Linda Winer

“‘That Goes Wrong,’ the winner of London’s Olivier for best comedy, finds the line that separates the annoying and stupid from the I-can’t-believe-I’m-laughing-at-this brilliance.”

“The play — a psychologically serious, deliciously amusing tragicomedy — extends Ibsen’s three-act, multicharacter masterwork with just four characters in an intense but surprisingly breezy 90 minutes.”

“The writing is giddy with the excitement of ideas, some intentionally bogus, some inspirational.”

“The lyrics are self-explanatory (‘she trembles like a flower, but in her is a power’) and the songs (one sounds like ‘Officer Krupke’) are familiar.”

“For a musical about the wonder of pure imagination, ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ is bizarrely lacking in it.”

“And yet, it is the happiness exuded by Midler that makes this first-rate revival of Jerry Herman’s 1964 chestnut so delightful and, yes, so deeply touching.”

“This production does make her absence feel bigger.”

“It’s a gripping and entertaining show with laughter and tears and a real rainstorm in which two women from the marvelous 10-member cast re-enact what, in 1921, had been the first lesbian kiss on an American stage.”

“The creative team that deftly balanced the nasty with the comic in ‘Matilda’ finds at least as much special chemistry in this surreal challenge, a romantic comedy and life lesson that, in the words of one of the characters, ‘messes with the space-time continuum.’”

“This contradiction has found a blissful home as Garry Essendine, the reluctantly aging, casually devastating matinee idol in 'Present Laughter.'”

“Thanks to an excellent cast and an ace design team, we get close to slices of vivid life, sliced very thin, so the proud bones and the broken hearts become visible under the ordinary structure of the straightforward, naturalistic plot with its leisurely exposition...”

“Eva Noblezada has an enormous, poignant strength and a piercing voice that can delicately float as confidently as it blasts.”

“Theatre has put together a splendid cast — Mark Ruffalo, Tony Shalhoub, Jessica Hecht and Danny DeVito — for director Terry Kinney's straightforward and loving revival of Miller's drama about the value of things and the price of delusions.”

“The locals disarmingly embracing the gay guys and the wary New York black fellow and the Muslim, while a romance develops between the Texas woman and the man from England.”

“In the very center of that core, however, are characters with no life who spend far too much of it dreaming about and planning their weddings.”

“Ultimately, this is nothing less than an unpretentious art-history lesson, a great bittersweet love story and a close-to-the-bone consideration of art’s toll on the human psyche.”

“Like the merchandise, the show is a limited edition selling paste and glitter as treasures.”

“It's especially wonderful that, just at this Wilson moment, we have director Ruben Santiago-Hudson's authoritative 'Jitney' production of this less-known part of a masterwork.”

“This is dazzling ensemble theater, partnering Blanchett with the sly and thrilling Richard Roxburgh, her Vanya in 2012.”

“Sanitized subway musical with a capella harmonies.”

“The show is superb — original, sensitive, provocative, endearing — about so many other knowing and loving things that it’s even possible to overlook the unearned happy ending.”

“Schreiber may never seem inevitably to the manor born.”

“The show remains brave and hilarious, a charming and deeply moving treasure.”

“But the much-anticipated production, with Diane Lane at the top of a blazingly promising cast, is perplexing, stylistic gibberish.”

“The actors are back, even more nuanced and riveting, at MTC’s Broadway venue, subtly peeling layers off a vastly improbable yet profoundly believable relationship.”

“The show, iterations of which have been enthusiastically embraced on the road and Off-Broadway, bungees around with absurd, occasional cleverness, with dated references to Blue Man Group and softball observations about theater cliches.”

“For those hoping that the Roundabout Theatre Company had ambitions more challenging than perky audience bait to compete with the other moneymaking holiday offerings, well, hope elsewhere.”

“I couldn’t get beyond the sense I was hearing a radio play with plenty of sound effects and incidental visuals.”

“For the resistant rest of us, alas, ‘Cats’ remains an overblown kiddie show.”

“It is hard to imagine a better group than this one, finally, to tell the world about ‘Shuffle Along.’”

“This really is, with perhaps one miscalculation, a stunning revival of this churning family exorcism.”

“I feel the same about the future of this enchanting long-shot of a show.”

“So it feels bad to have to say this, but Ferguson, despite exhausting commitment to this demanding 80-minute comic showcase, is totally wrong for ‘Fully Committed.’”

