Adam Feldman — Theater Critic

Evan Cabnet's production, with its handsome set by Beowulf Boritt, does atmospheric justice to Thérèse's desperation: When she and Laurent meet for a tryst, his cramped artist's garret hangs in the middle of the stage, like a cloud. Helen Edmundson's cold-eyed thriller doesn't shy from the lurid misanthropy of Emile Zola's 1867 novel (a tale of adultery and murder and their brutal retribution) or its gothic, Poe-esque denouement. But it does give a sharp sense of the limited options available to women. Thérèse may be a shark -- the word in French is requin -- but you pity her the way you might a shark in an aquarium.

Dames at Sea was launched in 1966 at the downtown coffeehouse Caffe Cino, where its affectionate send-up of 1930s movie musicals tapped -- or, rather, tap-danced -- into nostalgia for the busily silly spectacles of yesteryear. Now it's on Broadway, where it lands like a harmless piece of wet fluff. The first 20 minutes of wide-eyed antics are cute; then your mind starts to wander. Dames at Sea's mild pastiche...is passable but passé -- imagine a revival, half a century from now, of a Fringe show about the '80s -- and it's presented with tongue so far in cheek that it can't say much at all. The cast of six works hard to sell it, though...Director-choreographer Randy Skinner gives them furiously fast tap numbers to perform, as though they were pumping invisible air pedals to keep the show from deflating. In the end, no such luck: pfffffft.

Together, the stars of The Gin Game, James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson, are 175 years old. They draw from massive piles of skill and goodwill, and watching these masters play the audience is a delight. Watching them play cards for two hours, however, is less compelling. Jones is the ornery, hypercompetitive Weller; Tyson is the prim, shrewd Fonsia...As they chat, flirt and turn on each other, the play asks us to consider how much of their isolation stems from bad hands they've been dealt, and how much from bad judgment...Leonard Foglia's revival lacks that sense of purpose in its shape. The age of the actors perhaps makes them slower and cuter than might be ideal; the result is likable but shambling.

Life spurts out all over the place in the first two thirds of Lisa D'Amour's Airline Highway...Although the characters are familiar in many ways, director Joe Mantello and his accomplished cast of 16 breathe spirit into most of them, and the big, boozy party scene has jazzy vigor. (Freeman and White are standouts.) But D'Amour's dialogue is short on the kind of poetry that might elevate her gallery of beautiful-loser types, and she can't sustain the wide focus she initiates; Airline Highway's multiple plot threads are pulled out (or forgotten) in a rushed, unsatisfying denouement that resorts to summarizing its message to the audience in the form of a (literal) high-school class presentation.

Being is not the same as acting, and this lesson is illustrated by Fleming herself throughout Joe DiPietro's lousy new comedy, Living on Love. She's a great star giving a mediocre performance as a great star...The canned corn of DiPietro's writing -- 'This dog was petted by more Italians than Sophia Loren!' -- is pressed into mush by Kathleen Marshall's clunky direction; the younger actors, who spend most of the play in a panic, are nearly unwatchable. Living on Love is meant to be hammy, but it's not even that. It's a bland, synthetic dud: a ham-flavored turkey.

Being is not the same as acting, and this lesson is illustrated by Fleming herself throughout Joe DiPietro's lousy new comedy, Living on Love. She's a great star giving a mediocre performance as a great star...The canned corn of DiPietro's writing -- 'This dog was petted by more Italians than Sophia Loren!' -- is pressed into mush by Kathleen Marshall's clunky direction; the younger actors, who spend most of the play in a panic, are nearly unwatchable. Living on Love is meant to be hammy, but it's not even that. It's a bland, synthetic dud: a ham-flavored turkey.

