Linda Winer

Boldly going where others found only pitfalls is Lucas Hnath's 'A Doll's House, Part 2,' which closed the door on this remarkable Broadway season with dazzling theatrical fireworks. The play - a psychologically serious, deliciously amusing tragicomedy - extends Ibsen's three-act, multicharacter masterwork with just four characters in an intense but surprisingly breezy 90 minutes.

The title 'Bandstand' is a curveball. So is the subtitle, 'The New American Musical.' For audiences of a certain age, the name of the season's final musical suggests those dopey and adored teen dance shows that began on '50s TV. To audiences of a different certain age, the '40s look of the publicity photos implies a happy story of the bands that entertained the troops in World War II and moviegoers forevermore. Once inside the theater, however, we discover that we are meant to take the word apart and take it seriously. This is a musical - really, more of a musical drama - about a band of damaged war veterans who take a stand while competing in a national radio contest in 1945. The concept is more ambitious, darker and more sophisticated than its name invites theatergoers to enjoy. It is also more than a little shapeless and overly long.

The production, directed with compassion and merciless hilarity by Trip Cullman, has a wonderful, luxuriously large cast, with some actors dropping in for just a few perfectly pitched scenes. Allison Janney and John Benjamin Hickey are blissfully snooty yet insecure high-end art dealers who live on the edge of financial disaster in their sleek Fifth Avenue high-rise. It has been impeccably designed by Mark Wendland with the hanging two-sided Kandinsky (get it? two faces) and a red scrim revealing many other rooms and the skyline.

Now 'Anastasia,' inspired by the 1956 Ingrid Bergman film but mostly the 1997 animation, does have plenty of snow - lovely fat snowflakes that flit like fireflies behind the semicircle of graceful windows (designed by Alexander Dodge) that twirl and reveal scenes from St. Petersburg to Paris. This one also has a score by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, who wrote the music for the cartoon that catapulted the song, 'Journey to the Past,' to pop stardom. For the Broadway version, they have teamed up with playwright Terrence McNally, their collaborator for the far superior 'Ragtime.' More power ballads have been added to the pretty but dispiritingly predictable story of Anastasia, the princess who, as rumor once had it, may have escaped the revolution's firing squad as a child in 1918.

For a musical about the wonder of pure imagination, 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' is bizarrely lacking in it. The show does have Christian Borle as Willy Wonka, the mysterious chocolate-making genius created by Roald Dahl in 1964, then indelibly embodied by Gene Wilder in the 1971 movie and (a bit less indelibly) Johnny Depp on screen in 2005. Alas, especially in the long and slow first act, it's almost painful to watch Borle, a master of endearing virtuosity, work so hard to sell charm that simply isn't in the script, the music and too much of the staging.

If there were such a thing as a happiness meter at the Shubert Theatre these days, where, oh, where would that be placed? The obvious position is in the audience, where fans of 'Hello, Dolly!' and fans of Bette Midler - which may well add up to just about everyone - have come together in a palpable bonding festival of hot-ticket excitement, contentment and raucous joy. And yet, it is the happiness exuded by Midler that makes this first-rate revival of Jerry Herman's 1964 chestnut so delightful and, yes, so deeply touching.

The next time anyone challenges the need to have nonprofit Broadway houses alongside the commercial theaters, I'm going to shout out, 'The Little Foxes.' It's possible to imagine a profit-motivated producer deciding to stage Lillian Hellman's 1939 drama about a greedy Southern family these days if a megastar - recall Elizabeth Taylor in 1981 - wanted to claw her way through the carnivorous role of Regina Giddens, the Cruella of small-town 1900 society. But the nonprofit Manhattan Theatre Club has not merely dared to cast Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon - sublimely intelligent actors, but hardly summer tourist-bait - to play grasping, glamorous Regina and her mousy, quietly alcoholic sister-in-law Birdie Hubbard in the company's Broadway venue. To complicate matters deliciously, the two are alternating roles equally through the run.

After Paula Vogel's extraordinary play...burst open at the Vineyard Theatre last year, the sad and strange and wonderful piece landed on many annual best-play lists. Yet it was hard to imagine how its specialness...might hold up in a big Broadway house with broad commercial expectations. It is a thrill to report that this 105-minute, multilingual...adventure is a natural fit. It's a gripping and entertaining show with laughter and tears and a real rainstorm in which two women from the marvelous 10-member cast re-enact what, in 1921, had been the first lesbian kiss on an American stage...In her program note, Vogel writes, 'I believe the purpose of theater is to wound our memory so we can remember.' 'Indecent' does that, but it also enchants.

The creative team that deftly balanced the nasty with the comic in 'Matilda' finds at least as much special chemistry in this surreal challenge, a romantic comedy and life lesson that, in the words of one of the characters, 'messes with the space-time continuum.' Tim Minchin's music beguiles with odd phrase lengths and wildly unpredictable, amusing lyrics, while director Matthew Warchus and his first-rate cast take us through the day and its many conflations with a light touch that belies the head-spinning concept and scenic intricacy.

'War Paint' may not be one of the great musicals, but it is an enormously satisfying one. Yes, it is a showcase for established artists hungry for new material. But the show, sleekly and compassionately directed by Michael Greif and created by the team that made the haunting 'Grey Gardens,' looks at American women from 1934 to 1964 through a new lens - from the lives of two business titans who took lipstick from harlots to high society.

In fact, this is a revival that, despite a cast of farce experts, treats the broad moments as rare offhand treats that flash suddenly on characters as momentary glimpses into humanity's silliness. Unlike Broadway's 2010 revival, in which actors pretended to look terribly sophisticated but instead looked tarted up for a Noël Coward costume party, this production has one absolutely critical element for Coward.

