Jesse Green

Mostly, “Illinoise” makes me wonder why so many musicals, even those that feature dance heavily, are so leadfooted in their storytelling conventions. (No surprise that Peck was influenced, as he told The Times, by the groundbreaking pop jukebox dancicals of Twyla Tharp.) “Illinoise” instead builds on its faith in the audience, trusting us to organize its various streams of information into a steady river of deep feeling inside our own heads. Or if you wind up crying, as I did, outside.

Which is not to say that “The Ally” is artless. Quite the opposite, it is almost too artful, arraying its eloquent arguments in clever pairs of impossible contradiction. If only frustration and hopelessness were feelings worth intensifying, it would win a prize for its form-follows-function design. But I felt the need for more wisdom than craft.

The book has unsolvable problems, but then so do most musicals, until they are solved — or bulldozed. Even then, few give you a first act like this one, or a subject — the creation of American music in the furious cauldron of race — as hot. I mean hot as entertainment, of course, but also, even hotter, as history.

That’s the setup, if nowhere near the payoff, of the “The Apiary,” a bright, strange and mesmerizing marvel by Kate Douglas, making her professional playwriting debut with this Off Off Broadway production. Unlike most such debuts, though, “The Apiary,” which opened on Tuesday at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, is receiving a nearly perfect, first-class staging under the almost too good direction of Kate Whoriskey.

Complicity was not of course possible in the no-longer-available 2020 streaming production, which required viewers to process it on the fly, in much the way they process social media, deciding for themselves what to laugh at — and what to ponder, repost or trash. Lacking that formal congruence, the live “Russian Troll Farm” has a temperature problem: Instead of cool, it feels overheated; instead of suggestive, prosaic.

But that animating idea is also a problem because aside from Jason Robert Brown’s typically propulsive songs, which excite even the most absurd moments of Jonathan Marc Sherman’s book, the engine of the story, set in the 1990s, depends on uncertainty about Ethan’s veracity. That’s a nonstarter.

That this Manhattan Theater Club production, directed by David Cromer, remains mostly riveting is the result of the richness of Harmon’s novelistic detail — and the exceptional skill of the principal actors in realizing it.

It would also be easy to attribute the improvement to Neugebauer’s direction, which is so smart and swift for most of the play’s substantial length that you feel gripped by storytelling without being strangled by argument. Her staging, on a towering double-decker set by the design collective dots, is also nearly ideal, accentuating (with the help of Jane Cox’s painterly lighting) the conflicts and alliances among the characters. And the daredevil cast, instead of reveling in falling apart, focuses for as long as possible on keeping it together. We thus experience, in the force of that repression, just how awful human awfulness must be if human will cannot ultimately corral it.

But when the staging, singing and playing come together, whether in exuberance or sorrow, I was happily reminded of another musical about music that originated at the Atlantic: “The Band’s Visit.” (David Yazbek, that show’s songwriter, is credited here as a creative consultant.) In such moments — the hypnotic “Chan Chan,” the ear-wormy “El Cuarto de Tula,” the heartbroken “Veinte Años,” the gorgeous “Drume Negrita” — you really do feel the past harmonizing with the present. What Compay says is true: “Old songs kick up old feelings.” Even, as in the showstopping and, yes, scorching “Candela,” with a flute.

Perhaps it’s enough that “How to Dance in Ohio” offers solace and encouragement in a mild, conventional package. (There are cool-down spaces for those who need them, as one of the actors explains in welcoming the audience.) Doing sweet, reparative work for any part of humanity means doing sweet, reparative work for it all.

But because those hits are hits for a reason, there is still pleasure in hearing them. The singing, arrangements and orchestrations (by various hands including Adam Blackstone, Tom Kitt, Dominic Follacaro and Keys herself) are thrilling, if strangely unbalanced in Gareth Owen’s sound design. The fire-escape sets (by Robert Brill), expressive projections (by Peter Nigrini), saturated lighting (by Natasha Katz) and often hilarious costumes (by Dede Ayite) are all Broadway-ready.

“Scene Partners,” which opened on Wednesday at the Vineyard Theater in a top-drawer production directed by Rachel Chavkin, is part of a genre you might call the absurd picaresque. Meryl is a hardheaded Candide, a sharp-eyed Don Quixote. When we meet her just after the long longed-for death of her abusive husband, she is leaving Wisconsin for California so fast she doesn’t bother burying him. “Within the year I will rise to fame and fortune as an international film star,” she says in farewell to her drug addict daughter. Sure enough, she soon acquires not just her agent and acting coach, but also a contract to write the movie of her life.

Letting the clowns run the flying circus, at least part-time, is integral to the history of Python’s success. (Idle told The Times that the material survives because “it was written by its actors and acted by its writers.”) It is also a smart move for a show that could otherwise feel calcified; a production I saw at the Stratford Festival over the summer seemed more like an animatronic museum exhibit, making me doubt it was really revivable. And even this mostly excellent production betrays a faint odor of mothballs, especially in the projection-heavy scenic design of Paul Tate dePoo III, so dependent on the feel of Terry Gilliam’s original animations. The key to the comedy is not after all replication but individuation. The Pythons were each their own kind of oddball, and the bits are only funny with fresh bite.

But the version of “Harmony” that opened on Monday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, after a potholed, decades-long trek to Broadway, makes a beeline for the bleakest parts of the tale and then bleakens them further. Sussman’s script, relentlessly focused on historical trauma, takes reasonable dramatic license with the group’s actual history, but only in one direction: darker. And though Warren Carlyle’s production is smart and slick, it traps the tale in a figurative and literal glassy black box (by Beowulf Boritt) from which only pathos escapes.

