Naveen Kumar

First, let’s keep Hanks’s co-star Kelli O’Hara above this fray where she belongs. As a wounded but warm and plucky divorcée, she is the lone lighthouse in this sea of slop. It’s easy to see why a few minutes with her character, as she kicks off her uncomfortable heels at the 1939 World’s Fair, would make a time-traveling man crazy to see her again. In fact, O’Hara’s delicate radiance in the role — and the devotion it inspires — is the only part of the story that makes sense.

What everyone is really here for are the handful of blow-your-hair-back, 1980s-style rock ballads sung by the love-triangulated leads. Whether or not you appreciate the outrageous decibels at which they are amplified here, the bangers are built to impress, with notes held for longer than most people can count in their heads.

In a way, “The Queen of Versailles” suitably mirrors Jackie’s extravagant unfinished estate: It, too, is an ostentatious token of excess that ultimately proves hollow. At least these particular horrors of capitalism potential ticket buyers have the option to escape.

But “Liberation” does more than appeal to resistance-frazzled nerves, an ameliorative quality it shares with last season’s “Good Night, and Good Luck,” the hit George Clooney vehicle about a free press holding the government to account. Wohl’s ensemble drama is a memory play about a social movement, full of arguments that will ring familiar to many. But it’s rooted in vibrant, complex characters who embody the individual stakes entangled behind efforts at solidarity.

Smart, returning to Broadway after some 25 years, brings astonishing clarity and depth to the part. Spinning an enticing yarn from shopworn material — the action is set in 1989, when it may have struck a modern tone — she delivers a performance that feels deceptively featherlight while demonstrating total command. She lends Izzy’s tin-eared poetry a soaring lyricism and Wax’s trope-heavy script the texture of a character study. Every expression feels alive, and the sum total is transfixing.

The non-musical show... is a chaotic fire hose of fan-service with enough sensory stimulation to make even the most experienced gamer want to puke just a little.

Fortunately, the new musicals built around their legacies are, first and foremost, splendid showcases for powerhouse performers. As the cartoon vixen sprung to life in “Boop!,” Jasmine Amy Rogers gives the most sensational star-making Broadway turn in years — funny, captivating, a total knockout. It would be impossible to take your eyes off her if the rest of the production, directed and choreographed with maximalist razzle-dazzle by Jerry Mitchell, weren’t such an eye-popping spectacle.

It pains me to say, as an admirer of thorny texts and risk-taking celebrities onstage, that “Othello” offers scant reward, even if your only sacrifice were time — and even that is arguably too precious. What does “Othello” have to say about “the near future,” where a projection at the outset places us? It’s a question that, by its own admission, the first Broadway revival in more than 40 years needs to contend with. But this staging from director Kenny Leon offers little provocation to suggest it’s even worth asking.

Rashad, a longtime Broadway performer and accomplished director, does excellent work with the actors and with navigating quicksilver vacillations in tone. Moments of real uncertainly — when it seems that just about anything could happen next — are a rare and wonderful feat. If a bit of patience is required in return, call it a fair trade.

Audiences of different ages crave different spins on love and death, and judging by the stage-door stampede following the buzzy Broadway revamp of “Romeo and Juliet,” young people are in a frenzy for tragedy. Or at least eager to catch a glimpse of stars Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler on the street. The enthusiasm is thrilling, even when it almost flattens you under foot. Unfortunately, the production’s rave-like, nihilistic drive does little to make up for its lack of clarity or a pulse.

Nicole Scherzinger’s radiance as Norma Desmond in “Sunset Blvd.” is difficult to overstate. She sings “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” an aching one-sided duet with fame, with such delicacy and gut-slugging power that even Barbra Streisand, who covered it the same year the musical came to Broadway in 1994, might consider retiring the song from her repertoire.

Leon’s staging is lovely, but I found myself craving a daring challenge to the idea of convention rather than simply an inclusive version of it. Why should the picture of a “typical American life” remain so narrow? Why stuff it with more types of people rather than pull it apart? That’s a job for other storytellers — whose repudiation of norms will hopefully become the new one.

Perception, and who gets to control it, is at the heart of “Yellow Face,” which previously played off-Broadway’s Public Theater in 2007, also under the direction of Leigh Silverman. Hwang’s interest in setting the record straight can seem like an ego trip, and the staging, though pleasantly efficient, has a somewhat clinical feel. So many headlines appear in projection (designed by Yee Eun Nam) that occasionally the play reads like Hwang’s salvo in an ongoing beef with the New York Times.

But there’s a funny irony here: Celebrity vehicles about hot topics are proven Broadway cash cows, so isn’t “McNeal” itself the product of a predictive algorithm? Even if that’s some part of a meta point, the show is nevertheless a bloodless and convoluted mess.

