Ben Brantley — Theater Critic

Yet against expectation, Mayer's interpretation, staged in a 270-seat theater, summons the shivery elation I felt seeing 'Shop' at the East Village's Orpheum nearly four decades earlier. It restores the show to its original scale and sensibility, reminding us of the special potency of grisly things that come in small, impeccably wrapped packages. It's not an exact facsimile of the 1982 production, which was directed by Ashman. Working with an ace design team, Mayer heightens the show's classic pulp elements, its aura of low-rent noir splashed with flecks of blood-red.

A nation is broken. Life savings have vanished overnight. Home as a place you thought you would live forever no longer exists. People don't so much connect as collide, even members of the same family. And it seems like winter is never going to end. That's the view from Duluth, Minn., 1934, as conjured in the profoundly beautiful 'Girl From the North Country,' a work by the Irish dramatist Conor McPherson built around vintage songs by Bob Dylan. You're probably thinking that such a harsh vision of an American yesterday looks uncomfortably close to tomorrow. Who would want to stare into such a dark mirror? Yet while this singular production, which opened on Thursday night at the Belasco Theater under McPherson's luminous direction, evokes the Great Depression with uncompromising bleakness, it is ultimately the opposite of depressing. That's because McPherson hears America singing in the dark. And those voices light up the night with the radiance of divine grace.

I was hopeful when, in the production's opening moments, the gang members filed onto the front of the vast, empty stage and looked dead-eyed into the audience. You could imagine any of these able-bodied young brawlers being a deadly weapon all by himself. Then those big, projected close-ups begin. (Luke Halls did the video design.) And as the camera caresses each photogenic face, the men's tattoos start to look less like don't-mess-with-me emblems of tribal membership and more like fashion choices. We might have stumbled into a casting call for a Calvin Klein fragrance ad ('Rough - for the man who likes it that way'). Soon, they all start to sing and dance - and occasionally exchange dialogue that in this context sounds terminally quaint. And the impression is no longer of angry young things on the brink of catastrophic explosion.

The title character of 'My Name Is Lucy Barton,' Rona Munro's crystalline stage adaptation of Elizabeth Strout's 2016 novel, is hardly a woman of mystery. On the contrary, as embodied with middle-American forthrightness by a perfectly cast Laura Linney, in the production that opened Wednesday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Lucy may be the most translucent figure now on a New York stage.

While retaining the jolliness and sentimentality associated with some 170 years' worth of stage versions (including a competitive flock that opened the year after its publication), Thorne and Warchus have polished the story's social conscience to a restored brightness. Be assured, though, that their 'Carol,' which stars Campbell Scott as Ebenezer Scrooge, never sings shrilly.

Ambition and achievement are not entirely commensurate in 'The Inheritance.' Its breadth doesn't always translate into depth. As fine as the acting is throughout - and quietly brilliant when the extraordinary veteran Lois Smith takes the stage, toward the very end, as the show's sole female character - none of the characters here have the textured completeness of those created by Forster and Kushner. Ultimately, the play twists itself into ungainly pretzels as it tries to join all the thematic dots on its immense canvas. Yet even by the end of the overwrought second half of 'The Inheritance,' you're likely to feel the abiding, welcome buzz of energy that comes from an unflagging will to question, to create, to contextualize, to - oh, why not? - only connect.

Enter the opposite side, person by person, through the magically porous, shimmering gray curtains that encase the stage. The musicians and backup singers materialize as a multiplying, multinational ensemble. Annie-B Parson's exacting, exultant and altogether astonishing choreography often have them moving in a single, tidal wave. Yet each of these gray-clad beings is irreducibly individual, and even with Byrne center stage, you want to watch everyone else all the time, too.

Tomei knows from Italian-flavored portraiture. (She won an Oscar playing a character named Mona Lisa Vito in 'My Cousin Vinny.') If, in the closefitting 1950s slips and dresses the costume designer Clint Ramos has provided, her affect is more cuddly pixie than temperamental colossus, she is nonetheless a bold and inventive comic performer. Unfortunately, she is in hard-fought competition with her environment. It's not that she's operating in a vacuum, which might be easier. Cullman has populated the stage with an ever-present chorus of singing Italian women and frantic children.

The everyday poison known as toxic masculinity becomes dangerously easy to swallow in 'Linda Vista,' Tracy Letts's inspired, ruthless take on the classic midlife-crisis comedy. In the sunny opening scenes of this very funny, equally unsettling Steppenwolf Theater production - which opened on Thursday at the Hayes Theater - you'll probably feel like cozying up to that sheepish, disheveled big guy who rules the stage with his outspoken wit.

What distinguishes 'Freestyle Love Supreme' from other Broadway songfests is that its numbers spring into existence before your very eyes, or ears. And you, dear audience members, are the co-authors of these numbers - feeding the onstage crew the words, ideas and emotions that they then transform into improbably rhymed performance pieces. That means live theater doesn't get more live than this. 'Freestyle' demands that you exist purely in the here-and-now of the show. And to guarantee you do so, it requires that all smartphones (and smartwatches) be locked into Yondr pouches before you take your seat.

And how about - yeah, how about - that extraordinary finale, in which six audience members help Mr. Brown finally disclose the secret that gives this show its title? Like the concluding scene of a Shakespearean romance, it interlaces a variety of jangling, disparate elements into the semblance of cosmic harmony. And God help me, I found myself in happy tears at a magic show.

