Adam Feldman — Theater Critic

'Sometimes I get the feeling that New York is jaded,' sings Buddy in the second-act opener, 'Nobody Cares About Santa.' Can he blame us? Even with a chorus line of dancing Kris Kringles, that number, like the show as a whole, earns dutiful applause but no Christmas cheers.

The frustrating thing about Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is that it is not bad; it is merely unready. Had the show opened out of town, many of its narrative troubles might have been fixable. (The current version exhibits scars of last-minute show-doctoring.) But in its current form, it seems lost among the streets of Madrid—always on the verge of breaking through, but finding itself instead in the soup.

Vanessa Redgrave is a world-class actor, but she has little business playing Daisy Werthan—or rather, she has too much business, in the sense of fussy stage activity. From the first scene, which she spends whipping up a cake, to the last, in which she screws her face into a cartoon of wizened mischief, she never quite jells into personhood. Her deracinated Daisy verges on hokey; and so it falls to Jones’s slightly dazed Hoke to give their relationship the requisite depth. Hale and booming, the actor is in fine fettle—though, at nearly 80, long-toothed for the part—and his imposing presence lends poignancy to Hoke’s solicitude and dignity to his growing self-respect. His scenes with the reliable Boyd Gaines, as Daisy’s son, have an enjoyable rhythm. But without a strong connection between the odd couple at its core, the play putters along as little more than a star vehicle, and one in which Jones does most of the driving.

Gentleness is not the first quality that leaps to mind when it comes to the work of David Mamet. But the bile master's 1977 two-hander, A Life in the Theatre-now making its Broadway debut in a slight but entertaining production starring Patrick Stewart and T.R. Knight-has little of the rat-a-tat dramatic firepower of Mamet's later and more famous works. It is a knowing, affectionate, faintly nostalgic portrait of actors and the roles they play onstage and off, and Mamet tends to illuminate them not with the glare of a follow spot but rather by the soft glow of a ghost light.

Following a limited run at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre last season, Donald Margulies’s dexterous drama has now returned for another shot. If the writing is occasionally well-crafted to a fault, this minor flaw is mitigated by Daniel Sullivan’s attentive direction, which elicits an exquisitely nuanced central performance from Linney and strong supporting ones from the rest of the cast, which includes a rumpled Eric Bogosian as a magazine editor and Christina Ricci (stepping in for Alicia Silverstone) as his unsophisticated young girlfriend. For all its carefully woven-in themes—about personal versus professional priorities, the ethics and limits of representation, and more—the play is perhaps best appreciated as an artfully composed picture of a woman in a quiet crisis of her own, who feels safer in war than in love.

The play is less mawkish than its premise might suggest. Hall, who delved into related terrain in Billy Elliot, does not overly sentimentalize the working-class men at the core of his story (even if, as in Billy Elliot, he takes a few cheap shots at the fancier characters). Directed with lovely balance by Max Roberts—and acted by a fine British ensemble, led by Christopher Connel as the most sensitive of the pitmen—the play presents the miners’ works without evading the question of whether they were, in the judgment of art history, mostly minor work. It’s a well-crafted and thoughtful evening of theater, and Hall ends the show on a sober note of socialist disillusionment.

To the noble Marin Mazzie falls the unenviable task of replacing Alice Ripley in Next to Normal, and she rises to the challenge: The succession is a success. Ripley’s star turn was one of those rare, perfect matches of actor and role; all of the idiosyncrasies that distinguish Ripley as a performer seemed to weave into her Diana, a suburban housewife suffering from an extreme version of bipolar disorder. To equal her would be next to impossible—Betty Buckley might have given her a run 15 years ago—and I was wary of seeing anyone else as Diana. But Mazzie comes through with confidence and surprising intensity. If this beast of a role seems a little tamer under her control, it still scratches out.

While the play raises some pertinent questions about the intersections of life and art, at heart it’s a cozy, bookish West Village version of All About Eve. But the women are unevenly matched: The excerpts that Margulies gives us of Lisa’s supposedly promising work are unimpressive, and Paulson is not a sharp enough foil for the dramatic fencing required. Lavin deserves to be seen, but might be better appreciated elsewhere. Is it perverse to hope for an Off Broadway transfer?

Certainly, it is a joy to see Cook back on Broadway for her first musical in nearly 30 years. At 82, she continues to embroider her gossamer soprano with rich threads of longing, sincerity and emotional intelligence. But although Vanessa Williams looks as sensational as ever, her acting is not always up to the demands of the incisive lyrics. (Her account of “Ah, but Underneath,” one of the sharpest and most underrated Sondheim songs, nails the physical striptease but not the emotional one.) And Tom Wopat’s casual leading-man style is lamentably wrong for his big numbers, Sweeney Todd’s “Epiphany” and Sunday’s “Finishing the Hat.”

The endearing Hayes excels at his nebbishy physical comedy and zany confidences with the audience, but still seems nervous in the wrong ways when he sings. More problematic is the talented but miscast Chenoweth, who tries to work against her patented micro-Valkyrie persona but remains too strong and mature for Fran. Two famous songs—“I Say a Little Prayer” and “A House Is Not a Home”—have been added for her; although the second one actively contradicts the plot, in a way it is this production’s theme song. Large and kitschily well-appointed, Promises, Promises has the faint inside echo of an unsold McMansion.

Terry Johnson’s superb revival is tighter and bolder. This La Cage aux Folles is no longer breaking ground; it’s planting new crops and watching them bloom. I would never have thought that we needed another revival of this musical so soon after the last one’s flames flickered out. Yet somehow this familiar show blows the roof off the Longacre Theatre, and makes a case for La Cage as a classic of American musical comedy.

