David Rooney

Following in the footsteps of crowd-pleasers like Jersey Boys and Motown: The Musical, this is entertaining boomer bait that elevates its by-the-numbers narrative with great songs. It's also a tremendous showcase for the talented Jessie Mueller as she embodies King's blossoming from songwriter-for-hire to empowered performer of her own material...McGrath's book flirts openly (though not displeasingly) with sitcom dialogue, and by no means skirts the clichés and shortcuts of hackneyed behind-the-music chronicles. But the story, and perhaps more importantly, the characters, are never less than engaging...The ace up the show's sleeve, however, is Mueller's lovely performance as King, full of self-effacing humor, emotional depth and understated vulnerability. She conveys the burgeoning singer-songwriter's creative drive while wrestling quietly with her ingrained, old-fashioned sense of the expectations for a wife and mother. There's a disarming yearning quality to her characterization that makes us root for Carole to spread her wings. And her vocals are superb, capturing King's colloquial style while insinuating her own personality into songs that work like a time-travel machine for the musical's target audience.

Following in the footsteps of crowd-pleasers like Jersey Boys and Motown: The Musical, this is entertaining boomer bait that elevates its by-the-numbers narrative with great songs. It's also a tremendous showcase for the talented Jessie Mueller as she embodies King's blossoming from songwriter-for-hire to empowered performer of her own material...McGrath's book flirts openly (though not displeasingly) with sitcom dialogue, and by no means skirts the clichés and shortcuts of hackneyed behind-the-music chronicles. But the story, and perhaps more importantly, the characters, are never less than engaging...The ace up the show's sleeve, however, is Mueller's lovely performance as King, full of self-effacing humor, emotional depth and understated vulnerability. She conveys the burgeoning singer-songwriter's creative drive while wrestling quietly with her ingrained, old-fashioned sense of the expectations for a wife and mother. There's a disarming yearning quality to her characterization that makes us root for Carole to spread her wings. And her vocals are superb, capturing King's colloquial style while insinuating her own personality into songs that work like a time-travel machine for the musical's target audience.

McKellen takes on the choicest of the main roles in the poet Spooner, an obsequious sponge who has met well-heeled man of letters Hirst (Stewart) over drinks in a local pub and accompanied him to his home near Hampstead Heath for a few more. In designer Stephen Brimson Lewis’ austere set, the host’s living room is both a statement of stifling tastefulness and a scary cell in which Spooner, a shabby drunk despite his posturing refinement, is unceremoniously imprisoned for the night by Hirst’s hostile amanuensis Foster (Crudup) and his intimidating butler/bodyguard Briggs. With their air of homoerotic complicity, this domestic duo claim to be Hirst’s protectors, viewing Spooner suspiciously as an intruder who might upset their status quo.

The main roles in Godot – another pared-down play famous for the fact that nothing happens – in many ways are imperfect mirror images of Hirst and Spooner, wearing bowler hats that make them appear like a vagabond Laurel and Hardy. Stewart’s Vladimir, affectionately known as Didi, is the restless thinker, blindly clinging to the belief that the enigmatic title figure will show up for a designated appointment beneath a dead tree. McKellen’s wheezing Estragon, or Gogo, is more enfeebled, both physically and mentally. His memory is as broken as his feet, requiring Didi every day to remind him of the previous day’s events. As irascible and indulgent with each other as any old married couple, they often wonder if they wouldn’t have been better off alone. The one thing they consistently agree on is that hanging themselves from the tree would be a fine idea, if only they had some rope.

During previews, Broadway chatrooms have drawn facile comparison to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the Tony-winning 1986 Rupert Holmes musical that was given a sparkling revival last season. While there's some overlap in the pastiche score and vintage British music hall-style staging, Gentleman's Guide is far superior, propelled by a rollicking story, humor of the most delectable amorality and the cleverest lyrics assembled in quite some time. Just hearing Mays as the ridiculously posh Lord Adalbert D'Ysquith scoff his way through 'I Don't Understand the Poor' (a wicked anthem for the one percent) is enough to restore an audience's faith in musical comedy while getting them in the mood to off some toffs.

It can't be said that Billy Crystal doesn't know his audience. They eat up his menu of Jews, jazz and baseball, wrapped in Catskills-inspired comedy and heartfelt Mom-and-Pop sentiment. Back on Broadway with 700 Sundays almost a decade after the solo stage memoir broke box office records and landed him a special Tony Award, Crystal again shows his gift for taking an Eisenhower-era childhood that was both ordinary and exceptional, and rendering it universal for a nostalgic public. Whether or not our experience overlaps with that of the hardworking performer, his family reminiscences strike chords.

