Ben Brantley

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.

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.

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.

As embodied by the bright and bouncy new musical 'Honeymoon in Vegas'...the world capital of gambling and neon is everything you want it to be. That means a little hip, a little square, a little dangerous, a little kitschy and a whole lotta delicioussh fun...But here's the bonus, in which East (Coast) meets West: This production is also a real-live, old-fashioned, deeply satisfying Broadway musical in a way few new shows are anymore...Mr. Brown...here finds a shiny, fertile common ground between brassiness according to Broadway and to Las Vegas. His songs seamlessly propel plot and define character in the way numbers did in the heyday of Rodgers and Hammerstein. But he often inflects them with the ring-a-ding swell and swing you associate with Frank Sinatra recordings from the late 1950s and early '60s. He's not just quoting or sending up that style; he's embracing it on his own terms as a keen-eared fan of today. And in a breakout performance, Mr. Danza...matches the nuanced flash of the music.

Who knew that higher physics could be so sexy, so accessible -- and so emotionally devastating? 'Constellations,' Nick Payne's gorgeous two-character drama, starring a perfectly matched Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson, may be the most sophisticated date play Broadway has seen...as staged by its original director, Michael Longhurst, 'Constellations' has been scaled up without bloat, and it's every bit as affecting as I remember...It's no surprise that Ms. Wilson...is comfortable with her role's demands. But Mr. Gyllenhaal, whose theater experience is more limited, is every bit as persuasive. They are both fluent in the awkward body language of nerds in love, and in the crossed signals of emotional ambivalence. But they use contrasting and complementary physical vocabularies to balance, gracefully and clumsily, shifts in power and longing, aggression and retreat.

Within a few moments, Mr. Cooper - without makeup or prosthetics - will have slowly and painstakingly distorted his form and features beyond recognition. From then on, he is not Bradley Cooper, or even someone in the mold of one of the finely detailed neurotics he has portrayed so compellingly in films like 'Silver Linings Playbook' or 'American Hustle.' Instead, what this actor has become is a big blank slate onto which others may project whatever they choose. One imagines that someone as famous as Mr. Cooper has ample experience of what this feels like.

Hope arrives in the form of dread toward the end of the first act of Edward Albee's 'A Delicate Balance'...Up to that point in this production, directed by Pam MacKinnon, it's been hard to detect much feeling of any kind within the carefully color-coordinated, dust-free, energy-free environs that have been installed onstage. To be sure, the three talented and celebrated people we have been watching up there thus far -- Glenn Close, John Lithgow and Lindsay Duncan -- have been delivering their characters' zingers and stingers with crispness, clarity and, when one feels an important theme coming on, heavy italics. Yet they have the distant, flattened dimensions of specimens under glass...But then -- oh, sweet deliverance -- here come good old, miserable, intrusive Harry and Edna to shake things up...As embodied by Bob Balaban and Clare Higgins, Harry and Edna arrive like a gust of -- well, I was going to say fresh air, but what Harry and Edna bring with them is something noxious and polluted...Their acting is more subtle than anybody else's here, but it is also bone deep...Yet in this version of 'A Delicate Balance,' there is no underneath. Its stars speak the lines as if they -- I mean, the performers, not the characters -- know exactly what they're saying and why...As you would expect of these highly accomplished, multi-award-winning cast members, none of them are bad. But they're giving us the play, instead of living it.

'The River' is conducted in a more minor key, and is also a more minor effort. Like 'Jerusalem,' this cryptic tale of a man and a woman (or women - maybe) magnifies the seemingly ordinary to mythic proportions, while honorably refusing to stoop to easy explanations. The director Ian Rickson, who brought such clarity and vitality to 'Jerusalem,' lends the same care and polish to the far more shadowy 'River.' This artfully staged production, set in a rural fishing cabin that is one man's insular kingdom, is guaranteed to hold your attention. But you're likely to leave it feeling hungry, and not just because it aims to mystify. Be grateful, then, that any pangs of emptiness are counterbalanced by the intriguing heft of Mr. Jackman's strangely radiant opacity.

Do not be misled by the title. Authenticity is conspicuous only by its absence in the tinny revival of 'The Real Thing'...Evidence of real feelings, real chemistry and real life in general is dishearteningly scarce in this interpretation of Tom Stoppard's 1982 comedy...Despite a talented big-name cast...this Roundabout Theater Company production is one of those unfortunate revivals that make you wonder if the play in question is worth revisiting...This latest version, though, never acquires a pulse beyond the rhythmic thrust and parry of bandied bons mots. As directed by the estimable Sam Gold...'The Real Thing' often feels as teeth-grindingly brittle as a summer stock production of a W. Somerset Maugham drawing-room comedy.

