Peter Travers — Theater Critic

The best advice about seeing The Inheritance on Broadway - which you definitely should if you're looking for a head-spinning, heart-rending theatrical experience - is to forget the hype surrounding it. And that won't be easy. Playwright Matthew Lopez, a Puerto Rican transplanted to New York City from the Florida panhandle, is fresh from London where his ardently ambitious play about different generations of gay men living in post-AIDs Manhattan won an armful of Oliviers (the Brit Tonys named after the late, great Lord Larry) and gushy reviews that called it 'the most important American play of the century.' Try living up to that. You can't, but it's impossible not to marvel at the incisively hilarious and deeply humane effort put forth by Lopez, director Stephen Daldry (The Crown, Billy Elliot), and a cast that could not be better. The Inheritance is an emotional powerhouse. It's also approximately seven hours long. That means you have to see it in two parts (the . Another gay fantasia, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, pulled it off, but unless you're J.K. Rowling's pre-sold Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, you're fighting an uphill battle.

Let's hear it for Tootsie, the laugh-out-loud funniest musical of the Broadway season. Yes, it's another tune-filled spin on a hit movie - Pretty Woman, King Kong, the list goes on. But this one is actually good - hell, better than good, it's musical-comedy heaven. Using the beloved 1982 movie with Dustin Hoffman as a launching pad, the singing-dancing Tootsie still features an unemployed asshole of an actor who has to dress up as a woman to land a part. But the film's casual sexism (it celebrates a dude who finds himself) has been updated for the #MeToo era, going from retro to woke and slamming the door on patrimony with a mighty Times Up.