Jesse Green — Theater Critic

Forget girl power, sisterly love and the high-belt clarion call of 'Let It Go.' Anxiety over the handling of a precious gift is the theme that comes through loudest in 'Frozen,' the sometimes rousing, often dull, alternately dopey and anguished Disney musical that opened on Broadway on Thursday.

The story, concocted from clichés that were already droopy when they appeared in almost every other jukebox musical ever written, does not require you to put your thinking cap on. Mostly it asks that you notice the winking way it sets up situations that will later make Mr. Buffett's lyrics seem as if they were custom fitted to the yarn rather than the other way around.

Wodehouse isn't as easy to read aloud as Lardner, but Mr. Lithgow takes a great deal of pleasure in mapping sentences whose verbs are barely in earshot of their subjects. And he revels in Dadaist assemblages like this one: 'I know if someone came to me and said 'Jelly this eel!' I should be nonplused.' Yet the Wodehouse, for all its airy wit, is not about nothing: It too is a story of deception, only in this case the kind that delivers delicious comeuppance to the puffed-up and slow-witted. And what could feel more current, more worthwhile, in the first cold days of 2018 than that? The imagination, Mr. Lithgow wants us to know, is a powerful weapon if we don't let it go dull.

Wodehouse isn't as easy to read aloud as Lardner, but Mr. Lithgow takes a great deal of pleasure in mapping sentences whose verbs are barely in earshot of their subjects. And he revels in Dadaist assemblages like this one: 'I know if someone came to me and said 'Jelly this eel!' I should be nonplused.' Yet the Wodehouse, for all its airy wit, is not about nothing: It too is a story of deception, only in this case the kind that delivers delicious comeuppance to the puffed-up and slow-witted. And what could feel more current, more worthwhile, in the first cold days of 2018 than that? The imagination, Mr. Lithgow wants us to know, is a powerful weapon if we don't let it go dull.

But for all its clever construction, I doubt 'The Children' would feel so important without Rose's agenda and the challenge that comes with it. I will say only that it has to do with selfishness in both its ordinary and also its existential varieties. When Rose tells Robin that 'we can't have everything we want just because we want it,' she means, yes, the love of one's youth, but that's just the start. A good death is not guaranteed. Even electricity, as the local disaster has proved, is not a right.

What a delight it is to enter the world of 'Once on This Island'...The hallmark ingenuity, warmth and intensity bordering on excess that characterize Mr. Arden's style is recapitulated everywhere within the production, from the frankly stupendous singing (Chris Fenwick is the music supervisor) to the electric choreography of Camille A. Brown. Everyone is working on the same crammed page.

Most of the rest of the cast, their parts even less defined, struggle to offer coherent portraits. This proves no impediment to Ms. Brown, however, whose 40-plus years on the stage provide her with an arsenal of theatrical weapons she can deploy at any moment. Watch her coo in pride over her daughter; watch her collapse in mortification later. Her second long scene with Ms. Thurman, when the tables get turned, is the high point of the drama. It may be the only drama, in fact.

It would be more satisfying if Mr. Martin, who started working on the play in the 1990s and then put it aside, had found a way to maintain character integrity while developing his bigger ideas and also remaining funny. But that's a tough set of balls to juggle.

In the lectures, Mr. Leguizamo comes off as a cross between Howard Zinn and Professor Irwin Corey, drawing impossible pie charts and ribald diagrams on a chalkboard and then acting out a brutal history in ludicrous skits. The physical comedy, often verging on dance, is priceless - 'translating thought into action worthy of an Iron Man competition,' as Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times in March for his review of the Off Broadway premiere at the Public Theater.

Make no mistake, 'Springsteen on Broadway,' which opened on Thursday evening, is a solo act by a solo artist with an artist's steel. Even though Patti Scialfa, his wife, shows up to harmonize on two numbers, this is not a singalong arena show or a roadhouse rouser. Even less does it try to be a feel-good Broadway book musical or a slick, whitewashed jukebox like 'Jersey Boys.' Rather, 'Springsteen on Broadway' is a painful if thrilling summing-up at 68: a major statement about a life's work, but also a major revision of it.

