Ben Brantly

For a show that celebrates tall tales, 'Big Fish' feels curiously stunted. Granted, this movie-inspired musical about a whopper-spinning traveling salesman, which opened on Sunday night at the Neil Simon Theater, is certainly big by most conventional measurements...'Big Fish' fails to forge the crucial connection between its characters and their fantasies. Featuring songs by Andrew Lippa and a book by John August, this musical is about one of those impossible, wonderful, embarrassing fathers whose ghosts have done so much to keep psychiatrists in business...[Susan Stroman] seems to be drawing almost randomly from her bottomless bag of tricks. Yes, her use of dancers to embody an enchanted forest and a campfire is delightful. And it's hard not to chuckle when those two-stepping elephants make a cameo appearance. But if the show is all about the need for personal myths, it has to let its leading mythmaker take charge...Not once did I feel that what I was seeing had been spawned by the teeming mind of Edward Bloom. The show's de facto theme song may advocate 'be the hero' of your own life, but somehow 'Big Fish' turns everyone into a local-color extra.

How can something be this delicate and this strong, so elusive and yet so tenacious? That question radiates from John Tiffany's stunning production of Tennessee Williams's 'Glass Menagerie,' which opened on Thursday night at the Booth Theater and promises to be the most revealing revival of a cornerstone classic for many a year to come. More than any interpretation I've seen of the 1944 drama that made Williams's name, this 'Menagerie' - which stars Cherry Jones and Zachary Quinto in career-defining performances - finds the brute force in a play often described, a bit condescendingly, as lyrical, wispy, elegiac. Yes, the tapered fingers of poetry shape 'The Glass Menagerie.' But when these fingers curl into a fist - and they do so again and again in this production, before you quite realize it - be prepared to have the breath knocked out of you.

Mr. Bloom, in a first-rate Broadway debut, and the gifted Ms. Rashad exude a too-fine-for-this-world purity that makes their characters' love feel sacred...Yet, while the production features stunning columns of flame as part of its eclectic mise-en-scène, it never acquires the fiery, all-consuming urgency that 'Romeo and Juliet' should deliver...Good as she is in the early scenes, Ms. Rashad doesn't yet have the vocal heft and variety to take Juliet into the echoing halls of tragedy...On the other hand, Mr. Bloom, famous for being handsomely heroic in the 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Pirates of the Caribbean' franchises, keeps surprising. For once, we have a Romeo who evolves substantively, from a posturing youth in love with love to a man who discovers the startling revelation of real love, with a last-act descent into bilious, bitter anger that verges on madness.

'Cities,' directed with a masterly combination of shadow and shimmer by Joe Mantello, emerges as stronger, more sincere and more credible in its Broadway reincarnation... The Wyeths' competitive hyper-articulateness seems to come more naturally to them now. Always balanced on a razor's edge of affection and aggression, this studied cleverness is what allows them to continue to communicate with one another.