Greg Evans

In this still-young Broadway season already boasting a remarkable line-up of new productions that, regardless of box office sales or seats filled, is a small miracle, the Roundabout Theatre Company production of Caroline, Or Change places itself squarely at the forefront of the best in culture this city has to offer. Directed by Michael Longhurst with intensity and sensitivity, and performed by a cast that seems to have made a pact to sustain itself at the towering heights achieved early and unfailingly by its mighty star Sharon D Clarke, this Caroline, Or Change is a hurricane wind unleashed on decrepit legacies and newfound cautions.

I mentioned that the actress here - the magnificent Deirdre O'Connell -doesn't speak, but that's not entirely accurate, but I was reluctant to use the phrase 'lip-sync' too early. The art form's usual connotation of comedy and/or deception doesn't apply here. Mouthing the words of actual interview tape recordings in which Higginbotham opens up about her ordeal, O'Connell and Dana H. convey both the specifics of one woman's trauma and something universal about the all-encompassing nature of abuse and its survival.

Money, the pop song says, changes everything, and as Broadway's magnificent The Lehman Trilogy so splendidly demonstrates, everything means everything, from the most private of personal circumstances to - if you've got enough cash (or even the suggestion of it) - the grand sweep of history.

Money, the pop song says, changes everything, and as Broadway's magnificent The Lehman Trilogy so splendidly demonstrates, everything means everything, from the most private of personal circumstances to - if you've got enough cash (or even the suggestion of it) - the grand sweep of history.

ixing spoken word, slam poetry, laugh-out-loud comedy, drama and razor-sharp dialogue, Scott's words are met with Steve H. Broadnax III's directorial flourishes that are so lovely they elicit gasps. Both playwright and director are Broadway newcomers, and their Thoughts of a Colored Man is a marvel from start to finish.

Throughout the course of its taut 70 minutes, the remarkable Is This A Room, opening tonight at Broadway's Lyceum Theatre, prompts a steady, gut-churning stream of 'what ifs' as audiences do exactly what whistleblower Reality Winner did during her 2017 FBI interrogation: We second-guess, we attempt to predict, we consider and reconsider every angle, we panic.

Lifting every last detail from Tyler Perry's recipe book, this family comedy is brimming with stock characters, creaky jokes, tired references and easy, feel-good sermonizing. Bickering relatives speechifying with exposition and put-downs? Family secrets guessable even by the most distant outsider? Characters that can be summed up in one-word signifiers? Check, check and check.

Lifting every last detail from Tyler Perry's recipe book, this family comedy is brimming with stock characters, creaky jokes, tired references and easy, feel-good sermonizing. Bickering relatives speechifying with exposition and put-downs? Family secrets guessable even by the most distant outsider? Characters that can be summed up in one-word signifiers? Check, check and check.

Ruben Santiago-Hudson summons a world of ghosts, or at least as many as will fill a couple boarding houses and a lifetime of gratitude, in his affectionate Lackawanna Blues, the one-man autobiographical tour through a childhood made golden by the presence of a strong and loving guardian angel.

Introducing themselves by both name and fate - 'Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived!', they chant-sing - the wives, dressed in glitzy, geometric dresses that recall the space-glam flourishes of Lady Marmalade-era LaBelle, take the stage in a non-stop high-energy avalanche of sound. While each of the wives is given a contemporary musical niche - Catherine of Aragon hits the Beyonce-Shakira notes, Jane Seymour goes full Adele, Katherine Howard blends Britney Spears with Ariana Grande - the numbers, distinct and in quick succession, mesh like the colors of a nicely aged tapestry.

Without spoiling the new ending, Nwandu has concocted a more fantasy-like approach, embracing an Afrofuturistic style and a continuation of the magic realism that has already made sporadic appearances, and while there will be blood, its source might surprise. Even the cop is offered a chance at redemption as the set, designed by Wilson Chin, transforms from the stark urban purgatory - presided over by a streetlamp that looks more like the gallows in a game of Hangman - to something altogether more pastoral, more promised.

But the most notable addition to the show was Springsteen's inclusion of 'American Skin (41 Shots),' the song he wrote in 2000 after the NYPD killing of Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old unarmed Black man. Bathed in a red spotlight as he sang 'You can get killed just for living in your American skin,' Springsteen updated his Broadway show with a 21-year-old song that, tragically, could have been written just last summer.

In case you hadn't noticed over the last five or six decades, Bob Dylan can't be contained, not by any particular genre, persona, creed or even voice, and the same can mostly be said for Girl From The North Country, the musical, written and directed by Conor McPherson, that transports the hits and deep-cuts of a peerless songbook to a Depression-era, crossroads-of-humanity boarding house. Opening tonight in a Broadway production that both focuses and somewhat constricts the musical that seemed more physically expansive, more tonally dreamlike, in its 2018 Off Broadway incarnation, Girl From The North Country nonetheless remains a revelation in its uncanny interpretations of even the most familiar Dylan songs.

