Jeremy Gerard

Platt seems more to inhabit Evan than to merely portray him. The halting delivery of soulful lines, the arms that flutter out in birdlike spasms as if grasping for logic or reason and, most of all, with a voice that rises from assured tenor to plaintive falsetto all conspire to bring this character to life. Evan could be cousin to The Glass Menagerie's Laura Wingfield.

What a world MacArthur 'genius' Mimi Lien has created at the Imperial Theatre forNatasha, Pierre & The Great Comet Of 1812. The auditorium is voluptuously draped in scarlet velvet, with gold and brass accents. Brilliant knockoffs of the crystal-and-gold chandeliers at the Metropolitan Opera House rise and fall like Fourth of July fireworks as stairways curve gracefully into the orchestra, where some seats have been replaced by candle-lit bistro tables suitable for nestling overpriced cocktails. Portraits of Important People, including the Emperor Napoleon, are stacked on the walls like art at the Louvre (or Sardi's, take your pick).

So Rourke's production seems so much gilding of the lily, as it were, making the points with as heavy a hand as possible. It's skillfully performed, sometimes visually arresting but mostly just plain crude. This is especially so in the performances Rourke draws from her stars. McTeer, who is tall and regal, seems to pause before each over-emphasized curl of the lip, arch of the eyebrow, pointing of the finger, in a performance that unfolds as if in stop-action until her penultimate scene, when Merteuil explodes in jealous rage at Valmont. Schreiber, who exudes plenty of sexual charisma in other settings, here takes some getting used to in wig, breeches and ruling class accent. Neither the bon mot nor the catty snipe roll trippingly off his tongue, and his protestations of life-changing ardor for Tourvel are cringe-inducingly unconvincing. He's much more believable when he's got one hand over young Cécile's mouth while shoving the other up her sleeping gown.

Not because this revival isn't terrific - it is, mostly. It's got tons of heart, unimpeachable performances by a cast of seven including the best kid actor since Fun Home's Sydney Lucas. But while the production - staged by James Lapine, who also wrote the book for the show, scored by William Finn (both won Tonys for their work) - left me teary in all the right places, and laughing in all the other right places, it never actually took flight. It's earthbound.

With his jauntily angled fedora and suit jacket slung over his shoulder, Slattery comes across as more of a Rat Pack swinger than a flapper-following flirt just before the Jazz Age was snuffed out by Black Monday. But it suits him and he's an instant bright spot among the malcontents who've been forced into a long night awaiting the 7 AM hanging of Earl Williams, an illiterate white man who has been convicted of killing a black cop. Hildy's plans inspire caustic merriment among his pals, who insist it won't be long until he 'has seven kids, a mortgage and belongs to a country club.' There's also much ribbing of New York newspapers, especially the New York Times ('might as well work for a bank,' one says), inside jokes from two authors who knew newspapers, Chicago and its Second City neuroses better than anyone.

This production is staged by Simon Godwin, an associate director at London's National Theatre, and in keeping with current trends, it takes Chekhov at his word in classifying it as a comedy. Too much so, as it happens, in a mixed-bag of a production that despite some high points, struggles but fails to achieve a consistent tone. That leaves Lane somewhat in the lurch as Ranevskaya, who has returned from Paris after five years' absence to her once magnificent estate, now on the verge of being auctioned off.

Pinkham, a Tony nominee for A Gentlemans Guide To Love & Murder, is no crooner; indeed, he's the Ethel Merman in the mix, singing like the brass section and selling every word to the balcony. Corbin Bleu, of the High School Musical franchise, is the discovery, tapping up a storm that recalls the young Sammy Davis Jr., technical brilliance and cockiness and goodtime in one barely containable package. Sikora also has the right metalurgy of voice, while it's up to Lawrence to infuse the operation with warmth, and she's endearingly up to the task.

Complicite has been in the vanguard of merging technology and performance, and its latest work, The Encounter, which has just opened on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre, is the most audacious immersion yet into an artificially intelligent new theater. A solo show in which McBurney portrays many characters in wildly different locations, you might think of it, as I did, as a particularly inventive episode of A Prairie Home Companion as conceived and directed by Carlos Castaneda. It's a mindblower.

...this is the show with which the Montreal-based global franchise plants its standard on Broadway, promising - and, in spades, delivering - a mashup of 42nd Street backstage romance, non-stop Ziegfeld folly and Cirque's brand of acrobatic arts...It's as eye-popping as Christmas at Radio City Music Hall, if not quite as intimate or touching....We've come for the visuals and while it's doubtful that Paramour audiences will come away disappointed in that department, they may wonder why that annoying story kept stopping the action dead in its computer-assisted tracks...did I mention the horrible music? Well, with Cirque that's a given.

