Allison Adato

That both of these women are portrayed by Laura Linney is the neat trick of Lucy Barton. In an enthralling performance, Linney embodies both memoirist and memory. Did Lucy's mother even show up, or was she a hospital fever dream? She certainly sounds authentic, and has a real effect on Lucy when she jostles the worst of her daughter's past to the surface. The play, a 90-minute one-act, is a monster of a monologue: Realistic in reflecting the ways that recollections can be inconsistent and tangential, but all the more difficult to memorize for being so. Linney's delivery is seamless. (The show's sound cues, intrusive here, suggest music wafting in from another patient's room; neither the actor nor the audience need them.)

But as a focused exploration of human duplicity, Betrayal is an unembellished marvel and this Broadway revival gives the 1978 play a smart, stripped down treatment. The cast, imported from last spring's London production, includes Tom Hiddleston (Loki in the Marvel films and forthcoming Disney+ series), and Charlie Cox (the title role in Netflix's Daredevil). Along with British actress Zawe Ashton (Velvet Buzzsaw), Hiddleston and Cox come with long theater resumes; they are both terrific sprung from their comic book trappings.

There are any number of quotes from King Lear that one might employ to kick off a discussion of how fully Glenda Jackson embodies William Shakespeare's disintegrating ruler. 'Every inch a King,' might do, though it is spoken ironically in Act IV, when things have fallen well apart. Rather, what came to mind not long into a viewing of director Sam Gold's outstanding production of Lear now at New York's Cort Theatre, was the bit of dialogue above, from Terrence McNally's 1994 play Love! Valour! Compassion!. Machismo just begins to graze it. The tragedy of the mad king is a study of masculine power battling its own decline and Jackson, with self-ruinous male ego animating her wiry frame, feasts on the notoriously challenging role.

The only other person on stage is the unnamed American Legion officer. In that supporting role, Mike Iveson evokes Dana Carvey doing George H.W. Bush - just the right amount of silly earnestness. That is until he, too, breaks the fourth wall to tell us a story about Mike Iveson. This may be to give Schreck a break during the show, which is 100 minutes with no intermission. While Iveson has an emotional tale, the diversion doesn't make sense. One wants to go back and tell 15-year-old Heidi: 'Someday you're going to have a Broadway stage all to yourself, and people are going to pay to listen to you talk about the things you care the most about. You have the right to not share your stage with a guy, even if he has, as you say, 'positive male energy.'' Not all our rights are spelled out because, as she (and the author of the Ninth Amendment) notes, 'How long do we want this document to be?' B+

If you love Cher there is probably nothing I could write here that would keep you away from The Cher Show. No discussion of thin plotting, of costumes changes subbing for character development, or of retro har-har jokes will dissuade true believers looking for a bedazzled good time.

American Son is most affecting when it is personal, not political: When we understand that Jamal, a prep school kid off to West Point in the fall, has recently cornrowed his hair, started wearing baggy jeans, and adopted what Scott calls, 'that stupid, loping, surly walk' not merely as an exploration of identity, but as a way of differentiating himself from his father, who has let the family down by moving out. Was this reactionary change in Jamal's attitude and appearance a factor in the trouble he found himself in that night?

With seven hours of angels and five hours of wizards to take in on Broadway this season, can a case be made for four hours of end-of-the-line drunks? Yes, and a good one. The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O'Neill's frequently revived dark meditation on the life-sustaining merits of self-delusion, is in good hands with this latest creative team led by director George C. Wolfe. (That stunning tableau is thanks to lighting designers Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer; costumes are by Ann Roth and scenic design, Santo Loquasto.)

Having its Broadway premiere nearly a quarter-century after its Off-Broadway debut, Three Tall Women is far from an easy evening of theater, despite being a swift, intermission-less hour-and-a-half. In the first act a woman in her 90s (played by Glenda Jackson and identified in the program only as 'A,'), strong of will but failing of mind, is tended to by a woman in her 50s (Laurie Metcalf, 'B') and visited, for vague legal reasons, by a woman in her 20s (Alison Pill, 'C'). The text, by turns poignant and funny, can also be, like Jackson's character, prickly and distant.

