Chris Jones

Love and sex are ever complex and while I don't doubt some will rail against 'Burn/This' and its tropes as a dated piece of Broadway theater, Wilson was so compassionate and haunting a writer that his play was, and is, filled with comfort, and some challenge, for everyone. As its title implies, 'Burn/This' is complex and dangerous; it is worth more risk.

Many of the vocals avoid the bravura in favor of the isolated choke. Most of the dance has been cut; what survives is largely an expression of individual feeling, as when Gabrielle Hamilton dances a solo dream ballet, clad in an ironic 'Dream, Baby, Dream' shirt, wherein it seems America might crush Laurey under its oppressive weight. No wonder Rebecca Naomi Jones plays the putative romantic heroine as unhappy throughout, removed from her world, aware of her own metaphors, interested in a furtive fumble with Jud Fry (the excellent Patrick Vail, who avoids all the usual tropes) but clearly far smarter than her daffy Curly (Damon Daunno).

Like a lot of intense, progressive, secular work in this time of revolutionary exploration on Broadway, Gold's 'King Lear' just has a better understanding of what needs to go than what needs to take its place. It wrestles mightily with the play's inherent moralism, religiosity and conservatism, and its demands that we feel our obligations. It seems to say that the old white guys made their mess all on their own.

Red meat for liberal feminists and clearly aimed at inter-generational audiences, 'What the Constitution Means to Me' is part progressive political lecture, part personal confessional, and part manifesto for feminist reform. The show, which opened Sunday night at the Helen Hayes Theater and will run at least through July 21, captures the political restlessness of a moment when many Americans are looking back at the assumptions and power structure behind what they were asked to do in their own past and feeling plenty ready to view those experiences through a revisionist lens.

'Ain't Too Proud' has a wholly conventional structure, as if everyone involved didn't want to run any kind of counter-narrative to that of Williams or upset Berry Gordy (Jahi Kearse), whose persona here is exactly like his persona in 'Motown the Musical.' Fascinating issues like the band's appeal to white audiences, its need to tour in the South, its internal debates over whether it should sing Smokey Robinson ballads or Norman Whitfield soul, the drug use among many of its members and the complexity of Williams' own personal life are brought up but quickly and often awkwardly dismissed. Such are the perils of doing legacy-creating shows about living people with ownership interests in the material.

Right from the opening number, you can see where Ellis is going with what turns out to be a very pleasurable and inclusive evening in the company of a plethora of seasoned professionals whether that's the great Paul Gemignani conducting the orchestra occupying the boxes on either side of the stage at Studio 54, or choreographer Warren Carlyle's clutch of seasoned hoofers with senses of humor to match their agility.

If all of its overplayed, insecure, overwrought, dial-in-the-red-zone freneticism could have been avoided, we'd actually have an interesting Broadway show that not only reveals just how terrified we all are about the encroachments of digitized technology on our human bodies - and of teenage addiction to medication - but also how difficult it is to pull off weird 'Little Shop of Horrors'-style satire in this moralistic moment when every show has the same thing to teach. Be your nerdy self and let your freak flag fly! They won't love you 'till you love yourself.

Aaron Sorkin's genuinely radical and thoroughly gripping new Broadway adaptation of this iconic novel - which opened Thursday night at the Shubert Theatre with Jeff Daniels in the starring role - has no truck with the heroic image of Atticus, his wide-eyed daughter Scout and the famous Finch briefcase, a stand-in for the slow march toward justice, all striding together into a new American dawn. No siree. Sorkin has written a 'Mockingbird' that fits this riven American moment. And the director, Bartlett Sher, has felt little need to assuage with sentimentality.

For all the obvious flaws of 'The Cher Show,' it's an honest, self-deprecating effort, given the givens. Vastly different and greatly improved from its Chicago tryout, which was framed around a phony TV show about Cher, the final Broadway version of the show has Block's Cher striding to center stage and proceeding to tell Cher's story strictly on Cher's terms.

Good luck, Emma, you think. And you'll need the sense of humor that nobody bothered to write for you. But you're still laughing much of the time at the generally witty book and, for sure, enjoying Nicholaw's truly eye-popping explorations of how youthful dance can be a unifying force across our great political gulf.

Alas, a great popular musical needs more than the big daddy of all puppets to deliver a hit show that pounds the heart and licks the bananas of the mind. And the best way to sum up everything wrong with 'King Kong,' which opened Thursday night at the Broadway Theatre with a thud surely audible in Staten Island, it would be that the show created a star worthy of the biggest marquee in Midtown, but not credible or complex characters with whom the titular dude can meaningfully interact, once he is winched down from the heavens.

So you have to get past all that schematic writing to get to the deeper point, which is that racism poisons everything: marriages, justice, economic progress, decent black police officers, even hope for the American future. The two ex-spouses fight as proxies for their identities: Scott argues Kendra has encouraged the kid to be 'too black'; Kendra says the kid was mad at having been abandoned by his rich, white dad. The African-American cop is caught in the middle. The piece wrestles with crucial issues, and it's performed with enough intensity by Pasquale and Washington under Kenny Leon's theme-based direction that they effectively collide with your own prejudices, whoever you might be. You feel everything the characters feel, and, given the crisis we're all in, that has worth.

