Jesse Green — Theater Critic

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.