Ben Brantley

““Is This a Room,” which opened on Monday at the Lyceum Theater, turns the ums and stutters and bizarre non sequiturs of recorded speech into astonishing — and astonishingly emotional — theater.”

“But I fail to detect a natural rhyme or reason for the way video is used here, aside from the location street shots that often provide backdrops for outdoor scenes.”

“When Lucy says, with a satisfaction that’s bigger than happiness, that “all life amazes me,” we feel exactly what she means.”

“While retaining the jolliness and sentimentality associated with some 170 years’ worth of stage versions (including a competitive flock that opened the year after its publication), Thorne and Warchus have polished the story’s social conscience to a restored brightness.”

“Ambition and achievement are not entirely commensurate in “The Inheritance.””

“This triumphantly revitalized musical has its own sly message for an era in which celebrity is regarded as a constitutional right: Embrace fame at your peril.”

“The everyday poison known as toxic masculinity becomes dangerously easy to swallow in “Linda Vista,” Tracy Letts’s inspired, ruthless take on the classic midlife-crisis comedy.”

“Allowing for Serafina’s tendency to hyperbole, she might be talking about the production in which she appears.”

“This British version is the most merciless and empathic interpretation of this much performed work I’ve seen, and it keeps returning to my thoughts in piercing shards, like the remnants of a too-revealing dream.”

“This production doesn’t slow down long enough to provide the necessary undergirding for “A Life” to pack the emotional punch it’s aiming for.”

“In “Moulin Rouge,” life is beautiful, in a way reality never is.”

“Ms. McDonald and Mr. Shannon achieve something close to perfection in their portrayal of two lonely souls who find temporary refuge in each other's arms.”

“The disheartening moral of “Beetlejuice” is that when anything goes, nothing much registers in the end.”

““Ink” charts Murdoch’s seduction of one Larry Lamb (Jonny Lee Miller), an editor steeped in the old-school values of Fleet Street, then the main artery of British journalism.”

“This is Hillary’s life as it was, is and apparently ever will be, even in an alternative universe.”

“The gods, or more likely Ms. Chavkin and her creative team, have saved “Hadestown” on its way uptown — via Edmonton and London — by turning it into something very much warmer, if not yet ideally warm.”

“What we have in this case is a one-man conflagration.”

“Making his Broadway debut as a director, Mr. Fish has reconceived a work often seen as a byword for can-do optimism as a mirror for our age of doubt and anxiety.”

“But much of what surrounds her in this glittery, haphazard production seems to be working overtime to divert attention from that performance.”

“That’s the urge being translated with such sublime grace by those five natty men on the stage, Platonic ideals of stepping high and looking fine.”

“As embodied by a brilliant Ethan Hawke, in full-menace mode, and a tightly wired Paul Dano, everyday sibling rivalry has seldom felt this ominous.”

“Whether Mr. McCraney is formulating a new aesthetic or just extending an old one familiar from “issue” plays of the past, the result is a script, or at least a production, that is far more powerful than its flaws might indicate.”

“If the bravura dementia of his Howard makes much of the rest of the show seem as two-dimensional as a flat TV screen, it’s a trade-off I’m willing to accept, albeit with a sigh.”

“And, as embodied by Michael Urie in the happy revival of Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song,” which opened on Thursday night, Arnold is just the guy and gal to pull you out of your election-season weariness.”

“That’s what makes “The Waverly Gallery” a work of such hard, compassionate clarity.”

“By the end of this magnificent drama, Mr. Butterworth has connected the contradictions with a skill that takes the breath away.”

“That’s where Mr. Bean’s delicious new comedy “The Nap” opened on Thursday night, directed with an assured balance of blatancy and subtlety by Daniel Sullivan.”

“That’s more than a wicked valentine: It’s a vision.”

“'Pretty Woman: The Musical' lowers the already ground-scraping bar for literal-minded adaptations of film to stage.”

““Head Over Heels” lacks the courage of its contradictions.”

“But in mannerisms and voice, this guy is too tight, too cautious to be the extravagant, escapist playboy he is said to be.”

“Mr. Wolfe has filled the stage with such delectably seasoned hams, who lap up limelight the way their characters throw back booze.”

“Despite the exciting vocalism of a cast led by the formidable LaChanze, it reduces the late Queen of Disco and pioneer of electronica to a few factoids and song samples that make her seem profoundly inconsequential.”

