Charles Isherwood — Theater Critic

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.

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.

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.

“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.