Jesse Green

But to suggest something is not to achieve it, and though “The Cottage” operates like a farce it only rarely achieves a farce’s liftoff. That’s when the pressure on the characters becomes so intense that it initiates a kind of verbal and physical fission.

In any case, on Broadway, it’s not until the gorgeous last song, “God Draws Straight,” that the material matches the movement in a way that reaches the balcony. Led by Moses Villarama, and based on comments by eyewitnesses to the peaceful 1986 revolution, it acknowledges the moral superiority of its real heroes — the Philippine people — in the only way a musical can: by giving it beautiful voice. Finally, it’s OK to applaud.

And even though he’s telling a story about white supremacy, you are. That’s the glory and also the slight hitch of “Just for Us,” which opened on Monday after runs in London, Edinburgh, Washington and Off Broadway. No, it’s not Ibsen, a dramatist rarely noted for zingy one-liners. But it’s not silliness either. Despite its rabbi-on-Ritalin aesthetic, and its desperation to be liked at all costs, the show is so thoughtful and high-minded it comes with a mission statement. Edelman wants to open a conversation about the place of Jews on the “spectrum of whiteness,” he recently told my colleague Jason Zinoman, “without having a conversation about victimhood.”

This makes for considerable humor, which Jacobs-Jenkins — with his ear for the snark of 38-year-olds (like himself) — renders faultlessly, and which Ting’s breakneck staging, never missing the details, amps to the max. It’s a mystery of the fine writing and excellent acting that the humor does not squash but rather enhances the pathos surging underneath. When it erupts, it can be devastating.

“Grey House,” at the Lyceum Theater, is certainly an in-your-face assault, more in the manner of John Carpenter movies than anything seen onstage since the age of melodrama. It is so expertly assembled from spare parts by the playwright Levi Holloway and the director Joe Mantello that you may not notice, between the jump scares and the shivery pauses, how little it has on its mind. Something about cycles of abuse? The legacy of misogyny? Sure, let’s go with that.

Otherwise, the musicalization feels both too assertive and too inconclusive, like a parade passing by. (There are rarely buttons on the songs to tell you they’re done, leaving the audience wondering whether to applaud.) Only in one song is there a concerted approach to the dramatic experience. The song involves Aditi’s orphaned cousin Ria, raised with her as a sister. Serious and studious, Ria (Sharvari Deshpande) plans to attend New York University, mostly as a way of escaping the marital expectations that Aditi, a pampered princess — “even your panties are ironed” — is all too willing to meet.

But deBessonet’s entertaining and beautifully sung production, featuring terrific turns by Lilli Cooper as the proud doxy Nancy and Raúl Esparza as the criminal den leader Fagin - as well as a touching one by Benjamin Pajak in the title role - is at this point still too muddy to be convincing as sociology, let alone drama

Oscar Levant, the troubled midcentury musician and wag, often said he’d erased “the fine line between genius and insanity.” He says it again, or a version of it, in “Good Night, Oscar,” the unconvincing biographical fantasia that opened Monday at the Belasco Theater. But on the evidence of the character as written, and especially as impersonated by Sean Hayes in a gloomy if accurate performance, Levant doesn’t erase the line so much as fudge it.

The dashing is not just Tessa’s M.O. but the production’s. With its expressionistic sound (lots of pumped-up heartbeats by Ben and Max Ringham) and sudden slashes of harsh light (by Natasha Chivers), Martin’s busy staging is at pains to help Comer fill the vast space alone. She doesn’t need it; she solves the one-actor problem with her own resourcefulness, handily playing all sides of conversations that sometimes involve several people. And when she must be both a third-person reporter of a remembered event and a first-person participant in it, she makes the echo meaningful by using it to specify the content. The laugh she lets out after saying “We laugh” is a very particular and complicated kind.

And though it's always hilarious to see floorboards fly up and smack actors in the face, the professionalization of fake trauma may have outstripped the comedy of it. The difficulty of producing a stunt safely is not, after all, related to the amusement it provides; in fact, the difficulty, when too obvious, can get in the way. 'Peter Pan Goes Wrong,' directed by Adam Meggido, too often belabors the horseplay, making it feel mechanical.

