Theater Reviews

Nostalgia will undoubtedly lure many to a London revival of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. It has more in common with a theme park than with theater, our critic writes.

Is moral leadership possible without parliamentary power? Two very familiar congresswomen battle it out onstage.

Elevator Repair Service’s staged reading of the huge James Joyce novel retains much of its humor, pathos and bawdiness.

A family gathering fuels Crystal Finn’s new play, in which an excellent cast teases out the many complications of inheritance.

Resetting the “Memory” musical in the world of ballroom competitions makes for a joyful reincarnation.

Marin Ireland’s play opens with Tatiana Maslany in a rotating cast of stars, and “What Became of Us” continues its own experiment with changing casts.

A play from Denmark, with a South African cast, turns the heroic tropes of horse operas into the tools of tragedy at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.

A somber yet witty play set in 18th-century England is a clever perversion of a courtroom drama that features strong performances from an ensemble cast.

Her frenetic new dance-theater work, which opens a new festival at the new park on the Hudson, includes references to Camus and music by T Bone Burnett.

Maury Yeston’s score, stupendously played and sung, is the star of the final production of an excellent Encores! season at New York City Center.

Samm-Art Williams’s 1979 play about the uprooting of a Black farmer returns to Broadway for the first time.

Shayan Lotfi’s topical play about a family building a new life in a new country leaves the details vague, deliberately.

Maggie Siff plays a war journalist facing the most dangerous assignment of her life: domesticity.

The Irish Rep ends its season-long Brian Friel survey with the story of a blind woman who undergoes an operation to try to restore her sight.

How do you bring an almost plotless book of elliptical fragments to the stage? The director Katie Mitchell has tried with three actors, four screens and three bottles of whiskey.

Raja Feather Kelly makes his playwriting debut with a spellbinding story of three generations of Black men at Soho Rep.

In José Rivera’s latest play, a Puerto Rican family moves to Long Island in 1960, contending both with Hurricane Donna and their neighbors’ hostility.

A production at the Shakespeare’s Globe theater faced criticism because a nondisabled actor plays the scheming king. But disputes like these miss the point, our critic writes.

T. Adamson’s new comedy, which opens Clubbed Thumb’s popular Summerworks series at the Wild Project, is about a group of worked-up Franciscan friars.

A hit at Edinburgh Fringe last year, Julia Masli’s show arrives at SoHo Playhouse for its New York debut.

Lauren Patten and Taylor Iman Jones star in an achingly romantic, softly sexy new musical by Rachel Bonds and Zoe Sarnak.

It’s open mic at the post-pandemic cocktail bar where Dave Malloy’s hypnotic triptych of monodramas takes place.

While poking fun at her own agreeable malleability, Benanti flexes her talents in a show that will be available on Audible, without the physical dimension.

Improv adds a theatrical dimension to the role-playing game, which has been undergoing a renaissance as it turns 50 this year.

Julia May Jonas turns the menacing male siblings of Sam Shepard’s “True West” into squabbling pregnant sisters in Vermont.

The French writer Laurent Gaudé taps into collective trauma from the Nov. 13, 2015 terrorist outrage and channels it into something like catharsis.

Maia Novi stars in her play about a Hollywood-struck actress from Argentina who stops at Yale’s drama school and an inpatient psych ward on her way.

Laura Winters’s romantic comedy pays careful attention to the dynamics of living with disabilities.

Archivists are the heroes of a documentary play about a photograph album depicting daily life among the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

A quirky and joyful play based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s books joined weightier works at this year’s Theatertreffen drama festival.

A stage production of the beloved Studio Ghibli movie is big on spectacle, but rarely grabs the heart.

Abigail and Shaun Bengson muse on death in their latest work, but its looseness makes it hard to get a handle on.

This Molière in the Park production doesn’t have the sharp satirical bite of the original.

Benedict Andrews’s production in London offers perfectly pitched comedy where other directors find somber tragedy.

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s co-artistic directors have put together a challenging debut season. But many visitors come to Stratford-upon-Avon seeking something more traditional.

Restaurant patrons and staff members are oblivious to the impending apocalypse in Abe Koogler’s new show at Playwrights Horizons.

Elfriede Jelinek’s latest play deals with collective calamity and individual grief, but is let down by a chaotic production.

The revival of a 2006 work by Thomas Jolly, the director masterminding the opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics, shows his gift for visual flamboyance.

Alternating between funny and bleak, the Public Theater’s latest production tackles race and the modern workplace.

This musical adaptation, now on Broadway, is a lot of Jazz Age fun. But it forgot that Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel endures because it is a tragedy.

Jessica Lange stars as a ferocious matriarch alongside Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jim Parsons in Vogel’s latest family drama.

Sleek, lucid, amusing, often beautiful, it’s Chekhov with everything, except the main thing.

In this revival of Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of the Woolf novel, now starring Taylor Mac, the flashes of comedy can’t make up for the loss of poetry.

Amy Herzog’s heartbreaker arrives on Broadway with Rachel McAdams as the alarmingly upbeat mother of a fearfully sick child.

The new musical doesn’t take itself too seriously and has many winning moments — almost enough to eclipse the weaknesses of its story.

Michael Stuhlbarg and Will Keen shine as a kingmaker and his creature. But in Peter Morgan’s cheesy-fun play, it’s not always clear which is which.

At St. Ann’s Warehouse, this documentary play about a London fire is blood-boiling and aggrieved.

Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin star in a buzzy Broadway revival that rips the skin off the 1966 musical.

The retooled jukebox musical, with its top-notch performances and exciting choreography, “stands out as one of the rare must-sees” in a crowded season.

Despite a juicy premise, this Colt Coeur production, starring Tim Daly and Jayne Atkinson, never manages to take off.

In David Adjmi’s new play, with songs by Will Butler, a ’70s band’s success breeds tension, and punches up the volume on Broadway.

Shaina Taub’s new Broadway musical about Alice Paul and the fight for women’s suffrage is smart and noble and a bit like a rally.

The musical traces the story of Black twin sisters who pass as white, and exact their own form of justice for the crime of slavery, in 19th-century Texas.

Almost 50 years after it debuted, this classic Black take on “The Wizard of Oz” tries to update its original formula.

The 30-year relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson is the basis for Suzan-Lori Parks’s hilarious and harrowing nesting doll of a play.

A musical about the groundbreaking Art Deco painter is vocally thrilling but historically a blur.

The Wooster Group’s staging of Richard Foreman’s play operates like a delightful love letter from one giant of experimental theater to another.

In Robert Icke’s adaptation of Parts 1 and 2 of “Henry IV,” the veteran stage actor’s performance belies his age.

The classic coming-of-age novel has become a compelling, if imperfect, musical about have-not teenagers in a have-it-all world.

In his new show, James Harrison Monaco blends storytelling and electronic beats in service of curiosity and escape.

New productions of “Macbeth” and “Hamlet” follow a French tradition of adapting familiar works. The results are innovative, and sometimes cryptic.

Jesús I. Valles’s prizewinning play gets a stage at the Flea, but the ambitious work about queer history proves too difficult to wrangle.

Will the Who’s rock opera about a traumatized boy hit the jackpot again?

Ivo van Hove’s stage adaptation of the 1977 John Cassavetes film, with music by Rufus Wainwright, turns a taut character study into a corny melodrama.

Kate Taney Billingsley’s play starts with a fictional apology, but then segregated choirs and a racist waitress create tonal dissonance.

“For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy” and “Red Pitch” offer generous portrayals of male bonding.

In his solo show, the screen and stage star shines a light into his formative dark corners and on the people who made an impression.

The circus-themed love story, already a novel and a movie, becomes a gorgeously imaginative Broadway musical.

In Charles Busch’s satire of Henrik Ibsen’s plays, a widow faces a rather catty fight to save her husband’s legacy.

A cult horror film about a teenage girl with a surprise set of chompers gets another surprise: the song-and-dance treatment.

The “Succession” star headlines a Broadway revival of Ibsen’s play about a lifesaving doctor and the town that hates him.

The 2004 weepie comes to Broadway with songs by Ingrid Michaelson and a $5 box of tissues.

In Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Lucy Prebble’s play, Paapa Essiedu and Taylor Russell are a couple who fall in love during a pharmaceutical trial.

A new play by J.T. Rogers goes behind the scenes of the shady “news-gathering” that rocked Rupert Murdoch’s British media empire over a decade ago.

The creators of “The Band’s Visit” return with this mischievous ghost story of a musical based on an odd slice of Old West history.

Liev Schreiber and Amy Ryan star in a revival of John Patrick Shanley’s moral head spinner about pride, the priesthood and presumptions of pedophilia.

Sufjan Stevens’s 2005 concept album has become an unlikely and unforgettable dance-musical hybrid, directed and choreographed by Justin Peck.

Romeo Castellucci’s production of the classic play by Jean Racine is all about the lead performer — and that’s it.

Zach Zucker delivers a raucously funny portrait of a catastrophically dim stand-up comic at SoHo Playhouse.

John Patrick Shanley’s new play, starring Cecily Strong and David Zayas, is a romantic comedy with a penchant for the resolutely dismal.