Johnny Oleksinki

Is imitation the highest form of flattery? Maybe. But “The Unknown” is simply flat.

Harrison’s story is topical, that’s for sure. Frighteningly so. What elevates it above the ripped-from-the-headlines hackery of, say, so many political dramas co-written by Wikipedia is that it’s also profoundly human and lump-in-the-throat relatable without ever toppling over into boo-hoo sentimentality. The play exposes its audience’s emotional weaknesses like few others do. I reckon that most ticket-buyers will silently ask themselves if they would buy a Prime if they had the chance. And they’d probably be uncomfortable with their honest answer.

The musical comes dangerously close to cloying sentimentality at times, but Dougal’s dry sense of humor and Tutty’s first-class delivery prevents the story from ever getting too soupy.

Reid, Strong and Manville are transfixing as awful revelation after revelation comes to light. Strong’s nice guy gives way to brutishness and boiling blood, and Manville’s heretofore stalwart Jocasta crushingly crumples when the grotesque truth is finally revealed.

It’s a hard-hitting, hard-laughing show that combines topics that you arrive at the theater not itching to confront — the COVID pandemic, meth addiction, health insurance, shift pay — into an absorbing story you leave wanting much more of.

The sorry excuse for a stage adaptation, which opened Tuesday at Stage 42, takes a quirky 90-minute film that was completely reliant on the charm and chemistry of its leads Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow, pumps in almost an hour of formless filler and pulverizes its personality to the point of being practically unrecognizable.

It still is. She doesn’t have a mastery of the Beaumont’s huge thrust yet. And so this is an overly presentational staging in which actors other than Ross struggle to connect to one another, which is partly why the experience is mostly unmoving even as songs desperately beg us to cry.

A few smart, artful additions raise “Masquerade” to something far greater than a jolly tourist attraction. Paulus, when she’s firing on all cylinders, knows how to fuse the commercial with the profound.

French writer Yasmina Reza’s 1998 whine-and-cheese comedy, which opened at the Music Box Theatre on Tuesday night in an askew revival starring Neil Patrick Harris, James Corden and Bobby Cannavale, remains a slim, one-joke, pseudo-intellectual affair that gratingly and exhaustingly works to send up fellow pseudo intellectuals.

Well, I say, 'thank you for the musical.' 'Mamma Mia!' is a much-needed vacation from all the seriousness and drear. And its foundations could withstand a nuclear blast. The foremother of the old-pop-songs-in-a-new-story genre is still the very best in the game.

The entire off-its-rocker off-Broadway show, whose sole sin is occasionally trying too hard, is lovably loony.

Smart is funnier, deeper and, well, smarter than anything in playwright Jamie Wax’s mummified one-woman show that opened Thursday night at Studio 54. Yet she’s relegated to cracking “Moby Dick” jokes next to a toilet. This Wax work, a musty quilt of cliches, is about a Louisiana woman who lives in a trailer with her abusive, deadbeat, hard-drinking husband. Essentially alone, Izzy writes poetry on two-ply as an escape. She then hides it away in a Tampax box that no one dare open.

Director Scott Ellis’ boisterous romp is not groundbreaking in the way the Joseph Papp-produced 1980 revival was, but it has the same irreverent spirit — and perpetually ridiculous tale.

All of the expensive visuals are in service of a throwaway play in which the real villain ain’t Vecna — it’s the writing.

Belflower’s play says the opposite while mirroring Miller’s moral certitude about his own characters’ top-to-bottom guiltlessness. She casts zero doubt on the men being investigated. They absolutely did it.

Similarly indecisive, ‘Smash’ is on the fence as to whether ‘Bombshell’ is a good or bad musical. That should have been action item No. 1. [...] But the only reason ‘Smash’ is on Broadway right now is because Shaiman and Wittman’s songs from the series still have admirers. Why, then, are the fictional composers depicted as unreliable hacks who no one seems to believe in? It makes no sense. Nothing does.

There’s ​such a ​throwback showbiz energy to discovering a major talent like Rogers that makes the marquee lights twinkle a bit brighter as you ​b​oop out ​o​f the theater and off to Sardi’s.

It’s unnecessary and obvious; shoveling textureless meaning into the troth.

So, to channel Mamet, why the f–k has it been plopped onto the same stage that was home to “West Side Story,” “Legally Blonde” and “SpongeBob Squarepants: The Musical”? It’s a huge mistake. Any tension heads straight down the lobby escalator as soon as the curtain rises, and it’s challenging to become absorbed by the tale — even during the always-feisty second act.

But what the worthwhile play offers — and I know there are many who pooh-pooh screens onstage as a rule — is the childlike wonderment of not understanding the logistics of what you’re looking at. The first hour is marked by awed and confused “How did they do that?”s. “How did she do that?”

The madcap World War II comedy from London, which opened Thursday night at the Golden Theatre, is an often tiring wallop of frenetic hyperactivity. There’s ample cleverness and some witty lines, but the Red Bull tweeness gets grating.

Really, though, the plot is just a means to more exceptional music. What gets our blood pumping is the fabulous onstage band that stirringly performs some 20 numbers, including 'Chan Chan' and 'Dos Gardenias.' The songs are accompanied by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck’s vibrant, fluid, full-bodied choreography that’s so athletic and rubbery it makes you question if the dancers actually have bones.

There’s trauma after trauma. Yet what’s so puzzling about “Redwood” is that it’s a textbook tearjerker — a mom in mourning rediscovering herself midair, weighty speeches about losing everything — that leaves your eyes totally dry. The closest the musical comes to being remotely affecting is a quiet song toward the end called “Still,” beautifully sung by Zachary Noah Piser as Spencer. Jesse’s winding explanation for her son’s death should be scrapped and completely rewritten, but Piser has a velvet voice and an easily emotional presence regardless.

“Gypsy” is, by the estimation of many — including me — the greatest musical ever written. But you wouldn’t know it from the slow and unsteady revival starring Audra McDonald that opened Thursday at the Majestic Theatre. The quintessentially American story about driving and moving from place to place while scraping by with a pipe dream of stardom does not satisfyingly drive or move. With stop-start direction from George C. Wolfe, the sixth Broadway production of Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents’ musical runs out of gas early.

Since Act 2 narratively does not have as much drive or emotion as the first, and the songs are still mush, Gattelli should have included even more body horror schtick. The Demi Moore film “The Substance” is a lesson in how upping the gore ante can rev up a story. But whenever the material sags, like aging skin, its sensational stars inject the show with new vibrancy. Even if the musical doesn’t have a discernible heartbeat, Hilty and Simard ensure “Death Becomes Her” stays fun and fabulous.