Repeated several times over the course of 90 minutes, that cycle - enhanced by Chavkin’s pacing, which leaves you swallowing your laughter - can lead to an upset stomach. And the characters are sometimes so exaggerated for satire that they lose their grip on your emotions. Still, by the time the bloody tale of the Pequot massacre is enacted onstage, you may find yourself agreeing with Logan, of all people. Being a vegan, she already struggles with the “holiday of death”; I wanted to disown it entirely, from the turkeys all the way back to the Pilgrims. But “The Thanksgiving Play” is not primarily a brief for correcting American history. Like Tracy Letts’s “The Minutes,” which also uncovered a horrific massacre hiding in the clothing of civic pageantry, FastHorse is interested in how new information (new only to some people) might change the stories we tell in the future. The first step, to judge by the absurd crew onstage, will be to change the storytellers. FastHorse being the first Native American woman known to have a play produced on Broadway, maybe we’ve finally started.

Lacking songs to support them, Sorkin’s historical enhancements fall flat. Particularly unconvincing is his sidebar on the evolution of magic into science, with Merlyn (Dakin Matthews, excellent) now a sage, not a wizard, and Morgan (Marilee Talkington) some kind of chemist. (Let’s not even get into Mordred, the mortifying Plot Necessity played by Taylor Trensch.) Forced to maintain the Lerner framework, he can neither justify the romantic story on modern terms nor distract from it in ways that make musical sense.

That “Fat Ham” achieves its happy, even joyful, ending honestly, without denying the weight of forces that make “Hamlet” feel just as honest, is a sign of how capacious and original the writing is, growing the skin of its own necessity instead of merely burrowing into Shakespeare’s. It’s also a sign of how beautifully the cast brings the writing to life. Everyone is excellent, and Thomas’s loud-lady-in-the-pew-behind-you routine is flat-out hilarious. But Spears, with his minute calibrations of feyness and fierceness, holds the whole thing together. In his scenes with Crawford, especially one in which Tedra pleads with Juicy to hold it together — “you don’t get to go crazy” — he lets us see how a character creates and re-creates himself in real time.

Still, with all its fake unsophistication, “Shucked” is what we’ve got, and in a Broadway musical season highlighted by an antisemitic lynching, a murderous barber and a dying 16-year-old, some amusing counter-programming is probably healthy. You may even find its final moment moving, as the paradox of separation and inclusion is resolved in a lovely flash. Just don’t expect intellectual nourishment; forgive me, I’m breaking my promise, but it’s mostly empty calories you’ll find in this sweet, down-market cornucopia.

Now comes a new special on the menu: the ravishingly sung, deeply emotional and strangely hilarious “Sweeney” revival that opened on Sunday at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater. Starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford, and directed by Thomas Kail, it has a rictus on its face and a scar in its heart.  

That’s because 'Bad Cinderella' is not the clever, high-spirited revamp you might have expected, casting contemporary fairy dust on the classic story of love and slippers. It has none of the grit of the Grimm tale, the sweetness of the Disney movie or the grace (let alone the melodic delight) of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Instead, it’s surprisingly vulgar, sexed-up and dumbed-down: a parade of hustling women in bustiers and shirtless pec-rippling hunks.

In the often-thrilling, often-frustrating revival of the 1978 dancical, which reincarnates the spirit and choreography of Bob Fosse, the two possibilities are much the same. Substantially revamped and restaged by Wayne Cilento, a standout in the original production, this “Dancin’” argues that Fosse’s genius was constrained by the pedestrian storytelling of musical theater, with its “villains,” “baritone heroes” and “Christmas trees.” True Fosseism, it seems, can fully thrive only in the abstract, Olympian realms of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins.

What struck me even more vividly in this well-judged and timely revival is the quick path hysteria has always burned through the American spirit if fanned by media, politicians and prejudice of any kind. When a chorus of white Georgians chants “hang ’im, hang 'im, make him pay,” the words can’t help but echo uncomfortably in the post-Jan. 6 air. And another song, a prayer for a return of the day when “the Southland was free,” sounds a lot like current talk of a second secession.

