Robert Hofler

The “Mamma Mia!” that opened Thursday at the Winter Garden is a touring production, and at intermission I was not thinking of the recently destroyed World Trade Center. I went much further back, to the 1970s when vanity productions like “Angel,” “Doctor Jazz,” “Got tu Go Disco” and “Platinum” took up their brief residences on the Rialto among now-classic shows by Sondheim, Kander & Ebb and Lloyd Webber. The current “Mamma Mia!” remains under the control of its original director, Phyllida Lloyd; production designer, Mark Thompson; and other creatives. Frankly, the show looks so tacky that it could be the original 2001 production with a not-very-good paint job.

It doesn’t mean anything to call “Prince Faggot” the best play of the 2025-26 theater season, which is only about six weeks old. It does mean something to put Tannahill’s play in the same august company as Bess Wohl’s “Liberation,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Purpose” and Emil Weinstein’s “Becoming Eve,” all of which opened earlier this year. As with these American writers, Tannahill, a Canadian, is a great storyteller, and he runs fast and furiously with this riveting narrative: What happens if a contemporary prince comes out as gay and marries another man when he’s finally king?

Roger is angry, but as cunningly played by Krasinski, he is also kinda sweet, which is why, I think, the laughter from the men in the audience may be far less pointed in its attack. Krasinski expertly dons lamb’s clothing to play a man who’s basically a pig. Krasinski is also very effective at playing all the people in Roger’s life. He makes us want to go to the ‘Angry Alan’ website, to which Roger has become addicted and to which he even donates one month of child support.

Great novels and great movies rarely translate into great musicals, much less very good ones. When it comes to suitable source material, a second-rate book or film often makes a more successful transition to the stage. If a novel or a movie is classic, it fits the chosen medium to perfection. Adapting them to the stage automatically destroys what’s great. In scene after scene, Lisa Loomer and Nell Benjamin’s book for the new musical “Real Women Have Curves” is a vast improvement on George LaVoo and Josefina Lopez’s screenplay, which is based on Lopez’s play. Where the 2002 film dawdles, the musical defines and drives with great narrative precision its timely tale of Latina immigrants who make dresses in a Los Angeles shop.

Get ready to book the Palace, the Palladium, the Hollywood Bowl and the Baths of Caracalla! “Just in Time,” the new Bobby Darin bio-musical that opened Saturday at Circle in the Square, makes it clear that headliner Jonathan Groff is ready for his own solo show on any of the world’s most famous stages

But my patience for being toyed with ran out at the top of Act 2 when Hyde Pierce sings “The Nightmare Song” from “Iolanthe.” I had no idea what was going on until the musical skidded into familiar turf with “A Paradox,” which is clearly from “Pirates.” It helps that Karimloo, Monsoon and Barasch sing the classic song with great panache. The show ends with “He Is an Englishman” from “HMS Pinafore,” which has been retitled “We’re All From Someplace Else” to make it an ode to immigrants. Good will does not always translate into good entertainment.

Trefry’s stage play is a muddled, pedestrian prequel... What’s on stage at the Marquis resembles a jukebox musical comedy with lots of shock effects haphazardly thrown in.

Whatever its deficiencies, Floyd Collins delivers a mighty central character that musically, if not dramatically, is the male equivalent of Rose in Gypsy. Jordan’s magnificent work here is one for the record books, one of the all-time great musical performances. Don’t miss it... The Broadway debut of Floyd Collins makes a good case for the musical without being a revelation... Landau’s book doesn’t really take off until the second act... Her staging calls out the crass American commercialism by giving us a crass Broadway circus-style production number... It is unfortunate that someone with a fresher take wasn’t engaged for this major revival.

“John Proctor” is written in short snippets of scenes, often the crutch of a novice playwright. Danya Taymor’s direction looks to punch up all these scene changes with flashy interludes that offer blinding shots of lightning (by Natasha Katz), ominous “Carmina Burana”-esque music (by Palmer Hefferan) and a black-lit classroom set (by Amp and Teresa L. Williams) that jiggles. It’s all about as subtle as Taymor’s direction of her cast, Ebert excluded.

The second act of ‘Smash’ hinges on which actress will end up playing Marilyn on opening night. Frankly, we don’t care, because the show is loaded with many songs for each of them to sing. Too many. In the second act, the female empowerment anthems become numbing, since each is delivered as a showstopper. How many times can a show be stopped before it actually stops?

“Becoming Eve” happens to be a very funny play, some of the best moments coming in the cultural mashup between Schiff’s Hasidic rabbi and Uranowitz’s “transdenominational Renewal” rabbi, whom the father at one point calls Judas. The timing between these two great actors is vintage vaudeville.

