Elysa Gardner

The resilience demonstrated by Kalukango’s character and others in Paradise Square seems fitting in a show that might have been prematurely written off as the latest big musical that couldn’t. Instead, at a time when original stories and scores are becoming increasingly rare in such Broadway fare, the production delivers both a surge of energy and a flicker of hope.

Wisely, though, MJ neither defends its subject from the most serious charges against him nor urges us to distinguish between the artist and his art. Like most jukebox fare, it's at its most winning when song and dance are in progress-and since Jackson's hits always lent themselves to theatrical presentation, and theater and film giants were among his biggest influences, Wheeldon and his company have plenty of room to fly. In one sequence, the ballet-bred choreographer and director pays cool, glistening homage to Fred Astaire, Bob Fosse and the seminal duo the Nicholas Brothers, offering a bit of historical perspective on the restless brilliance captured in other routines.

It's the 1950s, and after taking LSD for the first time, the movie legend and one-time vaudevillian is getting psychically re-acquainted with his much younger self through song and tap dance. The tune is impressively catchy, and the routine, as choreographed by Michelle Dorrance and executed by Yazbeck and Ware, is so exhilarating that you may feel chemically enhanced just watching it. I'd love to report that Sunset sustains that high for its roughly two and a half hours, but this long, strange trip-featuring a book by James Lapine, who also directs, music by Tom Kitt and lyrics by Michael Korie-is ultimately an uneven one.

'Company's other commitment-phobe, Amy, has been reborn as Jamie, a man, still terrified to marry the adoring Paul, played by the adorable Etai Benson. After managing to calm Matt Doyle's adroitly hysterical Jamie, Bobbie sings 'Marry Me A Little,' one of numerous Sondheim fan favorites cut from productions of his shows through the years. 'Keep a tender distance/So we'll both be free...I'm ready,' she announces. She isn't, quite yet, but she's getting there, just as Bobby was, and Elliott and her own company trace that journey with a mix of intuition, invention and heart worthy of its creators.

LaChanze is luminous and fierce in the central role, showing us the dignity and warmth that have sustained Wiletta where others might have simply become embittered. Another musical theater stalwart, Chuck Cooper, has a poignant turn as Sheldon Forrester, the veteran actor cast as Job's father, whose obsequiousness contrasts with Wiletta's rising pique, while Michael Zegen captures Manners's unconscious arrogance to almost chilling effect. Don Stephenson and Danielle Campbell deliver deft comic performances as the white cast members, Bill O'Wray and Judy Sears-respectively, a latently racist character actor and a well-meaning but clueless ingénue-and Jessica Frances Dukes adds more punch as Millie Davis, a Black actress who is older than Judy but younger than Wiletta, and hasn't quite arrived at the latter's level of frustration, yet.

I could cite a number of even more cringe-worthy lyrics, but why bother? In truth, Diana isn't much more insipid than any number of musical hagiographies that have popped up in recent decades, and director Christopher Ashley, to his credit, guides it with a light hand, having fun with the dishier aspects of the story rather than wallowing in the pathos. A scene documenting Diana's rapport with AIDS patients is offset by one in which her boy toy James Hewitt turns up, played by a strapping, shirtless Gareth Keegan, bumping and grinding a bit of relief into our heroine's dreary lot. Diana's butler, Paul Burrell, is a stock character, the dutiful but mischievous servant, but Anthony Murphy plays him with infectious relish.

If there are a few slow-moving moments in Longhurst's production, the payoff is big; it's unlikely that anyone with a beating heart will leave after Act Two without moist eyes, or at least a lump in the throat. That's not because of the sadness in Kushner's story, of which there is plenty; it's because of the sense of hope that ultimately cuts through it, blazing through the final number. It's not easy to juggle despair and exuberance without resorting to sentimentality, and Caroline still manages the task handily.

