Alexis Soloski — Theater Critic

When the dancers are leaping, the accordions wheezing, the lights flashing, the skirts swirling, and the vodka flowing, then Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 feels thrillingly unlike anything else on Broadway. A chunk of War and Peace, adapted to a sung-through indie-folk-electro score by composer Dave Malloy and directed with breathless, breathtaking verve by Rachel Chavkin, this musical is a cannonball aimed at any show that has accepted proscenium staging as an unyielding norm rather than a conscious choice.

When the dancers are leaping, the accordions wheezing, the lights flashing, the skirts swirling, and the vodka flowing, then Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 feels thrillingly unlike anything else on Broadway. A chunk of War and Peace, adapted to a sung-through indie-folk-electro score by composer Dave Malloy and directed with breathless, breathtaking verve by Rachel Chavkin, this musical is a cannonball aimed at any show that has accepted proscenium staging as an unyielding norm rather than a conscious choice.

This production has no doubt that Merteuil will win, though at some cost to herself, and Schreiber seems to sense this. There's a saturnine, slightly defeated air to his alcoholic Valmont. Despite Schreiber's height, swagger and masculine force, his Valmont is no match for Merteuil. He layers some of his eventual rout into the earlier scenes, all but ceding the stage to McTeer. McTeer knows what to do with it. She has set her voice somewhere between purr and growl and arranged her hands and arms into movements that are both perfect expressions of court gestures and precise parodies of them. Her Merteuil is both elegant and vicious, with an air of surface refinement barely concealing the ferocity below. There are claws beneath her manicure, fangs behind her smile. Her extraordinary performance is scorching and chilling. Ice and fire at once.

The Broadway revival is not a copy of the original - some lyrics have changed, some emphases. Neither is it a faultless work. The set, by David Rockwell, with its chintzy cutouts of the Manhattan skyline and peculiar cube of furniture, is one of the ugliest to galumph onto the stage in recent years. Spencer Liff's choreography has some spry moments, like a dance that draws on bullfighting and Greco-Roman wrestling, but at other times seems oddly reticent. And while Borle is not precisely miscast, the role only rarely allows him to display his great strengths - his madcap comic verve, his brassy tenor. Other actors are better suited, particularly Uranowitz, who delivers a superb Mendel.

There are ideological principles in play here and a couple of provocations, as when Lopakhin's triumphal jig takes on the rhythms of a tribal dance (the original music is by Nico Muhly). But the heart and that particular laughter-through-tears tone seem to have deserted the piece. You can't see the Chekhovian forest for all the miscellaneous trees.

These septuagenarian grotesques are the alter egos of the comics Nick Kroll (Gil) and John Mulaney (George), first developed on alternative comedy stages and more recently seen on The Kroll Show in the segment Too Much Tuna. (Yes, enough tuna is used in this show to raise the mercury levels of everyone attending to dangerous heights. And this is even before the addition of a giant puppet depicting a tuna sandwich as incubus, which is practically guaranteed to give audience members nightmares. Also indigestion.)

These septuagenarian grotesques are the alter egos of the comics Nick Kroll (Gil) and John Mulaney (George), first developed on alternative comedy stages and more recently seen on The Kroll Show in the segment Too Much Tuna. (Yes, enough tuna is used in this show to raise the mercury levels of everyone attending to dangerous heights. And this is even before the addition of a giant puppet depicting a tuna sandwich as incubus, which is practically guaranteed to give audience members nightmares. Also indigestion.)

The book, by Gordon Greenberg and Chad Hodge, has modernized the tale somewhat (the blackface routine is no more), but not too much. (Surely in this day and age it would be Jim and Ted who band together to open that B&B. And they might have decorated it more handsomely.) The story has an old-timey predictability that may delight those with more conservative tastes, but no real effort has been made to differentiate this show from the other recent Berlin offering, White Christmas, or to integrate the songs into the show. 'What could be better than Broadway?' a hoofer asks. Then Jim launches into Blue Skies. You can check out anytime you like, and chances are that one will - and quite often - as the leaden dialogue trudges to its close.

