Ben Brantley — Theater Critic

Ms. Blanchett does bring colorful shades of excitement to being bored. Her Anna plays a great game of dramatically uninterested chess, and her response to a rambling speech by Mikhail at the lunch table is priceless. (Hint: it involves the removal of an undergarment.) That comes just before that rip-roaring, scenery-destroying bacchanal I wrote about earlier. It's one of the most memorable party sequences I've ever seen, a volcanic channeling of a displaced class's fear, anger and disgust. These people want to blow up their world, and in a way they do, most entertainingly. That leaves us with another full hour of tediously sorting through the ashes.

Every now and then, as yet another peppy cliché prances across the stage of the Circle in the Square Theater, you may pause to ponder the pioneering achievement of 'In Transit,' the singing portrait of New York City subway travelers, which opened on Sunday night. After all, what you're listening to often gleams with the blended polyphony of a good-size band. Yet not an instrument has been used in the performance of this a cappella musical, staged by the Tony-winning director and choreographer Kathleen Marshall. Everything we hear, as we are told in a (sung) preshow announcement, is created by human voices. Acknowledging this is rather like admiring the ingenuity that must have gone into a sentimental picture of a rainbow, perhaps with the Care Bears in the foreground, rendered entirely in bottle caps. It's definitely something to have achieved such visual specificity out of bottle caps. But it's still a picture of a rainbow with Care Bears.

I could dwell on those performances endlessly. Unfortunately, my immediate duty compels me to consider these figures of natural grandeur in the state of unnatural captivity into which they have been penned in 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses,' which opened on Sunday night at the Booth Theater, a production during which you pray for their deliverance.

No doubt Walter would inform me that you, my impatient audience, have already stopped reading by now. But though 'The Front Page' is all about the adrenaline rush that turns journalists into deadline junkies, it's hard to work up the proper urgency about Jack O'Brien's production. So to finish the thought I started before I so rudely interrupted myself, the latest edition of 'The Front Page' is ... diverting. Pretty darn good. At moments, very funny indeed.

Though it stars that fine actress Diane Lane, is staged by the rising British director Simon Godwin and features a new adaptation by the seriously gifted young dramatist Stephen Karam ('The Humans'), this frenzied, flashy take on one family's mortgage crisis may be the most clueless interpretation of Chekhov I have seen. And, yes, that includes high school, college and community theater productions. So, as one of Chekhov's characters, who know from dashed hopes, might put it, 'What happened?' But no matter the angles from which you examine Mr. Godwin's production - and I've tried so many I have a neck cramp - it's impossible to discern a coherent point of view.

Yet one of the points of this wondrously stealthy play, largely set in London and directed with crystalline precision by Mark Brokaw, is that life is made up of infinite variables that keep combining to unpredictable ends. That's where Heisenberg, the founder of the uncertainty principle, comes into the picture, but don't worry. His name is never invoked directly; this is not an obviously highbrow play.

They also manage to paint an exquisitely painful portrait of a dysfunctional twilight bromance, in which the (sort of) patrician George dominates the (marginally) shlubbier Gil. The details that define their characters, too, are precise and impeccably off-center, a perfect match for their stained, saggy corduroys and fungoid gray hair.

They also manage to paint an exquisitely painful portrait of a dysfunctional twilight bromance, in which the (sort of) patrician George dominates the (marginally) shlubbier Gil. The details that define their characters, too, are precise and impeccably off-center, a perfect match for their stained, saggy corduroys and fungoid gray hair.

But the awe-struck descriptions of nature in ascendance are always secondary to what we're feeling, physically as well as emotionally. And 'The Encounter,' which has only sharpened its production values since I saw it in London in February, summons those sensations not just through sound but also through lighting (by Paul Anderson) and projections (by Will Duke) that transform a sterile stage into a phosphorescent jungle where shadow trumps substance or an American suburb illuminated by a bonfire of discarded worldly goods.

