Ben Brantley — Theater Critic

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.

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.

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.

'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.