All this loving attention to the play's philosophical superstructure does little to alleviate the stiffness of the actual scenes, which are filled with the kind of canned dialogue and bald exposition that Monty Python and other English satirists would come to savage a few decades later. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the performances - including that of Ms. McGovern, who lately played a mother of similar vintage but more anodyne personality on 'Downton Abbey' - are often overstated.

Still, you don't have to disagree with Mr. Moore's politics to find that his shtick has become disagreeable with age. 'The Terms of My Surrender,' which opened on Thursday at the Belasco, is a bit like being stuck at Thanksgiving dinner with a garrulous, self-regarding, time-sucking uncle. Gotta love him - but maybe let's turn on the television.

Are we grimmer or dumber or colder than we were in 1991, when Frank Rich, in The New York Times, called Scott McPherson's 'Marvin's Room' 'one of the funniest plays of this year as well as one of the wisest and most moving'? He did so even while noting that this 'healing' comedy, then opening Off Broadway, featured three major characters dying or disintegrating - and a bunch of others arguably worse off. I ask because the Roundabout Theater Company revival that opened on Thursday, giving the play its Broadway debut, barely seems to be any of the things Mr. Rich listed. Thoughtfully directed by Anne Kauffman; keenly performed by Lili Taylor, Janeane Garofalo and especially Celia Weston; a pleasure to watch throughout - it is all of these. But it is somehow, also, fatally mild.

I have suppressed the impulse to interrogate the logic of the story too carefully; though it makes an unusually strong case for the road it takes, surely there are potholes. But this is not the point. Hnath is not using the preexisting characters and their backstory (let alone the real woman - a friend - on whom Ibsen based the tale) as ways of avoiding having to create something original; rather, they are springboards to something very new indeed. The march of progress, halting as it is, has allowed a male playwright in 2017 to write a work that the inhabitants of A Doll's House (Part 1) in 1879 could never have imagined: a great feminist comedy. By that I mean a stand-alone work that glories in the self-interest and correctability of all women - and all men.

I have suppressed the impulse to interrogate the logic of the story too carefully; though it makes an unusually strong case for the road it takes, surely there are potholes. But this is not the point. Hnath is not using the preexisting characters and their backstory (let alone the real woman - a friend - on whom Ibsen based the tale) as ways of avoiding having to create something original; rather, they are springboards to something very new indeed. The march of progress, halting as it is, has allowed a male playwright in 2017 to write a work that the inhabitants of A Doll's House (Part 1) in 1879 could never have imagined: a great feminist comedy. By that I mean a stand-alone work that glories in the self-interest and correctability of all women - and all men.

Bandstand, on the other hand, has the courage of its convictions. It is really about what it's really about, which broadly speaking is the damage war does to combatants and the further damage sometimes done by peace. Yes, it's the first PTSD musical. I'm not saying it's perfectly carried out, or even especially profound, but as directed and choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler, who created the musical staging for Hamilton, it remains almost compulsively faithful to its vision and never asks you to choose between what it's showing you and what you know to be true. Unlike too many musicals, it matches itself.

Even softened slightly as it is in this production, the play's brutal message to sophisticates, whether at the end of Reagan's era or the start of Trump's, comes through. We still do not know anyone but ourselves - and ourselves not too well, either. The idea that there are 'six degrees of separation' between any two people, which in Guare's formulation became a global catchphrase, is not merely a humanistic piety about interconnectedness; it's also a warning. Those six degrees are unbridgeable if you live on an island.

It bewilders me that in making stage musicals from animated or otherwise fantastical movies, adaptors seem to think they can remain outside history. Perhaps the creative team of Anastasia held meetings whose agenda items included such items as Finessing the Romanovs. (There is exactly one reference to their possible contribution to Russia's problems.) You see why this must have seemed necessary; otherwise, Anastasia's self-discovery could not be the climax of her hero's journey, and her beautiful tiara might seem a tad undeserved, even to the Fanastasias. All her sorrowful warbling about the past - well sung, if little else, by Christy Altomare - would be sickening instead of heart-catching. Yet this does not excuse Anastasia, on the lightweight end of the scale, any more than it did Evita on the heavy. You can't have your revolution and eat it too.

