Sara Holdren

The 90-minute examination of the ingrained dynamics at work amongst an aging father and his three adult sons is, in large part, exactly those things Lee points to as so currently unfashionable: It's nuanced, curious, and compassionate. That's not to say it's comfortable-Lee's sense of mischief and her expert control of tension are still at play-but it is, in its bones, gentle. Those buying tickets hoping for a gleeful evisceration of straight white male privilege, a parodic fuck-you of a play, may be disappointed. Good. Lee is doing something much harder and much more humane.

There are surely things to be enthusiastic about in Joe Mantello's glitzy, solidly acted revival, perhaps most of all the commitment of its producers, David Stone and the seemingly omnipotent Ryan Murphy, to assembling a complete cast of openly gay actors, a feat that would have been impossible when the original production shocked and captivated New York a year before Stonewall.

The revival of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh-now at the Bernard B. Jacobs under the direction of George C. Wolfe and strapped with heavy starpower in Denzel Washington-is the kind of production that puts prospective audience members off 'classics' for good. Whether you're a card-carrying member of the O'Neill Society or you simply flipped a coin at the TKTS booth, you'd be within your rights to run screaming from the theater by the first of the show's two intermissions. If, however, you decided to stick around for the whole moribund, infuriating ride, you might find yourself wondering why this play is considered a classic at all, how it's earned a place on a shelf so high that, these days, we can't get to it without sending up little hot-air balloons of reverence. You might be angry not only at the clumsy production but-blasphemy!-O'Neill's play itself.

if your first experience of Shaw or his Joan is Sullivan's tepid production and its disappointingly soft starring turn by Condola Rashad, you could be forgiven for writing this vigorous play and its fascinating playwright off as a collective bore.

They've come for the music - and perhaps theatergoers like me have our own cynicism to reckon with in the face of a fan's earnest euphoria. Whatever your personal taste, being surrounded by genuine excitement-by middle-aged women wearing sequined blouses actually standing up in a Broadway theater and joyfully shaking their booties during multiple slinky disco numbers-does a body good. That's what's currently happening in the Lunt-Fontanne, and thanks to the swift, smart construction of Summer, which neither overburdens its material nor overstays its welcome, it's a pretty damn good time.

But the additional-and perhaps the most powerful-enchantment of this particular trip to the theater is actually on our side of the footlights. Looking around me, I saw Hogwarts house colors, black robes, and wands filling the seats. When Jamie Parker made his first entrance as Harry Potter, and when Noma Dumezweni and Paul Thornley first appeared as Hermione and Ron, the already crackling energy in the dark auditorium erupted. (Later, I heard a woman actually scream in delight when a silhouette resembling that of Severus Snape began to glide forward, back to us, on the set's big central turntable.) This isn't normal entrance applause: The audience is cheering not for celebrities but for characters. Not that the actors aren't doing cheer-worthy work. On the contrary, they're turning in effective, endearing performances, from Parker's stubborn, struggling, still emotionally stunted Harry, to Thornley's dad-jokey Ron, to Dumezweni's restrained (but comically adept) Hermione and Poppy Miller's patient, not-to-be-messed-with Ginny.

Bartlett Sher's glowing revival of Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady has arrived at Lincoln Center to prove that it can be done. A beloved musical from another era can keep on kicking, and, as is the case here, it can even do so without making radical shifts in aesthetic, as long as it's got its eyes wide open.

Elliott, who's become known for her ability to coordinate vast, complex productions (she's the only woman with two directing Tonys, for War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), knows how to embrace the scope of Kushner's play while still keeping it about the ensemble who powers it. She and her top-notch design team are taking full advantage of the resources afforded by a huge, commercial show like this one, but they're doing so with purpose and even restraint, to the full support of the actors.

It's not that I hate fun. Fun is great! I love fun! Every now and again, I even love shiny, high-budget, well-constructed dumb fun based on a big-name brand. But Escape to Margaritaville is about as much fun as buying a dud hermit crab as a pet. It seems like it'll be exotic, or at least cute, but it's really kind of sad, and definitely a rip-off, and, at the end of the day, actually just an empty shell.

Despite Lithgow's tendency to wax Hallmark card-ish when he's talking about his stories rather than telling them, he's a sensitive enough performer to know when to move on from the personal - to feel when his audience needs a laugh and a lift. And when he dives into the words and worlds of Lardner and Wodehouse, Stories by Heart is pure entertainment of the most ancient and appealing kind. In his current sojourn in New York City, Lithgow seems to have taken the words of the immortal Uncle Fred as his touchstone: 'On these visits of mine to the metropolis, my boy, I make it my aim, if possible, to spread sweetness and light.'

The Children - which premiered at the Royal Court in London last year and has now transferred to Broadway's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre with its original cast and director, the deft, deceptively unostentatious James Macdonald - is a play about responsibility and guilt, reparation and redemption. It's also a British play, so these heavy matters are handled lightly, wryly, approached from the side until circumstances absolutely demand a head-on confrontation.

