At the center of director Joe Mantello’s crisply staged yet emotionally distancing revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, one particular scene stands out. It is a scene that might not typically be considered the play’s most memorable—or at least, would not commonly feel like its narrative peak. 

Titular salesman Willy Loman, a mammoth role here tackled by three-time Tony Award winner Nathan Lane, pays a visit to his obnoxiously youthful boss Howard Wagner. Howard inherited the company from his father, Frank, who made Willy certain promises prior to his death. Now 63-years old, deep in debt and exhausted by life on the road, Willy asks—or, eventually, begs—young Howard for a position in the company’s New York office. A desk job. (The American dream, right?)

As played by a perfectly icy John Drea, Howard is an unfeeling man. He is not cruel, exactly. But certainly Howard is more engaged with his fancy new wire-recording contraption than the desperate Willy. Designer Rudy Mance costumes Drea in a suspiciously Patagonia-adjacent vest, starkly contrasting with Lane’s overworn beige suit—an outfit almost as wearily ragged as the man. Drea is not tall, but standing over the defeated Lane, his dominance is without question. Howard is the future: impersonal, driven by innovation, uninterested in history. Sitting opposite, Willy looks small and irrelevant, like a visitor from another time. 

In other words, Willy looks like he just stumbled in from a little play called Death of a Salesman. And that feeling of temporal displacement is present elsewhere in this spare, abstract mounting by Mantello and a distinguished creative team. Chloe Lamford’s vaguely dystopian set, somewhere between a decaying ‘40s garage and a modern crumbling warehouse, feels both contemporary and ancient. Mance’s other costumes have a similarly displaced quality—Linda Loman’s bathrobe wouldn’t look out of place in a suburban household of today. 

I locked in on Salesman during this scene, stirred up by that feeling of then-and-now colliding in an uncertain and purgatorial theatrical space. But for too much of this spare staging on a grand scale, now open at Broadway’s none-too-intimate Winter Garden Theatre, the same clarity of purpose was not present. Most of Mantello’s gorgeous staging is more impressive than moving, a thing to be admired more than fully engaged with.

Does the fault lie in the play? Hardly. While pockets of Miller’s language do resist efforts to pull this story out of time, the form of Salesman is near-experimental in its structural boldness. Willy’s tragic descent into depression and (maybe) senility is rendered as an unsettling waking nightmare, with figures from his past slipping in and out unsettlingly, like haunting specters pushing him towards doom. Reality is a loose thing in this text, and Mantello embraces that boldness. Voices from past and present meld together confusingly in Sasha Milavic Davies’s destabilizing movement work and Mikaal Sulaiman’s eerie sound design. 

Not everything about Salesman blends perfectly with today. The play’s bucketloads of dramatic irony can feel, in certain moments, just a little suffocating. Perhaps this is not a critique of the play so much as an unavoidable reality of our times: that capitalism and the “American Dream” are cruel, destructive lies is, at this point, a truism. Few writers have deconstructed the American fiction as devastatingly as Miller, but one still inevitably grows fatigued as Willy’s decent unfolds.

I think that Mantello’s goal, in this stripped-down Salesman, is to offset that familiarity by honing in on a certain emotional immediacy. Mantello is looking to make the story feel alive, not a museum piece but present and urgently felt. In this way, Mantello’s vision feels reminiscent of Sam Gold’s genius 2017 revival of Tennesse Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, which pulled away all the ornamentation and got down to the heart of the thing. 

But Mantello is fundamentally a showman, in a way that Gold is not. He can’t fully commit to his own concept, instead allowing a number of grand gestures to seep in. The most fatal is Mantello’s decision to cast the younger versions of Willy’s sons, Biff and Happy, with a separate set of baby-faced performers. As Willy unfolds the exaggerated fantasies of his children’s absurdly hopeful youthful days, these actors (Joaquin Consuelos and Jake Termine, performing the task assigned) leap and bound on-and-off like youthful cubs. Lighting designer Jack Knowles floods the stage with bright sepia tones for these fanciful flashbacks. It's a concept that feels like a concept, constantly yanking this production out of its supposed commitment to simplicity. 

No similar fault can be found in the leading performers, who are superb. Ben Ahlers is a perfect Happy, foolish, flawed but essentially kind; Christopher Abbott commits fully to Biff’s profound disillusionment in both his father and, most tragically, himself in a sincere and heartbreaking performance. 

While Metcalf and Lane cannot fully shake certain familiar mannerisms, both ultimately find an unshowy ordinariness that could, in another production, truly overwhelm. Lane plays Willy’s acceptance of his fate with an unnatural, devastating smallness: in Metcalf’s hands, Linda’s final lines are almost tossed off, as she scarcely herself even has energy left to care.

And yet, I was ultimately unmoved. Why? In sitting uncertainly between total adornment and its weighted ideas of temporal displacement, the production had never quite gotten me there. This Salesman tries to be a few too many things, and.  the intended emotional clarity proves just out of its reach.

Death of a Salesman is now in performance at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here. 

The 2025 Broadway Cast album of Chess will be released in digital and streaming formats tomorrow, Friday April 10 through Ghostlight Records. The recording will be released on CD and vinyl later this year. 

The new album is based on the record-breaking production currently running at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre, starring Aaron Tveit, Lea Michele, and Nicholas Christopher. 

Theatrely has an exclusive first listen to “Where I Want to Be” performed by Nicholas Christopher. 

