Jesse Oxfeld

Michael Mayer's staging, at the Westside Theatre, the Hell's Kitchen off-Broadway house best known for the kinds of shows that play best to Wednesday matinee crowds, is true to the show's (voracious) roots off-Broadway in the East Village. This lo-fi production of a show now so often encountered in high schools and community productions wonderfully illustrates the magic that can be made with a small cast, a great score, and ravenous puppet.

Greenberg's script remains as sharp and funny as it was 20 years ago, full of both quippy one-liners and wise monologues on the meanings of life and baseball. Ferguson gives an extraordinary performance as Marzac, wracked with awkwardness, thrilled to be star-adjacent, tearing through those philosophical monologues. As narrator-intellectual Kippy, Adams is equally strong, the even-keeled, avuncular center of the plot's chaos. Williams is the production's weak link, playing a cipher but with such cool affect as to drain this allegedly magnetic center-field star of any real charisma.

Befitting this endemic duality, the biomusical MJ, which opened tonight at the Neil Simon, arrived in New York on simultaneous waves of both anticipation and apprehension. It has most of the ingredients of a jukebox hit-great songs, iconic dances, a rags-to-riches story-plus a prodigiously talented creative team. But it is also the story of a man with real problems, a man who quite likely committed some heinous crimes-and a man whose estate controls his life story and is involved with the production. The latter fact is probably unavoidable. But it's also deeply awkward. MJ is big and loud; it is joyful and joyous. The music grooves, the dancing glides, the crowd bops. The spectacle is everything you expect. You enjoy Jackson's work, you see his genius-but you never truly grapple with him as a character, because this hagiography cannot work if it asks you to. Michael Jackson is today a credibly accused child molester, and MJ succeeds only if you can ignore that fact.

The specifics of the story are largely but not entirely the same as in the 1993 movie. Karey Kirkpatrick and John O'Farrell, who wrote the book, and Kirkpatrick and his brother, Wayne, who wrote the songs, update things to account for changing tolerance for jokes about men wearing dresses and gay people being outrageous makeup artists. The script doesn't rise to the dizzying goofiness of Something Rotten!, but it's still very funny. The songs aren't especially memorable, but they're perfectly enjoyable. And if not all of the plot and character updates quite work, what has ended up on stage is still a very entertaining, very successful, very good time.

It is not good. It is not terrible. It is bloodless, procedural, and, in Christopher Ashley's staging, constantly, exhaustingly turned up to 11. It lacks nearly any wit, poetry, or sense of fun-except in the few moments when the tone shifts, briefly and inexplicably, to camp. (The estimable Judy Kaye doubles as both Diana's regal mother-in-law and also her over-the-top step-grandmother, the pulpy romance novelist Barbara Cartland, and in the latter role offers those few goofy moments.) We appreciate, once again, the many trials, stolen triumphs, and ultimate tragedies of Diana's life. But watching it all rehashed at the Longacre, we are not especially amused.

The dialogue is sharp, funny, and unflinching, and the performances are extraordinary. Hill and Smallwood (in his Broadway debut) are deft and winning, and they imbue their talky parts with a dynamic, nearly acrobatic physicality. Ebert is unctuously oily in his two roles. And director Danya Taymor, together with designers Wilson Chin (scenery), Sarafina Bush (costumes), and Marcus Doshi (lighting), create a world that is bleak and haunting, until it suddenly and unexpectedly turns vibrant and lush.

The genius of Girl From the North Country, which opened tonight at the Belasco Theatre, is that it treats Dylan's oeuvre, which forms the basis for the lovely, lyrical musical, not as hits to be played from a jukebox but as poetry that constructs a mythic, broken American landscape. The music sets a scene and tone; the story, original to the play and equally mythically American, unfolds within it.

