Robert Hofler

If ever a play needed a high concept, it is Thornton Wilder's surreal comedy with its many disparate parts and radical shifts in tone. Lileana Blain-Cruz directs this revival with less a vision than a couple of ideas. To call them 'concepts' gives her too much credit, and both those ideas hold our attention for a minute or two. That's a problem for a play with three acts that lasts three hours. I haven't witnessed this many walk-outs at a theater since the Met Opera last staged Schoenberg's 'Moses und Aaron.'

Feldstein doesn't possess Streisand's voice, but what she does offer is a sweet, piping sound that encompasses the score's range from E below middle C to a high F. Equally important, she respects that 1964 score and doesn't modernize it with a lot of melismatic distortions. After her enchanting Broadway debut playing Minnie Fay in the Bette Midler 'Hello, Dolly!,' Feldstein is a quirky, offbeat choice to play Fanny Brice. But then, Streisand was also a quirky, offbeat choice back in 1964. Carol Burnett and Anne Bancroft were the more conventional choices back then, and Brice's daughter, Fran Arnstein Stark, wanted to see Mary Martin cast in the title role.

In the Atlantic Theater production, some of the pub's hangers-on were played too broadly. A few of them seemed left over from McDonagh's 'Leenane' trilogy. That's not the case on Broadway. Owen Campbell, Jeremy Crutchley, Josh Goulding, Richard Hollis, John Horton and Ryan Pope complete the near-perfect ensemble under Dunster's direction. 'Hangmen' is this Broadway season's best play.

It is a very happy silver anniversary for a number of talented artists in the theater. Twenty-five years ago, Paula Vogel's 'How I Learned to Drive' opened Off Broadway starring Mary-Louise Parker, David Morse and Johanna Day under the direction of Mark Brokaw. They're all back, looking better than ever - and that includes the play itself - only now they're on Broadway, where 'How I Learned to Drive' opened Tuesday at MTC's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

Tournie's choreography is part Petipa, part Horton, part Tharp, part Barnum & Bailey. A typical non-balletic flourish is for the dancers to lift themselves on one hand and kick their bare feet in the air. Truck's dreamy music, with its electronic effects, should do nicely at the next White Party, to be played at 6 in the morning when the drugs are beginning to wear off. Most disappointing are Marie Jumelin's video designs, projected throughout the show on the upstage cyclorama. Jumelin attempts to duplicate Saint-Exupery's illustrations. Rather than evoking an elegant simplicity, the animation is simply crude.

Haidle is big on concepts. For his play 'Smokefall,' he told the story of four generations of one family, and even took us inside the womb to explore the development of two characters. In 'Birthday Candles,' he visits the character of Ernestine (Messing) on several of her birthdays, from age 17 to well into old age. Since 'Birthday Candles' is a one-act play clocking in at around 100 minutes, Haidle's writing involves major compression of time. Some of those birthdays last 10 minutes; others are covered in seconds.

Ellis and his cast deliver scene after scene of great drama. How Greenberg gets to some of those scenes in the second act is little more than sloppy dramatic license, unfortunately. The final confrontation between Mungitt and Lemming, as mediated by Kippy, provides emotional fireworks. Unexplained is that Mungitt landed in prison for murdering Lemming's best friend, Davey Battle (Brandon J. Dirden), and Lemming would be the last person allowed to see the accused at this moment in time. Even shakier is the idea that Lemming would have a best friend who's a raving religious bigot. Before Lemming came out of the closet, did Battle never express his 'pervert' view of homosexuality? This 'Take Me Out' is worth seeing, even if it's not built on a firm playing field.

In 'Paradise Square,' which opened Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, sex workers and their madam, Nelly (Joaquina Kalukango), come bubble-wrapped with enough important issues to placate the most hardened moralist. The credits reveal that the show is 'inspired in part by the songs of Stephen Foster.' The songwriter gets no thanks from the book writers, who deem his music racist. Actually, the little bit we hear of those simple Foster ditties is a relief from the bloated tunes surrounding them. Whether the characters are happy or sad, pissed off or just in a funk, they're simply thunderous when they sing. Best of the songs is Nelly's fiery 'Let It Burn,' not to be confused with 'Let It Go' from 'Frozen.' How much more effective it would be if not preceded by so much aural bombast.

