Alexis Soloski — Theater Critic

Its current Broadway incarnation, adapted by Jack Thorne, directed by Matthew Warchus and embellished with a dozen carols, is as gleaming as a Christmas goose. Which is to say, it's no turkey. But in readying the play for Broadway, Thorne has echoed his Harry Potter and the Cursed Child themes - the tension between fathers and sons, the ways we misunderstand the people we love - and borrowed a bit from Dickens's own life, turning a weird ghost story into a thin psychological allegory about a man whose daddy didn't love him enough.

More than a concert and less than a musical, a one-man show with a full backing band, American Utopia brings David Byrne - gray-haired, gray-suited, barefoot, magnificent - to Broadway. A loose agglomeration of songs, sometimes linked by brief monologues and get-out-the-vote exhortations, it is both an introduction to Byrne's particular psychology and catalogue and an oblique consideration of America today and how it might be bettered. Resistance is musical.

Past productions have starred actors with a heft of gravitas - Anna Magnani, Mercedes Ruehl, Maureen Stapleton - women who may have given the gags somewhere weightier to land. Tomei is a lighter, flightier presence - sensuous and delightful - and she plays even the darkest moments brightly, in on the joke. She and Elliott have great fun together, but they don't sell sex as life-affirming. It looks effortful and cheap. The whole cast screams and flails and races around Mark Wendland's set, which scrambles any sense of indoors and outdoors in something like an orgasmic frenzy. The plastic flamingos look on, unmoved.

You could be forgiven for thinking that this tale has reached its sell-by date. But Moulin Rouge is one of those shows that is not only critic-proof, but maybe also story-proof. In Alex Timbers's production, with a book by John Logan, the characters are so thinly drawn that they disappear behind their corsetry and the love triangle so lopsided that it defies most laws of geometry. Any subtext has been shoved into a push-up bra and short shorts. It doesn't matter.

You could be forgiven for thinking that this tale has reached its sell-by date. But Moulin Rouge is one of those shows that is not only critic-proof, but maybe also story-proof. In Alex Timbers's production, with a book by John Logan, the characters are so thinly drawn that they disappear behind their corsetry and the love triangle so lopsided that it defies most laws of geometry. Any subtext has been shoved into a push-up bra and short shorts. It doesn't matter.

You could be forgiven for thinking that this tale has reached its sell-by date. But Moulin Rouge is one of those shows that is not only critic-proof, but maybe also story-proof. In Alex Timbers's production, with a book by John Logan, the characters are so thinly drawn that they disappear behind their corsetry and the love triangle so lopsided that it defies most laws of geometry. Any subtext has been shoved into a push-up bra and short shorts. It doesn't matter.

But happily and improbably Beetlejuice, directed by Alex Timbers, lays those problems to rest. (A pretty hectic rest, but still.) Where the show falters is in the more ordinary stuff of musical theater, story and song. But when the conductor rises from the orchestra pit with a shrunken head above the shoulders of his natty suit, you can forgive a lot.

The songs are peppy, if not especially remarkable, somewhat in the vein of Yazbek's earlier shows like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. There's nothing as swoony as Omar Sharif here. But Yazbek shows his gift for writing for character, with Sandy's high-anxiety What's Gonna Happen and Jeff's dry, cackling Jeff Sums It Up. A lot of Horn's jokes are groaners, but some of them aren't and the script is packed with so many that the laughs-per-minute ratio stays pretty high. The cast is a treat, particularly the supporting actors, whose characters are written more playfully and at times more cogently than Michael or Julie, though Fontana is working overtime, backwards and forwards, in heels and out, to make Dorothy more than a caricature and Michael more than a jerk. He's even found a distinct singing voice for Dorothy, a fleecy contralto.

Aplay about the rancid heart of the American dream, Arthur Miller's early tragedy, All My Sons, is rebirthed on Broadway, looking like it never left. Thrillingly acted - with performances that threaten, tantalizingly, to go over the top, but stop just short - Jack O'Brien's production for the Roundabout is a vigorous anatomy lesson, a show about how guilt and transgression can rot a family from the inside, spoiling everything they touch.

