Terry Teachout

The Roundabout Theatre Company is putting on 'Trouble in Mind' in its 740-seat American Airlines Theatre with a deluxe cast led by LaChanze and Chuck Cooper, and the results are glorious to behold. George S. Kaufman is said to have quipped that 'satire is what closes on Saturday night,' but if this one doesn't draw crowds all the way to the end of its limited run, I'll be shocked.

If I sound a bit lukewarm about the results, it is because I did not immediately warm to 'The Lehman Trilogy.' But Mr. Mendes's staging is gloriously imaginative, and Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester, the three English character actors who comprise his cast, are prodigiously gifted changelings who all play men, women and children at various points in the show. Without exception, they do so with a light and witty touch that draws the sting from the words they speak, which are too often portentous and never truly poetic ('At 70 he will obtain perspective / at 80 fall into decrepitude / and at 90 years old a man is as good as dead/and can no longer participate in the affairs of the world'). By the end of the second act, whose curtain comes down on the morning of Oct. 24, 1929, I had put aside my preconceptions and was completely on board with what the creators of 'The Lehman Trilogy' were trying to do.

Wonderful news: 'Girl From the North Country,' Conor McPherson's self-directed jukebox musical based on the songs of Bob Dylan, has reached Broadway after hugely successful runs in London and at New York's Public Theater, slightly altered but essentially the same as the show I reviewed in 2018, calling it 'a musical that does complete justice to the artistry of the great American songwriter whose genius inspired it.'

Wonderful news: 'Girl From the North Country,' Conor McPherson's self-directed jukebox musical based on the songs of Bob Dylan, has reached Broadway after hugely successful runs in London and at New York's Public Theater, slightly altered but essentially the same as the show I reviewed in 2018, calling it 'a musical that does complete justice to the artistry of the great American songwriter whose genius inspired it.'

All of which brings us to the Broadway transfer of 'Jagged Little Pill,' which originated at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and whose marquee declares it to be 'inspired by' Alanis Morissette's grunge-flavored pop album about teenage love and life. Most of the songs, co-written by Ms. Morissette and Glen Ballard, come from the album, whose release in 1995 led Rolling Stone to dub Ms. Morissette 'Queen of Alt-Rock Angst.' The stage version, by contrast, is a cliché-prone chronicle of suburban spiritual emptiness whose book is by Diablo Cody ('Juno') and whose characters include a 'perfect' mother ( Elizabeth Stanley ) who is secretly addicted to opiates and her black, bisexual adopted daughter ( Celia Rose Gooding ), who is...well, angst-ridden. The results play like a cross between 'American Beauty' and 'Next to Normal,' and if that notion appeals to you, then you might enjoy 'Jagged Little Pill.' Me, I found it leaden with earnestness. Teen angst, lest we forget, isn't all that interesting when seen from the outside, which explains why the best fictional portrayals of the pain of adolescence have been satirical comedies like 'Daria' and 'Heathers.' And while Ms. Cody's issue-of-the-week book might work as a teleplay, it gains nothing from being used as a dramatic Christmas tree on which to hang the songs.

While the stage version of 'Hadestown' is longer and considerably more elaborate than the 2010 concept album, it still bears the mark of its origins, and therein lies its chief flaw. Ms. Mitchell's songs are beautiful but undramatic-the score runs mainly to slow and medium tempos-which means that the overall narrative pace can feel a bit sluggish, enthralling though it is from moment to moment. Even at its frequent best, 'Hadestown' plays more like a song cycle than a stage show. I won't pretend that this isn't a problem, but Rachel Chavkin's endlessly varied direction and David Neumann's dances, all of them fully integrated into the staging, help to keep things on the move, as does Rachel Hauck's turntable-and-trap-door set.

'Ain't Too Proud,' the new Temptations jukebox biomusical, is a Broadway musical for people who don't like Broadway musicals-or maybe for people who like only jukebox biomusicals. The score, which includes such chart-topping hits of the '60s and '70s as 'My Girl' and 'Papa Was a Rollin' Stone,' is terrific, as are the singing and pit band, but Sergio Trujillo's choreography is way too slick-the real-life Temptations moved like street-corner kids from Detroit, not glammed-up 42nd Street gypsies-and the projection-heavy set design is ploddingly dull. As for Dominique Morisseau's book, it sounds as though a roomful of ad executives wrote it.

Would that it were even half as good, but this 'Kiss Me, Kate' is bland and unimaginative. Not only is Ms. O'Hara miscast-she is as warm and friendly as Kate is sharp-witted and spiky-but she and Mr. Chase have all the romantic chemistry of a pair of squabbling siblings. As for Mr. Ellis's staging, it looks as though he'd put the show together while thinking about something else.

