David Rooney

Ironically, given that the musical has a more cartoonish quality amplified by the extensive use of video in the design, the key transformation plays more believably on stage. That's also because fresh-faced Henningsen, with her big, bright voice, brings such assurance to Cady's ricochets from guileless adventurer in a strange land to cool conqueror and back to humbled do-gooder, who is able to see the redeeming qualities in everyone. And Henningsen's sweet chemistry with Selig lends spark to their scenes; Aaron's own reawakening from Regina's spell contributes to Cady's growth as he tears down her misguided belief that 'More is Better.'

Stage acting doesn't get any better than Glenda Jackson's performance as the autocratic nonagenarian in Edward Albee's Three Tall Women, modeled on the adoptive mother with whom the playwright had a famously thorny relationship. On Broadway for the first time in 30 years (23 of which she spent as a member of British Parliament), the two-time Oscar winner shows no trace of rustiness in a characterization of such diamond-hard ferocity you dare not take your eyes off her. It's an almost ridiculous luxury that in Joe Mantello's crystalline production of this brittle but moving play about death and self-knowledge, two such accomplished actors as Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill become supplementary dividends.

Let's get the obvious question out of the way up front: Does Chris Evans cut it in his leap from the superhero universe to the naturalistic comedy-drama of Kenneth Lonergan's Lobby Hero? Absolutely. Evans fully inhabits his character of a vain but well-liked New York City career cop on track to make detective, who is quite comfortable rationalizing to himself abuses of power large and small in a profession where gender inequality and toxic masculinity come with the badge. The actor best known as Captain America brings plenty of cocky swagger, his thumbs hooked into his utility belt like an Old West cowboy with a bushy mustache to match, but his assured performance never aims to be a star turn. Rather, it's an integral part of an evenly balanced, four-person ensemble piece.

Lane brings yet another kind of volatility to Roy's spiky scenes with Belize (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), a nurse at St. Vincent's Hospital and Prior's former drag sister. Stewart-Jarrett nails every laugh with his imperious attitude, bouncing Cohn's abuse right back at him. But his swishy attitude doesn't hide his wounded indignation over the disease that's ravaging the gay community, finding a worthy target in defensive Louis in one particularly memorable encounter.

Under the direction of Michael Grandage, Frozen doesn't entirely go wrong, but it does evince signs of the struggle to establish a consistent, unifying tone and to settle on a center in a story inherently bifurcated by having two heroines kept apart for most of the action. It ends up being merely adequate, a bland facsimile when it should have been something memorable in its own right.

Unlike in Alan Bennett's play The Madness of George III, and its film adaptation, the deteriorating mental health of a monarch here doesn't constitute a sustaining narrative arc, even if Rylance's commanding performance remains the center of attention. (It's certainly the main reason for the production's Broadway transfer.) The more interesting thread is the motivation of Farinelli to keep extending his stay in Madrid, his love for Isabella becoming a contributing factor, and his refusal ever to sing in public again.

I confess I had never been drawn to linger long in Bikini Bottom, the character's underwater home. And for much of the show I was dazed by the sensory overload of Tina Landau's acid-trip production while groaning at its fusillade of cornball aquatic puns and absence of musical cohesion. But whether it wore me down like coral erosion or grew on me like algae, the show's unstinting commitment to anarchic plotting, goopy sentiment and bonkers ADHD juvenilia had me grinning like an idiot, even before I got knocked in the head with an inflated plastic orb (lawsuit pending) during the crowd-pleasing closing number.

Together with his resourceful design team and cast of expressive, vocally gifted performers, Arden has approached the piece with the nurturing hand it requires - striking a balance between child-like story theater and folkloric ritual with a fantastical dash of dangerous voodoo. It's a show about the healing power of storytelling, which makes it perfect for these grim times. Themes concerning the divisions of class, race, skin-color pigmentation and wealth also give the material timeless currency.

But this is a play with an identity crisis, exacerbated by MacKinnon's incongruously stylized scene changes - architectural blueprints of halls of power laced with ribbons of news ticker. Visually, these fussy interludes make no sense, beyond echoing the confusion of a work that can't decide if it's a sly political thriller about our alarming reality or a conventional drawing-room comedy about no credible reality at all.