As Pale and Anna, Driver and Russell seem mismatched, mostly because he's a Juilliard-trained stage animal and she's a first-rate television actress, versed in small-screen physicality and nuance. He's reaching for the fly space and she's working in closeup, a problem exacerbated by the play, which seems fascinated by Pale and includes several scenes where Anna mostly just listens and reacts. Actually a few of her scenes with Burton (a character who makes perilously little sense) are like this, too. It's only with Larry that she gets anything like equal billing, so Russell mostly disappears, though she does somehow make 80s mom jeans look impossibly chic.

Thrilling, cluttered, inventive and exhausting, Sam Gold's King Lear, which stars an impish and imperious Glenda Jackson, throws a stack of director's theater clichés at its marble walls. Some of them stick. Running three and a half hours (padding out the folio with bits of the quarto, like the mock trial scene), the production brings avant-garde techniques to Broadway with variable success. Some of the performances are exhilarating - Jackson, of course, Ruth Wilson, Elizabeth Marvel, Matt Maher in his Broadway debut - some aren't and the storytelling dazzles, then rambles.

Shattering, galvanizing and very funny, Heidi Schreck's What the Constitution Means to Me close reads an old text in new and breathlessly exciting ways. When Schreck, a longtime Off-Broadway actor and more recently a playwright, was a teenager, she traveled around American Legions Halls, winning money for college by delivering a speech called Casting Spells: The Crucible of the Constitution. In this mostly solo show (Schreck is joined by the actor Mike Iveson as a legionnaire and later by a teenage debater), Schreck, sunny in a daffodil blazer stands inside a re-creation of one of those halls. (The design is by Rachel Hauck.) Persuasively, she conjures both that brace-faced Patrick Swayze-swooning teenager, and the woman she became.

There's a chilly irony at the shrink-wrapped heart of Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations, the thrillingly performed and dramatically static jukebox musical on Broadway. This is a musical that's about (if it's about anything) the perils of fame. And a goose of fame is what it offers to the Temptations, the consummate R&B group that has been grooving in unison for almost six decades.

True West, that drama of Cain-and-Abel family dynamics and masculinity stunted like a Joshua tree is back on Broadway. Probably Sam Shepard's most popular play and the one in which his artistry and his preoccupations collide most openly and honestly, True West is catnip - or neat whiskey - to a certain kind of male actor with an interest in both indulging a macho sensibility and deconstructing it. For this production, the Roundabout, under James Macdonald's direction, has brought together Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano, who somehow produce all the great upheaval of a 10-gallon hat left out in a drizzle.

There are other tensions operating here, too. McCraney typically layers his stories with myth and archetype. But here he's abandoned most of his poetic and thematic flourishes (barring an on-the-nose speech in which Pharus discusses the beauty of spirituals), working instead in a more naturalistic style that while friendly to Broadway can sometimes feel a little pat. The short scenes tumble on speedily, but it's really only in the clefts between scenes, when the young men step forward, not necessarily in character, and deliver forceful, emotive versions of Rockin' in Jerusalem or Rainbow Round My Shoulder, that the play takes on a real intensity. In these moments Choir Boy ascends and its choirboys achieve, as long as the notes hold, what feels like freedom.

It's here that Sorkin has most directly intervened, expanding the roles of Tom Robinson (Gbenga Akinnagbe) and Atticus's black housekeeper, Calpurnia (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), so that the white voices aren't the only ones heard. These moves can't really disguise a story about a white savior who sees more and knows more than the people around him. (White saviors - lawyers, newsmen, a president - are big with Sorkin.) The gestures toward the present day - mostly reminders that racism stems from feelings of inequality and economic insecurity - aren't especially necessary or helpful.

Cher's fandom is assured. The exuberant, occasionally tacky jukebox musical that tells her life story is more faltering. The Cher Show, like last year's Donna Summer musical, requires three actors (and the occasional dancer) to play one jukebox queen. Micaela Diamond is Babe, Teal Wicks is Lady, Stephanie J Block is Star. (That trio sounds cheerier than Maiden, Mother, Crone.) Together they describe the evolution of Cherilyn Sarkisian from southern California ugly duckling to the black swan entertainment queen. This is a straightforward story of female empowerment, though, as crafted by an all-male creative team, it sometimes feels more like a compilation of girl-power pep talks than an individual woman's singular journey.

