Helen Shaw

Speaking of day drinking, the best Diana can hope for is that its tackiness will transform, through the magic of mess-addicted theatergoers, into a sort of warmly accepted kitsch. The show's social-media account has been encouraging people to have wine beforehand, cheering 'here for a good time not a long time!' There's plenty of evidence that the show's creators Joe DiPietro and David Bryan are going for a kind of late-night extended-SNL-sketch vibe.

Eighteen years ago, the musical had a little more ... hope in it. As Kushner has noted, the story has always been Caroline's tragedy, but in 2003, it used Emmie and Jackie and even Noah to point at possibilities of the non-tragic to come. The musical still ends the same way, but in the audience, we know the U.S. continues to display its own immobility, its own dogged resistance to change. Longhurst's production is therefore brave enough not to brighten, not even at the curtain call. The libretto does for a while pretend there's a kind of slantwise equivalence between the bereaved Noah and the exhausted Caroline, but in 'Lot's Wife,' the show has admitted which grief is the unrecoverable one. 'I'm gonna slam that iron down on my heart,' Caroline cries. 'Gonna slam that iron down on my throat, gonna slam that iron down on my sex.' The sound in the room grows huge and unbearable as a woman gives up on her future, releasing energy like an atom ripping apart. The show can't recover from this intensity; certainly, we cannot. Whatever comes after 'Lot's Wife,' whatever little grace notes the production gives to Emmie and Noah, we stay frozen in that song's nuclear blast.

Despite its well-honed beauty (Paul Toben sends a perfect sunset through those curtains), it's hard to measure Dana H. as a theatrical object. You can say O'Connell's performance is piercing, since it's dazzling on an artistic level, but there's also a quality of witness in what she's doing, which moves it beyond evaluation. The 'story' too has suspense, motion, revelation, exposition-all the components that critics like to tick off with their little pencils-though I came away staggered, finding that mode of critique very thin. Yet the truth isn't the whole story here either: This is not just a podcast or a dressed-up episode of This American Life. Waters, Hnath and O'Connell have made something intensely theatrical that reaches devastating emotional heights. All their distancing strategies have the paradoxical effect of drawing us close. We see the mask, but it makes us even more aware that somewhere, reality is crying out beneath it.

Signs play an important part in the episodic play Thoughts of a Colored Man. For one thing, the show itself was a sign: Thoughts was the first new show to put up a marquee during the COVID shutdown. In February, no one knew exactly how or when an opening would happen, so the display was a big, bold, crocus-yellow promise that the theater was going to return. The play also takes place on a sign - Robert Brill's set is a gigantic billboard. Behind the performers on the Golden Theatre's stage is a huge white rectangle with the word COLORED blocked out in gray-on-white letters. As the characters visit various locations in their neighborhood in Brooklyn, the performers wander around and on the billboard's metal framework.

Signs play an important part in the episodic play Thoughts of a Colored Man. For one thing, the show itself was a sign: Thoughts was the first new show to put up a marquee during the COVID shutdown. In February, no one knew exactly how or when an opening would happen, so the display was a big, bold, crocus-yellow promise that the theater was going to return. The play also takes place on a sign - Robert Brill's set is a gigantic billboard. Behind the performers on the Golden Theatre's stage is a huge white rectangle with the word COLORED blocked out in gray-on-white letters. As the characters visit various locations in their neighborhood in Brooklyn, the performers wander around and on the billboard's metal framework.

Is This a Room dwells in a nebulous other-region, even now that it has moved uptown to Broadway. The 75-minute thriller is conducted in suspended time: You don't leave the show so much as you wake from it, shaking off its foggy, clinging, chilly mood. Satter and her company have built a highly choreographed event around a found text, the verbatim transcript (with redactions) of Winner's arrest at her home in 2017. Satter hasn't changed a single word, revealing the exquisite way lowercase-r reality can 'write' a text. On the page, the unscripted lines already throb with subtext and sing with terrifying overtones.

