"The next best thing to Veep has arrived on Broadway, a profane West Wing comic strip of a play in which a septet of hyper-caffeinated actresses let their funny flags fly.
Your cabin crew for this raucously turbulent flight has impressive comic credentialing. Rachel Dratch, Vanessa Williams, Lea DeLaria and Julianne Hough are probably the best known, but there’s no slouch among their extremely funny co-stars, Julie White, Lilli Cooper and Suzy Nakamura. Veteran director Susan Stroman, universally known in theaterland as Stro, is a choreographer by training. She has the mechanics of farce down pat, a knowledge base that ensures this team at all times has clockwork timing in its arsenal.
Watching these performers go all out affords ample payoffs. Hough is a revelation as a seductive farm girl given an extra-special invitation to the White House by an extra-grateful chief executive. Williams, playing an elegantly self-absorbed first lady, reveals an unbridled deftness for political satire. White, as an embittered workhorse of a chief of staff, comes to a boil with delightful regularity.
The roster is filled out smashingly by Nakamura, as the tightly wound press secretary; Cooper, portraying a Time magazine reporter whose bad aim with the bust of a famous suffragist sets the mayhem in motion; and DeLaria, as the president’s drug-dealing sister just sprung from prison. They all run amok at the top of Fillinger’s wacky government by the people, of the people and, most importantly, for the people."