Chris Jones

The touring cast certainly lives up to all the requirements of the piece, from their macho good looks to their inner sensitivity (or so it seems) to the quality of their voices. I suspect many in the audience will have different favorites, but Nolan White is an especially fine Ponyboy Curtis and Bonale Fambrini a most appealing Johnny Cade. If you know the book, you’ll know that Sodapop Curtis, as selfless as the day is long, is the moral conscience of the story, the one who tells the others what actions matter the most and although Corbin Drew Ross does not get to throw himself around the stage as vividly and dramatic as many of his colleagues, he captures what I think mattered most to Hinton when she wrote this story, and also what matters most to this show.

The scariest change, though, is that in an America where guardrails have fallen, tech-sector parasites run amok in our hands and heads, and trust in government is close to nonexistent, what seemed totally implausible in 1996 now feels like reasonable societal comment. At one point, there is worry about whether one of the characters is some kind of robot. Thirty years ago, I vividly recall laughing that off as a device of plotting and one of Letts’ signature, genre-driven games with many more yet to come. This time around? Not at all. Felt perfectly plausible.

Isaiah Bailey is a moving “Phantom,” fully able to inhabit the, well, operatic requirements of the role while offering some gentleness at the same time and Jordan Lee Gilbert’s more accessible Christine is no pushover, even as Gilbert beautifully hits all comers and goers within the part’s famous vocal range. Midori Marsh adds an uncommon note or two of humanity to the trampled-upon role of Carlotta.

Nixon’s Tess is vulnerable enough for you to sense the fear in her eyes, but this is an actress with a steely core and, indeed, Nixon turns on a dime when her character realizes, as I think many of us have or will, that this brave new world is short on both guardrails and moral principles. Burstein is equally effective as husband Jon, his warm eyes dancing with empathy, although we are not always so sure about that, given his programming skills. “Am I supposed not to notice she is being nicer to that thing than me?” Tess snaps at one point, bringing up another salient A.I. issue.

Stories with odd couples on the edge of Eros, so to speak, can be very effective (see the movie “Lost in Translation” or the musical “The Band’s Visit“) but if writers choose to have their couple get naked and hit the sheets, in this case at the Plaza Hotel, since we’re all about New York aspiration here, they struggle to know where to go. So while this show held me for Act One with its considerable charm, by Act Two, it was hitting turbulence. 90 minutes and out would have been a better plan.

Diaz and Keys were also smart enough to know that the show couldn’t all rest on that one character, given her age, and, unlike many jukebox shows, they spread out the music over a broader range of performers. In the case of this tour, this clearly attracted middle-career singers to these roles. Kennedy, a recording artist in her own right, just kills it, like really kills it, on “Pawn it All,” and the silky-smooth sounds of Ellington, a “Hamilton” alum, sent the woman across the aisle from me into convulsions of pleasure during his several numbers. Which is kind of the point of the character.

And, as one always obsessed by the road not travelled, I enjoyed those themes, too. “This World of Tomorrow” clearly wants to avoid sentimentality but let’s be real. It trafficks in nostalgia, not least because there is so much now not to like.

This is the Broadway show of the fall that some will claim to dislike and yet most everyone will enjoy, even if that has to be in secret. Happily, that’s a match for one of the main themes of a 1980s musical that always saw geopolitics, even the dangers of nuclear proliferation, as games played by those who enjoyed the strategizing.

Icke’s work is really something: I can’t recall ever being as riveted at a Greek tragedy. And my admiration for his show is increased by how Icke manages to stay remarkably true to so much of the original play while turning its dialogue into contemporary speech; this doesn’t read as something based on the Greek original, it feels like the play itself, re-energized with the kind of crackling relevance all too rare on Broadway. With Shakespeare, of course, theater artists pretty much have to stick to the original text. But since Greek tragedies were not written in English, everything has always been an adaptation, thus freeing creativity. Spectacularly so, here.

What you are getting for your top ticket price of $199 is a low-to-mid budget David Copperfield-type magic show with some neat tricks but minus any truly grand illusions, coupled with a protracted Muppet meet and greet to get folks in the door.

I suspect some will want far more blue state judgment with their big Broadway night out. Not I. I’m all for a huge, morally complicated show that sends your head spinning through the mirrored funhouse of Versailles in Central Florida, musing on all-American achievement and aspiration and realizing family and friends are the only way to happiness.

Metcalf has the opposite assignment. Her secret weapon is her disdain for over-articulation, her empathic determination to honor those who struggle to speak for themselves, and that’s exactly what Hunter brings to the party as a playwright. It’s a spectacular combination that is, in today’s American theater, unique.

“Romy & Michele: The Musical,” like we needed one, really is that bad. But yet not bad enough to work on a campy level, either.

“Liberation” pokes fun at long, “male” plays written by the childless, which is a bit of a cheap shot, albeit one that lands with this audience. In reality, it has much in common with those epic lifts, and that’s a compliment. There are certain thematic interests and structural devices in common with Paula Vogel’s “Mother Play,” which is not surprising, but Wohl has such a powerful and enjoyable voice. She makes everyone care about the questions she has herself and that’s exactly what a playwright should be doing.

