David Rooney — Theater Critic

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.

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.

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.

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.

Talk about a match made in heaven. Kevin Kline was born to do Noel Coward, and his casting as Garry Essendine, the 1930s stage star and aging playboy at the center of his own eternal melodrama in Present Laughter, yields a performance of unimpeachable skill, made all the more delectable by its lightness of touch. Matching witty verbal jousts with florid gesticulation, and head-to-toe body language that constitutes its own uniquely refined brand of physical comedy, Kline etches a character pulled between conceited selfishness and encroaching melancholy, a coddled man-child helpless without a captive audience.

A dubious quote plastered outside the Walter Kerr Theatre declares, 'It's impossible not to be charmed' by Amelie, A New Musical. While reviewers spend their working lives arguing that all critical opinion is by its very nature subjective, I'd call that fake news. Just as Jean-Pierre Jeunet's popular 2001 French film presented an elaborate fantasist's version of modern-day Paris, bursting with quaint eccentrics, this grating stage musical takes the slenderest of romances and drowns it in cartoonish quirks in place of genuine warmth or feeling. And while Phillipa Soo is a creditable stand-in for the movie's uber-gamine Audrey Tautou, as a musical comedy heroine, Amelie Poulain is a dud, a bundle of cutesy affectations in search of a human core.

Director Kate Whoriskey's fluid and propulsive staging benefits from an excellent cast led by the fearless triad of JohAnna Day, Michelle Wilson and Alison Wright, who play plant drones and tight friends destabilized when one of them moves into management. James Colby adds sensible notes as a kindhearted but ineffectual bartender, and the vibrant Khris Davis and Will Pullen are young buddies whose hope curdles into anger and violence. Sweat communicates its points with minimal fuss and maximum grit. Along with the rage, despair and violence, there's humor and abundant humanity.

Call it the guilty pleasure of '80s nostalgia if you must, but revisiting the show at almost three decades' distance, I was unprepared to be so consistently entertained for the two-and-a-half-hour duration. Sure, it's a brash, broad-strokes saga with questionable racial and gender representation and a taste for salacious vulgarity. But although director Laurence Connor has adhered to the basic contours of the original, his grittier approach exposes teeth in the material that I don't recall previously being so sharp. That's most notable in the show's unflattering depiction of American foreign policy, viewed through the prism of a misguided war and the messy atonement efforts that followed.

Continuing Roundabout's long history with Miller's work, this is a very solid, sensitively directed production of a flawed but rewarding play. It's no Death of a Salesman, but it still has much to say about capitalism and its costs to the striving American family.