Ben Brantley

A little more than 16 years after it first opened, and only a decade after it closed, it feels as if the popular Roundabout Theater Company production of 'Cabaret' never left Studio 54, where it reopened on Thursday night. Alan Cumming, who won a Tony as the nasty M.C. in 1998, is back, offering a slightly looser, older-but-wiser variation on the same performance...The most conspicuous difference is the bright blond actress portraying Sally...The promiscuous, hard-partying Sally is now embodied by a very brave Michelle Williams, who doesn't look all that happy to be there. I'm assuming that's more a matter of character interpretation than of personal discomfort, but it does put sort of a damper on the festivities...Leading the Kit Kat girls in nightclub production numbers like 'Don't Tell Mama' and 'Mein Herr' with a shiny, metallic vibrato, Ms. Williams comes closer to evoking the musical style of the Depression than any Sally I've seen. And for her climactic performance of the show's title song, she has the shouty power and shell-shocked stare of someone who's seen the future and knows that it's terrifying.

Directed with unexpected ripples of beauty by Joe Mantello, 'Casa Valentina,' which opened on Wednesday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, conveys the blessed consummation that occurs for ordinary people when they're transformed externally into what they think they are inside...This being a work by Mr. Fierstein -- who, no matter how daring his subjects, is an old-fashioned playwright at heart...paradise will be lost through a series of carefully laid-out confrontations...The terms of the arguments here are intelligent, and sometimes even provocative. But the air often feels filled with the dry dust of chalk erasers being batted together by a painstakingly instructive schoolteacher. This is a shame. For its first half-hour or so, when 'Casa Valentina' is more show than tell, it promises to be Mr. Fierstein's most engagingly insightful play to date.

Do not be alarmed by recent reports that Neil Patrick Harris, an irresistibly wholesome television presence, has fallen deeply and helplessly into the gap that separates men from women, East from West, and celebrity from notoriety. There's no need to fear for his safety, much less his identity. Quite the contrary. Playing an 'internationally ignored song stylist' of undefinable gender in'Hedwig and the Angry Inch,' Mr. Harris is in full command of who he is and, most excitingly, what he has become with this performance. That's a bona fide Broadway star, the kind who can rule an audience with the blink of a sequined eyelid...And while Mr. Harris may let you see him sweat as he struts, slithers and leaps through this shamelessly enjoyable show, rousingly directed by Michael Mayer ('Spring Awakening,' 'American Idiot'), he never makes it feel like heavy lifting.

But the star in question, Daniel Radcliffe, isn't here just to flex his charisma for fans. In the title role of this glimmeringly dark comedy from 1996, Mr. Radcliffe - the boy wizard in the immensely successful Harry Potter movie franchise - is entirely convincing as the boy who is regarded as least likely to succeed at pretty much anything in his God-forsaken rural Irish town...Compared with most of Mr. McDonagh's work, Cripple has a fairly low violence quotient. It's more comfortably a comedy than, say, Beauty Queen. But as outrageously funny as it often is, the play aches with a subliminal sadness that stays with you. The fabrications and speculations that these characters spin, in the fine old tradition of wild Irish yarns, come from an awareness that life is short and dangerous and, perhaps worst of all, empty...This gorgeously realized production has the wisdom to let us laugh until it hurts.

Since Hart is the heart of 'Act One,' which has been warmly adapted by James Lapine from Hart's 1959 memoir of the same title, Mr. Shalhoub and Mr. Fontana's shimmering performances are reason enough to celebrate -- and to heave a sigh of relief. If the lively but overblown production that surrounds them isn't always up to their high standards, I'm still not grousing...That's because whatever its flaws, 'Act One,' which Mr. Lapine also directed, brims contagiously with the ineffable, irrational and irrefutable passion for that endangered religion called the Theater...'Act One' critically reminds us, at a moment when it's easy to forget, of why so many of us fell head over heels for this cockamamie faith to begin with.

Mr. Franco, Mr. O'Dowd and their director, Anna D. Shapiro ('August: Osage County'), face the daunting task of turning folk heroes as fixed as the heads on Mount Rushmore back into pulsing flesh. This shouldn't be impossible...Yet somehow Ms. Shapiro's handsome, meticulously designed production (featuring impressive Walker Evans-evoking sets by Todd Rosenthal) feels about as fluid as a diorama in a history museum. And its two undeniably talented leading men, though known as quirky and adventurous screen stars, here wear their archetypes like armor...Lennie is a role that is pretty hard to get wrong, if the performer has the right physical dimensions. Mr. O'Dowd gives the expected gentle-giant performance, though he uses his left hand in surprisingly delicate gestures that bring affecting grace notes to Lennie's lumbering presence. Though he sports a Yosemite Sam accent, Mr. Franco is often understated to the point of near invisibility. It's a tight, internal performance begging for a camera's close-up.

