Tim Teeman

The play, to be fair, does not aspire to be encyclopedic. It is, like Farinelli's operas, an entertainment-and one specifically for Rylance to play with all manner of facial expressions and tones. If the story palls, look around you. Director John Dove uses every bit of the theater, with actors going up and down the aisles, and musicians, led by Robert Howarth on harpsichord, placed in the gods. Jonathan Fensom's design is your own visual test for the evening: The theater is lushly paneled, as if we are indeed at court, with descending screens signifying different settings. But the other bit of truly crucial magic is Paul Russell's lighting. Six chandeliers filled with candles act as the stage's main illumination. There are candles all around the stage in boxes. Where is the other light coming from? Seemingly from the existing, beautiful lighting of the Belasco, which is variously raised and lowered in intensity. Perhaps Russell has hidden other lighting genius more surreptitiously. Whatever, your eyes and ears will leave Farinelli happy indeed.

That swirling unknown is bought startlingly to life at the end of the play, in one of the most visually stunning denouements on Broadway right now. And the true test of sitting and watching a play with no intermission for close to two hours is that you want to follow Hazel, Rose and Robin to where they are going, to listen to them more. But Kirkwood has imagined the right end for them, right before a far more profound end presents itself.

SpongeBob's goodness is of the wide-eyed and true variety. You follow his every thrilling step, right up to the climax where he limbers his amazing body through gaps and slats of what looks like a gigantic mechanical spider's web to do his best to prevent the explosion, a brilliant feat of directing by Tina Landau who ensures a ranging production makes smooth sense, while remaining an arresting and unpredictable visual delight.

The Caribbean music of Once On This Island is so exuberant and beautifully performed that it is only at the end you realize what a tragic tale has been told to you...Kilgore's voice is pure and resonant, Philip Boykin and Kenita R. Miller, as Ti Moune's adoptive parents, who worry for her safety, sing beautifully too, their warmth and love for Ti Moune feel as an all-encompassing musical blanket by the audience too. Salonga is the perfect 'good witch' of Love counterpart to Dandridge's malevolence. If the music is wonderful-truly, every song-and the direction brimming with life and originality

Thurman's performance is truly intriguing: Physically and verbally, you are never quite sure which direction she will go in. Under Pam MacKinnon's tight direction, Thurman slinks, stomps, charms, cajoles, threatens, and sometimes, fleetingly, she is upset. (But really, this is only fleetingly.) It's a performance that feels a little unpredictable and roughened, as if we are watching Chloe outwit not just her adversaries but also her own frazzled nerves and unseen demons.

The play is a brisk, intermission-less 80 minutes, and its problem is that every character, if not unsavory, is not that likable. Do they feel imperiled? Not really. Do we care about their relationship faultiness? No. Both couples are playing games, and both know they are playing games, and we are in on the games.

The history lesson slightly struggles to be the prime object of attention, as Leguizamo's teaching methods emerge as the true star. Morons is the most high-energy and comic history lesson you have ever sat through: a riot of figures, facts, invective, and scrawling on the chalk-board, mashed up with Leguizamo's own passions for sex and dance, and memories of his own life. Leguizamo plays himself and everyone else, from his son to his wife and daughter, to characters like the bully's father and Moctezuma.

The 95-minute musical, directed by David Cromer and first performed last year off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company, is such a contrary enterprise in many ways, not just in terms of the bright lights and brassiness one associates with Broadway musicals (it has none), but also in the story it does tell, and how that too proves to be nothing you would expect from it.

From the outset, Junk by Ayad Akhtar feels too familiar to be original-it is yet another play about greedy and venal Wall Street types behaving greedily and venally in the mid-1980s when Junk is set. Characters are variously housed in two rows of Hollywood Squares-like cells, or stalk to the front of a bare, handsomely lit stage-a dark parody of a game show, perhaps-to assail us with wry observations about capitalism. They also inform us, in their brutal, dense financial argot, about what they are about to do to buy, sell, or destroy. Each character feels familiar, each set-up feels familiar, the butch tone and swagger feels familiar. If you've seen Wall Street, or The Wolf of Wall Street, or Enron, or Margin Call, or Arbitrage, you've seen most if not all of the vital elements of Junk.

