Jesse Green

I have suppressed the impulse to interrogate the logic of the story too carefully; though it makes an unusually strong case for the road it takes, surely there are potholes. But this is not the point. Hnath is not using the preexisting characters and their backstory (let alone the real woman - a friend - on whom Ibsen based the tale) as ways of avoiding having to create something original; rather, they are springboards to something very new indeed. The march of progress, halting as it is, has allowed a male playwright in 2017 to write a work that the inhabitants of A Doll's House (Part 1) in 1879 could never have imagined: a great feminist comedy. By that I mean a stand-alone work that glories in the self-interest and correctability of all women - and all men.

Bandstand, on the other hand, has the courage of its convictions. It is really about what it's really about, which broadly speaking is the damage war does to combatants and the further damage sometimes done by peace. Yes, it's the first PTSD musical. I'm not saying it's perfectly carried out, or even especially profound, but as directed and choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler, who created the musical staging for Hamilton, it remains almost compulsively faithful to its vision and never asks you to choose between what it's showing you and what you know to be true. Unlike too many musicals, it matches itself.

Even softened slightly as it is in this production, the play's brutal message to sophisticates, whether at the end of Reagan's era or the start of Trump's, comes through. We still do not know anyone but ourselves - and ourselves not too well, either. The idea that there are 'six degrees of separation' between any two people, which in Guare's formulation became a global catchphrase, is not merely a humanistic piety about interconnectedness; it's also a warning. Those six degrees are unbridgeable if you live on an island.

It bewilders me that in making stage musicals from animated or otherwise fantastical movies, adaptors seem to think they can remain outside history. Perhaps the creative team of Anastasia held meetings whose agenda items included such items as Finessing the Romanovs. (There is exactly one reference to their possible contribution to Russia's problems.) You see why this must have seemed necessary; otherwise, Anastasia's self-discovery could not be the climax of her hero's journey, and her beautiful tiara might seem a tad undeserved, even to the Fanastasias. All her sorrowful warbling about the past - well sung, if little else, by Christy Altomare - would be sickening instead of heart-catching. Yet this does not excuse Anastasia, on the lightweight end of the scale, any more than it did Evita on the heavy. You can't have your revolution and eat it too.

O'Brien rebuilt the New York version as a simpler affair, hoping the audience would use its imagination to fill in the blanks; the result is an unusually dull set design by Mark Thompson and effects that would hardly have seemed special twenty years ago. When Wonka, who has spent much of the first act in disguise as a candy store owner in order to give Borle something to do, reveals himself as the grand wizard of chocolate, the transformation scene involves a crowd gathering around him while he takes off his overcoat. At least the Oompa-Loompas are fun - the first one or two times we meet them. Even so, I doubt this musical would have proved at all likable even if an apt style and thrilling visuals had been found for it. The story is too maudlin and, at the same time, too angry.

But the real source of the warmth and color is Midler herself, and the crowd's feelings for her, which together create a feedback loop so tight that the distinction between star and audience is all but obliterated...she performs in a style so broad and unironic despite its myriad references that it seems nearly naked. It's not even a style, really: just a here-I-am, as-I-am honesty (however contrived) that in disguising its own achievement not only breaks down the fourth wall but makes you forget why there ever was one. In Dolly she never looks as right as when she's out on the famous passerelle, promenading among her people, reaching out to them with delight if never quite pressing flesh.

What remains powerfully effective, and what Sullivan's handsome production gets right, is Hellman's dissection of (and shocking prescience about) the way a systemic lack of power can turn into manipulative fury. Hellman had seen it before in the toxic capitalism that led to the Depression and did not imagine it would disappear anytime soon from the human repertoire of injustice. After all, she took her title - courtesy of Dorothy Parker - from the Song of Solomon's image of little foxes that 'spoil the vines' and the tender grapes thereon.

