Johnny Oleksinski

No other show understands the callused skin that hardened, cynical New Yorkers develop to make it through another miserable day quite like 'Company' does. Sondheim's musical, splendidly directed by Marianne Elliott, is a paean to NYC about the pains of living in NYC. Eight million people and somehow you're still single and in your 30s. Constantly surrounded by wackos and dullards. Friends hightail it at random, unable to deal with the stress. Apartments are small. The subway is unavoidable. Why pay for therapy when you could go to 'Company'?

Why has a movie that was never anything more than a ridiculous star vehicle for the late Robin Williams' comedic talents been dragged onstage almost 30 years later without him? Partly as a star vehicle for Broadway favorite Rob McClure, who now plays Doubtfire a k a Daniel.

The Caesars Palace buffet of camp, 'Diana' tells the story of an innocent, teenage Diana Spencer meeting eligible bachelor Prince Charles at a party, marrying him very quickly and then becoming trapped in the cold, stifling royal family. The fame, of course, led to her 1997 death in Paris. In the show, Di suffers from postpartum depression, commits self-harm, has extra-marital affairs, visits an AIDS ward and is hounded by the paparazzi - Lifetime Channel-sized events paired with some of the silliest lyrics you've ever heard.

A happy surprise of 'Thoughts of a Colored Man,' which opened Wednesday night on Broadway, is that it's much more entertaining than its portentous and literary-sounding title would suggest. What you expect to resemble a book from a college syllabus actually gets belly laughs and a tear or two. And at 90 minutes, the show is not a second too long or short. Keenan Scott II's new play at the Golden Theatre, with refreshing warmth, gives us what it promises: the internal musings of a group of New York black men.

'Six' is more of a concert than a traditional book musical, though, with nine numbers and a megamix crammed into a quick 80 minutes. The songs here, by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, are all whip-smart and catchy. With jukebox shows proliferating like rabbits, audiences are getting used to hearing modern music onstage, but 'Six' is one of the few original musicals in memory whose score is radio-ready.

Hill and Smallwood have a lively rapport that makes us believe they really have been with each other constantly for a thousand years. Hill, in particular, reveals both sweetness and immense passion. The dance-like movement director Dayna Taymor gives the pair perfectly suits Nwandu's musical text.

For a consummate performer like Springsteen, the deeply personal show was routine, but damn was it inspiring for me and the rest of the audience. On Saturday, we learned that tourists are back. Everytime Springsteen mentioned a town - San Francisco, Phoenix, Asbury Park - there were loud cheers from people who live there. He had to tell the out-of-towners to 'shut the f-k up.'

For a consummate performer like Springsteen, the deeply personal show was routine, but damn was it inspiring for me and the rest of the audience. On Saturday, we learned that tourists are back. Everytime Springsteen mentioned a town - San Francisco, Phoenix, Asbury Park - there were loud cheers from people who live there. He had to tell the out-of-towners to 'shut the f-k up.'

A series of unfortunate events has come to Broadway. No, not the Lemony Snicket novels, but 'Girl From the North Country,' a mashup of Bob Dylan songs and abject misery. The show, which opened Thursday night, is little more than a stack of vaguely depressed persons who take breaks from sad scenes to sing anguished and questionably relevant songs.

By pushing back against what we remember from the Oscar-winning 1961 film, a musical that many can recite line-by-line becomes newly suspenseful and gripping. It's still the 'Romeo and Juliet'-inspired story of Tony (Isaac Powell) of the Jets gang, and Maria (Shereen Pimentel), the sister of the rival Sharks gang leader, Bernardo (Amar Ramasar). The couple meets during a dance at the gym and, at great risk to themselves, fall in love. But every step in this well-worn plot comes as a startling surprise, starting with the gangs themselves. As we watch during Leonard Bernstein's booming 'Prologue,' when a camera pans across the cast's faces, the racially specific animus (Puerto Ricans versus the Polish and Irish) is largely gone. It's still there in Arthur Laurents' book and Stephen Sondheim's lyrics, but in an effort to reflect modern-day New York and its evolving conflicts, the casting is totally diverse - and devastatingly young.

That's Laura Linney, the venerable actress, who stars in the one-woman play, adapted from Elizabeth Strout's novel, that opened on Broadway Wednesday night. It's a skilled performance that employs the actress's signature move: commanding the stage while remaining genteel and dignified.

More social issues are addressed in 'Jagged Little Pill' than at a Democratic presidential debate. Opioid addiction, race, bisexuality, sexual assault - the Alanis Morissette musical, which opened Thursday night on Broadway, has got 'em all. But, like trying to shove Elizabeth Warren's entire platform into a single evening, nearly every topic gets short shrift.

