Jesse Green

Nottage's delightful new play, 'Clyde's,' which opened at the Helen Hayes Theater on Tuesday, dares to flip the paradigm. Though it's still about dark things, including prison, drugs, homelessness and poverty, it somehow turns them into bright comedy. In Kate Whoriskey's brisk and thoroughly satisfying production for Second Stage Theater, we learn that, unlike Oedipus and his mom, people who may have little else nevertheless have choices.

For sheer crackling timeliness, the play most of the moment is in fact the oldest: Alice Childress's 'Trouble in Mind,' which opened on Thursday at the American Airlines Theater. Originally produced in 1955 in Greenwich Village, but derailed on its path to becoming the first play by a Black woman to reach Broadway - a distinction that went to Lorraine Hansberry's 'A Raisin in the Sun' four years later - it is only now getting the mainstream attention it deserves, in a Roundabout Theater Company production that does justice to its complexity.

'Diana,' as directed by Christopher Ashley, has on display. The real problem is intrinsic, arising from the choice to tell the story in song at all. Musicals, like laws, are often compared to sausages: You don't want to know what goes into them. In this case, you don't want to know what comes out, either; if you care about Diana as a human being, or dignity as a concept, you will find this treatment of her life both aesthetically and morally mortifying.

Now Clarke, who won an Olivier award for her performance in the British production, adds hers. She makes of the maid an almost Shakespearean figure; even at the depths of the character's despair, in the scarifying 11 o'clock number 'Lot's Wife,' she commands attention without begging for it, and does not allow herself, because Caroline wouldn't, the luxury of collapse. The result of that restraint is more painful than cathartic, leaving the story's emotional release to those who can afford it: Caroline's children. The chance to believe in change is her hard-won bequest to them - and, in this devastating, uncomfortable, crucial musical, to us.

Call it Thriller Karaoke, a form in which the story is almost as dangerous as the mode of storytelling. You worry that O'Connell will fall out of sync with the recording, which never stops once the play begins. Gradually, though, as her inerrancy becomes clear, you let go of that concern and switch to related ones: Why tell the story this way in the first place? What do you get from the astonishing feat, besides astonishment, that you wouldn't get if the same material had been acted out as it might be in a typically effective television procedural?

How does mind-numbing banality become heart-racing excitement? In 'Is This a Room,' the transcript is only the starting point. More salient is the way the production, conceived and directed by Tina Satter, views the document through an expressionistic lens, allowing Emily Davis, in a heartbreaking performance, to make words into windows on a world of interior terror.

Representation matters. I see many great and necessary new works about the problem of Blackness in a racist society - or rather, the problem of whiteness. They are filled with anguish and unfunny funerals. What I rarely get to see are works about Black American life that are defiantly not problem plays. Their sunniness is just as necessary, however garish the aquamarine and pimped-out the corpse.

Somehow 'Six,' by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, isn't a philosophically incoherent jumble; it's a rollicking, reverberant blast from the past. I don't just mean that it's loud, though it is; you may clutch your ears even before the audience, primed by streaming audio and TikTok, starts singing along to the nine inexhaustibly catchy songs. I also mean that though gleefully anachronistic, mixing 16th-century marital politics with 21st-century selfies and shade, it suggests a surprising, disturbing and ultimately hopeful commonality. Which shouldn't work, but does.

In rewriting for Broadway, [Nwandu] has gone even further. Not only has she decided to push the play past tragedy into something else, but she has also, in its last 10 minutes, let its innate surrealism fully flower in a daring and self-consciously theatrical way. (The transformation is gorgeously rendered in Wilson Chin's scenic design, Marcus Doshi's lighting, Justin Ellington's sound and even, in their removal, Sarafina Bush's costumes.) Somehow Nwandu gives us the recognition of horror that has informed drama since the Greeks while also providing the relief of joy - however irrational - that calls to mind the ecstasies of gospel, splatter flicks and classic musicals, all of which are sampled.

