Greg Evans — Theater Critic

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.

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.