Yet another Stephen Sondheim revue is playing on Broadway. This one is called Old Friends, and it opened Tuesday at MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre after engagements in London and Los Angeles. This is the sixth Sondheim revue to open on Broadway. In recent decades, legendary composers from George Gershwin to Richard Rodgers have not received this kind of attention. Hands down, the three best moments in Old Friends come when five wonderful singers (Jacob Dickey, Jasmine Forsberg, Kyle Selig, Maria Wirries and Daniel Yearwood) deliver a memorable Tonight Quintet from West Side Story. The two other great moments belong to Lea Salonga, who brings down the house twice, first with Somewhere from West Side Story and then Everything’s Coming Up Roses from Gypsy. Salonga presents a great Rose, and what adds to the excitement is how different Rose is from the roles that made Salonga a star: Kim in Miss Saigon, Fantine in Les Miz and the singing voice of Jasmine in the film Aladdin. If there were any justice, Cameron Mackintosh, who devised this Sondheim revue, would have instructed Matthew Bourne, who directs, to include Rose’s Turn for Salonga to finish off the evening.

Foster and lyricist Susan Birkenhead load ‘Boop!’ with so many anthems they appear to be auditioning for some new ‘I Love NY’ ad campaign. As for Foster’s tunes, you will leave the Broadhurst humming them, because you’ve heard them all before, whether it is caterwauling gospel or anemic jazz or the ubiquitous female power ballad.

The show’s toxicity has apparently affected at least one of its performers. Jonas and Warren are both strong singers, but Warren possesses the better voice. And she doesn’t mind proving that fact. Warren hangs on to high notes, and her fan base is prone to rewarding her with vocal outbursts and applause while she distorts the musical line. In her final duet with Jonas, at the preview I attended, Warren held a high note long after he concluded his. That’s grounds for divorce in the musical theater.

At times, however, Patrick Marber’s direction doesn’t trust Mamet’s extreme language to do the job and he lets his actors go way over the top in their attacks on each other. Some of this overacting may be the result of playing the Palace Theatre, a 1,600-plus-seat venue that’s too large for such an intimate play. Then again, the audience loves these big performances, and several of these acting outbursts are rewarded with applause, which only further acts to dissipate the real drama.

Williams’ adaptation follows Wilde’s original story more closely than the 1945 MGM movie starring George Sanders as Lord Henry and Hurd Hatfield as Dorian. Hatfield does something unexpected in that horror classic: His face throughout remains a tabula rasa. The actor lets the painting do all the acting. Snook takes a very different approach. She eschews the blond curls halfway through the show to don a slick pompadour that’s closer to what Glynis Johns sports in “The Chapman Report.” Snook also goes full-throttle to tear up the stage, even though there isn’t much scenery to put through her acting shredder.

Gyllenhaal delivers the most engaging Iago I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some pretty good Iagos: Christopher Plummer with Jones and Daniel Craig with Oyelowo. Gyllenhaal’s performance fuels the show, and when his Iago takes a needed break after getting Cassio wounded and Roderigo murdered, this “Othello” never quite regains either its focus or its propulsive momentum.

Robert Hastie provides the frenzied “Mincemeat” direction. It forced someone behind me to whisper halfway through Act 1, “This is exhausting.” Nothing kills a laugh faster than seeing actors sweat.

Buena Vista Social Club is the story of survival through the preservation of what artists do best, not only for them but for a whole island and its culture.

Simon Stephens’ adaptation here resembles a Cliffs Notes version of Uncle Vanya where several pages have been torn out, most of those featuring the title character now gone.

Through the course of this three-hour play, she is all these people plus a few more, and Richardson Jackson achieves these many mercurial changes by simply adjusting the temperature of her voice. Hers is a masterful performance.

Of course, this all-or-nothing approach only works if you have great actors, and O’Brien has assembled the best ensemble now performing on the New York stage. What is especially satisfying is that Billy Crudup and Lily Rabe are that unique mix of oil and water that produces combustible moments on stage. Crudup’s Pastor Manders is a busy, petty man who changes his moral convictions faster than a Republican senator. Where Crudup is giftedly mannered, Rabe takes the opposite approach to portray Helena Alving, a woman who has dedicated her life to protecting a son, Oswald (Levon Hawke), from a dissolute husband, the deceased Captain Alving. Rabe turns Helena into the drama’s black hole. Her every utterance, glance, and gesture is a master class in minimalism. Yet, her gravitas sucks the other characters’ life force into her quietly, fiercely swirling orbit.

Menzel’s latest Broadway venture, another original musical, is even more adventurous. In “Redwood,” which opened Thursday at the Nederland Theatre, her character Jesse climbs a tree to escape the traumatic memories of her adult son’s death. As the title makes clear, it’s not just any old tree but a majestic redwood that grows in northern California, and, before the show is over, Stella — Jesse names the tree Stella — is threatened by wild fire. Beyond the word “adventurous,” one might also throw out “indulgent” to describe “Redwood.”

On the page, these female characters could not be more different. On stage in the vivid performances delivered under Lileana Blain-Cruz’s very showy direction, they sometimes border on caricatures from vastly different melodramas. When one of them makes a major pronouncement, and there are a flood of them, Blain-Cruz lets go with storm effects (lighting by Jiyoun Chang, sound by Palmer Hefferan) in case anyone is dozing off.

Marco Pennette’s book gives Hilty all the grand-dame one-liners, but it’s Simard who gets the more unexpected laughs with delightful line readings that take a second or two to register. The sharp dialogue is in perfect tune with Julia Mattison and Noel Carey’s lyrics, and that duo’s music, which is merely serviceable, manages not to get in the way of the characters and the story, which Pennette has made far less convoluted than its source material.