The best way to enjoy the madcap, madly old-hat It Shoulda Been You is to pretend it's a lost TV relic from the 1970s. The shortcomings of Brian Hargrove and Barbara Anselmi's mossy new show, about an interfaith wedding gone awry, are easier to forgive through a lens of affectionate camp: the dated stereotypes of pushy Jews and boozy WASPs, the creaky farcical contrivances, the hokey-schmaltzy jokes...But while the antics are predictable -- aside from one huge, implausible twist -- they're not unenjoyable, thanks to a seasoned and flavorful all-star ensemble...Though the cake is stale, they decorate it well. It shoulda been better but it coulda been worse.

...Eric Schaeffer's revival, starring High School Musical's Vanessa Hudgens as the titular girl, rescues the show from the dustbin of history and moves it to a recycling bin of the present. Revised by Heidi Thomas to accommodate modern sensibilities, this Gigi is inoffensive to a fault. The heroine remains a courtesan-in-training, but she's been given more spunk...Gigi is the story of a girl being groomed to sell herself, and when the musical dances around that -- however attractively, thanks to Joshua Bergasse's swift choreography -- it feels evasive. More often, though, it merely feels generic. Hudgens's Gigi seems lovely but simple, her gee-whiz appeal hobbled by affected enunciation...Only Cott, especially in his big solo, seems committed to the reality of the story. The rest is mostly yesterday's bubbly, domestic and served lukewarm.

Praise be to the angels behind it: Hand to God has made it to Broadway. No need for heavenly choir music, though, because the reception the play deserves is the one it gets nightly at the Booth: roars of gleeful laughter. Some have wondered whether Robert Askins's outrageous dark comedy-about a sweet Christian teen, Jason (Steven Boyer), and his demonic puppet, Tyrone-would work as well in a larger venue as in its two hit Off Broadway runs. The answer is a resounding, full-throated yes. The freshest and funniest Broadway comedy in years, Hand to God is to plays as The Book of Mormon is to musicals: a welcome breath of foul air.

Inspired by quantum mechanics, Nick Payne's captivating play, directed crisply by Michael Longhurst, explores the idea of parallel universes in a mosaic of scenes that often restart and branch off in new directions, skipping forward and backward in time...Beekeeper Roland (Gyllenhaal) and cosmologist Marianne (Wilson) are on-again, off-again lovers: in some worlds on, in some worlds off. Their relationship and its challenges -- infidelity, illness, death -- vary in ways that sometimes reflect nuances of their behavior and sometimes stem from forces beyond their control...Informed by authors like Jorge Luis Borges and Caryl Churchill, Constellations is smart but not dry; its focus is on the personal and emotional, and Gyllenhaal and Wilson reboot themselves convincingly at every stutter and turn. They're wonderfully multiversatile.

...Bill Condon's darkly sumptuous revival, it really is better than it was. The musical has been extensively rewritten, with many new songs, richer side characters and a clearer let-your-Freaks-flag-fly message. Emily Padgett (as the stardom-eyed Daisy) and Erin Davie (as the shrinking Violet) work marvelously together, achieving both the requisite synchronicity and the trickier discreteness of personality. Ryan Silverman, Matthew Hydzik and the iron-voiced David St. Louis are impressive as their side men, and some scenes are genuinely moving. But while this sincere and stylishly designed production is perhaps the best that Side Show can be, that best, alas, isn't great. Bill Russell's lyrics-the leaden rhymes drilled into Henry Krieger's tunes, the corny banalities of the declarative songs-continually jostle the musical into kitsch.

On the Town itself, though frisky and enjoyable, does not have the strongest legs as a monument...As Ivy, the object of one sailor's infatuation, the splendid Megan Fairchild dances throughout with an elegant lightness unmatched elsewhere in the piece. But although it occasionally pushes too hard, John Rando's production inspires considerable affection. The three able-bodied seamen each get moments to show off their abilities (and their bodies), and their other two main squeezes (Alysha Umpress and Elizabeth Stanley) sing well; the supporting cast of zanies (including Allison Gunn, Stephen DeRosa, Philip Boykin and the always-ripe Jackie Hoffman) give the streets of New York a suitable complement of muggers. I suspect there will be people who love the torch-carrying spirit of this On the Town, and I wish them, and it, the best. To me, however, it seems a bit like a well-mounted exhibit at some Natural History Museum of Broadway: a stuffed lark.

