Adam Feldman — Theater Critic

Scott McPherson's Marvin's Room may sound, from that description, like a certain kind of TV movie of the week. But this pained yet comforting play cuts its sentiment with laughing-into-the-darkness comedy, just this side of absurdism, that reflects the influence of John Guare and Christopher Durang. And it also suggests a deep understanding of illness and sacrifice, drawn from McPherson's personal family history and the world he inhabited. 'I am 31, and my lover has AIDS,' he wrote in a program note for the play's 1990 Hartford production. 'Our friends have AIDS. And we all take care of each other, the less sick caring for the more sick.' He died in 1992.

When was the last time you felt scared at the theater? Not disturbed or perturbed or provoked, but scared? The harrowing climactic torture scene of 1984, adapted from George Orwell's novel by directors Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan, is intense in a way I've never seen on Broadway: It's gut-churning. Children under 13 have been barred from attending it; even adults may shake in their seats, or at least avert their eyes. This gripping show rewards watching, though, and not just in that visit to Room 101 at the grotesquely named Ministry of Love. Orwell's vision of a surveillance state awash in groupthink and propaganda was published in 1949 and set in 1984, but it remains uncannily suggestive of the present and the future.

With Lucas Hnath's lucid and absorbing A Doll's House, Part 2, the Broadway season goes out with a bang. It is not the same kind of bang, mind you, that ended Henrik Ibsen's 1879 social drama, A Doll's House, in which bourgeois Norwegian wife Nora Helmer walked out on her doting husband and young children with a decisive (and divisive) slam of the door. In Hnath's taut sequel, set 15 years later, the runaway bride-played by the great Laurie Metcalf, with magnificent grit and frustration-returns to confront the people she left behind: her husband, Torvald (a sympathetic Chris Cooper); her now-grown daughter, Emmy (Condola Rashad, poised and glinting); and the family servant, Anne Marie (the uncommonly sensible Jayne Houdyshell).

As Anastasia piles discovery upon discovery, the happiest surprise is how consistently good the musical turns out to be. Smartly adapted by Terrence McNally from the 1997 animated film and the 1956 Ingrid Bergman movie-with Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens impressively expanding their score from the former-Anastasia is a sweeping adventure, romance and historical epic whose fine craftsmanship will satisfy musical-theater fans beyond the show's ideal audience of teenage girls. (When I saw it, a second-act kiss was greeted with deafening shrieks of approval.)

Midler fans out her performer's wares with expert self-assurance-she delivers her jokes at a steady vaudevillian clip, like Mae West in a hurry-but she also seems like she couldn't live without us. And the part of Dolly, a matchmaker in late-19th-century New York, is exquisitely suited to Midler's enormous warmth, savvy and drive. (She cuts her schmaltz with zest.) It's hard to imagine a better match of actor and role: It is, in a word, perfection. Adapted by Michael Stewart from a Thornton Wilder comedy, Hello, Dolly! may be a vehicle for its star, but this revival treats it like a vintage Rolls-Royce.

I was deeply moved by the play when it was at the Vineyard Theatre last year. On Broadway, with the same wonderful ensemble cast, it fills a much larger space without losing its essential intimacy. The script is Vogel's, the staging Taichman's, but the two are so lovingly intertwined as to be almost inseparable. The seven actors...weave multiple roles into a seamless whole. The same is true of the music that flows through the show...Rich in sympathy and humor, Indecent is as captivating the second time as the first...An elegant tribute to things that vanish in the blink of a historical eye, Indecent is a memorial that feels like a blessing.

The approach to politics practiced in (and preached by) Oslo is so different from our current discourse that it might seems (sic) quaint if it weren't so persuasive. J.T. Rogers's account of 1993 meetings between Israelis and Palestinians, which led to the breakthrough Oslo Accords, is a testament to the potential value of diplomacy, cooperation, mutual recognition of opponents' humanity and-contra the now-trending WikiLeaks ethos-backroom secrecy. Arriving at those things was not easy even then: As Rogers lays out, in a narrative flush with historical detail, it took the ingenious private openness and public duplicity of a well-connected Norwegian couple, Terje Rød-Larsen (Jefferson Mays) and Mona Juul (Jennifer Ehle), to get the warring parties to the negotiating table-and, no less crucially, the dining table.