'Something's coming,' screamed the ads plastered throughout New York newspapers and magazines. 'Something good.' It was a clever repurposing of the classic lyric for marketing purposes, but the claim seemed perhaps boastful. West Side Story, the beloved mid-20th century musical take on Romeo and Juliet, was indeed coming back to Broadway. But freighted with a radical reinterpretation and several bumps along its way to opening night, it was far less clear that it would be any good. As it turns out, this West Side Story is excellent. Staged in moody, damp shadows, with a multiethnic and heavily tattooed cast and new dances that evoke but (mostly) don't replicate Jerome Robbins's balletic originals, it is neither nostalgic nor prettified.

Still, A Soldier's Play remains as stubbornly earnest and straightforward as its title. At its end, the black soldiers-relegated mostly to playing baseball for the base, never getting to fight Hitler-receive word that they're finally shipping out. And O'Connell's Taylor realizes the error of his early ways. 'I was wrong, Davenport-about the bars-the uniform-about Negroes being in charge,' he says. 'I guess I'll have to get used to it.' It's a play set in the 1940s, written in the 1980s, optimistically looking toward a better time in American race relations. In 2020, that can't help but feel quaint.

The musical, which opened tonight at the Broadhurst Theatre, is, like the album, surpassingly excellent, if also slightly flawed. What makes it so good? It's the ideal exemplar of a certain sort of jukebox musical, one that hangs an artist's catalogue onto a fictional story, often to laughable result.(See: Everyone from the lovelorn Spring Breakers of Escape to Margaritaville to the wandering cowboy of Ring of Fire.) Here, in the hands of Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody, Jagged Little Pill fashions a story with characters that are actually compelling: A modern, seemingly all-American, upper-middle-class family, in which all the members have their own problems. A cynical theatergoer, weary of this kind of jukeboxer, might well find himself surprised to be emotionally engaged in the story.

Tina, which opened tonight at the Lunt-Fontanne, is, surprisingly, pretty good. Warren, its star, is spectacular. She sings beautifully and she dances ecstatically. She nails that raspy, growling, wide-vowelled Tina voice. (There is, one notices, something a little Cher-y about Tina's drawl.) And she does the whole thing with a focused ferocity that demonstrates how little Anna Mae Bullock could grow up to a legend. Warren's 'River Deep-Mountain High,' late in Act One, makes you stop, take notice, and settle in for whatever else she has to offer.

That's not to diminish any other parts of the staging or performance. Timbers, always an endlessly visually inventive director, has always had material that lived up to his specialties. (Rocky comes to mind.) But Luhrmann's fantasia gives Timbers license to do his best work-while creating something that is a definitively theatrical experience, not just a pale imitation of the film.

This may go toward explaining why this impeccably performed production of McNally's sweet, sad, and funny play, crisply staged by Arin Arbus, can feel nevertheless a bit sodden. For all the virtuosity on display, I'm not sure that we ever truly believe the characters, believe that these people are as lonely, and as needy, as the script requires them to be.

And thus is conjured a very enjoyable, very self-aware, very slick, very tuneful, very constructed-to-please-the-crowds new Broadway musical. It opened tonight at the Winter Garden, that frequent home to now-and-forever-running staples, and it's nearly guaranteed to follow suit.

In Gary, his characters succeed. Gary pulls off his Fooling. White's midwife, Carol, who appears halfway through Gary's machinations, still alive among the mound of bodies, finds and saves the baby that she believes she'd left to die back in the original play. (Why had she done that? It's complicated.) Life goes on. One hopes that's as true offstage as on.

That's when it's clear: Hillary and Clinton, an intriguing, fulfilling sketch of a fantasy that opened tonight at the Golden Theatre, is not The West Wing, a counterfactual of a competent, kind, White House to comfort us amid its opposite. It is instead M*A*S*H, looking back at an earlier war, to help us understand our current quagmire. The situation is real, or realish: the three characters arguing are Hillary, Bill, and Hillary's campaign strategist, Mark Penn, and Hillary really did barely eke out a win. But the interactions are imagined: It's the hard look we all wish we take at the Clintons' marriage behind closed doors.

