Alexis Soloski

The pleasure in her performance and in Rees's and of Jason Danieley in the small role of the schoolmaster eclipse the blurriness of the story The Visit wants to tell. But only for a while. Though the show runs only 100 minutes, there's surely room for more plot and more emotional arc than it provides. And despite the omnipresence of a young Anton and a young Claire, sighing and swaying and occasionally screwing in the background, it can't really sell itself as a swoony weepie, however nice the ballads, particularly as it's in the more macabre numbers - 'Yellow Shoes', 'I Will Never Leave You' - that the tone seems most confident. However fine the songs and the set, it may not be visiting Broadway very long.

Something Rotten! goes over easy. Too easy. The songs are catchy, but quickly digested (though the opening number Welcome to the Renaissance lodges in the head nicely). The book, co-written with John O'Farrell of Spitting Image, and lyrics settle for the undemanding laugh and usually get it. The performers are excellent, of course, with James strutting his song-and-dance stuff and Borle channelling Mick Jagger, or maybe just Harry Styles. Casey Nicholaw directs in his usual pert and perky fashion, and the choreography is reasonably entertaining.

Doctor Zhivago...gallops across the first several decades of the 20th century. But the period it most resembles is the 1980s, with the spectacle-driven mega-musicals it birthed. Not that Doctor Zhivago, slickly directed by Des McAnuff, is especially mega...The music is big and the cast is big and the emotions are definitely outsized...And yet the impact is oddly minimal. Maybe it's the undistinguished book or Lara's ridiculous wig or those silly icicles, but Doctor Zhivago seems a lot more overblown than overpowering. The style is pure melodrama, but most of the actors don't have the stanchness or the lines to pull it off...Which is a shame, as many of the songs are skillful...many of them communicate tone and character eloquently...Kelli Barrett has a lovely voice, but can't sell Lara as the cynosure of every man's desire...And if Tam Mutu doesn't seem the poetry-writing type, he has a pleasantly romantic baritone and very handsome looks.

Director Paulus keeps throwing in magic tricks and storybook set changes, but no amount of illusionism can make the songs any better or the script and style seem any more definite. 'Don't lose faith,' Sylvia comforts Barrie. 'You'll get there.' Finding Neverland tries to find the way - second star to the right and straight on till morning - but it never quite arrives.

Where Wheeldon falters is in pacing and storytelling. Often, the songs, dances and the book all repeat the same plot points. At times, the action stalls while the actors move. And an act 2 revelation about Lise's involvement with Henri's family is lavishly unshocking. But if you can ignore the stops and starts, there's so much to enjoy in between, not least some of the Gershwins' greatest hits: You Can't Take That Away from Me, The Man I Love, But Not for Me, I Got Rhythm.

Even if you've practically memorised the books, Wolf Hall still feels incomplete. Because it is. The third part of Mantel's trilogy, which details Cromwell's downfall, hasn't yet been published. Wolf Hall is a tragedy, but right now it concludes like a comedy (well, a comedy with a lot of beheading), which the second part acknowledges. 'There are no endings,' Cromwell says. 'They are all beginnings. This is one.' And gripping enough that I suspect nearly all of us will be back in these seats in a few years time, eager to see - 500-year-old spoiler alert - the bloody conclusion.

This is a costly production and in terms of the design, that money has been very well spent. Derek McClane's set is a Belle Époque fantasia, Natasha Katz's lighting is sumptuous, and Catherine Zuber's gorgeous, sensual costuming should sew up the Tony win nicely. Joshua Bergasse's choreography is acrobatic and playful, if perhaps somewhat overblown in The Gossips and The Night They Invented Champagne. The orchestra sounds wonderful and some of the songs are a treat.

It's not a lot more irreverent than The Book of Mormon, but it is a lot dirtier and there are no dance numbers. Askins's script, directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, often betrays an adolescent desire to shock and scandalise. Monologues that open and close the show spell out the religious critique too baldly. Some of the motivations are explained away tidily and a lot of the humour is puerile. But the puerile bits are particularly funny. (Though be forewarned: puppet fellatio is something you can't unsee.) Askins is smart and engaged enough that even the play's most outrageous actions seem grounded in character. Speaking of characters and those who play them, if Steven Boyer's name isn't on the best actor ballot come Tony time, then those awards are broken. Boyer, a slight and moon-faced blond who looks at least a decade younger than he is, plays both Jason and Tyrone, most often at the same time.

