Brendan Lemon

'Are you not entertained?' bellows Russell Crowe at the arena in the 2000 movie Gladiator. All during School of Rock, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Colisseum-loud musical that has just premiered on Broadway, I kept asking myself the same question. Like the victims of those enslaved warriors, I felt pummelled by the experience. Yet the tremendously talented children in this cast perform with an intensity that only a churl could deny.

Why the role of Thérèse continues to attract so many well-known actors is not a surprise. Even with its melodrama, the story furnishes a kind of female awakening that is as tempting to young women as one of Laurent's smouldering glances. Knightley invests Thérèse with a splendid abandon but her line readings can lack variety, and overall this production casts too few sparks.

Under the direction of Douglas Hodge...Owen plays a filmmaker called Deeley as tough but not threatening. He is no longer laddish, but wishes that he somehow still were, and Owen gives him just enough exposed nerve endings to make his final breakdown ignite believably...Erotic overtones are never absent for long in this 70-minute evening. As Kate, Reilly parades seductively in a high-waisted skirt and, as Anna, Best assumes sex-kitten stances in her slinky white silk outfit. Initially the actors appear more interested in posing than in acting, but eventually they form a true ensemble. Best and Owen have a natural chemistry, especially in the comic moments...I did, on the other hand, mind about the production's set...But the actors' skilful by-play helps blot out the images, as do the thumping snatches of original music supplied by Radiohead's Thom Yorke.

The Broadway Finding Neverland is swift-moving, playful, and appealing to children. This production is more extravagant than its American premiere last summer in Cambridge...This is not to say that Finding Neverland, to switch metaphors of movement, remains consistently airborne. The music and lyrics, by Gary Barlow...are redolent of pop-chart uplift and fail to contribute to character development. No matter how many emotionally effective touches the actors and their director, Diane Paulus, provide, the evening keeps returning to those mostly forgettable tunes. The lapses are especially apparent because this is, at heart, a show about artistic inspiration...the show's simplest moments, from Peter Pan itself, prove more entrancing than the giant, high-flying whirligig that's been built around them.

Never seen The Elephant Man onstage? Then the Broadway revival of this 1977 play, by Bernard Pomerance, will provide a palpable sense of the drama's clear storytelling and elegant dismantling of Victorian hypocrisies. The two-act evening also provides a chance for audiences to gawp at a shirtless Hollywood celebrity, Bradley Cooper, just as 1880s London gaped at the severely deformed man he is portraying, Joseph (here John) Merrick. What the cast, under the direction of Scott Ellis, does not bring out so well is Pomerance's humour.

Broadway audiences would gladly drink in the enormously appealing Jackman the song-and-dance man in perpetuity, just as movie-goers keep flocking to his Wolverine. To his credit, he wants to explore other worlds. But he has not found a way to convey effectively The Man's frustration at not finding the all-enveloping love he professes to cherish. Watching him towards the end of The River, when the pain of reality sets in, I kept wishing I were glimpsing his face in close-up: the anguish would have been much clearer. The too-capacious venue is more ocean than river, and the emotional impact suffers.

A New York City Ballet principal, [Megan Fairchild] is known for her sparkling footwork. Here she displays unexpected comic finesse, especially in her voice-lesson scene with Madame Dilly, one of many cartoon roles mastered by Jackie Hoffman. If Fairchild's acting lacks projection, especially compared to the other two female leads -- Alysha Umphress as Hildy and Elizabeth Stanley as Claire -- she compensates during the dance numbers. The choreography, by Joshua Bergasse, is inspired, though Robbins would have cracked the whip harder on the ensemble during the door-slamming number. All three male leads blend sweetness with virility. Clyde Alves is a swaggering Ozzie, Jay Armstrong Johnson a pratfall-mastering Chip, and Tony Yazbeck a deservedly centre-stage Gabey.

The riotous fun of the Kit Kat boys and girls is firmly in place, and the joy they all take in playing their instruments is infectious. We need such relief as the book scenes feel a little plodding. High quality global journalism requires investment. Williams plays Sally as a British baby doll. She sings well but not too well. She makes no Liza Minnelli-type pleas for our sympathy. Instead, Williams offers intense desperation. She holds on to the microphone stand as if aware into just what abyss she will spin if she lets go.