Watching fog rise off the stage, and listening to what sounded like a faint rumble in between certain songs, I was reminded of a colleague's comment that the Belgian director likes to stage the subtext of plays-and of how I irritated I was by the tics and tricks in some of his previous New York efforts. Not so here. Most notably, scenic and lighting designer Jan Versweyveld, van Hove's longtime collaborator, has teamed with video designer Luke Halls to make the latter aspect central to this production. An enormous screen projects both live and pre-recorded images, threatening to overshadow the actors at times but also providing vivid insights, not all of them dark. During 'The Jet Song,' we see the different individuals in the gang preening and clowning through the streets, even as the young men glower as a collective.

Having been lucky enough to catch Tina Turner in concert before she essentially retired from touring, I can report that Tina, for all its huffing and puffing, doesn't capture the force of nature she was in live performance. That's not a criticism of Warren; it's just a reminder that a better, truer and generally less expensive way to appreciate our favorite artists is through their own work. Though if Tina were to lead a few uninitiated audience members to Turner's, I'd be the first to stand up and cheer.

Life-affirming isn't a term that should be thrown around casually, but it's the first one that came to mind as I left a performance of David Byrne's American Utopia that was interrupted by several spontaneous standing ovations-not to mention audience members dancing at their seats, with the titular singer/songwriter's encouragement.

So now we know: The Greek gods were not helicopter parents. That's the takeaway, at least, from The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical, adapted from the popular young readers' book by Rick Riordan, the first installment in a series that's emerged as a sort of Harry Potter lite. The show follows the adventures of a group of 'half-bloods'-not the offspring of witches and wizards and non-magical 'Muggles,' as in J.K. Rowling's novels, but the spawn of gods or goddesses and mere mortals. And rather than meeting at a school for superior beings, these teens cross path at a summer camp for misfits, where our titular hero is sent after being tossed out of three schools; the last expulsion occurs after Percy attacks a teacher, when she turns into a creature called a Minotaur. (Think Dementor, Potterheads.)

What we get less of a sense of, despite Society's largely sympathetic portrait of its still controversial subject, is the turmoil Johnson must have endured, along with other leaders he engaged. Their dialogue is often too obvious to invite reflection, so that even the most supple actors can seem as if they're reciting lines in a well-crafted reenactment of historical events. Richard Thomas, who generally makes any production worth seeing, is wasted as Johnson veep Hubert Humphrey, presented here as part dutiful aide, part convenient foil. Marc Kudisch juggles a few heavies who contest Johnson's more progressive policies, among them Chicago's Mayor Richard J. Daley, and emerge as cardboard slimeballs-accurate in spirit, perhaps, but less interesting in execution.

Indeed, one suspects that had Brown, whose credits also include Netflix specials, not been drawn to his current calling, he might have applied his powers of persuasion to a more nefarious one-become a cult leader, perhaps, or a marketing executive for an oil company. Let's be glad he chose the path he did, one that led him onstage, for Brown is as natural and charismatic a live performer as you're likely to see in any capacity this season, combining a razor-sharp wit with exuberant improvisational finesse and, notwithstanding the various gifts he displays here-which extend to sketch artistry, apparently-a disarming sense of wonder.

Yet tragedy is not what defines Sea Wall, or A Life, penned by another acclaimed British playwright, Nick Payne (Constellations, If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet) and starring another film and stage star known to collaborate with him, Jake Gyllenhaal. Under the fierce, tender direction of Carrie Cracknell-also a Brit, who won praise here several years back for her London-based staging of A Doll's House at BAM-the plays attest to our essential will to live and love, despite the challenges these pursuits continually throw at us.

'Pander to and promote the most base instincts of people all you like, fine, create an appetite, but I warn you,' Cudlipp says. 'You'll have to keep feeding it.' If it's too late to kill the beast Murdoch has nourished over decades, Ink at least encourages us to reflect on its growth-and, if we're fair, our own accountability in that.

But Gary is just as difficult, in the best sense, to sum up neatly: a raucous comedy whose subject is tragedy-not the titular Shakespeare play, which is merely its starting point, but our enduring capacity for destruction, which Mac engages with gloriously raunchy humor and blazing intuition, and an aching tenderness that sneaks up on you and wraps itself around your heart.

