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Merrily We Roll Along,” “Sweeney Todd” and final show “Here We Are” are all playing at the same time. Over in London is a sublime revue of favorite Sondheim standards called “Old Friends” at the Gielgud Theatre that’s led by a deep-feeling Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga.Two hours and 30 minutes with one intermission. At the Gielgud Theatre in London.

won Brendan Fraser the Oscar for Best Actor, was about an obese man who never left his home and was visited by his daughter and friend. Its stakes were instantly sky-high, its characters deeper, its jokes funnier and its ending devastating.

What’s missed everywhere is passion. In Sondheim’s other experimental musicals — “Assassins,” profiling presidential killers, and “Sunday In The Park With George,” about Georges Seurat’s famous painting — heat arrives in the most unexpected ways and places.

bigger.Of course, Lloyd, who directed “A Doll’s House” on Broadway last season with Jessica Chastain, isn’t this wildly imaginative production’s only risky choice.Scherzinger, from the Pussycat Dolls, is about as far away from Norma type-casting as you can possibly get. She has little in common with the Martian-esque Swanson or Glenn Close and never bothers with an eccentric turban.But her breathtaking, feral Norma is, nonetheless, a grand creature of showbiz who’s been shunned by Hollywood’s cruelly short attention span by just 40 years old.

“Book of Mormon” duo now star in “Gutenberg! The Musical!,” a hyperactive two-hander that opened Thursday night at the James Earl Jones Theatre, and their old-school chops and boisterous chemistry are why the cute off-Broadway gem has improbably wound up, as Gad’s Bud accurately puts it, “on the weird side of 7th Avenue.”“Gutenberg!” is on the weird side, all right.The appealingly nerdy show by Scott Brown and Anthony King has two equally wild identities. Call it “Mr. Hyde and Mr.

Stephen Sondheim’s 1981 show, which was a 16-performance flop when it began its life, has, against all odds, only improved as the years have rolled on. It’s better and more youthfully optimistic now than it ever was before.

during the making of “Jaws,” frequently asks whether Steven Spielberg’s seminal blockbuster is art or entertainment.History has determined that it’s both — a monster movie, yes, but one overflowing with cinematic innovation and panache that amounted to a well-deserved Best Picture Oscar nomination and enduring worldwide fame. 1 hour and 30 minutes with no intermission.

plopped a boxing ring in the middle of the orchestra nearly 10 years ago.But Huey Lewis did not sing “Power of Car,” he sang “Power of Love.” And heart is completely absent from director John Rando’s shiny and serviceable staging of the beloved 1985 science-fiction movie.Coursing emotion, teen angst and can-do scrappiness are what set director Robert Zemeckis’ original film apart from other entries in the time-travel genre. “Back To The Future” wasn’t HG Wells or “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.” And it’s hardly remembered as a flashy spectacle, either.

my ear. The gist, without revealing specifics, is that everybody is cheating on everybody else. In a 1923 English countryside abode, erudite Beau (Eric McCormack) and Sylvia (Laura Bell Bundy) are not-so-classily getting it on, when gradually they’re intruded upon by Marjorie (Lilli Cooper), Clarke (Alex Moffat), Dierdre (Dana Steingold) and Richard (the role normally played by Neham Joshi was understudy Tony Roach on the night I saw it). The group is made up of husbands, wives, exes, secret lovers and, shall we say, secret professionals, all of whom have repressed desires and grievances to air.What unravels is not so much a jolly farce of slamming doors and shocking surprises (there are a few), but a two-act parlor scene of admitted sexual indiscretions screamed so the bartenders at Sardi’s next door can follow along. You miss the old farces. There isn’t much of the hiding-in-closets fun that has long been the meat of similar comedies such as “Boeing-Boeing” and Coward’s “Present Laughter.” That’s why the amped-up energy is so jarring — for the most part, these characters simply stand together and yell. That tried-and-true farce structure — low-key witty first act, madcap second, wrapup third — is abandoned by Rustin in favor of high-energy antics from start to finish, much like Broadway’s 2021 play “POTUS” that similarly ran out of gas halfway through.Steingold, as the loopy Dierdre, runs away with “The Cottage.” Her persona, with a voice somewhere between a ghost and a drunken bridesmaid, is hilarious.

West Side Story” and “Fiddler on the Roof” in is totally unrecognizable.Once we’re acclimated to the changed space, however, we start to ask more of the story. Broadway, after all, is a vastly different place than the Public Theater where I first saw the musical in the smaller LuEsther Hall 10 years ago and liked it a hair more.

