Chris Jones — Theater Critic

The dark, rich and provocative Rajiv Joseph play 'Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,' a worthy finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, has arrived on Broadway with Robin Williams in the title role...Frankly, the tiger could liven up, although the biggest problem with Williams' performance is that it seems to miss much of the amoral ferocity of the beast (a tiger can be depressed or antic, but he is still a tiger). And a bigger problem yet is that Williams' Tiger is, as things go, not so much the protagonist as a sardonic observer of Baghdad ironies.

Ashford does a couple of very shrewd things. First and foremost, he pairs Radcliffe -- whose character races up a corporate ladder with the help of the titular self-help book (Anderson Cooper provides the famous recorded voice) -- with veteran sitcom star John Larroquette, who plays J.B. Biggley, the company president and the show's surrogate father. Larroquette, whose sardonic sense of comedic timing is flawless and whose pacing is relentless, tutors and draws Radcliffe through the book scenes, pulling more laughs than the work of book writers Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert usually now snags.

But just as it starts to feel as if watching the 'South Park' guys deconstruct the apparent illogicalities of Mormonism is starting to sound the same, one-sided note, Parker, Stone and Lopez engineer a very savvy twist in the narrative. This re-energizes the show early in the second act, focuses it more acutely on those 'Avenue Q'-like themes of young people seeking out their purpose and propels it to a conclusion that leaves audience members feeling they've attended something weightier than a series of pointed laughs fired into a soft religious target.

But 'Priscilla' has a pulsing theatrical heart and soul, not least because its characters are inveterate creatures of the stage. As directed by Simon Phillips, who has been on this bus for years, the tone is warm and inclusive. 'Priscilla' has a rich dynasty of queens, unfazed by any desert and very much at home on Broadway.

Like, say, its recent Broadway predecessor '9 to 5,' the show gets hopelessly trapped in the succession of very short scenes - in this case, set everywhere from taxi cabs to Telefono boxes - that make up farcical films. By midway through the second act, the audience can no longer track the multicharacter action through chaos suited only for film, and palpably checks out of the entire proceedings.

The show is stuffed with bravura, impassioned, individual performances that fuse into an inestimably powerful ensemble.

But I think the last 20 years have, on balance, been kind to this script. After revealing the idiocy of its hero, 'La Bete' suggests that the cultural establishment is vulnerable to these pretenders because of its reluctance to venture outside its own elitist bubble - a tendency deftly suggested by Mark Thompson's shrewdly intimidating setting of towering bookcases filled with volumes that nobody really wants to read. There are plenty of Valeres out there, pontificating on cable, the blogosphere and at political rallies, all ready to pounce.

But this is still one of those shows that capture a moment, an old moment, a new moment. The young cast looks atypical and, at times, as if its members can't believe their luck. Jackson probably thought much the same.

That Mamet wrote this script when he was still, really, a kid, is both indicative of his prescient understanding of the daily grind to come and his astonishingly early powers of observation. Like 'Glengarry Glen Ross,' 'A Life in the Theatre' is a play about work. It just happens to be toil that takes place in the theater. It has the same deadening effect on the soul.

“Enron” won’t win any awards for stylistic unity, nor for subtlety. It comes with some of that irritating, knee-jerk anti-Americanism — especially anti-anything to do with Texas — that afflicts many left-leaning British writers essaying U.S. subjects from afar and invariably results in brash, crude, stereotypical cocktails of sex, excess and the rodeo. That can still play well in Manhattan, where the avaricious think themselves more subtle. And with Prebble, and director Rupert Goold, throwing in everything from fireworks to musical numbers to puppets to a chorus of ravenous dinosaur raptors (a riff on the debt-eating financial creations of Andy Fastow, Skilling’s CFO sidekick), “Enron” is a mish-mash with one foot in the tatty, good-night-out tradition of British political-populist theater, and another inarguably hypocritical foot clearly enjoying a rare chance to blow a Broadway budget.

And therein lies the problem with Hayes' key performance in Rob Ashland's intermittently amusing but emotionally unsatisfying revival. This invulnerable Chuck feels pre-packaged and self-contained. He doesn't seem to want or need anything, including that troubled waitress. And although Hayes' Chuck talks to us all night, you never really feel that anything has been revealed.

