Charles Isherwood — Theater Critic

Cleverly conceived—and often sharply funny—“Trophy Boys” nevertheless often feels like a debate itself, with Ms. Mattana expounding upon various ideas about the current discourse around gender and the reverberations of the MeToo movement, sometimes at eye-glazing length.

But ‘Lowcountry’ springs a few too many shock, or shock-adjacent, twists to be believable, among them the revelation that Tally and David knew each other as kids (he doesn’t recognize her), and Tally has sought him out for a confusion of reasons, including vestigial gratefulness at his kindness when her mother died when she was young, and she was ‘fat.’ The violent conclusion, in particular, seems more sensationalistic than persuasive. But ‘Lowcountry’ is at least novel in departing from the toxic-male-drama playbook: Here it is Tally, much more than the registered sex offender David, whose behavior proves most destructive.

Ms. Smart never strikes a false or histrionic note, even when she steps from Izzy into the half-dozen or so other characters, all crisply delineated. It’s a terrific performance, but one that nevertheless remains constrained by the material’s limitations.

The production is technically impressive in all respects, but when the sinister Dr. Brenner (Alex Breaux)—Matthew Modine in the series—made his ominous appearance at the close of the first act, I fantasized about pulling him aside to ask for a sedative. Although in truth the show itself was already soporific enough.

Although its subject is inherently sad, Floyd Collins depicts the title character and his family with a tenderness that allows the musical to transcend any abiding sense of despair. Floyd’s final solo, ‘How Glory Goes’—one of Mr. Guettel’s most rhapsodic and best-known songs—is performed with a transfixing ardency by Mr. Jordan, and leaves you with a sense of spiritual uplift that, in contrast to similar climaxes in many musicals, feels not manufactured to manipulate the emotions, but absolutely authentic... A seasoned actor giving his finest performance to date, Mr. Jordan provides the musical with an affecting emotional center... This one-of-a-kind musical leaves you not with the chill of the cave but with a warmth that glows.

For sheer fertility of imagination, there may be no dramatist writing today to match Caryl Churchill. Across a distinguished career spanning more than five decades, the British playwright has written about a vast array of subjects, from the evils of colonialism to the global financial system to the morality of human cloning. And with each work she seems, astonishingly, to find a fresh form, a newly minted theatrical vessel for her ideas. The four short plays currently on view at the Public Theater reveal the writer at her most economical—her works have become more concentrated in recent years—and often at her most provocatively enigmatic. These are plays that startle with their strangeness, but also leave you with much to ponder.

But as they extend into the second act, the busy convolutions of the plot—will Ivy, Karen or Chloe ultimately win the role of Marilyn, and does one really care?—become repetitive and mildly preposterous, even for the purportedly madcap world of showbiz.

The headliners are wonderfully showcased. Ms. Peters has been an exemplary interpreter of Sondheim’s work for decades, having starred in the original stagings of Sunday in the Park With George and Into the Woods. While her voice has lost some of its rich timbre, her rendition of Send in the Clowns is so deeply infused with soul-searching that any vocal imperfections are quickly forgotten as Ms. Peters’s evocation of a love that might have been—could have, should have—burrows into your heart. Equally extraordinary is her performance of another exquisite song of ill-fated yearning, Losing My Mind.

But for those who saw the movie—I assume a considerable portion of the audience—the theatrical version offers little that’s fresh, or even more fully fleshed out... The production never breaks free of the source material to become a captivating or original theatrical event.

Individually, all give sharp-elbowed, effective performances even if, under the direction of Patrick Marber, this staging never quite develops the head of steam that could keep the tension rising throughout the play’s brisk running time of less than two hours, including intermission.

Unfortunately Mr. Washington, here and throughout, fails to transmit the powerful majesty of Shakespeare’s writing for this character, “the Othello music,” as it has been called. Mr. Leon’s staging is roughly contemporary—taking place in “the near future,” we are obscurely notified—so one may infer that Mr. Washington and his colleagues have been encouraged to make the verse accessible to today’s audiences.

But the limited run has been extended more than once, and the surprise sensation of the Broadway season has been the unabashedly silly ‘Oh, Mary!,’ which also lampoons history, albeit more cavalierly. Audiences are always receptive to flights into jubilant escapism—perhaps particularly now—and this plucky musical provides it in generous doses.

Although it runs an hour and a quarter, the first act of ‘Purpose’ flies by, aloft on Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins’s sharp wit and astute delineation of the barely hidden conflicts among the characters, even if some of the revelations that pop up like unwanted birthday gifts are predictable.

The cast is deluxe for an off-Broadway production. Billy Crudup portrays Pastor Manders, the estranged friend of Mrs. Alving who as the play begins has come to make a rare visit to her estate, bringing documents that need to be signed before the opening of the orphanage Mrs. Alving is funding. Mr. Crudup’s handsome magnetism and the casual warmth he brings to the role are distinct assets, making Mrs. Alving’s fondness for him credible—the fondness might once have led to something more—despite his frequent retreats into pious sternness or shock when he takes stock of her radical reading tastes.

