Peter Marks

In the delightful 'John Lithgow: Stories by Heart,' an actor known for great intelligence and range devotes two hours on a Broadway stage to advancing that reputation. Enacting with consummate skill and physical grace a pair of short stories by Ring Lardner and P.G. Wodehouse, Lithgow accomplishes the mission in handy fashion.

I can tell you this: Much impressive design and engineering work has gone into this $20 million production, which has been guided with an eye for childlike delight by Landau, in concert with Zinn, who designed the exuberant neon-colored sets and costumes, and Christopher Gattelli, who staged the dances - the tapping by the four-legged Squidward Q. Tentacles (Gavin Lee) and a school of sardines being a particular joy. And the athletic Slater, meantime, proves to be a totally winning SpongeBob, accomplishing the unusual trick of seeming to exist simultaneously in two dimensions and three. Blessedly, a decision was made not to outfit Slater like the cartoon character; the actor's uncanny physicalizing integrates both a distinct personality and a cartoon aesthetic.

Thurman makes her Broadway debut at the Hudson Theatre, and so does Willimon, the playwright who hit it big with 'House of Cards,' his juicy and now - thanks to the allegations against Kevin Spacey - canceled Netflix remake of the diabolical British series of the same title. Neither 'Parisian's' star nor writer experience their finest hour with 'The Parisian Woman,' which had its official opening Thursday night and which, despite its plot of multiple infidelities and embittering betrayals, feels as if it has had the life sucked out of it. Not only is the Washington of Willimon's imagination here a place of tawdry political prostitution, but it's also a pretty dull den of iniquity to boot

With one toe dipped uncertainly in sketch comedy and another in theater of the absurd, Steve Martin's 'Meteor Shower' comes across as oddly, even merrily, flat-footed. Big-time comedians Amy Schumer and Keegan-Michael Key make their Broadway debuts in this lightweight affair, one in which they and co-stars Laura Benanti and Jeremy Shamos do at least manage to give a convincing impression of having a swell old time.

Beautiful music, beautiful story, beautiful acting. To quote the Emcee in 'Cabaret': Even the orchestra is beautiful. In this case, it consists of eight actor-musicians, portraying the members of a ceremonial police band from Alexandria, Egypt, who have been invited to play a good will concert in Israel. Except they arrive in the wrong town, a desert backwater where the blasé residents can't be shaken easily out of their arid torpor. Not even by the sudden appearance in their midst of courtly, uniformed fellows from a neighboring if culturally distinct country, bearing clarinets and cellos and the enticing hints of the world beyond.

'Springsteen on Broadway' - now there's a Jersey Boy - had its official opening Thursday night, in a taut and beautifully turned-out evening as sincerely wrought as a poetry reading. For sure, Springsteen rocks out a bit and tells some funny stories on himself. But onstage for two hours minus the E Street Band, and with Patti Scialfa - born like her husband on the Jersey Shore - appearing with him for two of the show's 16 songs, Springsteen is determined to maintain a mostly elegiac tone on this occasion. He's a musician on a mission. And it's a quest for a New York audience to listen for the craft in an American voice ringing with simple truths.

The Manhattan Theatre Club production, for which Susan Stroman is listed as choreographer and co-director, feels as if it were slapped together for the entertainment portion of a benefit dinner. The task of reciting the wooden commentary between songs is shared by the entire cast, each of whom reminisces as if he or she were Prince, with each sporting the eyeglasses eternally perched on the director's forehead. It's an affectionate touch, but like so much that transpires on this lackluster occasion, only minorly evocative of the great man himself.

Offering up as a model his history as a provocateur, Moore implores us to get off our duffs and drive Trump nuts. 'We have to be a swarm of bees around his head,' he declares at one point. Besides showing us an app, 5calls.org, that can automatically dial your representatives in Congress for you, 'The Terms of My Surrender' doesn't have much of a game plan. That goes as much for its theatrical goals as its political ones.

Hnath ultimately allows us to believe that even an iconoclast as single-minded as Nora is capable of learning from what she has lost. In Metcalf, one of the great stage actresses of our time, he and Gold have found an ideal vessel for conveying Nora's capacity for growth and fearlessness. 'A Doll's House, Part 2? demonstrates just how imposing is that big doorway Nora walked through once upon a time, and the guts it takes to keep walking through it, again and again.

