Dan Rubins

if Jackie is the show’s complex centerpiece, the show is most moving in a brief aside, a monologue lifted from the documentary in which the family nanny (Melody Butiu) laments that she hasn’t seen her own kids in the Philippines in decades. Jackie might not grasp the fullness of her nanny’s humanity, but the creators of The Queen of Versailles would have done well to build an extra wing or two for these everyday people living in the socialite’s shadow.

But the score, at its passionate and melodramatic heights, is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s best, and only two years later, that music has a new ingenious and most alive production, the immersive Masquerade, filling out all the floors, from rooftop to basement lair, of a creepy building just west of Carnegie Hall. Walking a tightrope between dramatic musical work and theme-park attraction, Masquerade is a mightily inventive twist on Webber’s classic stage musical.

“We are bored to death, there’s no denying it,” Vladimir reminds Estragon. “A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste.” If there’s a deeper meaning bleeding out from Lloyd’s revival, perhaps it’s this production’s exploration of how desperately we try to grapple with the passing of time, toiling to turn each ephemeral moment into a scene worth playing.

Prince Faggot, from its title on down, seems designed to attract the same sort of Daily Mail headlines that plague its characters: “Softcore Off-Broadway Play Sexualizes Royal Minor” and so forth. The play’s provocations may attract audiences—the run is mostly sold-out, presumably on the basis of its title alone (marketing doesn’t disclose the subject matter)—and they’ll be rewarded by Tannahill’s subverted expectations when they attend.

We learn all this from Roger in a lightning-speed monologue, staged smoothly and playfully by Sam Gold and delivered by Krasinski with jovial, almost folksy charm. And Skinner breaks down Roger’s increasingly appalling ideas into small enough leaps of logic that we sometimes don’t realize how far from reality he’s traveled until he’s already too far gone

Viewers of the series know that Henry will eventually become the demonic Vecna, ruler of the Upside Down and the monsters within, and how this backstory plays out since The First Shadow is ultimately an evening-long adaptation of a flashback sequence from season four. Most of the plot twists will be retrodden territory for Netflix viewers, and as such, when it comes to the story, the play’s fan service lies mostly in the recreation of iconic images from the series and in the supporting cast laying Easter eggs.

But even if Boop! delivers a low-key #DeepMessage, it’s mainly just a rollicking good time that earns the confetti cannon that goes off in the show’s final moments. Director-choreographer Jerry Mitchell’s exorbitantly exuberant production numbers fuse old-school tap excess with a bit of hip-hop fluidity. Finn Ross’s projections design playfully incorporate glimpses of the original Boop animation throughout David Rockwell’s set. And for its sense of childlike wonder and whimsy, Gregg Barnes’s show-stopping costume designs for the second-act opener, in which half-black-and-white, half-color outfits allow the ensemble to swap between ToonTown and the real world from beat to beat, ought to melt the hearts of even the steeliest theater critics.

And if there’s a good reason to revive Glengarry Glen Ross again, and Mamet’s cavernously amoral depiction of immorality inside it, Marber hasn’t made that apparent either. One self-serving prick is just like the next? We knew that much already.

Menzel has range, but Jesse doesn’t, and that’s Redwood’s chief failure. One moment she’s gregariously chatty and wisecracking, the next caustically defensive. Then she’s half-deliriously humming “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid. She’s also prone to PTSD-like flashbacks and quasi-hallucinations that sear across the stage with jolting sound and lighting effects. Menzel plays each of these individual moments convincingly, loosely tracing Jesse’s growing understanding that she can’t hide from her grief, but the music is too repetitive, the lyrics too broad, and the structure too airy for Jesse’s idiosyncrasies to ever cohere.

And because Gold lets the initial energy and urgency go limp, he sacrifices the chance to say something 2024-ish about youth culture or the inevitable violence of tribalism, the sort of low-hanging but potent fruit that he seems to be intent on plucking early on. But just as first love can blind the smitten to obvious flaws, maybe the imperfections of first Shakespeares can be similarly ignored. Let’s hope the Bard’s new bevy of devotees are won over and here to stay.