The book, by Gordon Greenberg and Chad Hodge, has modernized the tale somewhat (the blackface routine is no more), but not too much. (Surely in this day and age it would be Jim and Ted who band together to open that B&B. And they might have decorated it more handsomely.) The story has an old-timey predictability that may delight those with more conservative tastes, but no real effort has been made to differentiate this show from the other recent Berlin offering, White Christmas, or to integrate the songs into the show. 'What could be better than Broadway?' a hoofer asks. Then Jim launches into Blue Skies. You can check out anytime you like, and chances are that one will - and quite often - as the leaden dialogue trudges to its close.

McIntyre's story is fascinating, but it serves here a placeholder, an opportunity for McBurney to explore his deeper thematic concerns: why do we surrender ourselves to narrative? How do we distinguish between reality and fiction? When should we trust the evidence of our senses and when should we allow for the extrasensory? (There's also lots of less helpful material about being and time.) McBurney intercuts the narrative with recordings of his sleepless daughter's desire to be told just one more story. The binaural audio, he says, is his way of reading a bedtime story to each of us, using proximity to encourage mimesis and summon our empathy.

Fitfully thrilling and consistently baffling, Paramour - Cirque du Soleil's first attempt at a Broadway book musical - is the story of a young singer torn between the megalomaniacal director, who wants to make her his star, and the tender songwriter, who wants to make her his muse. Or perhaps it's a parable of forbidden love as enacted by shirtless twins in an erotic aerial pas de deux. Or maybe it's a wacky caper comedy with a culminating chase scene performed atop a giant trampoline. Honestly, it's hard to tell.

...Shuffle Along...a sometimes inspired and sometimes listless exploration of a path-breaking theatrical work...George C Wolfe has written a script detailing the struggle to bring the show to the stage. Amid these scenes -- some dramatic, some didactic -- are the original songs of Noble Sissle (Henry) and Eubie Blank (Dixon), choreographed in kinetic, hard-striking fashion by the tap mastermind Savion Glover...This Shuffle Along is sometimes edifying and sometimes entertaining, but rarely do these twin aims coincide...it's only when the feet are tapping, the fringe is swaying and the voices of the leads and chorus are celebrating the thrill of syncopation that the musical lives again.

The close of the play has always belonged to Mary, but Lange gets hold of much of the rest of it, too. Her Mary, a part she first played in the West End in 2000, can seem sweet, flighty, frail, but there's an adamantine spine beneath that softness, one that's been built on need and hurt. When provoked, she can turn as vicious as any of the men and she knows how to make her words cut more cruelly and deeply.

But the musical's signal misstep and ultimate salvation is its sentimentality. One of the finer qualities of Babbitt's book is how free it is of the slushy or mawkish. Not so here. Winnie is given a dead father, ostensibly to deepen her emotional predicament and there's a sappy quality in how her pert presence revivifies each of the tired Tucks.

Digs once targeted at Naomi Campbell are now meant for Gwyneth Paltrow and the current menu parodies the trend toward high-end foraging favorites...Some of the jokes could be sharper and even as the script skewers the horrifying patrons, it is often strangely polite...Ferguson is an actor of such irrepressible amiability...Under Jason Moore's direction, a few of the actorly shifts could occur more quickly and not all the personae have a gestural specificity to match the vocal one. But moving back and forth among 40 distinct characters still represents a tour de force, which Ferguson wears lightly, even humbly, though with obvious enjoyment.

Under Diane Paulus' direction, the show at times seems to struggle to fill the stage. The book, written by Jessie Nelson and based on the film script, is nicely witty. But the choreography, by Lorin Latarro, seems an afterthought, and the songs, by the Grammy-winning artist Sara Bareilles, are tuneful, yet often strangely reticent, as though meant to be sung quietly to oneself rather than loudly before a crowd. Bad Idea, a duet between Jenna and Dr Pomatter, is a nicely rowdy exception, as is Jenna's heartfelt She Used to Be Mine. (One song for Ogie, Never Getting Rid of Me, is a showstopper; the other, I Love You Like a Table, a cheerful muddle.)

