Chris Jones — Theater Critic

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.

But despite there being so very much here to love - truly - for the show to work at its peak prowess, you have to see what she first thinks she sees in Billy, the man who persuades her to give up so much. Here, that is difficult. Some of the issue comes from a lack of connection between these two gifted lead performers, but it mostly flows from Henry's yet-unmet need to embrace his character's belief that he could do better. That is why he sings the great 'Soliloquy,' which Henry renders in bravura fashion, but that lacks even a flash of optimism.

But that doesn't mean 'Children of a Lesser God' is an easy work to embrace in the current context. At least not without more revisions, or refocusing, than appears to have taken place before this first-ever Broadway revival.

All of Fey's long-form shows have unfolded at rapid paces and 'Mean Girls' is no exception. It's packed with body-twisting and often witty choreography from Nicholaw, whose show, with a set by Scott Pask, is so stocked with stimulation (verbal, physical, digital) that it rests not for a second, a choice that does not help Henningsen really change, given that Richmond's score, as energetic and funny as everything else here, is hardly centered on self-reflective ballads. But that likely will delight much of the audience who'll be trying to figure out why that dance number had boys in drag (don't ask me) and that one had that Easter egg and so on. At the Saturday matinee I saw, the balcony was having so much whoop-it-up fun, I was worried about someone's tucked-away phone falling and smacking me on my balding pate.

Mantello's stunning production bulges out the vascularity of this fantastic play. Metcalf is a key weapon in his arsenal, because we immediately intuit her no-nonsense Midwestern humanity, thus leavening a common problem with this play, namely its WASPy chill.

Andrew Garfield, the other excellent American star in a mostly British cast, takes theatrical command of Prior in a way that initially jars, but ultimately elevates the character, away from bitterness and immediate disappointment, more toward narrative omnipotence. By 'Perestroika,' it actually feels like Prior has stepped away from his own body and time. Lane may have the most dominant performance, but Garfield's revisionist and ennobling work is perhaps the most conceptually successful element of this new production.

Vastly improved from its rocky Denver tryout, director Michael Grandage's heavily sold production of Disney's 'Frozen' is set to open here Thursday night, replete with richer storytelling, less extraneous comedy and with its crucial pair of sisters, who in Denver seemed all iced up in some chilly corner of the castle, finally letting go enough emotionally to thaw the center of their mutually dependent story.

It all felt indicative of the challenge this musical - which I first reviewed in Chicago and has been significantly improved since then - faces on Broadway. Unless you are three sheets to the wind, you cannot declare this 'Mamma Mia'-style fusion of the Buffett oeuvre and a retro sitcom book by Greg Garcia and Mike O'Malley to be a font of artistic innovation, or any innovation, really. It attempts no such thing.

In other words, 'Farinelli and the King,' a strange and slow-burning theatrical experience in many ways and seemingly focused on just one relationship, actually turns out to be a remarkably complicated exploration of the most important question in the arts of the last 500 years, i.e., who gets to go? And, of course, if you get to go to this, you get the incomparably immersed Rylance, that most live of performers, an actor who reacts to others without particularly caring whether the force coming his way was planned or spontaneous, spoken or sung, in the script or merely a squawk from someone in the seats. To Rylance, it's all an equal artistic input demanding an immediate response.