David Rooney

It's often said that there's no greater grief than a parent's loss of a child, so it follows that there's no more devastating moment in King Lear than when the monarch's pitiless odyssey through familial betrayal, rage and madness, triggered by his own blind vanity, leaves him cradling the dead body of the one daughter whose love for him was pure. That goes double when the title character's tragic arc is explored, in Sam Gold's aggressively modern, gender-blind production, by the magnificent Glenda Jackson. The searing pathos of Lear's abject diminishment seems all the more powerful given the steely authority that precedes it.

Watching the spirited back-and-forth that wraps up this unique, stimulating and exquisitely heartfelt show on such an uplifting note, you can't help but wish that the primary and election debates in our country's hopelessly mired political system were even half as intellectually vigorous, half as perceptive and compassionate. If that were the case, the choices of every thinking person perhaps would be clear and our problems well on the way to being solved. We can dream, right?

There's some overlap here with 2015's Motown: The Musical, which covered a broader swath of the legendary hit factory's history. But this is the superior show, less pedestrian in its storytelling, if not without its own limitations. Those lie primarily in the workmanlike book, which settles on the memoir of Otis Williams, the Temptations' last surviving founding member, as its sole source. It also tries for such exhaustive detail that the narration almost literally never stops, while somehow making commercial success seem the easy part.

If the changes dampen some of the show's comedic vitality in order to make it palatable to contemporary sensibilities, so be it. There are corresponding losses and gains, too, in O'Hara's performance. One of America's most incandescent musical-theater stars, her default setting is elegance and sincerity, so the soupcon of campy self-intoxication that seems a requirement of the role is largely missing. This is not the harrumphing hysteric that audiences familiar with the show will remember.

Many of the characters are cut from familiar molds - the effeminate gay kid torn between self-affirmation and self-protection; the privileged bully with his own burdens; the closeted loner crippled by anxieties; the sensitive jock. And the microcosm of an exclusive boarding school has often served in theater and film as a prism through which to examine traits prevalent in society at large. But the specificity of a black middle-class milieu, plus the writer's sharp ear for dialogue and his observations on class, race and sexuality, give McCraney's play distinctive qualities that outweigh its more conventional aspects.

Perhaps the most notable achievement of this thoughtful adaptation, and Bartlett Sher's meticulously calibrated Broadway production, is that it takes Harper Lee's 1960 novel - a modern American classic that pretty much all of us know either from studying it in high school or watching the outstanding 1962 film version - and makes us hang on every word as if experiencing the story for the first time.

Anyone familiar with the movie will be prepared for the bleak malevolence of the ending. But van Hove and Hall save their most significant addition for last, replacing Chayefsky's omniscient narrator with a coda in which an out-of-body Howard warns of 'the destructive power of absolute beliefs.' Given the adaptation's shift to make Howard its monumental center, plus the fact that Cranston blows everyone else off the stage, it's fitting that he has the final word.

Is the show good? Certainly not in the sense of traditional musical-theater craft. Would I see it again? Duh, already planning on it. Director Jason Moore's production, which breaks new frontiers on Broadway for bare midriffs, underboobs, wigs and paillettes, unashamedly embraces its abundance of trashy-flashy, tacky vintage-Vegas kitsch. But it's also slyly fabulous and imbued with a plucky feminist spirit that's quite stirring, basically recounting the story of how the innately shy Cherilyn Sarkisian stopped letting men tell her what to do and found the strength to run her own show.

The legitimately funny book is co-written by Bob Martin, who won a Tony Award (as did Leavel) for his work in the same capacity on The Drowsy Chaperone; and Chad Beguelin, who penned Disney's Aladdin, another Nicholaw musical. The two-pronged score, which has distinct styles for the Hoosier teens and the Manhattanite interlopers, is by composer Matthew Sklar, with clever lyrics by Beguelin; the two last teamed on yet another Nicholaw show, Elf. Any musical that makes it to Broadway these days without a familiar movie source or a popular jukebox score is an achievement, so this original story is a rainbow unicorn that wins points right there.

