In the aftermath of a season of "identity politics," the Olivier Award-winning new play zooms in on a handful of young people whose personal identity politics happen to involve sexual orientation and gender identity, but who could stand in for any and all of us. And it does so with glitz and panache, meaty insight, sinewy dialogue and performances, and top-notch skill from beginning to end.

Though his ongoing fame today rests almost entirely on his writing for children, especially the world of Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne (1882-1956) was a literary polymath who had a successful career on the London and Broadway stages in the 1920s. The Mint Theater reminds us with the first New York revival of this "serious comedy," a character study of two brothers.

Two new albums feature opposite extremes of jazz vocalizing.

With a just balance of talent and charm O'Loughlin invites us into the most intimate of nonsexual activities – and makes us comfortable doing it.

A typhoon of a performance by Sophie Melville drives toward – and justifies – a wrenching twist. Directed with just-shy-of-frantic energy by Rachel O'Riordan, Sophie Melville's Effie is a raw slice of humanity, baring her ragged soul and bringing us her milieu, a few of the people in her life, and a critical encounter with a war veteran that bends the arc of her history toward, if not justice, a kind of heroism.

The superb musicians of the Chiara offered Pierre Jalbert's fine new String Quartet No. 6 and, with Palmer, Brahms' Clarinet Quintet at the Metropolitan Museum.

With a voice like a clear mountain stream, rippled with emotion and swirled with a hint of gold-dust gravel, Americana singer-songwriter Mary Bragg infuses each song with passion quickened by intelligent lyrics and resonant melodies, all backed up by superb musicianship and production.

Marvelous performances light up this too-long two-hander about what might happen when two people who've lived much of their adult lives in their own worlds are sent to a mental health facility to receive an experimental cure.

While Donald Trump may be an avatar of civilization's decline, it has already been proceeding quite nicely without him. A Roman Trump might well have said "Veni, vidi, vici," in just those words – building his strength on citizens' ignorance.

As a 'Ragtime' newbie, I wondered how E.L. Doctorow's three connected stories of early-20th-century America fit together in a musical theater context. The answer, on the evidence of this fine new production, is: brilliantly.