Chris Jones

Part sentimental confessional, part caustic farce rooted in bitterness and wholly insider theatrical baseball, this intermittently amusing, celebrity-juiced Terrence McNally comedy from 1982 has been updated, often painfully, for an age of gossip, annoying media personalities and an all-powerful critic likely to eat your precious creative baby as his late-night sushi on the train home...Fine, so this is a comedy. As directed by Jack O'Brien, it is also a depressingly uneven production. The first scene, which takes place between the immaculate Lane, who is superb, and the one no-name in the cast, Micah Stock -- having a career-making moment playing a newbie to Broadway and thus the guy serving the drinks -- sparkles with pleasures...But then Grint...enters...And then the otherworldly Broderick shows up...and, well, the air goes out of the whole affair because Grint is about six sizes too large and Broderick's performance is, with a few funny exceptions, just too creepy to be funny.

It is hard to think of a single revival of any musical that has achieved such fusion with the popular perception of the material. That makes this remounting, or reviving, or whatever the Tony Awards committee is calling it, perfectly justifiable in my book. Mendes' 'Cabaret' was, and is, a brilliantly inventive and revealing conception. Then and now...Cumming now oozes relaxed confidence in his charms, whereas he formerly spilled unctuous ambition. Both work, frankly. Cumming does not kill himself anymore, but there is no demonstrable need. He is, really, the consummate Emcee -- others who take on hosting duties at the Kit Kat Klub invariably copy him -- and his relationship with his delighted audience now arrives with ease...Williams, who makes her Broadway debut as Sally, certainly taps into the fragility of her character...She does not, however, deliver the famous numbers with the force (or tonal quality) of a great Broadway singer, which she is not.

If your memory of John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask's brilliant 1988 rock musical, 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch,' is that it works best in a grungy joint, ideally where the floors are sticky, the seats half-empty and the air heavy with tragedy...there is much about director Michael Mayer's new Broadway production, which fuses the character of Hedwig with a megawatt star and thus cures her desperation, to pull you up short...But there is no denying that Harris has thrown himself into the old girl, roaring through this 90 minutes with more tricks in his pants than Hedwig has sad yarns. And this is by no means an inauthentic piece of acting; on the contrary, Harris offers up a bravura, frequently thrilling, deeply committed, self-pushing performance that doubtless will introduce Hedwig, whose cult following was dwindling, to an entirely new generation.

Much of 'Violet' takes places on a bus, which lends itself to a minimalist staging with just a few chairs. The flashbacks should be simple, too. But once Violet and her GIs exit the bus, this production (which is designed by David Zinn) can't decide how (or whether) to build on its initial, simple style. The set expands and contracts. Some of the onstage musicians don robes and join a gospel choir. But you never really feel the pull of place, or of a lost time, nor the comforts of a well-defined imagined world. Foster throws herself into this unglamorous role, her face pale and her body propelled into a world of no self-confidence. It is a very honorable performance, filled with craft. Foster never condescends, and she clearly enjoys her character's intelligence, although she, too, struggles toward the end with the need for climax and consequence.

Of the three Radcliffe performances I've seen on Broadway (the others were in Equus and How to Succeed), this by far is the best. It really breathes as it hobbles along, and yet it's never showy nor overly optimistic. Radcliffe, who reveals chops here I've never seen on stage nor screen, is surrounded by superb character work throughout, including the killer likes of June Watson and Gary Lilburn.

Watching James Lapine's long, laborious and, well, hackneyed, Lincoln Center adaptation of Hart's book, you are constantly struck by the notion that Hart himself, had he been a creative consultant on the project, would have been leaping out of his seat, ready to cut some of his own scenes (plenty!), rewrite others and restage almost everything, being a fellow who understood the difference between autobiography and a work for the theater, between life and carefully constructed artifice. He knew the dance around the archetype without its actual embrace, the revelation of joy and the sorrow that cuts the treacle. And he would, I think, have been pushing for many more truths along with many more laughs.