No doubt Martin had in mind a cutting commentary on the obstacles faced in keeping a modern marriage together, and the vital importance for a couple of presenting a united front, even against the enemy within. But Meteor Shower is too busy setting up jokes to create the kind of fleshed out characters and relationships necessary to give the comedy real teeth, or to make us fear for the union under siege. Martin's structural gimmick involving time, and a Fight Club-style twist hinted at in Corky's earlier warning, seem more like improv-comedy fodder than grist for a full-length play.

One of the small miracles of The Band's Visit is that this wistful new musical - in which themes of waiting, yearning and inertia play a significant part - weaves such seduction out of ephemeral encounters unfolding over a single uneventful night. As soothing as a cool breeze across desert sands, this gorgeous, minor-key show won a deserved cluster of awards in its premiere late last year at the Atlantic Theater Company. It transfers to Broadway with its delicate alchemy intact, borne aloft by the intoxicating Middle-Eastern rhythms of David Yazbek's original score, and by the soulful performances of an exemplary ensemble.

Directed by Doug Hughes with a solid cast of 23 and a tireless foot on the accelerator, this is the kind of large-canvas, intelligent drama that Lincoln Center Theater does impeccably, notably so last season with Oslo. The difference, however, is that J.T. Rogers' Tony-winning play had richly individualized characters with incisively drawn cultural distinctions to flesh out the dense detail of its political history lesson. Junk, by contrast, is populated with aggressive arbitrageurs, inside traders and number-crunching sharks, all swimming more or less in the same pool.

Hwang and director Julie Taymor have taken a curious route to address that challenge, going back to include facts that subsequently came to light about the characters' real-life inspirations, and removing much of the illusion in a work that revolves around erotic deception. While broadening the play beyond the perspective of the fictionalized Frenchman, Rene Gallimard, to include that of his lover of 20 years, Beijing Opera performer Song Liling, the production wades into didactic territory that fights against the work's inherent theatricality.

While many theater-makers would have felt the urge to splash projections across the rear wall, providing visual cues along the way, Springsteen draws us into his world using only his words, lyrics, melodies and expert modulation of mood. The show is a model of finely chiseled simplicity, by turns contemplative, moving and joyous. It closes, naturally, with 'Born to Run.' In keeping with an evening in which so many well-known tracks are given fresh life, that timeless declaration about escaping the ordinary to taste life and love and danger becomes also a soulful reaffirmation of home, ending with a heartbeat tapped out on the body of a guitar.

Its inorganic mysticism aside, the play functions more readily as a naturalistic English drawing-room drama of the period, examining the shifting tides of wealth and class, the cost of bourgeois complacency, the failure of political idealism, and the loss of prosperity, position and security for one well-off Yorkshire family between the wars. Those themes provide a kinship to Chekhov, particularly The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters, though this is a vastly inferior work to those plays, or to Priestley's better-known An Inspector Calls. However, Roundabout at least deserves credit for casting its net beyond the established classics....Time and the Conways is a funny old play, interesting more for its structural adventurousness than its thematic trenchancy. And while Taichman and her uneven cast can't obscure the writing's weaknesses, the production closes on a forceful note that makes it retroactively quite satisfying.

Imagine simultaneous revivals of a dozen or so of the standout musical productions of the latter half of the 20th century. That's more or less what Prince of Broadway crams into two-and-a-half hours, in sample-size nuggets that touch on the magic while leaving you craving more. Sifting through such an embarrassment of riches, it's inevitable that certain choices and omissions appear questionable, and the nine performers that make up the tremendously versatile and hard-working ensemble are a better fit for some roles than others. But this recap of an illustrious career leaves no doubt about the validity of producer-director Harold Prince's exalted status, even if it's thin on illuminating detail.

That's perhaps unfair to Scott McPherson's 1990 comedy-drama, which is well constructed, with a deft balance of dry comedy, wisdom and pathos, and a sincere appreciation of the challenging role of the caregiver. Its rich underlay of compassion speaks of the author's direct experiences - of living with elderly, ailing relatives, and of devastating suffering and fortifying love during the AIDS epidemic, when the play was written. (McPherson died of AIDS-related causes in 1992, aged 33, nine months after his partner.) But yesterday's clear-eyed reflection on life's blessings and blights can be today's saggy, sentimental Lifetime movie manqué in the wrong hands. And director Anne Kauffman's are definitely the wrong hands.