Audiences flocking to this 95-minute entertainment, with book by John Cameron Mitchell and music and lyrics by Stephen Trask, may not think they have signed up for the first session of an undergraduate philosophy seminar. They have come to see Harris, a major American television star owing to How I Met Your Mother, give glam rock a workout. But the evening, even with the longueurs of its storytelling, manages to make us think about not just gender-based aspects of love but also the cold war, cheap American pop music, and the price of fame...A veteran not only of sitcoms but also of gender-bending stage shows such as Rent and Cabaret, Harris is ideally experienced to deliver Hedwig's low jokes as well as its rock 'n' roll kick-outs and tearful ballads.

'They go wild, simply wild, over me,' sings Helen Sinclair, an ageing diva, in a deluded attempt to persuade David Shayne, a fledgling playwright, of her enduring appeal. Sinclair, portrayed by the wonderfully self-assured Marin Mazzie, is one of the reasons to see Bullets Over Broadway, the new musical birthed by Woody Allen from his 1994 movie of the same title. The Broadway show makes a Sinclair-sized effort to persuade us of the value of early-20th-century songs shoehorned into a 1929 setting. The attempt is intermittently enjoyable, extremely well crafted by the director/choreographer Susan Stroman, and progressively unthrilling.

Mike Nichols once observed that casting a well-loved actor in a play or movie makes the director's job easier: you don't have to spend the first half-hour securing audience interest in the actor's character. For proof of the remark, look no further than Mothers and Sons, the sometimes absorbing, somewhat unsatisfying new play by Terrence McNally that has arrived on Broadway. Without Tyne Daly as Katharine Gerard, who has come to New York from Dallas to bring her dead son's diary to his former lover, the character -- and the 90-minute, interval-less play -- would have struggled to engage us from the first beat.

This new musical version of Rocky premiered last year in Germany, an appropriate choice: the 1976 movie and its five sequels are their own kind of Ring cycle. And that is, in fact, the key word here, as the main reason to see this spectacle is the stately Act Two emergence, from the proscenium into the audience, of a boxing ring. What precedes that coup is, in Broadway terms, an unexpectedly intimate affair -- a well-acted, occasionally dull and sometimes touching story of two wounded souls: Rocky Balboa, a piddling club fighter, and Adrian, a bespectacled clerk at a pet store...it becomes apparent that the musical Rocky subscribes to the method of Mamma Mia!...for ensuring a hit: wallop the audience for the final 15 minutes. The fight, which includes movement by choreographers Steven Hoggett and Kelly Devine, draws in the audience. By then, Andy Karl's painstaking performance as Rocky disappears among the cheers.

If I took more pleasure in the Sirs’ co-stars, the Americans Shuler Hensley and especially Billy Crudup, it is not, I hope, out of chauvinism, but because the latter duo appear still to be finding their way: confidence has not hardened their responses. This was true not only in the Godot, which the Americans did not do in London, but also in the Pinter. As Foster, the supposed amanuensis of Hirst, Crudup conveyed a precise blend of menace and mirth.

For the past month, New York has been awash in Beckett and Pinter, brought to us by Great English Actors. None of these productions has represented the performers at their peak. Case in point: when Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart did their new-to-Broadway production of Waiting for Godot in London, in 2010, they harvested acclaim for the freshness of their clowning. But, as with many London theatrical exports arriving on American shores, the routines now seem so worked-out they’re stiff.

Mike Nichols' skilfully staged yet only sporadically effective Broadway production of Harold Pinter's 1978 drama, Betrayal, starring Daniel Craig and his real-life wife, Rachel Weisz, as well as Rafe Spall, is not only an ewent: it's a theatrical assemblage that quickly sold out its run. The show's copywriters describe the demand as 'unprecedented', but, really, all those $400-plus tickets, and the hand-wringing they occasion, are old news. The prices are worth noting in this instance only because what many people pay is out of balance with what they see on the Barrymore stage.

Leveaux is a highly intelligent director but for the life of me I couldn't find much meaning in the objects that waft semi-symbolically throughout the performance...there are spectacular bursts of fire, generating more heat than Bloom and Rashad, apart from a passionate first kiss, manage to do...I cannot complain about the panoply of acting styles here; uniformity of performance usually means monotony of performance. It is, in fact, the jolting difference between Rashad and her nurse, the ever-valuable Jayne Houdyshell, that invests their scenes with aliveness. The disparity between Rashad's timidity and the power of Chuck Cooper, as Lord Capulet, also drives the performance. Christian Camargo, so disturbingly good as the title character's older brother on TV's Dexter, brings a similar eerie intensity here to Mercutio.

