★★☆☆☆ A new, extravagant musical adaptation offers a feminist but emotionally exploitative take on the classic tale
Usual Girls: Aching Just Like A Woman, and Breaking Too
★★★★☆ Ming Peiffer charts the fraught, funny, frightful journey from female adolescence to womanhood in a stirring new play
American Son: Modern Injustice, Wrought As Melodrama
★★☆☆☆ Topical and vital concerns get mired in banality in the new play marking Kerry Washington’s return to Broadway
Torch Song: Fierstein’s Epic, Shorter But Fierce and Funny As Ever
★★★★☆ Michael Urie shines in a condensed version of Harvey Fierstein’s still-pertinent, piercing and accessible comedy
Days of Rage: Talking About a Revolution, 50 Years Back
★★★☆☆ The latest from Dear Evan Hansen playwright Steven Levenson follows young protesters in a divided nation
The Niceties: Inside Ivy Walls, No Room For Empathy
★★☆☆☆ Two women separated by age and race find no common humanity in Eleanor Burgess’s dispiriting new play
Lewiston/Clarkston: A Western Landscape, Majestic and Tragic
★★★★★ Samuel D. Hunter surveys the America we still don’t know well enough in his beautiful, haunting two-part play
Mother of the Maid: A Soldier and Her Other Heart
★★★★★ Glenn Close brings Joan of Arc’s mother to radiant life in a luminous account of women’s strength, and love
Popcorn Falls: Small-Town Drama, Played For Laughs
★★★☆☆ Christian Borle directs two other facile funny men in a play by James Hindman.
On Beckett: Clowning in the Dark
★★★★☆ Bill Irwin offers an exuberant homage to a master of bleakness