Ben Brantley

Ms. Midler brings such comic brio - both barn-side broad and needlepoint precise - to the task of playing with her food that I promise you it stops the show. Then again, pretty much everything Ms. Midler does stops the show. As for that much anticipated moment when she puts on fire-engine red plumes and sequins to lead a cakewalk of singing waiters, well, let's just hope that this show's producers have earthquake insurance...But Ms. Midler isn't coasting on the good will of theatergoers who remember her as the queen of 1980s movie comedies or as the bawdy earth goddess of self-satirizing revues from the '70s onward. As the center and raison d'être of this show, which also features David Hyde Pierce in a springtime-fresh cartoon of the archetypal grumpy old man, Ms. Midler works hard for her ovations, while making you feel that the pleasure is all hers.

...'Indecent' arrives on Broadway as one of the season's most respectable - and respectful - plays. Yes, that notorious scene that never made it to the main stem, even in the licentious Jazz Age, is fully rendered here...The dominant note of this erotic encounter isn't prurience, though; it's piety...What's more, 'Indecent' delivers not only a history of styles of theater and their political contexts but also a portrait of Asch...as he progresses from youthful enthusiasm to embittered old age. This is achieved by a tight ensemble of chameleon performers...glowing with devotion to their craft and its possibilities.

Repetition is an art of infinite variety as it's practiced by Andy Karl in 'Groundhog Day,' the dizzyingly witty new musical from the creators of 'Matilda.' Portraying a man doomed to relive a single day over and over and over again in a small town that becomes his custom-fitted purgatory, Mr. Karl is so outrageously inventive in ringing changes on the same old, same old, that you can't wait for another (almost identical) day to dawn.

Some works of art cry out for large canvases. Though it is sparing in its use of scenery or anything approaching spectacle, J. T. Rogers's 'Oslo,' an against-the-odds story of international peacemaking, is undeniably a big play, as expansive and ambitious as any in recent Broadway history. So it is particularly gratifying to announce that it has been allowed to stretch to its full height in the thrilling production that opened on Thursday night, directed with a master's hand by Bartlett Sher.

So, though my eyes occasionally glazed seeing 'War Paint' for the second time, I wouldn't have missed it, if only to hear its leading ladies' climactic ballads. Ms. LuPone has an ardently sung tribute to the preservative powers of narcissism, during which a gallery of Rubinstein's portraits by famous artists materializes behind her. And in the show's most exquisite number, Arden takes inventory of an existence lived in a pale shade of rose. The song is called 'Pink,' and as Ms. Ebersole delivers that seemingly cheery word, it is weighted with triumph, regret, defiance and anger, all struggling for ascendancy. It's a reminder of how a single ballad, and a lone interpreter, can capture the full, ambivalent spectrum of a lifetime.

It's high time we were reminded again of what a great physical comedian Kevin Kline is. Playing an aging matinee idol in the bouncy new revival of Noël Coward's 'Present Laughter,' Mr. Kline blissfully plies the witty athleticism and derring-do that won him two Tony Awards ('On the 20th Century,' 'The Pirates of Penzance') and an Oscar ('A Fish Called Wanda') in his youth. In the uneven but enjoyable production, which opened on Wednesday at the St. James Theater, directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, Mr. Kline makes his entrance in a state of soigné disarray. His character, the stage star Garry Essendine, is suffering yet another stormy morning-after.

For a cunning little bauble of an entertainment, the 2001 French film 'Amélie' inspired uncommonly extreme responses. People were usually head over heels about it ('It's so cute!') or violently allergic to it ('But it's so cute!'). The mild-mannered musical adaptation of this movie, which opened on Monday night at the Walter Kerr Theater, is unlikely to stir similar passions. Featuring a book by Craig Lucas and music by Daniel Messé, with the lush-voiced Philippa Soo in the title role, it is pleasant to look at, easy to listen to and oddly recessive. It neither offends nor enthralls. Say what you will about its cinematic prototype, directed with an auteur's flourish by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, it had style to spare, not to mention the courage of its worldly but whimsical convictions. In other words, 'Amélie' the movie was très, très Français. 'Amélie' the musical seems to have no nationality, or sensibility, to call its own.

I propose putting your rational mind into sleep mode, the better to savor tickling images of order-inverting bizarreness, straight out of Dada, in which suddenly nothing is in its customary place or being used for its customary purpose. There's a wild, redeeming poetry in such anarchy. My audience, for the record, roared as loudly as the crowds at any wrestling match.

