Chris Jones

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.

It's a lot. You may have a headache. You may be encouraged in the view that kids cable franchises are best done in arenas with actors being forced to stick their heads inside animated costumes, if they are to be done at all. I think 'SpongeBob' deserved and got more, and this is a sincere endeavor to elevate his gestalt. Not every attempt at singularity works - familiar tropes in the storytelling sometimes rear up and squelch the freshness - but, in its best moments, it is very much its own thing. Proudly so.

This is a show that works on one heart at a time (yours). In so doing, the story of the peasant girl Ti-Moune, and her audacious capacity for love, homes in on the essential simplicity of the musical art and, especially, its place in the great human trajectory of assuaging life's crises through the collective telling, and the collective hearing, of pedagogical, allegorical and soothing stories. You do not need to spend much time with the current news to know that producer Ken Davenport has judiciously timed his revival of a show featuring a fearless female protagonist self-actualizing inside a story within a story, finding herself empowered by her community and thus able to take down the walls constructed by those with privilege.

Thurman flails around the stage, as if she does not know what to do. Soo mostly retreats within herself, connecting with no one. Lucas and Csokas have some spark, and Csokas even has a note of vulnerability, but these characters, as they play them, are absurd. Only Brown is any good, and her character is not central enough to allow anything to build. Even the jittery set from Derek McLane is a mishmash of tradition and technology; it looks as lost and as desexualized as the actors.

Which is not to say it does not achieve something worthwhile: an updating of absurdism for Gen Xers, starring their own kind but writ and choreographed by their elders. (Poor Gen Xers; those boomers just won't let go.) That marriage of the new stand-up/improv elite with the disgorged pain of a great comic writer suffering through a long stay on a planet America clearly spinning off its axis is what I have not quite seen before. Most neo-absurdist playwrights, your Will Enos and Annie Bakers, are gently compassionate satiric observers. They don't have Zaks out there in the dark going louder, faster, quicker, funnier, smarter, clearer, for goodness sake. Martin did.

'The Band's Visit' is only 90 minutes. For some, it will seem like a strange and esoteric Broadway musical, which is not wrong. There is no mention of any macro Arab-Israeli conflict whatsoever. No need. This is a remarkable and boundlessly compassionate and humanistic piece of theater. It lets us know that that is as absurd an enmity as all the other things about which we fight.

Paradoxically, 'Junk' actually represents something of a power grab by Akhtar, the ambitious young author of 'Disgraced' and other taut, oft-domestic, one-act dramas, for a more robust and defining place in the discourse of the American theater. Especially as produced here, 'Junk' is an epic, strutting, restless, sexually charged, slam-bang-wham piece of work, something akin to the huge socio-political dramas by the likes of David Hare, produced for years at the National Theatre in London but far less common on this, less reflective side of the Atlantic. There's a gaping hole, and Akhtar jumps in feet first with his fish-eye lens. Wall Street peddlers will sense there's a kindred spirit building this house of cards, even as Akhtar takes them down.

'M. Butterfly,' which officially returned to Broadway on Thursday night with a marquee director in Julie Taymor, a big star in Clive Owen and a significantly revised script from Hwang, is now an entirely different and very complicated proposition. The power balance between West and East has been transformed: Hwang himself acknowledged this in his underappreciated 2011 comedy 'Chinglish,' a play that displays much ambivalence about the so-called new China and is very much in dialogue with 'M. Butterfly.' 'Chinglish' is all about another feckless Western man in a sexually compromising situation, this time in a wholly subservient role. China doesn't flutter. It roars with capital.

'Springsteen on Broadway' is a very serious attempt at self-definition as written and self-directed by one of America's most intense and driven performers, a man who cannot act as one other than himself, and does not care to try, but who sure can make his own past live in the present moment. He can take you there for he takes himself there, and lives there again.

On this cruise through Prince's greatest hits (and a few of his flops), there are as many Hal Princes as there actors on the stage, all speaking improbably in the first person, all offering bon mots ('And we had another hit!') or epigrams, pithy truisms, famous names ('Steve and I') or wry acknowledgments of the role of good fortune and hard graft in any illustrious career. As written by David Thompson, those do not amount to meaningful insight into the subject under review. And as a consequence, and despite the pleasures of hearing reprises of musical numbers like 'The Worst Pies in London,' 'Being Alive' and 'You Must Meet My Wife,' the show functions mostly as a cautionary tale about the difficulty of anthologizing directors in a Broadway show.

