Brendan Lemon

Nolan transcends this one-dimensionality with a strong portrait, musically cresting with “Gethsemane,” whose anthem-rock style jars somewhat with the mood of a moment that the Gospels describe as “overwhelmed with sorrow”. But if the aim of Lloyd Webber and Rice was literalism, the show’s plot – an account of Jesus’s final days – would be an old-fashioned Passion Play rather than something that at its Broadway premiere in 1971 could still seem groovy.

Nixon has given numerous first-rate performances in contemporary fare – at this same theatre, she etched a fine portrait of motherly grief in Rabbit Hole. For Wit, her voice is not ideally tuned: neither sly enough to land all the jokes nor deep-welled enough to convey the fear of death.

Beane’s book is the standout creative element, allowing the cast, especially a big-mama Greek chorus figure called Hetaira, given good growl by Liz Mikel, to deliver laughs you don’t hate yourself for the next morning. Unfortunately, Beane’s book also tends to lose the basic plot thread, which unravels from helping the team win a game to a fairly generic message of uplift. Musically, the show keeps an audience percolating – vanilla rap, mild funk and power balladry are the presiding genres – but the audio design sounds tinny.

For the first half-hour, the parallels are beautifully balanced. If Venus in Fur had been a one-act, I would have rushed to assign it five stars. In saying this, I realise that I am adhering to the standard evaluation of Ives: adept at miniatures. But that judgment is no more disparaging than to say that Alice Munro excels at short stories. Once Ives introduces subplots from Vanda and Thomas's offstage lives - has Thomas's fiancée dispatched Vanda to the audition to test his fidelity? - the narrative begins to sag. The tense, touching performance of Dancy as an uptight intellectual and Arianda's lushly comic turn as the high-energy seductress do not quite compensate for the overextended central conceit.

Move over, Wicked, there’s a new Halloween musical in town, and, unlike its predecessor, it is safe not just for 13-year-old girls but for 13-year-old boys. I am talking, of course, about The Addams Family, the snap-happy tribe whose latest, musical iteration has popped into fitful life at the Lunt-Fontanne. Amply supplied with sometimes clever, sometimes groaning vaudevillian one-liners by book writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, whose last hit was Jersey Boys, and given resourceful songs by Andrew Lippa, composer of the gloriously decadent off-Broadway show The Wild Party, The Addams Family lends further life to a clan in love with death.