BROADWAY & ME QUICKIES

The Play: Left on Tenth; an adaptation of Delia Ephron’s memoir about falling in love again after the death of her husband and then having to fight the medical crisis that threatened to cut short that new happiness  Written by: Delia Ephron        Directed by: Susan Stroman One good thing: Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher are the show’s marquee-name leads but its true MVPs are Peter Francis James and Kate MacCluggage who play more than a half dozen roles each and find ways to make every one of them distinctive One not-so-great thing: Neither Ephron nor Stroman has figured out how to transfer the story from the page to the stage and they lean so much on direct-address narration that the result is too much tell and far too little actual show.     

The Play: We Live in Cairo, six young people—one of them played by Ali Louis Borzgui, who broke out in last season’s too-short-lived revival of “The Who’s Tommy”—live, love and put themselves on the line for democracy in this musical set in Egypt during the Arab Spring of 2011 and its aftermath Written by: The Lazours        Directed by: Taibi Magar One good thing: It’s great to get a story about a major historical event like the Arab Spring told by Arab writers, an Arab director and an entirely Arab cast One good thing:   David Bengali’s dynamic video projections are immersive, informative and occasionally gorgeous One not-so-great thing: The brothers Daniel and Patrick Lazour who collaborated on the book, music and lyrics pack in so much of what happened during that tumultuous period that they don’t leave room for much character development     

The Play: Romeo + Juliet; this 21st century spin on the classic love story, which features inclusive and gender-bending casting, music by the hip producer and frequent Taylor Swift collaborator Jack Antonoff and Gen-Z idols Kit Connor and Rachel Ziegler in the title roles, is designed to appeal to young theatergoers and other young people the producers obviously hope to attract  Written by: William Shakespeare        Directed by: Sam Gold One good thing: Connor is everything you’d want in a Romeo: swoon-worthy, suitably sensitive and able to speak the Bard’s language beautifully One not-so-great thing: All the double and triple casting— one example: Juliet’s Nurse and the hothead Tybalt are played by the same actor — makes it hard to follow who’s doing what to whom, especially since costume changes are so rare and so random     

The Play: Franklinland; the sometimes fraught relationship between fathers and sons is filtered through a somewhat comic treatment of the fractious one between Founding Father Benjamin Franklin and his son William who sided with the British  Written by: Lloyd Suh        Directed by: Chika Ike One good thing: Designer Riw Rakkulchon’s picturesque set is richly detailed, especially given what must have been a limited budget One not-so-great thing:  Franklin is portrayed as such a preening buffoon that it throws the whole story off-balance    

The Play:   Vladimir; this morality tale about the courage needed to oppose fascism is inspired by the real-life journalist Anna Politkovskaya's struggles to tell the truth in Vladimir Putin’s Russia  Written by: Erika Sheffer        Directed by: Daniel Sullivan One good thing: It’s hard to think of a timelier subject and the cast lead by Francesca Faridany as the Politkovskaya stand-in give fully committed performances One not-so-great thing:  Too much of the set is devoted to recreating a TV station when so little of the play involves TV, but the entire production too often loses its focus as it wanders into unnecessary and confusing subplots        

The Play:  Distant Thunder; a young mixed-race attorney whose white mother raised him away from his tribal reservation—and his father who remained there—returns with a plan that he believes will help its residents but finds that he must first  reckon with his Native identity  Book by: Lynne Taylor-Corbett and Shaun Taylor-Corbett      Music and Lyrics by: Shaun Taylor-Corbett and Chris Wiseman Directed by: Lynne Taylor-Corbett One good thing: The obvious delight of the actors—nearly all of them Native American—at being part of a musical that tells a story about their contemporary culture is infectious One not-so-great thing: The book crams in too many of the familiar tropes about Native American life—the love of Frybread, the greed of companies trying to steal Native land, the sad legacy of the forced removal that lead to the Trail of Tears, the lingering despair over the failure of the Wounded Knee Occupation—and the score only soars when a couple of songs evoke Native rhythms, other