Charles Isherwood

But even the babel of fierce combat between the American theater's definitive dumb blonde, Billie Dawn (Nina Arianda), and her abusive lover Harry Brock (Jim Belushi), cannot obscure the occasional sound of creaking at the Cort Theater, where a solid but inessential revival of Garson Kanin's comedy 'Born Yesterday' opened on Sunday night. The celluloid shadow of the wondrous Judy Holliday, who played Billie in the original 1946 Broadway production and the movie directed by George Cukor, inevitably looms large over any revival of 'Born Yesterday.' (Madeline Kahn starred in the only previous Broadway revival, in 1989.) To her immense credit Ms. Arianda, who made a spectacular Off Broadway debut last season as the actress-seductress in David Ives's 'Venus in Fur,' colors this cartoon role with her own set of Crayolas.

I wish I could report that the singing nuns from the Church of Philly Soul are giving those perky Mormons in Africa a run for their money in the unholy hilarity department. But when the jubilant choral numbers subside, as inevitably they must, 'Sister Act' slumps back into bland musical-theater grooves and mostly lacks the light of invigorating inspiration.

'High,' directed by Rob Ruggiero, isn't a particularly subtle or deep drama, despite some fancy narration... But it does afford Ms. Turner's fans a choice opportunity to bask in her undeniable star wattage. Her performance as the tough but troubled Sister Jamie is funny, consistently entertaining and at times satisfyingly hammy.

Mr. Wildhorn's absence from Broadway since his 2004 adaptation of 'Dracula' has not exactly occasioned widespread hand-wringing, and his competent rendering of various pop styles in 'Wonderland' probably won't win him a host of converts. Mr. Murphy's lyrics are of a matching blandness, with Alice's earnest ballads of self-discovery amply stocked in cliché. ('I remember every moment when my heart was young and free,' she sings upon meeting - literally - her inner child, 'and to my surprise I look through your eyes and once more I can see.')... But Alice's adventures are perhaps most subversively appealing for their blithe indifference to the kind of tidy moralizing that had been a staple of Victorian children's literature. 'Wonderland' thoroughly nullifies this aspect. Instead of transporting us back to an anarchic childhood world where right and wrong are just words like any others, to be tossed about at merry whim, the show drearily suggests that even grown-ups have to keep doing their homework, working doggedly toward self-improvement day after endless day.

Rajiv Joseph's smart, savagely funny and visionary new work of American theater invites fanciful comparison to the titular beast. 'Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,' for all the killing and suffering it contains, is buoyed by the vitality of its imaginative scope. Violence is not after all the only human activity that can have far-reaching, unforeseen effects, shaping lives far into the future. Mr. Joseph's richly conceived play reminds us that art can have a powerful afterlife too.

While the mysterious sources of Mr. Leguizamo's boundless energy show no signs of imminent depletion, the writing in this, his fifth solo show over the course of two decades, is beginning to show traces of flab. The show's energy stalls when Mr. Leguizamo slides from sharply funny satirical highs to puddles of banal confession...the scabrous class clown begins to feel a little too much like a lecturer at the Learning Annex promoting his latest self-help book.

The most rewarding role belongs to Mr. Sheldon, who brings an authentic note of dignified grace to his performance as Bernadette. His mothering of both the troubled Tick and the potentially self-destructive Felicia feels honest, and Mr. Sheldon has a way of inflecting the book's litter of catty zingers with refined nuances that make them feel smarter and fresher than they probably are. But any flickers of warmth and true human feeling in 'Priscilla' are either obscured by another onslaught of gyrating dancers or squashed flat by a giant platform heel. After a while even the festive parade of outlandish costumes, among the show's more reliably entertaining diversions, begin to feel stale and overworked. At the extended curtain call - aptly set to the catchy '90s dance floor anthem entitled 'Finally' - you are likely to feel slightly dazed and stultified, as if you'd been conked on the head with a disco ball.

Mr. Bedford's production is not entirely effortless - Wilde's rococo style can be daunting even to experienced classicists - but it is more buoyant and consistently funny than any I've seen. And as Lady Bracknell, Mr. Bedford presides at the cathedral's altar with supreme skill and stylishness - and a hint of substance too. It's one of the great performances of the season; to miss it would most definitely look like carelessness.

