Jesse Green

Kennedy, it seems, aims to forbid us the ease and release of a traditional scene, just as she has prescribed a conceptual set that in Beowulf Boritt’s rather stiff interpretation represents all locations and furniture as a tumble of library shelves full of law tomes. But McDonald is incapable of nonemotion; her performance builds to a shattering catharsis that may in some ways be unauthorized. Leon, too, works smartly against the grain of the play. In thoughtfully mimed vignettes, he shows us that the other characters, beautifully enacted if with little to say, are not just puppets of Suzanne’s memory but living creatures with their own struggles. They are lit (by Allen Lee Hughes) and costumed (by Dede Ayite) less forbiddingly than the script might lead you to expect, and accompanied by sound and music (by Justin Ellington and Dwight Andrews) that admits other emotions to the horror. Even the babies are touchingly represented: slips of pink fabric, delicate as scarves and as easily lost.

In its remaking for Broadway I wish 'KPOP' had preserved more moments like that: moments that allow you to consider what the excitement of K-pop (for those who feel it) and the expressiveness of American musical theater (likewise) can profitably say to each other. Both have their fans and no doubt their glories, as well as their limitations. But it seems to me that in introducing the two, a good place to have met would have been, well, halfway. 'KPOP' still has far to go to get there.

What saves '& Juliet' from being a lowest-common-denominator corporate byproduct is something else, something I never expected: wit.The wit operates on many levels in the director Luke Sheppard's super-poppy production, including hilarious hybrid Elizabethan costumes (by Paloma Young) that feature a codpiece the size of a snapping turtle, cotton-candy lighting (by Howard Hudson) and playful sets (by Soutra Gilmour) situating the story in a century somehow combining the 16th and ours.

The value of her life cannot be measured by how long it lasts, any more than the show's can by how long it runs. Which is not to say she or it is a downer. Far from it: Though an underground river of sorrow gives 'Kimberly Akimbo' its keenness, the surface is shiny comedy. That was already the case in the play by David Lindsay-Abaire on which it is based, a play that begins, as the musical does, with a visual joke: a grown-looking woman, outside a skating rink, dressed like a teenager and nibbling a candy necklace. That's upbeat Kimberly, as usual trying to make the best of life's bad situation. And now, with the addition of songs (music by Jeanine Tesori; lyrics by Lindsay-Abaire) that turn the carpe diem dial to maximum, the director Jessica Stone has turned up the hilarity dial as well, to keep all that emotion in balance.

I'm sorry to say that despite the intelligence of the 2000 movie on which it's based, and the track record of its creators, the stage musical misses every opportunity to be the sharp, smart entertainment it might have been. In retelling the story of a 15-year-old who gets sucked prematurely into the world of bands and groupies and roadies and drugs, it lands instead in a mystifying muddle, occasionally diverting but never affecting.

How wonderful to experience again, in the hilarious, harrowing and superbly acted Broadway revival that opened on Thursday at the Golden Theater, Parks's fearlessness. Rejecting fixed meanings, as well as the limitations and clichés of correctness, she generates themes that her play will not so much corral as set free. There's fraternal competition, as old and awful as Jacob and Esau. Race as fate but also performance. The endlessly sorrowful loop of American violence. And of course, sleight of hand: Before a minute goes by, Parks has her fingerprints all over your feelings.

Miranda Cromwell's revival, based on one she directed in London with Marianne Elliott in 2019, does more than give us Black Lomans - including Khris Davis as Biff and McKinley Belcher III as Happy. It also, crucially, puts them in a largely white world. Willy's employer (Blake DeLong), his neighbor (Delaney Williams) and his mistress (Lynn Hawley) are thus more than foils in the usual sense; like Willy, you can never untangle the personal, economic and now racial threads of their behavior. And even if they aren't bigots, they electrify moments - a card game with the neighbor, a negotiation with the 'boss' - in which Willy's paranoia seems at the same time both fantastical and well founded.

Miranda Cromwell's revival, based on one she directed in London with Marianne Elliott in 2019, does more than give us Black Lomans - including Khris Davis as Biff and McKinley Belcher III as Happy. It also, crucially, puts them in a largely white world. Willy's employer (Blake DeLong), his neighbor (Delaney Williams) and his mistress (Lynn Hawley) are thus more than foils in the usual sense; like Willy, you can never untangle the personal, economic and now racial threads of their behavior. And even if they aren't bigots, they electrify moments - a card game with the neighbor, a negotiation with the 'boss' - in which Willy's paranoia seems at the same time both fantastical and well founded.