“Instead, André gets small, time folds back and forth over itself, and all the other characters just feel like two-dimensional props for Langella’s performance.”

“In this gut-wrenching, modern-dress ‘Crucible’ — infused with the visceral suspense and the manipulative underscoring of a horror movie — the director denies us any protective distance from the cumulative modern implications of mass hysteria and hypocrisy.”

“'Bright Star' is also downright wonderful -- a multichambered sweetheart of an original that Steve Martin and Edie Brickell created for Broadway.”

“There is cause for celebration.”

“This riveting, visceral, uncompromising revival makes misgivings irrelevant.”

“And yet, given the flock of genuine experts who signed on for the spree, it does seem fair to expect more than this sporadically clever, sweetly produced, fantastically performed spoof of a passe genre — the ’70s disaster movie — in overdone jukebox musical style.”

“Radiant Nyong’o, simplistic drama.”

“And what a quietly satisfying, touching pleasure this production, staged by Tony-winning director Michael Grandage (‘Red’), turns out to be.”

“There is so much love, dread, tenderness and brutality in ‘The Humans’ that it is hard to believe just 90 minutes pass through Stephen Karam’s deeply-felt family tragicomedy thriller.”

“To describe Linda Lavin as flawless in 'Our Mother's Brief Affair' suggests we went looking for flaws, which could hardly be less true.”

“Andrea Martin at the center of a cumulatively virtuosic nine-expert ensemble of smart and fearless comic actors.”

“Sher's revival is well worth the wait.”

“Director John Doyle's passionate, scaled-down, streamlined, low-frills revival of the 2005 musical adaptation of Alice Walker's 1982. Pulitzer-winning novel is not priming us for big musical-theater gestures.”

“The kids are definitely all right in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s enjoyable show.”

“Every so often, Mamet gives him a wonderful line that sums up the dark side of humanity.”

“From those first moments, it is clear that the people behind Broadway’s adaptation of Stephen King’s popular thriller and the hit 1990 movie know exactly what they are doing.”

“Stripped of the distancing influence of Italian accents, ‘50s costumes and even of shoes, these terrific actors — all but one are Brits talking middle American — take a fierce stand on the primal nerves of jealousy, taboo, betrayal and violence so terrible it’s almost beautiful.”

“The show has fully developed characters, a strong cast and a new story to tell in an old-fashioned way.”

“The problem, which may not be a problem for many who have already pushed the advance sales into big numbers, is the by-the-numbers story.”

“Ultimately, however, the play feels more trivial than its pretense wants us to believe.”

“This is a suspenseful, beautifully staged adultery-and-murder thriller that, with the emotionally translucent Keira Knightley making her Broadway debut in the title role, left me feeling as if I had been somewhere faraway for just under three hours.”

“Despite increasingly annoying directorial exaggeration as Daniel Sullivan's production progresses, this one is another anthropomorphic lovefest on Broadway, now with an equally spectacular Annaleigh Ashford as the rescued talking pup.”

“What the musical does not have -- in addition to a breakout ingénue to elevate the unrelentingly, cheerfully lame nonsense -- is charm.”

“The partnership of Cicely Tyson and James Earl Jones comes very close.”

“Although Arianda and Rockwell have the looks, the presence and the guts, there isn't the down-and-dirty chemistry that makes the fate of the lovers' long and conflicted relationship feel inevitable and dangerous.”

“The results are moving and both visually and musically impressive, if ultimately a bit repetitious.”

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“If so, however, the truth is far too big for this Broadway package.”

“This story has less original characters and a forced peg.”

“‘The Visit’ is a haunting, haunted knot of Expressionist storytelling, a masterly 100-minute powerhouse with liltingly gruesome songs that create their own macabre world unlike anything onstage in recent memory.”

“The show's good-natured silly charms just feel hammered by an unrelenting tsunami of manic, frenetic, zanier-than-zaniest onslaught of collegiate show-biz humor.”

“In Michael Weller's fact-stuffed but monotonous adaptation, however, we never get beyond knowing that Zhivago -- and Pasternak -- suffered horribly in the early decades of last century.”

“There is something almost daring about Broadway's inexplicable insistence on throwback fluff-ball comedies this spring.”

