Sara Holdren

Lee gives the tirade all the TNT it needs: It’s funny and it blows up in our faces. That’s clearly the balance Chinese Republicans wants to strike as a whole, but even as Iris stands surefooted, the play itself is still teetering.

Maybe being a mom means, in part, always being behind, never quite catching up. Time becomes more soup than arrow, more palimpsest than progress. I often feel old and sore and busted and also simultaneously adolescent and clueless, a child recklessly, optimistically playing house. “I don’t know what I’m doing / I don’t know what will happen / But I know what I know,” sing the actors at the end of Meat Suit. All of them are mothers themselves — which, in this business, in this world, is its own small revolution. “I see you,” they sang, and whatever else I felt, I knew they meant it. I see them, too.

I’ve written before about the potential trap of the “cool story” bio-play, and the good news is that Marcel on the Train is stylish and thoughtful enough to avoid the standard pitfalls. Only occasionally does it give off a whiff of Life Is Beautiful mawkishness. For the most part, it makes a good-faith effort to be wiser and wryer about the tenuousness of living and the spiritual utility of art.

Stephens’s script attempts to envision death in order to pay homage to life, but neither great mystery feels freshly illuminated by a project that invests so little in actual presence, actual vigor. When An Ark was done, a hesitation preceded dutiful applause. The woman beside me joined in but turned to her friend with a short, uncertain laugh. “What,” she asked, “are we clapping for?”

The performance is forceful enough for this Bug to operate chiefly as a character study. Despite the cesspits of ­conspiracy-think that pollute contemporary politics, the specific paranoia of Letts’s ­characters — bugs under the skin, brainwashing, ­nefarious doctors in government labs — feels less blazingly relevant than comparatively quaint. At the same time, because Cromer and his designers opt to keep the audience at a remove from Peter and Agnes’s folie à deux, the monsters they behold don’t ever truly spook us. They are shadows­ only, never claws and flesh. In such a production, the fantasy at the story’s center can’t become contagious. We bear witness to two sad, mad people. We don’t question our own sanity.

That stuff’s all right there, both on the page and vibrating in the performances. At the same time, there’s a refreshing lack of attention being drawn to it here. Perhaps it’s a function of letting celebrity alone to do the work of getting butts in seats (across from Williams, an absolutely feral Tom Sturridge plays Anna’s love interest, the Irish ship’s stoker Matt Burke), but whatever it is, it feels like a shift in the winds of our preoccupation with relevancy. There’s not even a director’s note in the program — just a company of artists trusting in the richness and strangeness of the story they’ve undertaken. Watching them forgo protestations of their own necessity, I felt braced, even a little giddy — like Anna standing on the deck of Chris’s barge, her shoulders dropping in the mists of Provincetown harbor: “I love this fog! Honest! … It makes me feel clean — out here — ’s if I’d taken a bath.”

In our present reality, with the floodwaters of AI slop licking at the rolled cuffs of our pants, it’s a pretty sure bet that Second Stage’s elegant revival of Harrison’s play will be applauded for its (then) prescience and (now) timeliness. Yet watching Marjorie Prime — staged on Lee Jellinek’s set of crisp angles, with its green hues engineered for tranquility, by Anne Kauffman, who directs with spare, delicate rigor, as if she’s conducting Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel — I kept waiting to feel … well, more. More rapt, more heartbroken, more rattled by the harrowing questions presented by the long, slow, terribly seductive suicide humanity seems bent on carrying out via technology. Harrison is a formidable craftsman and Marjorie Prime is built very well, but in a way it resembles one of its own artificial humans: It’s an extremely palatable version of the thing. It has studied how to be a play, and it’s a good one — if only the feeling of study weren’t quite so palpable in that goodness. If only it didn’t place so much value on the neatness of its own construction.

