Johnny Oleksinki

Yet director Joe Mantello’s pummeling revival, which opened Thursday night, accomplishes what this play at its most potent should. Yes, you leave raving about the sterling performances of Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf and the striking stagecraft. But, for more than a few people I overheard on the way out, it also powerfully summoned a tougher topic: their own lives.

Without fail, the best Broadway shows are the off-the-charts inventive ones that could not have possibly originated anywhere else but the five boroughs. This season, that’s “The Jellicle Ball.”

Gionfriddo’s play clearly covers a lot of risky ground — gender, race, politics, money — only it’s so relentlessly hysterical you barely notice the mark it leaves until the appetizers arrive. Adding to the entertainment, director Trip Cullman’s direction is sexy, light and swift.

First off, the towering 80-year-old Tony winner bears a striking resemblance to the man, right out the box. But it’s Lithgow’s ability to be quiet and sweet and seconds later booming and scary that makes us squirm in our seats over our own feelings toward the writer. At times, we really do like him. The actor’s well-rounded, seismic Roald will be on the defensive, weaponizing his over-6-foot frame, massive intellect and huge temper. All giant, indeed. And right away he’ll snap into a kindhearted old man — the nurturing papa who Dahl readers dream is behind the prose. A camouflage, perhaps.

It’s Radcliffe’s vitalizing and vulnerable performance, a cardio workout both physically and emotionally, that’s the reason to go. He’s its most brilliant thing.

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?”