Adam Feldman — Theater Critic

The facets of Stoppard's jewellike play are overwhelmingly, even ostentatiously brilliant; the Irish Joyce is introduced in a scene that is written as a series of limericks. Yet in Patrick Marber's well-judged and high-spirited revival, which the director first staged in London in 2016 (with Hollander and McDonald), the result is inviting rather than snobbishly exclusive, and the structural and verbal dazzle are offset with subtle suggestions of elegy. Even if you can't solve it all as you watch, it's a pleasure to engage with a production that does Travesties full justice.

Heaven knows what the creators of Summer are thinking, if any thought at all has gone into this disco dud of a show. Three talented and blameless women-LaChanze, Ariana DeBose and Storm Lever-play the late Donna Summer at different stages of her life in a tacky, sub-Vegas jukebox biomusical that draws from the singer's groovy catalog of hits, including 'I Feel Love,' 'MacArthur Park,' 'On the Radio' and 'Last Dance.' At its most watchable, the show plays like a barely dramatized adaptation of Summer's Spotify and Wikipedia pages. But when it's bad, it's so, so bad.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is haunted by death and pain; it is often suspenseful and sometimes downright frightening. Yet amid the cinematic tumult and dazzle of the densely action-packed plot, Thorne and Tiffany carve out quiet scenes of intimacy and tenderness. Great care has gone into creating each moment of this state-of-the-art adventure. It leaves its audience awestruck, spellbound and deeply satisfied.

The musical pulls out all the stops for a raucous production number, 'Get Me to the Church on Time,' which marks the begrudging transformation of Eliza's father (Norbert Leo Butz, with his usual impatience de vivre) from ne'er-do-well to well-to-do. But its default mode is elegance. Sher is acutely alert to the shifts of balance within both My Fair Lady itself and the way it plays to contemporary audiences, and nowhere is that clearer than in his clever solution to the show's notoriously slippery ending. This revival has devised a way to have its scone and eat it too.

Carousel's sumptuous new Broadway revival plows steadily through the show's darker currents. Director Jack O'Brien invites us to admire the show as an exemplar of classic American musical theater, lovingly emphasizing its virtues. Prime among them is Rodgers and Hammerstein's innovative and varied score, repolished by orchestrator Jonathan Tunick and sterlingly sung by the cast; Henry offers a powerful account of Billy's long and winding first-act finale, 'Soliloquy,' and opera star Renée Fleming-though too grand in manner for the role of Julie's kindly cousin-adds elegant vocal luster to the stirring 'You'll Never Walk Alone.' The gorgeous choreography, by New York City Ballet's Justin Peck, is danced with aplomb by a very fine ensemble led by NYCB's Brittany Pollack and Amar Ramasar. Santo Loquasto's set, Ann Roth's costumes and Brian MacDevitt's lighting are first-class.

For a play that includes a great deal of sign language, the Broadway revival of Mark Medoff's Children of a Lesser God is maddeningly heavy-handed. Time has been unkind to this 1979 drama about a confused and defiant deaf woman, Sarah (Lauren Ridloff), and the would-be-heroic speech therapist, James (Joshua Jackson), who romances her.

Where Mean Girls glows most is in the spotlight it shines on its cast. Taylor Louderman is sensational as the blackhearted Regina, fearsome leader of the queen-beeyatch trio known as the Plastics. (Richmond gives her brassy, Bond-villain musical themes.) Flanking her are the manically insecure Gretchen (Ashley Park, her confusion infused with real feeling) and the chipper, empty-headed Karen (an extremely funny Kate Rockwell, with a tottering walk and a face like a blank check); on the opposite side of the cafeteria battlefield are the gothy 'art freak' Janis (Barrett Wilbert Weed, a rich presence and powerhouse vocalist) and the brightly flaming Damian (Grey Henson, whose second-act tap number, 'Stop,' does exactly that to the show). Mean Girls's gospel of female self-actualization is borne out in the platform it provides for some of the most exciting young performers in musical theater. They bring a lot to the cafeteria table.

As A, B and C confront their various self-images, illusions and memories, the monster of Act One yields to our deeper understanding of who she has been. What makes Albee's play so moving is not that all three are the same woman; it's that all three of them are us. Together, they create a singular experience at the theater.

