Helen Shaw

The director Leigh Silverman treats the set (designed by Studio Bent) like a noir soundstage, filling it with hard-edge shadows (Cha See designed the lights) and banks of fog-like smoke. The primary quality, though, is sound. “The Unknown” is hypnotic, which is another way of saying that its pleasures are very quiet ones. I felt like I was listening to radio drama on a rainy night, or as if someone were reading me a familiar story, but I’d forgotten the ending. Waller-Bridge’s dreamy music sounds as though it’s coming from another room, and it’s only when Cale deploys certain haptic details — Hayes describes the spare keys to Elliott’s apartment, stuck with a magnet to his fridge — that the evening takes on momentary weight.

Unfortunately, Sturridge gives a counterintuitive performance, one so at odds with the play’s romance and the performances around him that it sinks the ship. O’Neill describes the coal stoker, in one of his many page-filling stage directions, as a “powerful, broad-chested six-footer . . . in the full power of his heavy-muscled, immense strength.” The trouble isn’t that Sturridge, who has a quicksilver, elven quality, has been cast against type; it’s that he interprets the bewildered, love-stunned lummox as a pallid, twitchy creep, crawling on his haunches like Caliban and wriggling as if he’s got an eel down his trousers. (The night I saw it, Mat wouldn’t stop fumbling with his pants—Anna, I thought, get out.) Kail emphasizes this odd disjunction by stacking the mostly unspeaking ensemble with bruisers, their rolled sleeves straining over yoked shoulders. They, alongside similarly capable-looking stagehands, haul elements of Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis’s set around, totin’ platforms and heftin’ tables. Maybe Kail is unconcerned with realism and has asked Sturridge to play Mat’s inner self, the frail and contorting one he keeps hidden. But then what’s with all the stevedores from central casting?

Twenty years have done something wonderful to McCraney’s play. It now feels more like an assured masterpiece than the first work of a prodigy; here, polished to a deep lustre, is the finest exertion of McCraney’s talents, elevated by a cast with staggering gifts. Holland’s self-effacing tiredness as Ogun is deliberately unshowy, and, while the actor’s name appears above the title in the program, he cedes the limelight to both Mays, who gives the graceful, flirtatious performance of a lifetime, and to iLongwe, who grows more radiant and funny as Oshoosi’s frustration with his brother sharpens. A certain inelegant hastiness in the plot has been resolved by treating the monologues almost as arias, giving them each an equal sense of grandeur, like the relentless finale of a fireworks display.

Thankfully, the extended gestation also means that Rashad's production comes to New York from Chicago with much of its superb Steppenwolf cast intact. (Only Young and Jackson are new additions.) Every actor gets an aria-like monologue, which throws off the play's rhythm, but at least each one is a bravura showpiece. Perhaps that's where the real promise of Purpose in the idea that somehow every member of a family (or of a movement) can be sustained by our attention, rather than our worship. So much precious energy is wasted on building people into icons and tearing them down. Can there be a form of recognition that avoids celebrity? Steppenwolf's own ensemble model shows the way.

Levingston and Rauch’s melding of “Cats” and the queer ballroom scene is so effortless that it seems to have required only the slightest alterations. The synthesizer groove has been juiced up with some new club beats by Trevor Holder, the directors have added a plotlet about the naughty thief Macavity (Antwayn Hopper) getting rumbled by the cops, and the entire number “Growltiger’s Last Stand,” in which the titular tom hates “cats of foreign name and race,” has been tastefully deleted. The true difference, though, lies in the piece’s shift from commercialized kitsch to camp sincerity.

Lizzie and Sally may be the core duo, but Kirkwood offers her secondary characters the best material. Susannah Perkins is wonderful as Mary, one of several comic-relief characters, notable for her dim-witted sweetness (she “does not know which glove belongs on which hand,” Lizzie says); Ann Harada shines as a lusty, menopausal mischief-maker, who takes great joy in humiliating the humorless bailiff. Sarah (Hannah Cabell) is a mute jury member who forces herself to speak after years of silence; her hoarse confession that she has seen a cloven-hoofed woman, spitting on blackberries to make them sour, is the dense, dark heart of “The Welkin.” Sarah has, until her outburst, seemed affable and sane, and when she tells the others not only that she met a devil-woman but that the demon delivered Sarah’s baby, the women all accept her testimony as though it makes perfect sense. It’s like the moment in a village-gone-bad thriller, say, “Midsommar” or “The Wicker Man,” when you realize that everybody’s in on it. A sweet face is no guarantee that the mind behind it isn’t wriggling like a bag of snakes.

