Jesse Green

These are two worthy ideas, if contradictory. In light of racial injustice, accommodation seems to be a white luxury; in light of accommodation, justice seems hopelessly naïve. Perhaps what this beautiful, elegiac version of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' most movingly asks is: Can we ever have both?

There's a fine line between tacky and spectacular. In creating costumes for Cher over the years - costumes that often tell the story of a shy woman emerging triumphant from a chrysalis - the designer Bob Mackie has kept on the right side of the line by making sure the level of craft supports the extravagance of the gesture. Sadly that's not the case with 'The Cher Show,' the maddening mishmash of a new musical that opened on Monday at the Neil Simon Theater. Except for the dozens of eye-popping outfits Mr. Mackie gorgeously recreates for the occasion, it's all gesture, no craft: dramatically threadbare and surprisingly unrevealing.

But working with the director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw, who staged 'Chaperone' as well as the current 'Aladdin' and 'Mean Girls,' the team behind 'The Prom' has attempted a more difficult gymnastic maneuver. As in many of the greatest Golden Age musicals, they latch onto a subject of topical importance, using its gravity to anchor their satire and their satire to leaven its earnestness. In full 'Hairspray' mode, they mostly succeed.

'American Son' is not a subtle play; it barely feels like a play at all. With its unrelentingly high tension on every level - maternal, marital, societal - it's more like a slice of a nightmare, with few contours despite its surprises. Its abrupt ending doesn't even offer a chance for catharsis; it just spits you out.

If that's dry, the dryness is in some ways a fascinating choice. There used to be a genre of Broadway comedy meant to be topical but not emotional. Plays like 'Take Her, She's Mine,' 'Fair Game' and 'Norman, Is That You?' treated current social issues - the generation gap, divorce, gay liberation and such - as touchstones for an evening's light entertainment, and were welcome as such. So is this one.

Either way, Theresa Rebeck's new play, which opened on Tuesday at the American Airlines Theater, is so clever it uplifts, so timely it hurts.

To the extent that 'Gettin' the Band Back Together' is not based on a specific pre-existing property, he's technically right. But originality isn't novelty, and the show is such a calculated rehash of a million tired tropes that it can best be described with Broadway math: 'School of Rock' plus 'The Fully Monty' divided by 'The Wedding Singer' - and multiplied by zero.

The casting of shiny actors like Mr. Hammer (of 'Call Me By Your Name') and Mr. Charles (of 'The Good Wife') has the perverse effect - though they are both spot on - of making the play seem mainstream. So does Ms. Shapiro's direction, which is confident and highly polished; even the boys' mortifying, half-remembered rec-room dance routines are snappily choreographed, by Faye Driscoll.

Any production of the play thus hangs on how the director and star decide to deal with the negatively defined presence at its center. In Daniel Sullivan's thoughtful if mostly becalmed staging at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater on Broadway, he and Condola Rashad, his chipper Joan, stick close to the author's brief. Their Maid of Orleans is, as Shaw writes in the play's preface, 'a born boss.'

Even by that standard, 'Summer: The Donna Summer Musical,' which opened on Monday at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, is a blight. Despite the exciting vocalism of a cast led by the formidable LaChanze, it reduces the late Queen of Disco and pioneer of electronica to a few factoids and song samples that make her seem profoundly inconsequential. You could learn more (and more authentically) by reading a thoughtful obituary while listening to her hits - 'Hot Stuff,' 'Last Dance,' 'She Works Hard for the Money,' among many others - online.

The plush and thrilling Lincoln Center Theater revival of Lerner and Loewe's 'My Fair Lady' that opened on Thursday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater reveals Eliza Doolittle as a hero instead of a puppet - and reveals the musical, despite its provenance and male authorship, as an ur-text of the #MeToo moment. Indeed, that moment has made 'My Fair Lady,' which had its Broadway premiere in 1956, better than it ever was.

The pungency of sign language is not the subject of Mark Medoff's 'Children of a Lesser God,' which opened on Wednesday at Studio 54 in a mixed bag of a Broadway revival directed by Kenny Leon. But it's a wonderful bonus to the play's fierce rivalry between those who promote spoken English as the highest attainable form of communication and those who are staunch partisans of silence.

Her jaw thrust forward like a prow, her elfin eyes belying her regal bearing, her wide-screen mouth wrapping itself around those slashing, implacable consonants - they're all exactly as you remember them and want them to be. Or if you've never experienced them, welcome to the pleasure. Either way, Glenda Jackson is back; even better, she's back in a role that's big enough to need her.

Forget girl power, sisterly love and the high-belt clarion call of 'Let It Go.' Anxiety over the handling of a precious gift is the theme that comes through loudest in 'Frozen,' the sometimes rousing, often dull, alternately dopey and anguished Disney musical that opened on Broadway on Thursday.

