Blanchett's Anna is as complex a lost soul as Broadway is likely to host this season, her yellow-hot energy as vital and clamorous when she's fuming in silence at the dinner table as when she's swooping in desperate high spirits from friend to friend in Act I. Roxburgh, in the most central role, is just as compelling.

If you have some tolerance for the avant-garde and the unexplained, 'Holden' will be well worth your time. The actors and creative team of George & Co. have put their heart, soul, and blood into a powerful imaginative portrait of the psyche of one of literature's most fascinating characters, J.D. Salinger.

Refreshingly, the show doesn't focus on the tragic side of Édith Piaf's biography. It's nice to be reminded that her career was a deserved triumph, that sometimes popular audiences recognize greatness while the great one is alive to appreciate it.

A new live collaborative album by Torrini and The Colorist Orchestra reimagines some of the Icelandic singer's songs in entirely new arrangements for an eight-piece Belgian ensemble led by Aarich Jespers and Kobe Proesmans. Her voice inhabits this new, more organic world just as comfortably as on her albums, and with a touch of live-performance warmth.

Just around the corner from where it first played, Sholem Asch's 'God of Vengeance,' challenging and controversial in so many ways since its debut in 1907, has opened at La Mama in its original Yiddish (with English supertitles). Upon its Broadway run in English in 1923, the play's cast and producers were arrested on obscenity charges. With its frank depiction of lesbianism and prostitution, it's no wonder.

This adaptation of Dickens's classic tale is a mélange of social commentary, supernatural visitations, flashbacks, comic business, metatheatrical kidding around, and sentiment, all in the service of a classic story we seem to need to keep retelling.

Every song is about something. Maybe not always real people or events, but stuffed to capacity with visceral language and imagery on top of Dropkick Murphys' trademark skull-rattling volume and unison shouts.

Much of Jethro Tull's second album still stands up, so to speak. The bright nasality of the hyperactive mandolin on "Fat Man," the blues-rock/progressive fusion of "Nothing is Easy," and the dark psychedelia of "We Used to Know" are all of their time, yet in the new mixes they leap urgently from the speakers. A 1969 Stockholm concert and a booklet packed with reminiscences and commentary help make this new edition something Tull fans will value.

Don't let the cheesy cover art steer you away from this music, which is anything but. It's hard to go wrong with material this good, and Holly Norman and her fantastic backup musicians do right by it – and by Elvis – in a big way.

On a fizzy mix of traditional jazz (mostly originals) and standards (Gershwin, Cole Porter, Fats Waller), bebop, and classical and romantic piano music by the likes of Mozart, Chopin, and Ravel, the pianist and her trio take enormous joy in finding surprising connections.