Marc Snetiker

The show, for its many twisty turns, belongs squarely to its most consistent leads, its equally cursed children: Boyle and Clemmett, two fine English actors who, at 23 and 24, are as exceptional a leading pair as those Mormon boys or Wicked girls. Reprising their West End roles, both young men are formidable individually but meteoric together, specifically in their happy seizure of the central theme of this and Rowling's saga in general: friendship. Good friendship. The kind of friendship that trounces ostracization, that vanquishes evil, that draws power from the triumph of an inside joke as much as a shared tragedy. Boyle plays Scorpius, ostensibly Hogwarts' biggest outcast, with a ferocious nerve and mischievous wit; he's funny and heartbreaking and applies a vexing if effective quantity of outbursts to service his character's epiphanic moments. Clemmett, on the opposite hand, is an understated wonder; as the embittered but well-intentioned Albus, he has the less showy and perhaps more prohibitive role, but with a boyish charm Clemmett adroitly dodges pratfalls of teenage anguish and 'Ugh, dad!' resentment to remain hugely likable and empathetic even as he creates disaster after disaster for himself. The sparks the two actors create together are so dynamic, their occasional absence onstage does not go unnoticed.

Ashford is no one-trick canine, but those now-signature performance quirks...lend themselves to the spontaneous, indecisive, and rambling nature of Sylvia, whom Ashford plays with thoughtfulness and teenage vacuity somewhere between Snoopy and Kesha. With director Daniel Sullivan's license, Ashford is spry and spasmodic in channeling the animal's feral energy. Eventually, the physical half of the big 'joke' -- that is, human playing dog in earnest -- wears thin, but Ashford rescues herself from her own plateaus with bursts of sudden enthusiasm...Broderick gives the same pathos-less performance he's been offering since 2012's Nice Work If You Can Get It, a sleepy stroll that fits with Greg's stubborn, oblivious, and altogether aggravating lack of awareness...Even to the most pessimistic, Sylvia is innocuous and zippy, surprisingly foul-mouthed, and perhaps the very definition of disarmingly funny.

Boiled down to basic ingredients, the most cheerful tuners often share the same quirky, classic DNA: tap-dancing showstoppers, Broadway chorus lines, and for an inexplicable reason, boats. All are on display in Dames at Sea...but optimism alone can't keep a one-note ship afloat for too long...Under Skinner's uneven direction, the production waffles between a nicely prepared inside joke and the clunky result of its own satire. He vacillates between parody and earnestness, with the former offering genuine moments of humor for the very precise breed of fan who will appreciate them and the latter landing with something of a confusing, elongated thud...Fortunately, the piece's performers are perfectly cast to deliver the very long joke...As this very solid production stands, it's not particularly nautical and not particularly naughty, either. B-

MacKinnon's feisty if occasionally restless revival...makes intriguing work of Albee's portrait of WASPy retired couple Agnes and Tobias (Close and Lithgow) contemplating family and friendship in the final act of their lives...The production can feel like it's oscillating speeds, but the constant is shimmering character work, and why wouldn't you expect that from such a cast of heavy-hitters? In her first leading Broadway appearance since 1994's Sunset Boulevard, Glenn Close makes a comfy return to the stage as the self-important Agnes, whose self-pity is as dramatic as her pashminas. Close exudes the kind of veteran flair and magnetism you'd presume from such a marquee name. But although this seems to be Close's marquee, it's John Lithgow who runs away with the show. As insular dilemmas pile on for the pensive, settled Tobias, Lithgow offers a tremendous master class in the art of the slow burn, cautiously placing weight on Tobias until he hits his emotional tipping point with touching resonance. B