Peter Marks — Theater Critic

Make no mistake: After an evening on Broadway with Corey Hawkins, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and the electrifying theatrical crossfire of 'Topdog/Underdog,' you'll never again think of three-card monte as a mere money-grubbing street hustle. Thanks to the wild imagination of Suzan-Lori Parks - who won a Pulitzer Prize for the play in 2002 - the game is engineered as the centerpiece in the blistering struggle between Hawkins's Lincoln and Mateen's Booth, brothers possessing little in life and even less to hope for.

The remarkable revival of '1776,' cast entirely with female, transgender and nonbinary actors, is not as much about the pronouns as it is about a verb. Because the delightful ensemble owns the script and score of this 1969 musical as if the story of the signing of the Declaration of Independence were written explicitly about them. That sense of new ownership joyfully pervades this splendid production, which opened officially Thursday night at Broadway's American Airlines Theatre. Directors Jeffrey Page and Diane Paulus adhere to the philosophy of 'Hamilton's' Lin-Manuel Miranda, the founding father of the proposition that all men (and women and trans and nonbinary people) are created equal when it comes to serenading us about the birth of the country.

I also know from long experience that every Holocaust work ends, spiritually or physically or philosophically, at Auschwitz. But that knowledge - and Stoppard's immersing an audience in a story whose every plot point essentially has been documented before - did not prevent me from erupting in heaving sobs after 2 hours and 10 minutes in the Longacre Theatre, where the play marked its official opening Sunday night.

When Lea Michele launches missile-like into 'Don't Rain on My Parade,' she doesn't just bring down the house. She brings down the whole darn block.... Face it, though: This is the Lea Michele Show, and her presence has the effect of setting the playhouse in order. 'I'm the Greatest Star,' with its pulse-quickening affirmation of a young woman of enormous appetites and gifts, is delivered now with the full-throated confidence that leads easily to the conclusion that, yup, this is a star. Equally potent are Fanny's torchy 'The Music That Makes Me Dance,' and a finale in which Fanny pulls herself out of an emotional cellar, proof of the preternatural resilience that defines a mortal who thrives in the limelight.

The scintillating new revival of 'Into the Woods' is rendered so harmoniously and meticulously, you'll swear you even hear the punctuation marks in the lyrics. Here at the St. James Theatre, where the musical had its official Broadway opening Sunday night, the memory of the late Stephen Sondheim is honored in the best way possible: by actors who really know how to sing, and singers who really know how to act.

The songs in the 90-minute show take us from blistering satire to bracing self-discovery, so the evening evinces a profound emotional range; our thoughts turn not so much for sustenance to Usher's Thoughts, though, as to Usher himself. That's activated, under Brackett's guidance, by Spivey's keenly permeable portrayal. Usher affects a superior air about art and is so down on himself that he sabotages his opportunity for meaningful intimacy. Even so, his honesty and pain render him entirely lovable. And the musically gifted Spivey, with his dynamic presence and openheartedness, proves the ideal vessel for docking an audience buoyantly in Jackson's thoughts. The composer-lyricist already has that Pulitzer, but now he deserves the Tony. Spivey should get one, too. Heck, give 'A Strange Loop' a lot of Tonys. That's only just, for the best Broadway musical of the season.

Given the pedigree of the brassy 'Don't Rain on My Parade' - one of those killer damn-the-torpedoes anthems that reliably raise heart rates - Feldstein has the immense task of sending the audience into intermission on a literal high note. She sings her heart out, and if it were just heart that was called for, she'd be a Fanny Brice for the ages.

Featuring Jesse Williams as a superstar center fielder who comes roaring out of the closet, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as a goofy, white-collar guy already out and newly turned on by the game, the comedy-drama has been buffed to a scintillating sheen by director Scott Ellis and his lineup of pro designers. They ensure Greenberg’s wit steps up winningly to the plate for the revival that marked its official opening Monday night at the Hayes Theatre.

That sordid history would not seem to have foretold a jukebox musical devoted to the upside of Jackson's genius - and certainly not by artists of the caliber of two-time Pulitzer winner Nottage ('Ruined,' 'Sweat') and the celebrated ballet world fixture Wheeldon. The show's decidedly selective memory may be off-putting to theatergoers appalled by the stories of Jackson's alleged misdeeds. Nevertheless, the creative team's painstaking work has resulted in a riveting, adrenaline rush of a show, propelled by remarkable dancing and a mesmerizing central performance by Myles Frost as the sleek, soft-spoken pop megastar.

Long-winded and impossibly earnest, the world-premiere musical, which marked its official opening Monday night at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, features an unremarkable score by Tom Kitt and Michael Korie and a lumbering book by James Lapine, who also directs. Their account is of the unlikely if actual acquaintanceship of movie star Cary Grant with writers Clare Boothe Luce, Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard - and how they got together in Southern California in the mid-1950s to drop acid.

The highs are so high in director Marianne Elliott's gender-reversed 'Company' that a Sondheim freak like me can live with aspects that don't quite hit those lofty heights. We'll get to those, but first, let's dwell for a spell on the joys of a Broadway revival that had its official opening Thursday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre - pleasures that make this production a moving, and deeply funny, living memorial to the late Stephen Sondheim.

