Christopher Bonanos

Scrapbooking (a much funnier word with not one but two k sounds) gets a big laugh and then so do glue and trust issues. This exchange, containing as it does so much phrasing from the present day, may not hold up in another revival 60-odd years from now, but it absolutely works today. Which is, frankly, a lot of what a revival like this is about. You stage it because, in this moment, Sutton Foster exists and can pull off Winnifred — with an endorsement from the grande dame, now 91, herself. You also stage it because, if you’re lucky, thousands upon thousands of theatergoers will say, “I was in that show in high school,” and they might buy tickets to see as well wrought a version as can be done. Which, given the limitations of the show itself, this one may well be.

None of this, mind you, is a total mess. Individual scenes are affecting, Tomei can toss off a funny line with the best of them, and you are, by the end, rooting for Serafina to find happiness again. Ella Rubin, as her daughter, Rosa, has an unexpectedly modern role to play-she's a teenager of 15 who really wants to get with her reticent older boyfriend-and she too has stage presence to burn. Tomei looks great, and the costuming does well by everyone. (The script includes a few remarks about the degree to which Serafina has gone to seed, but you'll just have to take that on faith.)

Although they move around while they do it, there's almost no action, barely a plot, and (apart from some unusual dynamics involving Miriam Buether's tricky, clever set design) little that could be called a special effect. They just stand and deliver, or sometimes sit and deliver, and nearly two hours later you realize that you may not have blinked for minutes at a time while they did it.

It's a show highly dependent on special effects and stagecraft, with a lot of thunderous noise and blinding flashes of light when bad stuff comes to pass, and the most striking bit of production takes us entirely offstage: When Winston and his fellow rebel Julia have their clandestine meetups in the back room of a dusty London shop, we see the scenes play out on an enormous video screen above the main set. It's not clear, until fairly late in the play, whether those slightly grainy scenes are being played live or were pre-taped. That's the point: We're meant to consider the unreliability of images and their sources, and the ubiquity of cameras recording our every move. The big video monitor is of wide proportions, similar to those of the novel's telescreens. And though it's a little off-putting to see perhaps 20 percent of a play mediated on a big TV, it's a legitimate idea for theater-making, inventively and thoughtfully deployed.

So, okay, it's not Company-nobody's reinventing the form here. That's all right. What we have, in Kinky Boots, is a well-fitted, well-staged toe-tapper in the contemporary big-Broadway idiom. It's never boring; it's never shocking; you are likely to leave entirely entertained and satisfied. Can't argue with that. The Boy George musical Taboo, which went down some of the same yellow brick roads in 2002, was a somewhat more ambitious show that never cohered; Kinky Boots is clearer, brighter, and much, much better.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is 90 minutes long, and around minute 70, I began to despair of it. I started to wonder: Surely the whole play couldn't be about just that-facile, glib language mirroring a facile, racist political movement. Or maybe it was simply suffering from the move to Broadway, another show that originated in a small space dying in a big house.

It’s a light revue assembled by his longtime collaborator James Lapine, one in which the composer himself introduces most of the songs, VH1 Storytellers style, in onscreen snippets projected behind the performers. If you are even slightly inclined toward Sondheimianism, you will find yourself comfy and cozy here, but you won’t be challenged much either. If you’re a hater, you will likely find yourself only partway persuaded of his greatness. And if you’re really deep into the cult, you’ve heard all the anecdotes before—but I doubt that you’ll mind one more go-around.