Our Town, though, is a play not about death but about how to live. And if the final scene, in which Wilder tears down the shutters to stare directly at the audience, asking whether our lives have been lived less than fully, pummels across the footlights with the blistering force that it does here, Our Town has done its job. When Emily, whom Deutch, in her Broadway debut, lends a healthy balance of melancholy and cheekiness, pleads, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?,” Leon lets Wilder take us by the shoulders and shake.

The technology distracts from the real human drama that McNeal depicts, and the seriousness of that drama dilutes any coherent argument about the impact of machine language models on literature or life. And, no, that lack of clarity cannot be explained by Akhtar using A.I. himself in creating the text, as he insists that all the words are his alone. The hollow McNeal, after all, is only halfway to presenting as artificial intelligence. It’s got the artificial part down pat.

But Michael Urie, in transmogrifying the dopey Dauntless, doesn’t so much fill shoes as turn shoemaker, cobbling his own glorious take on the role that’s wildly silly but also moving. Foster upholds the reputation of Once Upon a Mattress—especially its goofy-gorgeous score by composer Mary Rodgers and lyricist Marshall Barer—as a quick-witted, big-hearted gem. It’s Urie who convinces, for the first time, that this musical isn’t just about a spunky, scrappy princess succeeding against the odds but also a real love story between two moonstruck misfits.

But the creators of Life and Trust have opted wisely for mood over minutiae, and who anybody is doesn’t matter once you’re immersed in a tapestry of stories that seem to unspool almost infinitely. Almost infinitely but not quite, because Life and Trust, like Sleep No More, runs on a loop so most scenes will occur twice. But I only once stumbled upon a replay, a surging waltz for a dozen cast members, with Mephisto presiding maliciously. I didn’t mind seeing it a second time. If the price of succumbing to Life and Trust’s devilish delights is a lingering desire to see the whole thing again, that’s the kind of deal for which I’d willingly sell my soul.

The play’s climactic pivot from thoughtful interrogation toward shock value finally positions it neither as psychological thriller nor dark comedy, but as horror. In describing, if never depicting, the truly grotesque and evil, Job achieves a sort of tonal homecoming. But its horrors are very real, involving the darkest corners of human behavior. They’re also inexcusably unexplored. Lobbing the bleakest imaginable themes at the audience simply to make the play’s lurid twists pay off makes this hollow play less of a job well done than a piece of work.

But even if Leon hasn’t stretched Home to fill the space, there’s a poignancy to spotlighting this playwright at this moment: Williams passed away on May 13, four days before preview performances began. If this revival doesn’t quite constitute a homecoming parade, it’s a cozy, unflashy tribute, perhaps just the way Cephus Miles would have dreamt it.

It’s not that Malloy, the multi-hyphenate creator of works like Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812 (for which he received Tony Award nominations for book, score, and orchestrations) and the a cappella choral-theatrical Octet, is afraid to plunge rawly into the depths of isolation. Rather, Three Houses, in wading through its excesses of ideas and often free-associative images, suggests misleadingly that it has a particular point to make, even a moral to unfurl (after all, the show is loosely based on the fable of “The Three Little Pigs”). But the disparate pieces never bundle into something fully legible, and Malloy’s sinewy music drifts away too wispily to cohere: As drama, this is, perhaps, closest to a house of straw.

And while any adaptation of The Great Gatsby has to thread the needle between wowing audiences with opulence and inviting critique of the ostentatious hollow center (those pyrotechnics are surely ironic, right?), the show’s final images seem to find that balance successfully. “I don’t want to live here, but I never want to leave,” the bombastically independent Jordan Baker (Samantha Pauly) sings as she enters one of Gatsby’s extravagant parties. That’s about right: If The Great Gatsby doesn’t have the makings of a long-term Broadway resident, it’s become, in its newly minted tension and decadence, a welcome visitor.