Alas for imperial Russia and the family of Czar Nicholas II, the 17-year-old Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna was murdered in 1918 by the Cheka, Vladimir Lenin's secret police. But since princesses have a unique ability to skate above republican sentiment and the harsh realities of forensic science, the legend of a surviving Anastasia has lived on in popular culture, most famously as a 1997 animated musical film, scored by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty and wherein Anastasia was voiced by Meg Ryan, she whom no Bolshevik could ever suppress. Now Anastasia has reappeared on Broadway, the centerpiece of a new musical that works quite delightfully when the star is center stage, and struggles mightily when she is off in the wings, where the charming Christy Altomare spends far too long.

Borle's problems are intensified by the show's decision not to take us to the chocolate factory until intermission, spending all of Act 1 on Charlie's early life, the golden ticket backstory and, weirdly, on Charlie's relationship with the owner of the local candy shop (also played by Borle). This was a truly terrible decision (that candy store guy, who is cold, is not Wonka). It ignores what is on the marquee and also then shoves so much caper-esque plot into Act 2 that the show can't wait around for a moment to focus on what really matters.

Among her fans, which sums up an orchestra section that behaved all night like the Shuberts had pulled out the seats and installed spring-loaded standing mechanisms in their stead, Midler has more rollover minutes than Sprint could ever conceive. Even if Midler had skipped 'Before the Parade Passes By' entirely - rather than merely ad-libbing 'live theater!' and gulping 'Here it comes! Wish me luck!' before vanquishing the frog and belting out the Jerry Herman anthem like nothing had happened - it is inconceivable that anyone would have hit the lobby for a transportation voucher out of there.

Nonetheless, there is no questioning the force and sincerity of Vogel's determination to elevate the biography and artistic contribution of a little-known playwright whose early 20th-century work suffered the discrimination widely faced by the Yiddish theater, and by the immigrant artists whose stories it represented. As Vogel tells it in a highly skilled, clearly personal and deftly structured piece - co-conceived and directed by Rebecca Taichman - Asch was the near equal of such famed masters of the nascent American theater as Eugene O'Neill, and certainly a writer with even more courage.

When it comes to credible depictions of small-town Pennsylvania, 'Groundhog Day the Musical' is about as veracious as a woodchuck named Phil is a qualified rodent meteorologist. This British import to Broadway - staged by people for whom small-town America is a typology, rather than a collection of souls - is more Whoville than Punxsutawney. Director Matthew Warchus' overstuffed and near-chaotic production is similarly far from Woodstock, Ill., the doppelganger for exurban insularity used to film the 1993 movie - a film forged in the caustic and improvisational Second City style by the late, great Harold Ramis, with Bill Murray as his melancholic muse. Andy Karl, the handsome, courageous and hugely talented star of these musical proceedings, is closer to the open-face sandwich that is Jim Carrey than to the iconoclastic Cubs fan Murray, benign and dangerous, perplexing and perplexed and a guy who looked like he'd been knocked around by the storms of life. But, you know, this is still a new Broadway musical that works - even one that has a few moments of greatness, replayed and redux.

But while there is enough substance in 'War Paint' to make you feel like everyone involved here is fully aware of the complexity of what these characters represented, the show ultimately demurs when it comes to holding the great titans of makeup, and the men who surrounded them, to moral account. And that is what might just have made 'War Paint' a truly great musical, instead of a highly entertaining and provocative one.

That truth surely explains why it's so painful to watch the very determined Soo, who is both an exceptionally capable actor and completely miscast here, trying to replicate what surely was a one-time discovery, inextricably linked to a very different, much more vulnerable actress. If you watch the film 'Amelie,' you'll see it was filled with risk-taking and suffused with a veritable explosion of ideas - aesthetic, formative, emotional, philosophical. There were many reasons why it should not have worked, but work it did. In that moment. In that form.

The exceptional direction of the piece, by Mark Bell, embraces risk and danger to an extraordinary extent. That means 'The Play That Goes Wrong' never seems safe or comfortable in its own skin - the tricked-out design by Nigel Hook is exceptionally clever and suffused with booby traps of considerable aesthetic imagination, but it remains persistently tawdry, as it should be, of course. And thus at no point is 'The Play That Goes Wrong' one of those smug, accomplished London imports, sets collapsing on cue and well-spoken farceurs risking nothing.