It’s worth noting that linguists generally translate Ibsen’s title — “Et dukkehjem” — as “A Dollhouse” instead of “A Doll’s House.” The prison isn’t just Nora’s; she and Torvald are equally trapped in it. My only real quibble with this compelling, surgically precise revival is that it doesn’t seem to be interested in preserving that unity: in keeping our sympathy for both characters as balanced as Ibsen evidently intended. When the astonishing curtain coup finally comes, you should feel his loss no less than her liberation.

Still, I'm left to wonder whether a few moments of enhanced relevance are worth the bother of a comprehensive and often counterproductive update. Couldn’t this cast have pulled off the standard edition? And pulled it off more smoothly, without the staging longueurs occasioned by the rough text and the stop-and-go direction? (But do keep the fabulous contemporary clothing by Qween Jean.)

The comparison between the two marriages, each undone by the search for something outside the characters’ ken, nevertheless feels specious. The dialogue in both sections, sprinkled like parsley with pidgin Yiddish and Hebrew prayer, has a secondhand aura that is also unconvincing. More authentic are the wigs by Tommy Kurzman and costumes by David Israel Reynoso; you certainly never question which world you’re in as the fur hats and wigs — the shtreimels and sheitels — give way to sweatpants.

The play by Sharr White that opened on Thursday at Studio 54, in a production directed by Bartlett Sher, has not made it all the way from two dimensions to three. Though honorable, thoughtful and wonderful to look at, with crafty performances by Danny Burstein, Zoë Wanamaker and especially Nathan Lane, it caulks so many of the book’s expressive cracks that the best thing about it — its mystery — is sealed out.

Everyone should see it anyway, to experience the pleasure of a great cast making a shrimps-and-veal meal of the incredibly rich material, even as it flips between comedy and tragedy on its way to the truth in between. Actually, that meal may even be too rich at points; the final scene can’t quite digest all that came before, and there are brief moments throughout when the actors’ love for the material itself begins to show through the facade of character, like those bricks behind the plaster. For the most part, though, Pendleton’s production is amazingly confident, featuring not just Walt Spangler’s set, but also top-notch lighting by Keith Parham, sound and music by Ryan Rumery and, especially, costumes by Alexis Forte, which tell their own story on top of Guirgis’s. And when the scene changes are as expressive as the actors’ attention to every nuance of each other’s actions, staging becomes a kind of emotional choreography: thrilling, precise, impossible to pin down.

With the Off Broadway run (through Jan. 22) all but sold out, and commercial producers teed up for a transfer, we may yet find out what “Merrily” can be at its best. For now, it’s just at its best so far. That means some scenes work as they never have; the Act II opener, “It’s a Hit,” which often lays an egg, is for the first time hilarious, thanks in large part to Reg Rogers as Frank and Charlie’s producer. The unlikely progress through the story of Gussie Carnegie — the producer’s secretary, then wife, then star, then ex, but in reverse — suddenly seems clear and, in Krystal Joy Brown’s fetching performance, charming if not credible. Yet at the same time, some things that used to work no longer do. The supporting characters, heavily doubled, are mostly a blur. The song “Old Friends,” which at its root is about the fatal compromises that keep people together, has a case of fake giddiness. And “Bobby and Jackie and Jack,” a comedy number about the Kennedy family that the three friends perform in a downtown club in 1960, lays the egg that “It’s a Hit” no longer does.

Ultimately, it’s the epiphanies and insights that make it possible to enjoy, without too much guilt, the flat-out entertainment of 'Some Like It Hot,' including its groaners, overemphasis and old-school gags. How smart it is, for instance, to have Daphne demonstrate the spectrum of gender by singing, simply, “I crossed a border.” (Smart too, to have it sung in the scene set in Mexico.) And how satisfying it is to have Osgood link his identity issues so succinctly with hers: “The world reacts to what it sees,” he says, “and in my experience the world doesn’t have very good eyesight.” Perhaps not, but some of its artists have a damn fine ear.