Second Stage's Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan's tonally mercurial 2001 play, directed by Trip Cullman, uses Cera's ineffectual persona to deft comic effect, even as it smartly explores weighty questions of spinelessness and courage.

Kushner's two-part play is massive: To see it in a single day, with multiple intermissions and a long dinner break, takes 10 hours. Yet every moment is so rich, so rewarding, so engrossing that it flies by in a rush. It is hard to do justice to the multitudes that Angels in America contains: its synthesis of the intellectual and the lyrical, the comic and the tragic, the intimate and the epic, the engaged and the transcendent. This is a play that breaks and fills your heart; it inspires you as it takes your breath away.

It would be one thing if Frozen's stiffness were in the service of a deeper take on the material, but its already shaky plot seems even less secure, too thin a rope to support the musical's dutiful climb up the narrative mountain. While the best songs from the movie-including 'Love Is an Open Door,' an ebullient duet for Anna and her dashing suitor, Hans (John Riddle)-still pop, the new ones are less strong; aside from an incongruous but zippy comic number at a sauna, they feel like heavy filler, especially in the busy and slushy finale.

What do you expect from a Jimmy Buffett jukebox musical? The alley outside the Marquis Theatre has been done up as an empty stretch of beach, and that pretty much sums up Escape to Margaritaville, which seems intended to be watched with your feet up and a melting frozen drink in your hand. Along with more than two dozen songs from Buffett's tropical-burnout catalog, the show offers steel drums, jean shorts, palm trees and dancers dressed as fluffy white clouds. It's often hokey and sometimes pokey. But I'll level with you: I had fun.

Lithgow's show is framed in family history, but no skeletons are exposed, unless you count the love of theater he carries in his bones. Ring Lardner's 'Haircut,' in which a country barber tells a customer about a scandal in his small town, takes up most of the first act; Lithgow livens it with deft tonsorial pantomime and a sense of dawning realization on the part of the garrulous narrator. The centerpiece of Act Two is P.G. Wodehouse's zany 'Uncle Fred Flits By,' a veddy British comic tale of embarrassment and family tension. It is a quaint and slender tale-more jam than scone-but Lithgow's love of sharing it is infectious. Likable though the stories themselves may be, the heart of this show is in their telling.

Davies's singing provides most of the high notes in this otherwise workmanlike play. The nature of the central musical therapy is barely explored; instead, we get contrived court intrigue, low comedy about English theater, a rushed quasiromance and an equally hasty coda, delivered in a steady march of flat-footed exposition. 'I'm telling you this as the King's chief minister,' says the King's chief minister. 'As the King's doctor, I am of the opinion that the King's illness has turned,' says the King's doctor. 'As the King's second wife I am unpopular,' says the queen (a bland Melody Grove). The pleasures of John Dove's production-the music, Rylance's halting propulsion, Jonathan Fensom's sumptuous sets and costumes-gleam to no purpose, real jewels glued to a trinket crown.

Hazel is correctly wary of her motives-Rose was a rival for Robin's affections way back when and remains a disruptive force-but Kirkwood keeps angles of their romantic triangle secondary to a larger concern: the mess that baby boomers have made of the world and what they can do to clean it up. As Rose, ever the femme fataliste, says: 'We can't have everything we want just because we want it.' Behind the subtleties of its direction and acting, The Children's central question is blunt: What does it mean to be responsible?

Are you ready? The splashy new Broadway musical SpongeBob SquarePants, whose arrival was greeted in some circles with sneers of anticipatory derision, turns out to be a joy. Like its irrepressible yellow hero, played by the peppy and limber-limbed Ethan Slater, the show is unabashedly committed to imagination and dorky enthusiasm. As SpongeBob and his squirrel friend, Sandy (Lilli Cooper), labor to save their undersea town-the cheekily named Bikini Bottom-from a local volcano, the wonders of Tina Landau's production pour from the stage in a ravishing stream of color and invention that sucks you into its merry, silly currents.

After seeing the imaginative and dynamic Once on This Island, you may feel that once is not enough. Michael Arden's immersive revival of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty's 1990 musical is staged in the round and constantly on the move, drumming its story forward to a steady throb of pop-Caribbean beats.