The play's politics seem retrograde, but maybe there's some comfort in that. In the final scene, Heidi offers some hopes for her adopted daughter, that if she ever meets a man like Scoop, 'he'll never tell her it's either/or baby. And she'll never think she's worthless unless he lets her have it all. And maybe, just maybe, things will be a little better.' And from the vantage of 2015, things do seem better. If only a little. Where's the play about that?

What's the trouble? Well, it's tough to love a musical with such unexceptional songs. Several of them are pastiche numbers - Indian Maiden's Lament, Veronique, Babette - tunes from properties that Oscar and his rival Max Jacobs (James Moye) want to produce. The latter two offer a lot of fun to the design team, but they're neither terrific nor terrible enough to really land. The overture and the opening number Saddle Up the Horse/On the 20th Century are nicely exciting and there's a quality comic tune in Sign Lily Sign, but already it's hard to remember any of the others. Without a first-class score to bolster the madcappery, even an engine as forceful as the Twentieth Century's sometimes runs out of steam.

Perhaps you wouldn't notice if you had anything riding on the central pair. But McClure, an able actor, plays the part at such a pitch of neurotic schlubbiness that who cares if he gets the girl? And though O'Malley is a fine, leggy singer with calf muscles that could crack lobster claws, her Betsy is so bereft of character that what does it matter if she's gotten or not? Yet through it all there's Danza, effortlessly cool and obviously amused. His voice, thin and a little lunkish, is no great instrument, but he plays it like a jazz cat that's got the cream. He can even put over a tender ballad about skin cancer. And he can tap-dance, too. Well, kind of. Ladies and gentleman, this is what a high roller looks like.

As much as it's about theoretical physics, it's also about the progress of any ordinary life, which begins with seemingly endless possibilities and then dwindles until death forecloses further choice. I wish I'd seen Sally Hawkins and Rafe Spall in the London debut, but the director Michael Longhurst has found very fine replacements in Gyllenhaal and Wilson. They have a lovely time playing with the script and with each other -- Wilson with her pointy, pouty features and wonderfully manic energy, Gyllenhaal with his bushy beard and earthier charms. He relies perhaps a bit heavily on blokiness and she on intensity, but they ably vary the mood of each new scene. And though the play fixes on physics, rest assured the chemistry is ample. If Longhurst's direction is somewhat invisible...he has created an environment in which the actors feel comfortable taking risks and chances and turns.

As a meditation on disability it's a lot more sophisticated than what's on offer just up the road in Side Show, but under Scott Ellis's brisk, stylish and slightly hollow direction, the ideas never seem emotionally connected to the experience of the characters. The dramatic events - a crisis of confidence and conscience for Treves, a scandal involving an uncorseted Mrs Kendal - seem obvious contrivance on the part of the playwright rather than incidents demanded by character and circumstance. And yet what does that matter? Well before opening, the show had set box-office records. So step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and see something that will astonish and amaze you: a bona fide Hollywood star in nothing but his skivvies. Really, why bother with a play at all?

In A Delicate Balance, an ominous domestic drama of 1966 now revived on Broadway, there's hardly a sentence that isn't meant to scratch or slice or slash...The director, Pam MacKinnon, who superintended the most recent and rather dazzling revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, works to ground these seemingly extraordinary events and to temper Albee's penchant for absurdism with a realistic emotional palette...Despite the exertions of director and cast, the play can feel long and talky and the audience was not without its snoozers. Yet nearly half a century on, it hasn't really dated. The sense of menace and threat that underlies the chat - the tenuousness of even the most settled lives - remains immediate and disturbing. Like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (if unlike The Zoo Story), a lot threatens to happen, but not much does....

Rather than offering practical explanations or clear timelines, The River keeps returning and reconfiguring the same handful of subjects and themes - love, truth, loss, fish. There's also a brief cookery demonstration. Some will find this frustrating, even the cookery part. (That fish looks delicious. Why can't Jackman share?) But if you can live with ambiguity - and with Jackman's doughty faith in his own charm - you may find The River's insistence on ambiguity strangely vitalising. Just when you think you've closed in a solution, it slips through your fingers and swims effortlessly away.

