Ben Brantley

Imagine, if you dare, the agonies of the talented people trapped inside the collapsing tomb called “The Addams Family.” Being in this genuinely ghastly musical — which opened Thursday night at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater and stars a shamefully squandered Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth — must feel like going to a Halloween party in a strait-jacket or a suit of armor. Sure, you make a flashy (if obvious) first impression. But then you’re stuck in the darn thing for the rest of the night, and it’s really, really uncomfortable. Why, you can barely move, and a strangled voice inside you keeps gasping, “He-e-e-lp! Get me out of here!”

“Red,” which arrives as fresh, yes, as paint from its recent premiere at the Donmar Warehouse in London, initially registers as a visceral exercise in art appreciation. Fortunately though, it turns out to be more a study in artist appreciation, a portrait of an angry and brilliant mind that asks you to feel the shape and texture of thoughts.

A flourishing member of a precious and nearly extinct species has been sighted on Broadway, looking remarkably vital and sure of itself for a creature so often given up for dead. “Next Fall,” which opened Thursday night at the Helen Hayes Theater, is that genuine rara avis, a smart, sensitive and utterly contemporary New York comedy. The question now is whether theatergoers will recognize that “Next Fall” embodies something they’ve been sorely missing, perhaps without knowing it, for years.

For the first few ecstatic moments of “A Behanding in Spokane,” which opened Thursday night at the Schoenfeld Theater, it looks as if the dangerous promises of Mr. Walken’s dead gaze will be fulfilled many fold. That they are not is no fault of Mr. Walken’s. His use of his signature arsenal of stylistic oddities has seldom been more enthralling. But the disappointment that shadows the face of Mr. Walken’s character — a one-handed man who has been searching for years for his severed appendage — comes to seem like a prophecy of the audience’s. The rest of the erratically enjoyable “Behanding” — directed by John Crowley and featuring Sam Rockwell, Anthony Mackie and Zoe Kazan — never matches the strange genius of its star.

Mr. Nunn’s “Little Night Music,” the first full Broadway revival of the show, may well be a hit too, though not because of any artistic finesse. It has what is a producer’s favorite form of insurance these days: stars known to the public from movies, television and tabloids, of whom people can later say things like “She’s even more beautiful in person” (as they surely will of the lustrous Ms. Zeta-Jones) or “She’s amazing for her age” (in reference to the 84-year-old Ms. Lansbury).

Though the play made pointed use of sexual and ethnic words that are still seldom heard in polite discussion, these elicited far more giggles than gasps. I couldn’t help longing for the days when a new play by Mr. Mamet so knocked the breath out of you that you wouldn’t think of standing up afterward until you were sure your legs would support you.

There should be dancing in the streets. When you leave the Eugene O’Neill Theater after a performance of “Fela!,” it comes as a shock that the people on the sidewalks are merely walking. Why aren’t they gyrating, swaying, vibrating, in thrall to the force field that you have been living in so ecstatically for the past couple of hours?

No show on Broadway right now makes as direct a grab for the heart — or wrings it as thoroughly — as “Next to Normal” does. This brave, breathtaking musical, which opened Wednesday night at the Booth Theater, focuses squarely on the pain that cripples the members of a suburban family, and never for a minute does it let you escape the anguish at the core of their lives. “Next to Normal” does not, in other words, qualify as your standard feel-good musical. Instead this portrait of a manic-depressive mother and the people she loves and damages is something much more: a feel-everything musical, which asks you, with operatic force, to discover the liberation in knowing where it hurts.

You’ll be happy to hear that the kids are all right. Quite a bit more than all right. Having moved indoors to Broadway from the Delacorte Theater in Central Park — where last summer they lighted up the night skies, howled at the moon and had ticket seekers lining up at dawn — the young cast members of Diane Paulus’s thrilling revival of “Hair” show no signs of becoming domesticated. On the contrary, they’re tearing down the house in the production that opened on Tuesday night at the Al Hirschfeld Theater. And any theatergoer with a pulse will find it hard to resist their invitation to join the demolition crew. This emotionally rich revival of “The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” from 1967 delivers what Broadway otherwise hasn’t felt this season: the intense, unadulterated joy and anguish of that bi-polar state called youth.

Examined coldly, this 90-minute play about two couples who meet to discuss a playground fight between two of their children isn’t much more than a sustained Punch and Judy show, dressed to impress with sociological accessories. But there’s a reason that Punch and Judy’s avatars have fascinated audiences for so many centuries in cultural forms low (“The Honeymooners” of 1950s television) and high (Edward Albee’s 1962 drama “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”). “God of Carnage,” which is poised somewhere in between, definitely delivers the cathartic release of watching other people’s marriages go boom. A study in the tension between civilized surface and savage instinct, this play (which recently won the Olivier Award in London for best new comedy) is itself a satisfyingly primitive entertainment with an intellectual veneer.

In the production that opened Thursday night at the Palace Theater, which lovingly replicates Mr. Robbins’s balletic choreography, what prevails is a tenderhearted awareness of the naked vulnerability of being young and trapped in an urban jungle. Half a century ago middle-class adult theatergoers were shocked and appalled by the brutality of the ethnic gang warfare of “West Side Story.” (The first sentence of Brooks Atkinson’s review in The New York Times said that “the material is horrifying.”) This time audiences — the grown-ups, anyway — are more likely to respond with feelings of parental protectiveness.