“What emerges from the churning wash of “Travesties” is one of the sweetest, sauciest and strangest defenses of art ever to land on a stage.”

“The tragic inevitability of “Carousel” has seldom come across as warmly or as chillingly as it does in this vividly reimagined revival.”

“Ms. Ridloff, who is deaf, gives a performance of such fervor and clarity that she seems to be speaking in a language more eloquent than words.”

“The show itself suffers from a similar indecisiveness, especially in its structure.”

“For one thing, much of what they have to say is both achingly funny and so pathetic it verges on tragic.”

“Its subject — not to put too fine a point on it — is life itself, and its defiant, forward-moving persistence through plagues and persecution, failing bodies and broken hearts.”

“And they honor a play that despite its frailties and wrinkles has aged beautifully, into a burning, raving classic.”

“The question for me is whether Disney, with the endless resources and talent at its disposal, wants to make its own magical transformation into adulthood.”

““Hamilton,” it seems — especially as led by its incendiary newborn star, Mr. Westman — can make a traitor of any English citizen for a night.”

“Mark Rylance is once again ruling audiences at the Belasco Theater, where the strangely enchanting “Farinelli and the King,” Claire van Kampen’s shimmering fairy tale for grown-ups, opened on Sunday night.”

“The naturalness of Mr. Macdonald’s stage movement in such a confined space (to say nothing of Peter Mumford’s baleful lighting and projection design) is central to the containment of energy that makes the play thrilling.”

“If you are none of the above, you will find your patience sorely tested.”

“What a delight it is to enter the world of “Once on This Island.””

“Maybe it’s just as well that Mr. Martin, after two previous productions of “Meteor Shower” and lots of rewriting, decided to settle for the jokes; despite them and the delicious tightness of its form, there isn’t much else to it.”

“Nothing is as beautiful as something you don’t expect.”

““Risk” may be the watchword of its protagonist, the monomaniacal Robert Merkin (a miscast Steven Pasquale), yet “Junk” feels almost numbingly safe.”

“In this incarnation, we’re not being seduced, but preached at.”

“Jolly for them, that is; tedious for us.”

“Watching this production’s overtaxed ensemble perform vignettes from different musicals, in an oppressive succession of themed wigs and costumes, is like hearing a rushed raconteur drop name after famous name, without bothering to explain their significance.”

“But it is somehow, also, fatally mild.”

“This unexpectedly rich sequel reminds us that houses tremble and sometimes fall when doors slam, and that there are living people within, who may be wounded or lost.”

“Mr. Hawkins, best known for his performance as Dr. Dre in the film “Straight Outta Compton,” gives us a Paul who is a truth-teller in spite of himself.”

“The show in which she appears trembles nonstop with internal conflicts during its drawn-out two-and-a-half hours.”

“Only in its second half does the show acquire a distinct taste, and it definitely isn’t confectionary.”

“Ms. Midler brings such comic brio — both barn-side broad and needlepoint precise — to the task of playing with her food that I promise you it stops the show.”

““Groundhog Day” reimagines a much-loved film about instant karma with such fertile and feverish theatrical imagination that you expect it to implode before your eyes.”

“They're strategically deploying the knowledge and craft of a combined eight decades in musicals to make us believe that the show in which they appear is moving forward, instead of running in place in high heels.”

“Mr. Kline, I am delighted to report, fully delivers on the promise of that entrance, building a paradoxically natural performance as a man for whom the histrionic gesture is a conditioned reflex.”

““Amélie” the musical seems to have no nationality, or sensibility, to call its own.”

“Everything is pitched so aggressively, you wind up feeling as battered as the ensemble.”

“For that reason alone, the arrival on Broadway of “Sweat,” which originated at the fertile Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was previously staged in New York at the Public Theater, warrants serious applause.”

“The “gadzooks!” arrival of the helicopter isn’t the only way in which this tale of love, betrayal and sacrifice in the last days of the Vietnam War summons the gaslight era.”

“Even the most stalwart cynics may have trouble staying dry-eyed during this portrait of heroic hospitality under extraordinary pressure.”

“Though Mr. Glick is very good and, I think, rather brave in following Jordan’s path from adorable to irritating, his company does start to pall after a certain point.”

“The audacity of this performance is matched by its veracity.”

“Acted by an impeccably tuned ensemble, this early work from an American master makes you realize how much the New York theater has missed the voice of Wilson, who died in 2005.”