Once Upon a One More Time” — an even worse Cinderella.Two hours and 30 minutes with one 15-minute intermission. At the Marquis Theatre.The dreadful show, which opened Thursday night at the Marquis Theatre, takes the pop songs of Britney Spears and plops them willy-nilly in a feminist Cinders in which the main character realizes there’s more to life than falling in love with a prince.Good for you, Cindy, but wouldn’t it be nice if you were both a freethinking, independent woman and your musical’s story made a lick of sense?It’s bibbidi-bobbidi-brainless.

opened this week at the Lyceum Theatre, attempts to be a new horror movie on an old Broadway.Such a merger sounds smart in theory, with the genre doing reliably big business at cinemas and boasting hoards of ready-made fans. Why not produce “M3GAN Live,” or “The Nun” in two acts?Well, for one simple reason: because the kind of paralyzing fear and gruesome death that fuels horror films is just about impossible to satisfyingly replicate at the theater. 1 hour and 40 minutes with no intermission.

The Empire Strips Back,” a funny sci-fi burlesque show in the East Village, has on offer: A gung-ho evening for ticket buyers who know what made the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs and/or would like to see women tantalizingly remove articles of clothing. 1 hour and 30 minutes with no intermission.

New York, New York,” which opened Wednesday night at the St. James Theatre, is akin to being stuck on the tarmac at LaGuardia. You can spot the city’s stunning skyline taunting you from across the river — “I want to be a part of it!” you think — but then nothing happens for hours on end, as you’re silently trapped there in your uncomfortable and expensive seat.And just like the elation and relief of finally deplaning, the best part of the show comes at the very end when the cast finally sings “Theme From New York, New York.” We clap for our local anthem and get to go home. Start spreading the news — I’m leaving today!  “New York, New York” is a show that honestly hurts to dislike.

Summer, 1976,” which opened Tuesday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, generously provides — featuring the indomitable Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht.Not that you’re outside — even if Japhy Weideman’s sparkling lights warmly make you feel like you are — or that the show is all smiles. One hour and 30 minutes with no intermission.

Good Night, Oscar,” there is no doubt. Whether the end result is a human being or a bag of tricks depends on your taste for ham.One hour and 40 minutes with no intermission.

“Shucked” is the best new musical of the Broadway season so far. The Southern comfort show, with a tuneful country score by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally and a superb book by Robert Horn, is just so damn funny. If any of the outrageous yokel characters open their mouths to do anything but sing, 99% of the time they will deliver a winning joke or pun. The receptive audience sits in a state of perpetual giggle, with heads bobbing up and down like buoys. An example of the sense of humor: A scamp named Peanut (Kevin Cahoon, brilliant) is a walking Poor Richard’s Almanac who colorfully announces his unhinged, universal truths as we howl back.

Stephen Sondheim’s horror-musical in which throats are gruesomely slashed and cannibalism is positively hilarious. 2 hours and 45 minutes with one intermission. At the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 205 W.

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Bad Cinderella,” which opened Thursday night on Broadway, doesn’t have much in the way of ‘tude and swagger onstage. Or brain cells.2 and a half hours with one intermission. At the Imperial Theatre, 249 West 45th Street.It’s a mess with multiple personality disorder.

Broadway revival of “Parade,” Jason Robert Brown’s sorrowful if flawed musical about the 1915 anti-Semitic lynching of Leo Frank, is youth.Playing husband and wife Leo and Lucille Frank, Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond come across strikingly young (and at 23 years old, Diamond really is), like a faded photo of your great-grandparents that you discover in a drawer. The subjects neither smile nor frown, but behind their neutral stares is so much promise and fear.2 hours, 30 minutes, with one intermission.

revival of “A Doll’s House,” starring Oscar winner Jessica Chastain, that opened Thursday night on Broadway. Running time: 1 hour and 40 minutes. At the Hudson Theatre, 141 W.

Caroline, Or Change.” Whereas Caroline was stalwartly cold, Clarke’s Linda is an amiable “Stand By Your Man” type. She never recoils when Willy shouts at her, and in her dewy eyes he can do no wrong. At times, her constant devotion bowls you over; at others, it is one-note.And Khris Davis is Biff, the favorite son who moved out West against Willy’s wishes and can’t live up to his father’s lofty dreams.

new revival of the show that opened Thursday night on Broadway, absolutely ironclad — and able to stand up to pointless, auteurist, burdensome, woke concepts like the one on display at the American Airlines Theatre.Two hours and 40 minutes with one intermission. At the American Airlines Theatre, 227 W.

Gnossiennes No. 3” plays.

Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” similarly, is about a recently discovered reel of film that is the only evidence that thousands of murdered Jewish residents of a small Polish town ever lived. Many of their names, even so, are lost to time.The pages of Stoppard’s drama, loosely inspired by the British playwright’s own family, slowly flip like a hefty fading photo album, too, and while that strikes an appropriate tone it also creates a theatrical problem.

Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 tearjerker novel “The Kite Runner” has no shortage of terrible traumas: deaths, beatings, a rape, the disastrous takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban. To say the very least, it’s a lot.  All that immense pain could prove overwhelming for the reader, yet the author’s gift for writing sumptuous imagery and tender, nuanced relationships softens the blow.