It delivers on exactly what's craved by lovers of old-school musicals from the era when giants like Merman roamed the Earth: big, gleeful performances and the kind of production numbers intended to move you as much as move along the story. Midler has the lioness's share of the lift here, delivering buoyant renditions of 'Before the Parade Passes By' and 'So Long Dearie' and, of course, executing a downstage strut in red beaded gown and feather headdress for that champagne toast of a title song. She is given expert support, though, from David Hyde Pierce, who would seem oddly cast as that grizzled skinflint and object of Dolly's nuptial desire, Horace Vandergelder. Yet he turns in a completely fresh comic performance, seasoned with just enough lemon and vinegar, and amplified by a number added for him at the top of Act 2, 'Penny in My Pocket.'

For both of these actresses, that would be the suppleness of Regina's mind. Her survivor's gift for staying one diabolical step ahead of the men - who would cheat her in a lucrative deal over a cotton mill - makes her more than a cardboard evildoer. That impression is encouraged in the performances of the men, who also include Oscar and Birdie's sniveling son, Leo (Michael Benz, wearing entitlement like a fitted shirt). McKean's Ben is a subtle demon, Goldstein's Oscar a more transparently brutish one. Thomas, as the mortally ill family truthteller, contributes a grand turn as the requisite voice of rectitude.

Some of us may be easy marks for any hint of humanity in a story of the indelible tragedy of the Middle East. 'Oslo,' in its account of intractable foes finding common ground, is irresistible and, ultimately, deeply moving. Jokes are related at the negotiating table, at the expense of the string-pulling leaders behind the scenes, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin; memories are shared about the suffering of warring peoples, the devotion to loved ones at home. The small acts of soul-bearing indeed bind the characters to one another - and an audience to them. Around Rogers's captivating table, gradualism is a triumph for everyone.

That 'War Paint' takes pains to reveal this parallel emptiness speaks to one of the musical's worthiest achievements: making room on a stage, to a degree virtually never seen, for star turns by two sublime female veterans of the musical theater. When Rubinstein and Arden were in their 60s, they were nowhere near ready to be ushered into the wings. And neither, thank goodness, are LuPone and Ebersole.

The familiar elements of Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil's 1991 musical are faithfully replicated in the Broadway Theatre, where this all-too-mechanical revival, under Laurence Connor's direction, had its official opening Thursday night. That compulsory object of attention, the musical's Vietnam War-era military helicopter - which hit its mark 4,092 times in the original - swoops back in again on this occasion, its 'blades' creating a whoosh that spreads a discernible wind over the audience. The design dexterity extends to cinematic Saigon streetscapes and heavenly sunsets by scenery creators Totie Driver and Matt Kinley and lighting designer Bruno Poet, and there's still bracing romanticism in a score played by an 18-member orchestra and conducted by James Moore. But even before the climactic evacuation scene of U.S.- and South Vietnamese-controlled Saigon, you're conscious of an absence. That would be the missing ingredient of outsize performances, to match what is supposed to be a politics-infused love story of epic scale.

The lump that forms in your throat in the opening minutes of 'Come From Away' - and remains lodged there for 100 buoyant minutes more - is the physiological confirmation that this effervescent musical, enveloped in Canadian good will, is an antidote for what ails the American soul...The alternating stories of the townspeople and the strangers in their midst - all played by a dozen superbly cast actors - are communicated vivaciously by book and songwriters Irene Sankoff and David Hein, in a bracingly kinetic production directed by Christopher Ashley, doing some of the most impressive work of his career. With the arrival of 'Come From Away' to Broadway's 2016-17 season, joining such accomplished new shows as 'Dear Evan Hansen' and 'Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812,'the Tony race for best musical of the year just got interesting.

Chiefly through Gyllenhaal's performance - at once intense and emotionally transparent - this version makes clearer than ever the incisive emotional channel from Act 1 to Act 2. In each half of the musical, too, there is a visual coup, in the form of an example of each artist's work. At the end of Act 1, it's the thrilling tableau of Seurat's painting come to life. And in Act 2, it's a demonstration of the artist's experiments with color and light in the form of a laser display that he calls a 'chromolume.'

'Historic' is an adjective I've rarely used to describe a performance, but a review that does not invoke it for Ben Platt's incandescent turn in the ravishingly bittersweet 'Dear Evan Hansen' would be doing it less than justice.

Josh Groban - he of the mellifluous lung power so dynamic it could lift a tall ship's sails - is the marquee attraction of 'Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812,' the vivacious new musical that had its official opening Monday night at the Imperial Theatre. And as it turns out, he's neither an overbearing blowhard nor a star adrift. Rather, Groban proves to be a thoroughly winning team player in an offbeat pop opera that is ultimately more memorable for technical dexterity than emotional texture.

