David Cote — Theater Critic

Gleaming with busy video backdrops and stadium kliegs, Thomas Kail’s production is light, speedy and gamely acted by the spunky ensemble. Kevin Daniels and Tug Coker were obviously cast for extreme verticality, but they also acquit themselves with humor and grace. Slipping in and out of a variety of supporting roles, Peter Scolari and the wonderful Deirdre O’Connell add emotional ballast to the whoosh of statistics and ESPN-friendly trivia. If the total package is less effective drama than “Lombardi” (the creative team’s previous foray into sports history), it’s an affable and warmhearted diversion.

Shatner and his director, Scott Faris, aren’t exploring any formal frontiers in this minimalist setup. There are a couple of chairs, a few unused props and a large planet-shaped screen upon which the crew projects photos and videos from Shatner’s career on stage and famously in the “Star Trek” series and movies. In between these video interludes, Shatner pilots a rolling office chair, regaling us with tales of his boyhood in Montreal, early thespian experiences with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and how “Star Trek” led to a long-standing friendship with NASA.

Having missed Kathleen Chalfant in a role that she was apparently born to play—Dr. Vivian Bearing in Margaret Edson’s powerful medical drama, Wit—I can’t weigh her performance against Cynthia Nixon’s in the Manhattan Theatre Club revival. But it is easy to imagine that Chalfant’s patrician starch and throaty low register perfectly conveyed a literature professor who can anatomize verse as easily as she verbally flays her students. Nixon has an innate warmth and coltishness that works against her, and she struggles in the first third of Lynne Meadow’s production to project sufficient froideur and hauteur. Still, it’s a testament to this remarkable play and Nixon’s skill that we ultimately believe her as the cancer-stricken teacher. Believing, we also weep at her fate.

On balance, does it work? Yes, as a version of Porgy and Bess. There have been valid variants on the classic ever since the 1942 musical-theater adaptation on Broadway. I’m not going to pine for an “authentic” take or howl that Paulus & Co. have sold out the Gershwins. Due to a fine cast, some clever dramaturgy and the inherent musical glories of the material, the new Porgy and Bess has integrity. Does it have more or greater integrity than what you’d see in an opera house? I’m no purist, so it ain’t necessarily so.

It was broke, but they sure ain’t fixed it. In fact, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever’s bumbling show doctors should be sued for malpractice and felonious misuse of star talent. Manslaughter, too: The patient died on the slab. The famously flawed 1965 Burton Lane–Alan Jay Lerner romantic comedy about extrasensory perception, past lives and a kooky gal with a magical green thumb has been reincarnated into a clunky bore that switches time periods and gender, inserts a gay subplot and turns its putative hero—psychologist Dr. Mark Bruckner (Connick)—into a creepy, manipulative stalker. Is this a tuneful retro quirkfest or Dressed to Kill?

Like a chef too fond of her ingredients and bored with the recipe, Diamond overstuffs and undercooks this rich stew of identity politics and parent-child resentments. As a result, the characters (played with grace and gusto by an appealing ensemble) give us plenty of high-attitude verbiage, but too few glimpses into their inner lives. Still, Diamond spins out lively dialogue by the yard, and it’s often fun to wriggle in her web.

There’s always danger when writers lampoon the publishing world: You never believe their wünderkinds are so wonderful, and they tend to burlesque bad writing beyond credibility. The acid test comes when someone reads aloud a passage that is purportedly genius or dreck. Rebeck wisely curtails recitation of manuscripts. Instead we watch as Rickman’s Leonard—being paid $20K to teach a ten-week intensive course at the Upper West Side apartment of Kate (Rabe)—as he pages through student submissions. A curl of the lip, a twitch of the eyebrow, a flare of the nostrils: These nonverbal signals speak volumes. Out of small gestures and that slurry, violoncello delivery, Rickman crafts one of the most vivid, dimensional stage monster in years: a burnt-up monument to cynicism and appetite who beds his students when not pulverizing their egos. Rickman gives the comic performance of the season.