The score is generic, true, but it is also polished, hummable-tune laden and professional. Mr. Beguelin's lyrics, at their best, have a bright comic zest and are well-matched to Mr. Sklar's gently swinging music. The boogie-woogie 'Nobody Cares About Santa,' featuring a chorus line of professional Santas sharing a Christmas Eve meal at a Chinese restaurant, is a rowdy parody of the rival Rockettes show at Radio City.

But mostly this is a straight-up re-creation of the off-kilter world of the original series, which managed to succeed as both a sincere, pedagogical children's show and a winking sendup of one at the same time. It was a remarkable magic trick that won the show an avid following both among real tykes and adults who warmed to Mr. Reubens's kitschy, mildly subversive take on a vintage formula.

The evening's themes are not exactly new. That humankind has been consumed in mayhem and folly ever since we started walking upright - and probably even before - is obvious to anybody who's glanced at a history book. Our propensity for destruction has been a source of cackling amusement at least since Aristophanes and the age of classical comedy. But if Mr. Quinn's ideas aren't novel, they're definitely immortal. And this easygoing alumnus of'Saturday Night Live' brings his own distinctive every-guy's perspective to the galumphing march of civilization toward - well, toward whatever it is we are approaching, as Blanche DuBois so lyrically put it.

But the musical never really resolves the tension between its impulse to entertain us with hoary jokes and quivering tambourines and the desire to render the harsh morals of its story with earnest insistence. The occasional portentous sound of a single bass drumbeat is like a summons from recess back to the schoolroom. 'The Scottsboro Boys' earns admiration for its stylistic daring and obvious ambition, but I'm not sure it's possible to honor the experience of the men it portrays while turning their suffering into a colorful sideshow.

Consider it enhanced karaoke, like a collective night in front of a giant television playing the new Beatles video game, but without requiring the kind of hand-eye coordination and technological savvy so vexing to the middle-aged....All appear to be having a good time and succeeded in giving the enraptured audience at the performance I caught a good time, too.

The director, Thomas Kail ('In the Heights'), manages traffic effectively, but the play's scattered structure and lack of a strong focus on its central character deprive it of forward momentum. Mr. Lauria, who bears a passable resemblance to Lombardi, supplies jolts of energy when he can, lacing the pep talks with gusto or stalking the living room with broody irritability, Pepto-Bismol in hand, when problems on the field arise. (The in-the-round set, by David Korins, subtly suggests the shape of a football stadium.) What no actor could provide is the compelling emotional or psychological substance that's absent from the writing.

New plays of substance remain sadly rare on Broadway, and return engagements are almost unheard of, which makes this remounting of 'Time Stands Still' as brave as it is unusual. Thankfully audiences who couldn't make time for this rewarding play last spring now have a second chance to catch it.

But for theater lovers there can be no greater current pleasure than to witness Bernadette Peters perform the show's signature number, 'Send In the Clowns,' with an emotional transparency and musical delicacy that turns this celebrated song into an occasion of transporting artistry. I'm not sure I've ever experienced with such palpable force - or such prominent goose bumps - the sense of being present at an indelible moment in the history of musical theater.

As good actors age — perhaps a more felicitous word would be mature — they learn how to do more with less. Consider the left eyebrow of Linda Lavin, the veteran star of the new revival of Donald Margulies’s “Collected Stories.” At one point in this durable drama about the manners and morals of writers, Ms. Lavin raises said eyebrow by perhaps half an inch. She says nary a word, and doesn’t move any other muscle, but still communicates with this minimal gesture more than a lesser actor might squeeze from a long monologue. She gets a solid laugh too.

“American Idiot,” directed by Michael Mayer and performed with galvanizing intensity by a terrific cast, detonates a fierce aesthetic charge in this ho-hum Broadway season. A pulsating portrait of wasted youth that invokes all the standard genre conventions — bring on the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, please! — only to transcend them through the power of its music and the artistry of its execution, the show is as invigorating and ultimately as moving as anything I’ve seen on Broadway this season. Or maybe for a few seasons past.

