Greg Evans — Theater Critic

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.

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.