Ben Brantley

Ben Brantley, The New York Times: The extravagantly resourceful ensemble members of “Peter and the Starcatcher” have almost nothing in the way of modern machinery to support their sky-scraping journeys. On the contrary, there’s little here that couldn’t be found in a theater 150 years ago. What they do have is some ordinary rope, a couple of ladders, a few household appliances, two toy boats and, most important, one another. And they have you, dear theatergoer, because in this ecstatic production you’re as important a part of this process as they are. ... None of this could be achieved if the actors didn’t have a level of synchronicity and reciprocal trust that you associate with master ballet troupes. As the cast members take turns delivering the narrative, the others instantly assume the myriad shapes and guises being described. It’s the most exhilarating example of locomotive storytelling on Broadway since the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby” visited three decades ago, with a cast that included a young actor named Roger Rees.

Despite the hard work of its spirited leading lady, the Argentine actress Elena Roger — supported by a barely there Ricky Martin and a sterling Michael Cerveris — this musical combination of history pageant and requiem Mass feels about as warmblooded as a gilded mummy. ... I thought I was fully immune to the show’s signature song, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” from having heard it everywhere (even discos) in my youth. But darned if that slippery thing, whose melody is a repeated leitmotif in the show, hasn’t attached itself like a leech all over again. And can anyone advise me about how to expel from my brain the jinglelike refrain, “I wanna be a part of B.A./Buenos Aires — Big Apple.” The show’s ads, borrowing from Mr. Rice’s lyrics, have it that “the truth is she never left you.” No, the notes she sings were just lying dormant, like a virus, waiting to infect our systems all over again.

As befits a play about Judy Garland, a woman known for liberally mixing her pills, Peter Quilter’s “End of the Rainbow” is a jolting upper and downer at the same time. After watching Tracie Bennett’s electrifying interpretation of Garland in the intense production that opened on Monday night at the Belasco Theater, you feel exhilarated and exhausted, equally ready to dance down the street and crawl under a rock.....Ms. Bennett seems to keep every chapter of that history, and the disjunctive reality it created, alive in her performance. Foul-mouthed, flirtatious, hypersexual, childlike (though never innocent), unedited, manipulative and supremely self-conscious: Ms. Bennett’s Garland is all these things as she makes love and war with Mickey and Anthony.

Here are a few titles of the songs by Alan Menken (music) and Jack Feldman (lyrics): “Carrying the Banner,” “The World Will Know,” “Seize the Day,” “Something to Believe In” and “Once and for All.” And if you asked me to explain what distinguishes one of these songs from another, I couldn’t begin to without consulting my notes, my program and possibly the show’s director, Jeff Calhoun, and book writer, Harvey Fierstein...But that doesn’t stop them from burning energy like toddlers on a sugar high at a birthday party. As choreographed by Christopher Gattelli, they keep coming at us in full-speed-ahead phalanxes, fortified by every step in a Broadway-by-the-numbers dance book. There are back flips, cartwheels, somersaults and kick lines galore, not to mention enough pirouettes to fill a whole season of “Swan Lake.”

But the greater distance between stage and audience that comes with a move to a Broadway house softens the edges of its exaggeration. And what was always wonderful about “Once,” its songs and its staging, has been magnified. In the meantime its appealing stars, Steve Kazee and Cristin Milioti, have only grown in presence and dimensionality. Who would have thought that this soft-spoken little musical would have found itself by raising its voice?

Emotional distance sprang, for me at least, from a feeling of disconnection between the leading actors (all, I would argue, miscast) and their characters. ... Mr. Hoffman, Ms. Emond and Mr. Garfield all bring exacting intelligence and intensity to their performances. They make thought visible, but it’s the thought of actors making choices rather than of characters living in the moment. Their reading of certain lines makes you hear classic dialogue anew but with intellectual annotations. It’s as if they were docents showing us through Loman House, now listed on the Literary Register of Historic Places. ... Two performances stand out, luminous and palpable, for their authenticity. As Happy, the younger son forever in pursuit of Dad’s affection, Finn Wittrock provides a funny, poignant and ripely detailed study in virile vanity as a defense system. Bill Camp, as Charley, Willy’s wisecracking next-door neighbor, wears on his face an entire lifetime of philosophical compromises, small victories and protective cynicism. And he speaks so deeply from character that he makes even a line like 'Nobody dast blame this man' sound as natural as 'hello.