...a second viewing of the play, now pumped up and retuned for Broadway, only makes its problems more obvious. Happily, its good qualities are enhanced as well, including an imaginative staging by Rebecca Taichman, beautiful klezmer-inspired music by Lisa Gutkin and Aaron Halva, and, most fundamentally, the depth of its engagement with a recalcitrant subject...Indecent gets one thing perfectly right. The rain scene between the two girls, which we also see repeatedly, is still, after 107 years, something shocking and sacred - and character-driven. Most history is.

Which is not to say that the manic business of the first act is entirely excused by the richer reflectiveness of the second. There were plenty of times throughout when I felt, with Phil, that I'd seen this all before. The adaptation from the film is, in that sense, too faithful; despite the musical's theatrical cleverness it is often literal and choppy, like word-by-word Google translation. But at least it gets better as it loops along. Perhaps all it needs is a few thousand more iterations.

Diplomacy is a lovely word, suggesting the idea that with tact and perseverance humans can accommodate one another. Yeah, sure. If that seems unlikely, so does the idea that diplomacy could be the subject of a madly engrossing play, and for a similar reason: How do you make tact and accommodation rewarding? More specifically, how do you theatricalize draft treaties and position papers? Yet J. T. Rogers's Oslo, which opened on Broadway tonight in a Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Bartlett Sher, turns the negotiations that led to the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord of 1993 into gripping human drama. To the extent that it does so by making diplomacy not just interesting but moving, it's a wonder of savvy stagecraft and wily performance. It's also, quite possibly, a lie.

The last half-hour or so of War Paint, the beguiling but frustrating new musical about beauty legends Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, is just about everything you could want from a Broadway show. The two leads - Patti LuPone as Rubinstein and Christine Ebersole as Arden - each get a gorgeous, perfectly conceived solo: 'Forever Beautiful' for LuPone and 'Pink' for Ebersole. Then comes a rueful duet finale ('Beauty in the World') to complete the arc of their double biography with some twin-engine vocalizing.

His moral comedy is undiminished. The scene in which he finally calls out the sexual subterfuges of his comrades - and definitively rids himself of his own extraneous women - successfully counterweights the play's many trivialities. Most of the rest of the cast, under the direction of Moritz von Stuelpnagel, seems to have got the same memo: Play the problems, not the jokes. I was especially impressed with the women. Cobie Smulders, a star of How I Met Your Mother making her Broadway debut as Joanna, not only looks sensational in gowns by Susan Hilferty but finds a core of valor in a typically odious character. Kate Burton - who played the ingénue Daphne opposite George C. Scott in 1982 - brings exceptional clarity and warmth to Liz, who can sometimes come off as a scold. And Kristine Nielsen is hilarious as the trusty secretary Kristine Nielsen.

...Which brings us to Soo. No surprise to those who know her from Hamilton or the pre-Broadway versions of Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1912, she's effortlessly lovely and a superior singer. But traits that have helped her bring Eliza and Natasha to life - simplicity, transparency - can't do much for Amélie, who remains, like the girl in her neighbor's forever-unfinished Renoir, an outline of a figure at the heart of the story. All of Soo's skill, and all the craft of the authors, have produced this final paradox: The more Amélie is revealed, the less we see. Like its title character, Amélie is a show that has very nearly willed itself into obscurity.

Farce is not an acquired taste; even babies laugh at pratfalls. Rather, farce is the taste you fail to grow out of - and thank God, because sometimes only the stupidest fun will do. If this is one of those times, then 'stupidest fun' should probably be plastered on the walls of the Lyceum, where The Play That Goes Wrong, a backstage comedy created by England's Mischief Theatre Company, is opening tonight. It's so ridiculous it makes you feel almost ashamed to love it.

What I realized seeing the play again is that its central conflict - between Tracey, who is white, and Cynthia, who is black - is trumped-up. This is not to say that longtime friendships have not been shattered over work disputes, or that work disputes have not surfaced the subcutaneous racism of white people hanging on to their last scrap of privilege. But nothing in Sweat convinces us that these particular women, as established, could develop in the way the play forces them to. Tracey especially, despite Johanna Day's valiant performance, is bent so far out of shape by the dramatic agenda that she no longer makes any sense.

