Dan Rubins

It’s not that either of those songs weren’t funny originally. Spamalot, as staged by the late Mike Nichols in that dominant premiere, was a giddy delight from top to bottom. And the original cast album remains a testament to the show’s scrumptiously irreverent good nature, the cleverness of Eric Idle’s lyrics, and the razzle-dazzle buoyancy of Idle and John Du Prez’s music. But not every joke told 18 years ago is going to land the same way now. Indeed, in its restaging, Spamalot has become a sort of musical theater palimpsest, a monument to what we found funny in America in 2005 resting on a pedestal of 1970s British absurdism, newly draped with some 2023 fabrics intended to keep those older structures from corroding.

What music there is, though, doesn’t disappoint. Sondheim’s score is decidedly within his most familiar vocabulary, a final master class in pressing music into the service of character. As the recent revivals of Sweeney Todd and Merrily We Roll Along also demonstrate, one of Sondheim’s superior gifts was his impeccable understanding of how the ear processes language. Rhythm and melody, under his pen, allow the text to crash like a wave over us, somehow guiding the listener response so that everyone gets the joke at the exact same moment.

The parts, though, do rise above the whole, including Derek McLane’s rather stunning set, which slides in, windowpanes locking into place, to transform the wood-framed walls for each scene before metamorphosizing in a final transition that offers the play’s most emotionally transcendent moment. And in a final sermon, Purlie erupts into gorgeous, empowering poetry: “I find, in being Black, a thing of beauty…Be loyal to yourselves: your skin; your hair; your lips, your southern speech, your laughing kindness—are Negro kingdoms, vast as any other.” If Purlie Victorious never completely conquers in cohering its disparate ambitions, its last moments offer an unexpected, quiet triumph.

If the play’s teachings get hammered home a bit redundantly in those final minutes, though, that hardly undercuts the harrowing journey that Prima Facie takes the audience on to arrive there. Martin’s production ably creates the high-tension world through Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design intensifying Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s choral and percussive score, Natasha Chivers’s intimidating flashes of light, and stage designer Miriam Buether’s untouchably towering walls of legal files. But it’s Comer’s Tessa, tough and raw, blisteringly believable as she begs to be believed, who wins the case for this play as urgent, necessary theater.

That doesn’t damn his Sweeney, though, since Groban is better able than some to explore the other edges of the barber’s frayed psyche. When Mrs. Lovett mocks him early on for vowing violent revenge against his enemies, we share her incredulity; it’s hard to believe our kindly Groban could do such a dastardly thing until the blood starts rushing from throat after throat. His violence spawns evil and not the other way around. He is, in other words, believably human. We can see in Groban the man that Mrs. Lovett fell in love with 15 years ago, and because he so convincingly sells his tender longing for his lost wife, we can buy his need for payback too.

'Nobody’s perfect,” goes the famous final line from Some Like It Hot, after Jack Lemmon’s Daphne confesses to a doting suitor that he’s really Jerry, a man in disguise. But even if the new Broadway musical adaptation of Billy Wilder’s classic isn’t perfect either, J. Harrison Ghee, playing a reimagined Daphne, comes pretty close.

And though one Thought suggests in answer that Usher 'might be overcomplicating,' A Strange Loop relies upon that level of introspective over-complication to make the case that Usher's thoughts deserve a stage to themselves. In proving that they do, and in bringing Usher's vivid and complex inner life all the way to Broadway with such gripping vibrancy, Jackson nudges the musical theater form in a startling, new direction.

It's hard now to imagine someone writing the headline for Ben Brantley's 1997 New York Times review of the off-Broadway production of Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive: 'A Pedophile Even Mother Could Love.' Twenty-five years later, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play is still hard to watch, but what audiences might have experienced as complex dynamics, grey areas, and blurred lines of consent back in 1997-the kind of uncertainty that spurred Brantley to describe Uncle Peck's crimes against Li'l Bit as 'in some appalling way, a real love story'-will resonate now with all the ambiguity of a three-alarm fire.

The Music Man has long had the misfortune of being both overexposed and underappreciated, a mainstay of school and amateur productions that doesn't consistently let audiences in on the sophistication and emotional honesty of Meredith Willson's score and storytelling. (Hearing that score played by a 24-piece orchestra at the Winter Garden Theatre under the baton of Patrick Vaccariello is especially gratifying here.) But there's nothing simplistic about The Music Man, and this slightly zany production, deeply felt and deeply funny, sells the show's intelligent warmth with a persuasiveness to rival Harold Hill himself.

Magnetic and devastatingly droll in The Band's Visit, Lenk plays the part of the charismatic chameleon compellingly, holding her own coyly, wryly, boisterously with each of the zany couples with which she spends her time. But she doesn't let her guard down enough in the moments in between for a more transparent, fully sympathetic Bobbie to come through. That's in large part because she sings most of Sondheim's soliloquies for Bobbie with an overt crooniness and rather affected vowels that give the sense that the character is still performing for us even when she's alone; the songs also tend to sit too high in her voice to allow much warmth to enter in. Only in 'Being Alive,' the show's final number, does Lenk offer a shivering, small-scale intimacy, as if she's learning the words for the first time. It's too little, too late, though, to buy that this is the Bobbie who we've been wanting to get to know all along.