Watching Let It Be, a perfunctory yet enjoyable Broadway tribute musical that follows in the footsteps of another recent tribute musical, Rain (their similarities have sparked a lawsuit), is an exercise in evasion. For reasons of legality, the four mop-topped performers onstage at Broadway's St James Theatre cannot call each other John or Paul or Ringo or George. We must instead watch this two-hour-and-20-minute concert as it makes scant attempt to tell a story but relies on our collective memory to fill in the details...My main objection to the song selection is the slighting of the Revolver LP, which regularly tops lists of the Greatest Rock Records of All Time. Of the 40 or so tunes here, I confess that I knew every word.

On Broadway in 2013, Orphans is not so much menacing as meagre. A larger, Broadway stage has robbed the two-act work of its claustrophobic thrills...The actors provide us with most of the production's scattered pleasures. Tom Sturridge wrings laughs from Phillip's every dazed discovery...Ben Foster...gives Treat tremendous swagger...The role of Harold exposes Baldwin's limitations as an actor. The character does allow him to show off his gift for fast-talking Irish blarney...But too much of Baldwin's charm relies on our acknowledging that he's the smartest guy in the room.

The love stories, as it happens, are among the few disappointing bits in Boots, which has been given tuneful songs by Cyndi Lauper, in her Broadway-composer debut, and infectious direction and choreography by Jerry Mitchell. Central character Charlie Price has inherited his family's shoe factory in Northampton, just at the moment when his girlfriend, Nicola, has whisked him away to London for a more stylish life. As Charlie, Stark Sands is saddled with an odd second-act plot development, but is redeemed with a winning finale.

In Richard Greenberg's elegant Broadway adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany's Holly Golightly has morphed into Holly Godarkly. I refer not merely to the tresses of Emilia Clarke, who plays her, which have gone from the porn-star blonde of her Daenerys in Game of Thrones to a lush brunette here. The tone of Tiffany's has also darkened...If the shift is truer to the spirit of Truman Capote's 1958 novella, it also makes for a rather dispiriting evening. So quickly apparent is Holly's phoniness...that the audience must strive mightily to develop much regard for her....Clarke is affected but not affecting, and a Breakfast without a fetching Holly isn't much of a meal.

Most of the electricity indoors is generated by Ciaran Hinds as Big Daddy and Debra Monk as Big Mama. Hinds hasn't quite the rotundity that we expect from Broadway Big Daddys. His beard and slick-backed hair suggest the con game of a riverboat gambler rather than the high stakes of an earthy Mississippi planter struggling with the spectre of cancer. But the actor's southern accent isn't syrupy, and he achieves genuine pathos in the act-two showdown with Brick about the latter's intimate relationship with his deceased buddy, Skipper.

A stripped-down approach to match a stripped-down central character may one day restore Picnic's lustre; the setting here, a hulking house and porches designed by Andrew Lieberman, tends to overwhelm the performances, even when the interiors furnish an almost 'American Gothic' glimpse of domesticity. This is a shame, because the play's central theme - how youthful beauty can be emotionally isolating - retains a certain potency. Maggie Grace, who plays 18-year-old Madge Owens, the pretty girl drawn into Hal's aura, gracefully registers the character's misfit quality, even as her chemistry with him doesn't greatly ignite.

Even in an only reasonably involving production, such as the new Broadway revival starring Al Pacino, we are reminded that, whatever the state of the playwright's recent fortunes – his latest play, The Anarchist , is being pulled from Broadway two months early after disastrous notices – his earlier work remains powerful enough to spawn envy.

Neither a must-see juicy disaster (that might have required Gifford herself to inhabit the primary role) nor a surprising, damn-the-critics success, Scandalous features a tremendously hard-working ensemble and a tremendously hard-working star: Carolee Carmello, as Aimee. Walt Spangler’s diamond-shard Art Deco set glitters, David Armstrong directs with some flair, and I have never seen such a display of hallelujah hands outside a gospel church service.

London theatrical commentators have fretted that US audiences wouldn’t fully groove to the beat of the play’s British and early-Beatles-era references. But physical comedy, in which the evening abounds, tends to transcend cultural difference. Corden is an inspired clown, and as long as he – and Oliver Chris, as his tall, toffee-nosed guvnor, and Tom Edden, as an ancient waiter – are around the mirth is steady.