But then the unrelieved hyper-emphasis of Laurence Connor's direction basically squashes whatever might be good in Miss Saigon. Certainly the rather delicate (if leather-lunged) performance of Eva Noblezada as Kim doesn't get far across the footlights; you can hardly find her half the time. Indeed, none of the signposts and pointers an audience might look to for advice about what's going on work properly: The sound is unspecific, the lighting is overbusy, and the set makes it seem as if everyone in the cast lives in everyone else's hovel. It is only in that Constructivist parade, and a few similar scenes, that the pressure is equalized between the overwrought style of the production and its overwrought content. But it's not a good sign when the most cogent parts of a musical about American perfidy are the ones that borrow a totalitarian aesthetic.

That a story is basically true does not make it more believable onstage...Not helping matters is the ambitious number of stories the show wants to tell. The cast of 12 plays at least 40 roles, both locals and plane people, most of them whizzing past our attention too quickly and indistinguishably (despite Toni-Leslie James's clever quick-change costume elements) to make lasting impressions. Even when they do, the show's pageantlike structure, in which bits of story are connected by setting and theme rather than by action, prevents those impressions from deepening over time the way they must. There's a lot of snow in Gander but no accumulation. To make up for it, the production, tightly directed by Christopher Ashley, with a handsome woodsy set by Beowulf Boritt and fine lighting by Howell Binkley, does its damnedest to knock you into submission. The songs, also by Sankoff and Hein, are pleasant, in a folk-rock-meets-Celtic-revival vein that the show exploits with the mercilessness of a phlebotomist. (Cue the fiddle, bodhran, and uilleann pipes.) There is much spirited if obligatory stomping. (The choreography is by Kelly Devine.)

If it's more of an inquest than a definitive statement, it's an inquest at a very high level; Sally Field, who plays Amanda, does not appear in basement black-box theaters. So Gold is performing a tricky balancing act: narrowing the scope of the representation and maintaining his cutting-edge cred while selling the story to an audience of 1,000. One of the casualties of this approach is what Tom calls 'the social background' of the play. We lose not just the particular St. Louisness of it (the accents are nearly nil) but also the world-on-edge tension that Tom describes at the start: Guernica exploding in Europe, and, in America, 'the fiery braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.' Instead Gold focuses on a novel and largely convincing interpretation of the family's warfare as a symptom of the powerful but constraining love they share, and on the way both things shape Tom's character deep into the future from which he narrates.

If only Significant Other, which opened tonight on Broadway, were as dramatic. But although Joshua Harmon's sour comedy has many fine supporting qualities - wit, a neat structure, lacerating dialogue, and a clutch of terrific performances from a cast led by Gideon Glick - they don't have very much to support.

Sunday in the Park with George, which opens tonight in a bare-bones but beautiful-enough Broadway revival starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford, is both a deconstruction and an example of that duality. A deconstruction because Lapine's book, among the brainiest ever written for a musical, works innumerable trenchant variations on the theme of sacrifice for art. The show is also a demonstration of that theme, because Sondheim's songs are so profound that they feel, even while unspooling in unbroken threads of human longing, as if they had left the realm of lived experience and entered a Keatsian plane of absolute truth-beauty far above our own. The lyrics constantly delight the ear while also dramatizing, in that very delight, the way art both exalts and erases. 'Rapturous' and 'capture us' are like the jaws of a trap snapping shut.