The first part takes a while to click in. The use of author E.M. Forster as a narrator, the ensemble chirpily finishing each others' sentences and the abundance of graphic sex-talk can grow cloying. The play finds its soul near the end of the first portion, which is a well-earned tearjerker. To reveal much of Part 2 would rob the drama of its suspense. As the story moves forward, the 15 actors embody a clown car of different characters. The most heart-wrenching are Adam, an actor Toby falls in love with, and Leo, a male escort who's a dead ringer for Adam. Both men are played by Samuel Levine, who, as Leo, gives a moving and truthful performance of someone in immense pain.

But let's be real: You come to 'Tina' for the songs. Director Phyllida Lloyd ('Mamma Mia!') stages them smoothly, with vibrant pops of color that ripple off the shimmering fringe of Mark Thompson's costumes. And all of them - including 'I Can't Stand the Rain,' 'Private Dancer' and 'We Don't Need Another Hero' - sound glorious. During the exuberant final concert, Warren isn't just rolling on the river: She's stampeding through Broadway.

With all that time for development, most of the characters, such as they are, remain vague and archetypal. There's little change from start to finish, and therefore no investment from us. For better or worse, 'Slave Play' is the sort of show you see to say you've seen it.

But your eyes are glued to the actors, who fill their Pinter pauses with fierce desire and longing - especially when standing several feet apart. Hiddleston supplies most of the play's danger with his forceful presence, while its heart comes from a deep-feeling Ashton. Meanwhile, Cox is a guy plenty of audience members would gladly leave their husbands for.

Director Alex Timbers' smartest move is not trying to replicate Luhrmann's quick-cut sense of humor, which would crash and burn onstage. Instead, he focuses on grandiose emotions, sensuality and the storybook sensation of first love, for which Tveit's puppy-dog innocence is ideal.

Most of the cast overplays (Butler, Kritzer) or underplays (McClure, Dannheisser), but the talented Caruso, with a Cyndi Lauper-like voice, strikes the right balance. This is a challenge for all involved, especially in the second half of Scott Brown and Anthony King's jumbled book. Indeed, if the actors took their scripts, threw them into the air, picked up the pages and performed them in their new order, Act 2 would be about the same. Director Alex Timbers' hyperactive staging and David Korins' huge-but-ugly set don't help matters much.

And so is the exciting new play about it, 'Ink,' which opened on Broadway Wednesday night after its West End run. James Graham's down-and-dirty dramedy tells the story of the 1969 purchase of the struggling paper by a scrappy Australian named Rupert Murdoch.

While Yazbek's jazzy score doesn't reach the heights of his work in 'The Band's Visit,' there are a few really terrific numbers. You won't leave 'Tootsie' humming, but you will leave laughing - which is even better.

Yes, composer Anaïs Mitchell's musical retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, which opened Wednesday on Broadway, sounds pleasant and looks more expensive than it did in 2016 at New York Theatre Workshop. But this classic tale of love - he looks back, she gets trapped in the underworld for all eternity - is still too slick and sterile for us to give a damn about her damnation.

Some of Fish's ideas are fun. The chili and cornbread doled out to the audience at intermission is tasty, and the women snapping ears of corn during 'Many A New Day' gives the scene rebellious energy. But in putting his actors in modern dress, making guns his wallpaper and forcing every moment that a gun is brandished or even mentioned to have bombastic significance, Fish clearly is saying he's not a great fan of the culture of the Great Plains - of yesteryear or yesterday. In a preposterously heavy-handed sequence, he even has Jud present Curly with a pistol, rather than the usual knife, which leads to a shocking but inane conclusion. All this, in a hokey old show that includes the lyric, 'Gonna give ya barley, carrots and potaters.' Listening to the New York audience applauding their own virtuosity makes a guy want to put this 'Oklahoma!' out to pasture.

We must, of course, credit the actress' brilliance as a performer. Her iconic comic chops - honed in Upper West Side gay bathhouses, Upper East Side divorcée-revenge capers and Las Vegas concerts - are on delicious display as Dolly the meddling matchmaker, especially next to David Hyde Pierce as her cheerfully crotchety leading man. And there is nothing more invigorating than Midler crooning Jerry Herman's sensational standards. But the actress' nonstop hustle during her 50-year career is every bit as ingenious as her art.

'Oh, Hello,' which opened Monday night on Broadway, has finally put an end to entertainment's interminable War on Fun. The smart, 95-minute two-hander created by and starring comedians Nick Kroll and John Mulaney dares to be hilarious, without a nanosecond of deeper meaning. And thank God for that.

'The Encounter' would work better as a podcast, where a listener can focus on the words, and pause and rewind in private. Instead it's been slapped onstage with 77 water bottles and a microphone shaped like a severed head.