Eyre's production-handsomely designed by Rob Howell (set and costumes) and dreamily lit by David Howe-exudes intelligence and style, but misses the necessary balance of musicality and silliness, of brittleness and bluff-without which Coward comes across as arch, empty fluff. Exquisitely contrived and capriciously sustained, Private Lives is one of his vintage almost-farces, a comedy of marital manners in which the divorced Amanda and Elyot find themselves in adjoining honeymoon suites in the South of France on second marriages. In short order they reunite in shock, feign apathy, fall in love again and adulterously elope, leaving their killjoy spouses (Simon Paisley Day, Anna Madeley) to track them down in Paris.

For Broadway, director Walter Bobbie milks the script more; the action clocks in about ten minutes longer than it did at CSC. Although easing up on the accelerator gives us more time to savor the sensual-slapstick dance between Dancy and Arianda, it also means the climactic 20 minutes-as gender roles and power positions sharply flip-grow a tad overindulgently logy. Undaunted, Arianda maintains terrific tension at all times-as well as full comic release.

Dear reader, I want you to laugh. And to judge from the horribly stale Relatively Speaking, I want you to laugh more than do Ethan Coen, Elaine May and Woody Allen. Shall I regale you with the tale of getting kicked in the crotch by a potty-mouthed granny, causing me to double over moaning? Or shall I recount, in photorealistic detail, a contretemps between a week-old burrito and my intestines? Maybe I'll just slip on a banana peel and fall on my ass. Such slapstick clichés would generate more guffaws than this tedious three-pack, in which family foibles inspire a trio of famous writers to draft sketches of feeble or nonexistent comic value.

The current production, staged by Kenny Leon with film stars Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett, opens with considerable hype and celebrity wattage, neither of which does it any favors. Miscasting and directorial overkill turn what could have been a beguiling chamber meditation on fallibility and destiny into an awkward, mawkish blend of docudrama, surreal whimsy and pandering black-history triumphalism.

It's hard to imagine a more commanding and forceful actor in the city. Langella is such a master manipulator of space and time, it's hard to believe that his character is destined for a semitragic fall. English director Maria Aitken ('The 39 Steps') deserves full credit for taking a solid cast and keeping them all on the same page. Under her steady gaze Man and Boy clips along, a cynical tale of fathers, sons and human bonds sold for profit. Adam Driver continues to impress.

McNally’s play may be a bit schematic, punctuated by soul-searching monologues about the diva’s tortured affair with Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis, but it’s an entertaining vehicle for Daly, and McNally is skilled in balancing bitchy humor and pathos. Moreover, the staging by opera veteran Stephen Wadsworth is stately and dignified without being fussy.

So the final mutation of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is not a multidisciplinary breakthrough, as Taymor hoped; it’s just a musical. Likewise, Peter Parker may have superpowers that let him fly around New York on spiderwebs, but at the end of the day, he’s just a kid.

Baby It’s You! may attract an undiscriminating audience for a spell, but this brand of pandering pap has limited appeal. If I wanted to sit around listening to 50-year-old pop tunes and corny jokes, wallowing in boomer nostalgia while pretending to enjoy myself, I’d visit my mother at her condo in Florida. At least she knows how to cook.

Those happy and sad masks are iconic for a reason: A director who wants to put a fresh spin on a familiar play need only fiddle with the comedy-tragedy equalizer knob. Such adjustments get you a Long Day’s Journey Into Night that taps undiscovered veins of goofiness, or a revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner that chronicles lives of quiet Midwestern desperation. John Guare’s 1971 classic, The House of Blue Leaves, isn’t so easy to flip. Guare’s black farce about nobodies dying to be somebodies tickles your funny bone before kicking you in the gut. So it’s only natural that David Cromer, whose gimlet-eyed earnestness led to revelatory stagings of Our Town and Brighton Beach Memoirs, should see how high he could pump the grim factor. The result is an overly dour production that gets Guare’s bitter ironies but none of his naughtiness or joy.