There is little the director, Whitney White, can do to tame the play’s unruly structure, although the dramatic focus grows sharper in the second act, when the agreeably cranky talk begins to turn contentious and more personal. A climactic passage finds the narrator-playwright trying to come to terms with her decisions and those of her mother—whether a fulfilling family life can ever be wholly consistent with a woman’s true autonomy as society is structured, then and now.

This impressive feat, performed during a climactic song, “In the Leaves,” marks a highlight of a show that is sparsely populated by such energizing moments. Directed by Tina Landau, who also wrote the book and lyrics—the latter in collaboration with Kate Diaz, who composed the music—“Redwood” is a technologically sophisticated but earnest and formulaic slab of musical uplift, a heroine’s journey from despair to emotional regeneration.

Crucial to the play’s appeal is the way the relationships between the characters, amiable but distant at first, evolve under the astutely detailed direction of Knud Adams. This is particularly impressive because all the actors played their roles in the play’s off-Broadway debut, and yet the performances still have the bloom of freshness and discovery, in exploring both the characters’ sympathies and antipathies.

Any production of “Gypsy” rises or falls on its Rose, and Ms. McDonald’s lifts this staging to majestic (sorry) heights. Days later I was reliving her “Rose’s Turn” in my mind with a mixture of elation, wonder and sorrow, the last arising from compassion for the devastating revelation of a woman’s misbegotten life. Who, after all, does not have dreams that withered, ambitions left unfulfilled? Who has not at some point felt that we walk through life as ghosts, just wanting “to be noticed,” as Rose wanly says in the musical’s moving final scene?

As the plot grows more ludicrous and convoluted, the fun peters out like a slowly deflating helium balloon sagging to earth. And if the show intended to make any pertinent commentary on the uselessness or dangerousness of chasing after one’s vanishing youth, it is swallowed up in the glossy production. Ms. Hilty and Ms. Simard are sufficiently seductive performers to hold our attention and affection through their witty work. Their final duet, an anthem of ax-burying solidarity, “Alive Forever,” brings the show to a musically satisfying climax. But while the heroines may achieve eternal life, the musical itself is much closer to forgettable than immortal.

The title, of course, refers to Henry David Thoreau’s paean to the beauties of the natural world; in the context of the play, it is also the name of the Mars habitat that Stella designed before her career at NASA was derailed. Ultimately Ms. Berryman’s drama is more successful as an exploration of knotty family conflicts than it is persuasive as a dystopian view of mankind’s in-the-offing predicament. Her dire vision is occasionally undermined by detail: If the world were really in such a parlous state, one can’t but wonder how Stella and Bryan have managed to collect such a well-stocked wine cellar.

As the lovers hurtle toward their deaths, the already-speedy production gains more steam. (Romeo’s fatal encounter with Paris goes by the wayside.) As a result the ending feels abrupt—wait, the party’s over, and everyone’s dead? This may in part be why Mr. Gold doesn’t succeed in making us feel the awe and horror, the sense of waste, we should at the mischances that result in the deaths of the lovers. But at least it lets Mr. Connor and Ms. Zegler out at a reasonable hour to greet the hundreds of fans waiting for them after the performance. While this isn’t the most subtle or emotionally resonant “Romeo and Juliet,” it is unquestionably bringing enthusiastic younger audiences to the theater, in itself a worthy and impressive achievement.

Mr. Leon’s “Our Town” is polished and marked by moments of humor and melancholy, but they do not cohere into a powerfully affecting production. For theatergoers who saw the director David Cromer’s hyper-intimate 2009 off-Broadway production—which ran for almost 650 performances, the longest run in the play’s history—its indelible impact (it ranks as one of the best theatrical productions I have seen) will inevitably lead to disappointing comparisons, unfairly or not.

“McNeal,” directed by Lincoln Center Theater’s newly named executive producer Bartlett Sher, is itself a confused and discursive if thought-provoking drama that often seems a grab bag of ideas Mr. Akhtar delves into without finding much depth.

Naturally, in a production that sprints through so many songs and shows in a mere 90 minutes, some numbers provide fewer laughs per bar of music. A finale spoofing “Suffs” doesn’t quite stick the show’s landing. A framing device using “Back to the Future” is a bit of a nice try. Mr. Alessandrini has to work with the material he is given. It’s not a coincidence that among the few weak spots are sendups of some flimsy or forgettable shows of recent seasons, like “Six” or “Water for Elephants.” The paradox of the “Forbidden Broadway” franchise is that the bigger and better shows make for bigger and better targets. In any case, it is an unalloyed pleasure to have Mr. Alessandrini back in form, committing merry musical larceny with flagrant and funny abandon.

The estimable Mr. O’Brien, who won a well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Tony Award just this year, calibrates the fluctuations in the women’s relationship with subtlety and grace, allowing these two superb actors to navigate the changes in the play’s tone and rhythm at their own pace, on a handsome set by Bob Crowley that hints at both possibility—those rich blue skies—and perhaps vulnerability.