Though it is steeped in social combustibility, 'Sweat' often feels too conscientiously assembled, a point-counterpoint presentation in which every disaffected voice is allowed its how-I-got-this-way monologue. And this thoughtful, careful play only seldom acquires the distance-erasing passion of Ms. Nottage's 'Ruined,' the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner about female casualties of the Congolese civil war...'Sweat' is best at its muddiest, when love and hate, and the urges to strike out and to comfort, teeter in precipitous balance. That's when Ms. Nottage's characters, and the cast members who embody them, emerge in their full tragic humanity.

It's not as if such stories don't still have the power to stir suspense and tears. But this eventful, sung-through production out of London, directed by Laurence Connor, feels about as affecting as a historical diorama, albeit a lavishly appointed one. (The lurid postcard set is by Totie Driver and Matt Kinley, from a 'design concept' by Adrian Vaux.) This despite the hard and dedicated work of its earnest cast, which includes a slithery Jon Jon Briones as an enterprising Vietnamese pimp, a dewy Eva Noblezada as a heroic country girl and Alistair Brammer as the American soldier who loves and leaves her. Though it sets off inevitable topical echoes with its tableau of asylum-seeking refugees, the show still mostly comes across as singing scenery.

Try, if you must, to resist the gale of good will that blows out of 'Come From Away,' the big bearhug of a musical that opened on Sunday night at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. But even the most stalwart cynics may have trouble staying dry-eyed during this portrait of heroic hospitality under extraordinary pressure...this Canadian-born production, written by Irene Sankoff and David Hein and directed by Christopher Ashley, is as honorable in its intentions as it is forthright in its sentimentality. And it may provide just the catharsis you need in an American moment notorious for dishonorable and divisive behavior...the show - based on interviews with the people who inspired it - covers a vast expanse of sensitive material with a respect for its complexity. It understands that much of what it portrays is guaranteed to stir fraught memories among many of us. And it mostly refrains from overegging what could have been a treacly, tear-salted pudding. Instead, it sustains an air of improvisational urgency, which feels appropriate to a show about making do in crisis, and it doesn't linger on obvious moments of heartbreak and humanity.

That shattering sound you hear coming from the Belasco Theater is the celebrated director Sam Gold taking a hammer to everything that's delicate in 'The Glass Menagerie.' The jagged, glistening shards of Tennessee Williams's breakthrough play are available for inspection in the revival that opened on Thursday night. Don't expect these pieces to be reassembled into an illuminating portrait of the anguished Wingfield family from this 1944 drama. Mr. Gold and his cast, led by an intrepid Sally Field, have dismantled a venerable classic, but darned if they can figure out how to put it back together again...On occasion, Mr. Gold's interpretation takes on the vicious aspect of a nightmare in which you see your past at its distorted worst. But even that vision is not sustained. When a plot turn plunges the theater into abject darkness late in the play, it only gives literal life to what you've been feeling all along.

The four central performers chart their characters' fraying ties with a graceful, instinctive grasp of the hierarchies and role playing that occur within such relationships. They're at their most poignantly expressive when they're dancing together (in dwindling numbers) at one another's weddings. (Sam Pinkleton deserves credit as the choreographer.) Mark Wendland's multilevel set nicely evokes the sense of a city of myriad dwelling places, to which people retreat in insulated isolation, whether as pairs or singletons. And John Behlmann and Luke Smith drolly fulfill their purposes as the various men in the central characters' lives. But the play's structure, built around an and-then-there-was-one countdown of weddings, can start to feel like a sustained musical vamp with only slight variations. Though Mr. Glick is very good and, I think, rather brave in following Jordan's path from adorable to irritating, his company does start to pall after a certain point.

He is a thorny soul, a man neither happy nor particularly kind, and not someone you'd be likely to befriend. But when the 19th-century French painter Georges Seurat, reincarnated in the solitary flesh by a laser-focused Jake Gyllenhaal, demands that you look at the world as he does, it's impossible not to fall in love. Or something deeper than love - closer to religious gratitude - is the sentiment you may experience in the finale that concludes the first act of the marvelous revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's 'Sunday in the Park With George,' which opened on Thursday night at the newly restored Hudson Theater.

The scenery may have shrunk, but that face - oh, that face - looms larger than ever. So does the ego that animates it, both indomitable and irreparably broken. 'With one look,' indeed, to borrow a song lyric that describes such unsettling presence. That outrageous, over-the-top, desperate old lady shedding sanity on the stage of the Palace Theater still has the poetry in her gaze to break every heart.

Conversation sings and swings, bends and bounces and hits heaven smack in the clouds, in the glorious new production of August Wilson's 'Jitney,' which opened on Thursday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. In Ruben Santiago-Hudson's vital revival of a 1982 play only now making its Broadway debut, words take on the shimmer of molten-gold notes from the trumpets of Louis and Miles.

