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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.

Prima Facie,” which opened Sunday night on Broadway, the audience is hit by two wildly different sensations.First, as we become fully absorbed by the harrowing story of Tessa, a brilliant young barrister whose life is horribly upended, there is great pain and sadness in watching her go through a trauma nobody should ever have to experience. Some viewers will be understandably overwhelmed by it all.One hour and 40 minutes with no intermission.

Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” the happily hyperactive comedy that opened Wednesday night on Broadway, provides: missteps, mayhem, incapacitations, faulty sets and, in a roundabout way, “Fawlty Towers.”The very funny British play’s premise is the season’s simplest. The amateur Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society tries to put on “Peter and Wendy” and fails epically. 2 hours and five minutes, with one intermission. At the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W.

that is the question.Running time: 1 hour and 45 minutes with no intermission.  At the American Airlines Theatre, 227 W. 42nd Street.Playwright James Ijames’ “Fat Ham,” which opened Wednesday night on Broadway, thinks so.

“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.

the new spectacle show “Life of Pi” seaworthy: stunning projections, and a better-than-necessary lead performance from the sensational Hiran Abeysekera.2 hours and 15 minutes, with one intermission. At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 W 45th Street.Working in tandem during the second act, when teenage Pi is adrift in the ocean with only dangerous zoo animals to keep him company, those fantastical images and Abeysekera’s boisterous energy create moment after moment of theatrical magic. They are sequences of pure action and ingenuity in director Max Webster’s production that do not rely on dialogue or plot to thrill us, only sheer emotion and awe.

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.

comedian Sarah Silverman’s memoir, is not as tight as a fitted sheet.Potential abounds in the tangled show, which opened Tuesday night off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company, especially in its central idea: that, to the mile-a-minute mind of a 10-year-old, waking up wearing wet pajamas can feel as emotionally traumatic as an adult dealing with divorce or depression. Life already sucks, even at 10.“The Bedwetter” uses little Sarah’s nighttime problem as an insightful window into the struggles of the eccentric grown-ups in her family. 2 hours, with one intermission.

Is this a Walther PPK which I see before me? Almost! It’s former James Bond actor Daniel Craig, who’s starring as the Scottish king killer in “Macbeth” on Broadway. His uninvolving and ponderous production (it opened Thursday night at the Longacre Theatre, but barred critics from publishing reviews till midday Friday for reasons that will soon become obvious to you) is a real Blunderball.Two hours and 20 minutes, with one intermission. At the Longacre Theatre, 220 W 48th Street.

“Ouch!” is the main takeaway of the intriguing, autobiographical new musical “A Strange Loop,” which opened Tuesday night on Broadway. It’s blow after blow after blow. And then some metaphorical slaps, kicks and scratches for good measure.

Three hours with two intermissions. At the Vivian Beaumont Theater, 150 W 65th Street.The set is the real star of “The Skin of Our Teeth,” Thornton Wilder’s geezer of a play that opened Monday night on Broadway.Up at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, designer Adam Rigg’s spectacular scenery for the revival is as mammoth as the woolly mammoth that stomps around the characters’ living room along with an adorable brachiosaurus.

You’re absolutely wracked with guilt at “Hangmen” — from laughing so hard at the many, many inappropriate jokes. A crude sight gag near the end had me practically dry heaving. That nonstop naughtiness is what makes Martin McDonagh’s killer satire the best new play on Broadway by a green mile. Two and a half hours, with one intermission.

An awkward question nags at audience members during the play “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf”: 90 minutes with no intermission. At the Booth Theatre, 222 W 45th Street.Just how relevant is this show anymore?The sluggish revival of the 1976 drama, which opened Wednesday night on Broadway, doesn’t make a particularly compelling case for its up-to-the-minute-ness.  The play comes across, unfortunately, as an antiquated time machine that’s at odds with the current conversation.

she’s never coasted.And there is poignancy to Parker and Morse reckoning with Li’l Bit and Uncle Peck after all these years. Morse, especially, humanizes the man into somebody we, at least, try to understand. One thing that is so remarkable about Parker is her comfort on a Broadway stage.

who replaced Armie Hammer) sticks in everybody’s craw as a doe-eyed, but not-so-gullible new member of the council, who was absent from the last meeting and keeps demanding to see the minutes. But they’re nowhere to be found.The secret of that document, we quickly learn, lies with Mr.

désolé. Or, perhaps, NYC should apologize for booking it.The woeful touring dance show, which opened Monday night at the Broadway Theatre, does not belong whatsoever where it’s currently situated.

There are flickers of beauty in the new play “Birthday Candles,” which opened Sunday night on Broadway.Noah Haidle’s warm-but-flawed dramedy, with great feeling and occasional poignancy, takes us through 90 years of an average Michigan woman’s life. 90 minutes, At the American Airlines Theatre, 227 W 42nd Street.Of course, when you condense nine decades into an hour and a half, both bliss and tragedy arrive faster than spam emails on a Monday. The name of Ernestine’s hometown, Grand Rapids, describes her rocky, unpredictable road well. After every victory for Ernestine (Debra Messing) — an invitation to prom, the birth of a child, the starting of a new business — a crushing blow soon follows.

who died last month, is the best musical about New York City ever written.2 hours and 30 minutes, with one intermission. At the Bernard B.

the late Robin Williams’ comedic talents been dragged onstage almost 30 years later without him? Partly as a star vehicle for Broadway favorite Rob McClure, who now plays Doubtfire a k a Daniel. 2 hours and 30 minutes, with one intermission. At the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, 124 W.