Jerry Portwood

This isn’t snark, but a palette cleanser from the doomscrolling. Public Charge may uplift many who have grown depressed and disillusioned, urging us to pick up the pieces, take action, and remember that the work, however maddening, is always worth doing.

The earnestness could be hokey or cloying—Night Side Songs, also playing Off-Broadway, traverses similar territory and fails to rise above the construct. Abigail Bengson’s ritual with two simple houseplants, bestowed upon audience members for safekeeping, shouldn’t work, and yet somehow does. But the ritual magic the couple creates onstage transcends all the woo-woo to become one of my favorite evenings of theater this year.

So much talent has been amassed for this production that it’s difficult to parse it all out. At many points, it gives Phantom of the Opera vibes, which makes sense. Director Hunter Bird is part of the creative team for Masquerade, the immersive reimagining of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Blood/Love embraces a similar heady mix of sentimental camp and romantic gothic drama, but with a contemporary beat.

Both actors trained extensively with former UFC fighter Sijara Eubanks, who brings her years of experience to add verisimilitude to their reenactment of the physical demands of jiu-jitsu, boxing, and taekwondo on display. One can feel exhausted just watching them work out on Andrew Boyce’s spare gym-like set.

So how and, more importantly, why do you re-stage the musical on Broadway in 2020? For Belgian director Ivo van Hove - an outsider who has an uncanny ability to see past the tired tropes of classics (The Crucible, A View From the Bridge) and focus on their essence - the ethnic tensions and tale of a divided society at the heart of West Side Story needed to be dismantled and reimagined for our current sensibility. And after years of preparation and millions of dollars, he has done it brilliantly. This new staging of the classic - with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's powerful new choreography and Jan Versweyveld's stunning minimal scenic and lighting design - is fantastic.

Because, of course, it's Morissette's music that saves the day. After the floodgates open with 'You Oughta Know,' the star of the show, MJ (a stunning Elizabeth Stanley), takes over, writhing on her sofa in the grips of an opioid overdose, singing the Grammy-winning 'Uninvited,' with a doppelgänger dancer-demon mimicking her agony. 'Hand in My Pocket' brings a grin. 'Head Over Feet' is adorable. 'Ironic' gets big laughs because it's set amid a high-school creative-writing workshop and invokes all the criticisms that have been launched at the song's quirky lyrics: It's not ironic, y'all! And the sublime movement by Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (who also choreographed sequences in Beyoncé and Jay-Z's 'Apeshit' video) recalls the spastic, emotive motion you'd recognize from a Sia music video.

At times, the dozen bodies on stage - nine musicians (six of them percussionists) and the two singer/dancers - feel like an ecstatic Mardi Gras marching band in neutral duds, at others they are transformed into a collective circle that's discovered a primitive ritual that will unlock some hidden cosmic truths. It's the kind of work that you might find in a church basement in New York's East Village: wacky, weird, and slightly awkward - not typically on a Broadway stage.