A few scenes land much less gracefully than that one, and Trevor Nunn, the director, shows a distracting tendency to keep the actors shouting even when Eleanor’s passions are absent. Late in the play, when Max’s Marxism begins to waver, Stoppard’s play also sounds like a less eloquent, less strongly felt version of Tony Kushner’s Slavs! Still, he has pulled off the most difficult trick of all for a history play: arranging the lenses just right, so the very near and the very distant snap into focus.

Stoppard’s characters live through the mass arrests, social upheaval, and ideological collapse of the seventies and eighties, but he keeps these crises offstage, showing us only their repercussions. His play renews your awareness that history is what happens while we live our day-to-day lives—or, if you like, the other way around.

On its surface, the finale looks like a happy ending. Yet I loved it precisely because of its contradictions. When the show’s last rock anthem begins to blare, the characters have arrived at 1990. It’s a delight to watch them celebrate the freedom that followed the Soviet collapse. If you look and listen closely, though, Stoppard reminds us of the compromises necessary to reach that point, the bitter truth that Utopia will always slip out of our grasp, and, above all, the havoc that newly triumphant market forces have begun to wreak. I left the theater feeling elated and depressed, and walked through the scrubbed-clean Times Square mulling two of Jan’s resonating lines from Act Two. "Life has become amazing,” he says—then, a few minutes later: “We don’t yet understand what we’ve done."

Young Frankenstein
By Mel Brooks.
Hilton Theatre.

Rock ’n’ Roll
By Tom Stoppard.
Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. Through March 2.

E-mail: theatercritic@newyorkmag.com.

Related:

• Archive: “Theater Reviews”
• Articles by Jeremy McCarter