Ben Brantley — Theater Critic

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.

It should surprise no one that Ms. Jackson is delivering a powerful and deeply perceptive performance as the most royally demented of Shakespeare's monarchs. But much of what surrounds her in this glittery, haphazard production seems to be working overtime to divert attention from that performance. That includes a perfectly lovely string quartet - playing original music by Philip Glass, no less - that under other circumstances I would have enjoyed listening to. Here, though, this intermittent concert seems to be competing with, rather than underscoring, Shakespeare's bleakest tragedy. The same might be said of Miriam Buether's blindingly gold set (lighted to sear the eyes by Jane Cox), which blazes with nouveau riche vulgarity.

While honoring all the expected biomusical clichés, which include rolling out its subjects' greatest hits in brisk and sometimes too fragmented succession, this production refreshingly emphasizes the improbable triumph of rough, combustible parts assembled into glistening smoothness.

For one thing, it is - by cold critical standards - the worst of the lot, with a repetitive score, painfully forced rhymes, cartoonish acting and a general approach that mistakes decibel level (literally and metaphorically) for emotional intensity. But this ostensible amateurishness may be exactly what sells 'Be More Chill' to its young target audience. Alone among Broadway musicals, 'Be More Chill' feels as if it could have been created by the teenagers it portrays, or perhaps by even younger people imagining what high school will be like. Though its production values have been souped up since I saw it in August, the show's current incarnation - which features the same cast and is again directed by Stephen Brackett - remains a festival of klutziness that you could imagine being put together in the bedrooms and basements of young YouTubers.

Sam Shepard's wild West just got a lot scarier. I'm talking about that shadowy, shifting desertscape occupied so disharmoniously by the two brothers of Shepard's 1980 masterwork, 'True West,' which has been given a ripping revival by James Macdonald at the American Airlines Theater. As embodied bya brilliant Ethan Hawke, in full-menace mode, and a tightly wired Paul Dano, everyday sibling rivalry has seldom felt this ominous.

Mr. Birbiglia - who came to national attention with the stage and film versions of 'Sleepwalk With Me,' an autobiographical account of his dangerous nights with a sleep disorder - seems not only to occupy but also to absorb and transmute every inch of the Cort's naked stage. (Appropriately, there's more to Beowulf Boritt's bare set than first meets the eye.) He achieves this partly by pacing, pacing as he talks, in ever-widening circles and diagonals and loop-de-loops.

Mr. Kaufman's staging - still designed to please the eye without overwhelming it, with 1970s shorthand sets by David Zinn, costumes to match by Clint Ramos and lighting by David Lander - now feels smoother and quicker on its feet. It also feels, well, bigger. I'm referring particularly to Mr. Urie's performance. This nimble actor has already demonstrated canny comic chops in Off Broadway plays (Jonathan Tolins's 'Buyer & Cellar,' Gogol's 'The Government Inspector.') But in filling Mr. Fierstein's dauntingly big shoes on a Broadway stage, Mr. Urie stretches to color in the outsize outlines of his part.

'The Waverly Gallery' is very much a group portrait, in which everyday life is distorted to the point of surrealism by the addled soul at its center. And Ms. Neugebauer has assembled a dream cast to embody the collective madness that seems to descend on those closest to Gladys.

The last time a new drama with this breadth of scope and ambition appeared on Broadway was seven years ago. That was Mr. Butterworth's 'Jerusalem,' in which a small-time, middle-aged country drug dealer (played by a monumental Mark Rylance) became a majestic emblem of an ancient, heroic England. With 'The Ferryman,' Mr. Butterworth is again assessing the chokehold of a nation's past on its present. But now it is Northern Ireland at the height of the politically fraught period known as the Troubles. (We hear radio reports of the of the dying Irish Republican hunger striker in the Maze prison.) And he mines the folksy clichés of Irish archetypes - as garrulous, drink-loving, pugilistic souls - to find the crueler patterns of a centuries-old cycle of violence and vengeance.

'The Nap' is less frenetically funny than 'One Man,' and more modest in scale. But it shares with its predecessor a fondness for the subterfuges and archetypes of classic farce, which Mr. Bean translates fluently into modern-day terms.

Directed and choreographed as if on automatic pilot by Jerry Mitchell, 'Pretty Woman: The Musical' has a book by the original film's director, Garry Marshall (who died in 2016), and screenwriter, J.F. Lawton, with songs by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance. Its creators have hewed suffocatingly close to the film's story, gags and dialogue.

You would think that a sexually polymorphous musical that combines a Renaissance pastoral romance with the songs of the 1980s California rock group the Go-Go's would at the very least be a hoot, a show that could get sloppy drunk on its own outrageousness. Yet 'Head Over Heels,' which opened on Thursday night at the Hudson Theater, feels as timid and awkward as the new kid on the first day of school.

I wish I could report that this charismatic and capable team, directed by the busy Joe Mantello, transported me vividly and uncompromisingly into the dark ages of homosexual life in these United States, and that I shuddered and sobbed in sympathy. But even trimmed from two acts to an intermission-free 110 minutes, the show left me largely impatient and unmoved.

If you have a good time at a production of 'The Iceman Cometh,' does that mean the show hasn't done its job? I was beaming like a tickled 2-year-old during much of George C. Wolfe's revival of Eugene O'Neill's behemoth barroom tragedy, which opened on Thursday night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, with Denzel Washington more than earning his salary as its commanding star.