Chess currently stars Tony Award winner Aaron Tveit, Lea Michele, and Nicholas Christopher, and features Hannah Cruz, Bryce Pinkham, Bradley Dean, Sean Allan Krill. The ensemble includes Kyla Bartholomeusz, Daniel Beeman, Shavey Brown, Emma Degerstedt, Casey Garvin, Adam Halpin, David Paul Kidder, Sarah Michele Lindsey, Michael Milkanin, Aleksandr Ivan Pevec, Aliah James, Sydney Jones, Sean MacLaughlin, Sarah Meahl, Ramone Nelson, Fredric Rodriguez Odgaard, Michael Olaribigbe, Katerina Papacostas, Samantha Pollino, Adam Roberts, Regine Sophia, and Katie Webber.

To pre-save the album, visit here.

Some fools will look to identify a singular moment in this transcendent Broadway transfer of Cats: The Jellicle Ball—a scene, a song, even a lighting shift—that lands with anything other than graceful perfection. 

They may try. They won’t succeed. 

“What about ‘Bustopher Jones’?” I hear you asking, foolishly. “That’s one of the weaker numbers in Cats, right?” Wrong. In this Ball, the vivacious Nora Schell has reinvented the “cat about town” as an incorrigible friend to all, a spirited lover of sex, drink and revelry. Bustopher is an icon now—get with it. 

“Well, ‘Gus the Theatre Cat’ is always a bit dull, isn’t it?” you might suggest, recklessly. Idiot. Gus has been redefined as a ballroom veteran, still throwing shade from the box seats with the best of them; a wearily witty Junior LaBeija (of Paris Is Burning) owns the stage in the role, provoking waves of laughter with the slightest eye-roll. 

“Are you really saying that even ‘The Ad-Dressing of Cats’ somehow lands?” Of course, you imbecile. The final number of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s enduring 1980s musical, which bizarrely chose to conclude with a treatise on proper engagement with felines, has been reframed as a counseling of respect for the ballroom legacy. Now you know—and don’t you forget. 

The concept of Cats: The Jellicle Ball, now on Broadway at the Broadhurst Theatre following a celebrated run at PAC NYC in 2024, is as simple as it is demented: co-directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch have transposed Cats into the underground ballroom scene. A parade of “Jellicles” strutting their stuff here become battling performers in a ballroom competition. Old Deuteronomy (André De Shields) becomes a queer elder judging the competition. The narrator, Munkustrap (Dudney Joseph Jr.), is our catty Master of Ceremonies. And Grizabella (“Tempress” Chasity Moore) is a faded trans ballroom icon of yesteryear, cast aside by the world yet worshipped (if at a distance) by this new generation of “Cats” as a living legend. 

It works. It works because the ballroom setting lends weight and specificity to a narrative world that previously felt airless, abstract to the point of nothingness. It works because Webber’s songs translate easily to ballroom categories. Most of all, it works because it’s a hell of a lot of fun. 

And on Broadway, it somehow works even better. I did worry that something might get lost in the tighter confines of the Broadhurst—a flexible space at PAC had allowed for both a long runway on stage, and bustling actions on all sides. Could the magic survive the transfer? 

I needn’t have fretted. On Broadway, Cats: The Jellicle Ball has both sharpened in its staging and deepened in its significance. 

Scenic designer Rachel Hauck has masterfully reshaped the proscenium space, adding stage seating that blends seamlessly with the action. Choreographers Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons utilize every nook and cranny of the Broadhurst, with Jellicles popping up on all sides. Wild movement work and meticulous lighting by Adam Honoré (the two elements working together far more smoothly than at PAC) keep our eyes focused on necessary action while still allowing space for the requisite ballroom frenzy—bodies everywhere, moving as one yet all, uniquely and thrillingly, telling their own individual story. 

Dropped into a historic Broadway house, Jellicle Ball also plays more clearly and movingly as a defiant revolt of queer joy against a regressive and unadventurous culture still fighting its way out of the Stone Age. The voguers have, somehow, invaded a house of the establishment. And they’re wreaking gorgeous havoc.

Within that rich context, I found the high points of this production all the more intensely euphoric. The opener, “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats,” is simply electrifying; “The Jellicle Ball” offers an overwhelming explosion of brightness and beauty; and the arrival of Old Deuteronomy, played by the incomparable De Shields, is sheer communal bliss. No other performer could command such a roaring audience response. That Shields is notably just a little frailer of body (though not mind or voice) adds only greater weight to his presence. 

Other highlights include Sydney James Harcourt’s scorching hot take on “Bustopher Jones,” and a visit from “Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat,” hilariously transfigured by Emma Sofia into the most fabulous MTA conductor you’ll ever meet. 

Far from using the culture as a gimmick, Levingston and Rauch pay loving tribute to ballroom’s rich history. A tasteful history lesson at the top of the second act, paired with “Moments of Happiness,” provides an introduction for under-educated audience members like myself. 

Under William Waldrop’s musical direction and supervision, a perfectly modulated band blasts Webber’s score (re-orchestrated to perfection by Webber and David Wilson, with some skillful help from beats arranger Trevor Holder) while never overwhelming the performers. And the already perfectly ostentatious costumes by Qween Jean have gotten a welcome upgrade for Broadway—over 500 looks, each as breathtaking as the last. 

Lastly, of course there is Grizabella, the original “Glamour cat.” The sheer presence that Chasity Moore brings to this role elevates Jellicle Ball to devastating emotional heights. Moore’s rendition of “Memory” is ragged, and weary. It carries a weighty history, and years of pain. It is precisely all that history, deeply felt in this momentous staging, that makes both Moore and this production so otherworldly. This Ball is not just a remembrance of things past—it points a way forward, to a more fabulous future.