So I left the theater feeling the rush of some exhilarating teamwork still coursing freshly through my brain. Floating up there most buoyantly is the impression of Lane's priceless turn as Walter Burns - an editor so voraciously news hungry he could survive purely on a diet of scoops. In boxy pin-striped suit and bushy black mustache, Lane hurls Burns's blunt-force insults and bolts of impotent rage in all directions, with the timing and élan that have made him one of the great comic actors of our age. Slattery, playing the roguish Hildy Johnson, Burns's restive star reporter at the Chicago Examiner, reveals again the gift for the kind of swaggering masculinity he displayed as Roger Sterling on 'Mad Men.' Mays and Baker, too, are deployed here to maximum enjoyable effect as a pair of courthouse reporters - Mays portraying a skittish germaphobe, Baker a diligent leg man.

Judging from the audience's enthusiastic greeting, the duo has acquired a following as a result of George and Gil's appearances on Kroll's now-ended Comedy Central sketch-comedy program, 'Kroll Show'; a well-received off-Broadway run in 2015, and a national tour. It's devotion well-earned, because these comedians, who met as undergraduates at Georgetown University, have sharpened to a very funny point an acumen for keeping an audience off-balance - and eager for more.

And whatever other misgivings you might have, wading through the thin story of the ascension of Grizabella the Glamour Cat (British vocalist Leona Lewis) to the redemptive Heaviside Layer, the cast assembled for the revival is gangbusters. Andy Blankenbuehler, the Tony-winning choreographer of 'Hamilton,' has been recruited to tweak the dances of 'Cats's' original choreographer, Gillian Lynne (another Tony winner). His refinements inject precision and verve and allow several of the performers, in their equitably distributed spotlight moments, to show off grandly. Among the most exciting are Ricky Ubeda as the magician cat, Mistoffelees; Tyler Hanes, playing Rum Tug Tugger, the rock-and-roll cat, and Jess LeProtto and Shonica Gooden as the mischief makers Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer.

'Fully Committed' has essentially a one-joke premise, which becomes apparent after about 20 minutes of ringing phones; a slender subplot revolving around Sam's recently widowed dad in the Midwest, whose fondest hope is that Sam won't have to work on Christmas, does add a soupçon of genuine warmth. The sustained enjoyment comes from the impressively controlled mayhem activated by Ferguson, under Jason Moore's savvy direction. The actor not only manages to soothe Sam's savage callers, but also the most judgmental of the evening's ticketholders.

It's surprising that 'Waitress's' director, the resourceful Diane Paulus, who staged recent Broadway revivals of 'Hair' and 'Pippin,' would not have required the softening of at least one of Earl's monstrous edges, because he's a villain so transparently designed to provoke a specific response that - no disrespect to the highly competent, physically imposing Cordero - the character comes across as an inane contrivance. Some other supporting parts fare far, far better, as with an eccentric suitor for Dawn named Ogie, played to the wonderfully kooky hilt by Christopher Fitzgerald. The number late in Act 1 in which Ogie introduces himself to us, 'Never Ever Getting Rid of Me,' jump-starts the proceedings with its effervescent spirit (and suggests that it might be fun if Ogie and Dawn got a spinoff musical of their own).

'American Psycho' creates another sub-genre - ersatz horror - an odd variation that fails to tingle your spine with its copious bloodletting or titillate you via the writhing bodies in its mechanical sex scenes (complete with pornographic video illustrations). Director Rupert Goold's shiny production, churning vapidly to the beat of composer Duncan Sheik's surprisingly clunky, characterless songs, charts the homicidal rampage of Patrick (Benjamin Walker) through the cash-engorged precincts of the Manhattan of the decadent '80s; Es Devlin's eye-catchingly sleek sets are the production's best asset. And then, in an odd departure from the novel, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's script pulls the blood-soaked rug out from under us, with the suggestion of a Patrick reborn, as a better man.

'The Father' - not of course, to be mistaken for the unnerving August Strindberg play of the same title - lumbers on in this vein for an hour and a half. The turbulent turns in Andre's powers of perception may strike one as unpredictable, but Zeller and Hampton's machinations do not. Langella is a bit too robust for a man so ravaged by mental deterioration. Still, he's in his element here, conveying with Lear-like levels of outrage and hurt Andre's refusal, or inability, to comprehend what is happening to him. As a demonstration of how Alzheimer's runs its course, Hughes's production has some merit: It might be serve as a useful training tool for medical schools. As illness-of-the-week plays go, however, 'The Father' is mundane. Much finer works, such as Margaret Edson's 'Wit,' about a professor dying of ovarian cancer, have crossed this company's path in the past.