Jesse Green

Though Broadway, with its vanities and oddities, is in many ways an easy target, hitting satirical bull’s-eyes is hard. Expecting Alessandrini to be as consistently sharp and catchy as the best musicals he ransacks is unrealistic. Even if the music direction by Fred Barton is, as always, top-notch, the show’s staging is rudimentary, the pacing of its mere 90 minutes erratic and pocked with potholes. As such, it’s probably a good thing that last summer’s planned production of “Forbidden Broadway on Broadway” didn’t work out; the scruffy, sarcastic, bare-bones revues that this franchise is modeled on no longer have a home there.

Most of what either woman says in “The Roommate,” which opened Thursday at the Booth Theater, is greeted by one or the other response. The two actors, old friends and old hands, play beautifully off each other, expertly riding the seesaw of a play, by Jen Silverman, that throws a Bronx grifter looking to reform herself into an unlikely alliance with a flyover frump looking to ditch her flannel ways. The actors’ intense focus and extreme contrast multiply the material exponentially, sending it way past the footlights to the back of the Booth. But as we’ve learned, sustaining and expanding are two different activities. Indeed, the Broadway supersizing of “The Roommate,” which has been produced regionally since 2015, does not necessarily represent progress, even as it no doubt reaps profit.

Though cleverly accomplished, the shift, as Jane turns the tables on Loyd’s supposed probity, makes “Job” feel even more manipulative than other therapy-based psychological thrillers. By comparison, “The Patient,” the FX series starring Steve Carell as a psychiatrist held hostage, seems like a model of earned dramatic tension. The tension of “Job” feels merely gratuitous.

They protest too much. “Oh, Mary!” may be silly, campy, even pointless, but “stupid,” I think not. Rather, the play, which opened on Thursday at the Lyceum Theater, is one of the best crafted and most exactingly directed Broadway comedies in years. Which is a surprise on many levels, and on each level a gift.

The play’s ideas and ideals are fine, and modestly if repetitively dramatized, but what makes this swift summer trifle so diverting is the embodiment of the women themselves. N and A are perfect incarnations of their congressional doppelgängers, down to Pelosi’s golden Mace of the United States House of Representatives brooch and A.O.C.’s signature “Beso” red lipstick. The gimmick also gives Holland Taylor (as N) and Ana Villafañe (as A) tasty roles and a meaty conflict to sink their teeth into.

I should say at this point that, no, I haven’t turned into a fan of the show itself, the one you can see at your community theater or license for your high school. I don’t believe musicals should need whisker consultants. But as happens occasionally, the right idea can transform the wrong material. If “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” has managed a Grizabella turn, reincarnating itself in fabulousness, do not expect an 18-year run or, pardon me, copycat productions. It’s a lightning strike: not now and forever but now and once.

Even if you buy that argument, your tolerance for its expression may be greater than mine. I don’t feel improved, enlightened or even chastened by a furious man repeatedly cracking a bullwhip in my direction. Nor was I amused by the dragooning of theatergoers brought onstage to witness atrocities or, at another point, to be turned, without warning, into slaves at an auction. The close-ups of their faces, as they crumple or freeze in the act of realization, are devastating, and not just for those undersold at $1. The devastation is of course the point. Everything “Dark Noon” chooses to explore figuratively was once quite literal to its victims. That there were millions of those victims lends moral importance to the endeavor — all the more reason it must be done well. But the play’s format seems to have gotten away from its values, creating a disturbing symbolic alliance between the storytellers and the perpetrators. It is no longer a representation of cruelty; it is cruel.

That tension between adventure and safety is what makes “Titanic” more than just a collection of tragic sketches. Perhaps a little baldly — Yeston’s lyrics are not as sophisticated as his music — he has Andrews (Jose Llana) say, in the show’s first words, that the liner he designed is part of mankind’s eternal attempt to “fabricate great works at once magnificent and impossible.” It’s a statement of hubris, of course: The show, after all, is about the human urge to dominate nature — and other humans — by whatever means necessary. Yet in art we can’t help relishing that hubris, if works like “Titanic” are the result.

