Chris Jones

Playing at the Samuel J. Freedman Theatre,' Lackawanna Blues' is a one-man show with Santiago-Hudson playing all the roles, and his fans might expect it to have funny characters and some lively blues licks (in this production, courtesy of the on-stage guitarist Junior Mack). And so it does. But few will be prepared for the emotional undercurrent present in Santiago-Hudson's self-directed performance, which often feels like it is being interrupted by a well of feelings so strong that the actor struggles to process them in the moment.

All shows open in a temporal context they can't always control. 'Six,' especially at just 80 intermission-less minutes and with low costs, an existent YouTube fame, a gently progressive sensibility and a youthful target demographic, is as well-suited to this moment as any piece of live entertainment.

Danya Taymor's production is well acted by all three cast members; Smallwood in particular achieves some truly haunting moments late in the play. Still, you're often left wondering how real these characters are intended to be. It's tough to perform symbols and the show struggles with specificity, especially in the difficult scenes with the cop. The show in general could do to trust more that its message is coming through loud and clear.

Far closer to Eugene O'Neill's 'The Iceman Cometh' than 'Mamma Mia!,' the beguiling and beautiful new show at the Belasco Theatre is hardly a Bob Dylan jukebox musical. Sure, the score for 'Girl From the North Country,' an ensemble piece that showcases Mare Winningham in an extraordinarily intense and musically compelling performance, is comprised of more than 20 of the legendary protest-warbler's iconic compositions, ranging from 'Slow Train' to 'Like a Rolling Stone' and 'All Along the Watchtower' to 'Forever Young.'

To put all that together, Van Hove has deconstructed the usual pieces of 'West Side Story' in service of better targeting the show's gooey, throbbing, omnisexual center: the truth that love is not only the fiercest human weapon against sectarian violence but the only real reason to live. No moment exemplifies that intent than a stunner of a sequence following 'The Dance at the Gym,' wherein a sensually smitten Tony (Isaac Powell) and Maria (Shereen Pimentel) strain to reach each other as they are held back by what looks and feels like two teams in a human tug of war. Anyone who has seen many a 'West Side' has experienced leads with no particular connection: In this production, their need for each other is so visceral as to overwhelm everything and everyone around them. In this production's take on 'Somewhere,' their feeling metastasizes with such force that everyone writhes around on the stage floor with a lover of their own choosing. Add in Van Hove's macabre talent for articulating pending tragic disaster (as seen so vividly in his 'A View From the Bridge') and the result is a gripping 'West Side' that you watch with both an appreciation for the power of the young and in love, and a profound sense of all-American doom.

Kenny Leon's lively, broadly staged Roundabout revival, which stars a savvy Blair Underwood and a bold-faced David Alan Grier, plays a kind of sly homage to the erotic legacy of that Oscar-nominated film, the stage being filled with a plethora of stunningly buff and good-looking guys - there are no women in the play, but there were plenty around me in the audience at the American Airlines Theatre on 42nd St.

The takeaway from Broadway's 'My Name is Lucy Barton,' the rich and complex new solo play at the Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, based on the 2016 novel by Elizabeth Strout and luminously performed by Laura Linney, is that you can move to a world of Starbucks, progressive politics and vegan-friendly journalism - cities where you can't even glimpse the sky from your bedroom window - and yet, eventually, it is as if you never moved at all. Such is the magnetic, lifelong hold exerted by the circumstances of our youth.

And if you want a quick lesson on just how much our culture has coarsened since then, you'll find one at the Broadhurst Theatre, where lean songs that bled with poetry and irony and fear and rage have been turned into a moralistic musical so over-stuffed and simplistic, so predictable in its hashtags and heroes and villains, as to rip almost all the complexity from the organic and unfiltered human material that provided the source.

'The Inheritance' invites comparison to Tony Kushner's 'Angels in America,' although it does not similarly concern itself with intersectional political ideologies and crises of religious faith. 'The Inheritance' remains a fundamentally intermural look at the gay community - the only female character in the show, played by Lois Smith, is a semi-mystical figure defined entirely in terms of her surrogate sons - and its existential ambitions are less expansive. Still, it reveals a deep advocacy for community responsibility and shares a world view with one of Kushner's most central notions, that the smallest indivisible human unit is two.

The show has a futuristic look, all right, and by presenting everyone dressed the same, conceived as part of a whole, the vibe is resoundingly, Ted Talk-y egalitarian. You might even say Byrne has evolved into a cooler, trimmer Bernie Sanders, directing an ensemble of enlightenment and inclusivity, welcoming to all. Even a cover of the Janelle Monae protest song 'Hell You Talmbout' is performed with the collective sense that a community of caring, decent people can solve this problem together.

As played in this gorgeous piece of theater by Mary Louise Parker - and, heaven forfend, what a complete performance! - Bella is a fiftyish woman, a professor of creative writing who sacrificed her personal life to a climb up the academic tentpole to a position at Yale University. She's the maybe-unreliable narrator of her own story, self-critical and fiendishly intelligent, even if she never has been all that productive. Couple of minor things published. That's been it. Still, a life to fill the years.