Some things were never meant to be shouted through megaphones. On the basis of 'Bullets Over Broadway: The Musical,' the occasionally funny but mostly just loud new show that opened at the St. James Theater on Thursday night, that would include the wit of Woody Allen...Yet while the movie was a helium-light charmer, this all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing reincarnation is also all but charm-free...What registered as wistfully absurd on screen has been pushed into grotesqueness. Sex talk that came across with a shrug and a glint resurfaces as a broad neon leer. And the moral ambivalence of its central character feels inappropriately queasy in this heightened, brightened context...Characters who were deftly drawn cartoons on screen have been turned into gargoyles by a desperately hard-working cast.

The spark of rebellion, the kind that makes a man stand up and fight, has almost been extinguished in Walter Lee Younger. As portrayed by Denzel Washington in Kenny Leon's disarmingly relaxed revival of Lorraine Hansberry's 'A Raisin in the Sun' -- which opened on Thursday night at the Ethel Barrymore Theater -- Walter appears worn down, worn out and about ready to crawl into bed for good. Frankly, he looks a whole lot older than you probably remember him...Mr. Washington's more laid-back approach has a persuasive emotional logic, and it adds a different kind of suspense to 'Raisin.' As the play tells its familiar story of the Youngers' attempts to leave the South Side for the suburbs, with the life insurance money left by Lena's husband, we're less worried that Walter is going to erupt into violence than sink into stasis, dragging his family down with him.

'If/Then,' you see, is a portrait of alternative existences, of roads taken or not, of the person a person might have been if she had only done this instead of that. If that sounds confusing, don't worry. You may occasionally have trouble keeping the show's twin story lines separate. But you'll never be in any doubt whatsoever as to what the central theme is. That's because Mr. Kitt (music) and Mr. Yorkey (book and lyrics) never let us forget. Until the show's last quarter, when some shadows darken the bright emotional landscape, all the songs are pretty much interchangeable. Whether performed as solos or ensemble pieces, these numbers tend to percolate along, blithely and wonderingly, at the speed of circular thought. They also put to work every metaphor you've heard about the elements of fate, chance and choice that govern our lives...Taken separately, neither plot of 'If/Then' is terribly compelling or distinctively drawn. Taken together, they feel less like variations on a theme than dogged reiterations of a theme.

'Mothers and Sons,' which opened on Monday night at the John Golden Theater in an impeccably acted production directed by Sheryl Kaller, is wrapped in a sense of urgency that paradoxically saps it as a drama. It wears its significance defiantly and a bit stiffly, rather as Ms. Daly's character, a Dallas matron visiting Manhattan, wears the big, blocky fur coat in which we first see her...It is, in essence, a debate play with fraught emotional underpinnings, and it doesn't avoid the stasis of that genre. It also tends to sabotage its potential to move us by making the debate, rather than psychological credibility, its first priority...The performers are skilled enough that we don't hear the sound of gears stripping. But they can't entirely justify their emotional U-turns, nor keep at bay our sense that we are following a menu of subjects that must be covered before the evening's end.

The creators of 'Rocky' the musical - which features a book by Thomas Meehan and Mr. Stallone, and songs by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, with Alex Timbers as the director - have perhaps gone overboard in capitalizing on this legend. For what they have given us is a show that at first feels like such a flat liner that you can't imagine that it could pull itself into any kind of competitive shape, even in a lackluster season for Broadway musicals. The doubts that plague and paralyze its title character (the appealing, deliberately underwhelming Andy Karl) seem to have informed the show as well. The governing sensibility isn't just underdog; it's hangdog...Every tool at the disposal of the creative team (and probably much of the show's budget) is brought into play now for an all-out, multimedia assault on the senses that forces much of the audience to its feet. And I won't say more, because why should I spoil the one real pleasure this show provides? The fight, for the record, lasts 16 minutes. With front orchestra tickets costing $143 (and you'll want to sit close), that comes to about $9 per heart-racing minute. Such is the price of excitement on Broadway these days. Hey, it's healthier than steroids.