Kaufman clearly gets the most important point made in this work: homophobia and its legacy of self-loathing were the underlying causes of why so many died, and so many looked away. But love lived on.

The 86-year-old Elaine May - who last appeared on Broadway 52 years ago in a show that ran for about 30 seconds - was gifted with a face formed in the shape of a smile. And anyone who remembers her iconic 1960s comedy routines with the late Mike Nichols knows that nobody, but nobody, listens to her scene partners as intensely as May. Especially now, it is revealed. She imbibes the energy of other actors like she's getting a blood transfusion, live on stage. That grinning visage, and that palpable zest for life, combine to make May's performance atop a starry new Broadway production of Kenneth Lonergan's 'The Waverly Gallery' (she's working with those kids Michael Cera, Joan Allen, Lucas Hedges and David Cromer) both one of the most beautiful things you'll ever see in a Broadway theater and one of the most profoundly sad.

It is a measure of the brilliance of Sam Mendes' direction, his uncommon ability to focus your eyes on a corner of this riot of characters, that you often forget Aunt Maggie even is there, sitting in a corner of her wheelchair reminding us that we all lose our mind eventually. The only moment of the show that feels theatrical, as distinct from real, is the tricky final violent climax, which this cast does not quite pull off.

There are contrivances - the play does not acknowledge that most fabulists, like most abusers, are serial offenders. And its binary conflict does not allow for the truth that even the most fiction-loving writer probably would prefer to avoid being sued for libel. But then it's a self-aware comedy: at one point, Radcliffe's truly relentless Jim climbs all the way inside a closet under his quarry's stairs, delighting the Harry Potter fans in the house. That is not the only meta moment. The writers based their play on a real essay penned by the writer John D'Agata and the editor Jim Fingal, which was in turn based on their actual encounter in getting an article ready for publication. So it's a blend of fact and fiction. Right?

The best performances are from Schnetzer and Lind, whose characters try to navigate some sort of coupling in the middle of all the insanity. Most of the other actors have created types: they get laughs and they're fun, but you never feel them breathe the same air. This American premiere also is underpaced: it's written to move with the speed of the black careening toward triumph, to ricochet with the excitement of the break, but instead you get too many pockets of air. Until the balls fly; then you want to cheer snooker's first Broadway moment.

Perhaps everyone was worried that would have limited the play's appeal, rendering it nerdy and overly Shakespearean. Come on, it's only the greatest play, ever. I say it would only have deepened its truths, and it would have freed McTeer in the process.

In essence, 'Pretty Woman' has found a smart sweet spot somewhere between nostalgic retro romanticism - unlike at the Chicago tryout, the show now fully and wisely embraces its original era, big hair and all - and the current necessity for heroines to take charge of their fumbling Prince Charmings and self-actualize their tickets to happiness.

This isn't a show that worries at all about internal logic or credibility or diversity; it's an ode of lamentation to lost youth, a theme as old as Broadway itself. No crime there and some discount ticketbuyers will have fun. There even are a few touching moments when the musical manages to home in on the repressiveness of small-town lives and dreams.

A lot of harder-edged Go-Go's fans who find their way through the door will wonder what on earth all of these silly theater people are doing with their beloved music, not just because it feels so far removed from its original pioneering context but also because the sensibility here so doubles down on fluttery theatricality at the expense of raw, charged, visceral, feminist pop.

Mantello wants his audience to breathe in not just his characters, with their one-liners, quips, power trips and deep sadness, but also to imbue the breathtaking contrast with the self-assured men who now are playing them, luckier men not born when the play was written. That is not to imply condescension on the part of these actors - on the contrary, for you can read the seriousness with which they take their assignments to play men much less famous than themselves - but merely to claim Mantello's clear purpose, as intensified by a design from David Zinn that has one foot in two eras and its cleverly timeless body in the close proximity of such contradictions as intimacy and performance, privacy and display.

And that's not even including 'Bad Girl' and 'No More Tears' ('Enough is Enough'); enough, when it comes to Summer, never really being enough. Not for we longtime fans, anyway. And unless you are in the parody business, you then need the actual life-story of the singer to have a structure on which to hang all of those songs, being as they express simple feelings, not complex narratives. So since you need all of these levels of permission from the flame, or the keeper thereof, to even enter the heat of the dance-floor, your chances of telling the warts-and-all truth are, you might say, limited.

And all the things that make 'Cursed Child' so theatrically remarkable are only intensified now. The list begins with how Tiffany, Hoggett and the designer Christine Jones carved out a theatrical playing space for the storytelling, something that interacts with what you have in your head and does not compete with the images of the movies. That is, Snape still looks like Snape, Dolores Umbridge like Dolores Umbridge, but when Albus and Scorpius stare out at the intimidating sight of Hogwarts, all Tiffany and his lighting designer, Neil Austin, choose to do is turn on the houselights.

The production is colossal: Michael Yeargen's set includes several superfluous rooms in professor Higgins' house, the fast-tracked arrival of which makes full use of one of the deepest stages in the nation, plus several exteriors, including a grand vista of Covent Garden that looks precisely like the part of the old market where tourists and performers now gather. But it's also an uneasy combination of romantic realism, symbolism and miniaturization.