Limping around with his hump hidden under a cloak and a gammy, shriveled hand pinned uselessly across his chest, Rylance’s Richard deliberately flirts with caricature. He approaches the ruthless climber as an unlovable runt, crippled as much by bitterness as by his deformities. Playing shamelessly to the crowd with his halting speech and false air of self-pity, he makes the audience complicit in every vile deed that Richard executes or orchestrates. Only deep into the action after he has seized the crown does the pathos of his victims alert us to the blood on our hands.

Conventional wisdom might dictate that Richard III, with its nonstop chicanery and carnage, would be a brooding affair after Twelfth Night. But Rylance and company gouge black comedy out of the history play without betraying its inherent nastiness.

The paramount requirement for any revue celebrating the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and '30s is stated right there in the Duke Ellington standard, 'It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing).' And After Midnight has it in abundance, courtesy of a superlative jazz orchestra handpicked by producer Wynton Marsalis from among the best in the business. Ninety minutes of exuberantly entertaining song and dance, this is a show that renders it impossible to keep your toes from tapping. Up first in a series of rotating special guest stars, Fantasia Barrino with her luscious vocals sets the bar high.

In the Internet age of sexting scandals and tabloid humiliation, infidelity without public shaming seems almost quaint. So why is Harold Pinter's 1978 play, Betrayal, still such a bristling drama? Its structural brilliance, for one thing, tracking an adulterous triangle in reverse chronology that stretches back nine years and uncovers as many mysteries as it solves. It also doesn't hurt to have actors like Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz and Rafe Spall at the absolute top of their game. Likewise, director Mike Nichols, who coaxes his cast to mirror their characters, carefully parsing every word for hidden meaning. In a play largely about what's unsaid, that makes for thrilling theater.

But homage is a tricky thing, in this case making for a tedious play that's stubbornly unaffecting, its pathos hollow and manufactured. Daniel Sullivan's Broadway production has elegance to spare. The same goes for the gorgeous sets of John Lee Beatty, which revolve to ingeniously allow for different perspectives on the same space of an early-20th century family hunting lodge in upstate New York, opening onto the wild marshes outside. Jane Greenwood's period costumes also are handsomely detailed. But the overwhelming impression remains that a lot of care and effort has been put into a play that acquires a pulse only intermittently...while Parker can be a dangerous and exciting stage actor to watch, her idiosyncratic mannerisms often place her inside a bubble with little connection to the other players on the stage; that contributes here to make an unsympathetic character more distancing.

The audience becomes the jury in A Time To Kill, Rupert Holmes' by-the-numbers stage adaptation of John Grisham's page-turning 1989 debut novel. But unlike the workings of a real jury, there's no room for ambiguity, moral complexity or startling insight in this formulaic courtroom drama about institutionalized racism in the Deep South, in which every liberal-pandering response has been hardwired into the dated material. Sturdy ensemble acting and Grisham's compelling storytelling make this go down easily, but the production provides little persuasive evidence that the thriller needed to become a play.

Directed for the screen by Anthony Asquith in 1948, and again by David Mamet in 1999, the play was last seen on Broadway 65 years ago. It's a slow starter, and indeed its unhurried four acts might seem to lack economy for contemporary audiences. But in a production as expertly judged and performed as this one, there's real pleasure in settling into the plush upholstery to savor the nuances of character, the subtle humor and fine shadings of the drama's consideration of justice and honor.

Directed for the screen by Anthony Asquith in 1948, and again by David Mamet in 1999, the play was last seen on Broadway 65 years ago. It's a slow starter, and indeed its unhurried four acts might seem to lack economy for contemporary audiences. But in a production as expertly judged and performed as this one, there's real pleasure in settling into the plush upholstery to savor the nuances of character, the subtle humor and fine shadings of the drama's consideration of justice and honor.

Mary Bridget Davies screeches up a storm as Janis Joplin. When she throws her formidable lungpower and raspy emotional rawness into 'Piece of My Heart,' you could swear the tragic supernova known to her friends as 'Pearl' had been reborn. But if you're after a contextualized bio-musical to provide insight into rock's first undisputed queen, writer-director Randy Johnson's sanitized concert tribute, A Night With Janis Joplin, is not the place to look.