But if the structure is slack, the book indifferent, the love story lopsided, and the gender politics unreconstructed, Sting's folk-inflected songs, with their bright percussion and yearning strings, are a pleasure and they are performed here with vigour and swagger and joy. As the working men sing in the show's most rousing song, 'We've got nowt else.' Well, that's plenty. Underneath all the metaphors and self-consciousness and strange earnestness, there's a seaworthy show.

Despite this difficulty and a final scene that over-enunciates themes and conflicts, This Is Our Youth is rich and sad and wry in its cruel-to-be-kind portrayal of disillusioned adolescents struggling to take up the business and onus of grown-up life. How do you put away childish things, it asks, when you aren't ready to pick up adult ones?

Pour one out for Holler if Ya Hear Me, the dead-on-arrival Broadway jukebox musical inspired by the lyrics of Tupac Shakur. As Tupac's life rights were unavailable, director Kenny Leon (a recent Tony winner for the Raisin in the Sun revival) and playwright Todd Kriedler have fitted a dozen and a half of his visceral tracks to a profoundly un-engaging story.

Plays based on philosophical symposia don't come louder, lewder or more gorgeously original than Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Inspired by a Socratic dialogue on the nature of love, this concert-style musical, with book by John Cameron Mitchell and music and lyrics by Stephen Trask, concerns Hedwig, a 'slip of a girly boy' from East Germany who is brought to America as an army bride. Hedwig discovers a talent for songwriting and launches the career of a teen idol, who then rebuffs her. The Angry Inch is her surly Croatian band - as well as her sobriquet for the results of a botched sex-change operation.

Wisely, composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown, book writer Marsha Norman and director Bartlett Sher attempt to mitigate the book's high-flown verbiage and fantastical air...They work well enough together, but in attempting to moderate the novel's silliness, they've shorn the material of some of its import. Brown favours simple, string-heavy compositions that soar only intermittently and feature a puzzling lack of duets...O'Hara is as sumptuously voiced as ever and dazzles in the biographical number Almost Real. Pasquale is implausibly hunky and an able, emotive singer himself. Unfortunately, they seem more like best pals than fervid lovers, the companionable vibe enhanced by chaste choreography that suggests that sex is best achieved with jeans zipped and buttoned.

We can credit costume designer Gregg Barnes with the boots - they really are luscious. But similar originality evades most of the songs, which, though tuneful enough, fade from the mind as soon as the last note has sounded. A few exceptions are The History of Wrong Guys, a clever girl/dumb choices number milked gleefully by Annaleigh Ashford, and I'm Not My Father's Son, a duet for Sands and Porter. Most of the others, even those that promise well, ultimately come across as generic, accomplishing little in terms of revealing character or driving plot. Certainly there's nothing to rival the poignancy of Time After Time, or even the daffy joy of She Bop. Still, Broadway audiences just wanna have fun, and if it means giving a standing O to a uneven book and score, they'll do it.

Despite everything we know about the demise of print media and the scandals that pervade it, Ephron and Wolfe really make you believe, at least for the play's two-hour running time, that journalism, as McAlary says, isn't 'the oldest job in the world, but it's the best job in the world.'

None of the central performances is quite as fully realized as you might wish—Stiller, for example, captures the “dreaming boy” aspect of Artie, but not the loathing that drives him. Yet together they somehow harmonize, ably conveying Guare’s gentle, genial take on the pathos of unremarkable, everyday lives. “The famous ones,” sighs Bunny, “they’re the real people. We’re the creatures of their dreams.” But it’s these sad dreams that Cromer spends his waking life imagining.

This is McDonagh's first play set in America and his second, after The Pillowman, not located in his native Ireland. He takes to certain of our idioms ('a coon's age,' 'y'know,' 'motherfucker'), but A Behanding lacks the lyricism of his earlier works. It also lacks their substance. That no one dies is not the only reason this amusing, harmless piece proves less affecting than any of his previous works. Instead of making the door to this hotel room one of the 'ten thousand several,' McDonagh has merely hung a metaphorical 'Do Not Disturb' sign on it.