The target audience appears to be tourists who couldn’t land tickets to Branson, Missouri, much less Jersey Boys, but the performers do pull out the stops. Lance Guest’s subterranean bass is right on the money for Cash, and Robert Britton Lyons and Eddie Clendening form a respectable rockabilly club as Perkins and Presley, respectively. Hunter Foster frets efficiently as Sun king Sam Phillips; Elizabeth Stanley, pretty in pink, adds welcome distaff support as Elvis’s girlfriend. But the night belongs to Levi Kreis, who gives a killer performance as the florid piano showman Jerry Lee Lewis: With the pounding he gives them, it’s a wonder the keys stay on the board.

Twyla Tharp’s Come Fly Away is not just the best date show on Broadway; it’s a bit like being on a great date yourself. First you’re in a retro nightclub, soaking in a bubbly bath of dance, romance and classic Frank Sinatra tunes; and then…bang! Things get wild. If last summer’s Burn the Floor was the Terpsichorean equivalent of pornography—all flash and thrust and money moves—Come Fly Away gets at its erotics more genuinely, charged by Tharp’s electrified ballet.

The best new American play of the Broadway season, Next Fall leaves you thinking about rapture and rupture. If you go, which you should, be prepared to laugh some, perhaps to cry some, and then to rise in appreciation.

For all the verve of its neo-Shavian back-and-forth, however, Race falters on its way to the finish line. Adept at articulating the play’s issues, Mamet is less successful at dramatizing them. The play is not unlike an 80-minute episode of a televised legal drama (on cable, where they can use the f-word). Its two lawyers are played well by Spader and David Alan Grier, but they have little dimension beyond their arguments; and the other two characters, who have more opportunity for development, register largely as ciphers.

Now that Broadway no longer benefits from Hairspray’s retro uplift, space on the Great White Way has been cleared for another musical about the racial integration of a television dance program in the early years of the civil-rights movement. Joe DiPietro and David Bryan’s Memphis cannot be faulted for its intentions: Its heart and its soul music are in the right place. The show’s assets begin with Chad Kimball’s dynamic, courageously outré leading performance as Huey, a Tennessee radio DJ in the 1950s, who champions “race records” and embarks on a risky romance with a black singer (the lovely Montego Glover, an impressive vocalist). The music has laudable drive, which Sergio Trujillo’s choreography brings to vibrant life.

It is not easy to pull off a musical about psychotropic drugs and electroconvulsive therapy—or for that matter, about duty, freedom and loss. In its trial mounting at Second Stage last year, Next to Normal sometimes suffered from acute self-consciousness and mood swings. Happily, authors Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt have successfully stabilized the show since then, and their songs make up the best new Broadway score of the season, merging show-tune influences (William Finn neurosis in “My Psychopharmacologist and I”) with more radio-ready styles (John Denver wistfulness in “I Miss the Mountains,” Seventies pop-rock thrust in the instantly memorable “I’m Alive”).

The musical’s status as a masterpiece rests largely on its two most exceptional assets: the expansive push and pull of Bernstein’s score, and the extraordinary mix of truculence and grace in the dances created by the show’s original director-choreographer, Jerome Robbins. But modern audiences, weaned on the sour milk of irony, have a built-in resistance to song and dance in a dramatic context, especially one so violent as West Side Story’s. The show had to adapt, and Laurents has labored—within the constraints of what remains a faithful account of a 1950s musical—to disguise its traces of old-fashioned corn and bring its themes into hardened focus.

But is South Pacific a masterpiece? The score is a treasure, certainly, but elements of this 1949 show’s depiction of military life now seem corny, as does the pedantic antiracism song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” And although the strings beneath their dialogue signify romance from the start, there is something creepy about the rushed central relationship between American nurse Nellie Forbush (the lovely O’Hara, totally capable as always but a touch on the chilly side) and the wealthy, older French plantation owner Emile de Becque, who is looking for “someone young and smiling.”

The musical In the Heights has plenty of good old-fashioned Broadway heart, and its heart has a thrilling new beat: the invigorating pulse of modern Latin rhythms, mixed with the percussive dynamism of hip-hop. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s joyous score gives classic musical-theater themes (love, self-definition, overcoming adversity) a contemporary urban twist; when the charismatic composer himself—playing Usnavi, the garrulous proprietor of a corner bodega in Washington Heights—lets his own witty rhymes flow, he pulls Broadway into the present tense. With its verbal extravagance, narrative focus and unapologetic emphasis on wordplay, rap is a natural match with the Broadway musical, and never before have the two been wed so happily.

With Jersey Boys, the Broadway musical has finally done right by the jukebox, presenting the Four Seasons' infectiously energetic 1960s tunes as they were intended to be performed. True, the script adheres closely to the dramatic beats of a VH1 biopic: building bridges in the first act, delving into tunnels in the second. But under Des McAnuff's sleek direction, the result feels canny instead of canned. And Bob Gaudio's music, as sung by a dynamic cast and shaped by Steve Canyon Kennedy's exemplary audio design, sounds as good as it ever did (and sometimes—blasphemy!—even better).

Chicken & Biscuits clearly has its heart in the right place, and the cast and creative team include more than two dozen people making their Broadway debuts. But their lack of seasoning shows: the writing is blobby, much of the design is unpolished, and young director Zhailon Levingston sometimes seems lost in dealing with the challenging three-quarters thrust stage at Circle in the Square.