Spectacle and director Julie Taymor go together; in the case of The Lion King, award-winningly, and in the case of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, with its litany of injuries and controversies, notoriously. Comparative restraint thrums through her vision for David Henry Hwang's Tony Award-winning M. Butterfly, first produced as a play in 1988, made into a movie in 1993, and now back on Broadway. This re-invisioning of Madame Butterfly, with boundaries of gender and sexuality blurred, is subtly drawn, and not made for superheroes leaping from balconies.

This solo acoustic show is a riot of artful, sparse arrangements of Springsteen's best-known songs. It is not a conventional Broadway show, and it is not a conventional rock concert, but being beached between the two feels more intimate, both on the part of Springsteen and his fans. His constant goal, Springsteen says, is to provide both an entertaining evening 'and communicate something of value.'

There is a disconnect between the big themes of Time and the Conways and its smaller-framed domestic sagas. It's hard to like or care about the characters, who exist in two fundamentally off-putting registers: When they are up, they are rah-rah party kittens playing charades, and when they are down they are grizzly and miserable. We don't know what has happened to them, beyond a few blunt specifics like Ernest's abusiveness. It is hard what to deduce of Mrs. Conway's bizarrely inconsistent moods, or Kay's portents of doom, when both characters are given scant depth. This is an oddly airless play, and it feels even more lost in a large Broadway theater.

When they are not singing, the nine performers appear as Prince himself with glancing stories and homilies from his illustrious career, glasses perched atop their foreheads. But the contents of these narrative interjections is scant at best. We learn that musicals are tough to mount, that it's surprising when critical flops turn out to be commercial successes, and vice versa too. But there is no detail of the tough times, no indiscreet back-stage talk, and no penetrating examination of life, character, motives and desires of Prince himself, who has won a record-breaking 21 Tony Awards. Prince of Broadway is not enough about the Prince of Broadway.

If your liberal heart is mighty sore, if no amount of strongly-voiced castigation and disapproval of President Trump is too much, then documentary-maker Michael Moore's The Terms of My Surrender is for you. Left-wing politics has come overtly and brashly to Broadway-the only things missing are Trump piñatas to bash the hell out of at intermission.

What is ultimately striking about A Doll's House, Part 2 is that it is a work of equality in a play that wrestles with that very concept. It has an encompassing generosity: Every character on stage, as written by the masterful Hnath, is conceivably right, which isn't to say that their faults aren't also clearly shown too. We believe all of their emotional truths, and all their self-delusions.

The play's most significant painting, a Kandinsky, hangs over all the action-and what does its centrality finally tell us? Perhaps, for one, that this a play about the perversity of worth: of the works of art that Ouisa and Flan are so engaged in dealing with, and-in contrast-of a human life, Paul's, which they show a terrible incomprehension about. Well, it's worth a lot of money, and its deeper significance, as Paul signals to Ouisa, is one of interpretation; the two great knots-material and psychological--of the play on one canvas. In the end, Paul, whatever has happened to him, has the power of that knowledge. Which may not be worth much, but it's something.

If you are particular about Russian political and cultural history, you might want to be gripping a stress ball before taking your seat at the musical Anastasia on Broadway. If you want to watch a proudly old-school Broadway musical with the best snow effects ever (thank you, projection designer Aaron Rhyne), however, then no stress balls needed. Despite a closing curtain of narrative ambiguity, this lushly orchestrated, gently delightful musical, directed by Darko Tresnjak, takes the view that the famous daughter of the Romanovs did survive the massacre of the Russian imperial family at the hands of the Bolsheviks in 1918, and-having fallen in with a loveable conman and louche aristocrat-sets off for Paris to prove her identity to her surviving grandmother.

