One of the more unusual Broadway offerings of recent times crosses the Atlantic with considerable style in an Off West End premiere of 2006 New York entry Grey Gardens that punches well above its weight. As luxuriantly cast as it is elaborately (and carefully) designed, Thom Southerland's loving production honours a peculiar slab of Americana that clearly won't be to all tastes, and some won't see beyond the second-act camp to locate the symbiotic portrait of love and loss that underpins the material.

The proverbial pond that separates the New York and London theatres has had a seismic effect on The Dazzle, Richard Greenberg's ironically titled play from 2002 that in every way seems darker, stranger, and more compelling in its British premiere than it did when I first caught it Off Broadway. What previously played as a somewhat wearing Wildean pastiche here assumes creepier colours as a play about two brothers gifted with language who use words in part to forestall the bleakness that lies in wait when things go silent. 

A pop album drawn from a musical could be off-putting to some. Images of Glee spring to mind or a tweenypop version of Idina Menzel – both of which seem quite a departure from Sara Bareilles’ hugely popular hits "Love Song", "Gravity" or most recently, "Brave".

The play that lost the 2011 Tony Award to War Horse is now receiving its British debut at the very address where War Horse premiered. But such theatrical coincidences won't register in most circles as much as a title, The Motherf**ker with the Hat, that sent newspaper copy desks into a tailspin (the New York Times didn't print the M word at all, even with the asterisks). Such hoo-ha, one feels, makes a certain kind of sense given the perpetual tailspin in which the characters in Stephen Adly Guirgis's high-octane theatrical universe exist.

Beauty transforms itself into a beast but an inner grace shines forth regardless: such is the enduring power of Bernard Pomerance's stage play The Elephant Man, first seen in London almost 40 years ago and a Broadway semi-regular ever since. The latest New York revival has transferred lock, stock and star-driven barrel to the West End, where local audiences can discover something I've had occasion to remark upon twice over the years on Broadway – for all his A-list screen actor status, Bradley Cooper is entirely at home on the stage.

Everything about this little-known and largely forgotten show suggests epic, starting with the title: multiple locations, ambitious concept, big ideas. But like so much of Jerry Herman's work - and the received wisdom on it is invariably wide of the mark - The Grand Tour is a chamber piece at heart. Adapted from the Franz Werfel play Jacobowsky and the Colonel, the show focuses on a  Polish Jew, Jacobowsky, and an anti-Semitic Polish Colonel, Stjerbinsky, who are thrown together in a desperate flight across France from the fast-advancing Nazi tsunami.

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu,Birdman is the story of a fading star’s search for professional rehabilitation and personal redemption that perches adroitly between dark humour and darker despair and injects a familiar story of mid-life crisis with fresh vitality and emotion thanks to vivid flights of an intensely cinematic fancy.

Michael Keaton, a leading man in light comedies before rising to the big leagues by playing Batman in the Tim Burton original and first sequel, has been cast for maximum meta-value as Riggan Thomson, an actor who found fame by playing Birdman, the superhero of an eponymous film franchise. Riggan is now seeking to resurrect both his career and artistic credibility by writing, directing, and starring in a stage version of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love on Broadway.

As well as putting everything on the line creatively, Riggan has to manage personal and professional complications arising from clashes with his co-star, an intense, Sean Penn-like Method devoté played by Edward Norton (giving rise to a hilarious Fight Club nod in another meta-joke), an unwise affair with the show’s needy ingénue (Andrea Riseborough), and the appearance of his estranged, semi-rehabbed daughter (Emma Stone pictured, below right, like Keaton giving a career-best performance). The backstage saga is imbued with understanding of and affection for actors and their combination of wild egomania and profound insecurity.

But primarily Riggan has to battle himself, or the aspect personified by his filmic alter ego, who periodically turns up to suggest he’s going to make a fool of himself with all this highbrow stuff and should return to the safety of the mainstream. And Birdman also represents the self-absorbed, insensitive, career-driven side of Riggan that has undermined his marriage and his relationship with his daughter. Ironically, it is this persona that is dragging him down, preventing him from breaking free from old self-destructive patterns and soaring to new heights.

Even more than the Birdman, another entity hovers over the film – the spirit of Robert Altman. Like Altman (who directed Short Cuts, constructed from inter-leaved Carver short stories), Iñárritu has a fondness for creating films with multi-stranded narratives. And remember the epic, masterful tracking shot that kicked off The Player, Altman’s dark satire of Hollywood? All of Iñárritu’s dark satire of Hollywood looks like one epic, masterful tracking shot as the camera swoops and glides backstage, onstage, and outside the theatre to Times Square and the surrounding streets.

Birdman also evokes Bernard Rose’s lesser-known but wonderful Ivansxtc, in which a Hollywood player in extremis reconsiders his priorities to the strains of Wagner, as Riggan does to the strains of Mahler, when not engaged in conflicts accompanied by a driving solo jazz drummer (you wait years for a film with a solo jazz drum score and then two – this and Whiplash – come along at once).

A moving, exhilarating ride into the depths of the soul and up through the empyrean of the imagination

However – and I say this with trepidation, given the excoriating attack on critics Riggan delivers to Lindsay Duncan’s pinch-faced bluestocking of a New York Times reviewer, a creature so friendless and misanthropic she is always pictured scribbling alone at a bar – the ending is problematic, at least for anyone with a low tolerance for magical realism. There are elements of magic realism right from the start (for example, Riggan’s ability to move objects telekinetically), but it’s entirely possible his superhuman powers exist solely in his mind. But then in the final scene we are asked, I feel, to accept their objective reality, though I know others who think Riggan’s final action is only figuratively rather than literally true.

As well, Iñárritu lets several important plot dynamics just drop. I’m not saying they need to be tied up with a neat bow, but we shouldn’t feel he’s forgotten about the characters and it made me wonder if he likes multi-stranded narratives because he doesn’t really do wrapping up subplots. But for most of the time, Birdman is a moving, exhilarating ride into the depths of the soul and up through the empyrean of the imagination.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Birdman