Chris Jones

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.

Rebeck clearly intends to lampoon her mercurial Manhattan milieu and treat the Midwest without the usual condescension. But one of the many problems with this script, which is entertaining and zesty in a moment-by-moment way but really does not hang together as a credible dramatic story, is that it relies on the dodgy assumption that people in Cincinnati actually define themselves, all the time, as heart-of-America Midwesterners, when, in fact, they think of themselves as Cincinnatians, residents of a pretty urbane locale…'Dead Accounts' holds one's attention, not least because it allows the hyperkinetic Butz to energize the piece. He is a lot of fun throughout, especially when playing opposite Houdyshell's dry wit. Holmes...generally lacks sufficiently expansive definition, but, in the few moments of actual revelation, she finds some poignancy in her relationship with her character. None of these actors, though, can help the lack of credibility of some of the play's central devices.

Director Scott Ellis' lively, crowd-pleasing and — given the horrors of the East Coast storms and the abiding comedic quality of the material — very well-timed Broadway revival...all has the feeling of a live version of a star-laden holiday TV special, with many of the same pluses and minuses…As a solve-it-yourself, self-aware musical, 'Drood' presents some traps, not all of which are here fully avoided. At various points, one has to force oneself to re-engage with the grand questions of the plot, which are not always tracked as adroitly as would be ideal. The best productions of 'Drood' manage, at least in the final number, to exploit the way the lyrics allow the clutter of the show to fall away — and to help us ponder a few broader matters of life and death, at least in passing. That never happens here. But that was bothering almost no one inside Studio 54. Block, who seems relieved not to carry the entire enterprise, sounds particularly spectacular, as does Betsy Wolfe as the ripe ingenue Rosa Bud. Rivera, as one might imagine, could not be a more delightful presence in any romp in town.

At the Palace Theatre, it feels very much like 'Annie' has gotten lost...It has some successful, even emotional, moments, especially involving Anthony Warlow's Daddy Warbucks, one of the few roles here that does not feel miscast...Finneran mostly looks lost and flailing here, trapped somewhere in the wastelands between traditional musical comedy stylings and some kind of new realism...Crawford, no question, has a lot more real, complex girl inside her than the typical spunky, bewigged moppets who've played this role on stage and screen, but there's a certain invulnerability throughout that proves problematic. Crawford is a capable kid; that was a directing problem.

MacKinnon's production, which essentially re-claims the work from its post-Hollywood identity — of a vehicle for a diva dangling on the edge and her handsome, self-loathing husband — is an ideal way to pay tribute to Albee. It banishes the image of Elizabeth Taylor (or even Kathleen Turner's) Martha and substitutes Morton's more vulnerable, down-to-earth characterization of the daughter of a college president and a woman who plays games, lashes out and ties herself in knots, but all in the service of keeping a lid on the dangerously disappointed, and thus dangerously destructive, guy she married and clearly still loves...Morton and Letts together convey, better than any of the other actors I've seen in this familiar drama, the essentially smallness of George and Martha's suffocating little republic, a dominion that can never reach beyond themselves.

Despite an enigmatic, career-making performance from Rob McClure in the title role, an earnest turn from Wayne Alan Wilcox as his tag-along brother Sydney, and an engaging performance from Erin Mackey as Chaplin's late-in-life love Oona, 'Chaplin' is a musical where the material is just not up to the complexity of its enigmatic subject. It's impossible to believe that the creator of such masterpieces as 'Modern Times' and 'The Gold Rush' would express himself in such prosaic, cliched terms. He may not have spoken in his works, but he surely was thinking up a storm with every twitch of his Tramp's eyebrows.

'Leap of Faith,' which is believed to be on shaky fiscal footing on Broadway, is actually an interesting new American musical that, in its best moments, takes a look at a side of America that musicals usually fly right over. The title number (and several others) are quite complex Menken compositions — imagine the best of 'Sister Act' suffused with a few notes and wails of the godless. And the show's main messenger delivers, with considerable flourish, the always-useful message that the more you think you know about life, the less the truth reveals itself.

'The Columnist' doesn't manage to make Alsop's particular case, and, granted, he was a particular case, quite enough of a metaphor for the American moment. We're not allowed to feel and think beyond the biography. That issue is exacerbated by classy but very careful and gentle production from director Dan Sullivan that uses dignified, measured transitions to capture the affluence of Alsop's upper-class, Georgetown milieu, but never allows Lithgow or his foes to fully let loose. For sure, these were wound-tight personalities dedicated to propriety, and this articulate cast surely captures that element of the national discourse. Still, one finds oneself wanting a couple more of these very civilized scenes — especially those between Lithgow and Margaret Colin, who plays Susan Mary Alsop, an in-name-only wife — to descend into staccato rage.

Overall, the show is too afraid of emotional engagement, which is silly when you have these songs and O'Hara's voice and Broderick's likable self to deliver them. More truth and honesty would make the work considerably nicer — and, for the audience, easier to get.

Our fervent if fantastical wish that our lives, and the lives of those we love, don't end with death has informed musicals since the form was invented. It is the heartbeat of 'Carousel,' one of the greatest musicals of all. So that moment in 'Ghost' — not so different, really, from the instant Julie Jordan senses Billy Bigelow standing before her — should put a lump in your throat. And for a second, it does (it's why the movie made plenty of people cry). But in this instance, it's quickly replaced by resentment that a show has co-opted and manipulated such an exquisitely raw and potent device, a vulnerable place for any audience where no show should casually tread, and used it so carelessly, tossing away the human vulnerability for a slew of harsh, digitized illusions.

Jeff Calhoun's production moves around Tobin Ost's metallic set mostly with efficiency, and John Dossett's villainous Joseph Pulitzer is a zesty creation, but there are no real surprises of any sort; in the formative sense, there's nothing one has not seen before. The number “Seize the Day” comes with top-drawer musical excitement, but this is not Alan Menken's best score for the theater, nor do Jack Feldman's lyrics dance easily in your head.

Kushnier, whose work was formidably intense, rich and complex for the work of an understudy, does not come with the same Goth intensity as Young's more sensual Judas, pushing the disloyal Apostle more toward personal panic than besotted manipulation. Both approaches have their strengths and so does Chilina Kennedy's earnest Mary, even if her work seems less central and layered than it did in Canada. But by eschewing any shades of folk or billowy sweetness in favor of an all-consuming need for Jesus' attention, she nails the famous ballads, “I Don't Know How to Love Him” and “Could We Start Again Please?” which is what people want from her the most in the theater and are the two most common questions people ask of Jesus in the world outside.

Whether a broad Broadway public will take to Once is an open question, even if the brilliance of its constituent artistry will surely slay those who most appreciate this form of expression. The music, although beautiful, does not come with the usual tricks. There is neither digital scenery nor spectacle — although I swear I saw the streets of Dublin and the possibilities of the world beyond. This is a show that demands that its audience listen. But then, how can you love if you're not willing to allow someone, something, to be heard?

Garfield shows us a young man who is troubled, angered and deeply affected by the hypocritical rhetoric of his father. But he does not show us a young man who has gone out and failed. His visage is infused with articulate, attractive innocence; yet when you've been in jail, you have scars, scars that Biff needs, because it finally drives him to action.

For all the controversy that has surrounded Diane Paulus' revisionist Broadway revival of 'Porgy and Bess,' or, as it now is billed, 'The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess,' the considerable strengths of this production, which opened Thursday night at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, are in the traditional pleasures of witnessing a passionate, beautifully sung, richly visualized, splendidly played and indisputably well-intentioned 'Porgy.' This is a great American opera filled with breathtaking stakes, towering characters and a thudding naturalistic intensity. The considerable weaknesses don't really flow from cuts in the running time or the textual changes (the work of adapters Suzan-Lori Parks and Diedre L. Murray) designed to make this show more palatable for modern Broadway tastes and that famously aggrieved Stephen Sondheim, who stood in solidarity with the original librettist, DuBose Heyward, and preemptively howled against a proposed, but now abandoned, new ending wherein Bess returns to Catfish Row. They have all been overhyped and overdiscussed.

The original play combined subversive comedic antics with hefty stakes. The derivative combines campy comedic antics with no stakes whatsoever, unless some joker has given you Athens U. in the March Madness pool. Without some viable equivalent of something big to play for, 'Lysistrata Jones,' its amusements and imagination aside, plays very thin and contrived — albeit with thick Broadway prices.

The reincarnation of the 1965 musical 'On a Clear Day You Can See Forever' now begins with its leading man, a shrink named Dr. Mark Bruckner, addressing a 1974 meeting of the American Psychological Association and discussing a patient who apparently was someone else in a past life, a someone with whom this doctor fell in love. When the star of the new Broadway version, Harry Connick Jr., starts to lecture, you're immediately put in mind of Al Gore. The craggy crooner, who plays opposite the gorgeously voiced Chicago star Jessie Mueller in a troubled and perplexing show that is hardly the best vehicle for her Broadway debut, has a physical resemblance to the handsome former vice president, and he also embodies some of Gore's signature stiffness. But among many inconvenient truths in this revival, with a radically retooled new book by Peter Parnell and direction and reconception by Michael Mayer, Connick — the big star on the marquee — is just not given a character or persona within which he can rest easy.

Such a spirit clearly has informed Jackman, a musical-theater geek at heart who was lucky enough to become such a massive movie star that he has a heft that's currently peerless in the Broadway landscape. And he knows how to play it like no one else. Theater people love him because, unlike most movie stars, he can really perform the 'Rock Island' patter from 'The Music Man' and sing 'Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin',' which opens his show. And the rest of the globe has not only heard of him, it regards him as as alpha a Hollywood male as ever roared.