To call 'Grand Horizons' one of the brightest shows to hit Broadway in years is not to tout its intelligence, which flickers. Rather, I mean that it is blindingly lit, no doubt in deference to the theatrical wisdom that defines comedy as what dies in the dark. And, boy, does 'Grand Horizons' want to sell itself as comedy. Not witty comedy with its verbal arabesques, nor intellectual comedy with its Paris Review name-checks, nor meta-comedy with its scrambled plotlines - but the vanilla kind that once dominated commercial theater. It's not entirely meant as praise to say that this Second Stage production is a big-laugh, blue-joke, bourgeois lark of the type Neil Simon mastered until the times mastered him and the genre petered out. There's a reason it did, and perhaps what the playwright Bess Wohl is attempting in 'Grand Horizons,' which opened on Thursday at the Helen Hayes Theater, is a last-ditch act of reclamation: a boulevard comedy for a cul-de-sac age.

Onstage, though, the loud ticktock of the investigation too often drowns out the emotion - an effect perhaps enhanced by the flattening of the genre brought on by endless 'Law & Order' spinoffs and reruns. In any case, whether 'A Soldier's Play' is a great stage drama regardless of its flaws is something its bumpy but worthy Broadway debut, directed by Kenny Leon for the Roundabout Theater Company, cannot answer. Despite some powerful acting, it is too distracted to make the case.

The great news for 'Jagged Little Pill,' and for us, is that its creative team, led by the director Diane Paulus, did more than just fiddle with a show that, though blurry, was already entertaining. The overhauled version that opened on Thursday at the Broadhurst Theater is fully in focus: clear in its priorities, rich in character, sincere without syrup, rousing and real. It easily clears the low bar of jukebox success to stand alongside the dark original musicals that have been sustaining the best hopes of Broadway in recent years.

More important, as far as pure entertainment is concerned, this story comes with songs that can thrill an audience when rendered as Turner sang them; at this, the musical 'Tina,' directed by Phyllida Lloyd, happily succeeds. In a performance that is part possession, part workout and part wig, Adrienne Warren rocks the rafters and dissolves your doubts about anyone daring to step into the diva's high heels.

The surprise - and joy - is that the world can seem so vast when approached that way. Or at least it does in Cromer's flawless production of 'The Sound Inside,' a play by Adam Rapp that opened at Studio 54 on Thursday. When I saw its world premiere at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2018, it was already a gripping small-scale mystery, and a spectacular showcase for its star, Mary-Louise Parker. Now, having been put through Cromer's less-is-everything makeover, it's even more resonant on Broadway: a tragedy about fiction, both the kind we read and the kind we live.

Here's an idea for a Broadway musical: An awkward boy with an absent father and an overwhelmed mother gets involved with friends in a dubious scheme that spins out of control and almost undoes him. Is it 'Dear Evan Hansen'? If only. Alas, 'The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical' is a pale patch on the earlier show and a failed attempt to board the teenage fantasy-angst train. (See also: 'Be More Chill' and, more successfully, 'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.') Based on the popular 2005 novel by Rick Riordan, it is both overblown and underproduced, filled with sentiments it can't support and effects it can't pull off.

Uptown, his staging has grown broader and funnier but no less trenchant in the 800-seat Golden than it was in a space one-quarter the size; the continuous embroidering of marvelous detail fills any gaps that might have opened in the expansion. (Watch Phillip take refuge under his hoodie when he gets overwhelmed, or Alana scramble after her notebook as if it might protect her from what she's learning.) The returning cast - especially Mr. Cusati-Moyer as the boyfriend who pathetically insists he is not as white as he looks - has likewise amped up the emotional volume; they have a bigger house to bring down. Their performances make that of the only new cast member - Ms. Kalukango - even more distinct and grave by comparison. As Kaneisha becomes the center of the play's argument, you see her struggle to express herself playing out on her face before she has the words. When the words do come, they are all the more devastating.

