Leah Greenblatt

As much as the show feels directed toward a strenuously young demographic - some of them possibly not even born yet when Backstreet were singing about their fire, or their one desire - the script makes several knowing nods, much like a Pixar movie, to the ancient grown-ups in the room. There's something a little relentless about & Juliet's dogged eagerness to entertain, but nakedly joyful too: a violent delight, flipped for the TikTok era. Grade: B+

At nearly three hours with intermission, the machinations of the last days leading up to July 4 begins to drag, unhurriedly circling the inevitability of that final, deathless Declaration. What colors and fills up the room is the vibrant, gifted cast, many of them making their Broadway or even theatrical debut: a mild loss for historical accuracy, maybe, but a bigger win for life and liberty, created equally. Grade: B+

Death is an ever-present character too, or at least the specter that (no pun) hangs over it all. That's par for the course with McDonagh, though the cheerful brutality of his work can sometimes betray a certain emptiness at the core; what are the stakes, when even a fatal miscarriage of justice is played for punchlines? Hangmen suffers from some of that dissonance, and its longer, talkier interludes serve more as amiable time fillers than story engine. But there's real pathos in between the lines and endless pints of lager - even maybe a little heart.

As deeply flawed as its many characters can be - ornery and petty and blind to their own faults - the story rarely deigns to judge them. Instead, it lets them simply exist in the context of the dreams they're chasing and the crashing convergence of events that marked the century and a half their narratives move through: Civil Wars, stock-market crashes, all the ordinary loves and losses that make up a life. 'Money is a ghost. Money is numbers. Money is air,' one character declares ruefully, somewhere late in the third act. Whatever billions were lost on paper - and how ever many essential truths about the Lehmans have been lost to history - this Trilogy finds the thrill in letting them live again on stage: the heart, the hand, and the potato, spinning myth (and cotton) into gold.

For all its high-concept minimalism, the production tends to tackle certain themes, like immigration and police brutality, with a literalism that borders on cliché: stock footage of Puerto Rico to match the 'tropical breezes' bits in 'America,' and rippling stars and stripes when it crosses over; a pair of grizzled cop characters who feel both malevolent and silly in their central-casting bravado. (The iPhone cameras that several gang members hold aloft when one of those officers threatens to get rough conveys the message far more effectively, without saying a word).

There's a sense that a story of this scope could easily have been made into some kind of limited-series television event, with its long-thread plot lines and dialogue that often swerves between wry Bravo bitchery (tossed-off references to Broad City and Truvada) and HBO issue-drama prestige (all those heavy shades of the original Gay Fantasia). In the end, The Inheritance is a play whose cup runneth over in so many often glorious ways that almost every sip yields something - even if it might have been served just as well (or that much better) in a shorter, stronger pour.

But as director Phyllida Lloyd (who helmed Mamma Mia! in both its stage and film versions) careens through the play's paces - from a pint-size Anna Mae Bullock's beginnings in Nutbush, Tennessee to her fateful meeting as a teenager in St. Louis with the man who would mold and rename her, on through their tumultuous union and her unlikely break into solo stardom in her mid-40s - pretty much every note of nuance is lost in the razzle-dazzle rush.

The spectacular spectacular, the ring-ding razzle dazzle, the gitchie gitchie ya-ya da-da: It's all in Moulin Rouge!, a Broadway musical so stuffed with songs and sequins and sheer outrageous excess that it's hard to catch a breath for most of its two-hour-and-45-minute runtime (at least not without inhaling an errant feather or a spangled scrap of confetti).

The answer to that question, after seeing the lush new production at New York's historic Shubert Theater, feels like an impressed, qualified yes. While Lee's vivid snapshot of the Great Depression-era Deep South is its own valuable time capsule, the shifting sands of race and justice in America (and all the things that haven't changed, depressingly, in the more than eight decades since) is well served by at least some new perspective. And the Emmy- and Oscar-winning Sorkin - ratatat duke of dialogue, reigning king of the walk-and-talk - does feel like a smart choice to drag it all into the 21st century.

The Waverly Gallery never quite builds to the emotional power of his most memorable screen work like You Can Count On Me and Manchester by the Sea; its stakes are lower, its humor quieter, and its tragedies less piercing. But it does have a movie-star cast - and a bona-fide living legend, in Elaine May - as well as a low-key, humor-laced melancholy whose impact accumulates as the play goes on.

There is some sharp repartee, though, and few fun in jokes (nobody puts baby in the corner, but someone might put Harry Potter in a cupboard). And in the last half hour, the onion does begin to peel for John at least, who would otherwise come off as just the sort of tetchy, one-dimensional blowhard who may or may not have the actual talent to back up his swollen self-regard.