Better yet, the new focus plays into the strengths of an empathetic cast that sings the bejesus out of these famous songs. Joshua Henry’s Colehouse feels younger than typical, less initially polite, more impassioned and, of course, his voice is the stuff of standing ovations. Nichelle Lewis’ Sarah is more fragile, which makes her crushed optimism especially moving. As Tateh, Brandon Uranowitz focuses on energetic joy. He expands the role and makes it all the more essential to the piece. Both Lewis and Ben Levi Ross, who plays the brooding Mother’s Younger Brother, bring qualities to those two characters I’ve never seen before. They are doing the best work of the night; Ross, especially, fleshes out what mostly has been a caricature.

Not all of the members of the cast feel or sound like they are from Nottingham or its environs (I spent my childhood not far from there), especially when it comes to humor. That said, Harrison certainly does and, more importantly, this very capable young actor captures what often lies behind that bespoke British-bloke blend of aggression using different parts of the body but all too little of the brain. The progressively morphing reaction of the excellent Robards’ bereaved, wound-tight dad, sometimes a million miles away from a kid he wishes had never been born and sometimes not far away at all, is deeply moving. I could have watched those painful scenes all night.

Depending on your preexisting view of this material and how upclose and personal you like to get with your fellow “Phantom” fans, “Masquerade” likely will feel either spectacularly intimate or horrifically so. One is led in small groups with timed entries through various rooms where shards of the story come together in a show where the multicast logistics must be a total nightmare.

It’s an interesting evening, this “Waiting for Godot,” spent in the company of very capable actors, for sure. Lloyd certainly has blown some cobwebs off a play that long has confounded anyone who has tried to sell it to regular folks. Famously and disastrously, the first U.S. production of “Waiting for Godot” (starring Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell) ended up at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, where it was billed as “the laugh sensation of two continents” and thus met mostly by confused audiences who wanted not so much to meet Godot (sorry) as to get their money back. They didn’t know or care they were seeing one of the most important plays of the 20th century.

Aside from spoofing the contemporary art world, with its insane valuations based on the throbbing insecurities of people with way too much money, “Art” eventually delves into male friendship and the difficulty men, especially middle-aged dudes, have in actually opening themselves up to their friends. You know, as distinct from joshing and sparring and circling each other like wolves gnawing at vulnerabilities. It had to be a woman to write a play about that. The ace in the hole in Ellis’ revival is Corden, who is just fabulous here. The one-time late-night host doesn’t have the kind of emotional script that made him famous in the British TV show “Gavin & Stacey,” but he doesn’t let that get in his way.

That’s not a fair assessment of the show, though, which is directed by Stephen Kessler and actually is far more complex and better written than I think many will anticipate. Ross gets away with such a surfeit of sentiment precisely because of his naturally caustic inclinations; the jokes are sharp enough and the laughs are hard and plentiful enough that all of the schmaltz feels not just charming but well-earned.

The big takeaway for me is that even as the U.S. underestimated this band, so Broadway underestimated this brand. It’s a one of a kind. Just watch how many people will come and have fun. Limited run? We’ll see.

But for “Parade,” which is a magnificent tour featuring far more organic and high-quality singing and acting than the nonetheless award-winning 2023 Broadway revival, all of that applies. Spectacularly so. Director Michael Arden clearly is still in charge. And I’ve seen enough of Jason Robert Brown in a rehearsal room over the years to know he does not mess around when performers are working on his music (I went all the way to Green Bay, Wisconsin, 25 years ago to see the first tour of “Parade” and found Brown in the pit, conducting his own score). All of that is self-evident at the CIBC Theatre, where I really can’t praise the two lead performers, Max Chernin and Talia Suskauer, highly enough.

All that is to say “Call Me Izzy” is not a total bust, especially given Smart’s formidable acting chops. Monologic shows like this with no explicit person being addressed require deeply conversational kinds of performance, as if the audiences were all your best friend who just happens to be outside the bathroom door. Smart is skilled and experienced enough to forge such a bond. I believed her entirely as a woman from small-town Louisiana capable of both great stoicism (often a feature of those in abusive relationships) and profound artistic yearning. Her performance is somewhat under-scaled and under-vocalized for so large a Broadway house (and why are we here in so huge a space, one wonders), but then it has been 20 years and the deeply honest Smart is clearly immersed in her character, with nary a note of condescension.

This craziness apparently was Yazbek’s idea. He and Della Penna (best known as Natalie Merchant’s guitarist) have a lot of fun with their internal rhymes and by contrasting gorgeous music of romantic longing with characters who have no actual access to their own feelings. But when combined with Moses’s very shrewdly toned book, the show does explore substantial themes, beyond its immediate purpose of persuading an audience not just to confront the certainty of their own death (always fun on a Saturday night) but their own corporal decay. The show notes that nothing ever was truly sacred or revered on the American frontier, the living and the dead all attracting their price, all susceptible to transactional exploitation. The notion lingers that not so much has changed. I’ve no idea how the modestly scaled, 100-minute “Dead Outlaw” will fare in the Midtown marketplace, or if enough of the touristically curious will eschew the familiar and abandon the reliably living for a gander at the truly distinctive.

Trujillo, an old pro, understands his material and his lively choreography is both created for the bonafide dancers in the cast and designed to make everyone else look and feel good. So they do. There’s a song about menopause that went over like gangbusters at the show I saw, determined ballads of hopes, fears and resilience and even a bit of PG semi-nudity when the factory gets too sweaty and confidence rises. The curves promised on the marquee are vivaciously delivered.