Greg Evans

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.

Opening tonight at the Golden Theatre, sensitively directed by Lila Neugebauer, Waverly Gallery - a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2001 only now making its long-in-coming Broadway debut - is an unsparing visit with a family in extremis. Performed by that first-rate cast - add David Cromer to the list - Lonergan's play, at once loving and unsentimental, gives attention to that long, inevitable passage in a family's life when the old slip away.

To reveal more would be indefensible, as Butterworth, under the impeccable direction of Mendes, with a flawless cast from young to old (including Fra Fee, Niall Wright and Carla Langley as the eldest Carneys), detail-perfect sets and costumes from Rob Howell, takes this play in directions you won't see coming. The Ferryman toys with what it knows we know - an exuberant Irish jig can't help but remind of Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa, until it goes full-out punk. The gentle Of Mice and Men danger of Tom Kettle, the bloody shocks we've seen from the likes of Martin McDonagh - everything gets rearranged, and you just might gasp at the power and poetry that brings The Ferryman to a close even as you know it had to come to this.

Certainly the top-grade quality of the cast (and the fascinating real-life story behind the play) has us hoping for answers, or at least a rousing good yarn. There's a little disappointed on both fronts.

The Nap, Broadway's latest laugh from London, tries to fool us and sometimes does, though not in ways playwright Richard Bean might have intended. Teased with the appealing prospect of an evening of Martin McDonagh-lite, we're quickly handed a cartoon con job.

As Bernhardt/Hamlet widens its scope to examine the very nature of art itself, pitting actor against playwright, performer against critic, truth against commerce, things get talky. Very talky. There are witticisms galore - A woman who cannot do anything is nothing. A man who does nothing is Hamlet - and a good amount of genuine laughs, but points are made and remade past any need to convince.

We're instructed time and again that the down-on-her-luck Vivian just won't give up on her true dreams, though if Pretty Woman bothers to explain dreams of what exactly, I missed it. We know she doesn't want a Prince Charming to rescue her - that much is stated and re-stated - but in the end, well, let's just say No fairy tale was harmed in the making of this musical.

And given the musical's two-or-three year gestation period, director Rando had plenty of time to trim the repetitions (and cut a couple gratuitous stereotypes from the secondary character line-up). Every bar band has to learn when its riffs are wearing thin.

For better or worse, Broadway's Head Over Heels is stuck with being known as 'the Go-Go's musical' - better because of the good will floating on stage with all those lighter-than-air hits by Belinda Carlisle, Jane Wiedlin, et.al., worse because the hard-working new production can't seem to keep itself from popping those effervescence tune bubbles one by one.

Young Jean Lee's delicate balance of a play, directed by Anna D. Shapiro with a more sensitive understanding of character than pace, brings together three adult brothers and their widowed dad over a Christmas holiday that will see laughter and tears.

Because director Joe Mantello, a production team that includes Ryan Murphy and Scott Rudin, and a cast led by the full-of-surprises Jim Parsons as well as Zachary Quinto and Matt Bomer, have revived and revitalized a play that for all its imperfections throws a party at the Booth Theatre that shouldn't be missed.

Well before Denzel Washington's glad-handing salesman Hickey makes his fateful arrival in the dive bar of George C. Wolfe's strong new Broadway staging of The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O'Neill's collection of pipe-dreaming drunkards arrange themselves across their end-of-the-line cafe as if modeling for Leonardo's 'The Last Supper.'

Directed by Daniel Sullivan with an easy flow that appears to modernize the 1923 play and keep all that Shavian verbiage moving at a smart clip, Saint Joan would seem an ideal resurrection for an era of #MeToo and the rejection of binary gender cages, but this Joan doesn't quite drive its sword into that ground as forcefully as you might hope.

Tom Stoppard's Tony-winning 1974 play Travesties, stuffed thick as a English gentleman's armchair, its ideas on art, war, patriotism and purposeful nonsense fashioned into a nonstop tourney of wit and erudition, has often been called a brainteaser, but brain tickler comes so much closer to the jubilant staging presented by Broadway's Roundabout Theatre Company.

Anyone who worked as hard for her money - and for a professional respect that came too late - as Donna Summer did deserves so much more than this. A jukebox musical that could undo all the genre rehab delivered by superior shows built around Carole King and, if you want to stretch the definition a bit to include Lazarus, David Bowie, Broadway's Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, opening tonight, is as unimaginative as its title.

The production's magic is hardly limited to well-choreographed transitions, though, with illusions ranging from the seemingly high-tech - lightning streams of flame, or a dreamlike effect that has the entire set shimmering with every jump in time - to age-old stage trickery modernized and perfected (unseen hands in black tote levitating actors, while some bat-wing swirls of Hogwarts cloaks all but demand a voila!). In theory, a visit from the wraithlike Dementors - relax, I'm not saying when, how or why - owes a nod to a hoary old Roger Corman gimmick, but the similarity ends with intent: The execution here is genuinely thrilling.