That's not enough to replicate the success of 'All the Way,' which won the Tony Award for best play. Mr. Cranston, whose portrayal of L.B.J. won a Tony Award as well, could carry that story, essentially a comedy, on pure skill and charisma. 'The Great Society,' a tragedy, needs more than that but instead gets less. It's bad enough that Johnson is so two-dimensional; the supporting characters have it worse. Their traits are parceled out on a one-per-customer basis: Humphrey's a patsy, King a worrier, Carmichael a hothead and Wallace a weasel.

You have to admit that a playwright could do worse than creating a juicy acting exercise for treasurable actors in their 70s (Mr. Pryce) and 80s (Ms. Atkins). Does it matter so much that for all their skill - set off by Mr. Kent's exquisitely decorous Broadway staging - there's no there there? It does. Even if you accept that 'The Height of the Storm' (as I wrote about 'The Father') is more of a vehicle than a destination, you may eventually grow weary of being taken for a ride.

Ms. Arbus, making a strong Broadway debut after a decade of critical success Off Broadway, seems to have realized that the comedy is crucial, not only because her stars trail tragic associations from most of their previous roles but also because the play can teeter on the edge of bathos. Her strategy of dryness and detail and specificity - leaving the poetry to Natasha Katz's lighting - pays off.

Comedy rarely flows as smoothly as it does here. The secret is more than the book; it's the songs. Mr. Yazbek is one of the few composer-lyricists working today who can set jokes to music and make them pay. The most obvious instance in 'Tootsie' is 'What's Gonna Happen,' a showstopping patter number for Michael's ex-girlfriend, the neurotic Sandy (Sarah Stiles). In a tumble of words reminiscent of 'Model Behavior' from Mr. Yazbek's underrated score for 'Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,' she goes well past that verge.

Ms. Bening goes deepest of the four leads in exploring the muck at the bottom of her character's personality. She also has terrific technique, both vocal and otherwise. But the opacity of the production overall means we still can't read her with any clarity, and the play acquires a weird wobble at its core.

So for me, at least, the most convincing and powerful moments came when the performances aligned with the gravity of the premise. Gary's speech about the power of art to create new realities was one such moment for Mr. Lane: You could feel the hope in the hyperbole he spoke of.

Joy comes too from watching an imaginative new kind of theater emerge. It doesn't come from nowhere, of course: In some ways, 'What the Constitution Means to Me' recalls Lisa Kron's memoir play 'Well,' in which a prepared speech about urban decline is hijacked by a mother who begs to differ. In other ways, Ms. Schreck's play seems to be part of the wave of formal experimentation being led by young black playwrights today. Linking these works is a sense of backlash and betrayal. But in the wake of tragedy, Ms. Schreck offers something more than catharsis. 'What the Constitution Means to Me' is one of the things we always say we want theater to be: an act of civic engagement. It restarts an argument many of us forgot we even needed to have.

Purists may squawk - though similar changes have long since shown up in feminist productions of 'The Taming of the Shrew.' For me, the adjustments, especially Ms. Green's and Ms. O'Hara's, are completely successful. They not only reorient the story as a warning to all sexes, but also provide a workaround for a musical that our cancel culture seemed ready to throw on the bonfire of the inanities. How nice to find 'Kiss Me, Kate' rescued from that fate: still speaking to us - or better yet, singing - from the not so buried past.

This is the first of many plot points that feel both obvious and false, like pieces of the wrong puzzle ham-hammered into place. Too frequently, information that if delivered sooner would have forestalled the plot completely is delivered hastily later, as if to sweep it under a dorm bed. In any case, Trip Cullman's tonally blurry staging for the Manhattan Theater Club does not help you understand what to make of such logical inconsistencies, though it is at least swift enough to keep you from dwelling on them. But a similar problem eats away at the credibility of most of the characters as written. Two of the choir boys, Junior (Nicholas L. Ashe of 'Queen Sugar') and David (Caleb Eberhardt), get approximately one trait each. Junior is pleasantly dim; David is tortured by something you'll see coming a mile away.