O'Brien rebuilt the New York version as a simpler affair, hoping the audience would use its imagination to fill in the blanks; the result is an unusually dull set design by Mark Thompson and effects that would hardly have seemed special twenty years ago. When Wonka, who has spent much of the first act in disguise as a candy store owner in order to give Borle something to do, reveals himself as the grand wizard of chocolate, the transformation scene involves a crowd gathering around him while he takes off his overcoat. At least the Oompa-Loompas are fun - the first one or two times we meet them. Even so, I doubt this musical would have proved at all likable even if an apt style and thrilling visuals had been found for it. The story is too maudlin and, at the same time, too angry.

But the real source of the warmth and color is Midler herself, and the crowd's feelings for her, which together create a feedback loop so tight that the distinction between star and audience is all but obliterated...she performs in a style so broad and unironic despite its myriad references that it seems nearly naked. It's not even a style, really: just a here-I-am, as-I-am honesty (however contrived) that in disguising its own achievement not only breaks down the fourth wall but makes you forget why there ever was one. In Dolly she never looks as right as when she's out on the famous passerelle, promenading among her people, reaching out to them with delight if never quite pressing flesh.

But the real source of the warmth and color is Midler herself, and the crowd's feelings for her, which together create a feedback loop so tight that the distinction between star and audience is all but obliterated...she performs in a style so broad and unironic despite its myriad references that it seems nearly naked. It's not even a style, really: just a here-I-am, as-I-am honesty (however contrived) that in disguising its own achievement not only breaks down the fourth wall but makes you forget why there ever was one. In Dolly she never looks as right as when she's out on the famous passerelle, promenading among her people, reaching out to them with delight if never quite pressing flesh.

What remains powerfully effective, and what Sullivan's handsome production gets right, is Hellman's dissection of (and shocking prescience about) the way a systemic lack of power can turn into manipulative fury. Hellman had seen it before in the toxic capitalism that led to the Depression and did not imagine it would disappear anytime soon from the human repertoire of injustice. After all, she took her title - courtesy of Dorothy Parker - from the Song of Solomon's image of little foxes that 'spoil the vines' and the tender grapes thereon.

...a second viewing of the play, now pumped up and retuned for Broadway, only makes its problems more obvious. Happily, its good qualities are enhanced as well, including an imaginative staging by Rebecca Taichman, beautiful klezmer-inspired music by Lisa Gutkin and Aaron Halva, and, most fundamentally, the depth of its engagement with a recalcitrant subject...Indecent gets one thing perfectly right. The rain scene between the two girls, which we also see repeatedly, is still, after 107 years, something shocking and sacred - and character-driven. Most history is.

Which is not to say that the manic business of the first act is entirely excused by the richer reflectiveness of the second. There were plenty of times throughout when I felt, with Phil, that I'd seen this all before. The adaptation from the film is, in that sense, too faithful; despite the musical's theatrical cleverness it is often literal and choppy, like word-by-word Google translation. But at least it gets better as it loops along. Perhaps all it needs is a few thousand more iterations.

Diplomacy is a lovely word, suggesting the idea that with tact and perseverance humans can accommodate one another. Yeah, sure. If that seems unlikely, so does the idea that diplomacy could be the subject of a madly engrossing play, and for a similar reason: How do you make tact and accommodation rewarding? More specifically, how do you theatricalize draft treaties and position papers? Yet J. T. Rogers's Oslo, which opened on Broadway tonight in a Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Bartlett Sher, turns the negotiations that led to the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord of 1993 into gripping human drama. To the extent that it does so by making diplomacy not just interesting but moving, it's a wonder of savvy stagecraft and wily performance. It's also, quite possibly, a lie.