Underlining one's progressiveness a thousand times, as this '1776' does, will not actually convey it better; rather it turns characters into cutouts and distracts from the ideas it means to promote. The musical even shows us that. It's only when Adams stops yelling and starts plotting that he begins to turn the tide toward ratification. Just so, theater makers should have enough faith in the principles of equity and diversity to let them speak for themselves. Are they not, as someone once put it, self-evident?

But 'Leopoldstadt' is not quite as tightly constructed as 'Arcadia,' say, or 'Jumpers' or 'Travesties'; it has too many themes to wrangle, and some dense historical exposition is unconvincingly disguised as small talk. As such, the play leans more than usual on a handsome, foreboding, smartly calibrated production. The acting is excellent across the board, with too many standouts to name. The director Patrick Marber's deep-focus staging keeps all the stories going at once on a set by Richard Hudson that fairly gleams with honeyed smugness under Neil Austin's lights. And Brigitte Reiffenstuel's costumes make you long for the elegance of prewar fashions until you are brought up short by remembering what happened to those who wore them.

Lea Michele, who took over the role on Sept. 6, turns out to be that stupendous Fanny. Yes, she even lights up like a light. Both vulnerable and invulnerable, kooky and ardent, she makes the show worth watching again. She can't make it good, though. Michael Mayer's production is still garish and pushy, pandering for audience overreaction. A confetti cannon tries to put an exclamation point on a dud dance. Many of the minor players overplay. The lighting by Kevin Adams would make a rat clap, and the unusually ugly set by David Zinn seems weaponized against intimacy. It looks like a missile silo. But at least 'Funny Girl' now has a missile: a performer who from her first words ('Hello, Gorgeous') shoots straight to her target and hits it.

Though the production too often feels as if it were designed for the company’s own edification — an endless rehearsal rather than a Broadway revival — it is not without its outward-facing qualities, especially after the initial throat-clearing. There are beautiful, quietly observed moments: a glance between Craig and Negga, for instance, that says more about marriage than some entire plays on the subject. There are smaller characters crystallized in a flash: Lazar’s Duncan dainty and handsy, Maria Dizzia’s Lady Macduff heartbreakingly resolute.

That physical humor is not always expertly rendered. (Dratch does it wonderfully, but the fight choreography is unconvincing.) And the turntable set (by Beowulf Boritt) that efficiently rotates the early action from room to room, like a White House Lazy Susan, seems by the second act to be spinning of its own accord, signifying hysteria but not giving us much chance to absorb it. (The sitcom bright lighting is by Sonoyo Nishikawa.) As the women move from cleaning up men's messes to making messes of their own, you may feel some of the air, or perhaps the milk, leaking out of the comedy.

To rip the bandage off quickly: Feldstein is not stupendous. She's good. She's funny enough in places, and immensely likable always, as was already evident from her performances in the movies 'Booksmart' and 'Lady Bird' and, on Broadway, in 'Hello, Dolly!' You root for her to raise the roof, but she only bumps against it a little. Her voice, though solid and sweet and clear, is not well suited to the music, and you feel her working as hard as she can to power through the gap. But working hard at what should be naturally extraordinary is not in Fanny's DNA. Still, you can't blame Feldstein for the show's problems; that would be like blaming the clown for the elephants. The main elephant is the book, written by Isobel Lennart and fiddled with for this production by Harvey Fierstein, to no avail.

That this feeling of disproportion is fainter in the Broadway production than in 2018 may provide a clue to the answer. The cast, with just four holdovers, is certainly better tuned now, and Threlfall makes a big difference. Also successfully amped up for Broadway are the sinister sets and pinpoint costumes by Anna Fleischle. But it's more than that. Four years later, the world feels coarser - perhaps it always does - and not just because death has become much more visible in streets and wards and wars. So has people's indifference to it, and to all kinds of suffering and unfairness. McDonagh's cynicism feels closer to our own, or rather we to it. 'Hangmen' now plays less like a clever exercise and more like news, with an unnerving headline. Garden-variety amorality is not a far throw from violent psychopathology, it reports, or for that matter from what we call justice.

Ultimately, I came to feel that if it is the theater's main business to mirror who we are - to act, like the minutes of a meeting, as an absolute record of what we say and how we behave - then 'The Minutes' does what a play aimed mostly at white people must. It shows us how we are starting to understand, but still mostly failing to accept, that our privileges are tied to a history of denying them to others. I think it is warning us, in its own dramatic way, to do better, before the minutes, as they will, harden into millenniums.