Certainly, Washington eroticizes Troy, a character typically played by more stentorian actors with deeper bass notes and thicker girths (although Washington has put on a few pounds and wants not for gravitas). But that potent sexual appeal — underexpressed in most productions of this oft-revived masterpiece — is very much a part of Troy. He was, after all, a star athlete of the Negro Leagues, and his married state doesn't prevent him from bedding a much younger woman (unseen but with enthusiasm implied) and fathering her child. Viola Davis, who plays Rose, the wife Troy betrays, uses that more powerful sense of sexual betrayal to fuel the play's famous Act 2 howl of anguish with such force that you're moved to tears. If Troy is already a broken, angry man, Rose hasn't lost much. But when you're losing Denzel Washington to some cheap floozy — well, the stakes can't help but rise.

There are many fine performances of these incomparable theatrical compositions. Williams is mercifully irreverent, there is only one Cook, and, while Wopat only goes so deep, Lewis' take on “Being Alive” is formatively and emotionally magnificent. But they are not what stays with you. It is not easy for the performers to cohere as a throbbing ensemble, because the star of the show is not in the building.

And thus “American Idiot,” the show, delivers a thick, gorgeous head rush of a musical soundscape without current Broadway parallel. It turns out to offer the kind of sensual lushness that a lot more traditional musicals would kill to emulate. That's mostly due to the brilliance of Tom Kitt's orchestrations, adding violin, cello, weight and gravitas to the Green Day sound without blunting its aggressive edge. With the gifted director Michael Mayer spreading his eight-member band out across a beautifully cacophonous setting — more a video-filled installation, really — from Christine Jones that evokes a constant blaring of Fox News in an endless sea of 7-Eleven parking lots and crappy urban apartments, you get a stunning musical wash of all corners of human emotion.

Folks are paying a lot of money and some of them like to know where that money went. But the finale is really about the music. And in this case, the money would have been far better spent on hiring a decent dramatic writer who could have added some subtlety and veracity to a crude book from Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux that still dispenses thudding anecdote, easy trivia and crude linkage instead of the live, credible, complex conversation of a quintet of icons of American rock ‘n’ roll.

They don't give out awards for “most improved,” and “The Addams Family” did not undergo some spectacular 11th-hour artistic unification. But clear-eyed changes have moved what was a wildly uneven but ambitiously progressive affair in Chicago much more in the direction of classic, full-tilt, fast-paced, old-fashioned musical comedy — and regardless of reviews, they're almost certain to cement this immensely popular title as a commercial hit on Broadway and beyond. (The show opened on Broadway with a whopping $15-million-plus advance and has been racking up “Wicked”-like box office returns since previews).

But if you accept this show as a populist ballet — Who deserves a populist ballet more than Frank? — you could find yourself entranced. I did. Tharp's achievement here, and it is a brilliant achievement, is to catch, in strident, fearful dance, that sense of an artist at once temporal and immortal.

The latest Broadway play from Martin McDonagh lands somewhere between 'Pulp Fiction' and an extended star-driven sketch from 'Saturday Night Live.' We already knew that McDonagh ('The Beauty Queen of Leenane,' 'Pillowman') writes with remarkable facility in the self-aware, neo-gothic, Tarantino-esque style. But the formative devil has become more formatively devilish. 'A Behanding in Spokane' reveals a more comic and happily anarchic side of this irreverent Irish writer, who consumed American noir as a youth in far greater quantity than Kerrygold butter.

This play probes affirmative action in white-collar professions. It's mostly an attack thereupon. If there is a thesis, it's that the law treated blacks and whites differently a century ago and does the same now. Both imbalances were wrong. You might well take offense at that argument. But if you follow Mamet's logic in 'Race,' you'd argue that no white liberal could write a watchable play on this subject, anyway. He would be too scared.

The show’s lyrics ponder memory loss, depression and confusion. A typical musical number is “My psychopharmacologist and I.” This not only is a serious, substantial, dignified and musically sophisticated new American work, intensely staged by Michael Greif, but a frequently moving picture of a empathetic nuclear family whose members are struggling, like many of us, to take care of themselves and each other, and to keep the stitches in the fraught daily fabric of their everyday lives.

Fortunately for a new generation yet to see this show produced at this level, it retains the heart, soul and original moves and sounds of a theatrical masterpiece with Leonard Bernstein melodies so beautiful they reverberate deep in your chest. And yet this new production also radically updates and rejuvenates the show’s social milieu. It’s an ensemble-driven change—rather than the individual lead performances—that dominates the feeling and impact of this production.

It celebrates the mineworkers’ collective struggle with all the political passion of a Studs Terkel history. Its extensive cast of children makes you think about the cost of growing up in a world of angry adults, but also the ability of kids to transcend such a world. And it ultimately comes down to a dad (played, superbly, by Gregory Jbara) who, like most of us, doesn’t understand much about his world, except for the most important thing therein. He has to get behind his kid.