The musical slaps on the sentiment with a heavy hand, and given that it's ultimately quite moving, that's no crime. But I couldn't get past fundamental problems with the source material...While the lyrics are more literal than imaginative, not to mention doused in Hallmark syrup, Lippa's score is better than his last show, The Adams Family. It freely mixes old-fashioned Tin Pan Alley with pop, using banjos to evocative effect for a show set in Alabama and Mississippi...But many audiences will lap it up, and nobody's begrudging them that. A lot of loving craftsmanship has gone into this musical, and it delivers satisfying entertainment for those who don't mind being emotionally manipulated

After a string of mediocre Tennessee Williams revivals in recent Broadway seasons, theatergoers might be forgiven for becoming jaded about this leading 20th century American dramatist's unparalleled gift for soaring poetry tethered to penetrating emotional truth. It's difficult to imagine a more potent remedy for that fatigue than John Tiffany's transfixing production of The Glass Menagerie, which accesses the extraordinary intimacy of this landmark 1944 play in ways that give the impression you're seeing it for the first time. A performance of towering complexity from Cherry Jonesis flanked by equally illuminating work from her three co-stars, making this essential theater.

The poster shot of Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad for Romeo and Juliet, clad in purest white and lost in each other's eyes on a bed of snowy linens, could be a perfume commercial. Let's call it William Shakespeare's Obsession. But the dreamy intoxication that such a heady fragrance might transmit is largely missing from David Leveaux's snoozy modern-dress production, along with poetry and heat. Bloom is the big name on the marquee and he makes a confident Broadway debut, roaring onto the stage on a motorcycle no less. But such contemporary trappings never quite amount to a distinctive edge.

...this Broadway summer filler's main challenge is to inject variation into an entertainment built entirely around a single sultry dance tradition, defined by its heightened sense of melodramatic sizzle. But creator-director Luis Bravo's worldwide hit addresses the fatigue issue by steadily cranking up the degree of difficulty in the routines as the marathon progresses....Smirnoff and Chmerkovskiy are about as authentically Argentinean as Tango & Cash, but who cares? The crowd is mad for them, and it's easy to see why. They're tall, sinuous and sexy, delivering polished showmanship with effortless charisma. The four routines that feature the duo are among the highlights

A medieval fable that makes a giddy hodge-podge out of Candide and Faust, bulging with sexy circus acts, magic tricks, tuneful early-'70s pop-rock songs, elementary existentialism and comedy that runs the gamut from goofy and campy through grotesque and bawdy, Pippin shouldn't work, but it does. Up to a point. Diane Paulus' Broadway revival of the 1972 musical is massively, almost overwhelmingly entertaining, even if its audacious razzle-dazzle doesn't mask the limitations of its book. Still, fans of this much-loved show couldn't ask for a more energized production.

Midler's consummate ability to deliver brassy chutzpah, fierceness and silky comic seduction at the same time is harnessed to perfection, allowing just a judicious whisper of vulnerability. Infusing her performance with equal parts Sue and Bette, plus a dash of her old Sophie Tucker routines, she makes this role her bitch.

[Tyson's] performance as Mrs. Watts is as remarkable for its spry, shuffling energy and wiliness as for its warmth and emotional transparency...Tyson's ability to convey stubborn resilience in the face of defeat is profoundly touching...But the production's tone is inconsistent, too often sacrificing truthful poignancy in favor of jaunty humor and manufactured sentiment. Instead of a quiet elegy that can cut deep with its sense of reaching for a past that exists now only in the imagination, it has become a heartwarming dramedy (a word I hate) of a kind regularly found on basic cable. It's still perfectly entertaining, just a long way from being all that this play can be.

A dense, boldly unorthodox piece for risk-averse Broadway, it has been directed with transfixing focus by Deborah Warner, whose frequent collaborations with Shaw go back 25 years...[Shaw's] Mary is haunted, scornful, a hardened skeptic as uncompromisingly judgmental with herself as she is with others. She also has the manic energy of a woman whose refusal of the comforts of sleep - and more pointedly, the healing balm of dreams - has taken her beyond fatigue...Provocative as much of the content is, Toibin is not doing anything so blunt as a revisionist interpretation of the Scriptures. He is undertaking a nuanced psychological exploration of a figure whose nobility is due in part to her eternal silence, rendering her instead here as a woman who will not be silenced.

Alan Cumming puts a daring new spin on Shakespeare's tragedy, shifting its focus from the cost of ambition to the harrowing imprisonment of madness.

...this dynamite production of Lyle Kessler's play needs no assist from offstage friction to galvanize attention. Packaged as a post-30 Rock return to the stage for Baldwin, this is a scorching display of ensemble acting in which the star is evenly matched by riveting performances from Ben Foster and Tom Sturridge, making the descent from black comedy into tragedy a bracing theatrical thrill ride.