The New York Times - Not Recommended
"...Noah Haidle's "Birthday Candles," which opened on Broadway Sunday night at the American Airlines Theater, tries to build poignancy and depth through moments that repeat like a record needle stuck in a groove. Instead, this Roundabout Theater Company production gets caught in a superficial cycle of wannabe profundities and emotional pantomimes."
NY Daily News - Highly Recommended
"...The wonderful new drama "Birthday Candles," which stars Debra Messing of "Will and Grace" fame, is a perfect example. For 90 minutes at the Roundabout Theatre on Broadway, face masks double as a means by which an emotionally wrought audience can wipe its eyes. No young person could have written this play; the pain and discoveries of the author are all over every beautifully written line."
Vulture - Not Recommended
"...In the new Broadway drama Birthday Candles, the playwright Noah Haidle hopscotches rapidly through time. It takes him about 90 minutes to travel 90 years. We meet Ernestine (Debra Messing) on her 17th birthday, and then we meet her again on that date on succeeding birthdays, visiting her 18th celebration, then some year in her '30s, then her 50th, and eventually her 107th. Each time, we find her baking her cake in her kitchen; such domestic repetitions are her ticking clock. But there's a sense of hours lost here, rather than a life counted up."
New York Theater - Somewhat Recommended
"...Noah Haidle is no Thornton Wilder. "Birthday Candles," running at Roundabout's American Airlines Theater through May 29, has its warmhearted and amusing moments, but it's essentially a middle brow entertainment that tries too hard to be ethereal, poignant, and poetic."
Variety - Highly Recommended
"...The ingredients of this Roundabout Theatre Company production are equally measured. The impressive acting, practical set and tailored direction blend well to tell a story that could easily feel flat and predictable. Vivienne Benesch's direction readily elevates Haidle's script, exploring the emotional and unpredictable time-lapse tale of Ernestine's birthdays over the course of 90 years."
New York Post - Recommended
"...Impressively getting more laughs than the "Will and Grace" star is the hilarious Crystal Finn as Joan, Billy's neurotic college girlfriend and later wife. When she chastises herself in the third person - "You ruin everything, Joan! They're all laughing at you!" - she morphs into everybody's strange in-law. Finn, making her Broadway debut, is a talent to watch."
Entertainment Weekly - Somewhat Recommended
"...It's a narrative device that's familiar to theater-goers (Thornton Wilder's 1931 play The Long Christmas Dinner comes to mind, as does A. R. Gurney's 1982 The Dining Room). But it's also one that prevents Birthday Candles from shining bright. So much of the play is filled with exposition that the emotional impact of the story's more dramatic moments are lost, the piece instead coming off as cloying as a Hallmark Christmas movie despite director Vivienne Benesch's best efforts."
amNY - Recommended
"...One could have a cynical reaction to "Birthday Candles," finding it sentimental and manipulative, with existential queries and lines of "King Lear" that are didactically repeated in an attempt to make it seem profound. On the other hand, others will find its gentle-humored examination of ordinary domestic life to be relatable and deeply moving. At my performance, I heard a lot of sniffing from audience members all around me."
Time Out New York - Somewhat Recommended
"...Messing knows how to make the sentimental bits work-the play elicits sympathetic "awwwww"s from the audience at several junctures-and she gets capable support from a cast that also includes Enrico Colantoni as her patiently lovestruck neighbor, John Earl Jelks as her husband, and Crystal Finn, Susannah Flood and Christopher Livingston as various descendents and others. (Finn brings a welcome breath of humor to her role as a high-strung daughter-in-law.) But Birthday Candles, directed by Vivienne Benesch, is little more than a compendium of twee pseudo wisdoms: Everything is made of stardust, forgiveness is the heart of most major religions, goldfish only have a three-second memory span, and so forth. There's a slice of life somewhere in this oversugared and underbaked confection, but even that slice is stale."
Deadline - Recommended
"...Birthday Candles, Noah Haidle's Broadway dramedy starring Debra Messing as a woman who, over the course of the play's 90 minutes ages from 17 to 107, has just about all the right ingredients for the poignant, funny and life-affirming experience it sets out to be. If everything doesn't always come together just as it should, well, even an imperfect cake is better than no cake at all."
TheaterMania - Not Recommended
"...Birthday Candles is very clear in its scope: 90 years in 90 minutes, every scene taking place on one woman's birthday. Throughout the play, she bakes a single birthday cake, just as her mom taught her and just as she teaches her children and grandchildren. In theory, this play seems almost designed for me. Much like the central character, Ernestine (Debra Messing), I care deeply about family and traditions, and am a passionate baker-my mom even taught me how to bake my first cake. Because of all the similarities and personal connections, Birthday Candles should have felt close to home and pulled on my heartstrings, but instead it just felt like a disappointing bite of bland cake overcompensating with achingly sweet buttercream frosting."