With scenic and lighting design by van Hove's longtime collaborator Jan Versweyveld, and video projections by Luke Halls that more than bolster the argument for finally giving that art its very own Tony Award category, this West Side Story fills the massive performing space at the Broadway Theatre with non-stop movement both on the stage and on the drive-in theater-size screen behind it. Small flourishes hold their own against grand visual statements: When Tony (Isaac Powell) and Maria (Shereen Pimentel) sing to one another as they lean against a mirror, their breath frosts the glass in momentary designs (a lovely detail we see courtesy of van Hove's trademark video cameras). When rain falls through much of the final act, the downpour, soaking the stage and beautifully lit by Versweyveld, creates a cinematic effect that only a dancer wary of slipping could begrudge.

No doubt Wohl and her play have an appealing, compassionate spirit (first on displayed in the playwright's well-received Off Broadway plays American Hero and Small Mouth Sounds), and that goes a long way: Grand Horizons (the title is the name of Bill and Nancy's senior community) is a comfortable, comforting entertainment, its jokes more funny than not, its performances, by and large, expert. Alexander and Cromwell are marvels, pros elevating their material with subtlety and bring-it-home delivery.

With three-time Tony nominee David Alan Grier and a commanding Blair Underwood leading a first-rate, 12-member cast, this Soldier's Play (adapted as A Soldier's Story for the 1984 film) moves with all the precision of a military cadence. The production is not without its missteps - a few self-conscious moments seem like gratuitous elbow jabs to make sure we understand the contemporary relevance - but director Kenny Leon drives the narrative with a solid feel for momentum.

We know, or strongly suspect, very early in the play that a happy mother-daughter ending isn't likely, at least not in any traditional dramatic way. What My Name is Lucy Barton does instead - in its writing, in Eyre's tender direction, in Linney's compassionate performance - is provide a setting in which the women can come to some understanding about their relationship and maybe themselves. Their successes and failures will haunt Lucy - and her audience - for a very long time.

At its frequent best, Harry Connick Jr.: A Celebration of Cole Porter, opening tonight at the Nederlander Theatre, pairs Porter's songwriting genius with Connick's superb musicianship, supple, ear-pleasing vocals and a brash confidence that pushes the music from the comfort of classic pop into bolder, jazzier terrain. Connick, with his years on American Idol, movie screens and concert stages, is certainly the most popular interpreter of American standards, and he takes fine advantage of that good will, unafraid to slip in an occasional dissonance or to slow down a vocal like a train creeping to its halt. Where Connick leads, his audience knows to follow.

With Tom Kitt's attractively amped-up arrangements and performances by an impeccable cast of fine singers (even if they're too often guided to shout-sing from the lip of the stage), Morissette's angry, street-poetic dispatches from a fiercely singular artist mostly withstand the out-of-context placement in this troubled-family saga. And what troubles. Packed to bursting with hot-button issues as bluntly conveyed as the many hand-painted protest signs toted by its idealistic young characters, Jagged Little Pill front-loads its fictional family with enough problems, secrets and cliches to fuel three years of Lifetime movies.

While not always faithful to its source (Young Scrooge, sweetly played by Dan Piering, is given a drunken, abusive father, and old Fezziwig, sympathetically played by Evan Harrington, is an undertaker, among other alterations and additions), Thorne's adaptation pays off in its gambles. If it feels abridged and rushed at first - some secondary characters are melded together, and we're done with the Christmas Present section by intermission - this Carol goes to new places with the inevitability of a clock chime.

Before the end of this two-part, six-and-a-half-hour play - opening tonight at Broadway's Barrymore Theatre - Lopez and his phenomenally good dozen-plus-member cast will demand a reckoning of the ages, of Forster's restrictive closet, of Manhattan's Plague Years and of today's, well, whatever today is, mean and brutal and not entirely free of hope.

Better than Broadway's reigning, mostly enjoyable and definitely money-making example of the genre - the Temptations biomusical Ain't Too Proud - Tina, directed by Phyllida Lloyd and crammed with one recognizable song after another from Turner's five-decade career, opens with one of the best scene-setters I've encountered in a genre that usually leaves me cold, and ends with a mini-concert finale that for sheer out-of-your-seat excitement blows away any Broadway challenger.

Featuring songs from his chart-topping 2018 album that gives the show its title, American Utopia (in case you're wondering) also includes a crowd-pleasing selection of hits from his Talking Heads days, flawlessly performed by Byrne and an onstage ensemble of 11. In fine voice (if he's lost any range over the years, it's unnoticeable beneath an ear-catching blend of Bowie croon and Dylan whine), Byrne remains a constant traveler of his own rabbit holes, and it becomes our job and pleasure to keep up.

Featuring songs from his chart-topping 2018 album that gives the show its title, American Utopia (in case you're wondering) also includes a crowd-pleasing selection of hits from his Talking Heads days, flawlessly performed by Byrne and an onstage ensemble of 11. In fine voice (if he's lost any range over the years, it's unnoticeable beneath an ear-catching blend of Bowie croon and Dylan whine), Byrne remains a constant traveler of his own rabbit holes, and it becomes our job and pleasure to keep up.

Broadway doesn't really do thrillers anymore. Unless we expand the definition to encompass the wailing banshees of The Ferryman or the occasional Martin McDonough blood drench, the stage has mostly ceded the genre to Hollywood. Yet that scarcity goes only so far in explaining the odd power of Adam Rapp's The Sound Inside, a remarkable psychological mystery starring the ever-astonishing Mary-Louise Parker and her sole co-star, the up-to-the-challenge Broadway newcomer Will Hochman.