Many in the audience for 'Of Mice and Men' are coming to see James Franco. But given director Anna D. Shapiro's long history with Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble, it's perhaps not surprising that the main pleasures of her straight-up but resonant Broadway revival of 'Of Mice and Men' lie with the gray-toned, journeymen actors who wander in and out of the Steinbeckian shadows of the Salinas Valley, cloutless traveling workers and those who wrangle them with various degrees of fear and loathing. All are writ and here played as fearful. Whether it's Jim Parrack as Slim, Ron Cephas Jones as Crooks, Joel Marsh Garland as Carlson, Jim Ortlieb as The Boss or Jim Norton as the elderly Candy, a heart-wrenching character who must suffer through the loss of his beloved old dog and immediately understand that they will be coming for him next, the valley on the stage of the aptly named Longacre Theatre is filled with small but beautifully crafted, and deftly cast, performances.

Pastore is exceedingly funny, as is the delicious Marin Mazzie, who blows her way deliciously and fearlessly through the Dianne Wiest role in the film... Brooks Ashmanskas eats his way through the night as the gourmand-actor Warner Purcell, and Nick Cordero stays sandpaper dry, perhaps to a fault, as Cheech... And Lenny Wolpe holds down the normative character, the agent Julian Marx, whose job is to set up the funny lines of the wackos and keep the narrative moving. There are, for sure, times when 'Bullets' is stymied by its lack of an original score, although the lyrics have been thoroughly subjugated to its comedic purpose, wittily so. The use of standards was not such a problem on film, since part of Allen's cinematic gestalt was to forge a gauzy comic tribute to a golden age of Broadway. But when you translate Allen and Douglas McGrath's backstage comedy to the Main Stem, somehow the Great American Songbook starts to feel a bit like a cop-out.

To some extent, Eno seems to be asking which of the Joneses is, in fact, realistic? Any of 'em? This is a play about confronting mortality for sure, which is what underscores the gobs of intellectual and linguistic stimulation that flows from the stage: Letts' Bob, for example, no longer sees the point of painting the house, given that it only has to be redone. That being what you do is no longer sufficient for him. Bob, for the record, has many more caustic zingers, even though the character barely has the energy to spit them out. Hall's John, meanwhile, keeps trying to talk risks of new enterprises and new ways to communicate (why not?), but he mostly flails. Of course. Death is a brick wall. But the play's emotional appeal - and this one, weird as it most surely is, has more of that than any Eno work to date - comes from its equal recognition of the stress of taking care of the ill, the dying, the declining, the angst-ridden...Gold clearly understands that Eno is a writer with heart and compassion (and a useful touch of insecurity).

This age problem is, at minimum, a distraction, an elephant in the room for a play that deserves no such issue in its way. I'd argue it does some damage to the actual play itself, an issue never more apparent than when Lena 'Mama' Younger (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) turns to her daughter-in-law Ruth (Sophie Okonedo) and marvels at how her immature son, having just kicked out a representative from the white residents' association, played by David Cromer, finally has come into his manhood. One is aware that one just has watched a scene of power and assertion, but the notion of the arrival of some kind of delayed maturity for a young man who has felt like a coiled-up spring is, well, stupid. What was everyone thinking? There is one exceptionally fine performance in this otherwise mostly unremarkable revival, staged on a set by Mark Thompson that feels overly fancy for a Chicago apartment house. Okonedo's world-weary but hopeful Ruth is a beautiful piece of acting, at once determined, kind, hopeful, loving and sad.

Beautifully and accessibly scored, 'If/Then' tracks its central character, an urban planner by trade, through two different sets of life choices. One involves kids and a traditional guy. The other features a bigger career but less cultivated, and thus more complex, romantic entanglements with the indecisive and conflicted (the choice between saving the world and liking Whole Foods being another dichotomy that confounds the Coldplay generation and thus infuses this show)...'If/Then' is, for sure, overstuffed with huge crises in both storylines, and since we're double-timing here, they cascade at times in Yorkey's book with dizzying, credibility-sapping rapidity. The expositional needs are intense, but once it's clear that we're tracking Elizabeth's happiness, or lack thereof, and once Kitt and Yorkey provide her with a blistering number about bad choices that she can sing in her bathroom, the audience is in Menzel's and the show's pocket.

