Theatre reviews: ‘Death of a Salesman’ and ‘Cats: The Jellicle Ball’

‘Death of a Salesman,’ Winter Garden Theatre, New York City

★★★

“Death of a Salesman has returned to Broadway, yet again in triumph,” said Helen Shaw in The New York Times. It’s been a mere four years since Arthur Miller’s tragedy last appeared on the Great White Way, and that one didn’t have Nathan Lane’s unusual take on Willy Loman. Whereas the aging, fading salesman is often portrayed as a hulk of a man, “Lane’s our song-and-dance man, after the music stops”; he’s so weightless that he “seems to drift like a tumbleweed.” That makes Laurie Metcalf the show’s center of gravity, and her portrayal of wife Linda is “a masterpiece of layered tensions.” She doesn’t cry when her self-aggrandizing husband dies, and neither will you.

While “there’s no such thing as a definitive staging of Salesman,” said Charles Isherwood in The Wall Street Journal, “this version ranks as the finest Broadway production of any classic play in many years.” Lane’s Loman seems “doomed to defeat as soon as we see him,” Metcalf is “extraordinary,” and Christopher Abbott is “a revelation” as the couple’s disappointing elder son, Biff. With its stark staging, this Salesman also feels more like an existential, rather than particularly American, tragedy. Miller’s play becomes “a resonant examination of the isolation and loneliness of life, the fear that comes with the waning of hope, the tenuousness of human connection.”

But director Joe Mantello has softened all the male characters, and that “drains the drama of its potency,” said Naveen Kumar in Variety. Though Lane is “undoubtedly” gifted, “his natural gentility is tough to dress down.” Worse, the tension we should feel between Willy and Biff never takes hold because neither seems sufficiently fixated on the idea of what a man should be. Fortunately, Mantello has Metcalf, “upholding her reputation as a Broadway MVP” by reminding us at every turn of the anxieties of reaching the end of life nearly penniless. “The revival is worth seeing for her performance alone.”

‘Cats: The Jellicle Ball,’ Broadhurst Theatre, New York City

★★★★

“Good luck naming a musical revival that has ever departed so radically from the original,” said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. In Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s balletic 1980s kitsch fest becomes “a glitter bomb of euphoric pandemonium,” and the transformation could happen only because the show’s performers aren’t pretending to be cats anymore and are instead celebrating Cats as participants in New York City’s competitive queer ballroom culture. Though I worried the show might not transfer well to Broadway following its hit off-Broadway run, “I was delighted to find it’s even better uptown.”

“We could quibble about what’s gained and lost,” said Jackson McHenry in NYMag.com. The ballroom competition’s runway is now shorter, leaving the performers “less room to strut.” But the staging does give the soloists a brighter spotlight, and as before, this reimagined Cats “makes a thrilling number of choices to comment on the bizarre musical entity borne of a posh Brit’s love of T.S. Eliot’s poems for children.” Every cat (or person playacting as a cat) still gets a Lloyd Webber song. And the tension between the composer’s commercial juggernaut and the marginalized art form of ballroom only enriches the show and its implied message: that “given any kind of stage, some talent, and enough attitude, a person can transform into whatever real thing they want to be.”

“As always, the showstoppers are the showstoppers,” said Greg Evans in Deadline. The Wiz actor André De Shields brings the audience to his feet when he enters as Old Deuteronomy, and “Memory,” delivered by “Tempress” Chasity Moore, is bathed in “thunderous” applause. Every other number is “entirely recognizable yet completely fresh,” helping make Jellicle Ball “so flat-out fun it smothers every slight ever suffered by Lloyd Webber’s mega-musical.”