But while 'True West' fails to add up to a convincing dramatic whole, it still works as a vehicle for two first-class actors, and the stars of this revival qualify. Mr. Hawke, who has the flashier of the two parts, comes on strong, occasionally over-egging the pudding (you get the feeling that he's enjoying himself a little too much) but nonetheless giving a performance in which you can smell the anger and envy leaching out of his pores. Mr. Dano, by contrast, is both subtler and more interesting: Here as in 'Love & Mercy,' he plays a character whose bland surface serves as camouflage for roiling interior turmoil, and everything he does in 'True West' is excitingly surprising.

Christopher Sergel's workmanlike 1991 stage adaptation of 'Mockingbird,' a regional-theater staple that I saw done three years ago by Florida's Orlando Shakespeare Theatre, is both truer to the book and far more dramatically effective. Moreover, that company's small-scale staging, sensitively directed by Thomas Ouellette, was superior in every way to Bartlett Sher's overblown, over-designed Broadway version, which is devoid of credible local color (hardly anybody on stage acts or sounds as if they've ever traveled much farther south than Cleveland). Mr. Daniels, a fine actor whom I suspect has been disserved by his director, paints Atticus with the coarsest of brushes, though the sad truth is that save for Adam Guettel's homespun incidental music and a handful of strong performances, most notably by Mr. Akinnagbe and Dakin Matthews, who plays the judge, nothing about this 'Mockingbird' is any good at all. Shame on Harper Lee's estate for letting it happen.

In the case of 'Network,' Lee Hall's stage version of the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky-Sidney Lumet film about a network anchorman (played in the film by Peter Finch and onstage by Bryan Cranston) who cracks up midway through the evening news and starts telling the truth, the frosting has been whipped up by Ivo van Hove, Europe's most pretentious stage director. Working in close collaboration with Jan Versweyveld, the scenic and lighting designer, and Tal Yarden, the video designer, Mr. Van Hove has given us a TV-screens-and-Plexiglas production that looks thoroughly postmodern. The catch is that Mr. Hall's script, set in 1975, is a faithful adaptation of Chayefsky's screenplay, a once-prescient satire of the dumbed-down future of broadcast news. All of Chayefsky's predictions having long since come to pass, 'Network' is thus a musty period piece: The bomb has already gone off.

The Prom will make you laugh-I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard at a new musical-and it will also fill you with the toasty-warm glow of unchallenged righteousness. That's a surprising combination, especially nowadays.

It's hard to know where to start pitching the tomatoes. The score and songs, jointly concocted by Marius de Vries and Eddie Perfect, are loud and vapid ('And years from now / The world will know / Your grace showed me the way to go'). Jack Thorne's book is stupefyingly banal ('Strong as I am, strong as you've made me, I can't hold you'). Together they add up to a show that made me feel as though I were fighting off an overwhelmingly powerful anesthetic. A true professional, Ms. Pitts manages to speak and sing her fatuous lines with a straight face. Lucky gorilla: All he has to do is growl.

The only thing wrong with Second Stage's off-Broadway revival of 'Torch Song,' which has been very effectively directed by Moisés Kaufman, is Mr. Urie, a fine actor who is miscast as Mr. Fierstein (yes, he's called 'Arnold Beckoff' in the play, but we all know who he really is). Whether on stage or screen, Mr. Fierstein was unforgettable, and to see Mr. Urie trying to put his own stamp on the part merely underlines why his predecessor was so good in it.

Mr. Radcliffe's post-'Harry Potter' career is a vanishingly rare testament to how serious a grown-up child star can become if he has sufficient talent-and resolve. In addition to choosing offbeat, consistently interesting film roles, he's also turned himself into a stage actor of exceptional quality, one who is more than good enough to go up against Mr. Cannavale and Ms. Jones, two of Broadway's very best performers, without getting his lunch munched. They are, of course and as always, as good as it's possible to be, and Ms. Silverman proves herself yet again to be the kind of director whose presence at the helm of a production is a sure sign of high quality.

Not that 'Pretty Woman' is terrible-it's just mediocre, albeit to a mind-boggling degree. The only noteworthy thing about 'Pretty Woman,' in fact, is the incalculably wide gap between the time, money and talent that went into moving it from screen to stage and the comatose tedium of the results currently on view at the Nederlander Theatre.

Michael Mayer ('Spring Awakening') has done what he can to put a directorial shine on 'Head Over Heels.' Spencer Liff's choreography is excitingly volatile and the sets and costumes are expensively fancy, while the five-piece pit band is as hot as a runaway atomic pile. Bonnie Milligan, a delightful performer with pipes to die for who previously appeared in the 2015 production, nails best-in-show honors as the horrifically vain Princess Pamela, who searches in vain for a suitable swain, then belatedly figures out that she's a lesbian (GASP!). Everyone else in the cast takes care of business, and if you really, really like the Go-Go's, you might possibly find the results tolerable. I doubt there are still enough Go-Go's fans out there to make 'Head Over Heels' a hit, but stranger things have happened on Broadway.

Of all the great Broadway musicals of the postwar era, 'My Fair Lady' is the only one that takes a major work of literature, George Bernard Shaw's 'Pygmalion,' and turns it into an equally distinguished musical that is true to the spirit and letter of its source material.