The director Matthew Warchus swathes the production in flourishes, many of them at least partly charming: a galaxy of warm, twinkling lanterns suspended above the stage; a preshow in which the company plays carols and tosses cookies and clementines to the audience; showers of brightly lit foamy snow that will actually melt on your face. But there’s no disguising Thorne’s limp, self-satisfied script, which feels less magical than simplistically Freudian. A Christmas therapist’s couch.

Initiative is stitched through with moments like these, like colorful patches on a heavy pall, little saving throws against the dark. Depending on when you were born and how much time you’ve spent rolling dice in basements, it might take you back, but its real achievement, bracing and compassionate, lies in its encouragement to keep walking forward.

Chess is not a serious musical. Fine. Good, even! When the show is at its best, it hits levels of unironic ludicrousness that are more fun than most things on Broadway. Back in 1988 Frank Rich ripped Chess’s American premiere a new one: ‘The characters,’ he wrote in the Times, ‘yell at one another to rock music.’ Yes, they absolutely do. And I had a great time.

It’s a shame, because this Oedipus, when it tries a little less hard, is also full of potency. Manville and Strong crackle together — their chemistry is steamy and genuine and, in some of the production’s best moments, after all terrible secrets have been revealed, so is their body-wracking devastation. These heights arrive at the crux of the breakless two-hour play, after Oedipus (Strong) has been engaged in his bullheaded pursuit of the truth for some time. (“Your honesty fetish is going to pull everything apart,” snarls one of his allies.) Here, Sophocles’s king is figured as a people’s politician, holed up at his campaign headquarters on election night with his family and key staff, awaiting news of what’s sure to be his landslide victory. (Elected to what? Icke never likes to get down to terms, but the implication is president or prime minister, with more than a splash of supreme leader.)

That’s why it’s refreshing to come across a play like Preston Max Allen’s Caroline, the assured, affecting three-hander now getting its premiere at MCC under the emblematically thoughtful and ungilded direction of David Cromer. Allen is writing about something that’s in our newsfeeds daily, but crucially, that thing doesn’t flatten or predetermine his people. What he’s actually interested in are relationships, the interconnectedness of messy human beings. His characters are grappling with the consequences of broken trust and the agonizing question of how much we can truly protect anyone we love. The political resonance of his project arises not from an explicit statement of values but from a tender demonstration of complex, undeniable humanity.

The tempo of Punch slows and the performances sharpen and deepen. Though the air is thick with anguish, three people start to grope their way through it toward each other. One can only imagine that these were the scenes that made Graham want to write the play. They are its finest and—in a moment where truth and reconciliation can feel like utopian fantasies—its most radically hopeful.

Because the production feels too cool (in more ways than one), its hottest performance leaps out like a firecracker set off in a Soho boutique: Brandon Dirden’s superlative Pozzo. Once per act, a second duo crashes in on Didi and Gogo, providing the tramps’ power balance with a lurid, distended foil. Pozzo is a histrionic slave-driver, Lucky his abused chattel who speaks only once, spewing forth a churning flood of half-thoughts, broken refrains, and dire imagery — a mind shattered, perhaps by direct violence, perhaps simply by the daily assault of living on “this bitch of an earth.”

Reza, though, doesn’t get into it, apart from making some easy jabs at “conceptual art” and “deconstruction” and the chichi gallery world. These things aren’t legitimate concerns but coat hooks on which to hang generic contention and an overall icky view of human nature — which is why some of the play’s actually funniest stuff, in both writing and performance, occurs in a frantic two-page monologue delivered by Yvan, who hurtles into Serge’s apartment mid-meltdown over complications with his upcoming wedding. Corden makes big, broad, breathless work of the set piece, eventually crash-landing in a chair to well-earned applause. It works because it’s played well but also because it has nothing to do with the matter at hand. Neither does anything else, but at least here, the disregard is genuine.

