Greg Evans

While Carousel spins its gorgeous melodies and troublesome social politics in Midtown Manhattan, My Fair Lady, its lighter-hearted companion in the Big Book of treasured musicals toting outdated notions, has opened some 20 blocks north in a sumptuous Lincoln Center Theater production, its cast of 37 led by a tempestuous Lauren Ambrose and, in his Broadway debut, Harry Hadden-Paton, best known stateside for a Prince Charming turn on Downton Abbey but here making a right turn by going full-bore, unapologetic cad as that most arrogant of misogynists, Professor Henry Higgins.

Let's state the obvious. Carousel is a masterpiece, a sublime piece of 20th Century musical theater that includes among its abundant treasures a song, 'If I Loved You', that ranks among the most beautiful ever written for the stage (I'd say the most beautiful but I'm not on a barstool). Jack O'Brien's revival, at the Imperial Theatre and Broadway's first in more than 20 years, superbly sung by Joshua Henry, Jessie Mueller and Renée Fleming, is ravishing, as lovely as anything you'll see and hear this season.

Children of a Lesser God lives on now mostly as a well-constructed if somewhat dated relationship drama and as a showcase for its two primary, argument-siding characters, here played by Jackson and Ridloff.

Vibrant, beautifully sung and visually splendid, this funny charmer - book by Fey, music by Jeff Richmond and lyrics by Nell Benjamin - broadens the original Paramount movie - a bar-raiser for teen flicks - to full musical comedy scale without sacrificing any of the mordancy and compassion that made a superstar of Lindsay Lohan and a generational descriptor of the title. Directed and choreographed by The Book of Mormon's Casey Nicholaw (and produced by, among others, Lorne Michaels, who surveyed this preview performance with the same inscrutable, puckered expression caught occasionally by the cameras of Saturday Night Live) Mean Girls, at the August Wilson Theatre, stays true to the plot (and well-remembered jokes and catchphrases) of the film while smoothly updating the high school mischief-making for the age of social media.

Director Mantello (The Humans, Wicked) knows his way around this play, finding the action - yes, action - in a work that's mostly, wonderfully talk. He orchestrates the conversation and guides his first-rate cast with an effortlessness matched point by point throughout this production. Miriam Buether's bedroom set design, to pick one example, begins the play as the very illustration of confinement - grand and lovely confinement, but still - before transforming itself into something as expansive as memory.

Angels in America, that winged masterwork of Tony Kushner and the 20th Century, is back on Broadway in a revival weighed with expectations as heavy as the angel Bethesda in Central Park. With marquee-name stars - Andrew Garfield, Nathan Lane, Lee Pace - and the halo of approval from London audiences, the two-part, 7-hour-plus, gloriously subtitled 'Gay Fantasia On National Themes' remains as rich a theatrical experience as when Kushner won the Pulitzer back in '93 and his eccentric, visionary fever dream first blessed the stage (and too many dying men to count) with 'more life.'

Directed by Tony-winning Michael Grandage (Red), the stage Frozen, opening tonight, doesn't consistently live up to 'Let It Go,' its book by Jennifer Lee (Zootopia) often feeling rushed, more concerned with hitting the movie's beats come hell or cold water than taking the time to just enjoy the characters that the audience is primed to love.

A new generation of cats just took over Broadway. Simply said, Julie Taymor's staging of Disney's 'The Lion King' is a marvel, a theatrical achievement unrivaled in its beauty, brains and ingenuity. Leaping far beyond its celluloid inspiration, the stage version improves upon nearly every aspect of the hit 1994 animated film, from visual artistry and storytelling to Lebo M's score and the newly African-ized pop songs of Elton John and Tim Rice. With this production, the Walt Disney Co. stages itself as a serious and ambitious contender on the legit scene, all but demanding that its first theatrical foray, 1994's too-literally adapted 'Beauty and the Beast,' was little more than a warm-up.

Any gripes about the producers of 'Chicago' charging full-scale prices for a stripped-down show evaporate like vapors from bathtub gin the second Bebe Neuwirth & Co. open the show with a pulse-quickening rendition of 'All That Jazz.' This concert staging, wonderfully choreographed by Ann Reinking (with a credit to 'the style of Bob Fosse'), is a bit more elaborate than when presented by City Center's Encores series in the spring, but even if it weren't, the performances, wit and sophistication of the show would more than earn a place on Broadway.