The story, concocted from clichés that were already droopy when they appeared in almost every other jukebox musical ever written, does not require you to put your thinking cap on. Mostly it asks that you notice the winking way it sets up situations that will later make Mr. Buffett's lyrics seem as if they were custom fitted to the yarn rather than the other way around.

Wodehouse isn't as easy to read aloud as Lardner, but Mr. Lithgow takes a great deal of pleasure in mapping sentences whose verbs are barely in earshot of their subjects. And he revels in Dadaist assemblages like this one: 'I know if someone came to me and said 'Jelly this eel!' I should be nonplused.' Yet the Wodehouse, for all its airy wit, is not about nothing: It too is a story of deception, only in this case the kind that delivers delicious comeuppance to the puffed-up and slow-witted. And what could feel more current, more worthwhile, in the first cold days of 2018 than that? The imagination, Mr. Lithgow wants us to know, is a powerful weapon if we don't let it go dull.

But for all its clever construction, I doubt 'The Children' would feel so important without Rose's agenda and the challenge that comes with it. I will say only that it has to do with selfishness in both its ordinary and also its existential varieties. When Rose tells Robin that 'we can't have everything we want just because we want it,' she means, yes, the love of one's youth, but that's just the start. A good death is not guaranteed. Even electricity, as the local disaster has proved, is not a right.

What a delight it is to enter the world of 'Once on This Island'...The hallmark ingenuity, warmth and intensity bordering on excess that characterize Mr. Arden's style is recapitulated everywhere within the production, from the frankly stupendous singing (Chris Fenwick is the music supervisor) to the electric choreography of Camille A. Brown. Everyone is working on the same crammed page.

Most of the rest of the cast, their parts even less defined, struggle to offer coherent portraits. This proves no impediment to Ms. Brown, however, whose 40-plus years on the stage provide her with an arsenal of theatrical weapons she can deploy at any moment. Watch her coo in pride over her daughter; watch her collapse in mortification later. Her second long scene with Ms. Thurman, when the tables get turned, is the high point of the drama. It may be the only drama, in fact.

It would be more satisfying if Mr. Martin, who started working on the play in the 1990s and then put it aside, had found a way to maintain character integrity while developing his bigger ideas and also remaining funny. But that's a tough set of balls to juggle.

In the lectures, Mr. Leguizamo comes off as a cross between Howard Zinn and Professor Irwin Corey, drawing impossible pie charts and ribald diagrams on a chalkboard and then acting out a brutal history in ludicrous skits. The physical comedy, often verging on dance, is priceless - 'translating thought into action worthy of an Iron Man competition,' as Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times in March for his review of the Off Broadway premiere at the Public Theater.

Make no mistake, 'Springsteen on Broadway,' which opened on Thursday evening, is a solo act by a solo artist with an artist's steel. Even though Patti Scialfa, his wife, shows up to harmonize on two numbers, this is not a singalong arena show or a roadhouse rouser. Even less does it try to be a feel-good Broadway book musical or a slick, whitewashed jukebox like 'Jersey Boys.' Rather, 'Springsteen on Broadway' is a painful if thrilling summing-up at 68: a major statement about a life's work, but also a major revision of it.

All this loving attention to the play's philosophical superstructure does little to alleviate the stiffness of the actual scenes, which are filled with the kind of canned dialogue and bald exposition that Monty Python and other English satirists would come to savage a few decades later. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the performances - including that of Ms. McGovern, who lately played a mother of similar vintage but more anodyne personality on 'Downton Abbey' - are often overstated.

Still, you don't have to disagree with Mr. Moore's politics to find that his shtick has become disagreeable with age. 'The Terms of My Surrender,' which opened on Thursday at the Belasco, is a bit like being stuck at Thanksgiving dinner with a garrulous, self-regarding, time-sucking uncle. Gotta love him - but maybe let's turn on the television.

Are we grimmer or dumber or colder than we were in 1991, when Frank Rich, in The New York Times, called Scott McPherson's 'Marvin's Room' 'one of the funniest plays of this year as well as one of the wisest and most moving'? He did so even while noting that this 'healing' comedy, then opening Off Broadway, featured three major characters dying or disintegrating - and a bunch of others arguably worse off. I ask because the Roundabout Theater Company revival that opened on Thursday, giving the play its Broadway debut, barely seems to be any of the things Mr. Rich listed. Thoughtfully directed by Anne Kauffman; keenly performed by Lili Taylor, Janeane Garofalo and especially Celia Weston; a pleasure to watch throughout - it is all of these. But it is somehow, also, fatally mild.