I am happy to say that Ms. O'Hara more than keeps the promises made by her interpretation of that first song, one of many sumptuous pieces that feel as if they had been written specifically for her by the show's composer, Jason Robert Brown. She also confirms her position as one of the most exquisitely expressive stars in musical theater. Her Francesca, a questioning farmer's wife who briefly discovers a love with all the answers, brings a rich and varied topography to what might have been strictly flat corn country. True, the rest of the show, directed by Bartlett Sher with a script by Marsha Norman, isn't nearly as multidimensional. Though Ms. O'Hara has a lust-worthy leading man in Steven Pasquale, most of what surrounds her has the depth of a shiny picture postcard, one that bears a disproportionately long and repetitive message. Still, when you have a central performance as sensitive, probing and operatically rich and lustrous as Ms. O'Hara's, you won't find me kvetching too loudly...

Yet in 'Machinal'...Ms. Hall must struggle to hold her own against an overbearing co-star. That would be Es Devlin's revolving, scene-stealing set, which portrays a juggernaut of doom -- i.e., modern urban existence -- that flattens all in its path. You might say such a battle, pitting a lone specimen of humanity against a marvel of technology and artifice, only underscores the haunting determinism of 'Machinal,' and I wouldn't argue. And even if the Young Woman is clearly headed for extinction from the first scene, Ms. Hall's emotionally transparent performance is never overwhelmed by what surrounds it.

...as designed by Derek McLane (sets), Alejo Vietti (costumes) and Peter Kaczorowski (lighting), 'Beautiful' nods so often to Michael Bennett's original production of 'Dreamgirls' that it starts to resemble a bobblehead doll. Originality is clearly not this show's strong suit. With one very important exception. That's Ms. Mueller, a Broadway star in waiting for several years, who here steps confidently into the V.I.P. room of musical headliners...Much of what makes Ms. Mueller's performance so touching is its projection of a lack of confidence. There's a humility to Ms. Mueller's Carole, part of whom wants only to be a good Jewish wife and mother, preferably in the suburbs. She plays ego-boosting, self-effacing geisha to Mr. Epstein's philandering, mentally unstable Gerry....Modesty is not the usual stuff of Broadway showstoppers. And if 'Beautiful' never acquires the flashy momentum of 'Jersey Boys,' it may come in part from the deferential gentleness of its heroine. But when Ms. Mueller sings the show's title song - sitting at a keyboard in, of course, Carnegie for the production's finale - she delivers something you don't expect from a jukebox musical. That's a complex, revitalizing portrait of how a very familiar song came into existence, and of the real, conflicted person within the reluctant star

...as designed by Derek McLane (sets), Alejo Vietti (costumes) and Peter Kaczorowski (lighting), 'Beautiful' nods so often to Michael Bennett's original production of 'Dreamgirls' that it starts to resemble a bobblehead doll. Originality is clearly not this show's strong suit. With one very important exception. That's Ms. Mueller, a Broadway star in waiting for several years, who here steps confidently into the V.I.P. room of musical headliners...Much of what makes Ms. Mueller's performance so touching is its projection of a lack of confidence. There's a humility to Ms. Mueller's Carole, part of whom wants only to be a good Jewish wife and mother, preferably in the suburbs. She plays ego-boosting, self-effacing geisha to Mr. Epstein's philandering, mentally unstable Gerry....Modesty is not the usual stuff of Broadway showstoppers. And if 'Beautiful' never acquires the flashy momentum of 'Jersey Boys,' it may come in part from the deferential gentleness of its heroine. But when Ms. Mueller sings the show's title song - sitting at a keyboard in, of course, Carnegie for the production's finale - she delivers something you don't expect from a jukebox musical. That's a complex, revitalizing portrait of how a very familiar song came into existence, and of the real, conflicted person within the reluctant star

These productions mostly stay, comfortably and tantalizingly, on the surface. But in doing so, they also bring out the beguiling polish and shimmer in Pinter and Beckett’s language. These shows allow us to appreciate the great paradox in some of the best dialogue ever written, which uses eloquence to plumb the futility of speech.

These productions mostly stay, comfortably and tantalizingly, on the surface. But in doing so, they also bring out the beguiling polish and shimmer in Pinter and Beckett’s language. These shows allow us to appreciate the great paradox in some of the best dialogue ever written, which uses eloquence to plumb the futility of speech.

Mr. Rylance’s Olivia, the best I’ve ever seen, is a vulnerable woman newly come into power after the deaths of the men in her family. (You may find yourself thinking of the young Elizabeth I.) Of course she’s loftier than thou; she’s hiding her uncertainty behind protocol, and an occasional stammer gives her away.

Only in the second half, do we fully realize we’re in the ice-cold company of a madman. I won’t tell you how Mr. Rylance achieves this, except to say that in switching between what he seems to be and what he is, this Richard has stripped his own gears. He ends up in limbo, without a part to play.

