Naveen Kumar

Instead, Brunstetter’s book, which spreads thin as it flits back and forth through a half-century, resists delineating the central pair with much of any identifying detail. Allie still likes to paint and Noah is good with lumber, but an effort to maximize their relatability winds up sacrificing their flesh and blood. The roles can be played by different actors because there’s nothing very particular about either character. The result is anodyne — and lacks the erotic charge of an attraction with distinct flavor set against a recognizable world.

But the lead performances are miscalibrated. Schreiber’s gruff, salt-of-the-earth Flynn lacks a threatening underside, like a rock without worms squirming beneath. Ryan, a last-minute replacement for Tyne Daly, who withdrew from the production for health reasons, wields Aloysius’s iron-fisted quips like daggers. But she seems to throw them for the sake of it, with an absence of fear or disgust that what she believes might actually be true.

Nixon, a delicately skilled stage performer, plays each character as a slightly exaggerated persona, like roles an artist might try on to demonstrate that identity is a kind of drag. If there are psychoanalytic underpinnings to this approach, they’re not compellingly explored. The result is two actors operating in uneven registers throughout, with Trensch as the so-called straight man to Nixon’s shuffle of mild caricatures. (The exceptions are mother-son confrontations that Elliott pitches as earplug-worthy shouting matches.)

There is also the strained union between this relatively mundane plot, not unlike a PSA about the dangers of alcoholism, and the poetic, dynamic songs by Adam Guettel, who also collaborated with O’Hara and book writer Craig Lucas on “The Light in the Piazza.” Fizzy and jazzy during the couple’s soused courtship, delicate and melancholy in the aftermath of their downfall, the score is a rich and undeniably gorgeous vehicle for the production’s stars, and especially O’Hara, for whom the adaptation has long been a passion project.

“Here We Are” delights in the flavor of its vapid jet-sets, but ultimately spits them out in a resolution that betrays its own internal logic. It’s too much, and robs the show of its potential teeth. Better to know when the feast is done.

In an attempt to imagine alternative ways of being, the playwright has smashed existing artistic forms and created new ones along the way. The result is provocative but messy: While the three acts interlock, they don’t propel each other forward, and Davis’s surfeit of ideas ultimately comes at the expense of a dramatic throughline. But cumbersome as it is, “The Refuge Plays” suggests the potential for stories to exceed the world’s limitations. Ellison would have to agree.

This is a paint-by-numbers sex farce, with parameters that do not extend beyond the obvious: heterosexual marriage is restrictive for all, unreasonable for many, and, oh, so thrilling to transgress. The forbidden-fruit pleasures that “The Cottage” tries to pass off as a feast, in a lavish production directed by Jason Alexander, are familiar, superficial and fleeting.

The ingenuity that Bryne demonstrated in “American Utopia,” an astute compilation of existing hits into a treatise on democracy, is unevenly expressed here. Though their dynamic musicianship is undeniable, it’s hardly clear what the creators make of the Marcos’ fraught legacy. According to the script, many of the show’s lyrics are drawn from its historical figures' public remarks. But the Marcos’ words have been artfully assembled here without a coherent or critical point of view about their politics or public personas. The pair’s duplicity and alleged wrongdoings are distilled into mere headlines, in projection design by Peter Nigrini.

Questions at the show’s heart, about the origins and limits of empathy — where we get it from, and to whom we owe it — would benefit from a slight downshift in pace, to lend them greater heft than the brisk clip of laughs. Then again, treating tough truths with quick humor would seem like another defining feature of Edelman’s inheritance.

“Sidney Brustein” is more voracious than the polite naturalistic drama that was perhaps expected of Hansberry when her swan song was deemed to be too much. But it was also her clarion call, to demand more from people, their principles and the art that confronts them. Broadway would do well to heed her word.

It’s a testament to the breakneck pace of the past eight years that “The Thanksgiving Play” would be better off set when it was written. The substance of its argument is no less pressing: How and by whom stories get told perpetuate systems of power and oppression. But the objects of its satire seem both too easy a mark and already expired. It’s true that vanity, complacency and self-congratulations hinder progress, but such illusions have largely gone up in smoke. The winds of backlash have shifted, the schoolhouse is on fire and the hose is needed elsewhere. To their credit, the players do eventually reach a realization, if one that seems even more obvious today — that white creators ought to do less, leaving space for others to tell their own stories. Hopefully “The Thanksgiving Play” clears the way for future artists like FastHorse to do just that.

Indeed, the play’s most obvious 'Hamlet' winks and callouts, from puns to a few direct quoted passages, cede Ijames’ voice more than is necessary. The playwright’s own prose is lean and precise, with a vibrance of rhythm and association that hardly needs any supplementing. You could pull up to this barbeque with no prior knowledge of the Bard and be very well satisfied. The synergy between Ali, Ijames and the nose-to-tail extraordinary cast are more than enough for a feast.

Groban, previously on Broadway in “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” is a gentleman’s Sweeney. It’s possible to argue that his buttoned-up countenance and natural nobility are like dressing up a demon in a top hat and overcoat. But if there is bloodthirst underneath his desperation, it’s not an unhinged or unpredictable one. His voice can conjure a thousand associations, but here, menace isn’t one of them. When he swings his razor high, the hair on the back of your neck doesn’t budge.

