Charles Isherwood — Theater Critic

Under the wire-taut direction of Louise Lowe, the confrontation that follows rises in emotional temperature with disorienting speed. Máire refuses to believe what Mel tells her, scorning the idea of looking at the evidence Mel flourishes on his phone. Ms. Mullen reveals through Máire’s increasing physical agitation and scorching voice her rising anger and outrage at having her private life spied upon. Making bold denials, she justifies herself by saying that at least Martin brought “a little happiness into the loneliness of this house.”

In any case, “Once Upon a One More Time” is a dizzy but enjoyable goof, similar in many ways to “& Juliet.” That show offers an upbeat feminist rewrite of Shakespeare’s tragedy, set to songs (mostly) by Max Martin, who wrote some of Ms. Spears’s big hits. Broadway doom-watchers can now decry the fact that not one, not two, but three musicals on the boards feature songs made famous by Ms. Spears. (The third is “Moulin Rouge!,” although it contains only a smidgen.)

Directed with his customary sensitivity by the veteran Daniel Sullivan (who also helmed, among many distinguished productions, Mr. Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize winner “Proof”), the play does in fact have the languorous but appealing vibe of a sleepy summer, initially uneventful, but with accumulating undercurrents of emotional complexity as Diana (Ms. Linney) and Alice (Ms. Hecht) gradually open up to one another. Not incidentally, Mr. Auburn’s play gives Ms. Linney and Ms. Hecht—two of our finest stage actors—an opportunity to display, without a moment of histrionics, or even conventionally structured drama, their admirably honed gifts.

Ms. Miller’s drama—the title is Latin legalese for “on the face of it”—arrives in New York trailing accolades, including Olivier Awards for best play and best actress, for its London run. High expectations can occasionally lead to disappointment, particularly as “Prima Facie” is opening in the fray of a busy Broadway spring season. Not so here. This urgent drama about the legal and emotional brutalities women often endure when they file charges of rape, particularly against a friend, lover or even husband, strikes home with scalding power.

Beautiful as the staging is, there are some bald bits of dialogue, including some obvious exposition in the opening scene; Father’s portentous observation that “man is the most dangerous animal in this zoo”; and a line that could be interpreted as making leaden parallels to contemporary issues: “This government show us bad behavior has no consequences. People are looting, fighting, vandalizing property and no one is held accountable.” Hmm.

With his boyish good looks, and despite a burly beard,Mr. Groban appears young for the role, looking scarcely older than Anthony ( Jordan Fisher), the sailor who rescued Sweeney when their ship heading to England foundered. More problematically, Mr. Groban has not yet reached deeply enough into the tortured soul of the character, who was separated from his wife and daughter when the corrupt Judge Turpin (Jamie Jackson) had him transported. Returned at last, the former Benjamin Barker, now Sweeney Todd, takes up his erstwhile job as a barber, and is soon dispatching any available victims with his razor, abiding until he can lure his nemesis into his fatal tonsorial parlor.

Even a first-rate “Parade” cannot disguise the conceptual problems I have with the show. It is puzzling that Mr. Brown, a gifted melodist, seems to give just as many moments of musical beauty or buoyant vigor to Leo’s enemies as to Leo himself, as if music and character are unconnected. (The show opens with a Confederate soldier going off to war paying pretty homage to “The Old Red Hills of Home.”) More problematic is the focus on the glaringly corrupt mechanics of Leo’s trial. We watch numbly as witness after witness spreads obvious lies, including scurrilous tales of Leo’s sex life. His martyrdom at the hands of iniquitous tormentors resounds like a recurring, unsubtle dirge. “Parade” does, in a sense, resemble the event of its title. The route is mapped out. We know where it will lead, and how it will end.

When contemplating the talent involved in Broadway’s “Pictures From Home”—a cast comprising Nathan Lane, Danny Burstein and Zoë Wanamaker, under the direction of Bartlett Sher—managing expectations is hard. But necessary. For while the production is impeccable and the performances polished and funny, the play, adapted by Sharr White from Larry Sultan’s memoir-cum-photography book, feels like a snapshot that hasn’t been fully developed, to borrow the handiest simile. Diffuse and sometimes repetitive, it uncomfortably resembles the scrapbook of sorts on which it is based.

Racing to its farcical climax, the new musical “Some Like It Hot” works up a sizzling head of steam, as its principal characters dash around attempting to secure their romantic fates and dodge the gangsters who have invaded their sunny refuge in a seaside hotel. This dizzying passage is pure pleasure. Unhappily, by the time it arrives audiences may be too dazed to notice, since this adaptation of the classic movie, while buoyantly performed, is also exhaustingly labored.

I spent a restless, almost sleepless night after seeing the play, haunted by its peculiar, unsettling power. Encountering a great work of art can be as disorienting as it is rewarding. “Ohio State Murders” leaves a lasting imprint—I picture a bloody handprint—on what for lack of a better term I’ll call the soul.

Mr. Swenson credibly evokes Mr. Diamond’s gravel-scraped baritone, but while his singing is excellent, he cannot quite find a distinctive persona in the character as articulated by Mr. McCarten. As Neil goes through divorces and the self-questioning that any neurotic Jewish boy would undergo upon reaching unfathomable success, the character remains steadfastly stuck in lonely-sad mode. (A flashback to his childhood illustrates its roots: “What kind of boy never has a friend over to play?” his mother laments.)

Tony-winner Victoria Clark stars as a teenage girl with a genetic disorder that causes her to age rapidly in a wondrous new musical by David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori.