Is it too much? Nah, no such thing. While I admit that I raised an eyebrow upon learning the show's runtime-two and a half hours seemed like a whole lot of SpongeBob for a single sitting-I left realizing that I had smiled for literally every minute of it. Even at that length, it may be a shameless celebration of the short attention span (there's something new and shiny to look at pretty much every thirty seconds), but its relentless novelty has a sweet earnestness to it. Not to mention real inventiveness: It's like a kid running up to you to show you the Super Powered Extra Awesome Cybernetic Blaster Raygun she just made out of a cardboard tube and some pipe cleaners. (Indeed, Sheldon J. Plankton, SpongeBob's miniscule but nefarious antagonist, cackles over just such a contraption: the Avalanche Maker 3000's construction looks to involve a caulking gun, a camera tripod, and several buckets).

The Parisian Woman is back onstage, lounging at the Hudson Theatre after a makeover for the age of Twitter and Trump. But despite high wattage both onstage and off (Uma Thurman is our present-day Parisienne and Willimon created House of Cards), the results are not sparkly but wooden and smug. In attempting to walk the line between classic sexual intrigue and contemporary political resonance, The Parisian Woman falls flat on both counts, delivering yet another lamely apologetic, latently self-satisfied slog through the worldview of an ostensibly liberal white dude.

Meteor Shower may not be groundbreaking (few meteors are), but comedy doesn't have to be revelatory to work. And Martin's particular brand of humor is loopy enough to keep us interested. He's also a master of the dad joke: The extended setup that builds to a wince-inducing punch line. (Re: Norm's dick: 'It's been photographed by Mapplethorpe.' 'How did he hear about it?' 'Word of mouth.') Yeah, yeah, groans all around - but you can't help giggling, too. And you could do far worse than spend 80 minutes chuckling and groaning in the company of this game foursome of actors (there's far worse out there right now). So grab a pre-wine or three and settle in for some puns and some Perseids on this lightest of all dark nights of the soul.

Plenty of plays are tackling issues of system failure, miseducation, and underrepresentation with dogged earnestness. And while the sprightly Latin History for Morons-now playing at Studio 54 in a transfer from its joint premieres at Berkeley Rep and the Public-has its fair share of sincerity, it's also got a leg up on some of its fellow pieces of sociopolitical theater: the unmistakable, irresistible sense of humor of its creator and star.

Director David Cromer, book writer Itamar Moses, and composer/lyricist David Yazbek are clearly unified in their pursuit of the specific and the humane over the grandiose. Together they've created a play of deep integrity - funny, generous, sweet without sentimentality, poignant without melodrama, and emotionally expansive even as it insists upon its own smallness.

Junk's driving tempo, cinematic smash-cuts, and clarity of underlying action undoubtedly hold our attention. Akhtar has said that he wants audiences 'to have an emotional experience of this process of capital' - to get caught up in the thrust of each scene ('somebody's instructing somebody, somebody's stealing from somebody, somebody's betraying somebody else's confidence') even if phrases like 'undisclosed equity stakes' sound a bit like Chinese. Director Doug Hughes understands that one of the things Akhtar is doing in Junk is riffing on the Shakespearean history play. He keeps the action rolling relentlessly forward on an effectively streamlined, compartmentalized set by John Lee Beatty that - not unlike an Elizabethan theater - allows for quick, imaginative shifts in time and space.

When David Henry Hwang's memory play M. Butterfly made its Broadway debut almost 30 years ago, it took home the Tonys for Best Play, Best Direction, and Best Performance by a Featured Actor (B. D. Wong in a career-making turn as the Chinese opera singer Song Liling). It also ran for almost two years - a remarkable feat considering its thematically ambitious, stranger-than-fiction story. The play is based both on Puccini's romantic (and deeply problematic) tragedy of an opera, Madama Butterfly, and on the real-life affair between the Beijing opera singer Shei Pei Pu and French diplomat Bernard Boursicot, who for 20 years believed his male lover to be a woman.

If only the play itself lived up to the extravagant - and admittedly powerful - visual metaphor that Patel and Taichman have created for it. But despite intermittent moving moments, the text often feels clunky, dated, and more than a bit sentimental. Taichman, whose work with her actors is sharper in the second act, overplays the first act's saccharine notes, and Paloma Young's costumes fall into the same trap: In 1937, they're crisp and evocative. In 1919, they feel like cotton candy - too sugary, too fluffy, too, well, costume-ish. With so many nails being hit squarely on the head, out in the audience it's easy to feel caught in one of Dunne's time-bending premonitions: We're constantly ahead of the events unfolding in front of us.

Though the music soars, the show's central figure remains a bit generic, a bit out of focus. We don't really see Prince - certainly not as we got to see Sondheim, through actual personal video footage, in the 2010 Broadway revue (and similar career retrospective) Sondheim on Sondheim. Instead, we see a mostly young cast, all looking very chic in black-and-white baseball costumes by William Ivey Long, delivering a number of well-meaning truisms about luck and heart. (The book, which weirdly feels both a little too slick and a little too earnest, is by David Thompson).

First of all, because it's almost entirely unsurprising. In an interview with Time Out, Moore promises that 'for 87 minutes, you're going to experience something you're not expecting' (the show runs 110 minutes, by the way), but my feelings upon leaving the Belasco Theatre can best be summed up with a long sigh. If I had had to make a guess as to what a Michael Moore Broadway show would feel like, this would have been pretty much it. The Terms of My Surrender feels like a live version of my Facebook feed: a few good stories and a boatload of preaching to the choir (add requisite helpings of self-congratulation and liberal-on-liberal shaming for full effect).