This is a performance that is large and lucid and delicate at the same time, and it justifies Manhattan Theater Club’s decision to mount what is essentially a chamber piece on Broadway. As directed with a persuasive combination of showmanship and sensitivity by Lynne Meadow, this production magnifies the innate theatricality of Ms. Edson’s play without compromising the firm emotional truth at its center.

In this quiet, slow and ultimately powerful production, directed by Gordon Edelstein and featuring strong performances from Jim Dale and Carla Gugino, Ms. Harris plays Miss Helen, an elderly South African woman who has hitherto seemed gracious, fretful and rather prosaic. Now she has given undiluted voice to the kind of fear that lurks in everyone — one of those personal fears that are so profound that people shirk from naming them. She is magnificent and shrunken, harrowed and harrowing.

But there’s a catch. Ms. McDonald’s Bess is — in a word — great; the show in which she appears is, at best, just pretty good. She and (the robust and intimidating) Mr. Boykin inhabit a world of exalted, dangerous passions that is separate from the rest of the denizens of Catfish Row...The enduring and magnetic appeal of Gershwin’s score is undeniable. It is pleasantly sung and played here. (William David Brohn and Christopher Jahnke did the new orchestrations; Constantine Kitsopolous is the music director and conductor.) Yet even theatergoers unfamiliar with “Porgy and Bess” may sense a thinness in the music. The big spiritual choral numbers should storm the gates of heaven; here they sound pretty but defeated and earthbound, like angels shorn of their wings.

“Lysistrata Jones” has been dressed up (and scaled up) real pretty for Broadway, bringing a heightened touch of summer sun and silliness to what has been an exceptionally gray season for musicals...Lysistrata may at first seem deeply superficial. But it turns out there’s tasty substance beneath the froth, just enough to keep you hooked. The same may be said of the endearingly escapist show in which she appears.

Where the heck is Zoloft (and Prozac and Abilify) when you need the little suckers? This wholesale reconception of a fluffy, muddled 1965 musical about reincarnation appears to have given everyone who appears in it — including its charismatic star, Harry Connick Jr. — a moaning case of the deep-dyed blues. Though done up to resemble a psychedelic fun house (the sanitized, perky kind that brings to mind middle-of-the-road rock album covers from the late 1960s and early ’70s), this “Clear Day” still has the approximate fun quotient of a day in an M.R.I. machine.

“Bonnie & Clyde,” which opened on Thursday night at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, is a modest, mildly tuneful musical biography of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, the kissin’ outlaws from Texas who hijacked the American imagination during the Great Depression. It portrays its title characters (played by Laura Osnes and Jeremy Jordan) as restless, libido-charged young ’uns who are about to suffocate from the grayness of their dreary lives.

Finally there comes a turning point, about an hour and 15 minutes into the show, when Mr. Rickman is allowed to embody something more than brisk intellectual sadism. Handed a really good piece of writing by one of his students, Leonard responds with a quietly potent mix of antagonism, humility, fear and something like joy. Of course this mélange of feelings, magnificently orchestrated by Mr. Rickman, is arrived at after Leonard has only glanced at the first couple of pages of a vast manuscript. But for the first time I felt an authentic rush of pleasure and the exhilaration of being reminded that in theater, art comes less from landing lines than in finding what lies between them.

The show mostly steers clear of sourness because of our awareness of a redeeming self-consciousness in Amanda and Elyot. Even when these two are going at it hammer and tongs, you have the sense of their watching themselves, on some level, and being elegantly amused by their inelegant behavior. In this version of Coward's soignée world, pratfalls are at least as important as poses.

