Jeremy Gerard

With much 21st Century razzle dazzle provided by the magnificent video projection designs of Jake Barton and huge digital composite images – video AI projections of faces of the actors meld into one another at one point – from AGBO, McNeal, astutely directed by the great Bartlett Sher, is an often confusing though wheedlingly emotional mindgame. The discombobulation is, one suspects, Akhtar’s intention, a way of presenting on a physical stage a near-future realm of thorny, magic-seeming complexity in which thousands of years of data – from Shakespeare and Ibsen to your dead wife’s old notebooks, and everything in between – can be melded into a book with your name on it, and in relative minutes. Is this theft, or merely a literary Moog waiting for its Brian Eno?

Van Hove's West Side Story isn't bad solely because he subverts the live action to video images and minimizes the living, churning story at hand. He's compressed the show to a single unbroken act of 105 minutes, eliminating material that allows the story to breathe. That crucial oxygen was originally supplied by book writer Arthur Laurents, composer Bernstein, director/choreographer Jerome Robbins and, at the time, novice lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Collaboration, as Sondheim stresses in his own recounting of the show's gestation in Finishing the Hat, was central to making all the elements merge into that most memorable whole.

The Roundabout Theatre Company's flawless revival of A Soldier's Play is such good medicine for Broadway's January blues that it might be enough just to tick off its merits: a gripping murder mystery heightened by crackling dialog, a first-class ensemble of actors in symphonic harmony, staging that audaciously adds a pinch of sex appeal to heat up its social consciousness, and just enough music to give it a pulsing rhythm and beat that delivers us to its shocking conclusion in just under two hours. That's the good news, and there's only good news to report.

Songs from Jagged Little Pill, augmented by others from Morrisette's back catalogue and two new ones written for the show, are folded into the story. The numbers themselves, spiky with adolescent angst and a more pronounced sense of outrage over how the female of the species is abused regardless of age, have lost none of their power. (I say this as someone who must have been AWOL when the album was released, but who found the songs as pungent and on target as if they'd been written today.) That doesn't save JLP from a bit of Mamma Mia-itis, which is what happens when a story is meant to frame a song list (there's also additional music by Morrisette and Glen Ballard), but the songs don't always quite fit, requiring a slather of narrative mortar.

With its unself-conscious blend of narration and performance, of tell and show, as well as most of the brilliant company playing multiple roles, The Inheritance put me in mind of another legendary two-parter. Not, as some have suggested, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, but the Royal Shakespeare Company's adaptation of Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickelby. For it is not so much a 'gay fantasia,' as Kushner called his epic work, as it is a tale told, planted in reality yet suffused with sorrow that, almost undetected, transmutes into hope.

Perhaps I was mistaken. Tina: The Tina Turner Musical has arrived after smacking London in the gob. It's not at all a lousy show, but Adrienne Warren's performance in the title role has the roaring lift of a helicopter taking flight and the dazzling sparkle of a hundred chandeliers, making Tina a musical not to miss. I came out of the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre feeling as though I'd just seen Serena Williams on center court, Simone Biles on the balance beam and Bessie Smith singing 'Downhearted Blues,' all rolled into one mesmerizing package. Yes, Warren is that good. You will remember her name.

And so it almost breaks my heart to add that this production, first presented in July at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, is the worst pairing of show and venue I've seen in as long as I can remember. The Sound Inside is an intimate work. Studio 54 is exactly the wrong theater for it. As hard as these formidable artists work to achieve that intimacy, the house utterly defeats them. Parker in particular has a delicacy of both presence and delivery that demand proximity. All is lost in the echoes of a cold, distancing space. That's a terrible shame.

Slave Play, by contrast, is the work of a promising satirist whose cleverness thus far trumps his dramaturgy. I was more taken with Daddy, the other Harris work staged off-Broadway last season. Most of my colleagues hated that one, but its unforgiving exposure of another race-charged theme - it concerned a wealthy white art patron and the impressionable young black artist who becomes his lover - more assured and more dangerous than this work. Slave Play earns its laughs, but not its sorrow.

And while The Father cast us on a rocky, battering shore with one disintegrating character brilliantly played by Frank Langella, Storm offers two unfathomably deep, indelibly collaborative performances, by Jonathan Pryce as André, a celebrated novelist settled into arch irrelevance, and Eileen Atkins as Madeleine, the unshakeable garden-loving wife who promised to outlive him.

To Lloyd's credit, and that of this spectacular cast, we never lose sight of the ways in which these three lives are ineradicably interwoven, giving more power to the emptiness and emotional wreckage their actions have wrought - despite their best attempts to be so very British about it all. The truth is visible there, in the splintered light glinting off a trail of mucus, loosed by the wrench of unexpected grief.

For me, the production takes full flight with 'I Hate Men,' about midway through the first act, when O'Hara (as Lilli as Shrew's Kate) delivers a full throated and beautifully arch takedown of what later generations would simply call patriarchy. 'Kate' delivers this song with utter conviction - no sense of the I'm just a silly girl spouting off that earlier productions might have presented.

Daniel Sullivan directed this long-developing show, and it's fleet. But Lithgow isn't well served by the design. Kenneth Posner's lighting is harsh and unforgiving, and John Lee Beatty's set is clean but oddly monumentalist, overpowering a necessarily intimate exchange between performer and audience. As someone who loves the short story form, I know one reader's Wodehouse is another's I.L. Peretz, one reader's Cheever is another's Pynchon. Lithgow is deeply impressive in sharing two wildly different examples. I wasn't sold on the first, but he had me at Pongo.