Except for Halston, who is incapable of not grabbing an audience, there’s little the cast can do to make this material feel full or fresh. Even Bonney, a director with miles of excellent productions to her credit — including “Mlima’s Tale” and “Cost of Living” — resorts to too many clichés. (The sound design, by Darron L West, and the projection design, by Elaine J. McCarthy, are especially obvious.) And a Hail Mary pass toward tragedy in the last moments of the play feels like an incomplete.

But do not fear. This is not the kind of play to abandon you in a dark alley, even if Cephus’s distaste for city life is the most compelling and counterintuitive part of the story. Plot machinations that you will see coming at quite some distance deliver a happy ending and may even elicit a few nonconsensual tears. No matter: They cleanse the soul just the same. Williams, who died a few days before this revival’s first preview, seems to have been willing to go anywhere to free his hero from despair as a way of freeing the rest of us, too.

For many, it will be enough compensation that Malloy’s music remains as hypnotic and embracing as ever, performed faultlessly by the cast (especially Seibert) and a busy quartet (violin, cello, French horn, keyboards) under Or Matias’s musical direction. A close-harmony coda, accompanied only by a hurdy-gurdy drone, specifically recalls the a cappella wonders of “Octet” and the hushed beauty of the title song of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.” But intermittent gorgeousness is not, for me, a sufficient substitute for substance. What is “Three Houses” trying to say, or have us experience, about living through the pandemic — beyond the usefulness of eight quantities of liquor?

The comparison is pungent but inapt: Archival work is not death work. Likewise, a play is not a museum. That’s part of why, while admiring Tectonic’s intentions and technique in “Blueberries” — not for nothing was it recently named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama — I find it even more unbalanced today than I did when I saw it last year in Washington.

That it does not have one here is not fatal. Neugebauer is such a detailed director, honing every moment and movement to a chic polish, that this typically gorgeous Lincoln Center Theater production offers a hundred things to enjoy. Mimi Lien’s sylvan set, receding into the depths of the Beaumont stage, is one. Musical interludes, by the songwriter Andrew Bird, often featuring accordion and violin, are another, striking the play’s jaunty melancholy just right. Kaye Voyce’s contemporary costumes, quickly identifying each character’s status and self-concept, are wonderful, and in the case of Elena’s knit dresses with their form-hugging cuts, sensational.

The Manhattan Theater Club production that opened on Tuesday, starring the rom-dram charmer Rachel McAdams, confirms that earlier diagnosis. But Herzog, whose Broadway adaptation of “An Enemy of the People” is running a few blocks away, is not interested in locking down meaning. Like all great plays, “Mary Jane” catches light from different directions at different times, revealing different ideas. On the other side of the worst of Covid, “Mary Jane” feels less like a parent’s cry for more life than an inquest into the meaning of death.

But then “Patriots” is no better a source for moral news than the other kind. Perhaps no play is. Here, though, Putin is given way more than his due: glamorized as a shy, upstanding mayor corrupted by Berezovsky and his plutocratic ilk. Whereas Berezovsky, who did after all try to bring Putin down, is left in the gutter, with a certain amount of dramaturgical glee. Goold stages his downfall like a rock opera, with strobes, bursts of loud noise (these are often assassination attempts) and weird dancers. If not moral clarity, then, “Patriots” at least offers a lesson: There are moments when tyrants are still tyros, when Putins are nobodies — and evil can be redirected or sidelined. Wait too long and you could lose your chance.