On stage now, Parker is as hard-working as Broderick is relaxed. She's always engaging because she's always coming up with some novel bit of business or an unusual line reading to keep us distracted from the fact that what she's doing and what she's saying is often not very inspired on the part of Simon. Congrats are in order here for Parker's director, John Benjamin Hickey.

'MJ' is a jukebox musical that is nothing but the late King of Pop's greatest hits. Would Jackson himself approve of such a sentimental journey? More to the point is that his estate has approved it. And that is only one of the minor offenses on display in 'MJ,' which opened Tuesday at Broadway's Neil Simon Theatre.

Under Ruben Santiago-Hudson's taut direction, this cast of four is uniformly splendid. Rashad, famous for playing a mother on TV in 'The Cosby Show' and on stage in 'Blue' and 'A Raisin in the Sun,' completely transforms herself into a seasoned factory worker here, and she wears those overalls with absolute confidence. Boone delivers a fierce, raw performance that consistently galvanizes the drama when he's on stage. Granted, he has a slightly easier task than the other three actors. His Dez character is the only one not infected with a blinding naivete about the world in which they live and work.

If you don't do recreational drugs but your friends do, you know the feeling. Everyone around you has smoked, snorted, dropped or injected something, and they're all having a great time. They all think the conversation they're having about a light bulb is fascinating. You, on the other hand, know they're talking nonsense. They're all on drugs. They're boring.You can replicate that feeling by seeing the new musical 'Flying Over Sunset,' which opened Monday at LCT's Vivian Beaumont Theater. Or, to put it more precisely, you can see the second act of this 160-minute musical.

Director Marianne Elliott puts the fun and the sex back into Stephen Sondheim's 'Company.' This is the production, first staged in London, where the lead character Bobby is now Bobbie. The switch from male to female works, but more important is the light, sexy touch of Elliott's direction and how it frees the musical from the year of its world premiere, 1970. This very rousing and arousing 'Company' revival opened Thursday at Broadway's Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre.

'Clyde's' is a battle between the saint and Satan. Rather than treating this extreme contrast as a flaw, Whoriskey embraces it to bring a magical realism to the production. The performances, however, are never as sharp as they are in those first few squabbles over the cutting boards. Only Aduba is able to build on her horrible first impression, and that's because the devil, once again, gets all the best jokes, not to mention couture that would make Kyrsten Sinema blush.

Longhurst's revival is strongly sung, led by the astounding vocals of Sharon D. Clarke in the title role. One of the delights of 'Caroline' is watching household objects come to life in an adult musical, and it's hard to imagine the prominent roles of the Washing Machine (Arica Jackson), the Radio (Nasia Thomas, Nya, and Harper Miles), the Moon (N'Kenge), and the Dryer and the Bus (Kevin S. McAllister) being more robustly impersonated vocally. Sitting through this 'Caroline,' I often thought how superior the singing here was to the Met Opera's new 'Fire Shut Up in My Bones.'

Within the first 30 minutes of this 75-minute drama, you may find yourself asking, as I did, 'Well, why didn't she do this?' Or 'Why did she do that?' to escape earlier. Or, 'Is she making this up?' The power of Hnath's play - the playwright adapted the interviews conducted by Steve Cosson - is the dark alternate reality it creates. Soon after her abduction, Dana left the world we know, that she herself knew, to enter another. The old rules of behavior or ways of looking at strangers no longer applied. Dana escaped the Aryan Brotherhood, but has never been able to return to the real world or, at least, the world she knew before her long, horrifying ordeal.

