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the musical “The Outsiders,” which opened Thursday night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, would include a song called “Stay Gold,” I laughed.Wouldn’t you? The words “Stay gold, Ponyboy,” from author S.E.

1 hour, 30 minutes, no intermission. The St.

Two hours and 30 minutes, with one intermission. At the Broadway Theatre, 53rd Street and Broadway.Forget East Egg and West Egg.

Two hours and 30 minutes. At the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, 150 West 65th Street.When Steve Carell emerges from behind a bench onstage at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, the crowd giggles automatically at the “Office” star.Now playing the hapless title role in Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” the revival of which opened Wednesday night on Broadway, the actor’s presence gets laughs before he does much of anything.

Rachel McAdams brings an instantly heartbreaking quality to her performance in “Mary Jane”: Her steadfast optimism.Writer Amy Herzog’s affecting play, which opened Tuesday night on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, is about a single mother whose 2-year-old son Alex is chronically ill. The poor kid, who the audience never fully sees, spends most of the drama in another room in bed, attached to monitors and oxygen tanks that beep and hiss.

brilliant-turned-tacky “The Crown,” the royals series that he created for Netflix, his writing about historical figures has grown animatronic and hackneyed. Mouthpiece Theater.

The other, “Back to the Future: The Musical,” did not.)Rolled out modestly, little “Heart” is also a lot more fun and proudly frivolous than any of its sober-minded neighbors. It’s perhaps the first time in my life that I’ve been happy to see a confetti cannon at curtain call.The show is hilarious, too.

as the Emcee in “Cabaret” — which includes weekly bouts of “torture.”“It’s quite full-on,” he told The Post exclusively at the show’s opening Sunday.“There is this amazing man named Greg, who is kind of a genius, body-work human being who punishes me once a week,” the actor, 42, explained. “My wife [Hannah Bagshawe] thinks it’s massage, but it’s actually a kind of borderline torture.

except for me).And, thanks to the intoxicating atmosphere created by designer Tom Scutt and Redmayne’s meticulous and freakish performance, the show does not make for an unsatisfying night out in New York. There’s plenty to admire.Yet the pricey bells and whistles distract from what is a so-so, overly dreary staging that is often undermined by its own overwrought machinations.

finally on fire. Two hours and 40 minutes, with one intermission.

Although “Stereophonic” is not a musical, it’s easy to get swept up by the terrific original rock songs that throb through it. Three hours and five minutes, with one intermission. At the John Golden Theatre, 252 West 45th Street.And as writer David Adjmi’s play, which opened Friday night at the John Golden Theatre, is set during the mid 1970s, Will Butler’s music sounds authentically of that edgier era.

2 hours and 30 minutes, with one intermission. At the Music Box Theatre, 239 W. 45th Street.The suffragist characters of the musical “Suffs,” which opened Thursday night at the Music Box Theatre, rarely take a breath to celebrate their victories.

What “Lempicka,” the mystifying new musical about Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka, needs more than anything else is turpentine.Two hours and 30 minutes, with one intermission. At the Longacre Theatre, 228 W. 48th Street.Gallons and gallons of it.Unfortunately, having garishly blared open Sunday night at the Longacre Theatre, it’s far too late for the creators to start over again on a blank canvas.And so, the ugly splatter that audiences are left to parse is a ridiculous two-and-half-hour Eurovision act with stratospheric delusions of grandeur.

It’s fair to say Meghan McCain won’t be seeing the upcoming musical comedy “Ghost of John McCain.”The 39-year-old outspoken daughter of the late Arizona senator took to X Tuesday to express her disgust about the off-Broadway musical, which is set to come to the Soho Playhouse over Labor Day weekend. The production will run through Nov. 5 – which is Election Day.“This is trash – nothing more than a gross cash grab by mediocre desperate people,” Meghan quote tweeted a Deadline article about the production.

and an inner child is a deeply relatable idea, even in a cuckoosical such as this one.David Korins’ set of spaceship white-neon frames is more streamlined than past “Tommy’s,” but it’s used so deftly by McAnuff, lighting designer Amanda Zieve and choreographer Lorin Latarro to paint lush and kaleidoscopic stage pictures. Most wouldn’t call this musical a dance show, but Lotarro’s thrilling choreography makes a case for that category.

shuttered “Harmony” was the first, followed by “The Notebook” — this latest lacking musical features a score by PigPen Theatre Co. and a hokey book by Rick Elice.

which last played Broadway 12 years ago, is the sort of not-quite-ripped-from-the-headlines play that could be about any fill-in-the-blank issue that’s on the viewer’s mind that day. It’s relevant by design.Exhibiting restraint — well, almost — director Sam Gold avoids making obvious modern parallels to needlessly buttress its potency.

