Greg Evans

The indefatigable cast, given loads of stage business by director Brackett and clever lines by Tracz (whose credits, besides Chill, include Netflix's wildly inventive Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events), pulls everything together. Each performer taking on any number of roles (except for McCarrell and, as the Hermione to his Harry, Kristin Stokes), the cast includes Izzy Figueroa, Jorrel Javier, Ryan Knowles, Sam Leicht, Sarah Beth Pfeifer, James Hayden Rodriguez, Jalynn Steele and T. Shyvonne Stewart.

As for the fates of the rest, well, romantic comedy wasn't exactly Williams' wheelhouse. He plays by its rules sure enough, even giving Serafina and Alvaro a shot at happiness rare in his universe, but all the effort feels like, well, effort, febrile and verbose and matched shout for shout, sob for sob by a production that could have used a little of the restraint Cullman showed with Choir Boy or Lobby Hero. If happily ever after is better than a shattered glass unicorn or getting carted off to the neighborhood loony bin, it probably shouldn't feel less fun.

He can't, of course, and his awakening is no less rude for being expected. Letts, his director and his cast show no mercy on characters whose lurking selfishness and cruelty would, in any Neil Simon comedy, give way to repentance and forgiveness. Linda Vista doesn't let anyone off the hook that easily, and if there's hope to be had, it won't come cheap.

And then Harris and his simpatico director Robert O'Hara - near miraculously blending their talents to pull off an incendiary work that could go wrong in any single minute of its intermission-less two hours at the Golden Theatre, where it opens tonight - add yet another meaning to the title.

An energetic, insistently likable mash-up of rap, improvisational comedy, hip hop, R&B crooning and, crucially, audience participation, FLS - in its own shorthand - is both the show and the rotating troupe of performers who have been bringing it to unique life off and on, in various venues, since around 2003, now including the Booth Theatre, where it opens tonight.

Schenkkan's telling, while necessarily concise, offers few, if any, surprises. Each character and development is no more or less than what anyone with a passing understanding of the age - or a passing grade from first-year college history class - will anticipate.

'Haunting' is a word critics overuse, but sometimes nothing else will do. Still, I'll do my best to avoid it - after this review of The Height of the Storm, the thoughtful and engrossing new play by Florian Zeller, translated from the French by Christopher Hampton, opening tonight at the Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway.

So descriptors, all accurate, will have to suffice. Stunning. Captivating. Thoroughly entertaining from start to finish. Etc. Even his previous Netflix specials can't quite capture the dizzying buzz of watching him do what he does in person.

Secret love shacks, or love flats as the case may be, notwithstanding, no affair is an island built for two - there's always at least a third person in the mix, typically considered the betrayed. In Jamie Lloyd's masterful revival of Harold Pinter's Betrayal - one is tempted to call it a reinvention, so deeply and definitely urgent is his take - three of the ever-shifting betrayers and betrayees occupy the stage at all times, one or another bearing silent witness as the other two enact an affair's all-too-familiar scenes of lies, transgressions, excitement and the love that, at least fleetingly, prompts it all.

When I reviewed the production in February during its Public Theatre engagement, I was struck by the emotional impact of the performances, the writing and Carrie Cracknell's direction. All of that stands, but seeing it again, this time in the larger Broadway venue, I noticed the many moments of humor that Gyllenhaal and Sturridge pull off so efficiently. Gyllenhaal, in particular, seems to have loosened up a bit in his role, superbly providing quicksilver shifts in tone and mood. Sturridge, in the more unrelenting Sea Wall, couldn't get any better than he was Off Broadway. Assuming the show's producers invite Tony voters to this strictly limited nine-week engagement, either actor could stake an early claim on next year's trophy nominations.

he something-for-everyone approach has its advantages - not least a steady stream of applause and recognition chuckles that make Moulin Rouge! feel like one of the liveliest shows on Broadway. With box office soaring), this reportedly $28 million enterprise will swat away any stray critical brickbats like so many gnats. But I don't think I'll be the only one leaning more toward grimace than grin.

When Terrence McNally's Frankie and Johnny In The Clair de Lune premiered Off Broadway in 1987, critics saw a sidelong glance at the AIDS crisis and the toll it took on intimacy. Nothing in the text has been changed for the affecting new production opening tonight on Broadway at the Broadhurst Theatre starring a powerful, ideally matched duo in Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon, and so those references to sexual terror remain.

