Linda Winer

If you want to get away - I mean really, really away - from concerns of the day, here is 'Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812.' It's a massive, luscious, romantic escape into decadent 19th century Moscow by way of Broadway's Imperial Theatre.

Schreiber may never seem inevitably to the manor born. He is not a preener and, at first, that wig with Vulcan hairline hardly eases him into the elegance of Christopher Hampton's deliciously evil and erotic 1985 adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos' scandalous novel. And yet Schreiber finds another way, an increasingly irresistible way, into a character generally expected to exemplify the exquisite, unrepentant boredom of the pre-Revolution French aristocracy. This Valmont seems more drawn to the mischief of the games he plots with the Marquise that ruin innocent people for sport and revenge. Despite his height and despite the violent moments when rough seductions get cringingly close to what we perceive today as rape, his Valmont is a bit of an imp - bemused, playful, almost touching in his insolent confidence.

Although it's hard to separate these characters from the original actors, the cast is terrific. Borle brings out more of Marvin's 'want it all' selfishness and Rannells is more of a hunk. Lapine's direction is finely calibrated to be showy without being show-bizzy and, though David Rockwell's modular foam set pieces and silhouetted Manhattan skyline can get a bit monotonous, they support the passion by getting out of the play's powerful way.

It hurts to have to say this. But the much-anticipated production, with Diane Lane at the top of a blazingly promising cast, is perplexing, stylistic gibberish. Worse, it is unmoving. With the conspicuous exception of Joel Grey in the small but crucial role of Firs, the old servant, and a few others, the production directed by Simon Godwin has only superficial historical moorings and lacks what Chekhov called 'the subtle elusive beauty of human grief.'

The actors are back, even more nuanced and riveting, at MTC's Broadway venue, subtly peeling layers off a vastly improbable yet profoundly believable relationship. Director Mark Brokaw's simple, impeccably observed production has little more than a couple of metal tables and chairs with which to burrow into fine-tuned character studies. Again, the audience sits on opposing sides of a runway stage, a meaningful way to keep us close enough to see many sides of the same shifting perspectives of the truth.

Alex Timbers, director of the hip 'Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson' and the cornball 'Rocky,' encourages a breathless pace that suggests we are not meant to ponder too long on any of the foolishness. Scott Pask's set is pretty wonderful, with hair-dryer chairs from 'Terms of Endearment' and a 'Pillowman' trap door. There's a 'surrealist ballet' and the 'Too Much Tuna' scene nightly includes a celebrity guest interview. At the preview I attended, Paul Sorvino was the befuddled good sport, but audience members may also be summoned for pranking.

It is, I hasten to say, a compelling radio play. Inspired by 'Amazon Beaming,' a 1991 novel that Petru Popescu wrote after meeting the real-life protagonist, National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre, and hearing about his encounter with a virtually unknown tribe in the Brazilian rain forest.

Best of all is the refreshed choreography by Tony winner Andy Blankenbuehler ('Hamilton') who has replaced Gillian Lynne's compilation of stock moves with variety and invention. Except for a preponderance of butt-waving, the taffy-jointed dancers have some of the angular, sudden, inexplicable moves of catliness. Highlights include balletic Georgina Pazcoguin, all in white, who moves as if she loves being in her skin, and Ricky Ubeda as Mr. Mistoffelees, who unspools turns and leaps with soft-paw landings.

Like its mouthful of a title, 'Shuffle Along or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed,' is not a conventional show...The result is a bold and wistful, playful and important musical-about-a-musical. It is overstuffed with ambition and talent, sure, but why shouldn't it be? There is so much to tell and as much to soak in and enjoy, thanks to a thrilling A-list cast...Indeed, there is a lot of exposition, a few too many back stories and, every so often, the narrative inertia of an illustrated history. But what illustrations these are -- choreographed for the terrific dancing chorus by Savion Glover with both a combination of the dazzling, syncopated black-tapping tradition and his own special full-footed, stomping identity.

The temptation is to talk all day and into the night about Jessica Lange as Mary Tyrone in 'Long Day's Journey Into Night.' It's hard not to dwell on the layers of hard-lived experience that appear and reappear, like a collage of time-lapsed photography, on her handsome face...This really is, with perhaps one miscalculation, a stunning revival of this churning family exorcism. Gabriel Byrne has both the grating self-centeredness and a poignant, vain blindness as Mary's husband James...Michael Shannon...makes his towering height and lugubrious mask shatter with devastating, piteous rage as the confessions and the recriminations pile up. A problem, and it isn't a big one, is John Gallagher Jr., a fine actor whose portrayal of the sensitive, consumptive Edmund, O'Neill's alter-ego, feels a bit too contemporary for 1912.