according to IMDB’s Box Office Mojo.. Domestically, the film’s made more than $86.5 million in its first two weeks in theaters.The Post said that Jack Black-helmed feature, “while nice enough, suggests that the smartest move would be to let the fuzzy guy retire to a calming bamboo forest rather than embark on yet another predictable adventure.”“Dune: Part Two” — director Denis Villeneuve’s epic sci-fi desert flick — managed to hold onto the #2 spot during its third week of release, taking in $8.15 million.“Arthur the King” on Friday sold more than $3 million in tickets, nabbing the No.

a popular movie starring a young Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. Like Pavlov’s pups, millennials habitually sob during that 2004 film, and the production has seized upon its teary reputation by selling branded tissue boxes. During the final 10 minutes, the noses are deafening.I suspect, however, that it is audience members’ fond memories of the movie and book, more so than the merely pleasant proceedings in the theater, that are prying open their tear ducts.Because as elegantly staged as “The Notebook” is by co-directors Michael Greif and Schele Williams, and despite boasting an appealing cast, the show amounts to a series of un-involving pencil sketches rather than a layered portrait of a decades-long love.Not a single change book writer Bekah Brunstetter has made improves the simple story’s effectiveness.

a hilariously scheming Mary Todd Lincoln who dreams of returning to her cabaret roots, but she’s stuck aimlessly wandering around the White House while unhappily married to Abe Lincoln.The deliciously demented mind behind this inspired lunacy is Cole Escola (who uses they/them pronouns), who wrote and stars as the titular subject opposite Broadway star Conrad Ricamora.In a recent interview, Escola, 37, told the New York Post that the genesis for “Oh, Mary!” came about over a decade ago in 2009.“I loved the idea so much that I was scared to write it,” they shared. “Because I wanted it to be as perfect as I had it in my mind.”But the COVID-19 pandemic helped the writing process along.“I had nothing going on,” Escola continued.

LOS ANGELES — As Universal Pictures prepared for a big night at the Academy Awards with “Oppenheimer,” the studio also celebrated the No. 1 debut of “Kung Fu Panda 4,” which collected $58.3 million in domestic theaters over the weekend, according to estimates Sunday.“Kung Fu Panda 4,” the first film in the DreamWorks Animation franchise since the third installment in 2016, got off to a better start than all but the 2008 original.

John Patrick Shanley’s scorching drama about a nun who suspects the parish pastor of being a child molester.90 minutes with no intermission. At the Todd Haimes Theater, 227 W.

How am I laughing so uncontrollably at a play about Mary Todd Lincoln?Yes, Abraham Lincoln’s wife is the subject of this riotous new comedy at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, written by and starring Cole Escola, that definitely does not aim to teach your anything or challenge your brain cells. Rather, the campy “Oh, Mary!” is too busy daring your lungs to stay full of air for more than a few seconds.

the streamer’s freshman attempt at a stage play is a huge, insufferable embarrassment.Mega-fans of the TV series, like me, will be extremely disappointed by how the live show, which opened Thursday night at the Phoenix Theatre in London, epically fails to conjure the magic and small-town charm of the Duffer brothers’ popular creation. Three hours, plus an intermission.

about the dance. Instead, that climactic event allows the viewer to meet the documentary’s extraordinary subjects and gain a deeper, more human understanding of what their daily lives are like. Unlike the overblown musical, the doc is not excessively and damagingly weighty.

To watch “Hell’s Kitchen,” the new off-Broadway musical by Alicia Keys that opened Sunday night at the Public Theater, is to experience euphoria followed by enormous frustration over and over again. How can we not feel elated being there for the star-is-born moment of actress Maleah Joi Moon, who makes an earth-shaking professional debut as 17-year-old Ali, a fictional stand-in for Keys?Two hours and 30 minutes, with one intermission.

Monty Python would often dryly announce, “and now for something completely different.”Well, not much is different about the revival of “Monty Python’s Spamalot,” the musical that’s based on their 1975 film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” that opened Thursday night at the St. James Theatre.

the musical “Parade” and Tom Stoppard’s play “Leopoldstadt.” The problem is that while “Harmony” is about a sextet of singers whose voices blend like milk and coffee, its elements do not similarly fuse into a cohesive and satisfying musical.The show, directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, has been tinkered with by Manilow and lyricist/book-writer Bruce Sussman for nearly 30 years, but on its largest stage yet it still doesn’t quite work.Structural flaws that were mostly forgivable when the production played the more intimate Museum of Jewish Heritage downtown last year are detrimentally exacerbated by Broadway’s imposing size. The musical, therefore, is lopsided.

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.