A gloriously grotesque aluminum corset in the shape of an alien spine; a pair of pearlescent antlers draped in embroidered lace; stiletto heels, bulbous, scaly, and spiky, like armadillos balancing on their heads and tails; wraithlike models with black contact lenses or silver prosthetic jaws, or covered in feathers, chain mail, spray paint, or the shells of razor clams … These might be some of the images that spring to mind when you think of the fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen, known to the world by his second two names and lost to it when he took his own life in 2010 at the age of 40. They are also among the near-endless array of gestures from his oeuvre that spur more excitement, more agitation, more pure feeling in their contemplation alone than does House of McQueen, the flat soufflé of a play now endeavoring to pay homage to its namesake at the Mansion, a nightclub-ish new performance space amid the glass towers of Hudson Yards.

Shenanigans like these aren’t unenjoyable, but neither are they entirely fulfilling. It’s a happy relief, therefore, that Oh blows through this Twelfth Night like, as Orsino might say, the sweet wind “that breathes upon a bank of violets, / Stealing and giving odor.” Her Olivia is a giddy, glowing delight — playful and sexy and grounded, as full and compelling a human being as this production will allow. She finds the play’s joy without resorting to gimmick, accessing her character’s essential truth and beauty while still allowing for the exuberant artifice of farce. In her, one can glimpse a broader, deeper Illyria, a Twelfth Night that — because it is as full of wondering as of wonders — is indeed most wonderful.

The new musical Real Women Have Curves is, on the whole, a vibrant, exuberant affair, soaked in the pink and gold of L.A. sunsets, with painterly projections of tropical blossoms regularly unfurling across its proscenium in such verdant profusion you can practically smell their perfume. Yet surrounded by all this lushness, the show’s darkest, grayest moments are some of its most striking.

Is it a play? I mean, yes-ish? Is it an extravagant TV-meets-theater-meets-theme-park hybrid that probably has not entirely heartening implications for the future of Broadway? For sure. Is it also so unrelentingly absurd that it’s hard to be mad at? Absolutely.

Smith’s writing shines brightest in small units, be they sentences or scenes. The six teenagers at her imagined grief camp — a ramshackle labor of love run out of the home of its founder Rocky (voiced by Danny Wolohan), who remains unseen but asserts a deeply earnest, increasingly surreal presence over the camp loudspeaker — are all weird normies, ordinary weirdos.

Floyd Collins leaves far too soft an impression. It never really joins its hero in the depths... For a show with such a potentially powerful symbol at its core — a man trapped in the rock, singing as he’s crushed by America — the production feels like it’s skimming the surface. Visually beautiful at times, but the horror of Floyd’s situation is never truly realized, and the people above ground feel more like concepts than characters. I felt more fear reading a sketch of the real entrapment than during the entire two-plus hours of the musical.

Along with a dexterity for shaping character out of the casual contours of contemporary speech, Belflower also has a keen sense of balance: She hangs just enough of her play on The Crucible but not too much. This isn’t a riff or a rewrite. Miller’s text functions as a kind of flint — a surface on which Belflower’s characters, especially Shelby, can create sparks, but the fire that grows belongs to them. They are the living, wrestling souls, contending with more than any teenager should have to and just as much as many do.

Whitney White’s revival is sleek and unpretentious—Stacey Derosier’s lights, elegantly juxtaposing oranges, golds, and blues, are particularly lovely in helping to score the story’s temporal and spiritual separations—but it hasn’t quite solved the asshole problem. Emotionally, this Last Five Years goes the route it’s easiest for the show to go: It belongs unquestionably to its Cathy, the luminous Adrienne Warren.

Movie star he may be, and flashy ticket Good Night, and Good Luck is, but there’s no arguing with his or the project’s sincerity, even its sense of duty... Clooney and his collaborators give a dignified and resonant answer.

For Glengarry to land its hardest, we’ve got to feel a measure of that Arthur Miller anguish in Levene’s ultimate downfall, no matter the character’s moral worth: Odenkirk shrinks toward pathos rather than expanding toward tragedy. Burr, meanwhile, plays Moss with a comedian’s ear for rhythm, setting up each blunt force blow and devious jab like so many cans to be shot off a fence. It works — there’s not much soul in Dave Moss to go digging for.