Once you can see past the, uh, smoke screen, there's evidence of real emotional embers smoldering among this talented ensemble, who are just waiting for the moment to turn into human flamethrowers...Fortunately, Ms. Best, Ms. Reilly and Mr. Owen...are skilled and charismatic enough to fulfill these requirements without entirely overwhelming the play's more subtle essence...In Mr. Hodge's interpretation, everyone exists in a five-alarm state of tension from the get-go, with equally heightened poses and inflections. Ms. Reilly finds a little-girl petulance in Kate's seeming passivity, while Ms. Best's Anna is worldly to the point of vampishness. Mr. Owen underscores Deeley's beleaguered air of machismo with a self-parodying, lounge lizard swagger. This approach, verging on caricature, makes 'Old Times' more obviously funny than it usually is, and the desperation within the triangle reads larger...Less felicitously, this more-is-more sensibility can also make the script seem self-parodyingly pretentious.

A show about young rebels grabbing and shaping the future of an unformed country, 'Hamilton' is making its own resonant history by changing the language of musicals. And it does so by insisting that the forms of song most frequently heard on pop radio stations in recent years -- rap, hip-hop, R&B ballads -- have both the narrative force and the emotional interiority to propel a hefty musical about long-dead white men whose solemn faces glower from the green bills in our wallets...But these guys don't exactly look like the marble statues of the men they're portraying...when they open their mouths, the words that tumble out are a fervid mix of contemporary street talk, wild and florid declarations of ambition and, oh yes, elegant phrases from momentous political documents you studied in school...And you never doubt for a second that these eclectic words don't belong in proximity to one another...Mr. Miranda's Hamilton, a propulsive mix of hubris and insecurity, may be the center of the show. But he is not its star. That would be history itself, that collision of time and character that molds the fates of nations and their inhabitants.

...despite a score that at its best has the flavor of darkest chocolate...'The Visit' only rarely shakes off a stasis that suggests a carefully carved mausoleum frieze. Nor does the show ever quite make peace between its uneasily twinned strands of merciless cynicism and a softer sentimentality...The show's cynical and morbid components are more persuasive, if a tad monotonous...That 'The Visit' still holds the attention has much to do with Ms. Rivera's command of the stage and her ability to find a concerto of feelings in what might have been a single-note role...Her singing voice, sharp-edged and resonant, is identifiably that of the original Anita in 'West Side Story' but invested with an authoritative, all-knowing world-weariness.

Unchecked enthusiasm is not always an asset in musical comedy, despite the genre's reputation for wholesale peppiness. 'Something Rotten!'...dances dangerously on the line between tireless and tedious, and winds up collapsing into the second camp...'Sophomoric' is the right adjective for 'Something Rotten!'...this production wallows in the puerile puns, giggly double-entendres, lip-smacking bad taste and goofy pastiche numbers often found in college revues...With his resolute jaw, gleaming smile and heroic tenor, Mr. d'Arcy James wasn't meant to play a sad sack like Nick. Though he works hard, the character eludes his grasp. Mr. Borle brings his well-polished panoply of comic tics, winks and flourishes to his portrayal of Shakespeare as a glam rock star...Borle is a master of carefully stylized excess. In 'Something Rotten!,' though, he has nothing else to fall back on. Like the show itself, it's both too much and not enough.

Unchecked enthusiasm is not always an asset in musical comedy, despite the genre's reputation for wholesale peppiness. 'Something Rotten!'...dances dangerously on the line between tireless and tedious, and winds up collapsing into the second camp...'Sophomoric' is the right adjective for 'Something Rotten!'...this production wallows in the puerile puns, giggly double-entendres, lip-smacking bad taste and goofy pastiche numbers often found in college revues...With his resolute jaw, gleaming smile and heroic tenor, Mr. d'Arcy James wasn't meant to play a sad sack like Nick. Though he works hard, the character eludes his grasp. Mr. Borle brings his well-polished panoply of comic tics, winks and flourishes to his portrayal of Shakespeare as a glam rock star...Borle is a master of carefully stylized excess. In 'Something Rotten!,' though, he has nothing else to fall back on. Like the show itself, it's both too much and not enough.

