Greg Evans — Theater Critic

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.

Hawke and Dano are well-suited in both temperament and talent for the Roundabout's Broadway revival of Shepard's once-shocking blast of new wave absurdism, opening tonight at the American Airlines Theatre.

When Choir Boy, the coming of age story from Tarell Alvin McCraney that predates his Oscar-winning, co-written screenplay for Moonlight, finds its sweet spots - and they are many - the drama, the humor and the music take off for parts unknown. This is a play that, like its unstoppable main character, never quits reaching for the high note, even when perfection is beyond its grasp.

Perhaps Sorkin and Sher felt the play needed Bob's extra villainy to justify Atticus' eventual out-of-character breakdown, the moment when the play's questioning of the book's '60s-vintage liberal ideal comes most fully into focus. If so, they should have trusted their material and Daniels' convincing performance. By the time Atticus comes to question his own moral code, and Sorkin has us contemplating the limits of tolerance and the boundaries of forgiveness, this Mockingbird has already landed its punches.

The adaptation by Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) sticks close to Chayefsky's original script, with mixed results. References to, say, The Mary Tyler Moore Show once gave Network a startling contemporaneity, but now seem a tad camp. And hearing, with fresh ears, that melodramatic monologue that won Beatrice Straight an Oscar does little but suggest just how good Straight was. That's no slight against Alyssa Bresnahan, who plays the role on stage, but lightning can't strike twice.

Believing in life after love turns out to be a surer bet than pinning your hopes on jukebox musicals, no matter how fabulous the subject. The Cher Show, opening tonight at Broadway's Neil Simon Theatre, might not disappoint anyone likely to applaud a Bob Mackie-designed Oscar gown, but neither does it do any boundary-pushing. So very un-Cher.

As the full-of-themselves hoofers and belters, Beth Leavel, Brooks Ashmanskas, Christopher Sieber and Angie Schworer, along with their more spirited than effective publicist, played by Josh Lamon, chew the scenery to great delight, descending on small town America like bedazzled locusts. Their big numbers - 'Changing Lives,' 'It's Not About Me,' 'The Lady's Improving' - show just the hoped-for levels of All About Eve level self-satisfaction anyone could want.

The emotional heart of The New One, though, beats loudest after the actual new one arrives, and Birbiglia's physical isolation becomes a metaphor for his emotional distance from mother and daughter. To say he's not particularly good at sharing or dealing with isolation is an understatement, and leads to one of the play's two most startling moments (the one that's not the before & after visual change-up, which, again, I won't spoil except to applaud set designer Beowulf Boritt).

Eighth wonder of the world? King Kong probably isn't even the eighth wonder of Broadway - those kids in The Ferryman aren't giving up their spots anytime soon - but the big ape does provide some roaring good thrills.

These aren't small inconsistencies, nor are they rare, and despite Leon's fluid direction and the robust performances, they keep the play from coalescing into the fully realized family drama it might have been. But as a cri de coeur, from a mother, for her child, for others like him, for her country, American Son screams just as loud as it should.

As if to confront and wrestle down any datedness head-on, Kaufman and his cast go broad. Like, vaudeville broad, with Urie doing his damnedest to drown out all memory of Fierstein's foghorn by calling forth a bizarre vocal affectation somewhere between Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion and Hanna-Barbera's Snagglepuss. I'd like to think of it as an homage to theater's great nances, but I'm afraid it's just cartoon Virginia ham.