Ben
Brantley

November 30, 2015

Toward the end of the fragmented new musical “New York Animals,” a tubercular homeless man inevitably wheezes out E. M. Forster’s immortal dictum: “Only connect.” There’s a macabre drollness about this decree, issued in a Manhattan hospital emergency room, since the most fertile points of connection would seem to be between the speaker’s germs and the vulnerable immune systems of everybody around him. Yet it’s advice that you can feel all the people onstage longing to heed, not just the atomistic characters in this mosaic of urban lives, but also the performers portraying them. And you can imagine these words resonating with anxious appropriateness in the heads of the talented creative team behind this production, at the New Ohio Theater, whose distinctive gifts never manage to merge into any satisfying whole.