Howard Shapiro — Theater Critic

Shatner's World is equal parts endearing and funny - a mixture of two worlds, really: everyday and rarefied. The show is a must for Shatner fans, but you needn't be all that familiar with his work to understand a lot about him through his stories, which travel from his roots in Montreal through college there at McGill University, and jobs that grew more challenging with each 'yes.' ... Shatner's appetite for new challenges pushes him to constantly redefine himself; he has been America's captain of Star Trek on TV and in the movies. He's been T.J. Hooker on the so-named TV show, host of TV's early reality-based Rescue 911, then oddball lawyer Denny Crane on Boston Legal and The Practice. And more. If you want a glimpse of him as himself, catch him interviewing celebs on Bio's Shatner's Raw Nerve. If you want to watch him build a character without saying a word or moving, click Priceline on the Web. If you're looking for Shatner the raconteur, you'll find him on Broadway.

Shatner's World is equal parts endearing and funny - a mixture of two worlds, really: everyday and rarefied. The show is a must for Shatner fans, but you needn't be all that familiar with his work to understand a lot about him through his stories, which travel from his roots in Montreal through college there at McGill University, and jobs that grew more challenging with each 'yes.' ... Shatner's appetite for new challenges pushes him to constantly redefine himself; he has been America's captain of Star Trek on TV and in the movies. He's been T.J. Hooker on the so-named TV show, host of TV's early reality-based Rescue 911, then oddball lawyer Denny Crane on Boston Legal and The Practice. And more. If you want a glimpse of him as himself, catch him interviewing celebs on Bio's Shatner's Raw Nerve. If you want to watch him build a character without saying a word or moving, click Priceline on the Web. If you're looking for Shatner the raconteur, you'll find him on Broadway.

Wit is, of course, scary - when is cancer not? But it's also funny - very funny - which is part of its triumph; we understand the pain and the process so much more clearly through the main character's witty vision. Nixon delivers those insights, in a play the character has constructed about her life with cancer, with a shaved head and no eyebrows - her character is on the highest dose of chemo possible. Emma Thompson shaved her scalp for Mike Nichols' tele-play of Wit on HBO (2001), as do actresses in regional theater. Nixon's normally expressive face is even more so, with a baseball cap perched on her high forehead

The immensely satisfying Porgy and Bess that opened in a Broadway revival Thursday night is not your grandma's P&B. In a controversial makeover that has ended up neither controversial nor very much made over, what you get is a compelling and confident mixture of opera and stage sense that drives the music as well as the story.

The immensely satisfying Porgy and Bess that opened in a Broadway revival Thursday night is not your grandma's P&B. In a controversial makeover that has ended up neither controversial nor very much made over, what you get is a compelling and confident mixture of opera and stage sense that drives the music as well as the story.

Well, you get the picture, even if audiences may find it spotty. The plot was tough in 1965, without all the sexual confusion that in fact gives the plot new depth - even as it makes it harder to believe. Except for the memory scenes with Melinda, On A Clear Day was set then in the '60s. It's update takes place in the mid '70s, still with Alan J. Lerner's lyrics and Burton Lane's lovely music, although some of it was not in the original and much of the rest has been moved around to nicely fit the new plot.

Bonnie and Clyde were real public enemies. The new Broadway musical Bonnie & Clyde is really its own worst enemy.

Fiery, intense and so sexy you could sweat, the production of David Ives' new Venus in Fur, a sensation when it ran Off-Broadway last year, opened in a remounted production Tuesday on Broadway. Much of the heat comes from a living generator, the actress Nina Arianda, who reprises the role she created downtown in the original production. There's a booster to this furnace - the Broadway actor and film star Hugh Dancy, who is essentially her prey. The two of them deliver performances that bubble, then explode, on the stage of Manhattan Theatre Club's Friedman Theatre.

Still, this Godspell is not just a good time but often outright funny, which is why it will be a hit. The brilliant Stephen Schwartz, who wrote its score (as well as Wicked, next door to the theater where Godspell plays), has updated his lyrics, which pop.

In Jon Robin Baitz's searingly funny and jolting new play Other Desert Cities, which opened at Lincoln Center and then again on Broadway Thursday night, this is a family larger than life, and overwhelmed by it...Jon Robin Baitz has given them a terrific, insightful and often funny play, and they know just what to do with it.