Of the musicals by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II that continue to hold the stage, 'Carousel' is-up to a point-the strongest. That point arrives toward the end, when the ghost of Billy Bigelow, the show's romantic antihero, returns to earth, watches his daughter graduate from high school and is escorted back to the Pearly Gates by an angel as the company sings a reprise of 'You'll Never Walk Alone,' the stickiest song that Rodgers and Hammerstein ever wrote (though the competition is stiff).

I've written more than once in this space about the flaws of 'Angels.' It's too long, too sentimental, too inclined to demonize at the expense of comprehension, too rigid in its Marx-flavored politics ('Angels' would be a richer play if Mr. Kushner had had the wit, not to mention the honesty, to portray Ethel Rosenberg as shamelessly guilty). Yet all these things notwithstanding, it remains a fixed star in the firmament of American drama, a testament to Mr. Kushner's willingness to take huge chances instead of playing it safe, and I expect it will continue to hold the stage, both for its genuinely visionary moments and for the character of Cohn, one of the 20th century's great stage villains. Mike Nichols's 2003 TV version was also highly impressive and largely successful, but 'Angels' works best in the theater, and if you've never seen it there, this revival, imperfect though it is, will show you much of what you've been missing.

The jukebox musical, in which the back catalog of a songwriter and/or pop star is repurposed as the score to a stage show, is one of Broadway's staple items. Rarely are such shows any good, but some have been hits, and hope springs eternal in the cash-hungry hearts of theatrical producers and superannuated rockers. That's why 'Escape to Margaritaville,' whose score consists of 26 songs by Jimmy Buffet t, has arrived on Broadway after preliminary runs in La Jolla, Calif., and Chicago, Houston and New Orleans. Even though the 71-year-old Mr. Buffett is very old news-'Margaritaville,' his first and biggest hit single, was released four decades ago-a group of hard-nosed businessmen is betting that his amiable brand of what he calls 'drunken Caribbean rock 'n' roll' is still popular enough to rope in a slice of the tourists who couldn't wangle tickets to ' Hamilton. '

Ms. Midler's singing voice is in a desperate, sometimes shocking state of disrepair...As for the rest of the performance, Ms. Midler doesn't even bother to act: She simply comes on stage and plays her familiar self, albeit at a disturbingly low level of energy...Ms. Midler is playing opposite David Hyde Pierce, who is all wrong as Horace Vandergelder...He is, to be sure, a talented actor, but his lightweight charm is utterly ill-suited to the role...Jerry Zaks and Warren Carlyle, the director and choreographer, have staged this revival in a cartoonish manner...While the show itself, like all of Mr. Herman's musicals, is lapel-clutchingly cheery to the point of diminishing returns, it's not hard to see why it was and is so popular, nor is it impossible for skeptics to appreciate a production that makes the most of its cornball charms. This one makes the worst of them.

Not so Ms. Close. To be sure, she is 69, much older than the 50-year-old character whom she plays, but that doesn't matter in the least. If anything, her greater age makes Norma's plight all the more pitiable, and Ms. Close's performance, by turns adamantine and childishly needy, is as memorable in its own way as was that of Gloria Swanson in the movie. No, the fundamental problem with turning 'Sunset Boulevard' into a musical is that it is perfect, a fact that is well understood by Don Black and Christopher Hampton, whose book is largely faithful to the Wilder-Charles Brackett script, give or take a sprinkling of superfluous four-letter words (though their lyrics are sing-songy and ill-crafted). The truth is that 'Sunset Boulevard' doesn't need songs, or anything else that it doesn't already have in abundance. Saving Ms. Close's presence, to change anything at all is necessarily to diminish the film's overwhelming effect.

Everything unfolds with predictably smooth Times Square professionalism, and I can imagine the results appealing to fans of 'Jersey Boys' (including the dances, which were choreographed by Sergio Trujillo, who worked on that show as well). But for all its slickness, 'A Bronx Tale' is nothing more than a weightless comic-book adaptation of the movie on which it's based, stripped of the understated yet ever-present sense of threat that gave the film so much of its dramatic force. Here, by contrast, the audience laughs all night long, even at the serious parts-and the screen version of 'A Bronx Tale,' for all its unabashedly sentimental appeal to old-neighborhood nostalgia, was at bottom a deeply serious film. Not so the musical: Even when somebody gets killed, you wait for the punch line.

Notwithstanding Mr. Finn's inability to write once-heard-never-forgotten tunes, the musical numbers are cleverly crafted and the overall tone is appropriately tart, this being a show in which no one is very likable. (The title of the first song, 'Four Jews in a Room Bitching,' sums up 'March of the Falsettos' pretty comprehensively.) In 'Falsettoland,' by contrast, a hideously painful situation is portrayed with a sincere but cloying sentimentality that occasionally curdles into kitsch. If you're old enough to have witnessed the AIDS epidemic at first hand, the second act of 'Falsettos' might just make you cry in spite of yourself. If not...well, it probably won't.