Ms. Blanchett does bring colorful shades of excitement to being bored. Her Anna plays a great game of dramatically uninterested chess, and her response to a rambling speech by Mikhail at the lunch table is priceless. (Hint: it involves the removal of an undergarment.) That comes just before that rip-roaring, scenery-destroying bacchanal I wrote about earlier. It's one of the most memorable party sequences I've ever seen, a volcanic channeling of a displaced class's fear, anger and disgust. These people want to blow up their world, and in a way they do, most entertainingly. That leaves us with another full hour of tediously sorting through the ashes.

Every now and then, as yet another peppy cliché prances across the stage of the Circle in the Square Theater, you may pause to ponder the pioneering achievement of 'In Transit,' the singing portrait of New York City subway travelers, which opened on Sunday night. After all, what you're listening to often gleams with the blended polyphony of a good-size band. Yet not an instrument has been used in the performance of this a cappella musical, staged by the Tony-winning director and choreographer Kathleen Marshall. Everything we hear, as we are told in a (sung) preshow announcement, is created by human voices. Acknowledging this is rather like admiring the ingenuity that must have gone into a sentimental picture of a rainbow, perhaps with the Care Bears in the foreground, rendered entirely in bottle caps. It's definitely something to have achieved such visual specificity out of bottle caps. But it's still a picture of a rainbow with Care Bears.

I could dwell on those performances endlessly. Unfortunately, my immediate duty compels me to consider these figures of natural grandeur in the state of unnatural captivity into which they have been penned in 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses,' which opened on Sunday night at the Booth Theater, a production during which you pray for their deliverance.

No doubt Walter would inform me that you, my impatient audience, have already stopped reading by now. But though 'The Front Page' is all about the adrenaline rush that turns journalists into deadline junkies, it's hard to work up the proper urgency about Jack O'Brien's production. So to finish the thought I started before I so rudely interrupted myself, the latest edition of 'The Front Page' is ... diverting. Pretty darn good. At moments, very funny indeed.

Though it stars that fine actress Diane Lane, is staged by the rising British director Simon Godwin and features a new adaptation by the seriously gifted young dramatist Stephen Karam ('The Humans'), this frenzied, flashy take on one family's mortgage crisis may be the most clueless interpretation of Chekhov I have seen. And, yes, that includes high school, college and community theater productions. So, as one of Chekhov's characters, who know from dashed hopes, might put it, 'What happened?' But no matter the angles from which you examine Mr. Godwin's production - and I've tried so many I have a neck cramp - it's impossible to discern a coherent point of view.

Yet one of the points of this wondrously stealthy play, largely set in London and directed with crystalline precision by Mark Brokaw, is that life is made up of infinite variables that keep combining to unpredictable ends. That's where Heisenberg, the founder of the uncertainty principle, comes into the picture, but don't worry. His name is never invoked directly; this is not an obviously highbrow play.

They also manage to paint an exquisitely painful portrait of a dysfunctional twilight bromance, in which the (sort of) patrician George dominates the (marginally) shlubbier Gil. The details that define their characters, too, are precise and impeccably off-center, a perfect match for their stained, saggy corduroys and fungoid gray hair.

But the awe-struck descriptions of nature in ascendance are always secondary to what we're feeling, physically as well as emotionally. And 'The Encounter,' which has only sharpened its production values since I saw it in London in February, summons those sensations not just through sound but also through lighting (by Paul Anderson) and projections (by Will Duke) that transform a sterile stage into a phosphorescent jungle where shadow trumps substance or an American suburb illuminated by a bonfire of discarded worldly goods.

Once you can see past the, uh, smoke screen, there's evidence of real emotional embers smoldering among this talented ensemble, who are just waiting for the moment to turn into human flamethrowers...Fortunately, Ms. Best, Ms. Reilly and Mr. Owen...are skilled and charismatic enough to fulfill these requirements without entirely overwhelming the play's more subtle essence...In Mr. Hodge's interpretation, everyone exists in a five-alarm state of tension from the get-go, with equally heightened poses and inflections. Ms. Reilly finds a little-girl petulance in Kate's seeming passivity, while Ms. Best's Anna is worldly to the point of vampishness. Mr. Owen underscores Deeley's beleaguered air of machismo with a self-parodying, lounge lizard swagger. This approach, verging on caricature, makes 'Old Times' more obviously funny than it usually is, and the desperation within the triangle reads larger...Less felicitously, this more-is-more sensibility can also make the script seem self-parodyingly pretentious.