Renée Fleming seems like far too nice a woman to be playing a diva...Even screeching and preening like a peacock in mating season, Ms. Fleming glows with good nature, good sportsmanship and the reassuring sanity of a hostess at a fancy dress party who knows that all these silly high jinks shall pass. If such amiability makes Raquel less a monster than the script dictates, it also makes the show less a chore to sit through...DiPietro's version seems more like a forgotten bottom-drawer comedy from the 1930s...in fairness, everybody in 'Living on Love' appears to be having a fairly good time...Though most of the jokes are so tired you expect them to nod off by themselves, the cast delivers them with go-for-broke gusto...It's only when [Fleming] sings...that Raquel becomes the passionate, larger-than-life figure she is said to be. The glimpse of real grandeur in that voice makes this trifle of a play seem even smaller. ... Raquel (Fleming) and her husband (Mr. Sills) belong to the breed of outsize, badly behaved theatrical couples who have been showing up at least since the salad days of George S. Kaufman and Noel Coward...

But most important is the music, a career high for Ms. Tesori ('Violet,' 'Caroline, or Change'), which captures both the nagging persistence of memory and its frustrating insubstantiality, with leitmotifs that tease and shimmer. (John Clancy did the nuanced orchestrations.) The music is woven so intricately into Ms. Kron's time-juggling script that you'll find yourself hard pressed to recall what exactly was said and what was sung.

Mr. Sher...understands very well what makes the show work, and he delivers it clean-scrubbed and naked, allowing us to see 'The King and I' plain...its most impressive achievement is how it balances epic sweep with intimate sensibility...That Ms. O'Hara, one of our greatest reinterpreters of musical standards, does so is not surprising. (You'll feel you're hearing 'Hello, Young Lovers' for the first time.) But also give full marks to the first-rate Ruthie Ann Miles...who, as the King's chief wife, turns 'Something Wonderful' into an exquisite expression of romantic realism that could be the show's anthem. The person she's singing about with such fond ambivalence...is the King himself, embodied here by Mr. Watanabe with the convincing exasperation of a majesty under siege...his big solos, while attacked with ardor, should become even stronger as his pronunciation improves. But he sure comes across when it really counts...As played by Ms. O'Hara, [Anna's] a smart, scrappy, willful pragmatist who also happens to know that love is often as strange as it is undeniable. That knowledge infuses every note Ms. O'Hara sings, and it is something wonderful indeed.

Clap if you believe in brand names...Neither Mr. Grammer nor the show's leading man, Matthew Morrison...appear wholly invested in their performances. But that's O.K. Their mere presences do most of the work for them...The stage version of 'Finding Neverland' is no replica of the film, though it might have been better if it were. Instead, it heightens the screenplay's sentimentality, tidy psychologizing and life-affirming messages by thickening their syrup and corn quotients in ways presumably deemed palatable to theatergoing children and their parents...Every song...vaguely reminds you of some recording you have heard in the background of your life...I'm assuming the theory is that high volume will obliterate our awareness that this music is fatally ersatz. But there's no disguising the feeling that almost every element of the production has a secondhand, synthetic quality: the dialogue, the jerky choreography (by Mia Michaels), the jokes, the anachronistic depiction of the show people who put on Barrie's plays.

'It Shoulda Been You'...confirms the sad truth that weddings...bring out the worst in some people. That includes cynics, show-offs, heavy drinkers, envious have-nots and, it would seem, the creators of American musicals...'Shoulda'...occupies that treacherous comic ground between smirky and perky. Mining an illusion of charm from such terrain is hard, if not impossible, work for any contemporary performer. Not that the eminently talented ensemble members here don't do their best to fill out the paper-doll stereotypes they have been asked to embody...For the most part, the score sticks so relentlessly to the same up-tempo jauntiness that you expect a bouncing ball to materialize...There's not an element in 'It Shoulda Been You' that hasn't been used, and wrung dry, before. Adding latter-day twists to this cocktail of clichés somehow makes it taste all the flatter.

The stage version...is strictly for fun. That may sound like a weak recommendation to those who wear their brows high. But being fun in period costume for nearly five-and-a-half hours of live theater is no mean achievement...But it's also because Mr. Herrin and Mr. Poulton craftily use the narrative urgency and immediacy of live theater to turn audiences into pleasurably guilty confidants. Spun as a bright web of tittle-tattle, 'Wolf Hall' pours secrets of states and of stately boudoirs into your ears, while reminding you that well-wielded gossip can be a potent (and potentially lethal) political weapon...Working with a vast cast of characters (embodied by a protean ensemble of almost two dozen) and covering many convolutions of plot, history, law and sexual practices, 'Wolf Hall' nonetheless gives the impression of always traveling light...Both staging and script use a galleon-load of hoary theatrical tools and tricks to keep us hooked, in ways that are as effective as they are shameless.