Shuffle Along...is an angry musical, its solid outrage sublimating not into bitterness or brutality but instead into a kind of suffusing sorrow over the cultural loss that is as fundamental to the legacy of racism as its more violent aspects...The more serious problem is that an idea is not a focal point, and so Shuffle Along...never resolves into a story. Instead, it's a series of historical scenes that tell, rather than show, and that's deadly for a musical. It's unquestionably entertaining to watch the five principal actors here at work, none less than consummate (though, brilliant as she is, McDonald has long since aged out of ingenue roles)...And yet Shuffle Along...struck me as both rough and unfinished.

The revival that opened tonight at the Roundabout Theatre Company's American Airlines Theatre is, in a word, transfixing...by the time this journey was done, I was completely given over to the dark and dangerous spell of O'Neill's masterpiece. It was as though I was seeing it for the first time. This would have been impossible without one of the rarest convergences on Broadway: an all-star cast and director that works as well on stage as they promised on paper...Over a mostly spectacular career, the two-time Oscar winner, who won the Olivier Award for this role, has made psychological complexity and transparency her hallmark...With Lange leading the way, Mary begins this Journey a tragic figure and concludes it a ghost who will haunt our dreams, for a time.

All of which is my circuitous way of avoiding the mostly depressing task of writing about the latest Tuck family visit, in the form of a Broadway musical so treacly you may leave the Broadhurst Theatre wanting to kick a puppy. This is mildly surprising because the team behind the show is not known for overdosing on corn syrup...Jesse is played by Andrew Keenan-Bolger, an amiable actor who really does seem eternally youthful. Winnie is played by newcomer Sarah Charles Lewis and -- I will try to whisper this softly, taking no pleasure in it -- she is charmless, with all the attributes of an over-prepared, too-polished child actor...But the best bit of casting is Terrence Mann as the evil Man in the Yellow Suit...because of the sheer malignant joy Mann brings to a comic-book turn.

As it happens, I was once married to a restaurant like Sam's, and I can say with some authority that the hilariously aptly named Ms. Mode knows whereof she speaks...Tyler Ferguson navigates these human mountains and valleys, major torrents and tricky rivulets, with precision and even empathy; it's a virtuosic performance and the audience, you should pardon the expression, eats it up...At barely 70 minutes, Fully Committed is not so much a meal as an amuse-bouche, that clever little thingy the chef sends out before your meal to tickle your palate and show off his inventiveness, and is made of stuff you never heard of. A gulp and it's gone.

Mueller, who won the Tony Award for her portrayal of songwriter/singer Carole King in Beautiful, returns with another spectacular performance in the title role as Jenna, eking out a living in a roadside diner in the South where she has achieved local fame as a baker of transcendent pies named according to her state of mind, which ranges in any given day, hour, minute from whimsical to mordant....The positives far outnumber the negatives. Jenna is a heroine of the moment, taking control of her life and offering no apologies for her choices, even - or especially - the arguable ones. Mueller has a girl-next-door appeal that sublimates into something less earthbound when she sings, her pleasingly throbby mezzo a purring engine in ballads until she lets out the reins and the horsepower kicks in.

Unlike Bale, who brought a scary chill to the role, Walker is more of a man-child, his ambition and his malice subdued by a vaguely goofy smile; in his CKs he recalls not so much Jack the Ripper as Tom Cruise in Risky Business...The musical has an awkward book by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa...and Duncan Sheik, who wrote the beautiful score for Spring Awakening and here delivers confident, well-crafted numbers...choreographer is Lynne Page; the dances are the most frightening thing about American Psycho, as the actors contort and distort themselves in jagged, angular paroxysms of stoned lust and raw hunger. I feared the sound of snapping limbs throughout...I no more enjoyed the mass slaughter depicted on stage than I would seeing a dramatization of Jonathan Swift...Aguirre-Sacasa and director Goold (and possibly Walker as well) have conspired to defang Patrick somewhat, embellishing his back story (the great Alice Ripley is wasted playing, among other roles, Bateman's mom) and the possibility of redemption...Didn't do much for me.

The Father was a hit in Paris and London and is smoothly translated by Christopher Hampton (Les Liaisons Dangereuses)...But Doug Hughes' production...seems slight at 90 intermissionless minutes. The exception, of course, is Langella, giving another master class in felt performance as André regresses - devolves, really - from strong-willed fighter to whimpering babe... It's a performance of surpassing empathy, and sadness.

Arthur Miller's 1953 drama The Crucible is a big play -- big ideas, big cast, big emotions. In a season of multiple Miller celebrations...Ivo van Hove's lucid and often mesmerizing production at the Walter Kerr Theatre honors all of those big factors without overwhelming us -- unless it's by the sheer impact of a company so right in nearly every detail, from the major roles to those less so...Van Hove and his incomparable troupe -- led by beautifully felt performances from Ben Whishaw (The Danish Girl), Sophie Okonedo (Hotel Rwanda) and Soairse Ronan (Brooklyn) -- play it straight. I think the impact must be quite similar to that felt by theatergoers 63 years ago.

