Todrick Hall's MIDNIGHT (Off-Broadway) — Page 7

No top tier reviewing publications out yet. so here's some C-Tier



1 MINUTE CRITIC - Positive

https://1minutecritic.com/midnight-todrick-hall-review/

Todrick Hall’s ‘Midnight’ turns a forbidden writing lesson into a love story

The voices are powerful, and by the end, theatergoers will wonder whether they could live someone else’s life. Although the show is set in the 1800s and centers on racism and homophobia, both remain sources of contention today. The music will keep you in your seat, but the message, especially so close to a monumental midterm election, will challenge your heart and mind.



SLANT - Mixed

https://www.slantmagazine.com/theater/midnight-review-todrick-hall/

Midnight’ Review: Todrick Hall’s Musical Takes a Daring Detour Into Alternate History

Hall’s euphorically maximalist musical is undeniably queer in its overabundance.

Hall’s choice of chattel slavery as a backdrop creates an uneasy context for the show’s promotion of equal, empathetic partnerships across racial lines in the present day. In allegorizing contemporary race relations and their intersections with queerness, Midnight situates itself in that historical moment presumably because its tropes are so familiar—and thus so ripe for subversion. But treating slavery as a fairy-tale metaphor, especially when the show stages murders, beatings, and family separations, ventures into treacherous territory. Any sense of self-aware subversion takes a long time to emerge.

Exploring those tensions and discomforts also seems to be part of the point. If Midnight has one major problem to address, it’s Hall’s eagerness to bundle up the show’s message after raising complex questions about how we perceive race in performance and, by extension, in our lives.



NY THEATER GUIDE - MIXED / NEGATIVE

'Midnight' Off-Broadway review — Todrick Hall's new musical goes big

https://www.newyorktheatreguide.com/reviews/midnight-off-broadway-review-todrick-hall

But put together in context, these components create a strange, complex experience that’s not exactly unenjoyable, but somewhat dubious. Hall, doing sextuple duty as director, choreographer, book writer, composer, lyricist, and star, has developed a show that’s equal parts Hamilton, Cinderella, Brokeback Mountain, Porgy and Bess, and The Color Purple to bizarre effect. On the one hand, the story of a doomed, clandestine queer relationship between a Black slave named Rail (Hall) and the wealthy white Richard (Jeremy Beloate), the son of the family who owns Rail, is certainly intriguing, even if we are not exactly short on stories of the exploitation and oppression of Black and queer people. There are minor ways in which Hall seems able to interrogate the social dynamics at play.

Midnight is surely entertaining: The cast feels gloriously unified while also giving actors like Charlotte Odusanya, Bella Coppola, Ayana George, Kennedy Caughell, and Kolbi Jordan standout vocal moments of their own. The choreography is dynamic and creates fine stage imagery, and the score has multiple earworms. But one can’t help but wonder if Midnight is also indebted to the age of the megamusical, when spectacle mattered more than a meaningful relationship between the subject matter and the style in which it's delivered. Does Miss Saigon really need that gigantic helicopter to convey the impossibility of love in a fruitless, tragic war? Does Midnight really need clubby strobe lights while Rail gets beaten on a plantation? Probably not

Updated On: 10/16/26 at 12:04 AM

THE NEW YORK SUN - NEGATIVE

Todrick Hall’s ‘Midnight’ Chimes Unevenly by Elysa Gardner

https://www.nysun.com/login?redirectUrl=/article/todrick-halls-midnight-chimes-unevenly

An ambitious off-Broadway musical which, while inspired by ‘Hamilton,’ lacks its ingenuity and inventiveness.

...“Hamilton” is actually a good reference point for “Midnight,” as Mr. Hall seems to have studied that mega-hit assiduously. In everything from its rhythms and rhymes (mostly sung, with some rapping as well) to its constant movement to its alternately winking and sober nods to history, “Midnight” practically declares itself a successor to Mr. Miranda’s venerated blockbuster.

That’s a tall order for a first musical, and if Mr. Hall deserves an A for ambition, “Midnight” does not, unfortunately, offer the sparkling wit, dazzling score, or sheer ingenuity that more than mitigated the self-importance of “Hamilton.”

The trouble is that much of “Midnight” feels like just that, a showcase, both for Mr. Hall’s ideals and for the undeniably impressive gifts of his fellow actors, rather than a terribly compelling or even truly provocative story.

The songs, which fuse influences ranging from folk and R&B to gospel and classical — sometimes shifting gears to fit stereotypical depictions of the slaves and their cartoonishly stuffy, snooty owners — offer the female cast members enough gratuitous high notes to supply an army of auditioning sopranos. That’s to say nothing of the orgasms of melisma sprinkled liberally through the numbers, some of which would make Mariah Carey dizzy.

The show’s message — basically, that racism and homophobia have proven stubborn stains on our national character — is delivered with a similar lack of subtlety, which would have been fine and could have been powerful had Mr. Hall’s approach not been so weighed down by platitudes. With a few exceptions — notable among them a pair of coquettish ingenues, brightly played and sung by Charlotte Odusanya and Kennedy Caughell — the men and women we meet are either noble or evil, even though a key plot twist stresses the malleability of human behavior.

By the final number, which nods so heavily to the one in “Hamilton” that you can see its forehead, Mr. Hall has proven himself a creative and performing artist who is plainly worth watching in the future. At this point, the performer is more developed than the creator .."

Updated On: 10/16/26 at 12:27 AM