Tim Teeman

Even if you haven't seen the 2001 film, there are grave impediments to enjoying this show. You may well raise your eyebrows at the moment Amélie takes it upon herself to 'help' a blind man, but removing his cane from him, throwing his beggar's cup away, and totally disorientating him by swirling him past a new set of urban landmarks. Then she leaves him stranded, a new world that she is introducing him to. It's supposed to be charming. It looks horrifying.

The Play That Goes Wrong features an utterly terrible fictional script executed utterly terribly by a terrible group of fictional actors, enveloped in a real-life brilliant script executed brilliantly by a very real and very brilliant group of actors. You only realize you've been smiling, gasping and laughing for nearly two hours when it comes to not smiling upon your return to the regular world.

It is refreshing to hear characters talk about politics as urgently, and realistically, as people are affected by it. Sweat is politics as lived and spoken about on the ground, not as an abstraction, and not as Washington power-game, or a shrieking panel on CNN. Sweat is the first, properly muscular play of the Trump era, directly addressing the political and cultural bedrock of his presidency: Nottage has already won the 2016 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. The politics of the play, while clear and emphatic, do not supersede the careful drawing of character

Is it impossible to find the entertainment in Miss Saigon, the epic musical that follows the tragedy of a virginal Vietnamese woman who falls for an American G.I. just as Saigon is falling in 1975, and the sacrifice she makes to ensure their son has the life she desires for him? As evidenced by the laughter and weepy sniffles around me a few nights ago: no. Many in the audience clapped loudly, stood, and cheered this revival (transferred from London and produced by Cameron Mackintosh). But watching this grandly designed and mounted Broadway show-first produced in London in 1989-especially in light of the fraught and charged debate around immigration and refugees, with its full retinue of racial stereotypes unchanged, is a bizarre confluence of opposites; like sunbathing on a bright sunny beach which is freezing cold, or drinking a banana milkshake and it tasting of garden weeds.

DeVito, playing the kind of irreverent, hilarious, irritation-generating dynamo that he also does so brilliantly on film-steals the audience's attention, especially when it comes to consuming an egg, the shell of which he cracks with his cane. He then eats it with the gusto that Cookie Monster attacks his cookies. His character is 89, and in a long, colorful life has been three times married and somehow acquired a discharge from the British Navy. But he, too, is hiding a family tragedy, and DeVito's emotional register shifts perfectly at the moment of its revelation. Hecht skillfully does as much as she can do with very little, Miller's vision of her seems beached between acquisitive shrew and frustrated peacemaker, with little shading in between-it is Hecht's subtle coquettishness that adds an edge to her interactions with Walter. Shalhoub is also unexpected: he looks as smooth as any stage villain should yet his desire for money isn't simple greed, and he doesn't patronize his brother, despite having materially achieved so much more. He puts the price of his beautiful coat at 'two gallstones'-operated on 'a big textile guy' who keeps sending him things.

Come From Away is more a rambunctious, musical exhalation rather than a deep and thoughtful examination. It's a snapshot of lives far from New York and D.C. in flux. 9/11 is not the show's focus or even default focus: it is simply the event that has brought these people together. The show now finds itself in New York, site of the most iconic tragedy of that day-and a cheery rock-musical about 9/11 may not be the first theatrical choice for those to whom the city has long been home and who may have their own complex relationship to 9/11. For some, maybe the musical itself strikes a bum note: it is not set here, and it is not directly about the human tragedy of that day. But Come From Away doesn't trivialize the events of 9/11 or seek to facetiously co-opt them. It is as simple in its focus as the acts of goodness and gratitude at its thematic core.

Every immaculately crafted moment of Sam Gold's staging of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie rings as clear as it does true. There is no reason to close your eyes, but you could, and the actors' beautiful enunciation and encapsulation of Williams's words would be as pleasurable as the best radio play...When characters are not in scenes directly they observe them or sit a little away from them. The psychologically astute implication is that they are present in spirit, or will be affected by whatever is unfolding. This is Williams as seen at his most pared-back. The comedy, and there is much-Field revels in her baiting as much as Mantello in his curdling distaste for her-is hearty rather than camp, like bitter but delectable dregs of cold coffee.

The reviews had been so positive for the off-Broadway production of Joshua Harmon's Significant Other, that its laureled coronation on Broadway should have been all but assured. But there are so many jarring, derailing elements to this Roundabout Theatre production-about a gay man in his late twenties, confronting loneliness, but not really confronting loneliness convincingly, and therein lies the problem-that the evening merely becomes an extended sequence of his irritating whining. The play's peppy (occasionally extremely funny) comedy ill-balances its very dark heart, which-as the final curtain reveals-is really about one man's terrible isolation. It's Ibsen meets Will and Grace, but-as that show's Jack might screech-'in a bad way.'

If Gyllenhaal and Ashford are the name draws, don't be surprised when you fall absolutely under the spell of the entire ensemble, including Seurat's mother (played by Penny Fuller, who turns out to be a battleaxe with a far-from-hardened heart), her nurse, two soldiers, two chatty shop-girls called Celeste (Ashley Park and Jenni Barber, adept scene-stealers both, particularly Park and her adorably annoying laugh), Louis the baker with whom Dot makes a calculated match, and two hideously philistine-ish American tourists.

In John Crowley's Broadway production-handsomely designed and costumed by Alice Babidge-there are none of the long skirts and even longer pauses one typically expects from Chekhov. Upton, who is married to Blanchett, has set this Sydney Theatre Company production in 1990s Russia, and though the play is focused on the romantic and personal travails of the group gathered to celebrate Anna's birthday at her country house, the theme of money-making it, losing it, the possibility of having lots of it-speaks to a modern social order in transition.