A respectable stage actor before he became 007, [Craig] brings the same fierce intensity to talking that he does to zipping across moving trains and zapping supervillains. Not that such overt intensity is exactly what 'Betrayal' asks for, but never mind. As for Ms. Weisz, she looks smashing. And let me add that she, Mr. Craig and Mr. Spall seem to be having the kind of rowdy old time you associate with moldy British sex farces, though that's a genre in which I would never before have thought to include 'Betrayal...this is not a 'Betrayal' to leave you brooding and melancholy about our capacity to wound one another and to reach out, hopelessly and heroically, for a sustenance in others that they can never provide...this is a sexed-up 'Betrayal,' which is not the same as a sexy 'Betrayal.' All those contradictory, fleeting, haunting shades of thought that you expect to see playing on the features of Pinter's characters are nowhere in evidence. Instead, Robert, Emma and Jerry make up the rowdiest, most extroverted sexual triangle since Liza Minnelli, Burt Reynolds and Gene Hackman caterwauled their way through the ill-fated film 'Lucky Lady' in 1975.

'The Snow Geese,' a fable of a family that isn't as rich as it thinks it is, is unlikely to stir any emotion other than bewilderment as to how this lifeless play wound up on Broadway. I can answer that question in two words (or three, if you don't count hyphens): Mary-Louise Parker...On its own, though, Mr. White's play remains a muddle of pastiche parts that never cohere into an original and organic whole. And the cast members - who include the excellent Broadway veterans Victoria Clark and Danny Burstein and several attractive young newcomers - fail to convince us, and perhaps even themselves, otherwise. The same might be said of Ms. Parker, whose preternaturally youthful face seems frozen in mild astonishment, as if she were surprised to find herself here.

This is a 'Pippin' for the 21st century, when it takes more than style to hold the attention of a restless, sensation-hungry audience...Fosse's original dancing is evoked, largely stripped of its sensuality, by the choreographer Chet Walker...And the connection between storytelling and style, between performer and self-expression, is only occasionally in evidence...Ms. Paulus's 'Pippin' is often fun (with an exclamation point), but it's almost never stirring in the way her Tony-winning revival of 'Hair' was. Only one moment, centered on Andrea Martin as the title character's grandmother, achieves that kind of transcendence. And I would argue that in courting its audience, this 'Pippin' is ultimately more cynical than Fosse's.

The title destination in Horton Foote's 'Trip to Bountiful'...is said to be a small, obscure town in Texas. But on the evidence of the performance of Cicely Tyson, who stars in the production that opened on Tuesday night under Michael Wilson's slow-handed direction, Bountiful is a code name for the Fountain of Youth...'Bountiful' often undercuts itself by broadening comic moments, especially in the early family-friction scenes in the Houston apartment...By the production's end...Ms. Tyson's Carrie has blossomed into genuine beauty during her nostalgic road trip, which makes the play's final moments considerably less sorrowful than they usually are. The 2005 Signature Theater revival of 'Bountiful,' starring Lois Smith, left me drenched in tears. But at the end of this one, I felt kind of optimistic.

Long before that moment of confrontational nudity, you will have probably surmised that Ms. Warner is going to err on the side of literal-mindedness...There are moments in 'Testament' that demonstrate that Ms. Shaw's abilities to command as an actress have only grown...This Mary is an ordinary woman of her day, forced against her will into a role in history she never sought or wanted. Ms. Shaw gives us that woman, for sure... But if you're going to give us a vision of Mary as we've never seen her, why would you block the view?...I was never happier - or more harrowed - than in those rare quiet, contained moments when this Mary made us feel that we were in a private tête-à-tête with a woman who had an extraordinary story to tell, and needed to keep telling it, forever and ever.

Perhaps the participants in this revival felt that they had had enough of fireworks for a while, so they decided to make nice, tread gently and, in the case of Mr. Baldwin, keep a respectful distance from the proceedings. In 'Orphans,' knives, guns, fists, rope and duct tape are all deployed to violent ends. Yet this version somehow plays like a sentimental sitcom, perhaps a low-rent 'Modern Family.'...The first problem with Mr. Sullivan's production is that nobody exudes a sense of, or even a sense of hunger for, power. The arguable exception is Mr. Sturridge...Mr. Foster doesn't do intimidating rage so well. His performance feels so inwardly concentrated that Treat seems like a danger only to himself...I assume that Harold was written as a slippery character, but Mr. Baldwin's performance eludes the possibility of our getting any kind of grip on it at all...It's a mutating cartoon of a performance, with only hints of the requisite menace.