Writer Rebeck (Seminar) and director Moritz von Steulpnagel (Present Laughter) keeps the action moving with brisk, chamber-piece choreography: The ingenious set (by Tony winner Beaowulf Borrit) makes the most of its two-plus sides, and supporting players (including Brittany Bradford and Dylan Baker as a bobbling fellow thespians and Nick Westrate as Sarah's grown son) swan around in Toni-Leslie James's dazzling costumes - crisp britches and white linens, richly piled velvets and shimmering silk.

From the beginning, Boys has been criticized for catering to some of the deepest and most damaging stereotypes of gay life: the nelly, the show queen, the self-loathing closet case. Certain facets do feel dated, but to scrub them entirely would also feel like a denial of the truths and the time the play is rooted in. And for all the pop-culture asides and pointed wit, it's hardly a hollow platform for banter and bitcheries; director Joe Mantello (Wicked, the original production of Angels in America) takes care to let his characters' messier humanity come through.

The 1923 vintage of Shaw's play hardly shows its age in Scott Pask's staging (though his rich, gold-tinted set does lean toward the Art Deco) or in the loose, slightly winky direction by Daniel Sullivan (The Little Foxes). But color-blind casting and the occasional 20th-century colloquialism feel mostly like modern window-dressing on a story that's been marinating in the collective psyche for more than half a millennium.

It may be easier to inventory what the Broadway revival of Tom Stoppard's 1974 tour de force isn't about than what it is: A gushing waterfall of wordplay, a fine-tuned literary torrent that only begins by covering love, sex, war, memory, and Marxism. Also James Joyce, Dada, the fine art of men's tailoring, and The Importance of Being Earnest.

It's Henry, with his murky moral dilemma - should he step in to offer his brother the alibi he's begging for? - and low-key comic timing, who becomes the play's least showy MVP. His family quandary is also what the plot turns on; its jerry-rigged tension eventually comes to a head in a revelation that feels more schematic than earned, and the stress points of race and sex and power the script touches on are only glancingly resolved. but Lobby is still a smart, thoughtful piece of work, fairy-dusted by the starry presence of its celebrated cast.

Tony-winning director Pam MacKinnon (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) has also landed something like a sure thing in her leading lady; at 26, Phillipa Soo has already originated two phenomenally successful roles: Eliza (a.k.a. the main Mrs.) in Hamilton, and the titular Russian ingénue in Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812. Like its cinematic namesake, her Amelie is introduced first as a little girl (played here by the engaging Savvy Crawford): Born to a frazzled neurotic of a mother (Alison Cimmet) and an emotionally distant physician father who mistakenly diagnoses her with a heart condition (it's only pounding with the excitement of her monthly checkup, which is as close as he comes to showing his daughter physical affection), she is a sad, isolated child, strictly home-schooled and left to fill the long empty hours with her fertile imagination.

Great divas never die; they just wait for the next Broadway revival. Nearly 70 years after faded star Norma Desmond swanned into pop-culture legend in Billy Wilder's classic 1950 film noir, she's still a spangled, endlessly quotable icon of Hollywood madness - and a delicious opportunity for any actress over 40 who knows her way around a big gesture and a bejeweled turban.

The staging is remarkable considering all its moving parts, and the gifted young ensemble, often cycling at full tilt through multiple roles, earn every ounce of sweat and confetti. But the end result feels a little too much like zero-calorie entertainment (well, not counting the pierogi): brisk and sexy and emotionally weightless. The flow of the story never quite takes hold, and the stakes for these star-crossed lovers feel no more or less crucial then the next musical number tells us it is. (Malloy's lyrics toggle between self-aware wit and straight-up exposition; the melodies themselves don't tend to leave many chemtrails.)

Miranda's singular gift for storytelling and wordplay makes even the Federalist Papers sound sexy, but the play's intrigue come mostly from its potent stew of friendship and romance and outsize ambition; it's as if House of Cards were folded into a sort of Days of Our Colonial Lives fever dream, then filtered through the minds of Tupac and Sondheim. It's that strange and that spectacular, and you'd be crazy to miss it. A

All three Alisons share the same refreshing kind of naturalism, and each actress makes the part her own without showboating or selling the story's knottier sentiments short to reach the cheap seats. A little bit of nuance inevitably gets lost when subject matter this dark is set to song; death and deep family schisms, after all, aren't always fit for jazz hands. But like the book, Fun Home manages to use an oft-unserious medium to deliver something seriously, singularly moving.