It's a tour de force of direction and writing and Devlin's set rarely rests under Jon Clark's always dramatic lighting. Better yet, the designer's big glass box is framed by a Imax-like cyclorama that keeps updating us on the physical rise of Manhattan's ever-changing skyline - until we're literally swamped in nothing but office buildings (stunning videos by Luke Halls). Also thrilling is the depiction of a plantation fire, much earlier in the story, that the first Lehman brothers exploit to grow their store from a pop-and-pop operation to a major force in the cotton business.

These short speeches don't make for the most promising introduction to the lives of the seven men featured in 'Thoughts of a Colored Man,' which opened Wednesday at Broadway's Golden Theatre, after its world premiere in 2019 at Syracuse Stage. The barbershop scene, however, brings them all together to create a mashup of arguments, personalities, disagreements, friendships, backgrounds and conflicts that grip the attention immediately and don't let up for the next 90 minutes.

If you knew nothing about Winner, this effectively staged transcript - let's not call it a play - offers a vivid portrait of group male intimidation of a woman. The FBI team features a good cop (Pete Simpson), a bad cop (Will Cobbs) and a clown cop (Becca Blackwell, who even sports orange hair). As Winner, Emily Davis suffers a slow meltdown into near-hysteria as the men, search warrant in hand, literally invade her personal space. The title refers to a room in her house where the interrogation takes place.

The forced hilarity is never given a chance to build before Lyons hits us with some terribly sincere moment of reflection, whether its comes between two sisters (Cleo King and Ebony Marshall-Oliver), who can't stand each other, or two same-sex lovers (Michael Urie and Devere Rogers), one of whom prefers the word 'friend' to 'partner,' much to the other guy's dismay.

What exactly does Ruben Santiago-Hudson not do in the first Broadway revival of his 2001 play 'Lackawanna Blues,' which opened Thursday at MTC's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre? He has written, directed and stars, giving himself at least two dozen characters to play in this one-person show about growing up Black in the steel town of Lackawanna, New York, in the 1950s and beyond. He sings the blues, accompanied by guitarist Junior Mack, and he plays a mean harmonica, as well as a wide range of characters - including an adorable pet raccoon that's let loose into the wild, much to the disappointment of Junior.

Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss' score is immediately hummable in the way that only derivative disco music can be. The often witty book, built around a competition among the six wives of Henry VIII, borrows a lot from 'RuPaul's Drag Race' while offering yet another #MeToo story. Those theatrical commonplaces aside, 'Six' is a needed antidote to 'Anastasia,' 'Frozen,' 'Jagged Little Pill,' 'Wicked' and other pompous shows of female empowerment.

I'd feared that Nwandu's intimate three-hander would lose much of its impact going into a big Broadway house. Too often plays performed in large theaters have an audio mush that makes it difficult to decipher from which actor's mouth the words are coming. Fortunately, Justin Ellington's expert sound design solves that problem. In fact, when each of the three actor's sheds his pesky body mic at play's end, Taymor's direction turns it into a witty act of liberation.

Fortunately, Rylance puts his full arsenal of mannerisms on display to prevent this king from being the royal bore of Madrid. Whenever van Kampen's dialogue turns florid, he gives it a flat modern reading, and throws in an F-bomb. Elsewhere, he vocally stumbles and pauses, and lets dull phrases wither in his mouth for added comic effect. Meanwhile, Grove's queen suffers without giving much range to her desperation other than an occasional eyeball roll or nostril flare. And Crane's castrato remains glum, especially when Davies is singing. Dove delivers an appropriately spectacular entrance for the singing Farinelli at the end of Act 1, but for the most part his direction of the two Farinellis is a major waste of potentially golden opportunities.

'The Cows' would have made a better title. The poster for Lucy Kirkwood's new play features its three actors suited up for what looks like a tour of a nuclear power plant, and emblazoned across their bundled-up bodies is her chosen title, 'The Children.' This very scary, cautionary drama opened Tuesday at MTC's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, and there's no doubt about it. Splashed across all that protective gear, 'The Cows' would have been more provocative.