And how about - yeah, how about - that extraordinary finale, in which six audience members help Mr. Brown finally disclose the secret that gives this show its title? Like the concluding scene of a Shakespearean romance, it interlaces a variety of jangling, disparate elements into the semblance of cosmic harmony. And God help me, I found myself in happy tears at a magic show.

Mr. Lloyd's interpretation balances surface elegance with an aching profundity, so that 'Betrayal' becomes less about the anguish of love than of life itself. Specifically, I mean life as lived among people whom we can never truly know. That includes those closest to us; it also includes our own, elusive selves.

In 'Moulin Rouge,' life is beautiful, in a way reality never is. All is permitted, and forgiven, in the name of love. Bohemian poverty is exquisitely picturesque. Stardom is around the corner for the gifted and hungry. And even songs you thought you never wanted to hear again pulse with irresistible new sex appeal. What this emporium of impure temptations is really selling is pure escapism. You may not believe in it all by the next morning. But I swear you'll feel nothing like regret.

In 'Moulin Rouge,' life is beautiful, in a way reality never is. All is permitted, and forgiven, in the name of love. Bohemian poverty is exquisitely picturesque. Stardom is around the corner for the gifted and hungry. And even songs you thought you never wanted to hear again pulse with irresistible new sex appeal. What this emporium of impure temptations is really selling is pure escapism. You may not believe in it all by the next morning. But I swear you'll feel nothing like regret.

In 'Moulin Rouge,' life is beautiful, in a way reality never is. All is permitted, and forgiven, in the name of love. Bohemian poverty is exquisitely picturesque. Stardom is around the corner for the gifted and hungry. And even songs you thought you never wanted to hear again pulse with irresistible new sex appeal. What this emporium of impure temptations is really selling is pure escapism. You may not believe in it all by the next morning. But I swear you'll feel nothing like regret.

In 'Moulin Rouge,' life is beautiful, in a way reality never is. All is permitted, and forgiven, in the name of love. Bohemian poverty is exquisitely picturesque. Stardom is around the corner for the gifted and hungry. And even songs you thought you never wanted to hear again pulse with irresistible new sex appeal. What this emporium of impure temptations is really selling is pure escapism. You may not believe in it all by the next morning. But I swear you'll feel nothing like regret.

In 'Moulin Rouge,' life is beautiful, in a way reality never is. All is permitted, and forgiven, in the name of love. Bohemian poverty is exquisitely picturesque. Stardom is around the corner for the gifted and hungry. And even songs you thought you never wanted to hear again pulse with irresistible new sex appeal. What this emporium of impure temptations is really selling is pure escapism. You may not believe in it all by the next morning. But I swear you'll feel nothing like regret.

In 'Moulin Rouge,' life is beautiful, in a way reality never is. All is permitted, and forgiven, in the name of love. Bohemian poverty is exquisitely picturesque. Stardom is around the corner for the gifted and hungry. And even songs you thought you never wanted to hear again pulse with irresistible new sex appeal. What this emporium of impure temptations is really selling is pure escapism. You may not believe in it all by the next morning. But I swear you'll feel nothing like regret.

The dead lead lives of noisy desperation in 'Beetlejuice,' the absolutely exhausting new musical that opened on Thursday at the Winter Garden Theater. This frantic adaptation of Tim Burton's much-loved 1988 film is sure to dishearten those who like to think of the afterlife as one unending, undisturbed sleep.

Directed with vaudevillian flair and firecracker snap by Rupert Goold, 'Ink' is set in London, in the gory glory days of a quaint phenomenon: print journalism. The show begins in 1969, with the purchase of a dying newspaper. Old, er, news, right? On the contrary. Mr. Graham's account of the resurrection of that paper - into a tabloid behemoth that hypnotizes its readership while forever altering its competition's DNA - foretells the age of populist media in which we now live and squirm.

A mighty sigh - equal parts frustration and resignation - seems to animate 'Hillary and Clinton,' Lucas Hnath's piquant, slender new play about ... well, it's about exactly what, and whom, its title suggests. This production, which opened on Thursday night at the Golden Theater under the suave direction of Joe Mantello, is indeed a portrait of a marriage between two extremely well-known American politicians. As for that propulsive sigh, it emanates from the title character called Hillary, who spends the surprisingly airy 90 minutes of this show in what might be called a state of angry wistfulness. It is our very good fortune that Hillary is portrayed by Laurie Metcalf, an actress who does being thwarted better than anyone.

The gods, or more likely Ms. Chavkin and her creative team, have saved 'Hadestown' on its way uptown - via Edmonton and London - by turning it into something very much warmer, if not yet ideally warm. The story is clearer, the songs express that story more directly and the larger themes arise from it naturally rather than demanding immediate attention like overeager undergraduates.

But this 'Burn This,' which is steeped in the rich compassion for the lonely and lost that is the hallmark of works by Mr. Wilson (1937-2011), only rarely stirs the heart. In the ideal production, it creates the sense of fire meeting fire in a folie à deux between two ill-matched yet inexorably bound lovers. What we have in this case is a one-man conflagration.

What she does is a far cry from the same sequence as immortalized by Agnes de Mille, the show's legendary original choreographer. But on its own, radically reconceptualized terms, it achieves the same effect. As she gallops, slithers and crawls the length of the stage, casting wondering and seductive glances at the front row, Ms. Hamilton comes to seem like undiluted id incarnate, a force that has always been rippling beneath the surface here. She's as stimulating and frightening - and as fresh - as last night's fever dream. So is this astonishing show.