From the small world of unexpected pleasures comes 'Tuck Everlasting,' a gentle but hardly lightweight fantasy musical about an 11-year-old girl and the prospect of eternal life. Perhaps the least-expected part of this unpretentious sweetheart is director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw...This touching low-tech show is for an underserved niche audience -- families who want to be thoughtfully charmed for a few hours after being hyper-entertained by 'Wicked' and 'Matilda'...The functional music by Chris Miller and lyrics by Nathan Tysen don't shy far from the Scottish-tinged folksiness of the former while, alas, some jaunty patter songs sound a bit too much like the latter.

Jesse Tyler Ferguson is a very talented fellow who, at least from an audience perspective, exudes exceptionally nice-guy qualities. So it feels bad to have to say this, but Ferguson, despite exhausting commitment to this demanding 80-minute comic showcase, is totally wrong for 'Fully Committed.' He is lovely as Sam, the desperate unemployed actor moonlighting as a reservationist in the basement of the hottest New York restaurant...And Ferguson, alas, appears to have five, maybe six voices at his command. This is no crime, were the whole point something other than a showoff platform for an expert impersonator and vocal chameleon.

The distinctions here include a rousing, comfort-food pop score by Sara Bareilles, the singer-songwriter in her confident Broadway composing debut, and the can't-miss casting of Jessie Mueller as Jenna. Mueller, whose down-to-earth authenticity as Carole King in 'Beautiful' earned her a 2014 Tony, brings an unforced honesty and creamy, plaintive, intricately colored voice to a character who keeps things real when, all around her, things threaten to become showbiz pat.

Well, does it kill? The answer is definitely yes, no and sometimes. In other words, success depends on what's happening in 'American Psycho,' the alternately dazzling and dull musical...in the middle is Benjamin Walker ('Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson'), so weird and nuanced as Patrick that misgivings about the vehicle feel almost churlish...I wouldn't want to lose a swatch of Es Devlin's ever-morphing box set with the amazing nonstop videos by Finn Ross...Katrina Lindsay's costumes are ideally flattering and ridiculous. The least subtle element is Lynne Page's choreography...

..how I wish I could say that Florian Zeller's play lived up to the depths of its worthy ambition - much less to Langella's silken heartbreak of a performance or to the international acclaim of the award-winning French author. 'The Father,' which is having its American premiere in a new production directed by Doug Hughes ('Doubt') and translated by Christopher Hampton, uses a come-on-along device to try to make us viscerally feel the confusion and the cruelty of the mind in disarray.

...despite the sprawling locations of Miller's story, all the action feels unforced into one big country schoolroom...Ronan -- blond, unbridled and unrecognizable from the gentle brunette in her Oscar-nominated film, 'Brooklyn' -- plays Abigail with the duplicity of a malevolent surfer-girl. Whishaw, as good-but-flawed John Proctor, is more low-key and less heroic than was Liam Neeson in the 2002 revival. Okonedo is quietly forceful -- and ultimately heartbreaking -- as John's wife, accused of witchcraft so Abigail can get her husband, and Hinds is aptly imperious as the pious, self-serving deputy-governor...Although van Hove resists even a hint of cheap contemporary resonance, the village characters in their everyday work clothes connect the dots for us. This is not to suggest that van Hove resists a few outrageous and entertaining touches of the hyper-theatrical.

It doesn't shy away from the cornball or the unapologetically sentimental. And, yes, the plot is implausibly romantic and hinged on coincidence. Along with all that, however, 'Bright Star' is also downright wonderful -- a multichambered sweetheart of an original that Steve Martin and Edie Brickell created for Broadway from little more than a 1902 news item about a lost baby and an unbridled love of American roots music...At first, all the 'sun's gonna shine' and 'a man's gotta do' songs seem awfully simple and self-explanatory...But as the relationships deepen and darken, the show -- directed with a lack of cynicism and lots of rolling wood furniture by Walter Bobbie ('Chicago') -- grows with the complexity of a juicy short story. The large cast is uniformly appealing, with choreography that brings a haunting moodiness to the square dances and jitterbugs. Then there's the score, which builds with rhythmic surprises, melodic complexity and the deep satisfaction of humming and plucking strings.