One potentially salutary effect of the 2016 presidential election, people on the left have been nervously saying, is that it might encourage a rebirth of oppositional political art. Beau Willimon's The Parisian Woman picks up that challenge and fumbles it. Loosely adapted from a 19th-century French play by Henry Becque, the play has been rewritten since its 2013 California premiere to specifically target the current administration, though Trump's name is not mentioned aloud until the last five minutes. Yet Willimon-who mapped the political sphere succesfully in Farragut North and Netflix's House of Cards-seems stymied by his project. A political thriller stuffed into a sex comedy's dress, the play bulges in all the wrong places.

Schumer, in a confident stage debut, is very funny as our conventional but malleable heroine (who claims to suffer from 'exploding head syndrome'), and nobody does nice-guy-finally-losing-it quite like Shamos; while Key sometimes seems a bit trapped in Gerald's booming swagger, the marvelous Benanti is hilarious throughout as his lusciously vague, mercurial companion. Yet despite a somewhat strained attempt to explain itself at the end, Meteor Shower never quite coalesces into a convincing whole. Its entertaining moments blaze, then disappear into an empty sky.

'Please be advised that Home for the Holidays contains haze effects,' warns a sign at the August Wilson Theatre, and boy, does it ever. First there is the hazy concept. This tacky pop-up Broadway concert, the yuletide equivalent of a Halloween costume store, features a comically motley cast: Candice Glover, Josh Kaufman and Bianca Ryan, three winners of televised vocal contests; Kaitlyn Bristowe, one of two bachelorettes on season 11 of The Bachelorette; Peter and Evynne Hollens, a married a cappella duo; and, somehow, veteran character actor Danny Aiello. Then there is the hazy singing: breathy, baroquely melismatic ornamentations, as though the vocalists were skating on thin ice and afraid to stay on a single note for more than a quarter of a second.

When we meet the Israelis, they are adrift on the central turntable of Scott Pask's set, waiting for anything to happen-'just something different.' Bittersweet and built for adults, The Band's Visit is certainly different from most modern musicals. Will Broadway audiences be willing to take its journey? That's the challenge this production offers, a line drawn gently in the shifting sand.

Money talks, but in Ayad Akhtar's trenchant Junk, people do plenty of talking for it. The playwright has a lot of explaining to do: His subject is the carnivore capitalism of 1980s Wall Street, and he spends much of the play briefing the audience on hostile takeovers and insider trading. But the details don't feel sweaty. Staged by Doug Hughes for Lincoln Center Theater, whose taste for quasidocumentary epics was also evinced in last season's Oslo, Junk melds a breadth of genres-crime story, tragedy, issue play, cautionary tale-into a fast-moving, broad-ranging social thriller.

Three decades later, M. Butterfly remains provocative and timely, with a great deal to unpack-in part because Hwang, in an unusually extensive revision of the text for its current Broadway revival, has stuffed it with new information. The humiliated Rene Gallimard (Clive Owen) still begins the play in the cocoon of a French prison cell, guiding the audience through flashbacks to his time with Song Liling (Jin Ha, continuously intriguing). But the nature of their intercultural romance has shifted. When they meet in this version, Gallimard knows that Song is male; Song must invent a far-fetched family history to convince him otherwise. These changes, among others, help shift the storytelling away from symbolism and toward a more specific account of a particular relationship, albeit a bizarre one. Aside from lively dance sequences set at the Peking Opera-which was traditionally all-male, Song notes, 'Because only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act'-there are few spectacular flourishes.

The Boss hits the boards in a concert run, performing five shows a week in the smallest venue he has played in decades. Springsteen has always been a musical storyteller par excellence. Tickets will be hard to come by.

It's unclear why the Roundabout has chosen to mount this play, except perhaps that director Rebecca Taichman has staged it before, and Elizabeth McGovern, who played the kindly matriarch of a comparable family on Downton Abbey, was available to play the mother. The production features solid work from most of the actors, including Charlotte Parry as the intellectually ambitious Kay, Anna Camp as her pretty but vacuous sister Hazel, Steven Boyer as Hazel's brutish suitor-a bullet of a man-and Brooke Bloom, who makes welcomely bold choices as the sour socialist Madge. But Time and the Conways requires a stronger gravitational force than McGovern's airy performance provides. The center does not hold.