David Cote — Theater Critic

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.

Wright can hold an audience with a cock of the head and his low, raspy voice, but here he’s surrounded by some of the city’s finest stage actors, whipped into a frenzy by director George C. Wolfe. Among others, we savor Veanne Cox as one of Cornet’s several married conquests; Mos (formerly Mos Def) as his sly manservant Murmur; and Reg Rogers as Cornet’s white half-brother, a whinnying simp desperate to reclaim his birthright. John McMartin and Paul Dano contribute nicely shaded portraits of the diffident President Thomas Jefferson and Western explorer Meriwether Lewis, respectively.

It's all good and well to enjoy Shakespeare under the stars, a piney breeze wafting over the lake and small woodland creatures pausing to savor the iambic pentameter, but I'm more awed and engaged by Daniel Sullivan's supremely intelligent Merchant of Venice now that it's moved indoors. This somber and stately (but never dull) production was the hot ticket in a boiling summer at the Delacorte Theatre. Such zeal was stoked, obviously, by Al Pacino's turn as vengeful moneylender Shylock. But surely urgent word of mouth also swelled the throngs of people waiting for free tickets. Now the seats carry a hefty price tag, but I doubt that will dampen sales or demand.

Ignoring Reubens’s checkered career, which is irrelevant to the show, here’s the toughest critical call: Is Pee-wee right for middle schoolers and younger kids? There is material that walks the line between naughty innuendo for adults and goofy gags for the children. One masturbation joke (which predates the Florida movie-theater incident) will go sailing right over young’uns' heads. If you bring a nine-year-old to the event, they’ll probably find plenty funny, but just as often, they may ask what Mom and Dad are laughing at. I leave it to you to make that judgment. Pee-wee will never grow up, and for 90 minutes at least, you won’t have to either.

I doubt that many middle-school teachers are organizing class trips to see Colin Quinn Long Story Short—the R-rated insults and ethnic humor are strictly for teens—but kids might actually glean something from the material. In 75 minutes, the comedian takes us on a gruffly wiseass tour of Western civilization, emphasizing the rise and fall of empires, from the ancient Greeks to America’s present status as corrupt global cop. Although a history professor would take issue with the soundness of Quinn’s facts and spin, there’s a surprising amount of insight and cleverness between the punch lines.

There's a 20-foot-high recipe for gazpacho printed on the curtain that rises on Lincoln Center Theater's 'Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.' If only a giant recipe for making a decent musical had been available to the makers of this major Broadway letdown, which squanders so much stage talent.

Perhaps with a more nuanced book and flexible frame, Scottsboro would have more punch. It’s almost exactly the sort of show we need now. A whole resistance movement has grown in the past two years around no discernible cause other than horror at a black man in the White House. Can Tea Party protesters in blackface be far off?

Researchers have calculated that in your average three-hour NFL broadcast, the ball is in actual play for roughly 11 minutes. I can guarantee that, for the 95-minute duration of Lombardi, Dan Lauria’s bellowing-to-speaking ratio is twice as much. Portraying the iconic coach who transformed his losing Green Bay Packers into serial winners in the early ’60s, Lauria barks, shouts, howls, roars, and—for subtle effects—growls ominously. Vince Lombardi, we learn in Eric Simonson’s canny and humorous script, was not a man given to understatement or mild utterance; through force of will and steel-reinforced lungs he vociferated his way into sports history.

Mark Rylance's turn as boorish, babbling Valere—available for your delectation in La Bête—ought not to work. This eccentric performance is compounded of broad prop acting, lowbrow sight gags (spitting food, wiping ass), redundant flourishes (recalling molestation as a boy, he steals a kiss from David Hyde Pierce) and alternating deadpan delivery with overwrought affectation. You could argue that such outré tics and the overall stylized tactic are true to Rylance's character and to the bouffon spirit of David Hirson's 1991 verse comedy, a critical homage to Molière. And you’d be right. But that doesn't diminish the fact that this daredevil actor rides the line between brilliance and awfulness—usually coming down on the side of genius.