To quote the title of an R&B hit by early '70s girl group Honey Cone, 'One Monkey Don't Stop No Show.' Except that in King Kong, it most definitely does. In fact, that monstrous ape, able to cup an aspiring Hollywood starlet in one giant paw, pretty much is the show in this otherwise blundering musical, in which a low-wattage cast gamely trudges through one embarrassing number or cliché-ridden book scene after another. Even if the star puppet might be better suited for an arena spectacle or theme-park attraction, you can't take your eyes off this technological marvel, not least for its incredible facial expressiveness. It's completely appropriate that the animatronic gorilla and its operators get the show's final bow.

One might question whether the grim inevitability of such a punitive ending was necessary, and whether the play might have gained complexity without diluting its message by subverting audience expectations with a different, less predictable outcome. But this is tense theater designed to shake up our complacency and make us think. In that aim, it succeeds.

The production felt a little choppy and uncertain last fall, with the talented Urie doubling down on self-satirizing Arnold by rendering the lovelorn professional drag queen a mushy caricature. Not only does he now feel more like a flesh-and-blood person - his needs and vulnerabilities and the self-defense mechanism of his caustic wit all achingly human; his vocal mannerisms part of who he is, not just a layer of performance - but the staging has acquired greater fluidity and emotional richness. David Zinn's sets (ranging from suggestive minimalism through playful stylization to homey detail) and David Lander's descriptive lighting also look gorgeous on the Hayes stage, as do the pleasingly understated period costumes of Clint Ramos.

What a pleasure to see improv queen Elaine May, erstwhile half of a legendary comedy double-act with Mike Nichols, back on Broadway after 50-plus years at 86, her timing as sharply idiosyncratic as ever. Even for those of us who know her acerbic style only from recordings, movies and playwriting, there's a special satisfaction in watching this influential humorist perform. She's alternately funny, maddening and heartbreaking as a longtime Greenwich Village fixture whose mind is deteriorating faster than her body in Kenneth Lonergan's The Waverly Gallery.

The performances are too good, right across the board, to single out all that merit recognition. But I particularly loved watching Flanagan emerge periodically from waking slumber, her eyes burning with feverish intensity. Another distinguished Irish stage veteran, Molloy, is so caustic as Aunt Pat that her words sting, but there's fathomless sadness beneath her bitter humor. O'Reilly cuts through Mary's fragile presence with a gorgeous speech that spills out of her toward the end, full of conflicting impulses of hurt and compassion. And Edwards' Tom Kettle is a figure of wrenching innocence and haunting pathos.

If this makes the play sound in any way didactic, more dialectic than drama, be assured it's not. The exchanges have the vigorous back-and-forth zing of a sweaty squash match, not to mention a stinging relevance to so much of what's been happening for years now in American social, cultural and political discourse. It's hard to imagine this pithy play ever being more timely or more ideally cast, and the dynamic of the three actors is thrilling to watch.

Sorry, but American actors can't do regional English accents. OK, maybe Meryl Streep and a handful of others. But too few of the people on stage in The Nap, in which many of the best lines acquire their flavor from colorful Sheffield vernacular. Effortful delivery is just one issue with the wheezy direction of Daniel Sullivan, whose forte is definitely not this kind of snappy, suspenseful comedy, in which timing is everything.

Few performers today have the quicksilver command and agile wit of Janet McTeer, so casting her as Sarah Bernhardt, the famed French thespian of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was inspired. Even more so once the focus tightens onto 'The Divine Sarah' as she chafes against the limited avenues open to women in the theater, ignoring naysayers in her determination to tackle one of the greatest male roles in the dramatic canon, Shakespeare's Hamlet. But despite many tantalizing elements and historical material ripe for exploration from a contemporary feminist perspective, Theresa Rebeck's Bernhardt/Hamlet doesn't add up to a play. At least not a satisfying one.

End-of-the-'80s nostalgia rules at the Nederlander Theatre, where the cut-and-paste musical version of Garry Marshall's 1990 romantic comedy, Pretty Woman, is re-creating the cultural-touchstone movie beat for beat, set to a score by Bryan Adams and songwriting partner Jim Vallance that could easily pass for vintage FM-radio pop-rock singles. Just as the film was a stellar vehicle for Julia Roberts, the musical showcases a radiant performance from Samantha Barks as the Hollywood Boulevard prostitute that becomes the 'beck and call girl' of a corporate raider.

Fifty years after Mart Crowley's landmark comic drama about a group of gay men in pre-Stonewall New York first made waves, director Joe Mantello vigorously shakes the dust off The Boys in the Band. What might have been another bulletin from the distant queer past is transformed into a scintillating portrait of the self-loathing that festers in ghettoized subcultures, perhaps as much now as then. Starring a high-caliber cast of out gay actors led by Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer and Andrew Rannells, the production is sharpest when the zingers are flying back and forth like missiles, but the anger coursing through the play's veins still scalds.

The surest way to get as pickled as the self-deceiving regulars at Harry Hope's downtown New York dive bar in The Iceman Cometh would be to take a shot of whiskey every time someone says 'pipe dreams.' Eugene O'Neill was seldom one to go easy on emphatic repetition of his themes, and the playwright's bleak vision of men drowning their deferred plans in cheap booze can be as prolix as it is poetic. George C. Wolfe's revival feels on some levels like it's still cohering, the underlying despair remaining muted for too much of the three-hour-45-minute running time. But it comes together in a powerful final act driven by the searing confessional monologue of Denzel Washington's Hickey.

Sadly, that's one of the few decent jokes in this tacky little show, a feebly dramatized Wikipedia page with lackluster covers, which was rushed to Broadway following a fall tryout at La Jolla Playhouse that received mostly tepid reviews. And yet it shows no sign of improvements having been attempted. Heaven knows it's not the way it should be.

Is it strictly for Potterheads? Not at all, though anyone going in cold, with no prior knowledge of the stories, will miss much of the clever cross-referencing of characters and events from throughout the series. A detailed recap starting with the key prophecy that propelled the entire saga and continuing with a breakdown of each of the seven novels is provided in the program and will be helpful to the uninitiated. But there's also a universal dimension to the human drama here - the challenges of parenting, the conflict between fathers and teenage sons burdened by intimidating legacies, the sustaining force of love and friendship, the eternal grip of the past - that will prove poignant and meaningful even to audiences unversed in the wizarding wars. I'm by no means a Potter obsessive but I was amazed, watching the plays, at how vividly these characters are embedded in our cultural consciousness. You can feel the electric charge in the theater even before the action begins, and it's highly infectious, whatever your prior exposure.

The changes are minor enough to go virtually unnoticed but sufficiently considered to fuel discussion among those convinced this light period piece has problems that needed addressing. Beyond that, it's a polished production with an accomplished - if not spectacular - cast. But it doesn't come close to the sweeping cinematic fluidity of Sher's best work, which filled the immense Beaumont stage with a majestic breadth seldom equaled. Nor does it approach the thrilling emotional engagement of those earlier shows.

A remarkable aspect of O'Brien's production - and of Henry's staggering, soulful performance, which is this revival's smoldering core - is that even in our current moment of heightened attention toward mistreatment of women, in which a hot-tempered man like Billy might seem an automatic villain, there's a tormented helplessness to this doomed, rootless transient that makes you understand Julie's surrender. Even when she swallows her shame and makes excuses for his reprehensible behavior; it's almost as if in choosing to love him she has chosen to be an outsider like him too.

Leon's sluggish production does eventually gather some steam in the second act, expanding beyond the banal romantic focus of impassioned teacher James Leeds (Joshua Jackson) and reluctant student Sarah Norman (Lauren Ridloff) into more complex issues. When it tightens its focus on the rights of deaf people to choose the terms on which they interact with the hearing world - weighing the virtues of American Sign Language, lip-reading, and speech with conflicting ideologies - you can see why this was an important work back in its time.