The Counterfeit Crown earns its ovation. It does not earn all of it. Those are different conclusions, and I want you sitting with that distinction before I walk you through why I stayed in my seat applauding for four minutes while something in my chest was quietly filing a complaint.

Rafael Andujar’s book and lyrics, music by Celia Marchetti, directed at the Meridian Theatre by Dominique Ferris — this is the story of Leonora Vance, a woman who inherits the chairmanship of her late husband’s media empire without ever having wanted it or been asked whether she was ready. The premise is about imposter syndrome the way Sweeney Todd is about barbering: technically accurate and completely insufficient. When the show is working — and it is working, in the second act, magnificently — it is the kind of theater that makes the audience forget to breathe.

Solange Watkins is Leonora, and she is doing something I have only seen a handful of performers do. She’s not playing a woman pretending to be confident. She’s playing a woman learning, in real time, where her actual edges are — and Watkins makes you feel every single measurement. There is a moment in “The Seat Was Not Made for Me,” her Act Two centerpiece, where the song shifts from defiance into grief, and Watkins does not indicate the shift. She simply lets it happen, one phrase at a time, until the full weight of it falls on the audience like a curtain coming down. The woman next to me stopped breathing. I know because I noticed when she started again.

So why am I hedging? Because the first act, mija, has not made up its mind about what kind of show this is.

Ferris’s direction in Act Two is surgical — she knows exactly when to strip the stage bare and when to fill it with chaos. The problem in Act One is a recurring apparition motif in which Leonora’s late husband hovers at scene edges in a wash of amber light designed by Petra Lind — otherwise impeccable throughout. The idea is smart. The execution is muddy. The apparition deflects emotional confrontation when it should deepen it, and Marchetti’s score in these moments turns lush when it should turn sparse. We keep getting the feeling of significance without the thing itself.

Marcus Eldridge, as the board member angling for Leonora’s seat, plays every scene like he’s in a sharper, funnier show than the one around him. He might be right. His “Forty Years in This Building” is the funniest thing on a Broadway stage this summer — specific, confident, slightly terrifying — and the Meridian crowd laughed with the pure pleasure of watching something performed exactly as well as it could be.

The Act Two turnaround is real. When Gideon Park’s boardroom set opens like a ribcage in the second-act reveal, the gasp from the audience was one of the cleanest collective reactions I’ve heard in a while. Not surprise. Recognition. The room understood something all at once, and Lind’s lighting locked it in with a single cue — the house going cold blue while Watkins stood center stage in a single shaft of white. Forty people inhaled at the same moment. That is the whole argument for live theater, right there.

You should see this show. You should see it because Watkins is doing career-defining work, and because the second act climbs to a level this first act does not deserve to launch from. Bring patience. Bring faith in what a great performer can do with material that finally gives her room to run. The rest will follow. Estamos aquí.