Charles Isherwood — Theater Critic

The pedal-to-the-metal approach has its advantages. With voices clamoring from the stage at top volume for much of the evening, your attention is rarely likely to stray from the finely spun web of ideas animating Ibsen’s play, about the ruckus raised in a Norwegian spa town when the local doctor discovers that the waters are poisoned.

While it has its moments of memorable wit and some appealing rhythmic Broadway-pop songs, “Bring It On” is by no means in the same league as those musicals [Next to Normal, In the Heights, Avenue Q], and has the feel of a daffy lark embarked upon as a summer-vacation goof…It’s when the cast members drop the bonding and the mean-girl bitching to take part in Mr. Blankenbuehler’s exciting cheerleading routines, arranging themselves into dazzling human starbursts, that “Bring It On” really brings something fresh to the ever-expanding roster of shows aimed at the teenage demographic.

The Pulitzer Prize committee may have never erred more egregiously than it did in favoring “Harvey” over Tennessee Williams’s first masterwork, “The Glass Menagerie.” But handled with care, as it has been in this Roundabout Theater Company production, this winsome comedy about a lovable eccentric can cast a satisfying spell. Mr. Ellis’s amiable staging—which features expert supporting performances from Jessica Hecht, as Elwood’s dithery sister, Veta, and Charles Kimbrough, as the eminent psychiatrist she hopes will lock her troublesome brother up for good—strikes the right, gently dizzy tone. Most important, Mr. Parsons carries the weight of a role immortalized on film by the inimitable James Stewart as lightly as Elwood does the hat and coat he keeps on hand for his furry companion. Mr. Parsons possesses in abundance the crucial ability to project an ageless innocence without any visible effort: no small achievement for an actor in these knowing times.

You see, if it were not for the alchemical magic of Mr. Rylance’s Tony-winning performance in Mr. Camoletti’s “Boeing-Boeing,” revived to popular acclaim on Broadway and in the West End a couple of years ago, I doubt I would have had to endure the creaking mechanics of “Don’t Dress for Dinner.” Instead of feeling freshly whipped up from a classic recipe — as “Boeing-Boeing” did, against all odds — this Roundabout Theater Company production has the stale flavor of an old TV dinner defrosted and microwaved.

“Ghost,” with a book and lyrics by Bruce Joel Rubin, who (unbelievably) won an Oscar for the movie’s screenplay; and music and lyrics by Dave Stewart (of the fab 1980s synth-pop duo the Eurythmics — say it ain’t so!) and Glen Ballard, may not be the very worst musical ever made from a movie. I might give that palm to either “Dirty Dancing” or “Fame,” neither of which has yet made it to Broadway. (Thank the theater gods for small blessings.) But it is just as flavorless and lacking in dramatic vitality as many that have come before.

“Magic/Bird,” [is] an efficiently informative but uninspired trek through the lives of two towering (forgive the pun) figures in sports history. ... But as depicted by Mr. Simonson, and portrayed by Kevin Daniels (Mr. Johnson) and Tug Coker (Mr. Bird), the dual heroes never emerge as nuanced or magnetic stage figures, and the celebrated rivalry between them — which revived the flagging fortunes of the N.B.A. in the 1980s — stirs little more excitement, since their relationship off the court was one of mutual respect but minimal interaction, and hardly intimate friendship. ... But the primary obstacle in writing about sports stars for the theater is that the achievements that make them inspiring figures are almost always the feats they performed on the court or the field. Those, of course, can probably never be dramatized in any truly engaging manner onstage.

By the time the curtain came down on this starry but sluggish production, and a nominee had been formally announced, I did feel as if I’d endured a particularly fractious and constipated evening at a political convention. Need I add that acquiring this experience has never been one of my great ambitions? ... I’m not sure Mr. Jones’s presence can be classified as color-blind casting.But no matter: this consummate actor digs into his role with a relish you can surely sense from the back row of the balcony. He all but swamps the stage with Hockstader’s hearty bonhomie and zest for the machinations of backroom deal making, but also succeeds in inflecting his character — in the last rounds of a losing battle with cancer — with a moving sense of his mortality. He also earns robust laughs with some of Mr. Vidal’s piercingly funny lines collapsing the distance between the politics of mid-20th-century America and today.

