Erik Haagensen

Here's to the creative team for insisting on delivering the show it wanted. 'The Scottsboro Boys' sets a high bar for Broadway musicals this season.

It seemed like such a good idea on paper: Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones in 'Driving Miss Daisy.' When the excellent Boyd Gaines was announced to complete the three-person cast of Alfred Uhry's Pulitzer Prize–winning 1987 drama, the project sounded even more promising. So it's with tremendous regret and disappointment that I have to report that, under the puppy-soft direction of the usually reliable David Esbjornson, this 'Daisy' never fully blooms.

I've seen Uta Hagen and Dana Ivey do excellent work in the title role. Jones equals them, though hers is a much different Mrs. Warren. As Shaw requests in his stage directions, the character affects an upper-class accent and manner unless she is disturbed, when she reverts to lower-class speech. Jones instead creates a fascinating accent, more upper-class than not, that places the character solidly outside of polite society while still allowing her to function within it. Jones is also a much more sensual woman than is traditional. She looks smashing in Catherine Zuber's rich costumes, color-coded to Mrs. Warren's mood, and you can easily envision her as the center of attention in an elegant whorehouse. She also brings a broad emotional range to the part, with the intensity of her love and need for her daughter particularly compelling.

Lee Hall's 'The Pitmen Painters' is a bit like the art made by its characters: Whatever it lacks in technique it more than makes up for in expression. If the characters are sometimes too predictable and the sentiment a bit thick, that doesn't prevent the two-and-a-half-hour play from being thoroughly entertaining.

When Kneehigh Theatre's multimedia stage adaptation of the classic Noël Coward-penned film 'Brief Encounter' played St. Ann's Warehouse this past December, this Coward fan attended with great trepidation, only to fall head over heels for it. I felt similar trepidation when I heard that Roundabout Theatre Company would bring the show to Broadway at Studio 54. St. Ann's is a decidedly intimate space. Would the show fill a much larger house? Happily, the answer is ringingly affirmative.

Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch are offering a mother-daughter combo far closer to that created by the roles’ incomparable originators, Glynis Johns and Hermione Gingold, than to the excellent work of Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury. And you know what? The company has adjusted, and the show is still pretty wonderful.

Playwright Lucy Prebble gets points for ambition. 'Enron' wants to be a bold, slashing piece of political theater that exposes the greed and selfishness at the heart of American capitalism through the titular energy company's collapse. I'm in sympathy with her point of view but unpersuaded by her methodology. Her play is like a big, shiny, beautifully wrapped package that once eagerly ripped opened reveals a horde of Styrofoam peanuts through which you search vainly for the anticipated present.

Six years ago, gifted director Kenny Leon delivered a fine production of 'A Raisin in the Sun' to Broadway, marred only by the stage inexperience of its bankable star, Sean Combs. Back with another classic chronicling the African-American experience, and this time with the right star in place, Leon knocks it out of the park with this beautifully calibrated realization of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize–winning 'Fences.' Denzel Washington is magnificent in the role indelibly created by James Earl Jones, and the astonishing Viola Davis matches him every step of the way. It's a deeply moving, hugely satisfying evening of theater.

Rob Ashford’s direction prizes yuks over truth, symbolized by a period chair in Sheldrake’s office that exists solely for a visual joke requiring utterly unbelievable behavior from Sheldrake, while Ashford's busy choreography can’t erase memories of Michael Bennett’s delightfully simple “She Likes Basketball” or orgiastic “Turkey Lurkey Time.” Set designer Scott Pask imprisons the show in a wraparound cyclorama reminiscent of the Berlin Wall.

Lapine makes smart choices. There's a healthy amount of less-familiar material (Sondheim even sends himself up in 'God,' a brand-new piece of special material), and most of the cast aren't known for performing Sondheim's work. Combined with the decision to eschew chronology in favor of a thematic structure, the result is a continual sense of anticipation married with a welcome freshness of interpretation. Most important, despite the presence of stars—Barbara Cook, Tom Wopat, Vanessa Williams—this is an ensemble show that places the spotlight exactly where it should be: on the material.

'The Addams Family' is a musical all dressed up with no place to go. There's one simple reason: Nobody knew why they were writing it. There is no animating purpose to the evening, except to throw well-known characters on stage so the audience can luxuriate in their comforting familiarity. Charles Addams' iconic cartoon creations have been robbed of all subversiveness, something even the 1960s TV series—made in a considerably more socially conservative era—didn't do. The thin wisp of plot—daughter Wednesday wants to marry a 'normal' boy from Ohio—in Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice's choppy book serves mostly to muddy the comic strip's iconography, and their inclusion of a subplot involving Morticia's fears of aging only compounds the problem. They've also come up with one of the flimsiest excuses for a chorus since Captain Jim romanced Rose Marie in the heyday of operetta.

There's barely a cliché left unturned in John Logan's 'Red,' a two-hander about the late-in-life creative struggles of artist Mark Rothko, arriving direct from London's Donmar Warehouse. Though it's served to a hi-fi fare-thee-well by director Michael Grandage and actors Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne (who won an Olivier Award for his supporting performance), all their efforts can't disguise the fact that this is a prime example of theater of the exclamation point.

I have always felt that director Trevor Nunn approaches musicals and plays with different palettes: broad and bold for the former, detailed and nuanced for the latter. In this chamber version of 'A Little Night Music,' however, he seems to have applied his play palette to a musical. While it's hard not to miss the romantic sweep and orchestral lushness of Harold Prince's glorious original production, which I saw on national tour multiple times, what Nunn delivers is a persuasive and entertaining account of a great American musical.

When Next to Normal played at Off-Broadway's Second Stage last year, Brian Yorkey's book and lyrics lacked the character complexity necessary to tell his ambitious story satisfactorily. Yorkey, composer Tom Kitt, and director Michael Greif went back to work, and Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage admirably gave the show a second chance. The well-received reworked version has now been brought to Broadway. There is improvement, particularly in Act 1, which gets more swiftly to its story and better fleshes out its characters. Some radical shifts in tone have also been addressed. Nevertheless, the show still fails to persuade.