One of the most famous exits in modern drama prompts an entrance that bristles with tension, provocation and unexpected subversive humor in Lucas Hnath's terrific new play, A Doll's House, Part 2. After acquiring a rising-star reputation with spiky works like The Christians, about evangelical megachurches, and Red Speedo, about doping in professional sports, Hnath makes an audacious Broadway debut with this pithy sequel. It delivers explosive laughs while also posing thoughtful questions about marriage, gender inequality and human rights that reverberate across the almost 140 years since Henrik Ibsen's original was first produced in 1879.

The 2011 Broadway revival of The House of Blue Leaves was too unbalanced to do the job, but Trip Cullman's razor-sharp staging of Six Degrees of Separation serves as a welcome reminder of the fiercely intelligent, pungently funny voice of playwright John Guare at his vintage best. The thoroughbred Allison Janney stars as Ouisa Kittredge, a well-heeled Manhattan WASP who dreams in dollar signs until a beguiling young African-American trickster, imbued with both obfuscation and naked yearning by Corey Hawkins, exposes her to the spiritual emptiness beneath her complacent sophistication. While those two sensational performances occupy the play's molten center, the entire large ensemble that surrounds them is on fire.

The key selling point of this pretty but anodyne musical, which ends up being more satisfying than the sum of its parts. It's a fairy-tale whose princess chooses her own kind of prince, a destiny foretold in the stirring shared childhood recollection of Dmitry and Anya, 'In a Crowd of Thousands.' It's kitschy, old-fashioned entertainment given a relatively sophisticated presentation, and you have to acknowledge its success when you hear the target demographic swoon on cue.

Somewhere along the way, the spirit of Dahl's writing has gotten trampled - the nimble wordplay, the eccentric humor, the mischievous horror, the mordant social satire - replaced by an abrasive parade of garish color and ugly incidents that rarely spell fun. This choc-atrocity has got to rank as one of the most aesthetically off-putting family musicals in memory. There's a creepiness to the show that's not Dahl's subversive creepiness or even Johnny Depp's fey creepiness in the unwatchable Burton movie. In fact, when Borle's Wonka goes out into the world incognito as a stringy-haired candy shop owner, it could almost be sex-offender-registry creepiness.

I can't recall the last time I felt a crowd so frothed up with excitement at a Broadway show, and certainly in those terms, no production currently playing in New York can touch this perfectly upholstered revival of the indestructible 1964 musical chestnut. What's more astonishing is that the enthusiasm never wanes, sending wave upon wave of love across the footlights for two and a half vigorously entertaining hours. And in a testament to the spirit of the veteran showbiz troupers who are now a vanishing breed, Midler soaks it up like a heat-seeking beacon and then beams it right back out into the house.

Sullivan's old-school refinement as a director is exactly what's called for in this merciless tale of greed and cunning. The Little Foxes is not a play loaded with subtext that rewards stripped-down surgical re-examination, which would explain why it was among the less illuminating forays into 20th-century American drama for leading experimentalist Ivo van Hove. But served straight, with the right actors, it's a crackling good yarn. The closest thing to a radical touch here is having lead actresses Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon alternate in the roles of Regina Giddens, the hungriest of the Hubbards and ultimately the snakiest; and Birdie, her alcoholic sister-in-law and the one character legitimately descended from Southern aristocracy.

Unlike far too many musicals regurgitated from hit movies, Groundhog Day is a delirious reinvention with its own defiantly unique personality, a relentless forward-backward spin that leaves you smiling, exhilarated and giddy, much like the Tilt-a-Whirl ride that briefly occupies the stage in the show's second act. The fiendishly crafty creative team has devised a musical that cracks open the source material to amplify its themes, using the story's collision of misanthropy and sweetness to explore existential questions about lives stuck in neutral and the liberating power to unlock meaningful change by savoring every moment as a fresh experience.

The musical is an admiring feminist salute to two trailblazing entrepreneurs - the first women to head American corporations that bore their names - whose success was fueled in part by their rivalry. It would seem perfectly timed to follow FX's juicy Feud, though War Paint is more notable for the distanced sparring of its glambitious animus. Despite the bellicose title, this is no wig-pulling, lipstick-smearing catfight. There's delicious bitchery and barbs aplenty, but the more indelible takeaway is the poignancy of all that these women had in common.