In the electric revival that opened on Thursday at Circle in the Square, Teach is embodied with coiled and then terrifyingly uncoiled ferocity by Sam Rockwell, making a great occasion of a great role. When he first skitters into the junk shop run by his poker buddy Don - Laurence Fishburne in a beautifully considered performance - he's already seething about a petty insult and stalking the joint like a rat-peacock hybrid. By the time he inserts himself into a heist Don is planning with his dim young gofer and protégé, Bobby, played by the angelic if underpowered Darren Criss, he is so hopped up on delusions of profit that he endangers the operation he means to abet.

At its best, 'Take Me Out,' which opened on Monday in a fine revival at the Helen Hayes Theater, is a five-tool play. It's (1) funny, with an unusually high density of laughs for a yarn that is (2) quite serious, and (3) cerebral without undermining its (4) emotion. I'm not sure whether (5) counts as one tool or many, but 'Take Me Out' gives meaty roles to a team of actors, led in this Second Stage Theater production by Jesse Williams as Lemming and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as his fanboy business manager.

In that combination, I feel the meaty hand of the producer Garth H. Drabinsky, who seems to have used his influence to shape “Paradise Square” into a likeness of his previous hits. Like “Ragtime” in 1998 and the 1994 revival of “Show Boat,” it frames social unrest as the product of a few representative individuals and tries to fill the inevitable gaps with big sound and stagecraft. It also borrows a famous plot device from “Show Boat” — which is effective here even if the debt goes otherwise unpaid. But unlike those musicals, which were built on the frames of strongly written novels by authors with singular voices, “Paradise Square” feels almost authorless despite its many contributors, and the direction of Moisés Kaufman, known for a strong hand and conceptual coherence, does little to erase the impression of anonymity. (The design elements are likewise merely efficient.) Contingent and anxious, the show seems more interested in saying the right things than in telling a coherent story.

The first thing you see when the curtain goes up on 'Plaza Suite' is an aquatint image of that grand hotel in its antique glory. But when it comes to datedness, the faux-French pile that opened its doors in 1907 has nothing on the Neil Simon comedy - itself a faux-French pile - that debuted on Broadway in 1968. Despite the wearying efforts of a likable cast headed by Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, the passage of 54 years is more than enough to reveal the triptych of one-act plays as uninhabitable in 2022.

The musical, which opened on Thursday night at the Winter Garden Theater, only intermittently offers the joys we expect from a classic revival starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster - especially one so obviously patterned on the success of another classic revival, 'Hello, Dolly!,' a few seasons back. The frenzy of love unleashed in that show by Bette Midler, supported by substantially the same creative team - including the director Jerry Zaks, the choreographer Warren Carlyle and the set and costume designer Santo Loquasto - has gone missing here, despite all the deluxe trimmings and 42 people onstage. Instead we get an extremely neat, generally perky, overly cautious take on a musical that, being about the con game of love and music, needs more danger in the telling.

In this, 'MJ' is trying to have it both ways. It wants to blame everything sad and weird about Jackson on others (especially the press, who are equated with the zombies in 'Thriller') but credit him alone for his every good deed and success. Acknowledgment of the choreographers and songwriters he collaborated with is mostly saved for the program. This defensiveness, constantly asserting his genius as if it were in question, eventually becomes dulling, like any act of bad faith. And so as the show, anticipating its star's trajectory, disintegrates in the second half, the pleasure that compensated for its inherent ickiness can no longer do the job. 'MJ' becomes a grind of obfuscation, a case of willfully not looking at the man in the mirror.

In truth, some of the plot devices, the neat parallels and red herrings, are, like Faye, a bit creaky with use. But that doesn't stop them from working; indeed, it's a pleasure to surrender to classic craftsmanship. Though you can certainly sense Morisseau's debt to August Wilson in her dramaturgy - 'Skeleton Crew' is part of a trilogy of works set in Detroit, as Wilson had his Pittsburgh Cycle - you also sense the brute efficiency of problem plays by Ibsen and the best television procedurals.

To a perpetual square, nothing is as mystifying as another person's high. Or so I learned in college, during the heyday of chemically induced inner journeys - and again at the Vivian Beaumont Theater the other night. Though sometimes mesmerizing, 'Flying Over Sunset,' the new musical about LSD that opened there on Monday, is mostly bewildering, and further proof that transcendence can't be shared.

It's new. And truth be told, I was never less than riveted - if usually in the way Bobby is, eyeballing messy marriages. Nor is the chance to hear the great score live with a 14-piece orchestra to be taken lightly; is there a more exciting opening number than the title song? So I guess I'm sorry-grateful. Sorry for not liking this version of 'Company' better - and grateful to Sondheim for providing the chance to find out.