Fans of Martin's wide-ranging gifts as comedian, author, movie star, art collector, playwright (count me in) have seen his avocation as expert picker blossom with the singer-songwriter Brickell. Their work is suffused with an irresistible chemistry of longing and optimism and even a kind of countrified mysticism that divines hope in sorrowful corners of the soul. So my advice is to spend an evening with Love Has Come For You and the new album, So Familiar, and skip Bright Star, the unfortunate musical they have brought to the Cort Theatre...If you can recall the take-no-prisoners lunacy of Martin's play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, you may be doubly disappointed by this earnest but soggy mess.

She Loves Me is probably the best Broadway musical you've never heard of (unless you're a Broadway nerd). It's an unassuming, Old World charmer, testament to craft, witchcraft and romance that echoes the operettas of Romberg and Friml...and I'm thrilled to say that while I have aged, She Loves Me has not, not one bit. The score remains enchanting...This time the unlikely lovers are played by the infinitely appealing Laura Benanti (ABC's Nashville and a Tony winner for Gypsy) and Zachary Levi (NBC's Chuck), delightful as irritated co-workers in Maraczek's Parfumerie by day, swoony epistolary confidants by night...The team of Scott Ellis (director) and Warren Carlyle (choreography) let the show breathe.

Broadway loves a fine romance and nowhere are the sparks showering down more heat and crackle than the ones being thrown off by Jeff Daniels and Michelle Williams in Blackbird...Their rapture is murderous. They want to annihilate each other. This is the electrifying production that this season's revival of Sam Shepard's Fool For Love aspired to be...Daniels and Williams are so devastatingly into David Harrower's stem-winding tale of an illicit conjugation, that by the time the lights came up I felt as spent as the actors themselves appeared to be.

Disaster! is the Nick The Lounge Singer of Broadway musicals. A cast of extraordinarily gifted stars appears to have been tricked into stretching a three-minute parody of movies that were parodies to begin with into a two-hour show. The result is so painfully witless it's hard to tell where the sea-spray ends and the flop sweat begins. Spoof disaster flicks - now there's an original idea. Meta, even. So take pity on Adam Pascal, Max Crum, Seth Rudetsky, Roger Bart, Kerry Butler, Jennifer Simard, Faith Prince, Kevin Chamberlin, Lucretia Nicole, Rachel York and youngster Baylee Littrell. Don't embarrass them with your presence.

Most important, Eclipsed is a major achievement - a scorching work about women and war whose humor burnishes rather than undermines its seriousness of purpose. And it features a ferociously committed ensemble performances staged with power and finesse by Leisl Tommy. It's the kind of work no sane commercial producer would look at and immediately think Broadway - even with two highly recognizable names on the marquee.

Forest Whitaker plays Erie, whose ensuing near-monologue takes up most of Eugene O'Neill's brief one-act drama of a man whose fragile delusions crack and turn to dust under the stolid gaze of an indifferent stranger. It's a brave, if odd, choice for a Broadway debut, this meager work that reads better than it plays...The biggest miscue of Michael Grandage's production (whether the choice is the director's or the star's, it's impossible to know) is that Erie seems to believe his bullshit. He lacks the sense of desperation that O'Neill says will overcome Erie during the course of this dark hour...There is no sense of the growing panic that will lead to Erie's final revelation about his loss of confidence after Hughie's death...The result is a failure to lift this small work into the tragic realm to which it aspires. It remains stubbornly small. That's surely as much O'Neill's fault as Whitaker's. But it's Whitaker we've come to see.

A smart decision was made to hold on to the exquisitely matched acting ensemble and also the play's, well, human scale by re-mounting it in the Helen Hayes, the smallest Tony-eligible house. As a result, the play retains its remarkable power as a tale of sorrows veined with silver threads of humor...As the evening moves like nature from light into darkness, Karam and his incomparable director Joe Mantello...take this first-class ensemble and us interlopers along a journey that's part family drama and thriller...Although the cast couldn't be bettered (and the standout remains the wildly gifted Steele), I thought they were still settling into the rhythms of a larger performance at the critics' preview I attended...I can only reiterate what I wrote earlier, that The Humans is tremendously exciting theater, and I remain convinced that you won't see a better play this season.

This is Noises Off, the Roundabout Theatre Company's happy antidote to all things January, a percussive dose of slamming doors, wince-inducing pratfalls and enough suggestive tomfoolery to fill the bill at Minsky's...Jeremy Herrin, the masterly director of Wolf Hall, lets Noises Off wind up a bit slowly, but once all the gears are in synch, the show is a dazzlement of set-pieces fit together with jigsaw perfection. Martin...returns to her roots as a mistress of the comic gesture, doing more with a plate of fish or an old newspaper than you may have imagined possible. Hilty...does physical comedy as though to the manner born.