Maybe that’s why Mendes’s production broods and thrums like it might suddenly turn into a Big Important Drama, or a potentially frightening one. The magnificent rotating set (by designer Rob Howell) features M.C. Escher-inspired stairways ascending as though into the great beyond. Deep, lingering shadows (lighting is by Natasha Chivers) and ominous swells of scoring (by composer and sound designer Nick Powell) drum up more intrigue than most of the story’s well-worn tropes. Even for a scene of imminent demise on the British coast, the dreariness is a bit overdone.

There’s no escaping the pair’s towering reputations, which turn out to be both a blessing and a trap. In this odd-couple comedy by Jen Silverman, Farrow and LuPone are cast as unlikely housemates in rural Iowa, lost souls eager to move on from their pasts. Directed by Jack O’Brien, the production leans generously into the distinctive qualities associated with its stars: Farrow plays a delicate and curious open book, and LuPone a blunt and sardonic riddle. Like most cohabitations, the results are uneven but not without tangible rewards.

There is a wittiness to the play’s conceit, rendering the awkward sparks of flirtation in synthetic voices. (The line readings and timing are a collaboration between the actors and the creative team, including the sound designer Matt Otto.) And Winters pays careful attention to the dynamics of living with disabilities that we rarely see depicted onstage, like balancing personal agency with the realities of needing assistance. But a sense of dutifulness toward representation — exploring differences in class as well as the origins and onset of disabilities, for example — gives “All of Me” a schematic quality. A subplot dealing with the opioid epidemic very nearly tips it into P.S.A. territory.

This revisionary attempt to turn “The Great Gatsby” into a clown car of passionate entanglements skids off the road when calamity is meant to strike. The second-act twists play out with the frenzy of a nighttime soap by Aaron Spelling, without any of the campy self-awareness. There is no ghastly reckoning with the follies of hedonism, just a rapid succession of abrupt ends.

It proves tough territory to conquer, despite the Sturm und Drang of this staging by Almeida artistic director Rupert Goold (Netflix, a co-producer on the show, is reportedly developing a screen adaptation). Morgan’s choice to focus on Berezovsky, a pivotal figure in shaping post-Soviet Russia (and installing its authoritarian leader), is a promising one. But “Patriots” suffers from a slipperiness of both focus and scale, dramatizing historical incidents and backroom deals while only thinly sketching the characters behind them.

All that stripped-down humanity onstage — from the entrails of broken lovers to the dancers’ carnal gyrations (choreography is by Julia Cheng) — make Redmayne’s Emcee a jarring exception. An otherworldly salamander of a narrator, he hunches over, Gollum-like, gnawing on every syllable as if it were his last meal. It’s a fiercely committed performance, but a mannered one, too. For the Emcee to exist as a creature apart makes narrative sense, but Redmayne’s remoteness drains some of the force from what is otherwise a grounded, gut-punching take on a disturbingly timely story.

Peering behind the mystique of rock ’n’ roll has undeniable voyeuristic appeal. So there is an immediate thrill to seeing the mahogany-paneled control room and glassed-in sound booth that fill the Golden Theater stage, where “Stereophonic” opened on Friday. But David Adjmi’s astonishing new play, with songs by the former Arcade Fire member Will Butler, delivers far more than a dishy glimpse inside the recording studio during rock’s golden age.

But the maximalist revival that opened at the Marquis Theater on Broadway tonight, following a 13-city national tour, diminishes some of the show’s reliable pleasures with unmitigated, candy-colored exuberance. This family-friendly approach — bright, broad, unironic — aligns with the musical’s legacy as a VHS favorite, but even kids could use help knowing where to look. Dizzying visuals and overamplification too often swallow both actors and storytelling in a swirling sensory overload.

The infatuation between Ponyboy and Cherry (Emma Pittman), which produces a couple of serviceable duets, feels perfunctory and fades into a melange of other conflicts. Hinton’s novel gallops with the muscular first-person voice of a tortured narrator, grabbing readers by the collar. “The Outsiders” musical takes a milder approach, peering under the hood of masculinity to the tune and pace of indie emo.

Fishburne has the air of wisdom of someone who, having undertaken deep self-investigation, is eager to share his findings. (The restrained undulating projections designed by Elaine J. McCarthy have a light-behind-the-eyelids feel, evoking memory and contemplation.) To the question of legacy, Fishburne seems to say: It’s not the stage and screen roles that matter, but his powers of perception — of others and of himself. It’s a skill you don’t have to be a movie star to perfect.

Gold’s attention to texture and tactile detail asks audiences to lean in; the play’s early scenes foster an engrossing intimacy later blasted apart by civic controversy. From the delicate border on Petra’s woolen shawl (costumes are by David Zinn) to the Rosemaling patterns painted on the white set (by the design collective Dots), the production creates a seductive and convincing world in the realm of the senses. But it took a startling ambush to jolt the moral of the story into the moment.