For this occasional series, our critics return to some long-running Broadway and Off Broadway shows to see how productions are faring with new casts.
‘Little Shop of Horrors’
At Westside Theater, Manhattan; littleshopnyc.com.
After seven years at the Westside Theater, Michael Mayer’s 2019 Off Broadway production of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s 1982 classic “Little Shop of Horrors” has fully twined its tentacles around a certain block of 43rd Street.
There’s something endearingly speakeasy-ish about this cramped venue, hidden inside an ex-church. For one thing, it nicely matches the set designer Julian Crouch’s run-down version of Skid Row, where an alien plant (with the voice of Christian McQueen) thirsts for blood. For another, an audience member is rarely more than a few feet from someone with Broadway-caliber chops singing her brains out.
The production has held up beautifully. That’s partly because Ashman and Menken’s songs are deathlessly good and partly because a succession of replacement casts have kept the soil fresh and the roots watered.
Those new actors have, in some ways, changed the show. Ethan Slater (Boq in the “Wicked” movies and a Tony nominee for “Sponge Bob Square Pants”) brings a more coiled, anxious energy to the shy florist Seymour than did the seraphically sweet Jonathan Groff, who originated the part in Mayer’s production. Slater’s Seymour and the excellent Urchin trio (Christine Wanda, Savannah Lee Birdsong, and Morgan Ashley Bryant), who operate as a tough-talking Greek chorus, now share a sharp-elbowed pragmatism; it’s a less innocent show than it was.
I would have seen “Little Shop” again just to see Betsy Wolfe (a Tony nominee for “& Juliet”) as the golden-hearted Audrey, who yearns for a suburban idyll and a boyfriend who doesn’t hit her. Wolfe has a startlingly moving voice as well as a left-of-center comic spaciness: She’s always a bit akimbo; she seems to have the hippie Janice from the Muppets scrambled into her human DNA.
Sometimes Wolfe’s mouth chatters silently, almost as if her Audrey is whispering or laughing to herself. It looks as though a phantom ventriloquist were moving her jaws. “Little Shop of Horrors” is famous for its sequence of Venus flytrap puppets, but Wolfe, perhaps thinking of Audrey’s few choices in life, has worked out how to become a puppet herself. Her Audrey becomes a delightful — and ultimately rather devastating — marionette act, in which Wolfe is pulling the strings for herself. (Slater and Wolfe both leave the production Oct. 25, at which point T.R. Knight and Hannah Cruz take over.) HELEN SHAW
‘Just in Time’
At Circle in the Square, Manhattan; justintimebroadway.com.
Groff’s electrifying, Tony-nominated turn as Bobby Darin in “Just in Time” felt more like a calling than a performance. He kicked off the show as himself, recounting the first time he heard a certain Darin song: like everybody else, he joked, “twirling in our mother’s heels in Pennsylvania Amish country, listening to our father’s records.” Decades later, he would spend eight years agitating to bring “Just in Time” to Broadway.
The current Darin, Jeremy Jordan, begins on a personal note as well but with a different perspective. “This is my third Broadway show in less than two years,” he quips, “and I know what you’re thinking, ‘Does the man not know how to get home?’”
The references may be professional rather than personal, but his joke reflects the need to entertain — a top requirement for any actor playing Darin, onstage almost the entire time of this turbocharged spectacle. Jordan does not quite match Groff’s evident delight in doing this particular show, but his performance comes into its own in the second half, when he reveals the fractures behind his character’s sheen. His Darin also has a fine rapport, playful then bruised, with Carrie St. Louis’s Sandra Dee. (St. Louis departs Oct. 18 to join “Dolly: A True Original Musical” on Broadway.)
A repeat visit to “Just in Time” only underlines how much of a glorious jewel box the production is: The onstage orchestra might be the most propulsively fun on Broadway right now; while the director Alex Timbers brilliantly uses Circle in the Square’s immersive configuration to plunge the audience in the middle of a whirlwind of giddy showmanship. And in terms of structure, “Just in Time” might replace “Jersey Boys” as the new exemplar of how to do a bio-musical right. Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s book smartly uses the songs to help move the story along.
Still, the name above the title on the marquee counts for an awful lot here. Jordan’s last performance is on Oct. 18, after which Matthew Morrison, who played the role this spring, returns on Oct. 20-Nov. 8. After that comes a decidedly intriguing casting move as Nicholas Christopher, a Tony Award nominee for “Chess,” steps into Darin’s fitted costume on Nov. 10. I might just have to go back for that. ELISABETH VINCENTELLI
‘Maybe Happy Ending’
At the Belasco Theater, Manhattan; maybehappyending.com.
It would be awful, wouldn’t it, if things really were falling apart over at the Helperbot Yards, the home for retired robots in “Maybe Happy Ending.” That’s where Claire and Oliver, the odd-couple neighbors at the center of Will Aronson and Hue Park’s sprightly romance of a musical comedy, spend their days, keeping an eye on their battery levels and sourcing elusive replacement parts: an elbow here, a charger there.
Broadway musicals, too, are machines, and they do a lot of switching out. Nearly two years into its run, Michael Arden’s production at the Belasco Theater has different stars than it did when it collected a half dozen 2025 Tony Awards, including best musical. But with its current leads — Hannah Kevitt as the chic, sardonic Claire opposite Zachary Noah Piser as the geeky, rigid Oliver — it feels as good as new. Which is to say, terrific.
If a show about sentient, human-looking androids sounds like the opposite of relaxing entertainment amid our current A.I. deluge, let me reassure you: These two pose no danger. Oliver, poor thing, can’t even overcome his programming enough to stop responding “You’re welcome” every time someone (frequently Claire, messing with him) says “Thank you.”
Set about 40 years in the future on the outskirts of Seoul, “Maybe Happy Ending” is a musically lush fantasy enchanted with the analog (see Oliver’s obsession with old jazz on vinyl) and deeply in love with the best of what makes us human, even when that causes us — or its charming robots — pain.
Comically in sync, Kevitt and Piser have stepped into a strong framework that owes much to two rock-solid original cast members: Marcus Choi as James, Oliver’s beloved former owner; and Dez Duron as Gil Brentley, James and Oliver’s favorite 20th-century jazz crooner. (The jazz vocalist Stella Cole is slated to cover for Duron during his four-week leave starting later this month, and Kevitt will give her final performance Oct. 18.)
The most significant change in this iteration of the show is the youthfulness of Piser’s Oliver, which subtly — no spoilers — makes an always poignant moment profoundly more so. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
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