There’s a lot to like about this relatively scrappy variation on a familiar theme. “Million Dollar Quartet” has a pleasing modesty, taking place as it does on a single afternoon, Dec. 4, 1956, in the rattletrap recording studio of Sun Records in Memphis. Aficionados of the dinosaur days of rock will recognize this date’s momentousness. Mostly by chance, one of the great jam sessions in recording history took place there and then, as Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley all gathered to shoot the breeze, harmonize and strum their guitars or thunder away at the piano keys.

Much of the responsibility for the evening’s only fitful amusement lies with the material itself. “Lend Me a Tenor” was a big hit in its first Broadway run two decades ago, playing for more than a year and winning a Tony for the great Philip Bosco in the role of the impresario. But Frank Rich, writing in The New York Times, noted that Mr. Ludwig’s comedy “is all things farcical except hilarious.” This time around, the unhilarity is almost uninterrupted, and sometimes magnified by miscasting and flaccid pacing.

In this dazzling new dance musical, which opened Thursday night at the Marquis Theater, Ms. Tharp deploys a stage full of brilliant performers to heighten the theatrical allure of ballroom dance, complementing the immortal appeal of Sinatra’s singing with movement that captures the underlying emotional tensions in it. The yearning to connect and the impulse toward flight — those contradictory verities of romantic entanglement — take sharp visceral form in Ms. Tharp’s fast, flashing, remarkably intricate dances.

Sex and race and rock ’n’ roll made for a potent, at times inflammatory, combination in the 1950s, when the new musical “Memphis” is set. But there’s no need to fear that a conflagration will soon consume the Shubert Theater, where the show opened on Monday night. This slick but formulaic entertainment, written by David Bryan and Joe DiPietro, barely generates enough heat to warp a vinyl record, despite the vigorous efforts of a talented, hard-charging cast. While the all-important music, by Mr. Bryan of Bon Jovi, competently simulates a wide range of period rock, gospel and rhythm and blues, the crucial ingredient — authentic soul — is missing in action.

The volcanic locks and endless guitar solos are tethered to a thin plot concocted from showbiz clichés spruced up in skin-hugging leather and acid-washed denim. But so what if the story is stale as the air in a dive bar at 6 a.m.? Mr. D’Arienzo, Ms. Hanggi and their ace designers (costumes by Gregory Gale, hair and wigs by Tom Watson and sets by Beowulf Boritt) mockingly evoke the sights, sounds and smells of the era with an affection so pure and an aesthetic so archly on-target that the familiar is freshened by a festive parade of gumdrop-colored lingerie and pungent grunge. When somebody pulls out a four-pack of Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers, the audience roars as if at a punch line of supreme perceptiveness.

First seen Off Broadway last year, “In the Heights” moves uptown with its considerable assets confidently in place: a tuneful score enlivened by the dancing rhythms of salsa and Latin pop, sounds that are an ear-tickling novelty on Broadway; zesty choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler that seems to put invisible wings on the young cast’s neon-colored sneakers; and a stage amply stocked with appealing actors who season their performances with generous doses of sugar and spice. Its fundamental deficiencies are also along for the ride, unfortunately. Conceived by Mr. Miranda, with a book by Quiara Alegría Hudes, “In the Heights” consists of a series of vignettes that form a vivid but somewhat airbrushed mural of urban life. Directed by Thomas Kail, it is basically a salsa-flavored soap opera, and if there is an equivalent of schmaltz in Spanish, this musical is happily swimming in it.

It's not easy being green. Or blonde, for that matter. Those are just two of the many lessons to be learned from this big, murky new Broadway musical. But maybe the most salient pointer is that it ain't easy being a Broadway musical. A strenuous effort to be all things to all people tends to weigh down this lumbering, overstuffed $14 million production. 'Wicked' is stridently earnest one minute, self-mocking the next; a fantastical allegory about the perils of fascism in one scene, a Nickelodeon special about the importance of inner beauty in another. There are flying monkeys, flying witches and flying scenery, but the musical itself truly soars only on rare occasions, usually when one of its two marvelously talented leading ladies, Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel, unleashes the kind of vocal magic that needs no supernatural or even technical assistance.