Going to Chicken & Biscuits does feel like being fed by loving but overweening relatives. There's a bit too much of it - the published running time notwithstanding, this show lasts more than two hours with no intermission - but it's a meal full of comfort dishes, difficulties resolved, and love requited. It turns the nearly in-the-round space at Circle in the Square into a church with stained-glass windows behind the audience and the great Norm Lewis in the pulpit.

The point of Six is its escapism. If you live at the intersection of its interests and can recognize a Spice Girls or Beyoncé reference ('C'mon, ladies, let's get in Reformation'), your animal heart will have no choice but to jump up and down with the beat. Even the sheer brightness of Six operates as color therapy. Emma Bailey's set is a simple rock stage backed by outlines of Gothic windows covered in LEDs that change and pulse in cheery display. Tim Deiling's lights are red and purple and gold, bathing your hungry pores. The color pours down your eye holes right into your serotonin receptors - all that warmth without heat triggers something deep in your lizard brain that says, 'Vacation.' So let the cares of this world roll away. Heck, let the cares of 16th-century England dissolve. This is one liberation in which you don't have to lift a finger. Queens are doing it for themselves.

In moving to Broadway, Nwandu has, while redrafting, given the script a new ending. Nwandu was raised in (and left) the evangelical church, and a sermonizing energy is certainly at work inside the play. It exhorts and exposits; it kindles the faithful. In changing the conclusion, though, she seems to be deliberately acting more as pastor than as preacher, taking care of herself, her cast, and her audience by eliding the earlier version's most hopeless moments. Some of these new, final scenes do still feel a bit improvisational. The flawlessness of the earlier sections falls away, and we can almost hear the 'let's try this?' of the rehearsal room. But I think the awkwardness of this happier ending might actually be the point.

McPherson's main dramaturgical problem here is magnitude. The size of the show is wrong, the size of the stories, the scenes, everything. It's simultaneously too long and too short-at times, so many people are getting introduced, it feels like a pilot episode, setting up the machinery for a ten-episode season. We know McPherson, when undistracted by songs, has one of the great senses of theatrical balance: He wrote plays like The Weir and The Night Alive, so perfect that they seem to continue on even after they're over, like a bicycle still wheeling along with the rider gone. That equilibrium abandons him in this, his first musical-he hasn't worked out how to get into songs gracefully, nor how to disguise that repetitive, get-to-the-next-number structure.

Dominated by an IMAX-size projection wall showing all manner of video - a live feed of actors on- or backstage, pre-shot film of New York streets at night - the production seems perversely gifted at finding the exact mode that will interfere with each moment and intention. There are certainly a few fine elements in the show, and Maria (Shereen Pimentel) and Tony (Isaac Powell) - clear, sweet-voiced, unaffected - do their iconic parts proud. Powell's superb Tony vibrates with energy and puppyish optimism; his rendition of 'Maria' is revelatory, a show-and-heart-stopper. If Pimentel's Maria seems less able to escape the show's occasional sabotage, her soprano is keenly lovely, a silvery fretwork above the rest of the ensemble's brassy, swaggering noise.

He's written one quite wonderful sequence, though, in which he shows us how he arranged 'Night and Day.' He walks us through the way that specific lyrics (a reference to a clock) make him choose instrumentation, and then, once he's chosen trumpets, how he decides between cup mutes and Harmon mutes. The projections show us how the notation changes, and the brass section behind him plays the heck out of the song in response. It's still all about ease - Connick tries singing the song in a couple of different keys, then chooses the one that 'doesn't make him work that hard.' But oh, the veil is down. We've seen the musicianship and care that all that relaxation requires, and it makes us melt a little further. We're in such good hands, after all.

You start out with the comfortable sensation that you've come to your umpteenth revival of the Charles Dickens classic, ready for some beloved old wine in a new bottle. But as playwright Jack Thorne's adaptation proceeds, that feeling becomes the creeping suspicion that it's not really liquor in there. Some weird and unnecessary process has taken place: The story's deep social concern has been shifted out of the way in favor of an unconvincing self-realization tale. The already high-sugar-content sentiment of the original dissolves into goo, boneless without its moral armature.