Senility is a joy ride in the exultant, London-born revival of Tom Stoppard's 'Travesties,' which opened on Tuesday night at the American Airlines Theater. This account of a clash of three cultural titans - James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara - in Zurich during World War I is related decades later by an ancient witness (one Henry Carr, of the British Consulate). His recollection is, to put it kindly, capricious.

For this slyly manipulative production knows exactly how, and how hard, to push the tenderest spots of most people's emotional makeups. By that I mean the ever-fraught relationships between parents and children, connections that persist, often unresolved, beyond death. Time-bending, it turns out, has its own special tools of catharsis in this regard. In the multiple worlds summoned here, it is possible for kids to instantly become their grown-up mentors, and for a son to encounter his forbidding father when dad was still a vulnerable sapling. 'I am paint and memory,' a talking portrait of the long-dead wizard Dumbledore (Edward James Hyland) says to his former star pupil, Harry. Well, that's art, isn't it? Substitute theatrical showmanship for paint, and you have this remarkable production's elemental recipe for all-consuming enchantment.

The tragic inevitability of 'Carousel' has seldom come across as warmly or as chillingly as it does in this vividly reimagined revival. As directed by Jack O'Brien and choreographed by Justin Peck, with thoughtful and powerful performances by Mr. Henry and Ms. Mueller, the love story at the show's center has never seemed quite as ill-starred or, at the same time, as sexy.

That this 'Mean Girls' takes place (still at an Illinois high school) 14 years later than the film has proved no obstacle to Ms. Fey. After all, social media only increases opportunities for social climbing and subversion. The disconnect that troubles this musical isn't a matter of adapting to changing times. Scott Pask's set, Gregg Barnes's costumes and Finn Ross and Adam Young's video designs render sociological exactitude with flat comic-strip brightness. No, the trouble lies in the less assured translation of Ms. Fey's sly take on adolescent social angst into crowd-pleasing song and dance. Mr. Richmond and Ms. Benjamin's many (many) musical numbers are passable by middle-of-the-road Broadway standards (though Ms. Benjamin's shoehorned rhymes do not bear close examination).

There's a reason that Mr. Rockwell's set revolves between scenes, forcing us to adjust our angles of observation. Like morality, identity is relative in 'Lobby Hero.' Few playwrights match Mr. Lonergan in making confident art out of such constantly shifting uncertainty.

Sometimes, just when you need it most, a play courses into your system like a transfusion of new blood. You feel freshly awakened to the infinite possibilities not only of theater but also of the teeming world beyond. And when you hit the streets afterward, every one of your senses is singing. Such is the effect of seeing the flat-out fabulous revival of Tony Kushner's 'Angels in America,' which opened on Sunday night at the Neil Simon Theater, with a top-flight cast led by Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane in career-high performances.

In the paradoxically plaintive and joyous sound of a castrato's voice channeling Handel's music, the King has glimpsed a paradise beyond his fractious court and his burdened royal self. Trying to create that idyllic vision in the real world, in a rustic outpost in the forest in the second act, is an experiment doomed to failure. But watching Mr. Rylance's Philippe experience Farinelli's voice, we hear what we hears. And an actor and a singer temporarily turn a night at the theater in an anxious city into an Eden beyond worldly care, all the more precious for its evanescence.

For what it's worth - and we're talking millions of dollars here - you are never going to see as convincing an impersonation of a two-dimensional cartoon by a three-dimensional human as that provided by Ethan Slater at the Palace Theater. Mr. Slater plays the title role in 'SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical,' the ginormous giggle of a show that opened on Monday night.

Breaking news for Broadway theatergoers, even - or perhaps especially - those who thought they were past the age of infatuation: It is time to fall in love again. One of the most ravishing musicals you will ever be seduced by opened on Thursday night at the Barrymore Theater. It is called 'The Band's Visit,' and its undeniable allure is not of the hard-charging, brightly blaring sort common to box-office extravaganzas.

And while Mr. Akhtar may have rejected many of the outer trappings of the Wall Street potboiler, he still hews to many of its clichés. That includes a woman being brought to orgasm by the idea of her decrepit lover's financial power, and the antihero Merkin solemnly lying to his wife (Miriam Silverman) in the manner of Michael Corleone. And while the script offers some amusing lessons in shading language with hopeful sounding words to pitch a deal, Mr. Akhtar's dialogue lacks its usual original snap. 'When did money become the thing - the only thing?' Ms. Lim's character asks in the opening monologue. It's an ever-intriguing question, but you've heard it before. And for all his intelligence and focus, Mr. Akhtar seldom bucks the formula to provide answers.

Though it bent (and blew) the minds of rapt audiences with its elusive opalescence nearly three decades ago, David Henry Hwang's 'M. Butterfly' returns to Broadway on heavier, drabber wings. True, the revival that opened on Thursday night at the Cort Theater, directed by Julie Taymor, has basically the same anatomy as its predecessor. But it has undeniably morphed into a more prosaic creature, and the tantalizing mists that surrounded its initial run have dissolved as if under a harsh morning sun. When the enigmatic title character in this breakthrough drama about the illusions of sexual and cultural identity is brusquely commanded to 'Strip!' by a stricken suitor, you're apt to think, 'No need guys. That's already been taken care of.'