Charles Isherwood — Theater Critic

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.

'Mamma Mia!,' which weaves a few threads of romantic comedy around a bumper crop of old Abba tunes, is a thoroughly preposterous show, but it's also a giddy guilty pleasure, and its arrival on Broadway in a time of unforeseen anxiety has an aura of sweet inevitability. ('Spores, shmores! Let's boogie!') The show is already a certified hit, with an advance approaching $30 million, and that number will hang firm as word spreads -- in sheepish whispers, and from the unlikeliest of quarters -- about the genial good time it offers.