Like any play transferring to Broadway from an Off Broadway success, this “Prayer” is a counterproposal to its earlier, smaller, and more intimate iteration. In some practical ways—for instance, the recasting of Patrick with Edwards, whose discomfort with his narrator duties hobbles the play from the start—the competition is weighted toward the Off Broadway version. That production, though, now feels like a relic from another time, before the recent Hamas attacks and the war in Gaza. The play’s ideas about the utility of fear sound particularly strange in this changed air. The production itself seems more tentative than it was before: Harmon has removed from the script a final recounting of several hate crimes that will occur after 2016, perhaps so that the audience will not think about other, more recent events. The room in 2022 where I first saw “Prayer” is lost now. The play was built for it, and sometimes you can’t go home.

What makes a larger impact, though, is a giddy sense of movement: the show’s director, Alex Timbers, and its superb choreographer, Annie-B Parson, whisk the performers across the space’s moving platforms, and even up into catwalks along the balcony, sometimes just to instruct the audience when and how to boogie. Justin Townsend’s wall-of-color lights, David Korins’s mammoth night-club set, and Clint Ramos’s vivid costumes create a setting that both sends up the real Imelda’s passion for Studio 54 glitz and aims to have its own hedonistic fun. (The show’s unlikely mix of morality play and G-rated rave felt less freighted, at the Public, before 2022 and the ascent of Imelda’s son, Bongbong Marcos, to the Presidency of the Philippines.)

The director of 'Topdog,' Kenny Leon-who was nominated for a Tony for directing the sensitive 2020 revival of 'A Soldier's Play'-emphasizes the dialogue's overheard quality, the shoot-the-shit ease that the brothers have together. His work with the actors is light but sure. Abdul-Mateen-swaggering, buoyant, easily offended-reacts behind the beat, maintaining his optimism for a minute after bad news comes through. Hawkins, on the other hand, stays just ahead of the moment, his shoulders crumpling slightly, like a card that's been thumbed too much, even when the brothers seem to be getting along. They are both wonderful, but Hawkins gives a sly, peekaboo performance that rolls up next to you like a grenade.

Almost tenderly, then, the production drifting around Craig touches him only lightly. It's an unusually bare staging for Broadway, stuffed with ideas but stripped clean of folderol. For the majority of the company, director Sam Gold has settled on a kind of still-in-rehearsal vibe, with big events whirling up out of an empty theater lit dimly by ghost light. Who is a witch and who is a laird in any single moment seems fluid - appropriately for a cast hamstrung repeatedly by COVID setbacks, anyone might play anyone. In contrast, Craig and Ruth Negga, as Lady Macbeth, are incontrovertibly stars, gliding across the space like slow, gleaming peacocks.

At breathtaking speed, for an hour and 45 minutes, Loop continues whirling on like this: the Big Ideas and the petty ones waltzing around in Jackson's profane, hilarious, metamusical carousel. It's less vicariously exhausting than it was Off Broadway, perhaps because the company no longer wrecks itself physically with every performance - but it's still furious, both with the world and itself. The shock of that sharp emotion strikes like a lance. Especially in the Lyceum Theater: It's a red-velvet-and-gilt balloon, and Jackson makes it go pop.

The director Lileana Blain-Cruz has cast the Antrobuses as a Black family, so playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins makes some necessary, feather-light adjustments to the text. A racist murder in the second act is no longer racist, for instance, and in the third act, in the procession of the thinkers, Jacobs-Jenkins has added bell hooks to the roster. Conceptually, I'm on board. Experientially, though, the thing is a roller coaster, and I don't mean the light-up one that designer Adam Rigg has placed on a New Jersey boardwalk. Blain-Cruz meets Wilder's maximalism with her own, his gravity with her seriousness, but the writer's comedy and the director's don't coincide. Beans in particular gets caught in the gap. She is being asked to play Sabina's broad stuff so broadly - in the ill-shaped Vivian Beaumont, which tends to swallow up every gesture - that we only realize what a glittering star she is when she drops the act for one of her many asides.

