David Rooney — Theater Critic

Did it need to become a stage musical? Debatable. But one thing the effusive show gets right, like the movie that spawned it, is the infectious energy of rock 'n' roll at a transitional moment - 1973 - when the raw, rebellious spirit of great rock was making way for the slicker, more commercialized sound of mass-consumption superstardom. For many epochal bands and solo artists, that year was an artistic peak they would never again match. That gives Crowe's quasi-memoir, in both incarnations, a bittersweet undertow of simultaneous discovery and loss.

Jackson savors every morsel of Wilson's glorious language, whether he's outlining a complicated grocery order; ruminating on the wonders of train travel and its dependability in an unreliable world; or ironing a shirt while singing an old railroad song. His characterization as Doaker - the chief living repository of memory for the fractured family, in whose home the play unfolds - is vibrantly inhabited, his every line delivered with a balance of weary experience and wry wisdom.

Into the Woods is arguably the most humorous of Sondheim's shows, and this ensemble of some of New York's finest musical-theater talents has a ball playing up the comedy. But the merriment is never at the expense of the characters' fragile humanity or the material's poignancy.

The revival's shortcomings by no means rest entirely on Feldstein's shoulders. Neither director Michael Mayer nor script doctor Harvey Fierstein has solved the problems of the creaky book, which can't build Fanny's longing for offstage romantic fulfillment to match her professional success - and her eventual showbiz survivor resilience - into a robust through line. The show feels patchy and episodic and it needs a knockout, roof-raising lead to paper over the cracks... Feldstein gives a spirited, highly enjoyable performance, and her freshness drew squeals of appreciation from what seemed like a large contingent of very vocal young female fans on a recent press night. But she never quite makes the material soar, and this is a rickety vehicle that needs a supernova to put gas in its tank.

The euphoria of discovery conveyed by Richard Greenberg through a gay outsider who becomes an impassioned baseball fan hasn't dimmed a bit in the two decades since Take Me Out was first produced. Other things, however, have changed in director Scott Ellis' finely tuned and superbly cast Broadway revival for Second Stage. Issues that once seemed too reflective of the playwright's hand at work now seem urgently keyed into a contemporary world in which masculine anxiety and its bilious consequences are being held up for scrutiny.

Alas, the stars' efforts, while certainly appealing, don't make the material any less obsolete, a throwback to the bougie boulevard comedies that were once a Broadway staple. The observations on marriage and relationships occasionally generate a chuckle, but more often seem stale and the sexual politics retrograde, something that John Benjamin Hickey's serviceable direction can't disguise. The laughs mostly spring from watching a real-life showbiz couple kick back and have fun bouncing off each other. Judging by the hearty response at a recent press night, for many that might be reward enough.

As talented as Lenk is, however, to this longtime fan of Company she seems jarringly wrong for Bobbie, regardless of the character's gender. A darkening touch of cynicism can work with this recessive protagonist, as Raul Esparza showed in the terrific 2006 Broadway revival. But Bobby/Bobbie's yearning has to be apparent, too, and Lenk makes her inaccessible. Without the sense of an ache inside for something more emotionally satisfying - a quality by all accounts not missing from London lead Rosalie Craig's performance - the internal conflict that drives the show has a fuel shortage. Lenk mostly seems aloof, casting a quizzical, sometimes bemused eye over her married friends while remaining too opaque about Bobbie's own needs.

Any work of art about the socioeconomic divide, particularly with regard to inequities rooted in race, class and power, is bound to land differently now than it did in, say, 2004. That seems entirely apposite for a musical with the word 'change' in its title and the tremors of personal, political and historical upheaval thematically embedded in its story. But it's not just shifts in the prism of American life in the 17 years since Caroline, or Change transferred from the Public Theater to Broadway that breathe urgency into this shattering revival. Everything about Michael Longhurst's production feels more emotionally charged, starting with Sharon D. Clarke's mighty performance in the title role.

Any work of art about the socioeconomic divide, particularly with regard to inequities rooted in race, class and power, is bound to land differently now than it did in, say, 2004. That seems entirely apposite for a musical with the word 'change' in its title and the tremors of personal, political and historical upheaval thematically embedded in its story. But it's not just shifts in the prism of American life in the 17 years since Caroline, or Change transferred from the Public Theater to Broadway that breathe urgency into this shattering revival. Everything about Michael Longhurst's production feels more emotionally charged, starting with Sharon D. Clarke's mighty performance in the title role.

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!'

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.

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.