“But here Ms. Blanchett’s take-charge inventiveness is as sorely taxed as that of her character.”

“Acknowledging this is rather like admiring the ingenuity that must have gone into a sentimental picture of a rainbow, perhaps with the Care Bears in the foreground, rendered entirely in bottle caps.”

“What’s more, this gorgeous heartbreaker of a musical, which opened at the Theater on Sunday, has grown in emotional potency during its journey to the big leagues, after first being produced in Washington and Off Broadway.”

“There’s hardly a moment in the exhilarating, devastating revival of the musical “Falsettos” that doesn’t approach, or even achieve, perfection.”

“The combination of Mr. Lane’s all-consuming passion for the theater and Walter’s for getting the story makes the endangered profession of print journalism feel, for a flickering moment, like the most vital job on the planet.”

“This frenzied, flashy take on one family’s mortgage crisis may be the most clueless interpretation of Chekhov I have seen.”

“More like a prematurely hung Christmas stocking smelling faintly of mothballs.”

“And, oh, the pleasure of their company.”

“Note to Ms. Lynne: Mild battery would really be sufficient.”

“Firsthand accounts suggest that the real Lottie Gee possessed those same traits.”

““Tuck Everlasting,” a warm-spirited and piercingly touching musical that has nothing flashy or splashy about it.”

“Ms. Mueller’s vibrant performance of this gentle but wrenching song, featuring a melody that soars and then recedes in waves, is the high point of the show — and for that matter a high point of the Broadway season.”

“Of course, it could be argued that the “American Psycho” team has done its job too well, since you’re also likely to identify with Patrick when, shortly before he crucifies a young woman with a nail gun, he concludes solemnly that there’s “not one clear, identifiable emotion within me.””

“What you do doubt, as you watch them have at one another onstage, is that they are members of the same family, bound by blood ties that will ultimately strangle them.”

“Before you know it, you’ve walked straight into his head, and what a lonely, frightening, embattled place it is.”

“"'She Loves Me' is a sustained reminder of the pleasures of exalted ordinariness...It succeeds in making you feel personally engaged by every one of its seven principal characters...It’s a world where even office antagonisms and anxiety can find an up-tempo synchronicity.”

“And an endlessly revived historical drama from 1953 suddenly feels like the freshest, scariest play in town.”

“What follows is definitely fraught, with the sort of acting that triggers seismometers.”

“In Michael Grandage's gentle, churning dream of a revival of Eugene O'Neill's 'Hughie'...Erie is portrayed by that excellent actor Forest Whitaker, in a transfixing yet modest Broadway debut. Mr. Whitaker provides all the anchoring physical detail that you might expect from his meticulously observed screen performances...Yet as you watch Mr.”

“With or without those ominous suggestions that the American family as we know it is under existential threat, “The Humans” is a major discovery, a play as empathetic as it is clear-minded, as entertaining as it is honest.”

“Ms. Lavin fulfills these demands with such thoroughness and subtlety that I wish the play that surrounds her were more compellingly realized.”

“Once it hits its lively stride, Mr. Herrin’s production rollicks along with machine-tooled precision, churning out belly laughs as if from an assembly line.”

“It will stay contentedly aloft for the next 2 hours and 50 minutes.”

“In the meantime, family audiences should be grateful for a Lloyd Webber show that only wants to have fun and hopes that you do, too.”

“Here, as he imparts his wisdom to the young Carson between confrontational phone calls, Mr. Pacino’s Mickey stretches every sentence into its own self-contained, crumbling, leaning tower of words.”

“This must be what Greek tragedy once felt like, when people went to the theater in search of catharsis.”

“If anything, the authors, feeling the responsibility of illuminating this shameful chapter in American history, pack the show with so much incident and information that “Allegiance” often feels more like a history lesson than a musical.”

“"On Your Feet!" ultimately falls somewhere in the middle of the hefty pack of jukebox musicals that have plugged in to Broadway's power strip.”

“What could have been only a cleverly executed stunt is instead an intellectually and emotionally gripping study of the strangely enduring anachronism that is the British monarchy.”

“Like these characters’ lives, their erotic encounters are nasty, brutish and short.”

“The gimmick of “Sylvia,” which is indeed a comedy — albeit a trifling one — resides in the casting of an actor as Sylvia.”