Charles Isherwood

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.

“Oh, Mary!” is directed by Sam Pinkleton at a breakneck speed that both allows room for the best jokes to harvest their share of laughter while never letting even the lesser gags land with a thud. The entire cast excels at physical comedy, particularly Escola, whose Mary, after seducing her acting teacher on top of Abraham’s desk, must find a dignified way to descend from it, with ingeniously amusing results. I have a pretty low threshold for the coarseness of much low comedy, and plenty of the humor in “Oh, Mary!” is so low it qualifies as subterranean. But Escola’s brilliantly loopy writing and knockabout performance—which also recalls the great gifts of Carol Burnett—won me over.

It may take a while for audiences to tune in to the play’s rollicking rhythms. Mr. Williams’s language is a dense, clipped, sometimes incantatory vernacular that can be hard to parse, particularly when flung at dizzying velocity in the early going. Trying to appreciate the language’s richness and lyricism is challenging enough; teasing out the thread of the narrative from the onrushing tides of words seems at times nearly impossible, especially as the chronology jumps back and forth. While one can appreciate the desire to bring heated life to Mr. Williams’s vigorous language, which almost seems to prefigure rap, Mr. Leon would have been wise to allow a few pauses for everyone to breathe.

Among Ms. Frecknall’s innovations is an emphasis on dance, with Julia Cheng’s choreography making inventive use of the stage space as the club performers romp, stomp and shimmy around Mr. Redmayne, engaging in ribald movement that at one point includes such unlikely sexually tinged props as a whisk and a toilet plunger. Their thickly applied makeup, skimpy costumes—a green macramé bikini?—and multicolored hair are suggestive more of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” than a seedy European club of the period, but they undoubtedly add to the show’s arresting visual allure.

“Suffs” largely succeeds in showcasing the accomplishments of its creators and performers, particularly with regard to Ms. Taub’s rich and often rousing score and the terrific cast, all radiating vivid engagement in the history unfolding before us. Nevertheless, at times the musical comes across as a bright but exhaustingly busy historical pageant, with a dizzyingly broad cast of characters and manifold triumphs and setbacks—mostly the latter, in truth—to unfold.

The musical’s cast shouldn’t leave anyone pining for starshine, so assured are its members in embodying the characters not as familiar pop-culture figures but as the raw, wounded, volatile and sensitive people they are. Teller of the tale, if not leader of the pack, is Brody Grant’s Ponyboy, the youngest of three brothers whose parents died in a car accident, with the oldest, Darrel, played by a touchingly conflicted Brent Comer, unhappily taking charge, while the middle boy, Sodapop (a buoyant, sometimes shirtless Jason Schmidt, winning the beefcake prize), tries to soothe the tension between his siblings.

Written by the performers with Edward af Sillén, who also directs, “Stalker” returns to that fellow in the audience with a copy of his chosen image inside a sealed envelope for its finale. And, remarkably, after the big reveal, the pair proceed—as Penn & Teller have sometimes done—to demonstrate precisely how they had (mentally) coerced their subject into choosing the image he did, pulling back the proverbial curtain in a manner that all but breaks the unofficial Code of the Magicians, I would assume. But given the many wonder-inducing moments that have come before, I doubt they need worry about having their union cards confiscated.

The term “rock opera” is amorphous, but perhaps no other show comes as near to defining it precisely as this one. Mr. Townshend’s songs are authentic rock dating from the heyday of one of the genre’s revered bands, not the watery pap that often passes for rock in contemporary musicals. And even the most outlandish plots of Verdi are no more sensationally dramatic than the story of “Tommy,” with its beleaguered but triumphant hero, its rogue’s gallery of foes and its frankly bizarre story.

Still, the largely pasteurized manner in which the musical depicts the often-sordid lives of circus folk of the period lends “Water for Elephants” an anodyne weightlessness, at least until the denouement. I’m not sure if a more faithful adaptation of the book would make for a better musical—although John Kander and Fred Ebb, in their heyday, might have taken a good crack at it—but it certainly would have made for a more provocative and adventurous one.

Purists may question Ms. Herzog’s fresh interpretation of Thomas, who in this version is less ornery and scorching in his denunciation of those who oppose him; even in his celebrated speech excoriating the disapproving townsfolk (audience members are recruited to represent them), Mr. Strong, taking his cue from Ms. Herzog, seems befuddled by his rejection, and afterward his designation as an “enemy of the people.” Thomas is notably less contemptuous, and less an advocate for a rigid meritocracy, than Ibsen’s original.

Nevertheless, the comparative simplicity of the teary tale at its center—love at first sight strikes boy and girl like lightning, they are separated for a decade, and then the couple reunites for a striding-into-the-sunset happy ending (before age and illness impinge)—left me dry-eyed and occasionally tempted to check my watch. This may put me in the minority, given the story’s proven success in other mediums, but for all its sweetness and polish “The Notebook” never rises to truly transporting heights—except when Ms. Plunkett, as the heroine, Allie, in her later years, and Dorian Harewood, as her husband, Noah, are the focus.

Admirers of the movie and of Ms. Dion are obviously the target audience; to get the most out of the show it’s best to be a fanatical double-partisan. I admired the plush cinematic richness of the movie, while deploring its length (the Titanic sank more quickly), and as someone unfamiliar with much of Ms. Dion’s extensive songbook, I was more taken with the sheer loopiness of the show than the blandly “adult contemporary” music. But whether blasting out pop balladry or silly shtick, the engaging cast beams joy at the audience, and receives it in turn, throughout.

Mr. Page is a consummately skilled classical actor—one of the country’s finest, although much of his Shakespearean work has been seen outside New York—and the show, which whips by at 80 minutes, is virtually all highlights. And the speeches and dialogues, chosen with care, never blur together into a generalized portrait of malignity at work in the human heart and mind. Each character, from the quasi-comic Malvolio in “Twelfth Night” to the nihilistic Iago of “Othello,” whom Mr. Page analyzes, convincingly, as a by-the-book psychopath, comes alive before us with different shades of menace, mendacity, vengefulness or spite.