Jeremy Gerard — Theater Critic

Sally Field's citric, unvarnished performance as Amanda Wingfield is so riveting you may find your focus pulled from the larger picture created by Sam Gold's shocking revival of The Glass Menagerie, which opened tonight at Broadway's Belasco Theatre. Stripped bare of the accoutrements of poverty Williams so carefully articulated in the notes for his 1945 'memory play,' Gold (Fun Home) takes more seriously Williams' prefatory caution that 'everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation' free of the 'exhausted theater of realistic conventions...'

Gideon Glick (The Good Wife, upcoming in Ocean's 8), an ingratiating actor with a gift for whipsaw changes from clownlike callowness to grieving bewilderment, repeats as Jordan Berman, a gay, single junior marketing executive edging up against the big Three-Oh in the protective, if bitchy, embrace of his three BFFs. There's self-adoring, pleasantly vulgar Kiki (Sas Goldberg); cool, self-confident Vanessa (Rebecca Naomi Jones) and, first among these equals, Laura (the superb Lindsay Mendez), whose ironic attitude and self-doubt make her Jordan's soul mate. Snuggling, they fantasize about setting up house together, creating their own little word to protect one another from the crassness and the hurt Out There.

Nevertheless, their names will not soon disappear from the thoughts of Tony voters come spring, for what was clear when the show was presented last October is more so today: This is a spectacular revival and the principals are simply breathtakingly good. The performances are assured - indeed, they've only grown in confidence. Moreover, the semi-staging by Lapine's niece, Sarna Lapine, with musical staging by Ann Yee, reveals (as if we needed reminding), one of the most beautiful, moving and endlessly inventive scores ever written, not to mention the equally ambitious and rewarding book that frames it.

Glenn Close first played Norma Desmond in the U.S. debut of Sunset Boulevard when it opened in December 1993 at the Shubert Theatre in Century City before bringing the show to Broadway a year later. She's returned in a version that's both stripped down - the scenery is closer in style to an Encores! concert at City Center than John Napier's over-the-top sets back then - and beefed-up, with a 40-piece onstage orchestra at the Palace Theatre that allows Andrew Lloyd Webber's music to take its place as Close's true co-star.

My own is Jitney, which until now was the only drama in the cycle not to have been seen on Broadway (though it had a celebrated run off-Broadway in 2000). That's been rectified with a superb production under the direction of Ruben Santiago-Hudson, a strong Wilson hand, that has opened at the Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Set (and written) in the 1970s, Jitney was the first play in the cycle. It's the work of a young playwright not yet fully in command of his prodigious gifts, yet already confident in voice and in the creation of characters who are as specific to their place and time as they are universal in their flaws, hopes and dreams.

The songs are as generic as those descriptions suggest, and - notwithstanding the efforts of the talented ensemble - nothing in Marshall's uninspired staging on Donyale Werle's highly romanticized and sanitized subway station set makes them of even passing interest while, say, waiting for the train. It's hard to imagine how this show made it to Broadway, but I suspect it will be on the express train to the next station.

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).

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.

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.