The performances under John Dove's direction are uniformly superb; in addition to Crane and Iestyn, they include the near-palpable forbearance of Melody Grove's Isabella and the Rushmore-faced Edward Peel as Philippe's conniving nemesis. And then there's Rylance. (Remember Rylance? It's a review about Rylance.) He compels us to watch him in close-up, because he has the star's gift of playing to the cheap seats without actually playing to the cheap seats. A sixteenth-inch twitch of the shoulder conveys the world-weariest of shrugs. The slight escalation of those drawbridge eyebrows rings louder than any shout of protest. And the throwaway line, like the subtle gesture, penetrates as keenly as any of Richard III's mocking asides. Meticulously off-handed, it's funny and sad, a performance to be savored in a totally engaging little triumph of a show.

Indeed, the show works so hard to amuse us with irreverent kickiness that by the time we return from intermission, the stupor induced by the Act I assault on the senses may have been enhanced by alcohol to put you in a fog. So my advice: Stay away from the bar. For, first-act problems aside, this show, ingeniously staged by Tina Landau and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli within an inch of its CO2 life, has more to offer than we had any right to expect in this era of dreary Broadway knockoffs of Hollywood dross. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, eat your heart out.

A joyful noise thunders through Circle in the Square theater, as Broadway welcomes a smashing revival of Once On This Island. Michael Arden's exuberant staging of this 1990 musical fairy tale set on a Caribbean island conjures a spell that is devastatingly timely yet affectingly timeless in its evocation of how love goes when the indifferent, capricious whims of gods and nature intervene in the deepest yearnings of the human heart.

Which may explain why The Parisian Woman is such a train wreck. If House of Cards succeeded on the strength of clipped dialogue smoothly set off by Kevin Spacey's conspiratorial asides to the audience, the dramaturgy fails Willimon here. The dialogue is stilted and delivered haltingly even by the pros in the cast, and they move about the stage as if in fear that Steve Bannon will show up any minute looking for a dance partner.

What ensues is one of the funniest, and wildest, games of social and sexual one-upsmanship since, well maybe since John Avildsen's 1981 film Neighbors, which starred Martin's former Saturday Night Live pals John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. Martin has a strong stylistic kinship with the late genius Thomas Berger, author of the novel on which that film was based. Both are specialists in the exacting style of genre parody (Berger also wrote Little Big Man and Meeting Evil).

That's one of the few lines I can quote without the use of asterisks, exclamation points and question marks. Even in Spanish the dirty words sound too dirty to repeat. I wish someone would tell him that the famous headline he quotes (I won't give it away here) was in the Daily News, not the Post. There are visual aids, many jokes (Trump, Weinstein and Weiner make cameos) and a sober mission at work, all effectively pushed to the max by director Tony Taccone. If you want the condensed version, listen to Randy Newman's 'The Great Nations Of Europe.'

Feed your soul: Go see The Band's Visit. Now that this exquisite musical has moved uptown to Broadway - it opened tonight at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre - I can make that recommendation with only one caveat, which is to spring for center orchestra seats, but more about that later. The rare film-to-musical adaptation that enhances the source material, The Band's Visit has stayed with me in the year since it opened off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company, like a dream from which I never wanted to awaken.

So it's a clever deception, this wall of numbers created by designer John Lee Beatty, who is much better known for sets that look like places where people actually live. The people who live in the world of Ayad Akhtar's Junk, which,opened tonight at Lincoln CenterTheater, have heads full of numbers, closets hung with hand-tailored suits and barrels, barges, of cash. They live in architected apartments that look like high-end hotel suites and guzzle Ch. Petrus like so much soda pop. Their children roll through parks in tank-like perambulators pushed by nannies with back-up nannies. Not that I'm envious.

Physically and cerebrally Clive Owen has the chameleonic qualities that define a certain kind of star charisma: He's handsome but not pretty; suave in a way that practically advertises insecurity; glib yet always on alert for the surgical riposte. All of which make the Knick star perfect for the role of Rene Gallimard, the French diplomat who falls in love with a Chinese opera star, in David Henry Hwang's electrifying drama M. Butterfly.

Springsteen on Broadway is a perfect concert...Seeing Springsteen on Broadway must be similar to what it was like to be in the audience for Clapton Unplugged: an electrifying (well, an acoustifying) session of mostly big big songs rendered without embellishment...Underscoring that seriousness, it's important to acknowledge the brilliant work of sound designer Brian Ronan, who manages the neat trick of high volume without losing the essential closeness of the experience...And Natasha Katz's lighting is hauntingly effective, through shadow into play, or just letting the man sing enveloped in a deep, quiet aura.

Coming right off her deserved Tony win for staging Indecent, the director offers a case study of her own theory of time and its consequences: Indecent was the product of several years' development with the playwright and a fully integrated company. Time and the Conways, on the other hand, feels stitched together in a hurry, a costume drama with no coherent point of view and performances so at odds with one another as to screech like chalk on slate. McGovern is the chief victim of this; her shrill performance lacks the conviction necessary to make this monster mom compelling or even much more than a vague annoyance.

Prince of Broadway bristles with the joyful noise of familiar songs delivered by a gifted and versatile cast of nine, under the direction of Prince himself, with an assist from Susan Stroman (The Producers,Scottsboro Boys). Jason Robert Brown's high-octane overture quotes composers as disparate as Stephen Sondheim and John Kander, Leonard Bernstein and Andrew Lloyd Webber, not to mention J.R. Brown. It sets the scene for a celebration of a theater maker who still refuses to be pigeonholed as high- or middle-brow. A director who deserves the honor not only for championing many of the greatest stage artists of the late 20th century, but for making their work urgent and central to an audience lured from Times Square by movies, TV and rock arenas.

The Terms of My Surrender is heartfelt and represents the thinking and ideology of a crucial voice of dissent and opposition at a time direly in need of such voices. But it's a lazy show that severely underestimates it audience. Preaching to the choir is one thing; pandering to to (sic) it is of a somewhat lower order.