If you're the kind of person who enjoys Chekhov but wishes it were more, you know, relatable--a kind of person who probably doesn't and certainly shouldn't exist-then The Country House is just the play for you. Donald Margulies's dozy family drama transplants Uncle Vanya to a cottage near the theater retreat of Williamstown, with modern jokes and bits of The Seagull patched in for variety...The essential banality of this bubbleless soap seems intended to be tempered by our inherent fascination with show business. The play depicts an insular and obsolescent theater world, and exemplifies it.

Why so soon? A better question might be: Why not? This Cabaret is a superb production of one of the great Broadway musicals of all time-an exhilarating, harrowing masterpiece. In Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall's staging, Cumming is the corroded soul of the show; he haunts it and intrudes on it, magnetically mercurial...Cumming's bouncy downtown energy keeps Cabaret from seeming like a period piece, and his new costars pull their weight. Waifish and vocally tremulous, Michelle Williams is credibly lost as Sally Bowles, a wanna-be bad girl who sings at the club; Bill Heck is appealing as her unlikely lover, Cliff, a sexually ambiguous writer. Though too young for their roles, Linda Emond and the lovable Danny Burstein are forceful and touching as Cliff's practical landlady and her menschy Jewish suitor; and Gayle Rankin is vividly gaudy as Fräulein Kost, a whore with a heart of flint.

It took 17 years, but Jeanine Tesori's beloved musical about a woman with a facial deformity journeying through the 1960s South has made it to Broadway...In expanding Betts's story, Crawley freights these relationships with more weight than his writing supports, and small moments of exaggeration (in the writing and staging) interfere with the piece's mood. But Tesori's music is a savory stew of American roots, stirringly sung by a cast that includes Emerson Steele as a younger Violet and Rema Webb as a gospel soloist. Though flawed on its face, Violet provides-as Flick sings in the show's best song-reason to rejoice.

What happens to a play revived? A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry's powerful 1959 drama, has certainly not dried up: It bursts with intense family conflict, racial politics and social consciousness. Nor, in its new incarnation, does it sag with the heavy load of an underqualified star, as the 2004 Sean Combs revival did. The pivotal role of Walter Lee Younger-a restless Chicago chauffeur and would-be/won't-be entrepreneur-is played by Denzel Washington; though 20 years older than Walter Lee, he is persuasively youthful (with an apt suggestion of seeming old before his time), and brings considerable charm and magnetism to a difficult, often unsympathetic role. Neither, however, does this production quite explode. Directed by Kenny Leon, who also helmed the 2004 version, this is a credible, realistically scaled account of a still-vital classic.

The sincere drama Mothers and Sons marks a return to familiar territory-the play is a follow-up to McNally's 1988 playlet (and 1990 telecast) Andre's Mother, in which a woman hovers at her gay son's memorial service-and also a return to form. Though dated at times, and shaded with passive aggression, this is arguably McNally's best play in 20 years...Sensitively directed by Sheryl Kaller, Mothers and Sons rarely lags as it unfurls in a single unbroken scene. And Daly's commanding performance helps check McNally's impulses toward pop sociology and reverse nostalgia. She has the strength and give of melting steel.

Aside from the tonic of Iglehart's djinn, however, Aladdin is short on magic. Director Casey Nicholaw fills the stage with activity, and Jonathan Freeman and Don Darryl Rivera offer ripe turns as a villainous vizier and his squawking sidekick. But the plotting drifts into weightless silliness, with a surfeit of generic padding and glitz. There's the rub: The musical is called Aladdin, but seems content to be Prince Ali.-Theater review by Adam Feldman

My eyes rolled a bit, I must confess, at the prospect of a Broadway musical based on Robert James Waller's sentimental 1992 bestseller,The Bridges of Madison County (which also inspired a 1995 film with Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood). But I must also admit that those same jaded eyes, by the end of the show, had misted up more than once; and judging from the waves of muffled sniffles around me, this was not an uncommon response. Marsha Norman and Jason Robert Brown's adaptation earns those tears. The musical's emotion is unapologetically grand, and its love story has a wide, old-fashioned scope. Directed with spare precision by Bartlett Sher-reunited with his most of his South Pacific design team­-it's a new work that plays like a classic.

While The Snow Geese inherits some of the less appealing aspects of 19th-century dramas-lengthy exposition, laborious bird metaphors-it does not share those works' depth of feeling or insight. And the play, intent on modern resonance, often feels jarringly, unevenly contemporary. (Someone calls the Great War 'a bloody shit show.') It's a pretty but unsatisfying meal, undercooked and overstuffed.

The perfectly chosen floral green wallpaper of Peter McKintosh's set forThe Winslow Boy is emblematic of the marvelous attention to detail that distinguishes Lindsay Posner's handsome revival. Terence Rattigan's crisp 1946 drama, inspired by a real incident that polarized Edwardian London, concerns the struggle of middle-class father Arthur Winslow to clear the name of his teenage son, Ronnie (Spencer David Milford)-and stand up for English fairness-after the lad is expelled from a naval academy for stealing a five-shilling postal order.

Big Fish feels like the show that got away. Adapted by John August from his own 2003 screenplay, the musical is built around the tall-or at least well-stretched-tales of an Alabama-born traveling salesman, Edward Bloom (Butz), who has a penchant for embellishing his life...Yet the show is hobbled by a major flaw: Andrew Lippa's thoroughly mediocre score. The music suggests a cross between familiar, inflated Broadway pop and 1970s AM radio; the lyrics vacillate, sometimes line to line, between banal colloquialism and stiltedness... Big Fish has lovely sequences, and earns some sniffles at the end. But it could have been a real catch

The best that can be said about Soul Doctor, a strange Broadway musical based on the life and music of 'singing rabbi' Shlomo Carlebach, is that it isn't as bad as it sounds...The songs hold up well-it's hard not to bop along to 'Am Yisrael Chai'-and Eric Anderson's full, warm voice does Carlebach honor; Amber Iman is impressively poised as Nina Simone, whose friendship with him is the focal point of Daniel S. Wise's episodic book. But the show digs shallowly into its central character and his beliefs, and often rings false. The real Carlebach was a complex, fascinating man, with flaws as well as melodies...Reverent to a fault, Soul Doctor bleaches a story that cries out for tie-dye.

Ladies and gentlemen, step right up to the greatest show of the Broadway season: Diane Paulus's sensational cirque-noir revival of Pippin. Here, in all its grand and dubious glory, is musical-theater showmanship at its best, a thrilling evening of art and craftiness spiked with ambivalence about the nature of enthrallment. Chet Walker's dances, which retain the pelvic thrust of Bob Fosse's original choreography, are a viciously precise mockery of showbiz bump and grind, enacted by a sexy, sinister, improbably limber ensemble...Circus elements created by Gypsy Snider...build momentum toward what the ringmaster assures us is 'a climax you will remember for the rest of your lives.' That just might be true. 5 stars

A live-action piece of Vanity Fair puffery, littered with boldfaced name-dropping, I'll Eat You Lastexists primarily as a platform for Midler's return to the Broadway stage in her first nonsinging role. The part itself-brassy, bossy, warmly outré-fits neatly into her comfort zone, and it's enjoyable at first to watch her hold court in tinted glasses and a powder-blue muumuu, drawing out her consonants like slingshots for her vowels, gabbing about whatever pops into her Beverly Hills kop.But Midler never quite settles into character. The jokes, tossed off with a hint of Sophie Tucker, sound like concert patter minus the songs; dramatic moments sink into labored schmaltz. Perhaps her performance will improve with time, but for now it's a shticky wicket.