Charles McNUlty

Director Eric Schaeffer...tries to distract us from the way political correctness has sanitized the story and made it soppier while lessening the stakes. The production's pacing is brisk, and the spirited choreography by Joshua Bergasse occasionally turns acrobatic. But a solution to 'Gigi' has not been found...Hudgens, a dark-haired waif with a pretty if not particularly distinctive singing voice, makes a winning first impression...Unfortunately, the longer Hudgens is on stage, the more superficial her Gigi seems. She can deliver an image of adolescent abandon, but her emotions are dictated entirely by the plot. Her acting is all romantic pabulum -- dull sweetness, exaggerated gaiety, trumped-up anxiety leading directly to amorous ecstasy. Thomas' update doesn't give Hudgens much to work with...Making matters more vanilla, Corey Cott's young-looking Gaston seems almost as innocent as Gigi...Cott's blandness goes away when he sings, but his Gaston is yawningly on the up and up...in an attempt to bring the story up to 21st century standards, the new 'Gigi' only seems more dated.

It's the pesky little things that make up Larry David's infinitely expandable comic universe. All those petty grievances and minor disputes, the slights and slips, the miscues and forced apologies -- so flustering in our own lives, so hilarious in his...This gift for stringing together minuscule moments of frustration and fury...is ideally suited to the small screen. On the stage, however, the smallness and the shtickiness are clumsily magnified, as 'Fish in the Dark'...uncomfortably reveals...This is an overextended sitcom that would like to become a farce but settles instead for some hoary Neil Simon middle ground. There are laughs, to be sure...But stretched out over the length of about three and a half episodes of 'Curb,' the show huffs and puffs its way to the finish line like a geriatric marathoner wheeling an oxygen tank behind him. It's not surprising that David's playwriting inexperience would show. What is astonishing is that the production would compound the problem by obediently following David's lead instead of channeling his comic instincts in a more theatrical direction.

: Director Pam MacKinnon...has paid exquisite attention to surface detail in her handsome revival...The work is overextended, not always dramatically convincing and sometimes too knowingly articulated. Yet there's something intriguing about its puzzling mix of realism and absurdism, which are ultimately reconciled in the dazzling display of Albee's fearless theatricality...This is an ensemble effort...The performances are all sharp -- Higgins' Edna is especially crisp -- but they're still coalescing. This is the kind of work that will deepen over time. As Agnes...Close is all patrician glamour and icy control...Her portrayal reveals the heavy burden Agnes has been carrying of keeping her family -- and her own psyche -- intact...Lithgow movingly depicts the panicked struggle of a man who realizes that he's in danger of being buried alive...If this production of 'A Delicate Balance' teeters unsteadily at moments, it remains always fascinating to behold. The pleasure lies less in the play's profundity than in its carefully coordinated staginess.

But the characters aren't simply anonymous - they're ciphers. As distinctive as the actors are individually (Jumbo has a fierceness, Donnelly a stridency), there's an impersonal quality to their portrayals that makes the relationships hard to credit. Jackman, whose electric aura challenges our acceptance of him as an ordinary bloke, is all concentrated modesty. But the character of this man, a narcissist with a game face, ultimately seems less real than the dead fish he prepares and consumes before our eyes. Those feeling cheated for having paid $175 for a ticket to this barely 90-minute sketch can tell themselves they've shared a meal with Wolverine.

But there's a fundamental problem in bringing 'Act One' to the stage: The episodic story isn't structured as a drama. There's tension but little suspense. Anyone who knows the vaguest thing about Hart will know that he became one of the 20th century's major Broadway figures...on stage this roller coaster journey, unable to induce butterflies of excitement, seems unduly repetitive. The book hasn't been distilled into a workable dramatic form...But there are rewards to the production. Three actors play Moss Hart: Matthew Schechter is young Hart, Tony Shalhoub is the older Hart looking back, and Santino Fontana is the anxious, eager-beaver acolyte Hart determined to conquer the Great White Way. All three are terrific, but Shalhoub, who also plays Hart's father as well as a highly neurotic George S. Kaufman (who has some of the same compulsive tendencies as Shalhoub's TV character Monk) is outstanding.