The impossibly talented, impossibly energetic Mr. Jackman is a glorious dinosaur among live entertainers of the 21st century: an honest-to-gosh old-fashioned matinee idol who connects to his audiences without a hint of contempt for them or for himself. A movie star with a major action franchise (as Wolverine in the 'X-Men' series), Mr. Jackman says he's happiest as a song-and-dance man, the kind who conducts mass flirtation with a wink, a wriggle, a firmly handled melody and maybe a cane and some tap shoes.

Non-Chinese speakers should have no difficulty interpreting Chinglish...That’s not just because of the helpful supertitles — largely translations of mistranslations, in which English is merrily mutilated, and the principal source of this production’s mirth. Mr. Hwang’s comedy, about a bewildered American businessman hoping to make his fortune in capitalist China, is laid out with the frame-by-frame exactness of a comic strip...Chinglish only rarely achieves the sort of momentum that sends audiences into the ether.

Unfortunately, this big-picture drama (and Ms. Hall’s big picture is bigger than you imagine) is short on revelatory close-ups. And despite an engagingly low-key performance by Mr. Jackson, it never provides the organic details and insights that would make Martin Luther King live anew.

But the main raison d'être of this production - and the one compelling reason to see it - is the occasion it gives its star to explore the pathology of power. Few performers are as good as Mr. Langella at using an actor's instinctive narcissism to capture the egomania that fuels (and sometimes topples) the wildly successful.

Somewhere along the road from Washington to Broadway, the Kennedy Center production of 'Follies' picked up a pulse. A vigorous heart now beats at the center of this revitalized revival of James Goldman and Stephen Sondheim's 1971 musical, which opened on Monday night at the Marquis Theater...The four stars of this 'Follies' give X-ray performances, in which lives past and souls divided can be seen clearly beneath the skin. Like Mr. Sondheim's music, they make harmony out of the jangling contradictions that come with being alive.

'Master Class' is not, by even a generous reckoning, a very good play, though it can be an entertaining one. Mr. McNally is an opera buff who here mixed a passionate fan's knowledge of myth, gossip and music into one pulpy, Broadway-ripe package. Yet Ms. Daly transforms that script into one of the most haunting portraits I've seen of life after stardom.

So is this ascent from jaw-dropping badness to mere mediocrity a step upward? Well, until last weekend, when I caught a performance of this show's latest incarnation, I would have recommended 'Spider-Man' only to carrion-feasting theater vultures. Now, if I knew a less-than-precocious child of 10 or so, and had several hundred dollars to throw away, I would consider taking him or her to the new and improved 'Spider-Man.'

Without Ms. Murphy this well-meaning Roundabout Theater Company production - which has a book and lyrics by Iris Rainer Dart and songs by Mike Stoller and Artie Butler - would be thin treacle indeed. As it is, even Ms. Murphy (who also gets to portray the various characters that Raisel plays onstage and on screen) has trouble generating the kind of energy that makes an audience sit up and smile, or sit up, period.

More than a quarter of a century after it first scorched New York, 'The Normal Heart' is breathing fire again...the play remains a bruiser. This is a production, after all, in which the showstoppers are diatribes. (One delivered by Ms. Barkin, playing an endlessly frustrated doctor, receives the kind of sustained applause usually reserved for acrobatic tap dancers.) What this interpretation makes clear, though, is that Mr. Kramer is truly a playwright as well as a pamphleteer.

As directed by David Cromer - and enacted by a talent-stuffed cast that includes Ben Stiller, Jennifer Jason Leigh and the remarkable Edie Falco - this production zooms in on every gritty grain of pain to be found in Guare's breakthrough work from 1966. Within the dimness, there is one luminous force. And that is Falco, whose varied, nuanced acting has long been familiar to television viewers in shows that include 'The Sopranos' and 'Nurse Jackie'...When the world is as dark as it is in this 'House,' your eyes naturally seek the light, whatever its source.

'Jerusalem' could have been written in almost any year from the 1920s onward. Yet this work takes you places - distant, out-of-time places - that well-made plays seldom do. And it thinks big - transcendently big - in ways contemporary drama seldom dares...But Rylance also captures - to a degree I can imagine no other contemporary actor doing - Johnny's vast, vital, Falstaffian appetite for pleasure, for independence, for life itself.