Much of the power of “Billy Elliot” as an honest tear-jerker lies in its ability to give equal weight to the sweet dreams of terpsichorean flight and the sourness of a dream-denying reality, with the two elements locked in a vital and unending dialogue. This isn’t wholesale escapism à la Busby Berkeley or “Mamma Mia!” In tone, it’s closer to the song-dotted working-class films of Terence Davies or, on television, Dennis Potter’s “Pennies From Heaven.”

Above all, though, what impresses about this “South Pacific” is how deeply, fallibly and poignantly human every character seems. Nearly 60 years ago Brooks Atkinson, writing in The New York Times, described the show as “a tenderly beautiful idyll of genuine people inexplicably tossed together in a strange corner of the world.” I think a lot of us had forgotten that’s what “South Pacific” is really about. In making the past feel unconditionally present, this production restores a glorious gallery of genuine people who were only waiting to be resurrected.

Mary Poppins” as a study of an unhappy family in need of healing comes more from the Disney movie, which starred Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, than from the Travers stories. But the script by Julian Fellowes (of the film “Gosford Park”) and the new songs suffer from squeezing the complexities of domestic dysfunction into the rhythms of a singalong children’s wonderland. Mr. Jenkins and Ms. Luker are excellent as the troubled spouses and give the show a much-needed emotional center.

In a year in which one pop-songbook show after another has thudded and died, 'Jersey Boys,' a shrink-wrapped musical biography of the pop group the Four Seasons, passes as silver instead of as the chrome-plated jukebox that it is. Unlike the recent Broadway flops, this show has the advantage of featuring singers that actually sound like the singers they are portraying and a technology-enhanced band that approximates the original sound of their music. Scriptwriters Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice provide some likably sassy dialogue as they chart the evolution of their main characters from street kids in the urban wastelands of New Jersey to pop gods enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But while 'Jersey Boys' is based on fact, it rarely leaps over the cliches of a regulation grit-to-glamour blueprint.

As a parable of fascism and freedom, 'Wicked' so overplays its hand that it seriously dilutes its power to disturb. Much of the impact of Baum's original novel, like that of so many fantasy stories, came from haunting, symbolic figures that readers interpret on their own terms. Though there have been numerous literary analyses of Baum's 'Oz' as a coded case for populism and agrarian reform, the book never feels like a tract. 'Wicked,' on the other hand, wears its political heart as if it were a slogan button. This is true not only of the dialogue, but also of Mr. Schwartz's generically impassioned songs, which have that to-the-barricades sound of the omninously underscored anthems of 'Les Misérables.' Though the talk is festooned with cutely mangled word ('swankified,' 'thrillified,' 'gratitution') that bring to mind the language of Smurfs, there's a rock-hard lecture beneath the preciousness. Mr. Mantello reconciles the gap between form and content only in Ms. Chenoweth's performance.

For if you take apart 'Mamma, Mia!' ingredient by ingredient, you can only wince. It has a sitcom script about generations in conflict that might as well be called 'My Three Dads.' The matching acting, perky and italicized, often brings to mind the house style of 'The Brady Bunch.' The choreography is mostly stuff you could try, accident-free, in your own backyard. And the score consists entirely of songs made famous in the disco era by the Swedish pop group Abba, music that people seldom admit to having danced to, much less sung in their showers. Yet these elements have been combined, with alchemical magic, into the theatrical equivalent of comfort food.

Where are you, really, anyway? The location is supposed to be a theater on 42d Street, a thoroughfare that has never been thought of as a gateway to Eden. Yet somehow you have fallen into what appears to be a primal paradise. And even the exquisitely restored New Amsterdam Theater, a former Ziegfeld palace, disappears before the spectacle within it. Such is the transporting magic wrought by the opening 10 minutes of 'The Lion King.' Unfortunately, it turns out that these glorious opening moments are only the honeymoon part of this fable of the coming of age of a lion with a father fixation. Throughout the show's 2 hours and 40 minutes (as against the 75-minute movie), there will be plenty of instances of breathtaking beauty and scenic ingenuity, realized through techniques ranging from shadow puppetry to Bunraku. Certainly, nowhere before on Broadway has a stampede of wildebeests or a herd of veldt-skimming gazelles been rendered with such eye-popping conviction. But in many ways, Ms. Taymor's vision, which is largely rooted in ritual forms of theater from Asia and Africa, collides with that of Disney, where visual spectacle is harnessed in the service of heartwarming storytelling. There will inevitably be longueurs for both adults and children who attend this show. But it offers a refreshing and more sophisticated alternative to the standard panoply of special effects that dominate most tourist-oriented shows today. Seen purely as a visual tapestry, there is simply nothing else like it.

In the pulse-racing revival of the musical 'Chicago,' which opened last night at the Richard Rodgers Theater, all the world's a con game, and show business is the biggest scam of all. It makes a difference, though, when the hustle involves a cast of top-flight artists perfectly mated to their parts and some of the sexiest, most sophisticated dancing seen on Broadway in years. By the time the priceless Bebe Neuwirth, playing a hoofer turned murderer, greets the audience at the beginning of the second act with the salutation 'Hello, suckers!,' it's a label we're all too happy to accept. The America portrayed onstage may be a vision of hell, but the way it's being presented flies us right into musical heaven.