David Rooney

This kind of campy conceit was executed with at least as much invention and more genuine charm 16 years ago in the off-Broadway hit Altar Boyz, in which a Christian boy band wrestled with their souls as they spoofed the testosterone-pumped teen sensations of the '90s. Six is probably closer to a three, but it's entertaining enough as bubbly pop confections go. By the time the inevitable curtain-call remix cranks up, there should be no shortage of young audiences ready to scream, 'Yass, queens!'

No disrespect to Bob Dylan, one of the greatest songwriters in modern American music, but hearing his tunes sung by the melodious voices in Girl From the North Country is a revelation - the second time even more than the first. Moving to Broadway after a hit 2018 run at the Public Theater, this brilliantly conceived project from Irish writer-director Conor McPherson could be called the anti-jukebox musical. Rather than being forcibly wedged into the narrative, the songs are used with imagination and a sweeping amplitude of feeling to deepen the mood, enrich the characters and liberate their inner voices. The result is a rapturous act of theatrical storytelling.

It says something about the supreme power of flesh-and-blood people portraying raw human feeling on stage, without the filter of another medium, that the most emotionally devastating and visually stunning moment in the radical new Broadway revival of West Side Story occurs when its extensive video elements are stripped away. That happens in the coup de théâtre at the musical's climax, as a torrential downpour fills the immense darkness of the stage while a shattered young woman cradles her dead lover's body. Like many big-swing experimental bids to reimagine a canonical work, director Ivo van Hove's vigorously youthful take on the 1957 classic comes with losses and gains, but the latter are what you'll remember.

The structural bones of a procedural investigation thriller laced with cinematic flashbacks might be timeworn after years of movies and TV, but Leon invigorates the drama with interludes of song and movement that draw a blistering line connecting the men serving their country during wartime to those working as slave or prison chain-gang labor. Those stylistic flourishes - the first of them emerging out of darkness like increasingly unquiet voices from the past in the production's arresting opening - add spiritual heft to what is essentially a well-made whodunit.

In her books Olive Kitteridge and Anything is Possible, Elizabeth Strout adopts a complex linked-story structure to explore character and milieu. But her slender, tremendously affecting 2016 novel, My Name is Lucy Barton, is as direct, deceptively straightforward and singularly focused as its title implies. At the same time, it unfolds a wealth of seemingly unrelated mini-narratives, personal insights and half-buried memories to draw the complicated connection of a daughter to her flinty mother, reconciling with the legacy of a miserable childhood. That duality, between the emotional immediacy of the present and the impressionistic filter of the past, is distilled with faithful exactitude in Laura Linney's finely calibrated performance in the title role.

The aggressive bid for now-ness is both a blessing and a burden in this overwrought, over-stuffed but ultimately affecting show. Wearing its woke sensibility on its sleeve with no hint of cynical calculation but instead with a sincerity that sometimes borders on cringey, the musical addresses a whole curriculum of hot-button bullet points - climate change, opiate addiction, gender and racial identity, white privilege, rape culture, social media-shaming and repressed sexual trauma, just for starters.

Every year around the holidays, adaptations of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol surface like regurgitated eggnog at regional theaters across the country. But Jack Thorne's retelling breathes new life into the old chestnut, creating an enchanting spectacle that really is something special. Staged with an ideal balance of sentiment and showmanship by Matthew Warchus and first seen in 2017 at London's Old Vic, where he is artistic director, the immersive production is infused with period atmosphere and heart-stirring music, fostering an infectious spirit of good cheer that reaches giddy heights with the movable feast of the play's climax.

The lively ensemble of seven actors playing Eric and Toby's inner circle and various other roles all register distinctively drawn characters, with Arturo Luis Soria scoring the best lines as a swishy schoolteacher and Harris firing up in some impassioned exchanges as Jasper. Daldry choreographs them like a ballet master, notably in an ecstatic sex scene between Eric and Toby that achieves maximum sensuality through stylized movement. When not directly involved in the main action, the cast is positioned around the elevated platform - which drops into a sunken floor at certain points - interjecting commentary, providing amusing facial or gestural reactions, passing props or jumping up to participate as required. The physicality of the production is exhilarating; it stands easily among Daldry's best work for the stage.