Audiences that want to indulge Broadway's penchant for recycling hit movie scripts with an insert-song- here sensibility could do a lot worse than 'Mrs. Doubtfire'; Broadway has repeatedly shown that it can - do worse, that is. (See 'Pretty Woman,' 'Ghost,' 'Sister Act,' etc.) The pop score by Wayne Kirkpatrick and Karey Kirkpatrick evinces some cleverness, especially in a mock-flamenco number, 'He Lied to Me,' performed in the Spanish restaurant where McClure executes nifty quick changes of Catherine Zuber's smart costumes.

Audiences that want to indulge Broadway's penchant for recycling hit movie scripts with an insert-song- here sensibility could do a lot worse than 'Mrs. Doubtfire'; Broadway has repeatedly shown that it can - do worse, that is. (See 'Pretty Woman,' 'Ghost,' 'Sister Act,' etc.) The pop score by Wayne Kirkpatrick and Karey Kirkpatrick evinces some cleverness, especially in a mock-flamenco number, 'He Lied to Me,' performed in the Spanish restaurant where McClure executes nifty quick changes of Catherine Zuber's smart costumes.

What melts away as you get to know the characters are the monumental stigmas attached to jail time. Donovan's Jason is inked to the max with prison tats, some of them racist symbols, but the story behind them reveals something unexpected. Letitia, here called Tish, in Young's smashingly vibrant turn, is all adolescent energy and adult anxiety, the latter brought on as a single mother caring for a sick child. Salazar's hyper Rafael needs an emotional home for his nurturing instincts, as an alternative to his weakness for drugs.

Devoid of insight and ricocheting between dull vulgarity and vacuous hero worship, the show, which had its official opening Wednesday at the Longacre Theatre, is less edifying than a scroll through the archives of the tabloids. The musical purports to ridicule them for hounding their prey, but in actuality matches them for exploitation.

If you're looking for a sleek, swift and superbly sung evening to take you out of yourself, the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, where the musical marked its official opening Sunday, fits ideally in your itinerary. At times, the vibe becomes so contagious that it may float you out of your very seat.

If you're looking for a sleek, swift and superbly sung evening to take you out of yourself, the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, where the musical marked its official opening Sunday, fits ideally in your itinerary. At times, the vibe becomes so contagious that it may float you out of your very seat.

The magnetic Hill and Smallwood infuse Moses and Kitch with exuberant physicality; though they create distinct characters, the ineffable, mutual dependence they conjure is their chief accomplishment. Ebert applies a freewheeling buffoonery to Mister and, later, an opposite dimension of cruel menace to his other role, a policeman who under stress will undergo a dramatic conversion.

An American trail ends at a Depression-era boardinghouse in Duluth, Minn., where a cross-section of desperate Midwesterners washes up. Foreclosure, bankruptcy, impoverishment and a god of false hopes are all beating down the door. Yet in 'Girl From the North Country,' the spiritually rousing musical that marked its official Broadway opening Thursday at the Belasco Theatre, these '30s horsemen of the apocalypse never get us down. Enveloped in the moving lyricism of Bob Dylan's songbook, the show is akin to a poem of uplift - an ode to fellowship forged in adversity. A roomful of gorgeous melodies performed on a landscape of diminishing returns.

'Jagged Little Pill,' the humorlessly banal new musical fashioned out of Alanis Morissette's agonized songbook, belongs to that burgeoning category of musical theater that cynically imagines any cycle of pop melodies can be repurposed for Broadway with the addition of a serviceable story.

The 100-minute performance is a pretty stripped-down affair, and yet it is consistently eye- as well as ear-filling. Byrne and his 11 musician-cohorts, all dressed in identical, monochromatic gray, are the entirety of the stage furnishings, their bare feet signaling a serendipity and lack of pretense. (Rob Sinclair's gorgeous lighting design is a particular enhancing factor.) 'Us and you: That's what this show is,' Byrne declares at one point, explaining how he sought a production with as few artificial barriers as possible between the instrumentalists and the audience.

It's in that persuasive finale, devoted to the tormented exasperation of Kalukango's sublimely rendered Kaneisha, that we get the stunning truth of what her character is after - and that only Nolan's expertly, intuitively constructed Jim can help her through. It is, in a cosmic sense, what 'Slave Play' is after, too. I cannot reveal to you what that catharsis is. I can just tell you that 'Slave Play' delivered one to me - and in the process opened my eyes and ears more fully, and gratefully.

The hallmark of a truly inspired stage actor may not be what he or she does with outstanding material, but what they can accomplish with the run-of-the-mill stuff. By that measure, a sustained ovation is due Jake Gyllenhaal for his yeoman work in 'Sea Wall/A Life,' a pair of rather humdrum monologues by British playwrights Simon Stephens and Nick Payne that made it to Broadway - chiefly, it appears, because the popular Gyllenhaal is in one of them.

The antic unconventionality of director Baz Luhrmann's 2001 pop phenomenon 'Moulin Rouge!' has been transformed into an eye-and-ear-pleasing - and altogether conventional - Broadway musical. With a glorious set by Derek McLane, more than 70 pop songs, and dynamic lead performances from Karen Olivo and Aaron Tveit, the show is engineered for an evening of easily digested diversions.

The antic unconventionality of director Baz Luhrmann's 2001 pop phenomenon 'Moulin Rouge!' has been transformed into an eye-and-ear-pleasing - and altogether conventional - Broadway musical. With a glorious set by Derek McLane, more than 70 pop songs, and dynamic lead performances from Karen Olivo and Aaron Tveit, the show is engineered for an evening of easily digested diversions.