The first musical by a Black composer to win Tony Awards for best musical and best score, this well-loved show turns 50 next year. If Schele Williams’s simplistic and sometimes bewildering staging doesn’t itself demonstrate how the show has held up across those decades, she wisely steers all attention toward the main event: the stunning vocal performances from her cast. And since the show’s underwhelming visuals feel like less of a distraction than an afterthought, it’s easy enough to put the “hard stuff” to one side and just relish the aural euphoria.

Lempicka sometimes recalls another unfortunate histrionic history. Diana the Musical, while disastrous on paper, recognized its own essential ridiculousness, rebranded itself as utter camp, and gracefully ended its short Broadway run with a naughty wink. But a musical about Princess Diana was clearly a terrible idea. Lempicka, by contrast, is always on the cusp of camp but unable to look itself in the mirror, so it never stands a chance of being so bad it’s good because it wants to be good so badly. It’s that friction—the tendency toward high camp in conflict with a more austere self-importance—that suggests a show at war with itself.

It’s that kind of fully realized theatrical gesture that most distinguishes Taymor’s directorial vision, elevating The Outsiders’s well-made material to a remarkable, emotionally arresting piece of theater. And, in the musical’s final minutes, as Grant’s sorrowfully resilient Ponyboy begins to pen his own self-portrait in the face of unrelenting loss, one could almost call that kind of heart-wrenching theater-making heroic.

Gold’s sharply accelerating production reveals the horror of hypocrisy, but, without outside assistance, it doesn’t quite challenge the audience’s own complicity. By the time the third Extinction Rebellion protestor arose, most of the crowd met him with vehement boos. Minutes later, Dr. Stockmann was back on his own soapbox demanding that he himself be heard: “Ask yourselves—Is what I’m saying dangerous? Or is ignorance dangerous? You don’t have to agree with me, I just ask that you listen, because I don’t have any reason to be up here, ruining my career, making my family suffer, except that I care about this place.”

Because writing for character means writing in distinct voices, there’s a thin line in musical theater songwriting between the simple and the simplistic: Unlike her gratifyingly accessible pop music, Michaelson’s score here falls on the wrong side too much of the time. That’s a shame, because, in revisiting the story, Michaelson and book writer Bekah Brunstetter have laid out the structure for a thoughtful adaptation that improves upon both the book and the film adaptation.

If there’s a red pen waiting for The Connector, perhaps it should underline the challenges of telling a tale with a twist that most of the audience will see coming from miles off. (The creative team hasn’t been shy about giving the game away in interviews either.) Indeed, you may wonder if there’s merit in an edit that, by spilling the beans earlier on, spent more time in trying to make sense of Ethan’s unraveling rather than simply hurtling toward it. Perhaps, but The Connector’s momentum is already pretty addictive, thanks to the electric collaboration of the writers and director Daisy Prince, who brought the concept to Brown shortly after helming his off-Broadway musical The Last Five Years in 2002. Prince keeps Robin and Ethan’s officemates constantly in motion and always on stage, either typing away at their desks or observing the action with intense curiosity, offering backing vocals while perched on piles of manuscripts that tower on either side of the stage. And Brown’s score, livelier if less sweeping than those for Parade and The Bridges of Madison County but more clever and compact than anything else he’s written, keeps moving too. Where he most excels as a composer, in soaring vocal lines that gaze down on nomadic grooves laced with sizzling piano licks, is the perfect landscape for a show like this. (He also conducts the show’s entire run from the keyboard.)

Isolate any 30 seconds of Hell’s Kitchen’s musical numbers and you’re probably looking at—and, more importantly, listening to—something marvelous. Choreographer Camille A. Brown keeps the ensemble engaged throughout in heart-pounding conversation with Keys’s music. If Robert Brill’s set, a real “concrete jungle where dreams are made of,” isn’t attractive in itself, it’s enlivened by Natasha Katz’s lighting and Peter Nigrini’s projections, especially in effectively channeling Ali’s elevator rides. Under the music direction of Dominic Fallacaro, the cast sounds tremendous, with sizzling vocal performances from Moon, Dixon, Shoshana Bean as Ali’s mom Jersey, Kecia Lewis as a dying piano teacher, and Jackie Leon as Ali’s supportive friend Jessica.