Charles Isherwood

'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.

But stripping away any element of this far-seeing and fiercely imaginative show might compromise the whole. In any case it has become a landmark of musical theater in the 21st century. Still, for this viewer, it is the unblinking yet compassionate portrait of the title character that lifts the show into the sublime, and Clarke's performance - much like Tonya Pinkins's in the original production - is the driving force behind its moments of transcendence.

Something of a grande dame of Off Broadway - although I suspect she'd roll her expressive eyes at the notion - O'Connell here gives a performance that seamlessly blends an extraordinary technical acting challenge with the earthiness, plucky everywoman humanity and the subtle spirituality that have often been hallmarks of her work. Both play and performance are a gift we are lucky to receive, as this Broadway season shapes up to be a landmark one for its presentation of unconventional new plays and revelatory performances.

But for all its surface stylishness, 'The Lehman Brothers' is a stolid and rather monolithic slab of a show: a three hour and twenty minute talking Wikipedia page, so dense with description and narration, and devoid of drama - or even dialogue - that watching it is like watching very expensive paint dry, or maybe, to use a more apt metaphor, listening to cotton growing.

Much of the play's effectiveness derives from Davis's utterly natural yet entirely extraordinary performance, for which she won both an Obie Award and a Lucille Lortel Award for the Off Broadway production at the Vineyard Theater. Davis bears a certain resemblance to Winner, but that's incidental. What gives her performance such quiet force is the manner in which she renders the character's shifting and conflicting emotions, and the racing mind beneath the placid exterior, as the interrogation proceeds.

Much of the play's effectiveness derives from Davis's utterly natural yet entirely extraordinary performance, for which she won both an Obie Award and a Lucille Lortel Award for the Off Broadway production at the Vineyard Theater. Davis bears a certain resemblance to Winner, but that's incidental. What gives her performance such quiet force is the manner in which she renders the character's shifting and conflicting emotions, and the racing mind beneath the placid exterior, as the interrogation proceeds.

The most welcome, and most stimulating, innovation is the fresh orchestrations, by Daniel Kluger, for a small band seated in a pit onstage. The instrumentation favors guitars, banjo and accordion, and while Broadway musicals usually feature more robust and varied orchestrations, Kluger's arrangements, and the terrific music-making, gives the show an authentic-feeling countrified flavor that makes the classic songs soar and leap with a new, spirited sound.

Directed by Doug Hughes at the dizzying pace of speed traders racking up dollars at full froth, and acted by an excellent cast, the play is supremely well-researched, insightful and smart. It is also, on the other hand, so conscientiously thorough in its analysis of its subject that it often feels dense to the point of stultifying. And its ample array of characters - as well as its many-threaded plot - result in a play with greater breadth than depth. As a many-chaptered primer on an ominous turning point in the American economy, it earns full marks. But emotionally, and to some extent dramatically, it's pretty much a washout.

Though it ends with a tragic death that mimics the searing ending of Puccini's 'Madama Butterfly ' - which is alluded to (and heard in bits) throughout - Taymor's plodding, sometimes fussy staging, coupled with Hwang's revised version of the play, ultimately leave a wearying, watery impression. Today the play seems overstuffed with now-shopworn metatheatrical gambits (direct address, audience engagement, a fake 'I'm ending this show now' moment, etc.), as well as self-explanatory dialogue that bluntly lays bare its themes. Plus there's the melodramatic climax for a big finish.

Although Springsteen is 68, his voice - never a crooner's smooth instrument - retains all its grit and vigor. Rough-edged, surly, sweaty and dark and raw, it can also hit notes of whispering tenderness that underscore the vulnerability hiding in plain sight in many of his best songs. It's a voice that defines the sound of rock 'n' roll as it was and will always be defined, the holler of rebellion and ecstasy, of swagger and hope.

Priestley is not always subtle in pointing out how precisely things have gone wrong for the characters; some ironies seem to land like bricks, and while the fog of disillusion is convincing, we in the 21st century cannot be expected to find all his revelations to be, well, revelatory. But for the most part 'Time and the Conways,' presented here with impressive polish, has weathered the years with impressive grace. Time can be cruel to people, but on occasion it can at least be kind to works of art.

Certainly the more than 30 songs performed by a superb cast of nine include some of the most beloved, or accomplished, ever written for musicals. A short list of the shows directed or produced (or both) by Prince ranges from the bouncy 'Damn Yankees' to the storied collaborations with Stephen Sondheim - 'Company,' 'Follies,' 'A Little Night Music' and 'Sweeney Todd' among them - as well as two Andrew Lloyd Webber megahits, 'Evita' and 'The Phantom of the Opera.' Plus 'Cabaret' and 'Fiddler on the Roof.' But Prince's protean ability to infuse an electric vitality into shows of such disparate styles and tones almost confounds the revue format - or rather is confounded by it. Prince's work was often celebrated for its seamlessness, the fluid interplay between dialogue, song and dance, between story and character and theme. But even the most skilled seam-sealer cannot make a revue of such diverse material into a conceptually cohesive and theatrically compelling evening.

Michael Moore's solo show, 'The Terms of My Surrender,' comes as close to being a campaign rally as anything you are likely to see on Broadway - or anywhere else, for that matter, save an actual one. Taking the stage of the Belasco Theatre to the kind of frenzied adoration currently being enjoyed on Broadway only by Bette Midler, the liberal filmmaker and author flings at his audience plenty of red meat dripping with contempt for Donald Trump, the country's current 'president,' as Moore puts it, fingers winking air quotes. And yet this shaggy but enjoyable evening, an autobiographical solo show spliced with a rabble-rousing call to arms against the reigning political regime, contains more surprises - and more funny diversions - than I expected.