Kids love Harry Potter because J.K. Rowling refused to dispense facile bromides and instead trusted them with complexity and ambiguity. And Potterland has always showed the punters how their hard-earned cash has been spent for their enjoyment. Those are the lessons 'The Lightning Thief' has to learn. You know, along the way.

Remarkably, you believe Tomei throughout. Most Sarafinas I have seen have nailed one or the other; Tomei, never contained by either, gets them both. It's a remarkable picture of restlessness and need, and reason enough to see Cullman's staging, which also leans wryly into the comedy of the piece, even to the point of including a bunch of pink flamingos in a rich setting from Mark Wendland that shrewdly suggests the immigrant's need to replicate their homeland, even as American visual banality shoots that desire in the foot.

He's got one foot in the movies of Woody Allen: a lovable loser with whom younger women mysteriously want to sleep. He's got a big toe in 'High Fidelity,' resembling Rob Gordon in his misanthropic attempts to fight off the cheap mass culture that now assaults his delicate aesthetic sensibilities from the age of vinyl. And there's a good bit of the Howard Beale about him, except that no one gives two shakes of a lamb's tail about his being mad as hell, even if he can't take it anymore.

But 'Slave Play,' which runs over two hours in one act, is under no obligation to make those points. It is the work of a major new voice in the American theater, a fervent, assured, hyper-articulate young moralist seeking acknowledgement of and reparations for, white supremacy, and who is utterly disinclined to dispense false hope to those who think 'I love you' makes good on anything.

It's all very interesting and fair-minded in a retro kind of way - and surely educational for the young. Its even-handed, centrist point of view is also distinctively out of step with the moment, a Biden-esque island in today's sea of activist progressive writing, even on Broadway. But the whole shebang nonetheless lacks bite.

These days, most Broadway theatergoers don't so much want to see a show as take a warm bath inside of one. We crave relief from our growing terror of physical intimacy and our technology-fueled loneliness. What used to pass as immersive theatrical entertainment is, as we end this panicked second decade of the 21st century, no longer immersive enough. The bar has risen. Ergo, 'Moulin Rouge! The Musical.' Yes, baby, you're a firework.

But with a lot of help from McDonald and a deceptively expressionistic set from Riccardo Hernandez, the director Arin Arbus effectively operates on the levels of the then and the now. In the best moments of the piece, you think about the different terms of relationships in the 1980s and also how so much and yet so little has changed.

The show, at the Winter Garden Theatre, might have a better chance of persuading us to go on some deep satiric dive here if it was using an adult actress. But Caruso is not yet an adult, although a whopping teenage talent and about the only human to really emerge well from this disaster. Except perhaps for Leslie Kritzer, whose comic instincts as Delia are so great that even the less-than-Perfect's lyrics and the Scott Brown book cannot bury them in bad taste.

Or as a populist mastermind who could see the cracks in the walls of the liberal elite's country clubs, who realized great storytelling always requires distinct heroes and villains, who knew one guy's fact always is another guy's fiction, and who figured out long before the other dumb media titans that user-generated content and 'Five hot things!' was far more profitable than the tortured copy and long sentences favored by pontificating columnists and critics? Well, as they like to say at Fox News, the new Broadway play 'Ink' mostly reports the facts. You decide, dear reader, you decide. At least you will have fun doing the deciding.

There really is much to like about 'Tootsie.' Horn's book is chock-a-block with digressive one-liners that tickled me pink when I first saw the show in Chicago and worked their magic all over again on Broadway. Dorsey, a pill who taunts directors with his ego, has a lovable deadpanning roommate, Jeff (Andy Grotelueschen) and a wacky best frenemy named Sandy (Sarah Stiles), and this boffo comedic pair, along with John Behlmann's clueless bit of beefcake, keep the laughs rolling.

Letts' performance likely will strike some as odd or disconnected - I find it perfectly in tune with the moment, and there is much to like about Bening's work, too. Kate Keller is a tricky part - she can come off as merely an enabler or a kook. Bening comes up with something much richer, as does Walker, who is quite moving and, well, sad. It will take another generation or two to fix things, you think.

Lane is quite spectacularly good here - he's in deeper than I've ever seen him, and I've been watching him for years. He's more vulnerable, too. His ambition - to be the fool, the kind of Stephen Colbert-like figure who speaks truth to power, rather than the clown guy who only offers non-ideological escape - is what drives this performance, remarkable in all kinds of ways.

I've liked this play since I first saw its premiere in Chicago - and, in Metcalf and Lithgow, it now has two in-sync old pros, demonstrably aware of the capriciousness of fame and power. Of course, this is not a charitable portrait of two dedicated public servants. Both appear without their pants at times - Hnath reduces them to hotel room obsessives, navigating their greatest challenge. Each other.

America's on the road to hell - better jump right off, my children. Too dangerous to look back. Instead, try and find the cracks in that famous wall we're building. That's pretty much the message of 'Hadestown,' the thrillingly alarmist new Broadway musical with the score that feels like it comes from somewhere deep in the American gut. Now an eye-popping, mythological blend of steampunk, 'Westworld' and Bourbon St. anarchy, this dystopian tuner has its origins in a 2010 concept album, a folk opera of sorts, by the remarkable singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell.