Chris Jones — Theater Critic

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.

It was Dahl who invented Matilda, the spunky, over-achieving, proto-feminist, grrl-power heroine of what is far and away the best new musical of the Broadway season, indeed one of the best family-oriented shows of any season, and a work of musical theater that feels like a grand cultural experience...'Matilda,' which features a faithfully wrought and happily insouciant book by Dennis Kelly and that score, that remarkably rich, occasionally anthemic score by Minchin, has arrived on Broadway with a formidable West End pedigree. One could nip at 'Matilda's' heels: the Broadway production, directed with great skill and a determined lack of sentimentality by Matthew Warchus, is a tad cool to the touch in spots...But that is about the only reasonable complaint. Warchus' superb cast is remarkably deep in craft and talent.

Lauper, a genuine and necessarily fearless original - happily lassoed for duty on a Great White Way in dire need of a woman with so many melodic hooks in her bag of tricks - has been promoting dance-fueled tolerance for decades. And that distinguished history, judiciously coupled with a book by the famously droll and direct Fierstein, is riveted into the stiletto heels dancing through industrial Britain in this show - a witty, striking and emotionally centered movie-to-musical transfer about a down-at-heel Northampton shoe factory that reinvents itself by making reinforced footwear for hefty drag queens.

The generally likable, small-scaled and well-meaning show...revolves around an endurance contest staged by a car dealer. Be the last person with your hands on the truck and you can take it home. Let go and you're road kill....The main problem with the piece (aside from some lyrics that feel forced and obvious) is that you probably could guess the casting breakdown without seeing the show.... The piece is not without interest and is quite enjoyable throughout: Trujillo has some zesty one-handed dance numbers, the actors bring a good deal of truth and, more important, the plotting feels far more original than the character types.

The problem here is of simpler vintage: There's no palpable connection between Fred and Holly, the unlikely and surely ill-fated couple of Capote's imagination...The other problem with Mathias' show...is that it misses the exuberance of the 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' novella...Capote understood the dangers of trying to start from scratch - the past will come out, and all that - but he also knew its appeal...Greenberg tries to underscore this crucial ambivalence in his text, and he tries to set out a fatalistic celebration of courage, but the invasive mores of this production keep toppling all that.

The fundamental problem with Douglas Carter Beane's perplexing, wholly unromantic and mostly laugh-free new book for this Broadway 'Cinderella' - which turns the heroine into a social reformer like a better-looking Jane Addams, the stepsisters (Marla Mindelle and Ann Harada) into sympathetic, wounded creatures of thwarted desire, and Prince Charming (Santino Fontana) into a myopic dunce who needs his eyes opened to the poverty of his people - is that it denies the audience the pleasure of instant reversals of fortune....Not for the first time, Broadway wants it all ways - the hip and the retro, romance and self-aware sniping, Rodgers and Hammerstein melodies and atonal satirical jabs, a golden title for family audiences and yet something else entirely once their credit cards have been charged.

Scarlett Johansson...unlike so many young movie stars, she has no problem expanding her performance chops to the live theater, booming out a character that has been precisely forged and defined but ill-advisedly contained...a clear point of view is absent in this generally confused, low-stakes and halting production - that went through changes and subtractions in its preview period and now seems stuck. It's neither a traditional staging nor a suite of fresh ideas on a great American drama that should both embody timeless interpersonal truths and reflect how much our world is changed, sexually speaking, in little more than a half-century.

In Daniel Sullivan's high-profile Broadway revival of a great American drama of prosaic Midwestern business, a masterpiece that can withstand almost any out-of-whack revival, even this one, the great American actor Al Pacino blinks straight out at the audience. He will do this, beyond all bounds of common practice, for the next two hours, a choice at once interesting, sweet and weird...An hour or two later, you come to see that the production has its high points, its entertainments, its solid performances and there is nothing herein to kill the appeal of this brilliantly constructed and spectacularly theatrical play...But this production...ultimately does not succeed pretty much for the same reasons that the last Broadway production of Mamet's 'American Buffalo' did not work out. Although hardly an everyman in whom we can see ourselves, Pacino's Shelly is certainly playful, unpredictable and rhythmically impulsive...Pacino certainly captures Shelly's vulnerability, even if he channels much of that into eccentricity. The problems arrive more when it feels like these actors don't understand the huge stakes of small events in these third-tier salesmen's lives.

There are two quite different performances here. LuPone cut her teeth on Mamet during the St. Nicholas Players days in Chicago, and she is a consummate interpreter of his works: She understands how to foreground his language without giving up the rest of what an actor does. She consumes this Cathy with a palpable hunger, forging a very shrewd and well-crafted performance. Winger, though, tends to lean back from the debate even as LuPone leans into its demands.