★☆☆☆☆ Glitter ball melodramatics are rolled up into an unworkable musical
Off-Broadway
Smokey Joe’s Cafe: That Leiber & Stoller Jukebox Lights Up Once More
★★★★☆ An expert, energetic company makes the musical most of several dozen old-school rock ‘n’ roll tunes
Fiddler on the Roof: ‘If I Were a Rothschild,’ in Yiddish
★★★★☆ Fiddler retains full enchantment in Joel Grey’s Yiddish-language production
The Originalist: Antonin Scalia v. a Liberal Clerk With Hot Results
★★★★☆ John Strand pits conservatism against liberalism in a play as timely as they come
The Damned: Arms and the Man in the Third Reich
★★★★☆ Ivo van Hove returns to town with a stunning, tour-de-force version of the Visconti film classic
The Damned: Ivo van Hove Goes About Theatricalizing Visconti
★★★☆☆ The challenging story of a steel manufacturing family in 1933 Germany struggling to survive
Fire in Dreamland: A Coney Island Cyclone, With Thrills and Twists
★★★★☆ Rinne Groff’s meditation on dreams and reality, devastation and redemption, packs a lot into a short ride
Fire in Dreamland: Rinne Groff’s New Drama Has Trouble Igniting
★★★☆☆ A woman hoping to make something of her life latches on to an ambivalent moviemaker
Mary Page Marlowe: Six Actresses, One Amazing Woman
★★★★★ Tracy Letts returns to the Midwest with a subdued but stunning play about someone “unexceptional”
Mary Page Marlowe: The Six Ages of Woman
★★★☆☆ Tracy Letts returns with an intriguing notion for a play, perhaps too streamlined for coherence