Why does this latest production, a production first seen in London, feel too small, too meager, and not magic enough? Charlie and the Chocolate Factory needs to go big, surely, or not at all...The show is far from a disaster, just far too timid. Borle and Flynn are charming flipsides of the same quirky coin, and as compadres are lovely to watch-even if their final glass lift journey, which modestly raises them from the ground before just as modestly bringing back them back down, seems to speak more generally to this cautious, not-outrageous-enough production. There a critically lacking wonder and magic here-and Charlie and Wonka deserve buckets of both.

Midler, taking on the role originated by Carol Channing, is marvelous, and so is the supporting cast which includes David Hyde Pierce as the gruff, befuddled, and ice-to-be-melted Yonkers storeowner Horace Vandergelder; and his initially-intended, Kate Baldwin's dress shop-owner Irene Molloy, who instead will find unlikely love with Cornelius Hackl, one of Vandergelder's shop-boys played by the all-leaping, dancing, and very funny Gavin Creel. Despite all the diva-ishness and scene-hogging required of her, Midler is also a generous performer. Hyde Pierce is given ample space to huff and puff, and steal his own scenes. The only characters ill-served by Hello, Dolly! are young lovers Ambrose the artist and Ermengarde, Horace's niece, who don't get much to do, but appear resolute (him) and weep loudly (her) in their quest to be together.

If you have the money and time, Broadway is hosting a fascinating performative parlor game. Linney and Nixon-the latter most famous for playing Miranda in Sex and The City-are playing, in different performances, both Regina Hubbard Giddens and Birdie Hubbard, the sisters-in-law and lead characters in Lillian Hellman's 1939 play (probably her most famous, and supposedly her favorite play), now a handsomely mounted Manhattan Theatre Club revival.

The play, for Vogel and Taichman who created it together, is an interrogation of the many definitions and interpretations of 'indecency'...Indecent can feel a little cluttered in its staging. Actors scurry this way and that. It is not always clear who is who, and who is speaking. Yiddish when spoken and sung has a translation projected on to the back wall. This uneven structure and pace can feel a little like casting an eye over a dense thesis with too many footnotes. But Indecent's roving eye, its busy-ness, its insistence to be about everything-homophobia, censorship, freedom of expression, tyranny-is as fascinating and genuine as it can be frustrating to watch.

This embracing of convention which Groundhog Day ultimately proposes is wrapped in a familiar redemption story. Yet the best things about Groundhog Day the musical are when the strangeness of the town, and Phil's extreme, snarled responses to it, are left on full, jangling boil. The musical is less convincing when it muffles itself to niceness; and it meanders far too lackadaisically to a conclusion. But at its center is Karl, a newly-minted Broadway hero, bravely performing through his pain. The question is, can he do this without hurting himself further, and should the producers let him: human costs versus performing costs.

In such ways does Oslo occasionally make us laugh. Indeed, there are some really excellent jokes in it, which will go unspoiled here. The absurdity of levity in the situation is as present as high-stakes political brinkmanship: Ehle is such a calm operator that the moment she freaks out at some randomly-appeared tourists is a moment of dramatic wonder. Within the conversations there are wry surprises too: In the middle of the backwards and forwards over giving up territory, and ownership of cities, one character asks another who-the Israelis and the Palestinians-will be responsible for tax and garbage collection. That's what the government really needs to get right.

After a shaky opening, War Paint heats up in the second act. The first zigzags a little fruitlessly in a search for plot and animus between its leads. It begins with a nice idea: An unseen voice baits a group of women about their beauty regimes and why they would benefit from makeup. This mini-circus of insecurities is awkwardly scored, and the orchestra-as happens occasionally elsewhere-is so loud it plays over some of the sung words.

Something in the writing of Present Laughter never raises the stakes to the level of gasping hilarity that true farce can elicit. The urbanity, wit, self-possession, and control of Garry, Monica, and Liz mean that we never think the demons they have to ward off will do as much as even graze their knees. There's no real driving plot in Present Laughter, just a battery of Coward's mots at their most bon. And like the best houseguest, just before it outstays its welcome, it takes its leave.