'Topdog/Underdog' feels oddly out of step with the times. While Hollywood has been re-examining black experience-painfully but not without moments of inspiration-in movies such as 'Till,' 'Hidden Figures' and 'Selma,' or reimagining it in action films like 'Black Panther' and 'The Woman King,' Ms. Parks's play depicts its characters as all but doomed to a life of poverty and shiftlessness.

How to both honor history and move beyond it is the overriding theme of 'The Piano Lesson,' one of August Wilson's finest plays. The new Broadway revival, featuring Samuel L. Jackson and directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson (a noted actor who is married to Mr. Jackson), certainly does an honorable job of breathing new life into the work, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1990. Wilson's plays are so dense with vividly felt experience-not to mention language that is simultaneously earthy and lyrical-that they always captivate.

I'll admit to some worry that the radical casting would prove a distraction from the musical itself, which boasts a fine score, by Sherman Edwards, and a book, by Peter Stone, that ranks as one of the wittiest and most eloquent ever written for a Broadway musical. But the committed and engaging performances of the cast, and the astute, focused direction, won me over quickly. This '1776' is disarmingly odd, occasionally thought-provoking and an absolute delight.

Funny Girl will always remain an imperfect musical, with its sketched-in supporting characters (Tovah Feldshuh, now in the role of Fanny's mother, makes the most of her part) and flagging second act, but with the arrival of Ms. Michele at center stage, those imperfections register only faintly. A production that sparked a virtual rainstorm of bad publicity has, improbably, turned into a parade that has audiences cheering almost from the overture to the curtain call.

The theater season is just aborning, but it is virtually inconceivable that it will produce anything superior to Tom Stoppard's 'Leopoldstadt.' An intimate, multigenerational drama about a Jewish family in Vienna, set against the tumultuous first half of the 20th century, the play-inexpressibly moving, unavoidably devastating-ranks among Mr. Stoppard's greatest works, which is a considerable achievement given his status as one of our pre-eminent living playwrights.

Now might seem an inopportune time to be reviving a play by David Mamet, who could be called America's bard of toxic masculinity, although the term was hardly current-in fact it hadn't entered the popular lexicon, let alone swamped it-when Mr. Mamet was in his prime. But the bruisingly funny revival of Mr. Mamet's 1975 play 'American Buffalo' on Broadway proves that such a judgment would be myopic. It's true that the play depicts men-mostly the foul-mouthed Teach, played by Sam Rockwell -displaying volcanic amounts of swaggering machismo, seasoned by a little misogyny and homophobia. And yet Mr. Mamet's characters are themselves the victims of their flaws and throbbing insecurities, so that any toxins they spew poison their own bloodstreams. In his finest plays, including this one and 'Glengarry Glen Ross,' Mr. Mamet is hardly a cheerleader for testosterone-driven aggression; he is a clear-eyed analyst of its destructive futility.

The highly, if not ecstatically, anticipated revival of 'The Music Man' - pandemic-delayed and pandemic-plagued - was the obvious, if not the only, candidate to bring a jolt of much-needed excitement to the business. More's the pity, then, that this undeniably polished production, with its ticket-sales-galvanizing star, Hugh Jackman, proves to be a sadly mechanical, overproduced and overdesigned revival of a musical that needs tender care to allow its undeniable charms to bloom.

'Skeleton Crew' resolves the conflicts and tensions that arise in an appropriately understated key: Although revelations come, the play does not rise to a dramatic confrontation between workers and supervisor over the fate of their jobs. This, one assumes, is Morisseau's express intent. For the many thousands of workers whose formerly secure jobs evaporated as much auto manufacturing moved out of Detroit, the end came not with a sudden bang, as of a car backfiring, but with a sad, despairing whimper - to extend the metaphor, the sound of a tire going flat.

A musical that pushes against the traditional notions of what a Broadway musical might or should be. It's a trip some won't be willing to take, but in an environment when musicals seem to fall into just a few dreary formulas - in addition to the jukebox, there's the seasonal movie-to-stage transfer - it's a valiant and intriguing journey into uncharted territory. This musical attempts to expand the possibilities of musical theater, just as its characters were intent on expanding their consciousnesses.

The production, directed by Marianne Elliott - or rather thoroughly reimagined by Marianne Elliott - scrubs away the date-stamps on this 1970 musical, with a book by George Furth, so thoroughly that the show seems as if it was written yesterday. While maintaining the original's eternally relevant themes, of emotional uncertainty and the risks and rewards of the married state, the production refreshes them for a new century and a society that has changed radically in the past 50 years.

Yes, it's often quite funny, whether borrowing dialogue wholesale from the movie or freshening it up. And, like its celluloid progenitor, it indulges in moments of sweet sentiment that tiptoe toward the cloying line without crossing it. But it shares a fundamental problem with most similar shows: The movie was chosen for adaptation because it was a hit, and superbly executed, which makes it virtually impossible to equal, let alone surpass on stage.

For the most part Nottage establishes her characters and their troubled pasts and uncertain futures economically and with compassionate nuance. But 'Clyde's' nevertheless also feels schematic, as scenes of confrontation with Clyde (who, incongruously, appears to the both proprietor and the only front-of-house worker) alternate with scenes of communal sandwich-making that bind the kitchen gang together. At regular intervals, we hear revelations about just how the characters ended up behind bars.

To answer the question that absolutely no one with a Netflix account and an interest in Broadway musicals is asking: Why, yes, 'Diana, The Musical' is every bit as abysmal as rumored. Social media was briefly aflame with withering descriptions when the show first began streaming in October, so the Broadway opening - long delayed by the pandemic - almost feels like a pointless afterthought. The wedding cake that was flavorless to begin with is now both flavorless and stale.