To clear up the obvious question, “Bad Cinderella,” which opened at the Imperial Theater Thursday night, isn’t good. Composed by Webber and with lyrics by David Zippel, it is a muddled and momentum-less retooling of the familiar fairy tale in search of a coherent point of view as if it were a glass-slippered foot. The book, originally written by Emerald Fennell, the Oscar winning screenwriter of “Promising Young Woman,” and adapted for Broadway by the playwright Alexis Scheer, is an illogical head-scratcher, despite being based on a story most everyone knows. “Bad Cinderella,” directed here by Laurence Connor (“School of Rock”), even manages to gleefully reinforce the chronic social fixations — on beauty, vanity and wealth — that it purports to deem toxic.

Crackling with humor and shot through with surprises, “Between Riverside and Crazy,” which premiered off Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2014 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is both a captivating collection of character studies and an incisive indictment of the systems that act upon them. It’s a stunning intellectual achievement that’s also a total gas, a rare breed of theater deserving of protection at all costs.

McDonald is also performing a double role — playing both present-day and college-age Suzanne, where previous productions have cast two actors. It’s another means of showing how fresh decades-old wounds can feel, and their lifelong reverberations, while taking full advantage of McDonald’s versatility. Leon’s production presents a bold, and unmistakable, visual representation of Kennedy’s argument for literature and imagination as both proof of human horror and an essential escape from it. The set design by Beowulf Boritt, a suspended cascade of bookshelves, sharply lit by Allen Lee Hughes, might be too on the nose were it not so startlingly beautiful. By any obvious measure, Kennedy’s arrival on Broadway in her ninth decade is long overdue. Commercial theater has not generally been the most fertile ground for daring, confrontational work that spotlights the voices and experiences of the most marginalized. But when an exception takes root, with a team of artists as visionary as these, it’s certainly worth the wait.

The prospect of dying by age 16 hardly seems like obvious fodder for musical comedy. But 'Kimberly Akimbo,' transferring to Broadway after an acclaimed run at the Atlantic Theater Company, is the sort of refreshingly unexpected musical that makes an exhilarating case for the vibrancy and potential of the form. It asks big questions about family and mortality. It's unabashedly heartfelt and irresistibly funny. Like life, it's inherently sad and a little absurd, and like its subject, 'Kimberly Akimbo' is exceedingly rare and almost impossible not to love.

It is a testament to the acuity of Suzan-Lori Parks' imagination and powers of perception that 'Topdog/Underdog' feels as vital and electric today as it did 20 years ago. The first Broadway revival, which opened at the Golden Theatre tonight, crackles like a live wire - an American fable with its finger shoved in a socket. Throw in career-high performances from Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and it is a theatrical event in the most essential sense, in that it demands to be seen here and now.

What gives life value and makes it worth our daily toil? What does it mean to need another person, and what do we owe each other? It is a testament to the brilliant craft of Martyna Majok's 'Cost of Living,' now on Broadway after a successful off Broadway run, that it poses these sorts of colossal questions in scenes so bracingly intimate that you might be tempted to look away were they not so utterly magnetic.

Leopoldstadt is the sort of dizzying intellectual panorama for which Stoppard is revered - a chronicle of social movements, theoretical frameworks, and geopolitical catastrophes. (Drink every time someone speaks passionately about the state of the world, and you'll have to crawl home.) The play, directed by Patrick Marber in a production that premiered in the West End, proceeds through 50-plus years in just over two hours, introducing more than two dozen characters that it seems to understand we won't be able to keep straight. Those details don't matter in the larger sweep of history, and the family's fate is evident from the start.

The revival that opened on Broadway Sunday night is not just a glorious lifeline for fans reawakening to the wonders of live performance after a long, dark hiatus. It's a crystalline showcase for sensational performances from an all-star cast of marquee veterans, and a testament to the enduring genius of the beloved musical, now in its fourth Broadway incarnation since premiering in 1987. The biggest giant in the sky this time around is Sondheim himself, and exalting his legacy is the production's unmistakable guiding principle.

Even truth can be subjective, but 'A Strange Loop' doesn't stoop or pander to solicit understanding and empathy. Undoubtedly there are details that may elude typical (read: white, straight, affluent) Broadway theatergoers, language and references specific to Black and/or queer culture presented here without explanatory commas. While 'A Strange Loop' may feel 'radical' to some (in the parlance of Usher's mom), to others it will be a rare and revolutionary moment of recognition.

'Funny Girl' is still more of a star vehicle than it is timeless or transporting. Its notions about women and men betray the rust of half a century, particularly its premise (she's funny, but couldn't possibly be pretty without fitting in). There are constraints to any material so snugly tied to gendered conventions, and their narrow conceit of how happily ever after is supposed to look. But with Feldstein firmly steering the ship, 'Funny Girl' is a breezy and joyful ride.

It would be some comfort to say that Vogel's taxonomy of how men and women are socialized into sexual beings feels outdated or old-fashioned, but it surely doesn't. This reunion of original stars Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse rather feels like a kind of haunting, confronting the present with ghosts who never left. The play's long-overdue Broadway premiere is bracing, intimate, expertly inhabited and a rare chance to see artists reanimate their work with the benefit of wisdom.

Some stories creep up in disguise, hiding a ghastly scowl. 'The Minutes' is an astonishing feat from playwright and star Tracy Letts, not least for its brilliant finesse in orchestrating audience expectations and surprise. To go in knowing little or nothing about the play may be the purest way to experience its dramatic cunning. (Reader, be warned.) It is thrilling and essential theater that interrogates the present by laying bare how history is written. And it's among the best new plays on Broadway in years.