Songwriter Friedman has always had an uncanny knack for the catchy hook and the clever lyric that rises to philosophical wistfulness. And here, he works in the surly emo-rock mode, finding exhilaration in the pent-up rage and nihilism that both demands center stage and shrinks from scrutiny. Not since Stephen Sondheim played bitter variations on “Hail to the Chief” for Assassins (1991) has a Broadway musical so starkly and brutally examined the underside of the American Dream. Particularly in the subdued penultimate number “Second Nature,” Friedman moves past the Sontag and Foucault namechecking to offer a hushed, plangent elegy for this land of strip malls over killing fields.

Cherry Jones, on the other hand, makes a full meal of a role for which she is perfectly suited. Jones is deliciously sensual and arch in a series of gaudy outfits, and her second-act speeches about pulling herself out of poverty are utterly spellbinding (a wobbly accent notwithstanding). Debonair Mark Harelik does sturdy work as Warren’s bullish business partner, Crofts, and Adam Driver is amusingly oleaginous as Vivie’s charming but morally flaccid lover, Frank. With grand sets and Doug Hughes’s smart, careful staging, so much goes right here. The only thing lacking is Vivie’s ruthlessness.

Cherry Jones, on the other hand, makes a full meal of a role for which she is perfectly suited. Jones is deliciously sensual and arch in a series of gaudy outfits, and her second-act speeches about pulling herself out of poverty are utterly spellbinding (a wobbly accent notwithstanding). Debonair Mark Harelik does sturdy work as Warren’s bullish business partner, Crofts, and Adam Driver is amusingly oleaginous as Vivie’s charming but morally flaccid lover, Frank. With grand sets and Doug Hughes’s smart, careful staging, so much goes right here. The only thing lacking is Vivie’s ruthlessness.

Although Brief Encounter offers plenty of comic embellishments and artful stage business, it is most powerful when it quiets down to give the material’s sorrow full scope. Adapter and director Emma Rice’s use of Coward’s songs—“A Room with a View” and “Mad About the Boy,” to name two—makes structural (if not always tonal) sense, even if you wish the cast included stronger singers. But then again, it’s the whole artful package, not its individual parts, that seems to sweep some people off their feet.

Leon elicits sensitive work from Hornsby and the stalwart Stephen McKinley Henderson as Troy’s loyal coworker friend, Jim Bono. And, with her second-act breakdown upon hearing that Troy has betrayed her, Davis blows the roof off the Cort with the spectacle of a soul in agony. No one does good-woman-done-wrong with Davis’s volcanic fury. Happily, Washington keeps pace with her on the other side of the temperature spectrum. When Fences first swept Broadway 23 years ago, James Earl Jones’s Troy was reportedly phenomenal. But Washington shows he can hit his share out of the park, too.

The English-born multimedia docudrama Enron, about the rise and crash of the Texas energy-trading behemoth, smelled strongly of what I called “transatlantic schadenfreude” in a review of another import: a topical satire in which Brits laugh up their sleeves at greedy, gullible American rubes. I was able to hedge my low expectations with my tremendous respect for director Rupert Goold and my boundless admiration for musical-comedy trouper Norbert Leo Butz, who portrays Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling. What a surprise, then, to discover that Lucy Prebble’s multilayered play is not your typical Yank-bashing, but a darkly exhilarating portrait of hypertrophied capitalism and a society that allows faith-based fiscal systems to ravage the body economic. Drawing from a deep bag of theatrical tricks and riffling through found text, news videos and observed gestures, Prebble and Goold supply Broadway theatergoers with the sort of play they demand—a sharp-witted and rollicking business thriller to dazzle the eye and tickle the brain. If Enron’s stock were still circling the ticker, my advice would be to buy, buy, buy.