If this delirious reception for a glitzy depiction of the most influential execution in world history doesn’t strike you as remotely absurd, Mr. McAnuff’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” may just be the right musical for you. I have to confess to finding the show alternately hilarious and preposterous — if often infectiously melodic — during the two hours’ busy traffic of Mr. McAnuff’s brisk and lucid staging.

If you’re going to have the chutzpah to call your show “Shatner’s World: We Just Live In It ...,” it is probably wise to enter joking. William Shatner, who does not need an introduction to anyone who has made it to the second sentence of this review, does precisely that in the chatty, digressive and often amusing tour of his unusual acting career, which opened Thursday night at the Music Box Theater for a brief Broadway run. Despite the absurdly (joshingly?) self-aggrandizing title, Mr. Shatner shows a welcome tendency to poke fun at himself that anyone who has seen his commercials for the travel Web site Priceline.com will probably recognize.

this overstuffed but lively comedy-drama, which opened on Thursday night at the Cort Theater, also signifies a departure for Broadway in its depiction of generational conflict and sexuAl Sparks among a well-to-do contemporary African-American family and friends. Pointed discussions of race and class erupt as often as testy personality clashes...The discovery of the evening is the quietly captivating Ms. Rashad.

Watching these two inimitable talents reel through an eclectic program of theater songs is a bit like riding one of those wonderful old wooden roller coasters at a seaside resort. One minute you’re levitating with exhilaration, the next you’re clinging to your seat for dear life, terrified that disaster is imminent. I am glad to report that the exhilaration far outweighs the intimations of peril.

The flickering of those stage lights barely registers beside the incandescent Nina Arianda, the sensational young actress recreating the role that made her a name to watch when she first starred in the play Off Broadway. Portraying an actress giving the audition of a lifetime, Ms. Arianda is giving the first must-see performance of the Broadway season, a bravura turn that burns so brightly you can almost feel the heat on your face. ... I'm not sure Mr. Ives himself has settled firmly on a resolution to the play's central mystery - the motives and identity of the elusive Vanda - but who cares? With the commanding Ms. Arianda giving a performance of such intoxicating allure, 'Venus in Fur' provides a seriously smart and very funny stage seminar on the destabilizing nature of sexual desire: vanilla-flavored, kink-festooned or anything in between.

Go easy on the caffeine if you're heading to the Broadway revival of 'Godspell' that opened on Monday night at the Circle in the Square. The cast of this relentlessly perky production of the 1971 musical, which transformed parables from the Gospels into a series of singable teaching moments, virtually never stops bopping, bouncing, bounding, even trampolining across the stage and up the aisles of the theater. It's like being trapped in a summer camp rec room with a bunch of kids who have been a little too reckless with the Red Bull.

Few family members are spared in this enjoyable if lightweight diversion, loosely assembled around the idea that our nearest and dearest can do us wrong in infinitely inventive ways...These plays are not going to do anything much in the way of reputation burnishing for their three celebrated authors — and certainly none is required — but they are packed with nifty zingers and have been directed by John Turturro with a boisterous flair for socking home the borscht-belt humor.

Mama said there'll be shows like this. But she didn't tell me there would be quite so many, or that any one of them could be this dismal. Invitations to sing along are flung at the audience regularly, as if they were life preservers. Further inducements to wallow in visions of happy yesterdays are provided by the slide shows of drive-ins and diners and other cultural markers of the period, accompanied by the silky narration of Geno Henderson, playing a sort of cosmic D.J. who registers the passing years with material cut and pasted from Wikipedia.

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.