it's all relative; Just in time for the holidays, all kinds of family dramas unfold on the New York stage, writes Adam Green.

Since time immemorial, little girls have been growing up and striking out on their own, turning daddies into befuddled tyrants. Thus it is in The Little Mermaid, the latest of Disney's big-screen animated classics to set shore on Broadway. Despite a blue-chip creative team, including the gifted opera director Francesca Zambello and the dramatist Doug Wright (Grey Gardens), reports from the show's out-of-town tryout have been lukewarm. Still, the story has broad appeal (a teenage princess with a fish's tail defies her pop by falling for a handsome landlubber); Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman's songs, among them "Under the Sea," are delightful; and the wonderful Norm Lewis (Two Gentlemen of Verona) is King Triton, and Sherie Rene Scott (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) is the evil sea witch Ursula. As the title mermaid, Ariel, Sierra Boggess exudes the doe-eyed charm of a Disney cartoon come to life.

An even more controlling father and headstrong daughter are at the center of Shakespeare's Cymbeline, at Lincoln Center Theater. A mishmash of intergenerational squabbles, court intrigues, and mistaken identities, the play features one of the Bard's most appealing heroines, Imogen, whose feistiness, wit, and ability to pass herself off as a boy recall As You Like It's Rosalind. Under the direction of Mark Lamos, Martha Plimpton, who showed a gift for high Shakespearean dudgeon in the recent Midsummer Night's Dream, plays the indomitably virtuous princess; John Cullum is the titular monarch who banishes his daughter's husband (Sweeney Todd's Michael Cerveris); and Phylicia Rashad is the wicked stepmom.

To create the matriarchal gorgon who chews every piece of scenery in sight in Die Mommie Die!, Charles Busch looked for inspiration to the ur-bad mothers of Greek tragedy. "I was thinking about using the House of Atreus and Clytemnestra as starting points for a play," Busch explains. "So, naturally, I realized that it had to be done as a sixties hag horror movie-a grande-dame Guignol, in which an aging movie actress degrades herself on-screen to keep her career alive." The hilarious result puts the playwright and star back where he belongs-onstage, in a series of period lounging outfits. As Angela Arden, a has-been diva with a bullying movie-producer husband, a daddy-fixated teenage daughter, a supergay hippie son, and a well-endowed tennis instructor-not to mention a homicidal streak-Busch channels the spirits of post-prime Lana Turner, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis with demented glee and disarming sincerity.

If you are in the market for ironic distance from ugly truths, you will find nothing for sale in The Homecoming, Harold Pinter's savage 1965 dissection of family life that put the playwright on the map. The needling, the bullying, and the domestic power plays among Pinter's working-class yobs may be unbelievably brutal, but if the director Daniel Sullivan does his job with this Broadway revival, they will provide uneasy ...