“Surrounded by audiences, this 1 hour 40 minute nonstop treasure of invention retains the unpretentious chamber-musical feel of director Sam Gold's masterly production, while scenes from Bechdel's story rise and disappear into the floor like slippery memories on David Zinn's ingenious set.”

“Now the same creative team, including star Kelli O'Hara, has reassembled to do it again, magnificently, with ‘The King and I.’”

“For a show about releasing the imagination, the musical is surprisingly conventional -- a down-the-middle family entertainment with excellent actors.”

“Right now, lyrics that say we've ‘seen it all before’ are the truest words in the show.”

“This is the most thrilling dance-driven musical since Twyla Tharp's wordless 'Movin' Out' in 2002.”

“It is hard not to wish for something deeper from all those hours onstage.”

“For much of the rest of us, this disconcertingly wholesome new version of the 1958. Oscar-winning movie about raising a French courtesan is very pretty and bland.”

“If the rest of the night just feels like foreplay, however, that's not play enough for Broadway.”

“This is still a witty, vibrant, wonderful play, directed with layers of wisdom and an embraceable aversion to cartoon by Pam MacKinnon.”

“Chenoweth, in a role created for Madeline Kahn, picks up the torch and dashes off with it -- glittery coloratura and selective vibrato blazing -- with all the unpredictable comic timing of a dainty trucker.”

“What could have been an acting stunt is instead a rich, deep portrait of a woman who, somehow, is deeply revealed without giving much of her mysterious self away.”

“This is a comedy which, despite the occasional amusing twist, could have been written by someone who hasn't seen a play since the early days of Neil Simon.”

“‘Honeymoon in Vegas,’ based on the 1992 film, is an unexpectedly delightful, thoroughly conventional movie spinoff that isn't hard-selling anything more than a good time created by experts.”

“Sting creates different voices for different characters.”

“Brilliant Albee, but unhinged balance.”

“Condon created a big, old-fashioned, shamelessly entertaining musical that tells its human story while embracing, without forcing, issues beyond the showbiz saga of the sisters' sensational and sad freak show/vaudeville/Hollywood lives.”

“The three-character drama is emotionally exposed and intensely inconclusive -- a poetic, lusty puzzle that rivets one moment, exasperates another, and is destined to keep theatergoers arguing about its meaning all the way home, if not all season.”

“Too bad Broadway doesn't get to feel all the burn.”

“Alex Sharp, a recent Juilliard graduate in his Broadway debut, is spectacular as a boy who seldom makes eye contact, yowls when frustrated and has violent tantrums when touched.”

“Except for the fine cast led by the formidably elegant Blythe Danner, however, there is little else that feels right enough about ‘The Country House.’”

“With only two characters, this deceptively simple piece, for all its familiarity, is a beguiling and wrenching kaleidoscope of real emotions.”

“And yet Lonergan has created three surprising character studies -- complete with individual peculiarities and universal problems -- that find genuine life onstage again.”

“Cumming is better than ever -- wiser, more dissipated, even more deeply entertaining in the role he stunningly recreated from Joel Grey's iconic original.”

“Along the way, bless him, he understands how to entertain.”

“The pertinent answers are that the unlikely Broadway show and its equally unlikely star are doing splendidly.”

“Even with actors the caliber of Parsons and Spinella, however, this is a once-over-lightly insult to a subject that deserves so much more than a mechanical showcase for gold-standard performers.”

“Daniel Radcliffe is lovely as a sweet cripple in a rude satire.”

“This play about the theater has a dazzling theatrical set but a dispiriting lack of drama.”

“The last times Woody Allen wrote plays for Broadway, his single drama suggested he hadn't seen one since middle-period Arthur Miller and his comedies were a tired throwback to Neil Simon. But with 'Bullets Over Broadway,' his first Broadway musical, Allen has created an old-fashioned, madcap lark of a show that seems precisely where it belongs.”

“It's also weird and cruel and profound in all sorts of unexpected places -- as sad as life but a whole lot funnier.”

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“In this intelligent, surprising, altogether original new musical, the main character is a 39-year-old divorced woman, Elizabeth, who returns to New York after 12 years as a wife in Phoenix.”

“Cheerful, enjoyable, human-scale musical-comedy.”

“But there is a sweet center here: Karl, who imbues the Cinderella-guy story with enormous reserves of macho sensitivity and the big heart that denizens of the South Philly gym keep describing.”