The stage version...is strictly for fun. That may sound like a weak recommendation to those who wear their brows high. But being fun in period costume for nearly five-and-a-half hours of live theater is no mean achievement...But it's also because Mr. Herrin and Mr. Poulton craftily use the narrative urgency and immediacy of live theater to turn audiences into pleasurably guilty confidants. Spun as a bright web of tittle-tattle, 'Wolf Hall' pours secrets of states and of stately boudoirs into your ears, while reminding you that well-wielded gossip can be a potent (and potentially lethal) political weapon...Working with a vast cast of characters (embodied by a protean ensemble of almost two dozen) and covering many convolutions of plot, history, law and sexual practices, 'Wolf Hall' nonetheless gives the impression of always traveling light...Both staging and script use a galleon-load of hoary theatrical tools and tricks to keep us hooked, in ways that are as effective as they are shameless.

They are hardly a well-matched pair, this couple that has been given such transfixing life in two of the most expert stage performances you're likely to see for many seasons. As embodied by Carey Mulligan and Bill Nighy in the heart-piercing revival of David Hare's 'Skylight,' Kyra Hollis and Tom Sergeant have none of the things in common that usually make for a fine romance...Yet as you watch Ms. Mulligan and Mr. Nighy move magnetically toward and away from each other in Stephen Daldry's exquisitely balanced London-born production...you can't help thinking that on some profound level these two were made to be together...The great achievement of this production from Mr. Daldry...is that it sustains each perspective with crystalline focus...As played by Ms. Mulligan...Kyra is obdurately calm and centered. But Ms. Mulligan achingly conveys just how hard-won this defensive stillness is. She has an uncommon gift for radiating complex layers of feeling by simply inhabiting a space. Mr. Nighy's Tom, in contrast, is a blinding kinetic force, a creature who never stops moving, advancing and retreating in a flurry of knife-edged angles, forever casing out and sizing up his environment.

Perhaps best of all, this 'Century' brings Ms. Chenoweth and Mr. Gallagher back to Broadway, where they can demonstrate the subtleties of being larger than life. These fine performers have been largely confined to television screens in recent years. And they grab the chance to chew (and devour) some real live scenery - and in Ms. Chenoweth's case, hit pretty much every note on the scale, musical and otherwise - with the ecstatic vengeance of genies let out of their bottles.

he show also allows the smashing Ms. Mirren to demonstrate her quick-change virtuosity in becoming the queen at different ages, from 1951 to the present, before our very eyes. Those transformations, accomplished with sleights of hand worthy of a master magician, are probably the most entertaining and satisfying aspects of 'The Audience.' It is somehow deeply reassuring to see Ms. Mirren, who turns 70 this year, step back in time as Elizabeth and persuade us that she is whatever age she wants to be. Such time-defying ease feels appropriate to the portrayal of a national ruler perceived as all but immortal.

...for people who feel that it's enough just to be in the same room as an adored celebrity, this 'Fish' -- which on paper would seem to teem with the comic tics and turns for which Mr. David is celebrated -- may well constitute a full meal...Mr. David has written a play that, four-letter language aside, feels like a throwback to the mid-1960s, when Neil Simon was king of the punch line...'Fish' gives us archetypes as old as commedia dell'arte and one-liners as old as the Catskills. But credible, breathing, present-tense characters are nowhere to be found....Broadway regulars like Louis J. Stadlen and Mr. Shenkman read loud and clear, in contrast to screen veterans like Ms. Wilson (as Norman's wife) and Mr. David, who tend to mumble. Perhaps in compensation, Mr. David has enlarged his gestures, providing semaphoric variations on his classic shrug. Oh well. The audience I saw the show with seemed pretty, pretty happy and gave Mr. David a big fat kiss of a standing ovation.