In playing George opposite Chris O'Dowd's lumbering, mentally challenged, bunny obsessed Lennie in Anna D. Shapiro's gleaming yet hollow production, Franco delivers a performance that is the equivalent of a term paper on John Steinbeck's 1937 novella written the night before it was due with help from a double-shot of energy drink. He's obviously an actor of wide-ranging intelligence, but his intellectualism doesn't serve him here. His acting -- unspontaneous, utterly devoid of reflexes and lacking the gremlin smirk of his best film work -- happens strictly from the neck up. Rather than inhabiting moments and making connections with his fellow performers, he plays a series of ideas, turning up the dial on impatience, anger and loneliness when required but remaining more or less disembodied from his circumstances...O'Dowd, making a worthier Broadway debut, submits himself more wholly to the task at hand. But the character of Lennie, with his child's mind trapped inside a giant's body, is a difficult role to credibly reinvent.

Only a fool would second-guess the transformative power of Audra McDonald, but when it was announced that this five-time Tony Award-winner was going to portray Billie Holiday in the Broadway production of Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill, I must confess that I had my qualms...But from the moment McDonald takes the microphone, a metamorphosis more striking than any in Ovid occurs...I don't want to overinflate the dramatic accomplishment of Lady Day, a minor offering that becomes something major only as a showcase for McDonald's rare artistry, but by the end of the piece Holiday's singing seems to tell not just her own story but a national one.

There's certainly much to savor in this gin fizz cocktail of a show, tossed back in the Art Deco glory of Prohibition-era New York. But the ostentatious flaws of this much-anticipated production, which opened at Broadway's St. James Theatre, make it difficult for me to hold my tongue...Backstage musicals bring out the best in director and choreographer Susan Stroman, and her production of 'Bullets' has electricity that at times matches her high-voltage staging of 'The Producers.' Even when the jokes fall flat and the songs (all borrowed from the period, many revamped by Glen Kelly) seem incongruous, the show has the galloping vigor of a runaway hit, if few of the ecstatic peaks...Stroman's staging moves with an effervescent fluidity - gangsters and flappers glide by, each in high Cotton Club style - yet the book isn't as spry. Scenes that could be distilled into a few lines are belabored. For all the frenetic Jazz Age motion, the show feels dramatically sluggish.

For much of Weisz's performance, Emma's eyes are frosted glass. Yet the character's inscrutability isn't a particularly powerful stance. Unlike Craig's Robert, who appears opaque for the same reason an invading soldier dresses in camouflage, Weisz's Emma, perpetually in retreat, seems to be acting more in defense than offense...this 'Betrayal' is a decidedly male affair, and Craig and Spall live up to the expectations that have surrounded this most anticipated production of the New York fall season. Whether the work justifies such exorbitant ticket prices is another story.

'I'll Eat You Last' is a highly packaged theatrical offering, more marketed than written. Indeed, there's more insight into Mengers and the changing nature of the agentry business in Peter Biskind's 2000 Vanity Fair account of her rise from William Morris secretary to unstoppable Hollywood power broker, followed by the sudden fall that was somewhat softened by the prominence of her much-coveted salon.

Broadway for Cicely Tyson is clearly like riding a bike. Her last rendezvous in the rialto was in 'The Corn Is Green' in 1983, but you'd never know that 30 years had passed by her exquisitely understated performance in the revival of Horton Foote's 'The Trip to Bountiful'...This is Tyson's Carrie Watts, and not a false note is struck...It's a shame that the rest of the production, directed by Michael Wilson, one of Foote's most reliable interpreters, isn't up to Tyson's level. Gooding...is the weak link in the cast. What he brings in name recognition he takes away in inexperience.

Tóibín's writing is elegant, rhythmic and vivid, but it's prose by a fiction writer and essayist whose primary medium is the page. His text, though it started as a play, is more impressive as a novel. In its dramatic format, there's an occasional choppiness to the transitions and the ending is abrupt...But 'The Testament of Mary' belongs to Shaw, one of the most versatile and commanding stage actresses in the English-speaking world. Her voice infuses Tóibín's writing with living color and her emotion forcefully clarifies the point of this risky and very un-Broadway-like theatrical endeavor - to find grace and redemption in the honesty of flesh and blood.

But this vibrantly acted production, directed by George C. Wolfe with his signature urban zip, does its best to mitigate the dramatic deficiencies by keeping the wider scene pulsating even when the protagonist's journey grows fuzzy or loses steam. The projections animating David Rockwell's kinetic sets only accelerate the staging's step.

