Musically, Penelope bursts with romantic elegance and engrossing tedium. Composed and orchestrated by Bechtel, the score utilizes lovely, string-heavy interludes to color the soundscape and transition between key songs and sequences. In “Prayer,” Penelope chronicles her daily religious ritual, hoping to curry enough favor with Athena to bring Odysseus home. The song soon transitions to a stirring recitation of another of Penelope’s rituals: weaving beautiful images on her loom each day, only to unravel them each night to keep her suitors at bay. As Penelope, Phillips is spellbinding in “The Pilgrim Song,” pondering what her life may have become with just a few different decisions. And channeling Joni Mitchell in “I Do,” a song recounting their wedding and early love, Phillips is simply transcendent.

With five Broadway credits under his belt, John Gallagher Jr. is unquestionably a bona fide star of the stage. But in his solo turn as part of the Renée Fleming Voices series at the Kennedy Center’s Studio K Saturday night, musical theater fans were hard-pressed to find any familiar show tunes on the bill. Nevertheless, in his tight 70-minute set of heartfelt original music and moving covers, Gallagher revealed his easy versatility across genres, blending folk, punk, rock, and country. And even in these varying styles, his stellar dramatic talents were on full display.

Forget The Big Short. And Margin Call. And Too Big to Fail, Inside Job, and (even as it prepares for its musicalized coronation in Boston this summer) The Queen of Versailles. Despite spending less than five minutes on the 2008 financial crisis, in which its titular firm was vanquished in a legendary collapse, The Lehman Trilogy assuredly claims its place as the definitive retrospective on the run-up to that particular financial meltdown. Playing in a first-rate production at Shakespeare Theatre Company through March 30, The Lehman Trilogy spans 150 years of American “progress” through the lens of one family. Given the breadth of its three-and-a-half-hour run time, one might be tempted to call this story an epic, saga, or rhapsody. But to do so would ignore what makes The Lehman Trilogy one of the most exquisite plays of the modern age. It isn’t merely an examination—it is an autopsy. And if the American Dream is the beating heart of the American experience, The Lehman Trilogy diagnoses greed as the lethal clog in its coronary artery.

Just three stops from the Pentagon on the 7A Metrobus, a new soldier has arrived in Arlington. Written and directed by Marshall Pailet, Private Jones is a musical enjoying its world premiere at Signature Theatre through March 10. But while military types might be a common sight in Shirlington and the surrounding environs, Private Jones offers a fresh riff on well-worn war stories, narrowing its focus to the experiences of a deaf soldier at the peak of World War I.

Arena Stage and its founding artistic director Zelda Fichandler hold a special place in the histories of the American theater and Washington, DC, as the first integrated theater in the city and an early promoter of the regional theater movement. So it’s fitting that Arena Stage has produced the world premiere of Kia Corthron’s Tempestuous Elements, a hometown play about another game-changing woman and educational pioneer, Dr. Anna Julia Cooper. Seizing this opportunity to bring an often overlooked figure to the forefront, Corthron chronicles Cooper’s tumultuous tenure as principal of DC’s historic M Street School at the turn of the 20th century.

Over the course of its 150-minute run time, Jonathan Spector’s This Much I Know rattles off a seemingly endless array of aphorisms that could have been ripped from your favorite armchair psychologist’s podcast: “We decide to do something, then we make up the reason.” “The less you know, the more certain you are.” “That’s why fake ideas are so dangerous—because they’re ‘sticky.’” Building a drama around such didactic dicta could be a deadly endeavor. But in a stunning feat, Spector contextualizes these and similar truisms in a jolting examination of the depths of belief, achieving a result that is both deeply funny and refreshingly thought-provoking.

“What happens if the cut, the burn, the break was never in my brain, or in my blood, but in my soul?” Like the sharp edge of a surgical scalpel, this question cuts to the heart of Next to Normal, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical playing in an uneven new production at Bethesda’s Round House Theatre through March 3. Over the course of its nearly two-and-a-half-hour run time, the rock musical asks hefty questions about the treatment of mental illness, the trial-and-error nature of pharmaceutical cocktails, and the continuance of care at the cost of compassion.

By the time the final song arrives in Audra McDonald’s powerhouse performance with the National Symphony Orchestra, the directive to “Get Happy” (by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, sung in medley with “Happy Days Are Here Again” by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen) feels a bit like cheeky sarcasm. After all, how could a person be anything but ecstatic after experiencing two whirlwind hours of McDonald at her best, lobbing soaring renditions of Broadway standards into the audience like the unbeatable champion of some musical theater home run derby. There are certainly worse ways to spend a Tuesday night, and few better.