Let me quickly add that Rebecca Frecknall’s production, first seen in London, has many fine and entertaining moments. Some feature its West End star Eddie Redmayne, as the macabre emcee of the Kit Kat Club (and quite likely your nightmares). Some come from its new New York cast, including Gayle Rankin (as the decadent would-be chanteuse Sally Bowles) and Bebe Neuwirth and Steven Skybell (dignified and wrenching as an older couple). Others arise from Frecknall’s staging itself, which is spectacular when in additive mode, illuminating the classic score by John Kander and Fred Ebb, and the amazingly sturdy book by Joe Masteroff. But too often a misguided attempt to resuscitate the show breaks its ribs.

The Greeks are useful here, having made sure to embody injustice in emotion, and even song, not just instruction. Their theater depicted the way policy and character were inseparably bonded. As such, “Suffs” is already good, in both senses — a good show and good for the world. I even shed a few political tears. But to be great, a musical (like a great movement) must grab you by the throat. “Suffs” too often settles for holding up signs.

The subtlety, cleverness and humanity with which “Sally & Tom” approaches the story of Hemings and Jefferson, dazzlingly doubled in the story of the troupe putting it on, come as no surprise at all. They are the hallmarks of an author incapable of writing a line unfilled with the bewildering burden — or is it the treasure? — of human contradiction. Indeed, Parks begins with an unprovable yet also undisprovable thesis. She has Luce, the author and star of “The Pursuit of Happiness,” decree: “This is not a love story.”

That there is little if any historical truth in that characterization is not ultimately the problem. The painter Georges Seurat in “Sunday in the Park With George” — a show referenced in the first lines of the script — is largely fictionalized too, a cad to his mistress and generally unlikable. “Lempicka” doesn’t have the craft, especially in the mis-accented, often vague lyrics, to make its title character a relatable modern woman, nor the boldness to let her be awful and great. Perhaps if it were less of a machine she could be more of a monster.

And yet the musical version of “The Outsiders” that opened on Thursday has been made with so much love and sincerity it survives with most of its heart intact. Youth is key to that survival; the cast, if not actually teenage — their singing is way too professional for that — is still credibly fresh-faced. (Five of the nine principals are making their Broadway debuts.) That there is no cynical distance between them and their characters is in itself refreshing to see. Also key to the show’s power is the director Danya Taymor’s rivetingly sensorial approach to the storytelling, even if it sometimes comes at a cost to the story itself. Many stunning things are happening on the stage of the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater — and from the sobs I heard the other night, in the audience, too.

Today, though, unless you’re a die-hard fan who thrills automatically to every lick and lyric, you may want something that calls itself musical theater to offer more than a full-tilt assault on the senses. This production — directed, like the original, by Des McAnuff — won’t provide that, being less interested in trying to put across the story (by McAnuff and Townshend) than in obscuring it with relentless noise and banal imagery.

I find the result a bit mystifying. Jackson is a major talent, and Jacobs, in her Off Broadway debut, is already highly accomplished. Benson, in her stagings of “Fairview” and “An Octoroon,” has proved herself the kind of director who can deftly manage complex genre pastiche. But in “Teeth,” I’m sorry to say, this holy trinity has bitten off more than it can chew.

Surely not the Ibsen, which aligns closely with their views and is a distant source of them. (The play was first performed, as “En Folkefiende,” in 1883.) Nor does it make sense that they would object to Sam Gold’s crackling and persuasive production, which drove those views home despite having to regroup once the protesters were ejected.

When songs provide so little information, barely differentiating the characters let alone advancing the plot, a musical tends to sag. And when a musical has gone to some trouble to accommodate those songs — the movie of “The Notebook” runs two hours, the show hardly 20 minutes more — the trade-offs are of the nose-versus-face variety.

Both precepts seem plausible, even if one is harsh and one loving, and both are chewily written. The entire play is like that: ideally worded, ingeniously structured, sinewy and swift. It never lets you, or poor Sister James, reach a conclusion as to which, if either, of her superiors is right. By the time Shanley takes the astonishing step of having Aloysius interrogate Donald’s mother — Quincy Tyler Bernstine, scoring big in a short but vividly counterintuitive role — you no longer know what you believe.