At first blush, the new Broadway musical War Paint looks like a face-off between rival 20th-century cosmetics magnates Helena Rubinstein (Patti LuPone) and Elizabeth Arden (Christine Ebersole). In fact, it's more about putting faces on. Titans of the beauty industry, Rubinstein and Arden made their names in makeup and put their names on it, but they never actually met-a serious challenge for War Paint's authors. As the show contrasts their personas and careers, it does what it can to keep them in the same frame-sitting, for example, in adjacent booths at a hotel bar-as it cuts back and forth between their stories. (It's like a conjoined-twins relative of Coco, the 1969 Coco Chanel biomusical: Co-Coco.) With two narratives to track, and a lot of time soaked up by musical numbers about customers and sales pitches, the show is heavy on primer and contours but light on blending and shading.

If you want to have a good time at this show, chances are good that you will; there are many funny sequences, and I laughed a lot. But you may find it rather exhausting. With almost no baseline reality from which to depart, the show is all payoffs and no setups; it's like a stand-up routine consisting only of punch lines

Victor (Mark Ruffalo), a working-class cop, blames his estranged brother, the well-heeled Walter (Tony Shalhoub), for abandoning him and their broken father during the Great Depression. When they meet to sell the old man's furniture, it's the first time they've seen each other since his death 16 years earlier. Harsh words are spoken; old wounds bleed afresh. Ruffalo and Jessica Hecht, as Victor's frustrated wife, do creditable work, but Shalhoub falters; although he is persuasive at first, when Walter floats on silky smarm, his emotional scenes have a tinny ring. The play winds up in the pocket of Danny DeVito, making his Broadway debut as a charming old ganef of a furniture dealer. With so much character and history compressed into his small body, he is a good match for the play. After dominating the first act, DeVito mostly disappears for the second, and the revival's energy flags without him. Only when he's onstage does The Price seem right.

Although the residual shock of 9/11 gives it a strong current of emotion, Come from Away's multiple narratives mostly have low stakes; it's essentially a show about a bunch of people inconvenienced at once. When it touches on weightier concerns-one passenger is the mother of a missing firefighter-it falters; it is better at celebrating less consequential things, like a rowdy evening of initiation at a local bar, where the visitors are urged to kiss a cod and try a local rum called screech. A band of eight plays the spirited, Celtic-accented score, heavy on fiddle and bodhran and flute. Under Christopher Ashley's fluid direction, the 12 versatile actors form a true ensemble cast, playing dozens of roles as both the Plane People and the plain people who welcome them to their rock...Despite minor stumbles of craft, Come from Away makes a persuasive case for the value of good intentions. For this kind of uplift you don't need planes.

Gay characters in mass culture often serve as supportive accessories in the marriage plots of others, but Harmon keeps Jordan in sharp, brutally revealing focus. Anyone whose heart has ever been broken can relate to his plight. Pushing 30, he has never been in a serious relationship, and his desperation to change that-sabotaged by his obsessiveness and awkwardness-only makes things worse. Glick delivers a star-making, gut-wrenching performance of deep sweetness and quicksilver mood shifts; a scene in which he considers sending an intense love email to a handsome coworker is a masterpiece of comic anxiety, and his climactic rant of pent-up resentment earns vigorous applause.

So it is with Sunset Boulevard. Those who go to see Close reprise her celebrated turn in the musical's 1994 Broadway production will not be disappointed. There was a risk of Norma-like pathos in the prospect of the actress, now nearly 70, returning to a role she played more than 20 years ago-draped, no less, in her original Anthony Powell costumes, a fantastical array of capes and turbans and fur cuffs and animal prints. But Close holds the stage with a feverish intensity that transcends camp. Her Norma may live in a fantasy world, but in a town of phonies, she inhabits her grand delusions with total authenticity.