The production, again directed with tender exactitude by Scott Ellis, now has the unstoppably appealing Laura Benanti and the equally winning Zachary Levi as the warring perfume sales clerks who don't know they're secret pen pals...By no means, however, is this a two-person show. Benanti and Levi are surrounded in the '30s Budapest shop by Jane Krakowski, delightfully adroit as the naughty-and-nice, unapologetically sexual co-worker, Gavin Creel as her dashing cad of a lover and Michael McGrath as the less theatrically assertive but no less essential salesman...And there are plenty of florid operetta demands for Benanti, who wears a role created by Barbara Cook with a lyrical yet sturdy sense of her character's worth and sense of humor.

He hulks, but looks more freaked out than scary. She may once have had the delicacy of a forest creature, but the ravages of survival have hardened her into a dried bundle of twigs. They are both so wired, so damaged, so residually attractive that the current between them seems to singe whatever protective shields they thought they wore before he rushed her into the employee lunchroom...Whatever doubts I had about Jeff Daniels' return to a character he played Off-Broadway in 2007, this riveting, visceral, uncompromising revival makes misgivings irrelevant. Again directed by the peerless Joe Mantello and now co-starring the extraordinary Michelle Williams, the drama feels more psychologically profound...Williams, who wipes away all bad memories of her Broadway debut in 'Cabaret,' matches him layer for complicated layer as Una.

It's possible to imagine a mood that may only be satisfied by a couple of hours of watching really good performers having a lark with really bad material. It is harder, however, to guess why 'Disaster!,' an intentionally tacky and silly hit in a cabaret several years ago, would stretch its amiable cheese-ball foolishness into a Broadway theater at no-joke prices. To fault the show for lacking substance would be as nonsensical as expecting 'Mamma Mia!' to be thought-provoking. And yet, given the flock of genuine experts who signed on for the spree, it does seem fair to expect more than this sporadically clever, sweetly produced, fantastically performed spoof of a passe genre -- the '70s disaster movie -- in overdone jukebox musical style.

Indeed, Nyong'o proved as compelling and radiant in person as on screen. But the play, despite other enthusiastic reviews, struck me as an earnest, heavy-handed labor of love - sincere and worthy but a dramatically simplistic look at the oppression of women as a weapon of war. Gurira - who, incidentally, plays Michonne in 'The Walking Dead' - wrote this after interviewing women in Liberia. Nyong'o was an understudy in a 2009 Yale Repertory Theatre production while still a student.

Fortunately for us, Oscar winner Forest Whitaker sees enough in the down-and-out loser to make him the daunting challenge and justification for his Broadway debut. And what a quietly satisfying, touching pleasure this production...turns out to be...Whitaker, who hasn't been onstage since the movies snared him after college, brings a buoyant, sweet, almost delicate sensibility to the breakable soul in the baggy suit and bow tie who has grandiose self-delusions...it is hard to imagine a more compelling, almost silent, witness than Frank Wood as the new clerk. With little more than a disbelieving blink and a dry stare, Wood dares us not to acknowledge this as a two-character drama.

There is so much love, dread, tenderness and brutality in 'The Humans' that it is hard to believe just 90 minutes pass through Stephen Karam's deeply-felt family tragicomedy thriller...The move to a larger showcase feels right, enlarging the impact without losing the nuances of light and dark...On second viewing, the retelling of bad dreams now seems woven into a richer psychological carpet and the few plot threads that seemed undeveloped now feel beautifully wrought...Last season, there was talk about initiating a new Tony category that would honor an acting ensemble instead of singling out individuals. If ever a cast deserved an award for sublime ensemble interdependence, this is it.

To describe Linda Lavin as flawless in 'Our Mother's Brief Affair' suggests we went looking for flaws, which could hardly be less true. Lavin's singular qualities - the voice that grates and comforts at the same time, the way she expresses an aside with little more than a deep sigh - could, at this point in her rich career, have frozen into a kind of tragicomic Kabuki. Instead, once again, the actress has channeled her special gifts into another in a seemingly infinite variety of smart, disappointed grown-ups who, in lesser hands, might just be Jewish monster-moms. Best of all, Lavin is challenged here by playwright Richard Greenberg's lean, lush dialogue, an intimate plot that goes in surprising directions and a character written with as much underlying compassion as overriding impatience.

The comedy in the first of three acts feels a little forced. But Herrin - not incidentally, artistic director of a company named Headlong - soon catapults the physical and verbal humor headlong into increasingly inspired opportunities to watch characters who play second-rate actors play out their real lives while trying to perform the complications of their second-rate play. Slippery sardines have seldomed seemed as ominous as when Jeremy Shamos, terrific as a hapless neurotic, flops around on them.