For starters, Mitchell is a gifted tunesmith, and lyricist, who approaches musical theater with a clear, infectious sense of wonder. Her melodic savvy, if not entirely consistent over a run time of nearly two and a half hours with little spoken dialogue, is buttressed by an ear for piercing, haunting harmonies, abetted here by musical director and vocal arranger Liam Robinson. Moreover, Mitchell and, to her credit, Chavkin have mined a beautiful and theatrically resonant tale from their source material. If there are traces of the pretensions that marred Natasha in this heavily stylized production, the director and her lavishly talented design team remain in service to the story, which ties together the myths of Orpheus and Eurydice, respectively played by Reeve Carney and Eva Noblezada, and Hades and Persephone, played by Patrick Page and Amber Gray.

But in striving for realness, Fish can actually reduce the level of their appeal, or the degree to which they earn our empathy. The latter is especially true for the show's darkest figure, the farmhand Jud, a troubled loner obsessed with Curly's love interest, Laurey. Though Jud is sometimes played merely as a heavy, better productions have conveyed his own psychological suffering; here, in Patrick Vaill's sulking, seething portrayal, he's a walking mug shot, lifted straight from a news report of the latest shooting spree. (In one scene, projection designer Joshua Thorson casts Vaill's twitching face larger than life on a screen looming at the back of the set.)

That previous King Lear was staged at London's Old Vic in 2016, under the direction of Deborah Warner, renowned for her innovative interpretations of classic works, including her collaborations with another great actress from across the pond, Ireland's Fiona Shaw. Having missed that acclaimed staging, I can only speculate that Jackson was as magnificent as she is in this current incarnation-and as generous, for Gold's Lear is as much a showcase for excellent ensemble acting as it is a star vehicle.

What's missing from Aaron Sorkin's new adaptation is the novel's vividly described community, or the sense that the story is just as much about Scout's coming of age as it is about the crusade by Atticus, her father. Sorkin (the writer behind 'The West Wing' and 'The Social Network,' among others) has made his play a John Grisham-esque legal thriller revolving around a charismatic man. Atticus may now show hints of trouble and doubt, but he's still the moral lighthouse guiding Maycomb, Alabama.

The performance [Jackson], in fact, refutes A's theory that life becomes sweetest when we're past mortal cares. Long may Jackson harbor such concerns, and share them with us.

The two-hour program is also, in its distinctly intimate, understated fashion, an affirmation of the exuberant showmanship and vivid storytelling that Springsteen's rock and roll shares with musical theatre. As a songwriter, we're reminded, he's as much an inheritor to Rodgers and Hammerstein as any contemporary pop artist; an unabashed romantic with a probing social conscience, whose soaring tunes give full-throated voice to American dreams and the demons that haunt them.

Vogel and co-creator Rebecca Taichman make the journey from there to the mid-20th century vividly theatrical and overtly political, suggesting other artists from that period - Bertolt Brecht, especially - while appealing to a world famished, once again, for tolerance and compassion...The larger focus of Indecent, and it couldn't be a timelier one, is the plight of the outsider or other, of anyone whose identity can be twisted into an easy target under tough circumstances...In our own troubled century, there's at least some encouragement to be found there. A-

As we now know, that period was just a warm-up for the noise and chaos that followed, and Oslo has arrived at LCT's Broadway venue with its sense of urgency intact, if not heightened. Director Bartlett Sher, whose rigorous insights into history and human relationships have buoyed new works and revivals, has actors rearrange the pieces of Michael Yeargan's spare set as one scene flows into another, so that the production seems in constant, almost frantic, motion. Their characters pace and circle each other and raise their voices suddenly, lashing out or buckling under the strain of having to maintain their composure. Bits of dialogue teeter into speechifying here and there, but you'll barely notice; the balance of passion, discipline, and suspense is organically, thrillingly theatrical.

But what emerges as this play progresses is something sharper and more unsettling. If Harmon doesn't eschew cliches - the playwright wields them with surprising wit, in fact - he has crafted, in Jordan, a central character who defies them. On the surface, our protagonist is the sweetly nerdy guy you can always confide in, whose company you always enjoy - the perfect platonic date. But as his buddies begin to pair off, his loneliness deepens into a tragicomic, primal fear, turning ominous and even ugly at points.