Lily Janiak

Under the direction of Michael Greif and Schele Williams, a couple of well-done moments provide brief relief. In the song “Forever,” when the Middles reunite, a lusty Middle Allie, finding out Noah built the table where she’s seated, buries her face in its woodsy smell and suggestively strokes its leg. Then there are all the times when different generations of Allies and Noahs are singing to each other, comforting other selves or voicing what the other can’t say.

Directed by Daniel Aukin, the show occasionally cradles its pregnant pauses or indulges monologues like a pampering mother. We don’t need to hear about every character’s dream or movie hot take, and loading those digressions with more weight than they deserve looks portentous. At these moments, it’s like the show’s so in love with itself that everything it comes up with is de facto brilliant. But most of the time, “Stereophonic” is brilliant, and such lapses are instantly forgivable.

Among the smartest parts of “Suffs” is that there’s no final dreams-come-true moment. The instant that women win the right to vote, the show pivots to focus on Ida, Mary and Mary’s daughter Phyllis (Victoria Pekel), who know it’ll still be years before women of their race can vote.

But resistance is futile. ‘Shucked’ knows that, deep down, you’re just a puerile punster looking for instant gratification, and all it takes is a bombardment of double entendres and one-liners for your true self to rear her yukking, dopey grin.”

In scene after scene, that premise plays like a theatrical round of pop music bingo. You wonder what bit of Billboard Hot100 ubiquity the dialogue is teeing up, and then when the first notes of Ariana Grande or Katy Perry strike, the first person in the audience to audibly recognize it wins.

Fradiani has that. His timbre is like an open range studded with tumbleweeds and barbed wire, cowboy ruggedness crossed with Flatbush grit, schmaltz with singed edges. And he knows just how to deploy it: when to purr, when to rawr, when to strum those vocal cords. But “A Beautiful Noise” attempts to be more than just a concert, and in so doing, it creates the clunkiest framing device and the least likable protagonist possibly in the history of jukebox musicals.

The further “Back to the Future: The Musical” gets from the film, the more it succeeds. When Doc explains his time machine to Marty, a line of girls dances in, with little explosion designs on their boots, to aid in and dramatize the demo. Marty asks where they come from, but Doc’s mystified too, in a canny bit of meta humor: The rules of musical theater defy scientific understanding.

“Some Like It Hot,” the stage adaptation of the 1959 Billy Wilder film, evinces deep awareness of these criticisms. The musical, which opened Thursday, Jan. 9, at BroadwaySF’s Orpheum Theatre, seeks to trumpet the delights of the original while finding contemporary analogs for its gender humor, all while providing jazzy throwback numbers for audiences who lament the loss of escapist Fred-and-Ginger glamour.

But within that humble frame, David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s Tony Award-winning musical illuminates the ultimate human mysteries. It places the devastations and delights of being alive side by side and doesn’t force one to cancel out the other.

But within that humble frame, David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s Tony Award-winning musical illuminates the ultimate human mysteries. It places the devastations and delights of being alive side by side and doesn’t force one to cancel out the other. Moreover, though Kimberly (Carolee Carmello) is sick, with a disease that ages her four times as fast as everyone else, meaning her 16-year-old self can pass for a 60-ish grandma, the show doesn’t force her to be angelic and subdued or punish her for not being that way. Instead it simply thirsts for life — and in so doing seems to expand your own.

John O’Farrell and Karey and Wayne Kirkpatrick’s musical, which opened Wednesday, July 3, at BroadwaySF’s Orpheum Theatre, seems like it wishes it could use other source material. Directed by Jerry Zaks, it shadowboxes its way through key plot points and memorable shots from the film as if it has to so it can stage the new scenes it’s actually excited about. That opening sequence where Robin Williams’ Daniel Hillard is voicing a cartoon? Now Rob McClure halfheartedly impersonates a few celebrities. A few scenes later, when Miranda finally declares she wants a divorce? Actor Maggie Lakis is such a nonentity, and the production around her is so noncommittal, that it’s as if she doesn’t really mean it.

And then there’s Bobbie herself, who spends most of the show adorable but inscrutable, a cipher onto which others project their wants and fears. Coleman’s default mode is a wry smile, and she doesn’t devise ways to limn the cracks in Bobbie’s superficial blasé cheer. The result is that Bobbie is kind of boring — someone who doesn’t have much to say beyond platitudes about who she is and why she’s unmarried, certainly not someone who’d justify so much raging interest among her friends about her romantic fate.

Its current incarnation, with comedian and writer Amber Ruffin (also in the city to participate in this year’s SF Sketchfest) updating Brown’s book, unfurls a promenade for Black talent. Lewis’ Dorothy has the vocal power and precision of a lightsaber. After Phillip Johnson Richardson’s Tinman gets his rusty jaw slicked with oil, his very singing in “Slide Some Oil to Me” has emollient qualities. His vocal slides practically moisturize your ears.

Whereas Michael Keaton rendered the film’s title ghoul as a jabbering, hyperkinetic creature — something genuinely otherworldly and fascinating, the way festering wounds fascinate — in the musical, Beetlejuice (Justin Collette) mostly lurches back and forth along the schoolyard-bully-to-sad-sack-comedian pipeline. But we’re asked to care about and psychologize him, too. He had a rough childhood, and he just wants someone to love him, in all his loathsomeness.