifer Simard) inflict on each other in this new Broadway musical, a savagely funny dark comedy about how the quest for beauty—in a misogynist world where the “F” word is fifty—can bring out the beasts in women. Its two central characters are old frenemies whose shared rage at age is understandable: They’re Mad and Hel, and they’re not going to take it anymore. The problem is how and on whom they take it out. Adapted from the hit 1992 movie, Death Becomes Her introduces Madeline in a delicious show-within-a-show production number that sets up the musical’s themes with a giant wink. As the star of a Broadway musical called Me! Me! Me!, she wonders why she stays in “the chase to stay young and beautiful”—“Is it the fact that I’m attracted / To each kernel of external validation?” she sings, with nifty internal rhymes—before launching into a punning answer: “Everything I do is for the gaze.” The song then morphs into a pull-the-stops-out campfest, staged by director-choreographer Christopher Gattelli and costumed by Paul Tazewell as a spoofy tribute to Liza Minnelli in The Act. As colorful streamers fly into the audience, you might worry that Death Becomes Her is peaking too soon. It’s not: Having popped...

The pent-up, mixed-up, horned-up 1950s teen culture that was sent up in the 1970s musical Grease gets updated and upended in a modern-day reimagining of the show's characters and themes. The script is by Catie Hogan, with contributions from five other writers as well as lyricists Billy Recce (Singfeld) and Danny Salles; Jack Plotnick (Girls Will Be Girls) directs a cast of eight.   TIME OUT DISCOUNT TICKET OFFER: VAPE! THE GREASE PARODYAn unhinged new musical Save 35%!Tickets $45–$55 (regular price $66–$87) Promotional description: Vape! The Grease Parody is a hilariously unhinged spoof of the iconic and timeless musical Grease. The show pokes loving fun at all the wonderful moments, sexual innuendos, outrageous characters, rivalries and secret romances from the original. The hair products may have changed, but the drama, the rivalries and the thirst for hallway clout remain timeless. It's the musical you know and love…but dragged through a cloud of strawberry-scented vapor and a TikTok filter. It's the show that you want! (Ooh! Ooh! Ooh, honey!) TWO WAYS TO BUY  TICKETS:1. Through the ticketing site: Click here to buy tickets2. Through the show site: Visit VapeTheMusical.com and enter code: TEENANGEL *Subject to Availability. Discount only applies to select tickets only. Other restrictions may apply. Not applicable to previously purchased tickets. Offer may be discontinued at any time.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  But is it art? That is the question, familiar to students of 20th-century aesthetics, that hangs at the center of the French playwright Yasmina Reza’s 1994 comedy of manners and men. Serge (Neil Patrick Harris) has paid a fortune for a large painting, by a celebrated artist named Antrios, that is almost totally white. His old friend Marc (Bobby Cannavale) is outraged by this purchase, which he considers a grave insult to common sense and, by extension, to his own good influence. Their perpetually flustered common pal Yvan (James Corden), caught in the middle, tries in vain to accommodate them both while retaining their love, as though mommy and daddy were getting a divorce.  Even in 1998, when Art debuted on Broadway, this framework was more than a little passé, rehearsing arguments about modern art that probably peaked around 1965. In the play’s current Broadway mounting, directed by Scott Ellis, those discussions seem even quainter—and all but irrelevant to the seismic gaps that have opened up in recent years. This iteration is ostensibly set in the U.S., so the francs of the original have been exchanged for dollars, but the names and the overall sensibility remain quite French (with a twist of British via Christopher Hampton’s translation). If you squint very hard, you may make out faint suggestions of contemporary American resonance—in Marc’s blustering contempt for elite tastes, for example, or Serge’s dismissal of him as a “nostalgia...