A bold and perilous artistic endeavor, this musical is also something of a tonal muddle, approaching the material from myriad angles - some serious, some sleazy, some nice, some nasty - which don't ultimately form a persuasive whole...As adapted by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, scored by Duncan Sheik, and directed by Rupert Goold, this is an inarguably stylish undertaking and sometimes an exciting one...Often the production delights, in ways camp and comedic, in the ugly extravagance of the period...Walker, looking like a brilliantined Ken Doll, gives another galvanic turn, communicating the seductiveness, playfulness, and terrible vacancy that define Bateman...So is this satire or psychodrama, monstrous comedy or moral horror? It's all and it's nothing, too.

Parts of the play can feel somewhat too pat, as though Zeller is amusing himself in finding out how many ways he can alter reality using the familiar mechanisms of the stage - an audience's trust of exposition, the faith in representational setting, the tendency to identify a particular character with a single actor. But he dismisses most of this cleverness in an ending that is both sentimental and searing and will probably devastate anyone who has seen a close friend or relative suffer from dementia. The final scene is a terrible and tragic reversion, in which a man of articulacy and power is reduced to a kind of infantilism, left with with no language but a cry.

Van Hove's production takes place neither in the colonial era, nor in the mid-century one, but in some sort of timeless present where teenage girls wear pleated uniforms and most of the men sport beards. All of the action, public and private, judicial and domestic, plays out in the same space, a somewhat gloomy schoolroom whose chalkboard occasionally bursts into animated life.

Arriving on Broadway after several out-of-town tryouts, Bright Star is still suffering some issues of scale. The story it tells is a small and tender one and the staging and the music, playful and lovely, sometimes struggle to fill the house. The most emblematic aspect: a toy train that trundles on a trestle above the stage to suggest the journeys that characters take, an effect both charming and chintzy.

Blackbird...is a distressing two-hander about the dangerous influence and magnetism of traumatic events. It courts ethical dangers, in daring to characterize the bond between abuser and abused as a kind of perverse love story...Under Joe Mantello's direction, there is considerable tension in the opening moments, not all of it calculated or purposeful. Daniels begins the play in such a paroxysm of fear and anger that one worries he will quickly exhaust himself...In Una's self-conscious performativity, Williams indicates an emotionally stunted young woman whose earlier ordeal has prevented her from ever establishing a coherent adult identity. As the play continues, she begins to exhibit a strong dissociative quality, showing the confusion she still experiences, the crossed wires of pain and desire...There are no weapons on display here...but this is the most lacerating play on Broadway this season.

Even appreciating the gratification of nostalgia and camp, Disaster! is an odd property to find on Broadway and doesn't seem particularly at home here, with its cheap sets, shabby projections and understaffed chorus. But with its winking awareness of its own deficiencies, it invites everyone to get hooked on a feeling. Assuming falling rubble or man-eating fish don't get them first.

Even appreciating the gratification of nostalgia and camp, Disaster! is an odd property to find on Broadway and doesn't seem particularly at home here, with its cheap sets, shabby projections and understaffed chorus. But with its winking awareness of its own deficiencies, it invites everyone to get hooked on a feeling. Assuming falling rubble or man-eating fish don't get them first.

The Humans...is a funny, mournful, richly detailed and deeply humane study of a beleaguered family celebrating Thanksgiving dinner in a tumbledown Chinatown apartment...Karam is a writer in the Chekhovian mode and watching The Humans may put one in mind of Chekhov's observation that while people's happiness is being created and destroyed, all they can really do is to go on eating their dinners...Karam's particular genius...is that he is less interested in the catastrophes that afflict us than in how we cope with them, gracefully and awkwardly. To pile on so much suffering would seem cruel in another playwright, but Karam is a profoundly compassionate writer. He shows us the bravery and tenderness of people trying -- and sometimes failing -- to get on with their lives.

Unfocused, anemic and astonishingly trivial, this drama of family and memory has somehow found its way to Manhattan Theatre Club's Broadway berth...Some of this is Greenberg's way. He doesn't really do melodrama and many of his better plays -- like The American Plan -- avoid direct conflict and sidestep escalation...But here he seems to skirt any drama at all, even as he and the director Lynne Meadow try to elevate anticlimaxes into crescendos. The acting is patently pleasant and sometimes a little better than that. Lavin is playful as ever, always testing and teasing her children, essentially a defanged version of the role she played in The Lyons.