But Sunset Boulevard, which opened tonight in a train wreck of a revival starring a woeful Glenn Close, also comes with a poison pill for would-be adapters. Its daring mix of film noir and Hollywood satire requires the utmost finesse to carry off, lest it turn into camp, a mere coffin of curiosities. (We are in fact introduced to Norma as she kisses the corpse of her pet chimp.) That it doesn't go rancid - that the film remains beautiful despite its overbite - is attributable to Wilder's worldliness: No extreme of human behavior surprises or discomfits him. It may be impossible to achieve that kind of detachment in theatrical song, which pretty much defies a neutral point of view. Perhaps that's why Kander and Ebb gave up. As for Sondheim, who was writing with Jeanette MacDonald in mind for the lead, he dropped the project after Wilder told him at a cocktail party that the material could only work as an opera.

Ruben Santiago-Hudson's staging, on a terrific David Gallo set that makes the hill in the Hill District palpable, tries to honor both, but is limited by the patchwork text. We certainly get the great Wilsonian flow of men's voices as they spool out their rough poetry of survival, and the delight of characters who are real characters. Some are familiar types from the rest of the cycle: There's dignified Becker, who runs the off-the-books jitney service; troublemaking Turnbo, the yakker with his nose in everyone's business; Youngblood, the struggling 20-something trying to do right by his girlfriend and their child; and Fielding, the dipso-sage with unexpected seams of experience and expertise. (He was once a tailor for Billy Eckstine.) Wilson orchestrates their voices with jazzlike felicity, abetted perhaps a bit too glibly by the setting; every time the phone rings with a customer needing a ride home from the grocery store, the kaleidoscope of characters reconfigures. Somehow the phone never rings in the middle of big speeches.

... if the politics of this Platonov revamp are apt enough, the drama still founders on the play's inability to link them convincingly to the nearly farcical social comedy of individuals at loose ends. Partly this is because the production, directed somewhat bumpily by John Crowley, keeps the politics at bay for too long while it focuses on the radiating damage an empty man can cause at great removes, like a storm surge. We do not really understand the stakes until it's too late, which may be accurate for the characters but undermines the audience. Chekhov's famous dramaturgical dictum - 'one must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off' - is meticulously observed here; the General's old pistol is all but spotlit throughout. But however much damage it finally causes, it isn't enough to turn The Present, which operates best as a comedy, into the tragedy it seems to wish it were. It would take Chekhov another 20 years to figure out how to make the two things into one.

I can't square the musical sophistication of In Transit with its narrative hackwork. Kathleen Marshall's staging, with its let's-get-past-it rather than the let's-explore-it approach, doesn't help: It's definitely an express. (Even so, the show is a bit too long at 100 minutes without intermission.) If all of Marshall's cleverness as a director and choreographer goes toward smoothing and polishing the surfaces, perhaps that's because in a cotton-candy musical like this one there's nothing underneath. The cast, for instance, is admirably diverse, yet from the show's portrait you would think that the New York subway in 2016 represented a utopian post-racial environment. Nor is anyone poor, except for one smelly homeless person who is the butt of an obvious joke, and the once-rich white guy who is learning his lesson. Donyale Werle's charming set, with its treadmill tracks and mosaic motifs, gives the MTA a Museum of Transportation gloss, but it made me wonder, as did the show in its entirety: Have you been down there recently? And have you been up here?

The big problem in writing great musicals is not the difficulty of writing great songs. The big problem is that the songs, great or not, are cannibals, picking the stories clean and leaving a pile of bones. It's a zero-sum system. In musical dramas the problem is even worse, as innumerable failed adaptations of huge 18th-century novels have proved. (They often seem like Cliffs Notes of Cliffs Notes.) But when a musical drama clicks, an amazing fusion event occurs: The songs and the story enlarge each other in the process of becoming inseparable. Think of Sweeney Todd or, more intimately, Fun Home. And now add to the list Dear Evan Hansen, which opened tonight in a production beautifully directed by Michael Greif. I called the Off Broadway production at Second Stage this May 'the feel-anxious musical of the season.' But it is even better on Broadway, so fine in its craft and rich its gathering of themes that, like the best works of any genre, it rewards being seen again - and again.