What does it look like when a star is born? In the case of Ben Platt, the astonishing young actor who plays the title role in Dear Evan Hansen, it's a bit like an actual birth: beautiful but strange and wet, tinged with confusion and danger. Evan is painfully introverted; he has no friends in high school, and even the thought of talking to a girl he likes, Zoe (the poignantly unaffected Laura Dreyfuss), makes his palms perspire. Platt's performance extends that to his whole body; when he sings, his face often gleams with sweat. Yet the effect is not off-putting; Evan is immensely lovable, even when he makes terrible mistakes. He speaks in rushes of instant regret, as though frantically digging a hole to bury himself in, and his intense awkwardness is filtered through first-rate comic timing, high-wire dramatic acting and a gorgeously expressive tenor voice.

Dave Malloy's mercifully transporting musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 is both a celebration and a cause for it. Mimi Lien's stunning set design transforms the stately Imperial Theatre into an ornate red-and-gold Russian nightclub, with stairs that wind up to the mezzanine, a sinuous catwalk that cuts through the orchestra and musicians planted strategically throughout the space. Members of the cast scatter into the audience and sit next to spectators at cabaret-style tables onstage. Director Rachel Chavkin's approach to the show-spectacular yet intimate, theatrical yet personal-is an ideal complement to Malloy's brilliantly unconventional musical, which breathes modern life into a section of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace.

'It's about time, don't you think?' sings Marvin (Christian Borle) at the outset of the second act of Falsettos, and yes: It is. It's about time that William Finn and James Lapine's intimate, obstinate, heart-shattering 1992 musical has returned to Broadway, to poke us and amuse us and reduce us again to helpless tears. Few musicals have the range, idiosyncrasy and emotional punch of this profoundly unconventional and personal work. Directed by Lapine, the show's revival is very much about a specific Jewish family in the early 1980s, and while its story of a man who leaves his wife and child for a male lover may be less novel today, its larger truths continue to resonate. Seeing Falsettos now is like opening a time capsule and finding a mirror.

If I understand the oblique title correctly, Heisenberg is about how being with another person-being observed, at close range -can affect your direction. Georgie and Alex are set in their different ways, defining who they are by who they've been; their unlikely romance opens them to things they would not have imagined for themselves. Mark Brokaw's spare production, which played at Manhattan Theatre Club's small City Center space last year, seem even less imposing in the company's Broadway house, but that works to its advantage. Stephens's carefully crafted 75-minute play has a sense of how little its characters matter to the universe. It makes that smallness feel liberating.

Perhaps you have spotted them at diners, parks, used-book stores or Zabar's counters. Or maybe you've seen them in sketches on Comedy Central's Kroll Show, hosting a cable-access prank show called Too Much Tuna. Embodied with a gleeful blend of affection and mockery by Nick Kroll and John Mulaney, respectively, Gil and George are miraculous comic creations who have earned a well-deserved cult following. Oh, Hello on Broadway, directed by goofy-smart prince Alex Timbers, stretches the shtick to 95 minutes of metatheatrical horseplay.

As the morphine-addicted Mary Tyrone in the latest Broadway revival of Eugene O'Neill's bitter masterwork, Long Days Journey Into Night, Jessica Lange brings stunning colors to the role of a woman clawing her way through fog. You can't take your eyes off her; it's a mesmeric performance...Lange's Mary is a desperate fighter, defensive and manipulative...By turns, she is loving, wistful, lonely, proud, vicious and confused -- but above all, she is an addict...Gabriel Byrne plays her husband, James, with striking weariness and restraint...As their dissolute oldest son, Jamie, the riveting Michael Shannon infuses his climactic drunk scene with acrid dark humor and reluctant, wounded tenderness toward his consumptive younger brother, Edmund (a willfully sincere John Gallagher Jr.).