Kline appears to be having the time of his life onstage at the St. James Theatre, where the latest Broadway revival of this 1939 drawing-room comedy opened Wednesday. It's a fast-paced and straightforward production, directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, featuring two equally delightful and delighted costars - the goofily irresistible Kristine Nielsen as Essendine's stalwart secretary, Monica, and Kate Burton, steely and wry as his devoted not-quite-ex-wife, Liz - plus a mixed bag of supporting players and a jam-packed Edwardian flat of a set, designed by David Zinn, that gets its own entrance applause.

Kroll and Mulaney are funny men, and the script is full of genuine laughs. They're smart and quick: The improv'd bit with Sorvino took an unexpected turn from peanut farming to Walt Whitman to Leaves of Grass. The play is directed by the playful and inventive Alex Timbers, who keeps the business humming along nicely. But there's virtually no attempt to initiate the uninitiated. Gil and George are obsessed with tuna, but there's never any explanation of why. They regularly mispronounce words - their show is playing on brudWAY - but that's presented as a mere tick, not anything that explains the characters. (It also leaves the innocent playgoer sometimes unable to decipher what's actually being said.)

About 45 minutes into Paramour, the Cirque du Soleil musical that opens at Broadway's Lyric Theatre tonight, the twin aerialists Andrew and Kevin Atherton are suspended over a stage set of what's supposed to be a movie set of Ancient Egypt. They're a striking pair: platinum blond, lantern-jawed, impossibly toned, and mirror images, each hanging from a strap and effortlessly contorting himself, dozens of feet above the stage. It's the sort of breathtaking, beautiful athleticism you expect from Cirque du Soleil, and it's thrilling. The audience is rapt. At the end of their number, the Atherton twins get the evening's biggest applause.

In the British director John Doyle's emotionally rich and visually striking new production of The Color Purple...there is an elegant staging and three gorgeous star performances...Jennifer Hudson makes her Broadway debut here, and it only reconfirms that she's a star...Danielle Brooks...is Sofia, the rare woman in this world willing to stand up to her husband...she turns out to be a gifted stage actress. She's funny, sensitive, and compulsively charismatic...Erivo...plays Celie, who is diminished and defeated through much of the story but finally finds her strength. Erivo's portrayal of that transformation is remarkable. A quiet, subdued performance slowly gathers conviction, and when finally Celie asserts herself with her climatic anthem of self-possession, 'I'm Here,' its power is astonishing.

School of Rock isn't perfect. But if, as the musical suggests, perfection is less the point than trying hard and having fun doing so, then it succeeds. There's a bit in it, repeated from the movie, in which Dewey tries to convince the other teachers that he has an educational philosophy by lifting some lines from Whitney Houston. And if the children are in fact our future, School of Rock suggests we're in pretty good hands. B+

One note: a distraction from that joy on the night we attended was a cell phone that went off during the final, quiet, climatic moments of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” its ringtone set to that old-fashioned, Ma Bell rrriiinnnggg. Ms. LuPone once suggested, famously and angrily, that we have lost our public manners. That she did not stop this show to throttle the offender suggests she was right, and that the phones have won. It’s enough to make you cry.

Yet in 2011, after Real Worlds and Real Housewives, after three decades of media-star pontiffs, Blue Leaves feels very much like an artifact of the late 1960s. At a time when some of its key surrealism is commonplace, Blue Leaves' other antic bits of wackiness—a fatal bombing played for laughs; hearing aids confused for pills—are still funny but land less effectively. The farcical elements don't build up the comedy of ridiculous premises; they instead rub awkwardly against the entirely reasonable.

Smoothly directed by Doug Hughes on a sumptuous hotel suite of a set by John Lee Beatty, Born Yesterday is a perfectly pleasant, perfectly pretty, perfectly tidy and perfectly forgettable three-acter. The one thing you won't forget is its Billie—who shows that there can be a lot lurking behind a vacant, pretty face.

Thank God for Kathleen Turner. I say this not just because she plays a woman of God, a foulmouthed nun, in her new star vehicle High. No, I thank God for Ms. Turner because without her measured, commanding and utterly compelling performance as Sister Jamison Connelly in this melodrama about addiction, religion and redemption, sitting through High would be like sitting through an ABC After School Special.