But it's bountifully clear, from the first forgettable lyrics to the last gratuitous lines that no hominid involved in this glitzy shambles has any idea what to do with him. As a feat of stagecraft and structural engineering, Kong is cool. A creature with the delts of a prize fighter, the potbelly of a toddler, a possible addiction to Crest White Strips and the external genitalia of a Ken doll (the 'he' is provisional), he is brought to animatronic life by the King's Company, a troupe of 10 black-clad puppeteers who tug his marionette strings in some version of a maypole dance, and four voodoo operators, who control his facial expressions from a booth at the back of the theater. Put it all together and you have a double-decker bus who looks like he's lost badly at beer pong. It's unlikely he'll sign at the stage door.

But though American Son has the superficial form of a classical tragedy and a scene of raw suffering that few tragedies can equal, it also has a creaky dramatic structure, shallow characterizations, naïve politics and indifferent writing. Directed by Kenny Leon, who has submerged his tendency to showboat in favor of a studied naturalism, it's a very powerful play without being an especially good one and that shouldn't matter - power being hard to come by - but sometimes it does.

The Waverly Gallery, now revived on Broadway, is an early play by Kenneth Lonergan and as directed by Lila Neugebauer and upraised by Elaine May's toweringly fragile performance, it is as quietly and ferociously sad as anything he has ever produced.

Fact: Lifespan of a Fact is one of the three best new plays open on Broadway. Fact: it is early in the season; only three new plays are open. Facts, as the show seems to insist, are tricky things. Do we insist on scrupulous accuracy if that accuracy effaces larger truths? Can we call a thing true if we've massaged data to get there? Is truth an absolute anyway? Well, at least it's nice to see Daniel Radcliffe on Broadway again. Fact.

Tuneful, schlocky, and deeply offensive unless you have a take-it-or-leave-it approach to female agency, the Broadway musical Pretty Woman turns on the adorably chaste question of whether or not a boy and a girl will kiss on the lips. They will. But only after they've kissed everywhere else first. Not that you will see any sex. This love story about a free-spirited prostitute and her john is a family show! Get your mind out of the proscenium.

Seen from some vantages, it's all rainbow flags and smiley faces. The US has achieved marriage equality, for now anyway, and many people who don't identify as heterosexual no longer feel compelled to closet themselves. Aids, which postdates this play, but seems to be prefigured in its discussion of the bathhouses and an analyst who couldn't make a session because of 'a virus or something, he looked awful', continues to transform from a terminal illness into a chronic one. One of the play's producers, Ryan Murphy, an openly gay man, is pretty much the hottest thing in entertainment and the play's cast is made up mostly if not entirely of openly gay actors, including Matt Bomer and Andrew Rannells, a thing unimaginable even a few decades ago. The actors are doing strong work, though a few of them keep signaling just how strong that work is.

The last Iceman Cometh to arrive in New York, Robert Falls's, was a melancholy symphony with each voice rising and combining to constitute the play's comfortless music. That's not present in Wolfe's production, a series of solos, many of them from the horn section. Cuts have been made to the play - it runs nearly four hours, an hour less than other productions - and maybe this has harmed the cohesion, the lived-in-ness. One experiences less a world and more a room full of actors, mostly good ones, each waiting for a chance to monologue.

As Cursed Child is one of the most plot-heavy texts to appear on Broadway since melodrama became déclassé and suspense is the spell that keeps it whooshing along, it would be unsporting to say much more. Still, fans of the source texts (who cheered and gasped their way through a recent, all-day performance, were treated to some familiar faces. And maybe some faceless faces, too. Cynics not already ensorcelled will wonder if Harry Potter belongs on Broadway at all and some of that wondering is valid. Like Frozen and Mean Girls and Escape to Margaritaville it's another show capitalizing on a known and already popular quantity. It is in dialogue with its fans (how else to explain the screams of delight when Moaning Myrtle appears?) and will deeply perplex anyone who hasn't read the delightful books or seen the so-so movies.