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.

A longtime bartender's fury at nearly everyone, from NYC health inspectors to an intrusive and homophobic landlady, recollected in tranquility and conveyed with measured energy and often at breakneck speed, delivers not bitterness but symphonic tension and release – and laughs galore.

Heather Massie resurrects the screen legend to gratefully address an audience that's finally asking "the right questions" – not about Hedy Lamarr's legendary beauty, her many marriages, the sex and nudity in her controversial 1933 film Ecstasy, or her post-career arrests for shoplifting, but about her mind.

Celebrated violinist Anne Akiko Meyers and pianist Akira Eguchi's program ranged from the 28-year-old Beethoven's teemingly imaginative first violin sonata to an evocative work for violin and electronics written in 2009 by the then also 28-year-old Jakub Ciupinski, inspired by the WWII wreck of an Italian ship.