★★★★☆ Two gifted first-timers, the Brothers Lazour, find melody and hope in recent historical events marked as much by defeat as by triumph
Man in the Ring: Forgiven for Killing, Condemned for Love
★★★★☆ Shadow Box author shadow-boxes with charismatic real-life champ, wins on points
Anastasia: Journey to the Musical Past
★★★★☆ Long-Run Lookback: McNally, Ahrens and Flaherty ransack the operetta playbook, with pleasing results
Man of La Mancha: Still True to Its Glorious Quest
★★★★☆ Director Mark Lamos invests a musical theater perennial with novelty and life
The Black Clown: Racial Pride Triumphant in Entertaining Showcase
★★★★★ A classic poem becomes a stunning music theater piece celebrating identity and dignity in the face of oppression
Petrified Forest, Sister Mary Ignatius: Revivals Under the Berkshire Elms
Harriet Harris shines as Chris Durang’s nutty nun, while Robert E. Sherwood’s vintage melodrama just shines, period.
West Side Story: Reproducing a Classic With Sincerity, and Safety
★★★★☆ 100th birthday tributes to Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins yield a familiar but affecting take on timeless material.
Lempicka: Art for Art’s Ache in the 20th Century
★★☆☆☆ An ambitious but unfocused musical gives a great, underappreciated 20th century female artist too much of a brush-off
The Closet: A Gay Deceiver for a New Century
★★★☆☆ Matthew Broderick shines in Douglas Carter Beane’s uneven comic vision of a post-bigotry, Freak Flags Flying modern America