Maybe if they'd said it a fourth time. Three times - 'Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!' - summons to life the stripe-coated, fright-wigged demon that made a superstar of Michael Keaton way back when. Could a fourth have magically conjured that extra something needed to transform Broadway's Beetlejuice into something beyond the realm of good enough?

Reflections on the heyday of scandalous Fleet Street likely won't stir Broadway audiences with the same vigor that roused the West End when Ink debuted there in 2017. Little matter. James Graham's play is so well-crafted that not knowing your Sun from your Mirror is a fairly minor hindrance.

You'll have just enough time during the false-start opening moments of director Scott Ellis' wonderful new Tootsie to ponder such things, and then the musical and its star Santino Fontana grab hold and don't let go. It's not without a few runs in its stockings, but this Tootsie is a delight, a not-quite-blind date that plays out so much better than you could have imagined.

A muddled casting controversy and the resignation of a prominent director no doubt diverted some early public and press attention from the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Arthur Miller's All My Sons, but this Broadwayproduction, opening tonight, can handle whatever comes its way. When all's said and done, Jack O'Brien's knock-you-from-behind staging is as powerful and sturdy as Miller's post-war classic itself. And in a shattering performance that adds yet another layer to her quietly remarkable career, Annette Bening finds grace notes in the role of the grieving Gold Star mother that brings the character to vivid, brutalized life.

And while we're on the subject of inadequacy, put me down for singling out Lane, who is only the most obvious of the pleasures in Taylor Mac's Gary: A Sequel To Titus Andronicus, the outrageous, hysterically funny and connivingly moving new play opening on Broadway tonight at the Booth Theatre.

Lucas Hnath's Hillary and Clinton boasts the gladdening sight of Laurie Metcalf, her every bit the equal John Lithgow and director Joe Mantello's unfailing grace, but for all of that, no small part of the satisfaction this play delivers is recognition of an entirely different sort. Yes, you're likely to think at least once or maybe many times during these 90 minutes, that's just what I suspected... Though if you're being honest with yourself, you'll add, ...but with considerably less wit, intellectual nuance and deep, unexpected compassion.

Written by the immensely talented singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell - the musical began life as folk opera concept album, then was developed at New York Theatre Workshop - Hadestown is brought to remarkable life by director Rachel Chavkin, who does for the Quarter and hell what she did for Tolstoy's Russia with 2016's equally fine Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.

So what's needed? I'd say passion, or at least chemistry. But Russell's Anna just hasn't the emotional weight to provide the heft needed for an equal and opposite reaction to Driver's Pale. She seems no more inescapably drawn to Pale than she was to Burton. Better she had stayed with that rich, handsome, doting stiff. They'd have had a nice little life.

With the score making an abrupt shift in style to something like the electric squall of Jimi Hendrix's 'Star Spangled Banner,' Oklahoma! rings out with a nod to the sublime, violent beauty Hendrix found in our national anthem. Is it so surprising Fish finds it on the plains?

Wilson, her vocal delivery as elastic, youthful and whoop-whooping as Jackson's is throaty and grave, is handed one of Gold's strongest theatrical ideas late in the play, as the Fool prepares to take his leave, Cordelia soon to return (in all-black pseudo-Marxist revolutionary garb, no less). Scholars have long debated on whether the Fool is actually Cordelia in disguise, and judging from a simple, revealing coup de theatre, Gold suggests he has the answer. It isn't the first or last moment of truth in this extraordinary production.

For much of the rest of its 90 minutes, Schreck, a monologist (with a little help from friends, but more of that later) in a league with John Leguizamo and Spalding Grey, will shift back and forth from the girl she was to the woman she is, delivering the speech that so many Legionnaires loved with the interruptions that the wiser and world-wearier adult Schreck can't resist adding.

Ain't Too Proud - The Life and Times of The Temptations is further proof, as if we need it, that the term 'jukebox musical' just isn't fair - to jukeboxes. Feed a juke some cash and it delivers music, free of the blunt exposition that passes for librettos in so many of these stage biographies. Even with source material as glorious as 'My Girl,' 'Just My Imagination,' 'Papa Was A Rolling Stone' and the song that gives this production its title, the result feels less celebratory than ruthlessly efficient, like the treadmill device that's forever moving the ever-changing Temptations line-up on, off and around the Imperial Theatre's stage.

And here is where Be More Chill stakes its most righteous claim: For all of its storyline predictability and maybe too-happy-resolutions, Joe Tracz's book and, especially, Iconis' lyrics don't flinch from the darkness and panic of the teenage mind.