Before he became a household name as the uptight Mitchell onModern Family, Jesse Tyler Ferguson was one of New York's most inventive comic character actors. You can sense his delight at stretching those muscles in the Broadway revival of Fully Committed...Over the course of 80 minutes, he also portrays some three dozen other people...Ferguson's performance is necessarily broad, and not always precise: a half-British accent creeps into several voices. But it hardly matters. The actor's likability glazes his hamminess with sugar, and the play, while not very filling, can be enjoyed with few reservations.

'If you knew my story, you'd have a good story to tell,' sings Alice (Carmen Cusack) in the introductory number of Bright Star. But would you know how to tell it? That's where Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, cowriters of this gawky tall tale, fall short...Bright Star aspires to be what the older Alice asks from a young fiction writer (A.J. Shively): 'a sweeping tale of pain and redemption.' But it cries out for an editor's sharp blue pen. Sweeping? In lieu of the color that the story seems to call for, Walter Bobbie's production is often actively plain, as though trying to hide its central bathos in beige. Painful? For the audience, perhaps, thanks to shoddy craftsmanship that saddles likable, plucky bluegrass music with lyrics that run from workmanlike to egregious. It does, however, have a genuine redeeming feature in Cusack...Cusack is distinctive and immediately interesting, convincing at playing Alice at both ages, with a voice that is full of beautiful surprises.

Put The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake and Airplane! in a blender; add 30 pop hits from the 1970s (such as 'Hot Stuff' and 'I Am Woman'), carefully chopped; stir in a seasoned cast of Broadway pros and a magical secret ingredient called Jennifer Simard; add garish coloring, muddle with camp and garnish with the kitschiest cocktail umbrella you can find. This is the recipe for Disaster!, a lovably scrappy and often deliciously silly jukebox-musical spoof...Not every joke in Disaster! lands, but there's a lot to enjoy on this nostalgia trip. Sit back, kick off your shoes and have a few laughs on the lido deck.

...not every show manages a Broadway transfer with equal grace, and I wondered if the some of the qualities that made it special Off Broadway -- the sharpness of Joe Mantello's staging, the ease of the ensemble acting, the audience's shared awareness of being in the dark -- could survive a transfer to a larger theater. I needn't have worried. The Humans is just as funny, just as moving and just as sneakily unsettling in its new Broadway incarnation, and retains its essential intimacy...Seeing the play a second time, and knowing some of its secrets, makes it even more compelling; you're more alert to what some of the characters aren't saying.

No one plays Jewish mothers with secrets better than Linda Lavin...You recognize these women right away, because Lavin plays them so hilariously to New York Jewish type: She has a cartoonist's control and economy of line. But to recognize them is not, it turns out, to know them...Greenberg's writing is elegant and keenly epigrammatic...Directed with canny ambiguity by Lynne Meadow, Our Mother's Brief Affair lets you to wonder how much this scandal has been retouched. But there is no doubt as to the casual mastery that Lavin, at 78, brings to the part. Shifting in and out of the past, elevating one-liners to three-dimensionality, she brings a lifetime of command to the stage. She owns this part and claims it like nobody's business but her own.

Seeing The Color Purple on Broadway, a decade after its premiere, is like meeting an old friend who has gotten her life together since the last time you saw her. It seems more confident in itself, surer in its sexuality, and it's lost a lot of weight...Doyle's production intensifies The Color Purple and brings out its deeper hues. The musical blossoms into a classic...Celie's journey has a clearer sense of direction than before, but she doesn't have to travel it alone. Erivo is supported by a mighty sisterhood of performers: Jennifer Hudson as Shug, Mister's mistress and Celie's lover; Danielle Brooks as the seemingly indomitable Sofia; Patrice Covington as the exuberant Squeak; Carrie Compere, Bre Jackson and Rema Webb as a trio of gossipy church ladies. This Color Purple is a celebration of black women, and it fills you with appreciation for the musical's return. It's here, and it's beautiful.