Some of Feldstein's assets do make the trip over from film: She's winningly fresh; she gives great 'bumble;' she has beautiful eyes the size of hubcaps, which roll and twinkle and flirt. In the first act, when Brice is an inexperienced gal blustering her way into the big time, Feldstein exudes a nice mix of hard-charging ambition and surprised giddiness when she succeeds. But in song after song, Feldstein's voice lets her down. Piercing and unpleasant when it gets any higher than her chest, fading and pitchy when it descends even a few steps, it's simply not a sound you expect to hear on Broadway. Styne and lyricist Bob Merrill wrote some stunners for Funny Girl, including 'People' and 'Don't Rain on my Parade.' The latter song sits in Feldstein's narrow comfort range, and so she blasts it out - particularly its final note - with foghorn force (if not phrasing). Everything else, though, goes sour.

The nasty-twisty plot works best in the first half, when its goads are sharpest. McDonagh needs speed and an unbalanced audience to keep his pressures high, but the last third of his play wobbles woozily, like a coaster that's gone rolling off the bar. Some of this is the fault of director Matthew Dunster's production, though it looks absolutely gorgeous (Anna Fleischle designed both brown set and brown costumes) and sounds incredible (Ian Dickinson can be thanked for many of the jump-scare transitions). Casting is everything in a show so reliant on its two leads, and here, as was the case when it played downtown, the balance isn't right.

I realize that doesn't make it sound like a fun 100 minutes in the theater. And Brokaw's production does show a few cracks: The glowing screens (designed by Rachel Hauck) are unhandsome; David Van Tieghem's sound design does not always amplify the actors sufficiently. But the chance to see these performers doing such incandescent work should shoulder all such concerns aside. See it for Parker, see it for Morse. Drive is also - and I'm sorry this is such an uncool way to put it - the truth. We have been surrounded in recent months by variously hysterical and inaccurate claims from politicians and blowhards about what counts as child endangerment. Vogel, with all her postmodern tricks, is offering a straight-forward account of how these things happen. A girl is in peril, and although the people around her all sense it, they actively push her further into harm.

I read The Minutes back in the early days of the shutdown, and I remember the moment when I began to think our real absurdities outstripped Letts's fictional ones. His touch is so perfect and light when he's doing realism that reality obliged and caught up to him. Knowing what he does now, what play would he write? Would that blunt ending be the same? I won't believe it. You can't just leave your satire lying around for two years; you have to measure it down to the minute.

Judged as a showcase, American Buffalo works beautifully. Rockwell has exactly the right tools to crack the Mamet safe. His half-whine, half-growl voice sings in what Todd London evocatively called the writer's 'fricative riffs' - unsurprisingly, given how well he's suited to other writers of masculine lyric like Martin McDonagh. Fishburne, judging his rhythms to the nanosecond, grips the play and captains it, and it's lucky that the close quarters of Circle in the Square allow you to see the details of his casual command. Criss, too, does fine work as the play's slow-minded straight man, though he finds fewer details in his character than the other two men.

Too much rests on Messing's shoulders, and it's simply the wrong play for her gifts. She has some odd ideas about playing young - her 17-year-old Ernestine has the physicality of a stomping kindergartner - and during the play's long middle she's inert, unable to strike sparks from her family. Even in moments of heightened emotion, Messing seems disconnected from those around her, twinkling at her children but not quite meeting their eyes. She's strongest when Ernestine gets into her nineties, because Messing's faraway gaze and abstracted air begin to take on poignancy. What is she seeing? What can she hear? Maybe there's some other life clamoring for her attention. Or maybe her mind is finally up there amid the constellation of lifetime things. Perhaps she's finding her place in the expanding universe, traveling farther and faster away.

Which leads you immediately to the thought - why are they so naked? We can do wonders with frosted glass these days, but Take Me Out insists that the actors be as close to us as possible (almost on the downstage lip) and that nothing obscure their full-frontality. Greenberg's deftly constructed play is full of dramaturgical distractions to keep us off balance, and the eye-catching choice should immediately raise your suspicions. Is this meant to be erotic? Even playfully so? No. Greenberg's play is unsexy in its bones. Take out the soap-and-towel stuff, and you're left with ideas that - give or take a few dozen slurs - you could take to church.

There is one good thing about the way Paradise Square has been developed into the ground: The ensemble members have had plenty of time to figure out their parts. Allen Moyer's tall, skeletal tenement set gives the two-dozen-strong cast plenty of places to stand, so director Moisés Kaufman often puts them on various levels, staring down at the floor of the bar. If the repetitive elements pall - you will start out amazed by the dancers, then those returns will diminish - you could always cast your eyes up, into the shadows. I had several favorites among the supernumeraries, including a guy who brought his baby to watch the competition and a mandolin player who fell asleep. Appropriately for a show about a neighborhood, the chorus gives us a sense of lives and passions moving just out of the field of focus.

The third play climaxes with various comic lazzi that Simon could have borrowed from Goldoni, if there were seventh-floor hotel rooms in 18th-century Venice. It's a bummer when it finally turns back into a Simon relationship play, with some limp observations about these youth today. Is this a flaw in the original, or in this revival? It's tricky to work out, since so much depends on rhythm. In all three plays, Hickey and his actors have found many little moments for physical comedy - Muriel sometimes kicks her legs like a colt trying to get to its feet, Roy clearly has a twingey back - but these jolts are rarely enough to create a sustained energy. The same is true for the evening as a whole. I know you can't wander around rewriting Neil Simon, but maybe they could have just ... skipped the middle one-act? That one's a cold cocktail frankfurter, I'll tell you that.

Certainly it feels like a glitzy, age-of-musicals move to cast Sutton Foster and Hugh Jackman; it's increasingly rare to see a pair of stage stars of this megawattage sing and dance together. Their celebrity and undeniable presence seem to have overcome any little concerns about fissures between the performers and their characters - there are places where Foster's mezzo strains in the high stuff and Jackman goes sour. But director Jerry Zaks solves that by bringing 'em front-and-center, to stand (or dance) on the stage lip and radiate Golden Age glamor.

The production, too, rests on Rashad's presence. Dirden is good (as he always is) at showing thought-in-action: You can see doubts shudder through his body even when his back is turned. The audience and the Friedman Theatre, though, need an operatic figure to focus all that space - and Rashad is it. Rashad's Faye wears baggy jeans and a shlumpy sweatshirt, and when she walks, she favors her back, like a woman who has done manual labor for a long time. But then, when Rashad turns her head suddenly, she looks like a queen. At its root, Skeleton Crew is about finding dignity - both in work and in the relationships between people - and it's useful, therefore, to have a person onstage who can gather majesty around her like a shawl. Rashad might seem to stop being Faye in these moments, but it doesn't break the show. She takes on the spirit of the underlying play, becoming something like the personification of labor itself. She turns into something larger and more commanding than the merely individual drama around her, and all of Broadway turns to look.

Physically, the show has two core comic tools. The first is what Rob McClure can do with his Doubtfire get-up. He plays a broom like a guitar! He sets fire to his rubber bosom! He breakdances in a fitnesswear parade for Miranda's new line! McClure himself is an antic type, elfin and prone to sudden grace and funny squawks: Imagine Kermit the Frog with incredible vocal control. Putting him inside a bulky padded costume means that we're seeing the two layers spinning in opposite directions: In the show's best dance number - Mrs. Doubtfire learns to cook from a parade of tap-dancing YouTube chefs - McClure hikes up his dress and you see the frenzied duck-on-a-pond paddle that's going on beneath his skirt. The second comic tool is more broadly applicable: farce.

Sweat asks a bleak question about whether work can sustain us; Clyde's offers a hopeful if fantastical answer. Many of the things that usually drive a play are absent in Clyde's. It's unclear about its stakes, and I couldn't always follow the way action leads to reaction - but as the play lifts off into its final minutes, it enters a realm where conventional dramaturgy doesn't apply. These characters aren't heading for dramatic resolution. They're aiming for a place, reached via sensual delight, of reconnection and reawakening.