In The Inheritance, the first three and a half hours are so full that even the most chattering mind is overwhelmed. There's the speed and effervescence of the group scenes, then there's Toby-glittering and amazing in Burnap's hands, absent too much in the second half. It also contains an image so strong that it wrenches the door closed behind it. Part Two turns on individual concerns-it's preoccupied by love, addiction, and the playwright's meta-musings on creativity-which are important, but seem like small potatoes after that ascension into prophethood and group-consciousness. Our souls had been wracked; why were we now watching a soap opera? All through Part Two, I tried to be a Margaret, but I just couldn't do it. Lopez had gone too slack, and my memories of the first half began to populate the stage again. I started to picture lost men, walking across a lightning-lit landscape. I could almost see them, even though they haven't been with us for 30 years and more.

The impersonation itself isn't perfect. After a run of scenes speaking in Turner's distinctive voice, Warren sometimes sounds like she's lapsing into 'cartoon old lady' instead of Turner's sandy rasp. But who cares? It's never a barrier, and it's all forgotten the moment she sings. Director Phyllida Lloyd has built long, multiscene sequences in Tina that crash like waves, massive song after mammoth hit after monster performance. Warren doesn't bear up under them-she rises up and smashes down too. She's gigantic. She's tidal.

In order to enjoy the The Lightning Thief, a myth-filled musicalization of Rick Riordan's first Percy Jackson novel, you'll need to read the book. Many of the show's current attendees obviously have: Secondary characters get entrance applause. But while those young theatergoers can fill in any missing details from memory, the challenge of turning a YA bildungsroman full of epic battles and road trips and snake-haired monsters into a musical has overwhelmed the creative team. In staying faithful to the novel, they've wound up with a mess.

Why is there no drama here? Clearly, there were matters of life and death confronting these men. The choices Murdoch and his editor made 40 years ago-the race to the bottom, the destruction of journalistic ethics, the anti-immigrant rhetoric-still matter a great deal today. But although Graham labors hard to humanize Lamb with shadows of self-doubt, this psychological element is oversold and unconvincing, and we're left with a long show about a foregone conclusion.

First Bening combusts, then Walker goes up like a Roman candle, and ultimately Letts collapses in an avalanche of dust. There are other strong elements in these final sequences, particularly Hampton Fluker's performance as the weirdly childlike George-who has been deeply wronged by the Kellers but who wants to forgive them anyway, because it would let him pretend to be innocent again. His dazzled eyes reflect the central trio, staggered by their charisma and blinded to any flaws. Does All My Sons have failings? Never you mind. All you'll be able to remember is a family of giants falling one after the other, like a stand of redwoods crashing down.

The performance is itself an exercise in critical thinking. Schreck almost immediately goes 'over time' to talk about how the Constitution has both liberated and imprisoned women's bodies. She burrows into her own family's painful past of spousal abuse; in one section, about her grandma Betty, she has to read from notecards so that she can muscle through the text without crying. In two years of building the show, Schreck has crafted a powerful argument that uses everything at hand: legal analysis, a dive into history, a consuming rage at sexual-assault statistics and her own very personal reasoning. (There's a scary and hilarious audio recording of Supreme Court justices that's worth the price of admission.) When her own raw grief threatens to overwhelm her, she invites a young local debater-either Rosdely Ciprian or Thursday Williams-for a sparkling debate, which offers tangible hope for the future.

We don't get many ancient Greek tragedies on Broadway. Tastes have changed, and what we think of as dramatic has shifted into different patterns. So Christopher Demos-Brown's American Son seems like a play from another time. It basically consists of two-person arguments, interspersed with messenger speeches: Something has happened offstage, and we wait with the characters to find out what it is. The rhetoric is heavy-handed, the grief and fear are unremitting, the brushstrokes are asphalt-thick, and there's no subtlety in either the characterizations or the narrative structure. In other words, Demos-Brown hasn't written a particularly skillful modern drama. But when the fate of a nation was at stake, Euripides wrote plays like this too.