TheaterScene.net - Somewhat Recommended
"...While Vivienne Benesch's production for the Roundabout Theatre Company at the American Airlines Theatre is beautifully done giving Debra Messing a bravura role as Ernestine Ashworth in which she is onstage throughout, the play is devoid of surprises in covering 90 years in 90 minutes in the life of one woman, too predictable to feel fresh. And once the characters are introduced, they pretty much stay the same throughout the rest of the play."
NY Theatre Guide - Recommended
"...There are some beautiful insights in Birthday Candles, such as when different characters deliver the same lines, to show how life can be circular - that every generation goes from the passionate idealism of youth to the resigned dissatisfaction of middle age."
Broadway Blog - Recommended
"...Birthday Candles is a rich confection for a middlebrow Broadway audience, particularly one of a certain generation, layered with accessible philosophical concerns, and frosted, not with earthshaking catastrophes, but with the kind of characters and situations - happy and sad - most of us contend with in our daily lives. Directed with sweet warmth by Vivien Benesch, who staged its premiere at the Detroit Public Theatre, Birthday Candles presents 90 years in 90 minutes, crafting a loving silhouette of a life well lived."
Stage Buddy - Somewhat Recommended
"...Messing is fine here as she ages without makeup. She is a skilled comedian (TV's "Will and Grace") and has also shown herself to be a fine stage actress. ("Outside Mullingar") but this show doesn't give her the opportunity to show off her talents."
Stage and Cinema - Highly Recommended
"...In playwright Noah Haidle’s new play Birthday Candles, currently running at the American Airlines Theatre, television star Debra Messing ages before our very eyes. When she first enters the stage, Ms. Messing is 17. Then she’s 18. Then she’s 38. We know that because it is in the dialogue. She continues forward on this journey to her best life, including short trips to her forties, sixties, seventies and even her hundreds. Along the way, she experiences trials and tribulations that would make the biblical Job submit a resignation letter, but still she persists. Buoyed by childhood dreams, family rituals, a stated rebellious nature and extraordinary resilience, she ultimately finds satisfaction in living the everyday life of an unassuming American woman from the Midwest. That woman being the play’s main character, Ernestine Ashworth."
StageZine - Recommended
"...Birthday Candles has so much going on and simultaneously not much is happening. We first get to see Ernestine Ashworth (Debra Messing) at the age of 17 making her first birthday cake as per her mother's instructions, where the ingredients-floor, sugar, butter and salt-are of the utmost importance, and continues to bake them for the next 90 years of her life. This lengthy time span all takes place in 90 minutes."
Daily Beast - Recommended
"...The stolen moments of the play-Messing letting Ernestine silently imbibe the world and events around her-make the most impact, as well as its affecting denouement (in which Finn, again, is a standout), when Ernestine attempts to finally finish the cake (and my, how you will panic over her lifting a container of flour). As it confronts the big and small questions of existence and time itself, Birthday Candles itself proves simultaneously over-baked and under-baked, but its performers ensure it is served warm."
Broadway News - Somewhat Recommended
"...But Haidle's characters are at times so self-conscious about their place in the world that they cease to believably inhabit them. Where a more expansive drama might demonstrate philosophical resonance, here those aspirations are spelled out as briefly as in icing ("Time is a lie") or in wordy and rushed asides about astrophysics."
Theatrely - Somewhat Recommended
"...But you're more likely to come away with a better understanding of how to bake a cake - something needs to hold us over before the next Waitress revival - than with our role in the universe, or how, or why, any of it should add up to something. "The pattern keeps getting stranger between the living and the dead," Madeline announces in one scene, apropos of nothing. If Haidle meant for us to make anything out of the disparate scenes he presents, some restraint in the amount of time, characters, and relationships covered might have done the trick. None are very memorable, and Haidle doesn't draw any interesting lines between them."
New York Stage Review - Recommended
"...Fortunately, whether she's wearing a ribbon in her hair and bouncing around the room as teenage Ernestine or slouchy knee-high stockings and shuffling slowly about as nonagenarian Ernestine, Messing is an absolute delight. And she's beautifully matched with Colantoni, a total charmer as the geeky boy next door and later the geeky geezer next door. You might say they take the cake."
Total Theater - Highly Recommended
"...It all takes place in the green and blue kitchen of Ernestine Ashworth, as her birthdays progress throughout the years. There's always a birthday cake, a pencil mark taken on the wall, and as Ernestine explains to us, a gathering of friends and family. "The genius of a party is to offer us all a rest from the daily human errand to travel morning until night. To stake a claim in an hour and say 'I will notice this.'" The same could be said of theater, especially since these words were read aloud by director Vivienne Benesch on the first day of rehearsal. Ten days later, rehearsals had to be halted because of Covid. What a sad time followed, much longer than any of us expected. We lost friends and relatives, medical staffs were exhausted to the bone, and looming ahead, Putin started a war, gas prices soared, and supermarkets were out of a lot of goods, even with the price hikes. And yet, here we are, enjoying a lovely play with a leading actress who makes stealing our hearts seem effortless."
