Jeremy Gerard

Hal Prince must have heard that something extraordinary was taking place at the Public Theater.

The familiar soundtrack from “Jaws” pulses through “Are You There, McPhee?”

The spirited crowd at City Center on Wednesday night couldn’t have been better primed when Megan Hilty took the stage to sing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

Simone, a swaggering merchant, arrives home to find his wife, Bianca, in the arms of a smooth prince of the city.

She’s a workaholic equities analyst with an assistant willing to work Sundays. He’s a burnout case who went from Harvard to Wall Street, made a bundle and cracked up when he realized his life was meaningless. His marriage ended and he hasn’t worked in four years.

David Rabe was so busy crisping audiences with his Vietnam War trilogy and powder keg plays like “Hurlyburly” that he never got around to writing that typical freshman work, the portrait of the dramatist as a young man.

Broadway loves a con man, especially one who sees the light.

David Auburn’s intensely satisfying new drama “The Columnist” has as much to do with journalism as “Proof,” his Pulitzer Prize winner, had to do with mathematics.

“Nice Work If You Can Get It,” which stars Matthew Broderick and Kelli O’Hara, isn’t nearly as self-important and ambitious a disappointment as “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.”

If the comic-book ideal appeals to you as much as it apparently did to director Matthew Warchus -- and if you haven’t been to the movies in, say, a couple of decades -- “Ghost: The Musical” has plenty to offer.

Grounded in powerhouse performances by Blair Underwood as Stanley Kowalski and Nicole Ari Parker as Blanche DuBois, the latest, mostly black, Broadway revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” is extraordinarily moving.

Within the last few months my homey upper Manhattan enclave has seen the closing of a family-run fruit and vegetable market and a shoe repair shop, the first to be replaced by an upscale wine store, the second by whoever is willing to pay many times the rent that Alex, the toothless shoemaker who often slept on the premises, could afford.