Naveen Kumar

It may be that 'American Buffalo' belongs in the junk shop where it's set - a token of bicentennial Americana with questionable lasting value. Like the novelty coin at its center, David Mamet's vulgar and compact heist drama no longer carries practical modern-day currency. It has very little, if anything, to say about American dreams and their fallacies that has not been said many times over - and in more broad-minded and sophisticated ways - since the play's 1975 premiere.

Despite the play's universe-skimming ambitions, there's also a narrowness to its imagination of what life can and could be. Ernestine follows a path of least resistance; though she has regrets, 'Birthday Candles' isn't a critique of conformity, or the broader social forces that led her there (she is a woman happily baking a cake, year after year, for more than half a century, after all). The play rather reinforces the heteronormative fantasy that fulfillment comes in recognizable forms - just be careful which man you choose. It's a bitter, if obvious, pill served with enough sugar to rot a full mouth of teeth.

But there's little retrospective insight to this production, from director Scott Ellis, which is a straightforward retelling of a story whose provocations were largely reliant on context. And if the play has enduring resonance - as a study of prejudice, or even a romance with America's pastime - here it's more an echo than a roar.

The body can sometimes say more than words, but even the most expressive moves cannot make a coherent case for 'Paradise Square.' The blunt and belabored history lesson of a new musical set in Manhattan's Five Points, and produced by Garth Drabinsky, purports to be a fable of American race relations. But while conflicts between the neighborhood's Black and Irish residents at times come thrillingly to life through dance, 'Paradise Square' is wrong-footed from the jump. For all its spring-loaded set-up, 'Paradise Square' quickly runs out of steam, sputtering through a reprise-heavy second act that somehow feels both bloated and rushed. A near-total lack of characterization beyond their historical circumstance invites little emotional investment in the numerous people on stage.

It's no surprise that the production's high-voltage stars, who last appeared together on Broadway nearly 30 years ago, have an easy, unassailable chemistry. There's even a slight air of voyeurism to casting Broderick and Parker to perform husband-and-wife routines, as though they might offer an oblique glimpse inside the couple's private life. But despite their offstage connection and individual talents, their performances here are out of step.

The demons that Jackson battles in 'MJ,' his father and the media, are figured as monstrous. But if there was darkness behind the angelic falsetto, a mix of light and shadow that made Michael Jackson a singular artist, 'MJ' enacts a sleight of hand, insisting it didn't belong to him. It's a renouncement worthy enough of a smooth criminal.

Half a century has passed since Stephen Sondheim and George Furth first dazzled Broadway with 'Company,' their tartly astute 1970 musical about a single Manhattanite dogged by coupled friends to meet a mate. But director Marianne Elliott's sensational new revival strikes like a lightning bolt, surging with fresh electricity and burnishing its creators' legacy with an irresistible sheen.

The Kirkpatricks' score seems bent on making up for its lack of distinct point of view with at least some measure of variety - a bit of rock 'n' roll (benign), a couple of beatboxing puppets (impressive) and a lot of genre non-specific songs in the style of contemporary musical theater (inoffensive). If the score has a unifying principle, it's duly resisting catchiness or memorability.

Nottage, a Pulitzer winner for the more weighty topical dramas 'Ruined' and 'Sweat,' maintains her interest in illuminating the lives of working class people, but shifts strategies here into broad comedy. The setup has a sitcom quality that's paradoxically inviting, not dissimilar to 'Orange Is the New Black,' for which Aduba won two Emmys; it's easy to imagine stopping by Clyde's every week, with a steady swinging door of short-order cooks working toward rehabilitation. The comedy is situational in both structure and execution, with personalities, incidents and drool-worthy sandwich descriptions making up a bulk of its substance.

Director Christopher Ashley, who heads La Jolla Playhouse where this production premiered, hands in a seamless and unfussy physical staging, on set designer David Zinn's royal-blue colonnade, an obvious gilded prison. But Ashley, a Tony winner for 'Come From Away,' offers no solution for the musical's narrative inertia, and Kelly Devine's choreography, a stock blend of mugging and scurrying, doesn't help. Though Diana's life ended in a frenzy, the musical whimpers to a conclusion, succumbing to its own lack of purpose.

A hope for the future arrives in the final moments of 'Thoughts of a Colored Man,' a dutiful and expansive cataloguing of its title subject by Keenan Scott II. 'I can't wait for the day when my skin isn't a novelty,' a man known as Happiness, played by Bryan Terrell Clark, tells the audience. It's as much a self-conscious commentary on the playwright's own project as on the broader experience of Black men in America. That's the sprawling, diffuse subject that Scott ambitiously inventories here, in a series of vignettes, run-ins and soliloquies set in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood over the course of a single day. Under the able direction of Steve H. Broadnax III, Scott's poetic distillations gleam with insights and vulnerabilities of heart and mind.

Satter, who serves as artistic director of the theater company Half Straddle, performs an impressive sleight of hand, coaxing suspense from a foregone conclusion like a rabbit from a hat. Satter's choreographic staging is marked by striking tableaux, as the agents circle their prey with a levity that grows cold - gradually, and then all at once.

The play proves most affecting in weaving intergenerational connections, and Lopez is adept at playing readily on heartstrings. Loss, regret, and the painful legacy of the AIDS crisis color the play's more moving moments. Quieter and more mournful than its raw and harrowing predecessors, The Inheritance lovingly turns to survivors for stories they have to bestow with the wisdom of hindsight.

SLAVA'S SNOWSHOW pushes the boundaries of family show to its highest standards and has been rewarded with more than twenty international awards, including an Olivier Award for Best Entertainment, a Drama Desk Award, and a Tony Award nomination.' Time Out New York: Such icecapades are not for everyone. Polunin himself wears a look of melancholy confusion-it's painted over his elastic features in black and white, with a round red nose at its center-and if you attend SLAVA'S SNOWSHOW without knowing what to expect, you may wind up with that expression, too. A preshow advisory would do well to insist that patrons must love clowns. How else to enjoy 100 minutes of vaguely amusing pantomime on a set that toes a fine line between crafty and cheap? Being under the age of 12 may help; the production might also pair well with milder psychedelics. But if you can embrace the logic of nonsense and surrender your personal boundaries to the spirit of the season, you may find this blizzard a blast.

Not every success story gets a sequel. The Great Society, Robert Schenkkan's follow-up to his Tony-winning play All the Way, renders President Lyndon B Johnson's second term an overstuffed yet still somewhat tedious office drama. It is less an illuminating history play with fully drawn characters than a dense and particularly animated lesson in facts and figures.

Lane embodies the tomfoolery and vague melancholy of Shakespeare's best fools, equally adept at milking crude sight gags and waxing philosophical. Nielsen's antic ability to wring every laugh from with slightest tick has rarely met a more fruitful context. Julie White completes the funerary tea party as a midwife who crawls from the corporal heap having survived a slit to her throat. Under the direction of George C. Wolfe, three singular performers blend in harmony to deliver a maniacal and uproarious treatise on the end of the world. Man's downfall has never seemed such a hoot.