The Broadway season has many openings left before the late-April cutoff, but it seems safe to say that none is likely to be weirder than 'Amelie.' Given the bushels of imagination in director Pam MacKinnon's staging and the radiant presence of Phillipa Soo in the title role, I wish that were more of a compliment. For much of the musical based on the enduring 2001 French film, the fantasy appears to be aimed at the not-exactly-underserved audience of bright 11-year-old girls. But that is before the jolly cautionary rock song about STDs and before we find out that Amelie's love interest is a salesman in a porn store.

'The Play That Goes Wrong,' the winner of London's Olivier for best comedy, finds the line that separates the annoying and stupid from the I-can't-believe-I'm-laughing-at-this brilliance. And when the company aptly called the Mischief Theatre hits that line, which it does over and over, resistance is ultimately futile.

In a way, this feels like a throwback to Depression-era drama. The depression, however, is ours. The urgency, the deep specifics of the characters make the conventional structure an essential, almost radical part of the storytelling. The relationships are so multilayered, the economic and cruel racial realities so clear that fancier stagecraft might just get in the way.

The story feels more urgent amid renewed refugee tragedies and our consciousness of the sex trade. And the narrative - helped by unusually graceful lyrics by Boublil and Richard Maltby Jr. - almost distract from the generic Euro-pop ballads and anthems that sound like many we've heard before. There is still no distinction between the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, with no explanation for the civil war, and the fake documentary showing real international orphans still strikes me as shameless.

After radical, dazzling director-driven revivals of Miller's 'A View From the Bridge' and 'The Crucible,' not to mention the profoundly stripped-down rethinking of Tennessee Williams' 'The Glass Menagerie,' it feels almost novel - at least, quietly reassuring - to have a lesser-known Miller work presented with down-the-middle sensibilities and expert care.

Could it be? Had the theater finally found a way to sing and dance with dignity regarding 9/11, a catastrophe that has, thus far, been the third rail of theatergoers' emotions? Well, 'Come From Away' may not be Broadway's first feel-good musical about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, but it is a feel-pretty-nice musical. Think of the simple 100-minute show as psychological training wheels, perhaps a way to ease us into the unbearable stories our playwrights might someday ask us to confront.

'Significant Other' is a slick, well-made, funny-sad new Broadway comedy, the kind that doesn't often get a first-rate commercial production these days. At its soft heart, however, the play is really a 21st century theater throwback to that old song that cried, 'Those wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine.'

Every once in a rare while, the theater rewards us with a kind of transcendent experience, a feeling that this, surely, will never happen again - at least not remotely in the same way. My once-in-a-lifetime theory is being crushed - exquisitely, rapturously - right now as Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford step up alongside Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters in the treasured place where I keep memories of the original 'Sunday in the Park With George.' They are that good.

In fact, there is something fitting, even satisfying about this less elaborate, modest incarnation - if modest is not too foolish a word for an economical event that still begins with a drowned corpse in the air, dresses Close in outrageous gold splendor by the original costume designer, Anthony Powell, and has a 40-piece orchestra onstage. The musical is presented here in the familiar Encores! style of semi-staged revivals by the English National Opera, directed by Lonny Price, and, surprisingly, feels less like a hokey entertainment straining for artistic importance than did the original.

This is a meticulously cast, lovingly observed play about life in a livery cab station in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Wilson's home base. We are in the '70s but Wilson never burdened his decades with easy pop-sociological markers. Vietnam is closer but no less life-altering than black experiences in Korea. Many of the actors are veterans of Wilson's storytelling style, experts in the unspooling ways he defines character and plot through grand handfuls of luscious and gritty street poetry. The problems at the car service revolve around the everyday joys and heartaches of fathers and sons, wives and husbands, men and their whiskey, and the yearnings in their souls.

It would be possible - and extremely pleasurable - to spend most of the three hours at 'The Present' just watching Cate Blanchett. Here she is playing the seemingly confident widow Anna on the eve of her 40th birthday. She stares out from her late husband's Russian country estate wearing a filmy summer dress. She lounges unselfconsciously in the laps of her party guests, enjoying a foot massage from her grown stepson.

The 100-minute musical - really, a collection of songs about mostly unrelated people in career and romantic transition - is meant to be inspired by the rhythms of the subway. This comes through best with the rumbling beats and virtuosic sound effects made by Boxman, a wise subway eccentric and one-man band played by beatbox artist Steven 'HeaveN' Cantor. Otherwise, it's a stretch to find the subway-rhythm idea as more than a pretext for getting together 11 actors to portray 40 very sincere and familiar characters - the struggling actress/office temp (Margo Seibert); the obsessed dumped girlfriend (Erin Mackey); the engaged gay guys (Justin Guarini and Telly Leung), one of whom is in the closet to his pious but kindly Texas mother (Moya Angela); and the former Wall Street guy (James Snyder) fired for pressing 'send all' on an indiscreet email and now, unbelievably, left without enough to take the subway.

Finally, there is Platt (the 'Pitch Perfect' movies), with his astonishing vocal nuance and his rare ability to communicate bunches of conflicting feelings with just a frown and a hurt, hopeful smile. His portrayal of catastrophic, perhaps autistic alienation is so astute in the early scenes that, when Evan miraculously heals up, we feel a little guilty for missing the old one.

'A Bronx Tale: The New Musical,' Chazz Palminteri's semi-autobiographical theatrical coming-of-age story, has been told and retold so many times that it has the ritualized feel of a folk myth - and not in a good way.