Other than Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House, Ibsen’s plays are mostly out of fashion these days, especially the folkloric early works featuring trolls and the mystical late works featuring Great Men who, come to think of it, are also trolls. The effectiveness of those in the latter category, including The Master Builder, now being revived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, depends in part on an assumption of respect for great men in general, so that something dramatic can occur when they are found to be wanting. Our time is not perhaps sufficiently amenable to that assumption. In any case, the revival, directed by Andre Belgrader and starring John Turturro, makes an excellent case for continued neglect.

To find out where the musical is going these days, you may have to follow it into a tent. Not Pippin’s big top on Broadway but the one nestled beneath the High Line at West 13th Street, where Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, Dave Malloy’s enthralling take on Tolstoy, is playing. Actually, there’s some confusion about the setting: The tent, once you enter it, turns into a Russian supper club called Kazino, kitted out gorgeously by the designer Mimi Lien in miles of red velvet hung with framed czarist portraits. A light Russian dinner (including borscht, pierogies, vodka, and what unfortunately tasted one night like vintage black bread) is included with your $125 ticket. But the show presented right in the midst of 199 patrons at tables and bars has little to do with bread or circuses. Rather, it describes itself in its lyrics as both a novel and an opera (and, sure enough, is completely sung) while also incorporating flourishes of a cabaret act, a floor show, a Broadway music drama, and — why not? — a naughty stag party.

Especially after the loud uplift and confetti cannons of Broadway’s spring jamboree, one of the pleasures of Off Broadway in May is the chance to recalibrate your ears and expectations to a more human scale. Precision kicklines give way to the individual choices of actors working in the same room with you, inches away. Yes, it’s a blast watching drag queens do flips on conveyor belts, or Bette Midler crack wise in a caftan, but it’s also pretty thrilling to watch Deirdre O’Connell, as a beleaguered stepmother in A Family for All Occasions, walk into her home after a day at a factory and do nothing. She’s so stiff she can barely sit. Even the muscles around her mouth — which in the 90-seat Bank Street Theater you can easily see — are clenched. She’s the living embodiment of the word dour, down to the cellular level, it seems, and in the second act, when she tries out a three-speed electronic foot massager someone has brought as a gift, her pleasure is so surprising (and nearby) it makes you laugh as if it were happening to you.

It’s 1920 and the Dolan family vaudeville act is at a crossroads. Now that the teenaged son is old enough to date the chorines, Ma is worried: “I’ve seen nothing developing in Junior except his lower nature.” She banishes him to school to forget about hoofing and become, as Pa envisions it, “a lousy music teacher.” Indeed, jump-cut to fifteen years later, and Junior is drilling the three Bs into students who’d rather hear jazz. Thus begins (and all but ends) the sensible part of the book of On Your Toes, the 1936 musical that implicitly asks what happens when vaudeville isn’t good enough for vaudevillians anymore. What do you — yes, you, American Musical Theater — do next?

The American theater suffers from a serious case of Chekhov envy. Dead almost 100 years, the great Russian has his fingerprints on nearly every wistful drama now produced. I’m not complaining; at least it’s not Strindberg. But Chekhov is easier to ape than to assimilate. His unhurried, sideways approach to the kill is too often mistaken for gentleness, a substitution that turns tension to mush and lets the quarry escape.

You know the guy. Looks slightly clammy. A bit misproportioned. Often has a stain on his collar. Isn’t told when or where the parties are happening. A bit of a loner, a bit of a loser. And so maybe you’ve been tempted to mock him a little, undermine him, but only behind his back. Or maybe in front of his face, okay, but in a style you figure he won’t understand because — where did he go to school? And anyway, what’s he doing here? Wouldn’t it be better for all concerned if he got the picture and somehow was made to disappear? Things would really be simpler, clearer, cleaner that way. For him, too. Poor fellow.