If you aim to embody the indomitable spirit of a beloved subject named not once but twice in the title of her celebratory bio-musical, you better be up to the challenge. Adrienne Warren has what it takes, and then some - the powerhouse voice, the jackhammer legs, the wild dance moves, and above all, the heart - to carry Tina: The Tina Turner Musical across the rough patches of its clunky book and uneven direction. This grit-and-glitter production is neither the best nor the worst (RIP, Donna Summer) of the ongoing wave of musical biographies, but the sensational lead performance that drives pretty much every scene is not to be missed.

Teaming up with a crew of 11 prodigiously talented and hard-working musicians, backup singers and dancers of diverse ages and ethnicities, Byrne gathers a vibrant community onstage, over which he presides as part professor, part preacher, part partying proletarian. The sheer jubilation being transmitted by the performers, not to mention the dynamic staging, seem to demand a new kind of sensory intake. It's less a concert than a participatory religious experience, honoring the primal pleasures of music, dance and song as collective celebration, a rite to be savored more than ever in dark times.

The production premiered with the same cast in summer 2018 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and fits surprisingly well on the expansive stage at Studio 54. Silence and darkness are key elements in the play's presentation, and Cromer works masterfully with his design collaborators - Alexander Woodward (sets), Heather Gilbert (lighting), Aaron Rhyne (projections) and Daniel Kluger (music and sound) - to coax scenes to life in isolated pockets of the blackened space, bathed in pools of suffused light. In a contemplative drama loaded with direct-address monologues, third-person narration and stories within the story, the director and playwright display an uncanny knack for drawing you in, as if providing access to the most private of thoughts and memories.

Marisa Tomei's earthy performance as half-crazed Sicilian American widow Serafina Delle Rose is the main attraction in Trip Cullman's maddeningly uneven production, first seen in 2016 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival with a mostly different supporting cast. Tomei emotes up a storm more brooding even than the clouds billowing over the Louisiana Gulf Coast in Lucy Mackinnon's atmospheric wraparound projections. But director Cullman has no feel for the tricky brew of pathos, passion, poetry, humor and clunky symbolism required of this second-tier Williams work. Instead, it's shrill and hysterically over the top, poorly paced and blighted by some very large Italianate acting with all the authenticity of an Olive Garden chicken alfredo. Troppo is the word that comes to mind.

Tracy Letts, the profusely gifted playwright who also happens to be a brilliant actor, or vice versa, is working in an elevated sitcom mode as well as a revealing personal vein in Linda Vista. The self-inflicted woes of a middle-aged white man, victim of his own inebriating cocktail of testosterone and narcissism, might seem a tone-deaf subject for character study in our current moment of masculinity vivisected and reconstructed. But don't let the slick barrage of one-liners deceive you into thinking there's no room here for bruising self-examination and perhaps even tentative growth.

Some will balk at the grim finality with which Harris stomps on the hope of finding sexual harmony in interracial relationships - or by extension, societal balance in the uneasy intersection of black and white America. Whether or not you agree, there's unquestionably something raw and unsettling in the playwright's position that black identity can never be wholly separated from historical oppression. The play appears to suggest that even the most liberal white perspective, on the other hand, tends to fall back on the convenient escape of not seeing race, rather than being mindful of the painful legacy of subjugation.

Generally, the writing is too busy sketching in historical detail to spare much attention to character development beyond the central figure, but Schenkkan can be commended for not letting his admiration for LBJ get in the way of a clear-eyed portrait. Cox provides a galvanizing center that keeps you watching, even more so as this driven, passionately civic-minded man begins to acknowledge the fatal flaws in his decision-making. It's a forceful, ultimately affecting performance that carries the sting of a disenchantment all too pertinent to American political life 51 years later.

The merciless forces of dementia, anxiety and depression, respectively, torment the protagonists of Florian Zeller's family trilogy, The Father, The Mother and The Son, intricate dramatic puzzles in which the French playwright deftly drops the audience inside the confusion of his characters' heads. All those states of psychological distress exert their cruel influence in The Height of the Storm. If the author's bag of tricks is becoming familiar and the wispy drama is too fragmented to be fully satisfying, the commanding performances of Jonathan Pryce and Eileen Atkins and the meticulous direction of Jonathan Kent nonetheless make this an affecting elegy.

Reverse chronology has become a familiar narrative device in film, but when Harold Pinter employed it in 1978 in his blisteringly personal drama about an extramarital affair, Betrayal, it was still uncommon enough to become highly influential. It makes the drama start from a place of awkwardness steeped in grief, two years after the illicit liaison has finished, and end at the beginning, with a rapturous sense of secret possibility, marbled by the deep vein of melancholy present from the first scene. That emotional complexity smolders like hot coals in Jamie Lloyd's expertly calibrated production, transferring to Broadway direct from its hit London engagement.

The show is A LOT, in every sense, both intoxicating and exhausting in its unrelenting visual and sonic assault. But it virtually defies you not to be entertained.

Writers Scott Brown and Anthony King, along with composer Eddie Perfect and director Alex Timbers, approach the 1988 Tim Burton cult comedy with the giddy excitement of rabid fanboys in their imaginative musical adaptation of Beetlejuice. That enthusiasm translates to the audience, too, with every visual reference lifted directly from the movie yielding huge laughs. The show is a loving homage to a wonderfully weird original, reconceived for the stage with eye-popping design, full-throttle performances and a mischievous sense of fun that literally seems to drip from the Winter Garden Theatre's chandeliers, tinged a ghoulish green for the occasion.

Graham's play has more going for it than the exhaustingly simplistic 'spectaclecture' of Enron. But it's basically a semi-dramatized Wikipedia page with two satisfyingly fleshed-out characters in a crowded field, and two correspondingly compelling performances competing for attention with a load of directorial froufrou. That includes a slinky club chanteuse, a dance number, jaunty onstage music-hall piano accompaniment and a raucous low-comedy interlude right out of The Benny Hill Show.

The ace creative team of writer Robert Horn, composer-lyricist David Yazbek and director Scott Ellis respect the footprint of the movie. But the explosions of laughter the musical elicits come chiefly from the ingenious ways in which the screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Murray Shisgal - plus the countless other hired hands that took a pass during the film's famously difficult conception - has been reimagined as a subversive comedy about gender roles specifically tailored for our times. And no, don't roll your eyes and wince about another gem from a less enlightened decade sacrificing its luster to anxious PC tampering. This is a savvy update that manages to combine awareness of the evolution in gender politics with insouciant wit, a playful spirit and an invigorating streak of good-natured vulgarity.

There's no shortage of scintillating elements in Hillary and Clinton. First and foremost are two giants of the American stage, Laurie Metcalf and John Lithgow, giving wryly amusing - and occasionally poignant - performances that tantalize with private glimpses into very public figures. Then there's playwright Lucas Hnath, who seems ideally equipped to explore a modern political power union, having mined subversive humor and stimulating insights on marriage and gender dynamics in A Doll's House, Part 2, which won Metcalf her first Tony Award. And not to forget Joe Mantello, one of the most reliably incisive directors working on Broadway.

In 'Road to Hell,' the exhilarating opening number of the utterly fabulous Hadestown, Hermes, the conductor of souls into the afterlife, invites us to 'Ride that train to the end of the line.' He's played with seductive authority and knowing humor by the eternally elegant Andre De Shields, outfitted like a superfly pimp in a flashy silver suit, and it's hard to imagine anyone resisting his call. He sells a ticket to a bewitching journey that pays off at every turn.

It's a credit then to the luminous Russell and the two fine supporting actors in director Michael Mayer's slick revival that nobody gets swallowed up in Pale's vortex of bubbling testosterone. Lanford Wilson's 1987 pas de quatre, to borrow a term from the play, remains a compelling account of love as a headlong plunge into the unknown, a risky jeté out of the ashes of sorrow and the stupor of safety into pulse-quickening passion. But in choosing to dial up the humor, Mayer has undercut the anguish that is the drama's foundation, exposing Burn This as just a circuitous journey to an inevitable romantic conclusion.

There's no denying the abundant pleasures to be had from a sumptuous large-scale revival of a classic American musical with a top-flight cast. But a bold reimagining of a familiar work from the canon can deliver an altogether different and far more startling thrill, bringing out unexpected textures and exposing previously subterranean thematic seams. The virtues of a revisionist production don't negate those of the traditional presentation, or vice versa. As the song says, 'the farmer and the cowman should be friends.' Purists will sniff anyway, but for audiences open to experiencing Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma! from a fresh perspective, director Daniel Fish's probing revamp will be a revelation.