Theater

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.

Falling in love is euphoria and terror. There is no other way to achieve its beauty and hope.

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.

Sir Noël Peirce Coward is a cultural icon you may be surprised to know inspired Elton John, Sting and Paul McCartney to sing some of his songs.

It is no wonder that Akhtar's play won the 2013 Pulitzer for Drama as the writing delves deeply into racial and religious issues of being a non-White Muslim in America.

This amusing spoof of those ubiquitous 1960s Christmas TV musical specials makes for a fun holiday outing.

Are you down with being hip or are you uptight as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs?