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.

After a long gestation and a difficult labor, including a last-minute funding scare, Breakfast at Tiffany's arrives on Broadway meager and stillborn. Here is a story that-in both Truman Capote's 1958 novella and Blake Edwards's 1961 film-relies on the restive charm of its central figure: Holly Golightly, a beauteous young courtesan in 1940s New York, who conceals her hillbilly roots beneath a blithe, insouciant manner and a cultivated voice flecked with faux French. 'She isn't a phony because she's a real phony,' as someone explains to the writer who lives next door to her. 'She believes all this crap she believes.' In the Broadway version, she never seems to believe it for a moment; Breakfast at Tiffany's is phony through and through.

Has any musical so essentially ridiculous been graced with a revival? Yet Wildhorn, the Stephen Sondheim of Bizarro World, continues to be produced despite a string of flops, and Jekyll & Hyde has accrued a following. So here it is again, in a form that will satisfy few. Director Jeff Calhoun and his cast struggle bravely and pitiably in the straitjacket...Accenting Jekyll & Hyde's best asset-Wildhorn's rousing melodies-and hitting the rest at off angles whenever possible, Calhoun and his crew excise much of the original production's most ostentatious terribleness, leaving mere very-badness in its place.

Richard Greenberg's elegantly moving The Assembled Parties is somewhere between a slice of life and a slice of mille-feuille...A brisk draft of intelligence blows straight through the script, tempering moments of sentiment with astringency and surprise. In Lynne Meadow's lovely Manhattan Theatre Club staging, the first act is a whirl of quips and overlapping scenes-Santo Loquasto's ingenious set spins the stage from room to room-and the second is ominously still, shadowed by past and future death. At the center of both is Julie, played with feathery otherworldliness by Jessica Hecht in one of the year's most absorbing performances.

Motown-The Musical left my eyes tired. For half of the show, they were glued to the stage; for the other half, they rolled up in disbelief to the farthest reaches of their sockets. Rarely has a Broadway musical offered such extremes of talent and inanity. The mountains are thrillingly high: glorious snatches of more than 50 classic pop songs from the catalogs of such Motown artists as Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, the Four Tops, the Temptations and the Jackson 5. But the valleys are abysmally low. The book sections of the show, in which Motown founder and Motown coproducer Berry Gordy Jr. traces 45 years of his own journey, is a compost heap of dubious history, wooden acting and risible dialogue...

Yet the musical holds up for the same reason Price & Son's products do: solid craftsmanship and care. Lauper is a musical-theater natural, combining bright, infectious melodies with simple but effective lyrics. As each act progresses, the energy rises palpably, boosted by a heart-strong cast. Porter brings tough sass, wounded dignity and husky vocal authority to a part he has seemingly been training all his life to play; and as Charlie's lovelorn underling, the sweetly tart Annaleigh Ashford-she of the perfectly timed comic take-adds another stolen show to her rap sheet. The overall effect is nigh irresistible; if you've been low about this season's musicals, Kinky Boots may be just the thing to get you back on your feet.

The Performers squeezes quite a few dirty laughs from crude, XXX double entendres—and Henry Winkler plays an aging cocksman, which is great news for anyone who wants to hear Henry Winkler talk about his dong a lot. But the raunch turns out to be mere dressing for a soggy rom-com salad...

Like its spiritual grandchild The Normal Heart, Ibsen’s drama scores hard points against real social ills while also suggesting that a passionate crusader, frozen in the spotlight of his truth, can sometimes be his own worst enemy.

That Bennett performs this show eight times a week is a marvel indeed; seeing it just once kind of wore me out.

Audiences must pass through a similar dry stretch at the start of The Road to Mecca, directed with a reverent air by Gordon Edelstein in the Roundabout’s Broadway space, which seems somewhat too large for the purpose. Load up on coffee before you embark on the dozy-cozy first act, a virtual sleeping draught of dim lighting, tea service and puttering exposition.

The problem with Lysistrata Jones is not just that it has overstepped its bounds. The show’s harmless Broadway incarnation, energetically coached by Dan Knechtges, is in several ways superior to its humbler predecessor: The male cast has upped its game, the ladies stay strong, and Douglas Carter Beane has given a better backstory to his title character (Murin), who organizes a chastity strike to spur her boyfriend (Segarra) and his apathetic college team to victory. But the plot remains silly, the music humdrum and the characters trite; the Latino figures have little but accents to define them, and not even the imposing Liz Mikel can rescue her weary-wise prostitute character from the sassy molasses of big-black-lady stereotype. For a show that is supposedly a paean to passion, Lysistrata Jones seems happy enough to let its earnestness go to camp.

Skillfully directed by Jeff Calhoun, Bonnie & Clyde doesn’t glamorize its subjects, as Arthur Penn’s 1967 film was accused of doing, but it does sentimentalize them; they are introduced to us as children, dreaming of fame, and never grow far beyond that. No matter how many innocent people they kill, this musical’s Bonnie and Clyde remain—like the show itself—not great, but not that bad.

There must be people somewhere who don't enjoy Hugh Jackman, but if so, I don't want to meet them. What more could a person reasonably want than this twinklingly studly Aussie showman, who seems as comfy tapping through a medley as clawing his way through the Wolverine franchise? In his blazing new concert, Jackman is his own special effect: a musical-theater superhero swooping in just in time to rescue Broadway from its seasonal doldrums.

Reorchestrated and sound-designed for young, modern ears, this Godspell sounds like a born-again Glee, and several performers have moments to shine (including Uzo Aduba, Telly Leung and the wonderful Lindsay Mendez). Capering through Christopher Gattelli's joyous choreography, on David Korins's continually surprising set, the actors are nothing if not energetic. But for all the copious tributes paid to him, Jesus is a thankless role, and Hunter Parrish is this production's sacrifice to it; with a voice and presence as light as his ultra-blond locks, Parrish preaches softly and wears a creepily forced smile. This is Jesus as Stepford twink, and it's regrettably in keeping with a show that, in its combination of bathos and kitsch, is a model of bad faith.

But this is a show no grown-up should miss; after 40 years, it remains a piercing stare of hope and regret, longing and compromise. The kind of musical theater it dissects and eulogizes may be vanishing from Broadway, but Follies is still here, and it's gorgeous.

Lacking Callas's elegance, the estimable Tyne Daly nonetheless controls the stage and the audience with command, and lends shading to the writing wherever she can; less successful are the three actors playing her students, guided with a heavy hand by Stephen Wadsworth. The pedagogical sequences, at least, have a patina of high culture, unlike the pair of vulgar, melodramatic flashbacks about Callas's doomed affair with Aristotle Onassis that form the climaxes of both acts. 'This is a master class, not a psychiatrist's office,' she announces early on-to no avail. Stripping La Divina of both mastery and class, McNally shrinks her with a vengeance.

Homey and nostalgic, this musical means to emphasize the importance of laughter in the face of tragedy. But the sob stories overwhelm the charm. A dying old woman, a child ripped from her parents, a lovable zany killed by thugs, a nation herded like beasts to the slaughter: These are just a few of the show’s many tugs at our emotions. By the time we find Raisel in the Warsaw Ghetto, clutching a rag doll stained with the blood of a murdered Jewish friend, even the softest touch in the audience may grow wary of Dart’s hard sell. The People in the Picture reminds us of the Holocaust’s bitter injunction to never forget. It’s a worthy effort, but work this blunt can’t pierce very deep; the tears the show elicits are too easily wiped away.

The faultless ensemble includes an impeccable John Benjamin Hickey as the first man to break through Ned’s defenses and Ellen Barkin as an early AIDS doctor, who brings down the house with a frustrated tirade about the slow official response to the epidemic. Pace commands tears with a superb account of the death of his lover, a passage that holds its own against the most gruesome messenger monologues of Greek tragedy. Jim Parsons provides exemplary comic relief and unexpected depth as a Southern activist in Ned’s group, and Patrick Breen, Mark Harelik, Luke Macfarlane, Richard Topol and Wayne Alan Wilcox offer admirable support. The entire company acts up a storm, and the production leaves you drenched. The Normal Heart is hectoring, stiff and one-sided; it is also raw, scary and galvanizing. That’s Kramer in a nutshell, and his kind of nuts we still need.

Directed with an elegant touch by Doug Hughes, Arianda’s Billie Dawn is a take-charge dame, carnally aggressive and self-delighted. Clomping around in Catherine Zuber’s exuberant costumes, on John Lee Beatty’s beauty of a set, she’s a sex toy by way of Shirley Booth; this braying, unapologetic bimbo—“I’m stupid and I like it!”—may be a cousin of Jennifer Tilly’s sour Olive in Bullets Over Broadway, but she’s utterly adorable instead of appalling. This is the part that made Judy Holliday’s career, and Arianda claims it all to herself. She succeeds where many would-be Billies, such as Madeline Kahn and Melanie Griffith, have failed: This is the era of a new Dawn.