[Holmes is] charming, natural and, yes, about as fresh-faced as a moisturizer model. But there's only so much that can be done with a Rebeck play that has more topical urgency (greed, ethics and banking funny business) than dramatic finesse. Sharing the stage with Holmes is two-time Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz, who pulls out all the stops in the play's leading role…he delivers a performance of frenetic gusto as Jack...Butz practically ricochets off the walls of the simple Midwestern kitchen that's the setting for 'Dead Accounts,' but not even he can transcend the contrived nature of a character who is really nothing more than a collection of manic playwriting impulses...director Jack O'Brien...isn't able to sort out the problem through his staging. His production draws out the sharpest colors in the cast, magnifying the characters' most salient qualities in an amped-up TV sitcom manner.

In tackling more than it can synthesize, the play often seems diffuse. But despite the flaw in its construction — a flaw that is really a conceptual one, stemming from Auburn's somewhat too passive relationship to his material — the work is engaging as cultural history and, to a lesser extent, as a psychological object lesson. As I said to my friend as we left the theater in the midst of a gathering spring storm, 'It's not a bad play for a rainy Sunday afternoon.' A good deal of the credit goes to Sullivan's finely acted production, which in addition to Lithgow (ideally cast as the peremptory patrician), features a first-rate ensemble.

So it’s a little surprising, though very satisfying, to report that the musical “Once” has made a happy Broadway landing at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, which has converted its stage into an old-fashioned Irish pub to make everyone feel, if not quite as cozy as they did at New York Theatre Workshop, where the work debuted late last year, at least just as relaxed and welcome ... The only major problem with the show, which stars Steve Kazee and Cristin Milioti as the characters known simply as Guy and Girl, is that it overstretches its material. There really isn’t enough story or music for two acts. The film didn’t need more than 90 minutes to complete the arc of this adult fable, and neither does the stage version.

Williams submits himself wholly to the play's utterly natural surrealism. Concerns that the actor might turn this into a vehicle for his signature shtick are dispelled right way: Williams is in complete sync with the blasted tragicomic vision of the playwright, whose ample humor is far too sneaky for stand-up showboating...He's put himself at the drama's service, and if that means ceding the stage to Moayed, whose poignancy has only deepened, so be it.

In addition to his patented boyish charm, Radcliffe possesses deft comic instincts. Every time Finch turns to the spotlight with a conspiratorial acknowledgement that the plan for advancement is working to perfection, the audience roared in hysterics. His voice, pleasantly serviceable but not distinguished, worried me in his first number, 'How to Succeed.' The singing improved as the show went on, but he's no Robert Morse, who originated the role with so much musical theater élan and effortless personality (as the film version wonderfully documents) that comparisons are invidious. But then this revival would very likely never have come into existence without the Harry Potter hordes. Looking into the crystal ball, I see fewer musicals and more dramatic comedies in Radcliffe's future. He'll never match Hugh Jackman's versatility, but there's no shame in being a likable 2 1/4 threat.

But for all its irreverence - and there's enough off-color insouciance to offend church ladies of every denomination - 'The Book of Mormon' has the old-fashioned musical comedy heart of adults who spent much of their adolescence lip-syncing to original cast albums in their finished basements.

The joy of Almodóvar's film is the profound simplicity of its whirligig emotional truth. Sadly, that quality has been lost in the Broadway shuffle. This new musical adaptation of 'Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,' which opened Thursday in a Lincoln Center Theater production at the Belasco Theatre, has many things in its favor. Chief among them is a glittering constellation of theatrical divas, featuring the one and only Patti LuPone as a kind of deranged den mother. But the show is hampered by a faltering score by David Yazbek ('The Full Monty,' 'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels') and a crucial bit of miscasting. Pepa, the protagonist thrown into a tailspin after her man cuts her loose, is played here by Sherie Rene Scott, a charming musical theater star but one with about as much Mediterranean earthiness as Barbara Bush or Paris Hilton.

'The Scottsboro Boys' rises in pathos as the fate of the imprisoned men is revealed. Not everyone in the audience will be able to trust their teary emotion—is this another of the musical’s subversive traps?—but it’s one of the few times that the show seems to belong on Broadway.