Ian Rickson’s picturesque staging is a model of tightly paced realism, with necessary room for more stylized passages. At three hours, Jerusalem flies by, thanks to Butterworth’s terrific ear and Rylance’s tirelessly inventive turn as a man who seems half mortal, half imp, all theatrical god. And we worship him—even if his giants and fairies are not native to this land. For three hours, at least, Jerusalem’s “mountain green” and “pleasant pastures” are ours. Anybody who cares about thrilling, world-class drama must make the pilgrimage.

Even if High didn’t have such stiff competition, it would still come across as sub-Lifetime-movie stuff.

Directors Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris knit together striking design elements (the puppets, video animations, painterly light and smoke displays) and a sterling ensemble of local troupers (including T. Ryder Smith, Richard Crawford and Alyssa Bresnahan) to build a triumphant epic of human and animal spirit, working together to heal some of the perilous wounds we have inflicted on nature. War Horse will make you believe that puppets live and breathe, and perhaps even have souls.

The fault might be in Catch Me’s awkward framing device. Early on, just as he’s finally nabbed in an airport, Frank (Tveit, ruthlessly charming) stops the action and insists on telling the audience his version of the story, against the wishes of the schlumpy but persistent Hanratty (Butz, full-bodied, triumphant). Frank opts for the format of a classic 1960s TV variety show, with sexy dancers, broad comedy and plenty of swinging tunes. But this may not be the best way to tell the story of a teenager who cashed more than $2 million in forged checks and impersonated an airline pilot and a pediatrician. The TV-special approach condenses large amounts of material into a jaunty, episodic structure punctuated by brassy numbers, but it also flattens the relationships—especially the potentially moving father-son bond between Frank and Carl.

There are comic zingers scattered throughout Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, and it’s a good thing Robin Williams is around to lob them—but don’t expect guffaws. These punch lines are the kind that pummel, leaving bruises, bloody noses and cracked ribs. When you laugh, it’s the arid chuckle prompted by a cosmic irony, which this surreal war fantasia has in abundance. A gripping, ferocious new drama that includes a morally wracked ghost tiger, buckets of blood and generous swaths of gallows humor, Joseph’s play is a metaphysical thriller equally indebted to Thornton Wilder and Quentin Tarantino.

Such a magpie aesthetic makes perfect sense for a show that examines, with impressive insight, cultural transmission, adaptation and assimilation. “It was a bunch of stuff you made up,” Price says to comfort Cunningham, who fabricates a wildly blasphemous version of Mormonism for the natives. “But it pointed to something bigger.” Just so, The Book of Mormon is more than a collection of offensive jokes about female genital mutilation, bestiality and Mormon kitsch; it’s about our ineradicable hunger for narrative and mystery—no matter how weird, sick or damnably fake.

'Arcadia' is a play with marvelous potential to amuse, delight and inspire intellectual discussion late into the night, but this misjudged revival doesn’t really crack the equation.

Director Gregory Mosher, masterful with last year’s A View from the Bridge, does what he can with lesser material, but he can’t get all his guys into the same game. Yet there’s no single element to blame. Times change. Thirty-eight years ago, ex-jocks wallowing in gallons of booze, casual racism, clammy misogyny and obsessive anti-Semitism might have given New York audiences a frisson, but today, we just call that a sports blog.­­

An optimal revival of The Importance of Being Earnest ought to be an utter waste of time, and therefore wholly delightful. Forgive the sub-Wildean quippery, but who wouldn’t want to fritter away hours, ignorantly, due to narcotizing joy? If our lives must dribble away on a temporal plane, let it be a high-flying plane, one that zooms off and leaves us transported. By that standard, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s semi-import (two of its actors and half of its design originated in Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival) is stuck somewhere between strolling and soaring. It’s pleasant, but doesn’t waste one’s time quite well enough.