Buzzed Broadway The best improvisers keep it simple and make it look easy. The folks behind Buzzed Broadway try too hard and make improv look impossible. It’s challenging enough to create a fully improvised parody of a Broadway musical, but this Laugh Out Loud show junks it up with an additional gimmick, a drinking game that invites audience members to lift a glass every time a performer says a particular line or does a particular dance move. I suppose it could still work if the performers seemed knowledgeable enough about musical theater to mock it (they don’t), or even if the audience got into the drinking game (it didn’t, at least not on the night I attended). Instead, this was 45 minutes of bad theater periodically interrupted by awful off-the-cuff singing and clumsy dancing not even beer goggles could make look good. —Jack Helbig
Mary Poppins Here’s a version of Mary Poppins that will frustrate both purist fans of the stories by P.L.Travers and those of us for whom the glorious 1964 Disney film was a defining experience. The show, cocreated by Cameron Mcintosh (the man who brought us Cats) and revived by the Mercury Theater Chicago, combines elements and characters from both the books and the movie (which Travers famously did not like) to create an awkward, overly long hybrid filled with both the wonderful old tunes by the Sherman brothers and less wonderful new ones by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe. The needlessly complicated story Julian Fellowes cobbled together runs out of gas halfway through the second act. Led by Nicole Armold’s likable Mary, director L. Walter Stearns’s fine A-list cast carries on bravely, but in the end the whole spectacle leaves us wanting less. —Jack Helbig