You can certainly count on coherence from the songs themselves, no matter how randomly they sometimes seem to have been placed in one Rodgers and Hart show instead of another. Even completely shorn of plot relevance, they are evergreen for a reason. Though this “Pal Joey” rightfully questions the appropriation of Black voices in American popular song — referring to the King of Jazz, Paul Whiteman, and the King of Swing, Benny Goodman, Joey says, “Awful lot of Kings out there playing our music” — it’s strange to build that argument on the back of these standards. If they’re the problem, why celebrate them, and make them sound so good in the process?

Though his only previous Broadway appearance was in the 2017 revival of Arthur Miller’s “The Price,” Danny DeVito commands interest without having to do much, and rewards it with funny readings of even unfunny lines. Yet despite his likability, the only parts of “I Need That” that feel authentic are those, near the end, in which the nonissue of Sam’s hoarding is momentarily swept offstage to make space for a few minutes of real father-daughter drama. To this, the DeVitos bring a vibrant understanding — part pride, part dismay, all mess — of what it means to be related. Sometimes what’s neat just isn’t as compelling as what’s not.

So however you want to categorize “Stereophonic” — perhaps a playical? — the great thing is that it doesn’t founder, as most theatrical treatments of the artistic process do, on either side of the genre divide. The music justifies the long buildup, and the play, Adjmi’s best so far, is as rich and lustrous as they come. You could even call it platinum.

The best good news about “Here We Are,” the combo platter Buñuel musical that opened on Sunday at the Shed, nearly two years after Sondheim’s death in November 2021, is that it justifies the idea of merging these two works and succeeds in making a surrealist musical expressive. In Joe Mantello’s breathtakingly chic and shapely production, with a cast of can-you-top-this Broadway treasures, it is never less than a pleasure to watch as it confidently polishes and embraces its illogic. Musically, it's fully if a little skimpily Sondheim, and entirely worthy of his catalog. That it is also a bit cold, only occasionally moving in the way that song would ideally allow, may speak to the reason he had so much trouble writing it.

I know we could all use a good laugh nowadays. But would you settle for a thousand chuckles? Because that’s what “Gutenberg! The Musical!” is offering. In the two-man, 20-character skit of a show that opened Thursday evening on Broadway, the jokes are abundant, interchangeable and lightweight: comedy as packing peanuts. If that suggests an inconsequential payload, well, perhaps consequential was not what the writers, Scott Brown and Anthony King, and the director, Alex Timbers, were after. Silliness crossed with satire seems to be their target, and with the help of two expert farceurs, Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells, they do hit the silliness bull’s-eye. The satire, I’m not so sure.

Radcliffe’s wit and modesty, combined with Mendez’s zing and luster, provide perfect settings for what is now (as it has never been previously) the inarguably central performance. Groff, always a compelling actor, here steps up to an unmissable one. With his immense charisma turned in on itself, he seems to sweat emotion: ambition, disappointment and, most frighteningly, a terrible frozen disgust.

“Jaja’s” is full of such treasurable moments, when the drama feels tightly woven with the comedy. And if the weave frays a bit at the end, what doesn’t? Like the Strawberry Knotless Afro-Pop Bob, it’s still a great look.

Originally played by Dee, and now by Kara Young, Lutiebelle is a rich creation, sweet and hungry, down-home and dirty. Young, a two-time Tony nominee known mostly for dramatic roles (“Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven,” “The New Englanders,” “All the Natalie Portmans”), is also a daring comedian, finding in Lutiebelle a cross between Lucille Ball and Moms Mabley. That she is not afraid to go as far as the part can take her — with a gawky pigeon-toed gait and hilariously lustful line readings in a taffy-pulled Southern accent — is a sign of the freedom the play gives her (and everyone else) to represent a character instead of a race.

In the play overall, though, you do. And until a thrillingly staged climax that moves unusually fast, you usually foresee the corners with plenty of room to prepare. The result is a play that seems becalmed on its surface despite the powerful emotions underneath — not just the characters’ emotions but the author’s.

All of that is faithfully rendered in “The Shark Is Broken,” which opened on Thursday at the Golden Theater, in a production directed by Guy Masterson. There’s a perfect replica of the Orca bobbing prettily on a C.G.I. sea, and costumes minutely matched to the film. (Duncan Henderson is the designer.) Accents, postures, props and hairstyles are fanatically accurate; there’s even a hat-tip (by Adam Cork) to John Williams’s sawing, rasping theme at the start. But these details do not on their own create much dramatic interest. Plots consisting of hurry-up-and-wait rarely do. Were it not for its curious meta-story, the play would be little more than a pleasant diversion: 95 minutes of bloodless, toothless, Hollywood-adjacent dramedy.

In the Broadway adaptation, which opened on Thursday at the Winter Garden Theater, the famously souped-up DeLorean DMC, or a life-size replica thereof, is terrific — in some ways more exciting than the one in the movies because it does its tricks live. Well, partly live. The time-warping, plutonium-powered joy rides that shuttle young Marty McFly (Casey Likes) between 1985 and 1955 in the vehicle retrofitted by the eccentric Doc Brown (Roger Bart) are crafty illusions combining mechanical action, busy projections and a lot of distraction with fog, lights and sound. Alas, that also describes the rest of the show, directed by John Rando with Doc-like frenzy: mechanical, busy, distracting, foggy. Though large, it’s less a full-scale new work than a semi-operable souvenir.