...this merry mating dance of a musical feels as fresh as first sunlight as it considers the urgent quest of three sailors to find girls and get, uh, lucky before their 24-hour shore leave is over. If there's a leer hovering over 'On the Town,' a seemingly limp 1944 artifact coaxed into pulsing new life by the director John Rando and the choreographer Joshua Bergasse, it's the leer of an angel...Mr. Rando...has a loving affinity for this material that dispels the scent of mothballs...'On the Town' has grown up quite nicely, thank you, with much of its original cast not only intact but also improved. Every element has been heightened in just the right way, a delicate achievement when you consider the heightening that's aspired to...What's surprising is how fluent the entire cast is in both the high and low languages they are required to speak...Throughout the show, which includes the dreamiest dream ballets I've seen in years, Mr. Bergasse...maintains this rare feeling of idiosyncrasy in harmony. Similarly, he's captured the Robbins spirit, but stamped it with his own vivid signature.

Big names drop like hailstones in Terrence McNally's 'It's Only a Play,' the kind that look like diamonds from a distance and then melt away before you know it...There is also another, less famous name that is bandied about. That's Ben Brantley, the theater critic for The New York Times whose review of the play in 'It's Only a Play' is being anxiously awaited...he clearly bears little resemblance to the critic who has written the review you are reading now. O.K., so maybe he does. But I still find it hard to take the references too personally. For one thing, the self-important, vitriolic Mr. Brantley is treated no more harshly than the self-important, vitriolic characters onstage...Such improper proper-noun-slinging probably goes down better now than it did three decades ago...[Lane's] portrayal here of James Wicker...is sterling. He and Ms. Channing -- who is hilarious as a washed-up, substance-and-plastic-surgery-abusing Hollywood star -- give the show a sheen and a heart it might otherwise lack...Mr. McNally's play is a bit more old-fashioned, perhaps, but then so is the theater, God bless it.

Adapted by Simon Stephens from Mark Haddon's best-selling 2003 novel about an autistic boy's coming-of-age, this is one of the most fully immersive works ever to wallop Broadway. So be prepared to have all your emotional and sensory buttons pushed, including a few you may have not known existed. As directed by Marianne Elliott (a Tony winner for the genius tear-jerker 'War Horse'), with a production that retunes the way you see and hear, 'Curious Incident' can be shamelessly manipulative...Played by the recent Julliard school graduate Alex Sharp, in the kind of smashing Broadway debut young actors classically dream about, Christopher is in some ways a parent's nightmare.

It's not that Mr. Margulies...has forsaken his usual high ambitions...But here, the elements seem to have come from different jigsaw puzzles, and the pieces feel jimmied into place...Like Chekhov, Mr. Margulies is a specialist in rueful regrets and misty glimpses of roads not taken. But his usually astute ear for matchingly wistful dialogue falters..Ms. Danner aside, the attractive cast members register as a little sheepish, as if self-conscious about trying to make ersatz Chekhov sound like the real thing while maintaining the rhythms of laugh-track banter. ..The most satisfying and exasperating aspect of 'The Country House' is Ms. Danner's performance. Because this actress is so good at playing an actress, she makes us long for another, deeper play that would allow her fuller range. As it is, Ms. Danner still commits fully to every trait, both magnetic and repellent, that Anna is meant to embody.

A lot of shows can make you laugh. What's rare is a play that makes you beam from curtain to curtain. Such is the effect of Scott Ellis's felicitous revival of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's 1936 comedy about one improbably happy family during the Great Depression...The evening's tone is set and sustained by Mr. Jones and Ms. Nielsen, who waltz through the show with the secret but infectious smiles of people listening to unheard, endorphin-boosting strains.

Just watch these bodies in motion: loping, flying, dancing, vamping and writhing at an altitude known only to the permanently high and perpetually crashing. The acrobatics being performed in Anna D. Shapiro's sensational, kinetically charged revival of Kenneth Lonergan's 'This Is Our Youth,'...aren't anything like those you'd find at the Cirque du Soleil. But they're every bit as compelling, and probably (painfully) a whole lot closer to your own experience...Shapiro...knows how to scale up intimate confrontations to Broadway dimensions without losing nuance. Under her direction, 'Youth' becomes more explosively physical than I recalled it, a ballet of gracefully clumsy collisions. And Mr. Cera, Mr. Culkin and Ms. Gevinson imprint highly legible and individual signatures onto their characters, in ways that extend into every inch of their postures.