This new production, a transplant from London's National Theatre, should appeal to two audiences: Those who fell for the play's humor and wonder the first time around (they are unlikely to be disappointed in director Marianne Elliott's take), and those who come to the show with no history. As a member of the first group, I have some envy for those in the second. Because while there may be bragging rights in being able to compare the Angel then (looking as if she flew off a Roman edifice) with the Angel now (more wild, broken-down and bird-like), the play's text and imagery deliver an ecstatic jolt the first time you see it.

Meteor Shower is a very funny play. Keening-like-a-howler-monkey funny. Design-a-new-cry-laughing-emoji funny. What it is not, however, is a substantial play. At 80 minutes with no intermission, this two-couples-one-weird-evening show is shorter than an episode of Saturday Night Live, with which it shares a familiar sketch comedy sensibility. You can imagine the SNL writers-room pitch for a version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but with four of modern-day America's most hilariously loathsome people.

In Broadway's new production of M. Butterfly, Clive Owen brings London stage chops and matinee idol polish to the play's conflicted protagonist and semi-reliable narrator, Rene Gallimard, a French diplomat in love with a Chinese opera singer who turns out to be a spy. It is a role that accommodates varying levels of power and pathos - John Lithgow was Broadway's first Gallimard in 1988; he was followed by Anthony Hopkins, Tony Randall and, in David Cronenberg's 1993 film, Jeremy Irons. But, as crucial as it is to have a compelling presence like Owen as the play's lead storyteller, success here hinges on pinning the right Butterfly: Song Liling is a Chinese man claiming to Gallimard - even in bed - to be a woman, one who lives publicly as a man and performs female roles (as male singers did in traditional Chinese opera).

The ideas are not terribly complicated, but illuminating them fully here would constitute a small spoiler. Suffice to say that, for anyone feeling steamrolled by the years, his words are reassuring even today. As deftly handled by director Rebecca Taichman (a 2017 Tony winner for Indecent), Priestley's metaphysics are poignant where, in less able hands, they could come off as annoyingly mystical. And while its Downton connection might fill seats, The Conways, despite some superficial period similarities, reveals its own complex pleasures - just give it time.

With the whole of theater history on the shelf, what makes a producer reach for a particular show to re-stage? Beyond a don't-miss pairing of a classic role and a magnetic star (see: Hello, Dolly and Bette Midler), it helps for a revival to resonate - topically, emotionally - with present-day audiences. That's a harder task for a returning show in which the story is contemporaneous with its original premiere (Dolly, for instance, never ages because, even in 1964, it swept audiences to the turn of the century). Unfortunately, this first Broadway production of Marvin's Room never quite justifies its trip back to the early '90s. While not a conspicuous period piece, it resists updating, and yet lacks the emotional power and resonance to move us from its long-ago vantage.

If you're an out-of-town visitor to New York looking for a feel-good night of theater, then Come From Away is surely recommended. This new musical tells the true story of how the residents of Gander, a Newfoundland island community of some 9000 people, responded with unparalleled Canadian hospitality to 7,000 stranded international passengers whose planes were diverted when the U.S. airspace closed on Sept. 11, 2001. In 100 heartwarming minutes, the show sets the best aspects of human nature to infectious Celtic folk and Broadway rock.

But one need not know Seurat to enjoy this enchanting production. Jake Gyllenhaal, bearded and intense with a rich singing voice, makes the character understood immediately: He is an artist blinded to life's joys by his own work ethic, even as he spends his days observing other people at their leisure. (George is not a total prig, however, and Gyllenhaal lets loose with some silly business singing the voices of two dogs in the painting.) By contrast, the pointillist's model and lover, the aptly named Dot, played with an endearing blend of comic sparkle and pathos by Annaleigh Ashford, wants the simple pleasures of going to the Follies and eating cream puffs. But she cannot pull George from his studio, and - practical girl that she is - may take up with the baker who keeps her in dough.