★★★★★ In Tom Stoppard’s brilliant, moving new play, very smart people grapple with very big questions
What to Send Up When It Goes Down: Making Black Lives Matter Through Art
★★★★☆ Aleshea Harris’s new play and “ritual” commemorates violence and a celebrates a community’s resilience
The Prom: Bringing Red and Blue Together with Song and Dance
★★★☆☆ Broadway actors invade a Midwestern town to help a teenage lesbian, and themselves, in a new musical comedy helmed by Casey Nicholaw
Thom Pain (based on nothing): Life, the Art of the Possible
★★★★☆ Will Eno’s early one-man play is revived, its brutality and beauty intact
King Kong: The Beast Is Us, with Special Effects
★★☆☆☆ 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