To a large extent, McNally is chronicling the revolutionary changes he has seen in the lives of gay Americans - and what playwright has more right to do so? McNally, 75, who got married in 2010, writes here with the moral authority of one who has chronicled this fast-moving history in real, dramatic time; had 'Mothers and Sons' been the work of a different playwright, the way it feels in the theater would be entirely different. The persona of the writer counts for a great deal here, aesthetically, politically and otherwise. Broadway doesn't often feel like a community talking to itself about the immediate moment, but it does here. This is also an exceptionally timely play, a piece that puts great change into context and, in the Broadway world, also has the advantage of having gotten there before anyone else; same-sex marriage became legal in New York only in summer 2011.

You might argue that nobody cares about such veracity in a show based on a cartoon and now expanded into a family musical full of color and exuberance - if still wanting for an overarching theatrical reason for being. But if the director Casey Nicholaw, the book writer Chad Beguelin and their cast all were just to pay a little more attention to the importance of committing to the truth of the plot, however familiar, it surely would greatly improve this show. And it would make it easier for us to engage with characters whose romance lacks emotional stakes, not least because it exists in a world without need.

Broadway's mostly doomed attempts at capturing the boundless American enthusiasm for professional sports, and the billions of associated dollars, have been handicapped by one crucial, constant failing -- an inability to really depict the playing of the actual game. 'Rocky,' the massive theatrical spectacle that opened Thursday night at the Winter Garden Theatre, certainly is a broadly realized story told with bold punches and too much nonperiod video, and it has a reflective, low-key score that reaches too often for songs of nervousness, or of past regret, when it should also convey the red blood that courses through a fighter's veins. But there will be no question in theatergoers' minds as they leave the theater that they have experienced the thrill of a fight.

Despite some beautiful music from Jason Robert Brown and exquisite singing from Kelli O'Hara and Steven Pasquale, 'Bridges,' which is directed by Bartlett Sher, is a curiously somber and remote musical. These problems are caused partly by a Marsha Norman book that captures much but misses the movie's smoldering passions, and to no small extent by the tendency of both these stars to remain very much in their own worlds and to play the end of their affaire de coeur right from the start.

Mueller shows us a reluctant star, a woman who only really starting singing out of necessity and would always have been happier with a few hit songs, a nice home and a man she really could trust. At the end of 'Beautiful,' she's not that different from how she is at the start. Most jukebox shows swing on that obscurity-fame-meltdown-comeback-maturity axis. 'Beautiful,' in its best moments, manages to suggest that the life of our artist is really just small moments that fall together, unknowingly.

Mueller shows us a reluctant star, a woman who only really starting singing out of necessity and would always have been happier with a few hit songs, a nice home and a man she really could trust. At the end of 'Beautiful,' she's not that different from how she is at the start. Most jukebox shows swing on that obscurity-fame-meltdown-comeback-maturity axis. 'Beautiful,' in its best moments, manages to suggest that the life of our artist is really just small moments that fall together, unknowingly.

You have the sense that the show, which currently stars the red-hot Fantasia, did not want to be seen as a historic re-creation, and indeed, the traps there are self-evident. For many of us, hearing the fabulous Adriane Lenox belting out 'Go Back Where You Stayed Last Night' is better than any clever Broadway conceit. And the notion of fusing old school and new school certainly has an effect of enlivening the former and rooting the latter.

Despite the play's reputation as an exquisite fusion of simmering menace and incontrovertible sexual desire, the haunting, richly textured Broadway revival of Harold Pinter's backward-traveling 'Betrayal' has been infused with an aching ennui by the redoubtable Mike Nichols, a director who has lived long enough to have seen that even adultery grows old, and the aging adulterers sad and pathetic. Run an affair through the relentless wringer of time and it becomes as confining as a marriage...[Rafe] Spall is, of course, much lesser known than his A-list co-stars, but it is Spall who runs off with the show at its crucial junctures, an imbalance that strikes me as perfect for 'Betrayal,' and, frankly, very much to the credit of these actors. With the wily Nichols putting the wind in their sails, Craig and Weisz, both of whom are up for the exposure, are engaging in a little deconstruction of their celebrity marriage as well as probing the inevitable terror felt by the established and the over-40 when some virile youngster comes nipping at his heels.

With the indefatigable, deeply engaged and seemingly irreplaceable Norbert Leo Butz driving its storytelling and willing the show's crucial emotional subtext into being by sheer force of talent and will, 'Big Fish' arrives on Broadway as an earnest, family-friendly, heart-warming and mostly successful new American musical. Modestly and movingly scored by Andrew Lippa, 'Big Fish' is set in the Deep South and honors that region's love of tall tales without exploiting the Southern stereotypes so common to the genre of musical theater.

As you can see both in director John Tiffany's beautiful Broadway revival that opened here Thursday night and in a smaller but equally insightful and yet more intense Chicago revival that was the highlight of last season, directors have finally realized that there is no shame in presenting explicit memory in the only medium that can fully serve it...Cherry Jones, one of the great American stage actors, understands that playing a character in a memory play does not mean work informed by the ephemeral. Her Amanda is a great, gutsy woman from a time lousy for her gender. In this fine performance, you discern that her attempts at survival and modest progress are laid low by her own awareness of life's fragility for women, such as her daughter, without visible means of support. Keenan-Bolger spends much of the two hours of stage traffic trying to find some small victories to overcome her own despair; it is another beautiful performance.

As you can see both in director John Tiffany's beautiful Broadway revival that opened here Thursday night and in a smaller but equally insightful and yet more intense Chicago revival that was the highlight of last season, directors have finally realized that there is no shame in presenting explicit memory in the only medium that can fully serve it...Cherry Jones, one of the great American stage actors, understands that playing a character in a memory play does not mean work informed by the ephemeral. Her Amanda is a great, gutsy woman from a time lousy for her gender. In this fine performance, you discern that her attempts at survival and modest progress are laid low by her own awareness of life's fragility for women, such as her daughter, without visible means of support. Keenan-Bolger spends much of the two hours of stage traffic trying to find some small victories to overcome her own despair; it is another beautiful performance.

In its home base of Chicago, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company's studiolike production of Kenneth Lonergan's closely observed and emotionally potent 'This Is Our Youth' was an intimate, immersive affair...On Broadway, though, 'This Is Our Youth' is very different proposition...Shapiro's enjoyable production remains a sincerely acted and smart-eyed take...[Dennis is] exceptionally well played by Kieran Culkin, the cast member here who is most at home on a Broadway stage. He drives the production much more explicitly than was the case in Chicago. Cera ('Arrested Development,' 'Juno') remains his minimalist self, his back stiff and his body constantly residing on the lines of various acute angles. Not all of his work lands as easily on the bigger stage -- to expand Cera is not necessarily to improve him -- but this still is a very smart, funny and painful take on Warren, a tricky character whom Cera turns into an inept but empathetic soul...Gevinson...does not find the technical demands of working in a big Broadway house easy.

There are shows that revive aging material through revisionism. And there are productions that prefer to celebrate the pull of nostalgia, especially when the songs are great. 'Pippin,' the brilliant Diane Paulus revival of the fantastically playful musical by Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson, with a special place in the theater-loving hearts of many, somehow combines the best of those two approaches, at once re-energizing this 40-year-old musical with freshness, vitality and eye-popping exuberance without ever making it feel like the crucial sweetness and naivete of the piece has been undermined or exploited.

Midler, as you might imagine, gives good dish. Superlative dish, even. There will be some for whom 90 minutes in the presence of an outsize character playing an outsize character will be a most delightful evening, leaving ample time for post-show martinis. That's the appeal of this pain-free bit of cannibalism. Meanwhile, the rest of America, the one without the invite, has to worry about more substantial matters.